Part 9 (1/2)

'I heard a scream,' Malone said. 'I was patrolling the perimeter and I heard it over on the west sh.o.r.e, near the ruined cottage. I was heading for the cottage, for a break and a f.a.g. And I heard a scream.'

Breaks and f.a.gs were very much what you had when you weren't patrolling. Whatever Malone had heard had scared him into honesty. Napier was still sceptical, though. He said, 'Could have been a gull or a seal. Could even have been a whale, in these waters.'

'It was human and it was terrified,' Malone said. 'And when I looked there was no one around to do the screaming. And when I went to report it to Captain Blake just now, his sleeping bag was empty and cold.'

It wasn't just blowing a gale. It was p.i.s.sing down with rain. Malone's pal Jarvis was somewhere to the north of where they stood, still patrolling. The rump of the Seasick Four, Smith and Cartwright, were fast asleep in their tents.

'Who else knows?'

'n.o.body knows. I tried radioing Jarve for backup, but couldn't get a signal. I came to tell Blake and he was gone. Then you nearly killed me.'

'Stay here,' Napier said. 'Wake the others.' He handed Malone his bayonet. 'Sit tight. If anyone you don't know approaches, if you're attacked, use that. Do it. Don't hesitate.'

'Where are you going?'

'I'll wake up Troy and his team. They need to be warned and we need their help in searching for Blake.'

'What do you think it is? What made Blake scream? Where is he?'

'What do you think I am, Malone, the oracle of all f.u.c.king knowledge?'

'I know who you are. We all do. I read about you in the paper after the thing in Afghanistan.'

'Get Cartwright and Smith on their feet. Stick close and stay put. I'll be back as soon as I can.'

Alert to movement and sound, covering the distance to the project command centre, Napier refused to speculate in his own mind about what it was that was going on. He had no way of knowing. He didn't think a clay pipe smoking phantom could have crooned Blake into a state of terror with an old folk song and he only had Malone's word for it that the scream had been human.

Blake could have fallen badly somewhere or blundered into a bog or been swept out to sea by a freak wave. They were in a pretty elemental part of the world, all told. Speculation was pointless without some lead or clue. Waking Troy and his men was the imperative; doing that and then proceeding coolly and methodically.

Troy, once roused, fetched Brennan. The two of them told Napier about their earlier encounter with Blake. They told him Blake had drunk just the one can of lager prior to leaving them, sober and in good spirits, slightly preoccupied perhaps, but only with what his duties necessitated there on the island, if Troy was any judge.

'Do you have any weapons?'

Troy and Brennan exchanged a look.

'Level with me, boys.'

'A couple of hunting rifles,' Troy said, 'bolt-action, small-bore, not exactly private army specification.'

'Scopes?'

'Night scopes on both,' he said.

'Good. Load both of them and give one your lads here. Tell them to be vigilant. We'll take the other one.'

'Where are we going?' Troy said.

'We're going back for Malone. Then you and me and Malone and Brennan here are going to go and take a look at that crofter's cottage on the other side of the island. Then if necessary, we're going to come back here and Brennan is going to establish radio contact with McIntyre's people and we're going to call this in.'

Brennan and Troy just stared at him and nodded.

'Anyone have a problem with my taking charge over this?'

'No,' they said, together.

Lucy met Jane Chambers after her testosterone soaked encounter with the archaeologist Jesse Kale. Kale insisted on meeting her at the city boy boxing gym in Holborn he habitually used. He sipped at a high protein shake and teased the protective wraps from his hands and sweat smouldered off him photogenically. It was all a bit tragic, really, Lucy thought, since she hadn't been accompanied as she might have in the old Fleet Street days by a photographer.

Kale was polite enough but not really engaging. Like most celebrity academics, he clearly felt as secured in his own myth as his hands were in the lint bandages protecting them from bruising harm when he threw his punches at the heavy bag. She couldn't get past the wrapping to the flesh.

She thought Jane Chambers would be a relief. Not light relief, because she was an intellectually astute woman and hardly a lightweight as a personality. Her enthusiasms extended well beyond girly pastimes like gossip and shopping. But she had not been interested in emphasising her own credentials on the phone during their first conversation. She had been concerned only to try to provide a plausible scientific answer to the mystery of New Hope Island.

She had a history with Karl Cooper, but Lucy would not broach that subject. She would listen, was what she would do. She had an intuition that she and Jane might become friends, or at least allies on the New Hope expedition. They would be living in a compound as a community in a barren and remote location. Carrick, Cooper and Kale; they sounded like an old variety hall act. But what they actually were was a trio of alpha males. They could not help but attention-seek and compete. Their career success, to her mind, however bright they might be, was a function of driven personalities.

It could become unbearable, particularly if the island was slow and reluctant in surrendering its secrets. Carrick was her immediate boss and she was stuck with the hierarchy unless he did something really stupid and Marsden fired him and promoted her. That was an unlikely eventuality. Carrick was not an original thinker, but he was a shrewd and skilful corporate survivor. Professionally, he just never seemed to put a foot wrong.

She thought it likely that Cooper and Kale would clash. Cooper's mother had taken in was.h.i.+ng so that the boy from Wigan could go to university. Kale came from an academic family so well-established it was almost a dynasty and there had always been money there. Or there had since his Scottish great-grandfather began mining in a mineral rich region of British Columbia.

They still didn't have their replacement medium. Or if they did, Lucy had not yet been told the ident.i.ty of the person. She was more open-minded about the possibility of contact with the dead than her jokes on the phone to Carrick on the subject had suggested. It was Hawsley-Smith she had objected to, not the principle of taking along someone who claimed to have second sight.

She considered the expedition's original choice of medium a fraud. She thought that his replacement would need a strong personality whatever their credentials. Cooper and Kale and Jane Chambers too for that matter were scientific in their approach. They were methodical and academically fastidious and above all, rational. Occult mysticism was something they would likely greet with nothing but scorn.

She had arranged to meet the virologist in Bloomsbury. During their second phone conversation, they forsook their earlier formality and became Lucy and Jane. They agreed to have lunch at a small restaurant with tables on the pavement in Lamb's Conduit Street. It was conveniently near the hospital building housing Jane's department. It was somewhere Lucy would be very unlikely to be seen by anyone connected to the paper.

Even if she was, it didn't really matter. She was expected to nurture these relations.h.i.+ps in order to gain insights into her subjects. Even off the record meetings were considered constructive in that sense, because they fostered trust. And this meeting was off the record. Jane Chambers had been insistent on that in seeking it.

Lucy got to the restaurant deliberately early. She found a table outside and ordered a small gla.s.s of Chablis and fired up an American Spirit. She inhaled the smoke gratefully, luxuriating in the guilt-free ten minutes she had to indulge her habit before Jane was due to meet her there.

She saw a waiter young, Mediterranean studying her from behind the tinted gla.s.s of the restaurant interior. The expression on his face was appreciative. She looked away from him, at the Georgian terraces lining the pretty street in the bright June suns.h.i.+ne. Objectively, she was an attractive young woman. She sometimes forgot that. Such was the prevailing machismo of the newsroom and the editorial conference that sometimes she almost forgot she was a woman at all.

The tables were Formica topped in a deliberately retro nod towards the continental style of the 1960s. The ashtrays were crimped little circles of metal foil. She was able to discard hers, along with the two b.u.t.ts it by then contained, in a street bin prior to Jane's arrival. Her lunch companion was a medical doctor and Lucy liked to be approved of. It was a character weakness, she knew. But at least, she thought, seeing Jane approach along the pavement, svelte in a blue cashmere suit and sungla.s.ses, I'm aware of it.

They were at the coffee stage before Jane finally confided what she'd come there to tell Lucy. Up until that point they spoke about the expedition generally and about Lucy's earlier interview with the forensic archaeologist.

'Does he have a theory of his own?'

'He says he has an open mind. He says if your epidemic theory is correct, he's confident he'll find the ma.s.s grave. Kale actually thinks the explanation for the disappearance might be really mundane and so he's checking meteorological data from the years immediately prior to the event.'

'Why?'

'He says because of the Island's exposure to Atlantic storms. He believes that if the storms were particularly severe for a number of consecutive years, the Island community might have built a shelter underground to protect themselves from the worst ravages of the weather.'

'And the shelter subsided or collapsed,' Jane said. 'And all the people sheltering were crushed or suffocated and perished.'

'Pretty much.'

Jane smiled down at her plate. Her sungla.s.ses were perched in her hair and there was a persistent frown line creasing her forehead. She looked pretty and troubled. She said, 'Mundane enough, if a bit gruesome for the victims. But I don't buy it.'

'Neither does Kale, really. What's bothering you, Jane?'

And Jane told her about Edith's dreams and the song she had learned to play and sing in her sleep and about who Jacob Parr had been.