Part 15 (2/2)

'Your timing isn't the best, professor.'

'Sorry.'

'You keep saying that.'

'Will you?'

La.s.siter was silent. Then he said, 'Was Horan married?'

'Yes.'

'And the lucky lady was called?'

'Martha Jane Garland.'

'Good.'

'Why?'

'Good because Garland isn't Smith or Brown. Trace the genealogy of Barnsley families with his wife's maiden name. He would have changed his to hers. That's my hunch.'

'Why?'

'Out of shame, Professor. He was ashamed of what went on aboard the Andromeda. He colluded in it. He drew his pay from the profits of a trade he knew was evil. He enjoyed an officer's status aboard the s.h.i.+p. The company that owned the s.h.i.+p saw to it that he was clothed and fed and berthed. He may have suffered sufficient remorse in later life to try to become someone else. When people do that, the first thing they change is the obvious thing. They change their name.'

'He might have used his mother's maiden name.'

'He wouldn't. To have done that would have been a perceived slight on his father. He did not wish to slight his father, but himself. In a sense he will have wanted to eradicate himself. He'll have taken his wife's surname. I'd bet money on it.'

'You were a really good detective, weren't you?'

'You've no idea how cruel the past tense can be, Professor.'

'You were though, weren't you?'

'Yes. I was.'

'What went wrong?'

'Thirst intervened.'

'What does that mean?'

'I was a drunk.'

'Past tense again?'

'I very much hope so, Professor Fortescue.'

'I'd actually prefer it if you called me Phil.'

'Then I'm Patrick to you. Just don't do that Scouse abbreviation thing, because I can't abide being called Patsy.'

'I won't.'

'Keep me up to speed on your Horan journal search, Phil. Edith Chambers is right. It is important. Something specific and highly significant occurred aboard the Andromeda and we need to know what it was.'

'I'd probably find it quicker if we looked together.'

'I've a personal interest in the continued wellbeing of Alice Lang, Phil. I'm not delaying my departure for New Hope even for a day. I'm going with her.'

'I thought you'd be more willing to help, after your experience in the bas.e.m.e.nt here and after your encounter in that pub, when you left the museum.'

Silence.

'Patsy?'

'What did I just tell you about calling me that?'

'Sorry.'

'What happened in Liverpool is precisely why I'm going with Alice to the island. She's determined to go. I have to go with her.'

They said their goodbyes. Fortescue put his mobile down on the desk thinking that Patrick La.s.siter was a very fortunate man. This was neither because he had conquered his personal demons, nor because of his imminent departure on an expedition the whole world seemed intrigued about. It was because he had never felt so strongly about a woman as La.s.siter so plainly did, and he envied him the unselfish strength of that attachment.

McIntyre threw a c.o.c.ktail party on the eve of the expedition's departure. Attendance wasn't mandatory, but Lucy thought it would have been a rash member who spurned their invitation. By the time the pictures of the event were published in the following morning's paper, the people wearing black tie and evening gowns and baring their photogenic smiles would be aboard a Lear jet taking them to Edinburgh and the choppers that would deposit them and their investigative hardware on the island.

Even to her deliberately jaundiced eye, they looked a glamorous collection of experts. Karl Cooper, despite the vanity and apparent taste for domestic violence, looked like a matinee idol slipping gracefully into grey-templed maturity. Jesse Kale had a swaggering charisma, brain and brawn immaculately attired and almost twinkling in the happy galaxy of the other guests. When Cooper and Kale huddled, it was like a moment, Lucy thought, from one of those buddy movies with a pair of competing leads.

Jane Chambers was poised and slender in black silk and a diamond choker, her blonde hair worn loosely, splas.h.i.+ng across her shoulders. She had a hauteur Lucy knew to be a total and even poignant misrepresentation of the woman's complex character. It was skin deep at best. But in a situation as glitzy and superficial as this one, it worked.

Alice Lang's s.e.xuality was more blatant than Jane's. Her full-lipped mouth wore almost a pout in repose. She had a ripe, succulent look, voluptuous even in the sober grey trouser suit she wore. Again, the air of serene sensuality she exuded was far from being the complete picture. Or story, come to that. Lucy had the sense that Alice was afraid of her gift and lived almost in dread of the revelations it forced upon her. She was almost a martyr to the awful truths it disclosed.

Degrelle, that terrible priestly show-off, wore a cape. Lucy did not think a cape an item of clothing many men could wear without looking ridiculous in the second decade of the 21st century. But the exorcist did not look foolish in the slightest. He looked das.h.i.+ng and formidable, with his club fists and brooding air of an ageing pugilist. As she had said in the piece he had complimented her on moments earlier, he resembled a cleric prepared to look for the knockout in the champions.h.i.+p rounds in the ring with Satan himself.

James Carrick, she was starting to worry about. He had a slightly haunted look. His usual bonhomie was missing. His hail-fellow-well-met persona was absent without leave and Marsden and McIntyre were highly likely to notice it had gone and demand it return immediately. It was much of what the paper paid his salary for. They had not hired a gloomy introvert. He had aged about ten years in the two weeks since he had announced, in that late night phone call, that he was the second staffer going to New Hope. He had sounded casual. Fraudulently so, she now realised.

'There's less to me than meets the eye,' he had always been fond of saying. 'Deep down inside, I'm really shallow.' Lucy was beginning to think that the opposite was true. To her own astonishment, she felt a stab of pity for her department head she had never dreamed he would evoke in her.

Patrick La.s.siter was the major surprise. In the file pictures, in his Met days, he had looked rather sallow and slightly hollow-eyed. In the flesh, he was tall and handsome and his brown eyes were shrewd and focussed. He held your gaze when he spoke to you and he was articulate and considered and sometimes mordantly funny in what he said.

She had expected all the personality of an online application form. It should have occurred to her that a detective as successful as he had been in solving crimes would at least be clever. It hadn't, though. She had not been able to get past the stereotype of the time-serving copper who struggled with drink. She did not often get it wrong, but she had with him, spectacularly so. And it had been down to misconception and prejudice. They were cardinal errors in her profession and the lesson of La.s.siter was one she had been grateful to learn.

Looking at them all, chatting casually to them in McIntyre's cathedral-sized atrium, she felt quite proud of the work she had accomplished for the paper in the lead up to the moment of departure. Her profiles had made a family of them. She had skilfully fostered the feeling that they were united in their cause, bonded in their ambition to finally crack one of history's most stubborn mysteries.

She could have gone the other way. She had been given more or less a free hand. Nothing had been subbed out except her snide references to Karl Cooper's air of preening narcissism. She could have made them seem like an unmatched set of competing prima donnas. It would have been unfair on the women and pointless with Alice Lang because she was not really well known enough. She did not have a pedestal from which to be knocked off.

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