Part 18 (1/2)

Fortescue nodded. 1808 was the year that Ballantyne's old maritime trade was abolished. Thomas Horan, who was by then Thomas Garland, had written a secret journal concerning events aboard the Andromeda. He had come to Barnsley and got to know the miners from the Elsinore Pit.

He had no doubt become familiar with the mine itself. An abandoned mineshaft might have seemed to him a clever place to hide his secret. If it doc.u.mented a time from a rejected life, he would not have been comfortable having it in his home. It would have sullied the home of a man so ashamed of his own past that he chose to live under his wife's maiden name.

'How dangerous would the south shaft be?'

'It's impossible to say, Professor. It would need a structural engineer's a.s.sessment and perhaps even a geological survey to tell you that.'

'And neither has been carried out because the shaft was sealed over 200 years ago.'

'Exactly.'

'Could I impose on you to take the time and trouble to show me the Elsinore Pit?'

'I can take you to it. I can point out the location of the south shaft. What we can't do is enter the mine. It's very dangerous, with the risk of subsidence. It's surrounded by fencing and barbed wire. But it's located only a mile from here and I'll be happy to guide you to the spot.'

'That's kind of you.'

'Would you do something for me in return?'

'I will if I can.'

'I've written the synopsis for a book doc.u.menting the history of mining in this area during the Industrial Revolution. I've never met a professional historian until now. Would you read the synopsis and give me your considered opinion?'

'Gladly,' Fortescue said, thinking if I survive what I intend to try to do this afternoon.

James Carrick unpacked in his room, placing the picture of his wife and children on the bedside locker where he could look at it before going to sleep. Then he switched on his laptop. His immediate task was to write a piece about the journey to the island.

He was to cameo each of the experts in the piece and Marsden had told him to include a paragraph about Lucy Church. In true post-modern fas.h.i.+on its principle architect had become part of the Chronicle's story. The readers thought of Lucy as every bit as integral to the expedition team as any of its other members.

His article was to be couched as a thousand terse and urgent words. It was a bulletin, not a colour piece, its sketches rapid and its language punchy and its sentences brutally short. It was the kind of thing he was actually quite good at and he was really rather grateful for the diversion.

He had awoken feeling no more optimistic about the trip to New Hope than he had at McIntyre's reception the previous evening. The difference was that in the sober light of day, he knew that resignation from the paper was a gesture he couldn't afford. It would cost him too much financially and as a journalist, would kill his reputation stone dead.

He would not be forgiven for the timing of his exit. It was simply too abrupt. You couldn't be a no-show on as story as big as this. There was no way he could rationalise his abstract unease over the trip to a future employer. He'd be written off as neurotic and unreliable. He'd make himself a Fleet Street pariah. And it wasn't just about him, this decision. He was the provider for his family.

He worked on his piece for a couple of hours, his concentration intense, thoroughly absorbed in the task, his fingers hovering over the keyboard as they habitually did until the apposite word slotted gratefully onto the blank page of his mind.

He wrote the piece as a word file. When he had finished, he sent it to the office in London as an email attachment. To his slight exasperation, he had to repeat this process three times before the file was successfully received at the other end. And he had to do it using his room's antediluvian plug-in modem because Wi-Fi didn't work on New Hope.

Neither did mobiles, he remembered. Neither did satellite or radio phones, with anything like reliability. He would try to use Skype to keep in contact with Lillian and the kids, but if that failed to function properly he didn't really know what he would do. She would have to get down to Maplin and buy a long wave radio transmitter and tune it to the frequency they were using in the comms centre the security fellow Davis had shown them around. At least he could legitimately put the purchase on expenses, as long as Lily kept the receipt and if all else failed.

He looked at his computer. He was using the portrait shot Lillian had downloaded from her Lumix as his screensaver. There was something fascinating about the woman with the black, geometric bob, seated at the pub table behind her Penguin paperback. Her expression seemed inscrutable until you really studied it. Then it seemed slightly hostile. Stare for longer, and it became vaguely threatening. It was almost as though the picture possessed internal life, a sly measure of intelligence. It was almost, wasn't it, like a kind of warning about something.

He'd managed to work out the t.i.tle of the book from the letters displayed on the cover at the angle at which she held it. Her fingers concealed some of the t.i.tle, but he liked anagrams and had cracked the visible pattern of letters the way you crack a code. The book was Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein.

He stood and stretched out, aware of the size of his growing paunch, probably more aware of it than usual, he thought, surrounded as he was by alpha-males in quite sickeningly athletic shape.

The security guys, led by the traumatised war hero whose name he could not now remember, were probably fit because it was in their job description. Given television's twin obsession with youth and good looks, it was probably in Kale and Cooper's job descriptions too.

But the ex-copper, La.s.siter, had opted to explore the island by jogging around its perimeter as soon as they'd finished their tour of the compound. He was sinewy and hard looking. And even the priest, though he smoked too much, carried no flab on that huge frame under the black suit he wore. He looked like an old-fas.h.i.+oned heavy, but heavy in the right places, like one of Al Capone's bodyguards in a black and white archive shot.

Carrick had his kit with him. He'd packed with gloomy resignation but also with the best of intentions. His running shoes and shorts were now on the bottom shelf of the steel locker in the corner of his room.

Wisest, though, he thought, to take Davis up on his offer of orientation before going for a run. Davis had cautioned them about the boggy ground at the centre of the island. He had warned that blanket fogs descended with total suddenness and very swiftly. Better to know the ground rather than to blunder through it blind and winded during a run. Runs were meant to be beneficial. They weren't meant to kill or cripple you or strand you neck deep in a quagmire.

He decided he would instead go and look at the comms room hardware. He was quite adept with technology. He was an early adapter who liked gizmos and understood most gadgetry intuitively.

It was why he had been secretly amused at the random picture Lily had taken with her new digital camera without knowing she was even taking it. He thought it genuinely endearing, his wife's technological inept.i.tude. The best relations.h.i.+ps were built on contrasts. He was soft and paunchy. His wife had a svelte figure honed daily during merciless workouts at her health club.

He saw none of his fellow expedition members on the short route from the accommodation block to the communication centre. He saw none of the security personnel either. He knew that they guarded the perimeter of the camp rather than its individual buildings. Theft and vandalism weren't their problem, journalists from rival media organisations were. He a.s.sumed they spent most of their s.h.i.+fts with binoculars vigilantly trained on the eastern approaches to the island, from which direction interlopers would naturally attempt to arrive.

He a.s.sumed some or all of their experts were by now at the settlement. That was the location most likely to offer any really compelling evidence of what had happened to the New Hope community. They wouldn't uncover anything today. This was going to be a marathon rather than a sprint and anyway if they were there, he knew that Lucy would be with them. She'd bonded with Jane. Alice clearly liked and trusted her. And if he was any judge, Karl Cooper had her in his sights as his next potential conquest.

Lucy would witness any immediate breakthrough, in the unlikely event that one came. And they would need to come back to the comms centre anyway to relay anything significant to the outside world, so his going there now did not const.i.tute complacency or negligence. He would have a look at the radio equipment brought to New Hope and rigged up at McIntyre's expense. He would familiarise himself with the hardware and he would master it.

He might use it to seek a reaction from Marsden or McIntyre himself as to the merits of the piece he had just filed. He could probably get through on the long-wave transmitter and get the other end to patch him through to Marsden's office. That would display initiative and demonstrate how quickly and well he was adapting to hostile circ.u.mstances in the field. It would prove he could thrive beyond what they probably thought of as his comfort zone of Ivy restaurant table and breakfast telly sofa.

It was dark in the communications room. Everything bar the long-range transmitter was switched off. That was on, emitting a greenish glow from the display that showed the frequency wavelength and signal strength. The volume pot had been turned right down and the only noise the set generated was a hum from the interior circuit boards or perhaps the fan keeping its internal workings cool.

What was odd was that the wavelength kept changing. Different sets of numbers kept appearing on the display. They rolled around as if at random, almost whimsically, Carrick thought. The signal strength vacillated wildly. He knew enough about the mechanics of a.n.a.logue radio engineering to know that the set was not behaving conventionally. He wondered whether some rogue magnetic field or freak incidence of atmospheric pressure might be responsible.

Crank up the volume. That was the first step to getting through to London. He had to transmit on a stable frequency free of static or vacillation if he wanted to enable a cogent verbal dialogue with expedition HQ in London.

He twisted the volume pot a quarter turn and a childlike moan ululated out from the single speaker. It shocked him so much that he jumped. His hand recoiled. It sounded human and disconsolate, pain and abandonment given a voice that was almost unbearable to hear.

The hairs rose on the back of Carrick's arms and he s.h.i.+vered and the noise from the speaker continued to amplify. There was a forlorn emptiness to the sound, as though it echoed out of some dark abyss of the soul. It was wretched and distressing. How was it getting louder? As he thought about covering his ears with his hands to escape it, it abruptly stopped.

In the sudden, vacant silence, he heard someone behind him. He was aware of a presence in the gloomy confines of the room, to his rear. He thought that perhaps the person was seated in a canvas chair, one of two of them that flanked the door through which he had entered. He could feel the scrutiny, unmistakeable, of being observed. It made the skin of his back and shoulders crawl and he could make no sense of it because he had shut the door firmly on coming in and it had closed with an audible click and he had not heard it open again.

'No hope.'

The two words sighed out of the speaker. It was the same voice as before but gleeful, now, rather than wretched sounding. Static didn't form words, did it? Radio interference did not articulate thoughts. A chill ran through Carrick, who reached for the set's volume pot again and then, before his fingers reached it, turned because the sensation of sharing the room had become so strong he could no longer ignore it.

She was seated in one of the chairs flanking the door, as he'd thought someone was, watching him. Her expression was not quite neutral. Her paperback book was nowhere to be seen. Her clothing looked a bit threadbare, her b.u.t.toned coat tawdrier in life than in the photograph his wife indignantly denied having ever taken. Her hair didn't quite have its photographic l.u.s.tre. It looked dull and unwashed and there was no light in her eyes at all.

She was tall, when she stood. His last cogent thought was that if nothing else, he'd been right about that.

Cooper thought the emotion not dissimilar to that created by seeing Stonehenge up close for the first time. You became so familiar with a place through photographs, that you thought you knew it intimately. But real intimacy requires physical proximity and the atmosphere of the New Hope settlement was totally different in reality from that suggested by the pictures of it he had studied over the years.

The pictures naturally took the dwellings as their subject. So they completely failed to convey the isolation in which the settlement had existed. The one-room settlers' homes seemed tiny and pitiful in the vastness of the landscape; under the dizzying sky and with the sea restlessly stretching away at the margins of the land beneath their feet.

Most of the encircling wall was still intact. It was a dry stone construction and Cooper thought the most impressive feat of building the community had achieved. It was about eight feet high and at least two feet thick. The wooden gate had gone; perhaps rotted away, perhaps salvaged or taken away to be chopped up and burned as fuel through vicious winters by the crofter David Shanks. But the posts were still there and they were strong and substantial, chiselled square and then dug deep in the earth to render the gateway secure.

The roofs of the dwellings had been constructed from timber and straw and so were long gone. The slate roof of the distillery remained. The tannery and the weaving shed had been made of wood and were therefore in poor repair. Their little church had lost its spire and its timber door to time and the salt wind, though the iron hinges that had bound the wood still remained.

Cooper shook his head. Authorities on comparative religion had commented often over the years as to the most singular feature of the church, which was that it had been built entirely windowless. Some said this was a symbolic metaphor for the blind faith onto which the New Hope community had insisted its members hold. Cooper did not have an opinion about that. But he thought that collective wors.h.i.+p inside somewhere so dark must have been a sinister experience, particularly in severe weather with the wind howling through the eves and the rain drumming percussively above.