by F. G. Cottam
Cooper answered without turning around. He said, ‘I’ve never met your paper’s editor.’
‘Not Marsden. I’m talking about my ultimate boss. I mean Alexander McIntyre.’
‘No,’ Cooper said. Now he did turn around. He’d pried the tops off the bottles and they were beading at their necks in the grip of his twin fists with condensation. He was grinning. ‘I may have been in the same room as your proprietor, but I don’t believe I have ever spoken to him in my life.’
Lassiter left it until noon before calling Alice Lang. He considered himself a man curious by temperament. He did not think it was possible to be good at detection without possessing a strong degree of natural curiosity. So he wanted to call her, really, from the moment he awoke. But he decided to leave it out of consideration and tact until a time when she might have regained some sense of self possession.
She had blacked out. She had gripped the film can briefly in the fingers of her left hand and lifted its insubstantial alloy weight from the table and then her shoulders had sagged and her chin slumped onto her chest and he had in a snapshot of self-loathing been aware of what she would look like in middle-age.
He lifted her from the chair and placed her carefully on the floor. He put her into the recovery position and pinched her nose upwards and opened her mouth with gentle pressure to the sides of her jaw and was gratified, when he listened, to hear that she was breathing normally.
Her eyes started open. She saw him, kneeling on his thin carpet beside her. Her body juddered with remembered shock. ‘Hold me,’ she said.
And Patrick Lassiter held Alice Lang as he had not held a woman for a decade or more. He held her tenderly and he stroked her cheek and shushed whatever silent noises gave rise to the current turmoil in her gifted mind.
Now, on the phone, almost 19 hours later, he coughed to clear his throat and said, ‘Tell me, Alice. Tell me what it was you saw.’
She answered with a question. She said, ‘What do you know about the death of David Shanks?’
‘Not much,’ Lassiter said. ‘He died in County Clare in the West of Ireland. I don’t know the specifics. His body washed up on a remote beach, not far from the Cliffs of Moher. It was 42 years ago. He must have set out in his fishing boat and then foundered in a squall. The Atlantic is an unforgiving ocean, violent and cold. The weather off Clare is unpredictable. It was not one of those whiskey and fiddle-playing Irish deaths. It was bleak, no music or laughter. All that I think can be said for certain is that he died as he largely lived, alone.’
‘I know the specifics,’ Alice said. ‘You’re wrong in one important regard. Yesterday afternoon, I saw his death. He didn’t die alone, Patrick. Though I am fairly certain he would’ve wished he had.’
Chapter Three
Napier waited by the makeshift harbour for the arrival of the choppers bringing the construction crew. They were a specialist outfit, experts at what they did. They were most often deployed building relief shelters and crisis headquarters all over the world in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes and catastrophic floods.
They would build the command centre from which the investigation into the New Hope vanishing would be organised and run. They would build the media centre from which the world would receive its carefully rationed revelations. They would build the accommodation in which the team of disparate experts would shelter and sleep when they weren’t on site.
They had, each and every man of them, been thoroughly vetted. They had all signed lengthy confidentiality agreements threatening punitive action if these were breached. They were probably being extremely well paid with a generous bonus if they completed their assigned work ahead of schedule.
Even before their arrival, Napier envied them. He possessed a set of job skills that made him a misfit in civilian life. They, by contrast, were knowledgeable and respected professionals. He hoped they would also be better company that Captain Bollocks and the Seasick Four.
At that moment, the former had deployed the latter on sentry duty, no doubt to impress the new arrivals with a show of vigilant authority. The captain himself was probably on the south of the Island in David Shanks’ crofter’s cottage. Strictly that was out of bounds, but the captain was the sort who enjoyed pulling rank and he spent more and more of his time there.
There was a window in the weather. It was not just mild, it was glorious. Generally you heard the heavy thrum of the choppers before they came into sight. That was particularly true of the Chinooks, with their twin rotors and the mighty turbines powering them. Today, though, he thought that he would see them before hearing the sound of their approach. Visibility seemed boundless, nature benign, the island positively Famous Five like in its picturesque appeal.
Despite this, Napier brooded. He brooded on his clay pipe find because the circumstances gave him no choice. He could not share the discovery with Blake. Captain Bollocks was the status conscious sort. Whatever his own private opinion about New Hope’s mysteries, the captain’s public attitude would be bound to be one of cynical disbelief.
There was no distance between open-mindedness and gullibility with blokes like Blake. They were too distrustful of their own judgement and ever wary of the wind-up, for that. With a bloke like Blake, incredulity was the default setting. He was the granite-hard combat veteran who believed in nothing he couldn’t poke with a bayonet blade.
He was an insecure wanker desperate to prove a toughness he had never actually possessed. That was Napier’s considered opinion, who liked his commanding officer less with every strange occurrence this peaty northern paradise threw at him. Except that Blake wasn’t really his commanding officer because the days of command structure and with them respectability had long gone. He was just the man in charge. He was the gaffer, whatever his military pretensions. And Napier had no respect for him or trust of his judgement at all.
The Seasick Four?
Do me a fucking favour, he thought. Napier reckoned he would tear out his own finger nails with his teeth before confiding anything that might come across as remotely inexplicable or spooky in any of them. It might amuse them. It might scare them. What it would most likely do would be to baffle them and alienate them even further from someone they already considered aloof and probably odd.
It left him alone. He was entirely alone. Whatever was happening on New Hope, and he had no fucking idea what that might be except for its apparent fidelity to a period theme, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.
Was he scared? Yes and no.
He was not unaware of the wider imperatives of the world. He knew about hype and sensationalism and the urge for publicity and vindication that would fuel a media mogul such as Alexander McIntyre in pursuing a project such as this. The stakes were vast. He had worked briefly as a bodyguard for a major Hollywood player and seen up close what megalomania could do to distort the values and perceptions of a man at the centre of things and addicted to remaining there.
What if New Hope Island produced nothing of interest? What if the wind scoured topology surrendered no new clues as to what had happened to its vanished inhabitants? Would McIntyre tolerate that? Could he endure such a crushing anti-climax to his expedition? Probably not, was the answer. He would fabricate things, wouldn’t he? He would conjure and invent them to provide a world hungry for sensation with what it craved most from his investigation of the great unsolved enigma.
That was possibly what he, Napier, had experienced. It was just conceivable. It was more plausible physically than any other explanation he could think of. McIntyre hoped for revelations but in their absence had a stock of special effects to fool the world into believing along with him in some paranormal phenomena, something terrifying and malevolent involving ghosts and their attendant paraphernalia. He hoped something real would manifest itself. If it did not, these tricks would be used and interpreted as hard evidence of something other-worldly. They would insure he would not face ridicule.
Old folk song
s mordantly sung at sunset by singers who weren’t there and clay pipes smoked by phantoms were probably only the start of things. There would be wraiths in moonlight, the weeping of infants carried on a midnight wind. There would be the creak of spectral vessels approaching the shore. It would scare the shit out of the assembled experts and their contagious fear would afflict the readers of McIntyre’s paper as they shuddered, reading it over their bowls of muesli or aboard their commuter trains on the way to work.
It was the most plausible explanation. It was quite a seductive theory. He had experienced only the tentative rehearsals for the bogus haunting to come. McIntyre had employed a crack team of special effects people and they were already secretly occupying the island, perfecting their smaller turns and preparing the larger set-pieces for when the show properly began.
It was always tempting to believe what was rational. The human mind was too tidy for ready acceptance of the inexplicable. What was inexplicable generally became unpredictable and from there it was a very short step indeed to uncontrollable. People liked to be in control. It was a lot safer than the alternative. And they liked to be able to determine events for themselves. Surprises, once a person achieved adulthood, were almost always of the unpleasant variety.
But despite agreeing intellectually with all of this, Napier did not really buy the plausible explanation for the mysterious oddities he had heard and smelled and seen and touched since arriving on New Hope Island. In his past, before he lost his self-respect and his professional status in the world, he had been a highly trained and formidable soldier; an expert at tracking and concealment, someone who could live covertly in hostile terrain for as long as a mission took to successfully complete.
Blake and the Seasick Four were the only other human beings on the island. If it had any other mortal inhabitants, he would have detected the evidence of their presence by now. He would have sensed their spoor, even if they hid themselves, in the manner of the predator he used to be. He was certain of this, even if it was not a terribly comfortable conclusion to have reached. Did it mean then that he now had to believe in ghosts? He had never done so before. But he thought that in that small and barren place, with its mysterious past, he might over the coming days and weeks, have to accommodate the possibility.
The nights, he muttered to himself. The days would likely be alright. The nights, however, he thought might prove to be altogether trickier.
Lucy asked Karl Cooper would he mind if she taped the interview. He was a media veteran and she could think of no conceivable reason why he should object to the recording, but asking was a necessary courtesy and she’d decided a sort of exaggerated professionalism might be the best way to get her subject to drop his guard. He was a vain man. That was her instinct. He would relax into himself if made to feel important. Pandering to his substantial ego was the admission price paid for entering his comfort zone.
‘Have you always believed in alien life?’
‘Certainly I have for as long as I can remember.’
‘How did that belief originate?’
He smiled. He said, ‘to paraphrase a far more eminent scientist than I will ever be, I always thought that the universe to be not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’
‘Haldane, the biologist,’ Lucy said.
‘Very good, you’ve done your research.’
‘So you assume the aliens are superior to us intellectually?’
‘That’s a given,’ Cooper said. ‘If they’ve been here, and I believe they have, then in order to get here, they have to possess technologies light years ahead of ours.’
‘Pun intended?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘So at a young age you decided that there was compelling evidence of alien life. And then you concluded that those aliens had visited earth?’
‘No. It was really the other way around. I looked, as a child, at the anomalies of history. The Aztecs constructed buildings of breathtaking intricacy yet an invention as fundamental as the wheel apparently never even occurred to them. Colossal sarsens hewn from a Welsh quarry somehow got to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to form Stonehenge; a structure of such geometric complexity we still debate its true purpose. Hauled there by Bronze Age man? Erected by Bronze Age man? I don’t think so. I could go on. But your readers have most of them heard me argue this stuff already on their television screens.’
‘Yet the general level of scepticism concerning alien life remains high.’
‘Does it? It might at the shabbier end of media, Lucy. It might in the halls of academe. It might among the scientific community, though that hasn’t been my personal experience. My peers don’t regard me as a laughing stock.’
‘I didn’t for a moment mean to imply they did, Professor Cooper.’
‘Karl, Lucy. Please. And anyway, I suspect the scepticism is a recent thing. You know about the ancient temple at Alexandria, about the library there?’
‘It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.’
Cooper nodded. ‘The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn’t for centuries.’
‘It burned down. The knowledge was lost.’
‘And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That’s the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and assembled it there?’
‘A blueprint for civilization, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?’
Cooper smiled. ‘I could hardly have put it better myself,’ he said.
The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. ‘Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.’
Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.
‘What do you think of that theory?’
‘I think that she’s entitled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.’
‘Have you discussed it with her?’
‘No.’
‘But you do know her?’
Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, ‘You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you’re aware of the answer already.’
‘It’s something you don’t wish to talk about?’
‘It’s a subject I can’t talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would’ve made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that’s off the record, by the way. I can’t and won’t talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.’
Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject’s patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.
‘Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?’
Cooper didn’t answer her for a long time. Then he said, ‘Perhaps Jane’s right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It’s possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn’t expected.’
‘You don’t for a minute believe that.’
‘No. I don’t. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.’
‘Then why were they taken?’
‘I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.’
‘But to what purpose, Karl?’
‘I don’t know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don’t know. It’s exactly what I’m going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won’t rest once I get there until I’ve succeeded in doing so.’
It was Lucy’s turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing platitudes about his jilted lover. I don’t like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He’s dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.
Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter’s boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.
She wouldn’t like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn’t exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.
A breakthrough such as she thought New Hope Island might offer would not exactly make her indispensible to her day to day employers, but it almost would. And it would place her at the front of the queue of medically qualified presenters when new TV programme ideas were being pitched. It was not a case of ego, but of necessity. There were times when a woman had to do what a woman had to do and for Jane, this was one of them.
