Part 10 (1/2)

'Just don't get drunk and fall off your horse.'

La.s.siter reached for a slice of almond cake from a tiered arrangement on the trolley. 'Does that mean I'm going?'

'There's been a spot of bother on the island,' McIntyre said. 'As yet, it's unresolved bother. We'll drink our tea and I'll tell you about it.' He shuffled forward and reached for the teapot. 'I'll be mother,' he said.

The head of McIntyre's security team had disappeared from the island the previous night. A member of the security personnel, a man called Malone, claimed to have heard a scream in the vicinity of the cottage built on the island by David Shanks while on patrol at roughly the time of the disappearance. A second member of the security team, Jarvis, had been patrolling the opposite end of the island from Malone and was adamant that he had seen or heard nothing out of the ordinary.

The missing man was a former Royal Marine captain called Richard Blake. He was a veteran soldier with combat experience and though weather conditions on New Hope had been severe the previous night, he was expertly trained in endurance and survival techniques.

Blake had not had a designated second-in-command among his team of five. But a former Parachute Regiment NCO called Paul Napier had a.s.sumed the role. He had requested and received the help of the construction experts building the expedition's headquarters. He had requisitioned firearms they had with them. He had secured the perimeters of both their HQ and his own team's camp and then organised a search for Blake. They had found nothing. In the small hours, after several hours of trying, they had finally patched through a radio message to McIntyre's London office to advise them about events on the Island.

Napier had requested permission to inform the coastguard of the disappearance, a legal and moral obligation McIntyre had been woken to personally accede to. The search had resumed in the morning. There was still no sign of Blake. The coastguard helicopter had been scrambled and awaited weather fit to fly in to begin a search for the body off the Island's coast.

La.s.siter said, 'Would that be the Paul Napier? The same bloke who was awarded the Military Cross a couple of years ago in Afghanistan?'

'I don't think there can be two of them,' McIntyre said.

'He sounds like an impressive individual.'

'Pure luck on our part,' McIntyre said. 'I delegated recruitment of the security personnel. I can't do everything myself. It seems the company was chosen on the most compet.i.tive quote. They were just the cheapest outfit, frankly. A head rolled in my London office over that particular false economy last night. I've also sacked the existing team.'

'You mean the surviving team. Blake will almost certainly be dead.'

'The surviving team have been dismissed. Better people, in stronger numbers, are already on their way.'

'That seems a bit hard on Napier.'

'I spoke to Napier personally in the early hours of this morning. He advised me on the new security recruits. Effectively they're hand-picked. He'll lead them. I'm hoping this is his first and last experience of crisis management on the island, but I feel happier knowing he's there.'

'Pay rise?'

'Let's not get carried away,' McIntyre said.

'I wonder what happened to Captain Blake.'

'That trail will be very cold indeed by the time you get there, La.s.siter. We'll have a better idea in the meantime, if the coastguard recovers a body.'

'Any theories you'd like to float?'

McIntyre shrugged. 'Blake was single and he had no children. He was a combat soldier age had obliged to leave the military. The suicide rate is disproportionately high among men sharing his profile when they leave the only family they've known. I suspect he felt he'd endured enough of life. I suspect he waded into the sea. He could avoid the stigma of self-murder because no coroner could rule out the possibility that he slipped or was taken by a freak wave.'

'And the scream heard by Malone?'

'Maybe the water was cold.'

Alice had not derived the information she wanted to when she'd touched the cine film can that had once been labelled and stored by the soldier of fortune and sometimes crofter and suicide David Shanks. She was not in control of her gift. It dictated to her what it was that she saw. She had actually wanted to know something about the nature and fate of the apparition Shanks had filmed on New Hope Island on that bl.u.s.tery, black and white day back in 1934.

She had not expected to witness his last moments of life. She felt no empathy for the man or sympathy for his predicament. Patrick La.s.siter had told her that he'd been expelled from an artistic community in Cornwall for dabbling in black magic. She thought that people who did such things probably deserved what they got as a consequence. As someone endowed with an uncanny ability she had never sought and only reluctantly acknowledged, she could not imagine courting such powers through the enactment of rituals and the deliberate evoking of spirits.

She had not even been curious about Shanks, really. But she had been very curious about what had happened to turn a little girl into the spectral predator that was the subject of the film shot by Shanks on New Hope.

Her clothing had put the apparition firmly in the period of the disappearance. And of course, the disappearance of the Hope Island community was one of the great unsolved enigmas of modern history. If they had been the victims of some awful crime, as Patrick seemed to suspect, they were beyond the reach of justice after all this time. Neither did Alice share Patrick's conviction that the person or people responsible should face the verdict of history. d.a.m.ning them now did so far too long after the fact for it to be perceived as any kind of retribution.

It was the little girl. She had been transformed into something lurid and terrifying. She was a ghost, wasn't she? She was a tormented soul who represented all the children lost to their own rightful futures on New Hope Island. Alice wanted to know what had happened to her and her brothers and sisters and cousins and schoolmates and friends.

She had to know and she believed when she got there, her gift would enable her to see it. She might even be forced to see it, she thought, with a shudder. It would be a revelation of awful clarity. But she suspected that this task was what she had been given the gift to accomplish.

She was afraid. She was frightened of the presence that had squatted observing David Shanks in his last moments on the cliff top at Moher in County Clare. Denser than the night, too large and far too still to be human, it had watched gleefully as Shanks bid a careless farewell to his long and bedraggled life. In some way it had coaxed and encouraged him. Or had it just filled him with such morbid dread that the plunge to the rocky waters below represented a sort of escape for him?

Denser than night, she thought, far bigger than a man. Had it followed him there from the Hebrides? Was it some vile thing he had conjured through a baleful spell and been unable to govern properly? Did it slouch around the island, living still, guarding its domain? She didn't know. She would not have answers until an artefact was put into her hands to which her unasked-for gift could respond.

Alice valued her life. She valued its possibilities with the flawed, clever ex-detective she now realised she had probably loved without realising it for several years. Only when she'd come to in his flat, in his arms, had her feelings for him finally become obvious to her.

She thought that they were a good match. They had both suffered sufficient loneliness to appreciate one another's company fully. They could compensate for one another's weaknesses because they possessed such contrasting strengths. Their shared future was one in which neither of them would ever take the other for granted. They had each endured too much solitary unhappiness to allow that to happen.

She didn't want to place Patrick La.s.siter in danger and she suspected that the island to which they were going remained a hazardous destination. But she had to go. It was what she had been given her gift for. It was her destiny to take part in the expedition. And he had to go because in helping solve the mystery of what had been done there he would find some sort of purpose. When that happened, she believed he would discover the thirst slowly killing him was finally and utterly quenched.

He had not taken a drink since returning from Liverpool. She had not smoked since their lunchtime kiss on her garden patio of the previous day. She still had the cravings and she suspected that Patrick did, too. But Alice looked forward to the time when the only addiction they would surrender to was the one they shared for each other.

The rifle felt good on Napier's shoulder. The weight of it felt familiar and comfortable there. Its action was almost antique to a man familiar with the SA80 semi-automatic a.s.sault item supplied as standard to every infantry unit of the British army. But the SA80 had proven to be a dismally unreliable weapon. Bits fell off it. It jammed when it came into contact with sand. It jammed sometimes when it didn't come into contact with sand. It was inaccurate and overheated far too easily.

The weapon on his shoulder used a small calibre bullet. You would have to shoot for the vital organs or the head to have success in stopping any human target in its tracks. But Napier was an excellent shot.

Anyway, he did not expect to have to use the rifle in anger. Blake had not been b.u.mped off by heavies or become the reluctant focus of an abduction plot. A fire-fight with paid goons was the last experience he expected to have to endure. The rifle felt good in a symbolic way. Troy had suggested he keep it, for the duration. It represented the respect the construction guys had for him and he was starting slowly to rekindle for himself.

He had found something. He had lied to McIntyre about that. He had been obliged to do so because the thing he had found would have panicked the others, or spooked them, he thought. He could not discuss it on an open frequency with Brennan beside him struggling to keep the signal from breaking up. The time would come to talk about what he had found, but it had not arrived yet.

He felt a bit sorry for the Seasick Four. They were on the quay now, in the harbour, waiting for the fis.h.i.+ng smack to take them to the mainland as the coastguard chopper lapped the island's coastline looking for a body Napier was confident would never be found.

It wasn't their fault. They were what you got when the training was inadequate and the pay p.i.s.s-poor. One of them, Malone, had actually, to Napier's mind, shown a degree of promise. With the right experience and a bit of patience, he could possibly have made the grade. But the blokes on their way to replace the guys on the quay were of a different order entirely. And there were eight of them their strength effectively doubled at Napier's own estimate of what was needed to effectively secure the perimeter of New Hope from any media rivals of McIntyre's hoping to steal the story.

The irony of the situation was not lost on him. Blake's disappearance had turned him from a loser into a winner literally overnight. That was something to ponder on, but the time for pondering on it wasn't now, because there were much more urgent things to think about.

The fis.h.i.+ng boat had hove into sight. In another hour or so, the seasick four would have departed the island for good. Troy and his men were scheduled to fly back to the mainland later in the afternoon, their work accomplished and the weather benign enough today for their flight. They would leave Brennan behind because the radio hardware wasn't functioning without severe and so far unexplained glitches. His own replacement crew would be here tomorrow morning.

It meant that Brennan would be all he had for company and backup for about 16 hours, some of them dark. They had a rifle apiece. Brennan was temperamentally sound and really, would they be any worse off? The Seasick Four were almost completely ineffective. Troy's men weren't stupid, but neither were they trained in areas like unarmed combat and covert surveillance. Besides, Napier had no intention of allowing either himself or Brennan to stray into what he regarded as the danger zone, at the other end of the island, in the vicinity of the cottage built by the crofter, David Shanks.

That was where he had found the object in his pocket. That was where he had found the b.l.o.o.d.y relic that told him for sure that Captain b.o.l.l.o.c.ks was no more and that what they were dealing with on the island was more than back-up special effects orchestrated by Alexander McIntyre.

It had lain in a tiny skid mark of blood and saliva on the stone floor of the Shanks cottage and he had seen it straight away. He had covered it with a boot until the others vacated the cottage and began their search of the surrounding land and the sh.o.r.eline a hundred metres away. He had bent at the knee and swiftly plucked it from the floor and concealed it. It was a single tooth, an incisor, and it had belonged to Blake until it had been plucked from his head with sufficient brutal force to leave a circle of torn gum around its root.

What possessed hands that could do that to a man? Napier didn't know. What possessed the inclination to do it? Again, he had no ready answer. He'd seen the debris of men blown to pieces by roadside explosives and artillery a.s.saults. He'd never in his whole military experience seen anything like that, though.