Part 5 (1/2)

La.s.siter persisted. But the answer remained the same. He rather admired the austere and sn.o.bbish stance taken against his enquiries. It was inconvenient, but he could see and appreciate the museum's rationale.

Then something changed. McIntyre casually mentioned that he would have one of the people who ran his charitable foundation call the person responsible for raising and sustaining the museum's public funding. This was an inst.i.tution vulnerable, in the current economic climate. It had lost its central and local government support. It had seen its lottery grant substantially reduced.

La.s.siter never learned the specifics. A donation, when all was said and done, was a completely different thing in law from a bribe. All he knew was that the att.i.tude of the people responsible for the museum's archive suddenly changed. They became cooperative where they had been obstructive and cordial where there had previously been only disdain. McIntyre, being McIntyre, had facilitated this. And La.s.siter felt in some subtle way that he had been tainted, guilty by a.s.sociation, a party to a procedure that was less than wholly honourable.

Did it matter? Not really, he thought, in the scheme of things. He was no longer employed to be the honest copper, clear of any hint of corruption or collusion. He worked for McIntyre now and he did as he was bid. But he still entered the museum building at the appointed hour on the morning after the night of his arrival in Liverpool feeling a shabbier man than he could remember having been in his sometimes prestigious past.

The museum itself was opulently appointed; a Gothic-revival extravagance of scrolls and etchings and reliefs in its ornamental stonework. Compa.s.ses and coils of rope and capstans and s.h.i.+ps wheels were prominent themes in the carved granite and marble. To the right of the main entrance a colossal old anchor sat heavily barnacled on a section of chain with iron links the thickness of a man's forearm. La.s.siter had always thought the sea an alarmingly alien and violent element and the iconography of this building dedicated to the subject did nothing whatsoever to change his mind.

The museum was sited on a stretch of still-cobbled street behind where the wharves of the West Dock had once been. It was a quiet location. You would not happen upon the building without knowing it was there. He fancied he could smell the sludge of the Mersey on a light summer breeze and gulls wheeled crying a few feet above his head. He noticed that there was no traffic noise.

He was ten minutes early for his 11.15 appointment. During those ten minutes, as he stood in a high vestibule lined with oiled wood and waited for the time to tick by on a handsome Victorian clock, excited mounted in him at what he might yet discover there.

He kept an open mind about the mystery of New Hope Island. He believed that the Shanks footage was authentic and could not explain it in rational terms. And he had told McIntyre the truth in saying that watching it had scared him pretty badly.

He did not really know what to make of the death of David Shanks his suicide in that cliff edge ritual described by Alice Lang. He did not know whether to believe it had taken place or not. But he knew for certain that she believed it and her psychic gift was something he had seen emphatically proven, twice during his police career.

He did not know what to make of his own accident p.r.o.ne existence when harbouring the Shanks film can in his flat. He just knew that it had stopped, as abruptly as it had started, since he had quarantined the container in a safe deposit box at a storage facility, rented with McIntyre's money in Wimbledon, a dozen distant miles from where he lived in Waterloo.

He was aware of McIntyre's theory that Shanks, having dabbled in demonology, had brought the manifestation he had filmed to New Hope Island with him. Either that or it had pursued him there. McIntyre believed it had nothing to do with the mysterious fate of the island community. But La.s.siter thought that was most likely to be because the existence of the apparition rested uncomfortably with McIntyre's own, privately held theory as to the community's actual fate.

He went over in his mind what he knew about the cache of belongings held by the museum in a sea chest that had once been owned by Seamus Ballantyne. The chest and its contents had been donated by his estranged wife. Her name had been Rebecca and her maiden name Browning prior to her marriage to the slave s.h.i.+p master.

He had been prosperous, successful and respected when they had met. They had done so at a hunt ball held at Fleetwood, on Lord Hesketh's estate. Rebecca's father had been a local magistrate and she had been a beauty, by all accounts, naturally blonde and finely boned if considered slightly tall and a bit too slender by the voluptuous standards of the time. Hunting had been her pa.s.sion and she had caused a minor scandal by refusing to ride side-saddle in pursuit of the fox.

She had been strong willed, much more independent than was common among even women of her privileged cla.s.s in her day in provincial England. She had set fas.h.i.+ons. In later life, she had campaigned for the education of girls. Her radicalism had not extended, though, to the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves.

La.s.siter thought that she must have been a cruel woman. But that was what the historians called revisionism, wasn't it? He could not judge her by the standards of a more compa.s.sionate and enlightened age that hers. In the late 18th century in England, slavery had not just been a legitimate trade. It had been entirely socially acceptable. House boys from Africa, dressed in picturesque costumes, had been a domestic fas.h.i.+on in Georgian English homes.

Rebecca Browning wouldn't have seen the conditions aboard her husband's s.h.i.+p. She wouldn't have seen the corpses freed of their manacles to be thrown over the side in the morning when the first mate inventoried the body count in the stinking hold from the night before.

She had been thirty when her husband's epiphany arrived and totally resolute in rejecting his new faith and his makes.h.i.+ft ministry on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour. She could hardly really be blamed for that. Marriage was a contract in those days and the New Hope adventure was not something really covered by the vows she took at the altar. Perhaps she had been a religious woman. If she had been, his conversion would simply have been heresy to her.

From her perspective, Seamus must have become a stranger overnight, in the grip of a religious zeal that must have seemed obsessive. Maybe she simply thought he had lost his mind. That happened a lot in those days to men who spent their lives at sea. They went mad on solitude and over-proof rum and the sheer incessant hards.h.i.+p of life before the mast. His conversion could easily have been interpreted by his wife as nothing other than the onset of lunacy.

This reverie was something La.s.siter rather enjoyed. He had a taste for psychology and his interest in history had grown since his work concerning New Hope Island on behalf of Alexander McIntyre. The characters were intriguing. David Shanks had been a private, flawed, s.h.i.+ftless puzzle of a man. But Seamus Ballantye, more remote in time, was a genuine enigma.

His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of the individual he was there to meet. Professor Fortescue was the museum's Keeper of Artefacts. It sounded an ominous and even slightly sinister sort of job. Everything the man handled had belonged to someone long perished. And Fortescue, slender and bespectacled, looked a good decade too young to be the occupant of such a portentous role.

He also looked distinctly nervous. He had before him what La.s.siter a.s.sumed was a sort of manifest. It was a doc.u.ment curled and yellowed with age and written freehand by someone with perfect copperplate. It was torn in tiny fissures at its edges and obviously stiff. He might have been nervous about this doc.u.ment incurring damage in the ambient humidity and overhead light. But observing his discomfort, La.s.siter thought there was likely rather more to it than that.

Fortescue cleared his throat. 'Are you familiar, Mr La.s.siter, with how common superst.i.tion is in regard to the subject of the sea? I mean with the prevalence and sheer persistence of some of those superst.i.tions?'

His voice was characterised by the nasal tw.a.n.g of Liverpool. He was educated, probably the bright and studious product of somewhere like Merchant Taylor's, the elite grammar school in Formby. No doubt the Keeper of Artefacts had a good degree from somewhere to his name. And his phraseology was pompous. But he was local, from a local family, which was to La.s.siter's advantage in helping provide context.

'I am, Professor Fortescue, though obviously I'm not the authority you are on the subject. Can I ask why it is that you bring it up?'

Fortescue wore gla.s.ses. They had gold frames. The frames glittered in the suns.h.i.+ne coming through the high windows of the vestibule. He put down the manifest on a large marble topped table bearing a single flower vase over in the corner. He played with and then removed his gla.s.ses. Then he polished their lenses on his tie and put them on again. It was an old-fas.h.i.+oned gesture for so young a man and one dictated, La.s.siter thought, totally by nerves. The lenses of his gla.s.ses had not been smeared.

He raised his head and gave his visitor a frank look. He said, 'I know that you used to be a police detective. No one gains access to our private collection without screening.'

'I see.'

'It's a formality. Some of the objects we house are very valuable. Our insurers insist. A questionnaire was filled in by Mr McIntyre's people on your behalf.'

'Fair enough,' La.s.siter said. 'What's your point?'

'You'll probably scoff at what I have to say.'

'Try me.'

'Fortescue glanced across at his manifest, as though it might have fluttered off somewhere, or was about to. It lay where he had left it. 'The sea chest belonging to Ballantyne came into out possession when the Maritime Museum was founded in the 1880s. Prior to that time, it was in the possession of the Browning family. Since that time, it has gained a reputation for bad luck.'

'I thought that the contents had never been publically displayed.'

'They haven't.'

'Then how can they be thought unlucky?'

'They've been studied, Mr La.s.siter. They've been the subject of study on two occasions. The first occasion was a few years after the conclusion of the Great War. A man called David Shanks asked to see the contents of the chest. He was a distinguished former soldier and something of a writer in the Orwell mode.'

'Yes,' La.s.siter said. 'I've heard of him.'

'So obviously he was allowed access to Ballantyne's artefacts.'

'Obviously.'

'He stole something.'

'He did what?'

'The theft wasn't discovered.'

'Careless.'

Fortescue tried to smile. The smile was unsuccessful. He had become too pale to smile heartily and the expression was anyway unsuited to the sweat now beading his waxy forehead.

La.s.siter said, 'Warm for you in here?'

'One or two of my predecessors in this job were less than punctilious in their care of the chest. They were not careless men by nature. Nor were they lacking in conscientiousness.'

'They were afraid of the chest,' La.s.siter said. 'At least, they were afraid of what it contained.'

'Yes,' Fortescue said, 'I think it's fair to say they were.'

'Go on.'

'Shanks returned the stolen object, by post, in the autumn of 1937. He wrote both an apology and a warning to others about the item he'd returned.'

'Do you have the letter?'