Part 19 (1/2)

They had returned and rea.s.sembled in the recreation suite and darkness was falling when La.s.siter, by now nursing a real cup of cocoa, asked Alice Lang would she touch something of Carrick's to see if that could give them a lead.

Lucy took this to mean that the detective already suspected something really awful had happened to her department head. She offered to go and fetch something of Carrick's from his room. She returned with his laptop and she switched it on and when the screen clarified La.s.siter went very pale and Alice screamed a scream blood-curdling even against the wail of the storm outside.

'He's gone,' she said simply, when she had composed herself.

To La.s.siter, Lucy said, 'Who's the girl in the picture holding the book?'

'Her name was Elizabeth Burrows,' La.s.siter said. 'She stole something from the sea chest that used to belong to Seamus Ballantyne when she was a graduate student in Liverpool. She killed herself in 1971.'

Degrelle said, 'And you believe those two events were linked?'

'I had recent cause to inventory the contents of that sea chest myself. It wasn't an experience I'd happily repeat.'

'It doesn't mean anything,' Kale said.

'All it means,' Cooper said, 'Is that Carrick had a rather morbid taste in screen-savers.'

'Had?' Jane Chambers said, 'past tense, Karl? Do you know something the rest of us don't?'

He shot her a vindictive look, but did not reply.

'I'm going to the communications room,' Napier said. 'I'm going to have to call this development in.'

'Good luck getting any sort of a signal in this s.h.i.+t storm,' Kale said.

'I have to try. It's my job. You should all try and do something positive before you turn in tonight. Anything; action is therapeutic.'

Jane said, 'Have you needed to resort often to therapeutic tasks in the time you've been on the Island, Sergeant Napier? Has this a.s.signment been particularly challenging for you and your men?'

Kale said, 'If you do get through, Napier, ask them will they come and take me off. a.s.suming we get a window in the weather.'

Cooper said, 'Are you serious, Jesse?'

'That guy Blake disappears. Then Napier's people find a rigid inflatable missing its pa.s.sengers and crew. Now Carrick vanishes. I'm seeing a pattern here, Karl. I was enthusiastic about the expedition in theory. But there's a word for the atmosphere in that settlement we toured this afternoon and that word is menacing. The threat was palpable. I believe every one of us felt it. And I've no interest in the kind of scholarly triumph that only comes posthumously.'

'Everything will seem much more mundane again when we find Carrick, alive, well, wind-bedraggled and highly embarra.s.sed at the fuss he's unwittingly caused. Will you stay if we find him?'

'Only if we find him alive,' Kale said.

'We'll find Carrick,' Cooper said. 'Blake was a cla.s.sic candidate for suicide. Boats are inherently hazardous in these waters. You wouldn't want to be out in one now. No one would. But we'll find Carrick, I'm sure. Anyway, you can't leave. We've only just arrived. The expedition needs you.'

To La.s.siter, Degrelle said, 'I'd like you to tell me about your experience with that sea chest in Liverpool.'

'Not now, Father. It's already been a very long day,' La.s.siter said. He was looking at the seated Alice Lang and his face wore an expression of naked concern.

Jane Chambers said, 'I think you should tell all of us about your encounter with the sea chest, Mr La.s.siter. It doesn't seem either fair or scrupulous to withhold that kind of information.'

'You're a virologist,' Cooper said. 'You believe in science, not spooks.'

'I believe in empiricism,' Jane said. 'I have an open mind.'

The inference being that you don't, Mr Cooper, Lucy thought, thinking good for you, Jane, but not really sure where this was all going. As if on cue, thunder boomed right above them. She s.h.i.+vered at the suddenness and loudness of the sound. 'The book Liz Burrows is holding in that picture seems to be Mary Sh.e.l.ley's Frankenstein,' she said. 'Maybe we should all sit around and tell ghoulish stories, until dawn breaks.'

Kale said, 'You're the professional story teller, darling. The rest of us would be at a disadvantage.'

Lucy said, 'We're all at a disadvantage until Mr La.s.siter tells us about his experience in Liverpool. Jane is right about that.'

'Tell them, Patrick,' Alice said. 'I think they need to know.'

Jane said, 'And then when you come back from sending your radio bulletin, Sergeant Napier, you can tell us all what it is about this island that's made a tough man like you so mad keen on therapeutic tricks.'

He was filthy and afternoon had turned to early evening when he emerged from under the ground. His hair was caked in coal dust and his eyes rimed with it. His clothing was stiff with the stuff. He walked the distance to where he had parked his car with his package under his arm, completely oblivious to the people staring at him open mouthed on the pavements of Barnsley on the route.

In modern times the miners had showered after their s.h.i.+ft. There was no one left living who remembered men looking like Philip Fortescue did now after a stint at the coal face.

But Fortescue did not think about that. All he thought about was the distance separating him from his flat in Formby. It was about 80 miles and around an hour and a half. It was a short jaunt and the blink of an eye, comparatively speaking. In the last couple of hours he had travelled 200 years back in time to reach something written in another world.

In some ways that world had been quite enlightened. But in other ways it had been quite deliberately dark. Children had manned the trapdoors in the mines meant to prevent the spread and build up of lethal methane gas during brutal s.h.i.+fts of work endured without a break.

That had not been the worst of it. Just how dark that period had been, he thought he would only discover truly when he un-wrapped the journal carried now in oilcloth under his arm.

The giddy thought hit him that he might actually be carrying nothing to do with the s.h.i.+p's doctor, Thomas Horan. He might just as well be carrying a cache of old newspapers or religious pamphlets. In theory the parcel under his arm could be anything from the period of the south shaft closure at the Elsinore Pit. It could be an inventory of workshop tools or a wages list of the men who had worked there. It could be a print run of election posters dumped by a lazy canva.s.ser.

But it wasn't, was it. Because he knew that when he had imagined someone singing The Recruited Collier along with him back down there in the darkness under the ground, at that moment when his bowels had threatened to turn to liquid and the sweat had frozen on his forehead, he had not been imagining anything at all. He hadn't been required to imagine it. The two-part harmony had been sly and sardonic and real.

He would unwrap and read what he'd discovered as soon as he got home. He would not take it to the museum. Generally he did all his serious, scholarly reading at his desk at work in the s.p.a.cious office he had to himself and which he could lock from the inside because some of the artefacts he handled were so rare and valuable.

In a sense this was a work related find. If he had never accepted his current post, he would not be carrying it now. He owed Edith Chambers' original call to his position at the museum. He owed Emma Foot's priceless cooperation to his professorial status and exalted job t.i.tle. But the methodology of the search and the nature of the object he'd tracked down would always remain a secret.

His experiences since opening the sea chest in the museum bas.e.m.e.nt had made of him a circ.u.mspect and superst.i.tious man. He felt that he would be very unwise to try to profit in any way from what Jacob Parr had obliquely led him to. It was not his to profit from. He would derive no academic glory from his discovery. He would read it and then pa.s.s it on and he felt truthfully that even reading it was probably a risk he shouldn't take.

He had to read it, though. He felt his courage under the ground had earned him that privilege. If he read it, its contents might haunt him for the remainder of his life. If he didn't, his curiosity would certainly torment him for as long as he lived.

He might sit with it in his favourite chair and glance up and see Liz Burrows in her double-b.u.t.ton coat under her black bob watching him from across his lounge with a look of mordant disapproval twisting that scarlet mouth.

But he felt that he probably wouldn't. He had seen less and less of her over recent weeks. He suspected that she must have urgent business elsewhere; someone more deserving than him to haunt. He certainly hoped that she did. Even a glimpse of her unnerved him. Where her ghost was concerned, familiarity would never breed contempt.

Only dread, he said to himself. He looked at his wrist.w.a.tch. The experts were well and truly on the island, now. They were preparing for their first night under canvas, or the hi-tech modern equivalent. He wondered how La.s.siter and the rest were getting on. He liked Patsy La.s.siter. He hoped Alice Lang was drawing a happy blank on New Hope with her dangerous psychic gift. He thought inevitably then of Jane Chambers.

He had reached his car. He opened the driver's door and climbed in, dirtying the fabric of the seat and seat back, smearing both beyond hope of ever being made properly clean again and completely oblivious to the fact. His mind was on Jane as he put her daughter's prize on the seat beside him. She would be out and about on the island, skipping through the gorse and s.h.i.+ngle, clad in one of those padded orange anoraks.

He thought that she was probably the only woman in the world who could make Gore-Tex waterproofs and Timberland boots seem a s.e.xy ensemble. He'd buy the paper in the morning and read the first story proper, see the pictures of their arrival as they exited their helicopters and got down to the business of nailing the New Hope mystery for good and all.

He thought of Seamus Ballantyne, staring bleakly into the distance, awaiting the speck of hope that was his bird while his community became ever more restive in their suffering in the settlement below. He hoped the journal on the seat beside his would be less elliptical than the account he had discovered written on the island, years later.

Patsy La.s.siter had said Ballantyne's bird was a carrier pigeon and Fortescue felt slightly deflated that he had not and never would have worked that one out for himself. He figured the journal written by Horan would be a much more straightforward read. Its contents would lie comfortably within his area of academic expertise. It was intended for Jane Chambers and she was a virologist, a clever woman but a doctor with no claim to the sort of arcane nautical knowledge he possessed.

He indulged the fantasy for a moment of going through it with her, perhaps clarifying its more obscure pa.s.sages with cogent verbal notes of his own that she would appreciate as her respect and liking for him grew exponentially into something resembling real infatuation.

He sighed, letting this silly daydream go. Then he opened his car's glove compartment and took out the SatNav and with grimy fingers, tapped in his home address. In the sunlit warmth of its interior, in the early evening suns.h.i.+ne, his car had begun to smell not just like coal, but like a coal mine smelled. It smelled dank and sour and rank and dirty and he didn't notice this at all.