by F. G. Cottam
He could not smell methane. That was another encouraging thing. He could smell only coal dust and the stale odour of undisturbed air signalling a century or more of abandonment.
Fortescue waited. He was in no hurry. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the scant light leaking into the shaft from the afternoon sky above. He hummed to himself. He hummed The Recruited Collier. And then he sang a bit of it. And then he stopped singing because it sounded as though someone was singing softly along with him and that was an unpleasant thought down there in the lonely darkness beneath the earth in a place far from home or safety or the kind of company he might welcome and not be made afraid by.
He was afraid. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He thought that only a fool would be unafraid in such circumstances. But his eyes grew sensitive at last to the limited light and he was able to see quite clearly in a monochromatic sort of way both the contours of the gallery and its shrinking, after twenty feet or so, to the black maw of the tunnel proper.
He thought that he would find what he was looking for in the tunnel. It would not be lying there in the gallery on a handy shelf or in a presentation tray. Life was not supposed to be easy. Everything was a trial. Everything worthwhile was difficult to accomplish. He had been brought up by his mother to believe that and it was a good belief because it never left you open to disappointment.
He took off his jacket. It was warm under the earth. His hands were already filthy and one of them was sticky with blood from his wrestle with the gate-top where he thought from the throb of pain that he might have lost a fingernail. He got down on his hands and knees. He crawled like that towards the tunnel mouth.
It was not necessary to see in the tunnel. It wasn’t wide or high enough for him to lose his way in. He could feel the iron rails to either side of his hands and knees. The trolley wheels had worn them smooth as the trolley’s laden weight of coal was pulled back into the gallery by the men working behind the cutter at the face.
They had toiled through 18 hour shifts, sweating and grimy in their grim and hazardous work. But there was no sense now, of all that industrious toil. Two centuries of silence and absence has stilled the place utterly.
He crawled. He crawled for what seemed a long time until he was fully immersedin blackness and silence, the blackness so complete and silence so profound that only his sense of touch anchored him any longer to the earth.
And then he bumped up against the trolley itself and its wheels creaked stiffly with lack of lubrication on the rails. And when he reached with a hand there was some cargo contained within the trolley, wrapped in what felt under his fingers, like oilskin. And he gripped and in the cramped black space hefted the stiff flat rectangle of something written long ago and stored there in dark secrecy.
Chapter Ten
By the time they realised he was missing, the weather had deteriorated to an extent that made searching for James Carrick a practical impossibility. The wind rose and strengthened on their descent from the heights and the settlement. The cloud lowered and thickened and the rain began to needle into their faces. It scoured off the vast Atlantic, propelled by a chilly Westerly wind. They reached the encampment cold and wet and tired, a bedraggled bunch of people collectively dismayed by the atmosphere of the place they had left and collectively defeated by the raw, dwarfing fury of the elements.
That was Lucy’s impression, anyway. Kale and Cooper looked suddenly like their men-of-action images were far more cosmetic than real. Jane and Alice looked as pissed-off and soaked through as she felt herself. Even Lassiter looked like a man who’d welcome a blue lamp signalling his local station and a mug of cocoa made by his old desk sergeant with something akin to relief.
It took them well over an hour to get back over the boggy exposure of the island terrain and only Paul Napier and the priest seemed unmoved by the ferocious violence of the still-gathering storm.
They assumed Carrick was in his room until Lassiter rallied knowing it was his turn first on their roster to prepare their evening meal. When he was ready to serve it, Lucy went and knocked on Carrick’s door, cursing him as a lazy bastard for missing the inaugural trip to the settlement and snoozing on the job.
He wasn’t there. He had left his computer switched on. Lucy noticed his screensaver, a picture of woman who wasn’t his wife pretending to read a book and smiling rather sardonically. She switched it off.
They could not find him in the compound. Lassiter asked her was it in character for him to wander off independently without leaving some indication of where he’d gone. She said she couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to do that than Carrick. He’d put on his McIntyre branded foul weather gear before climbing aboard the chopper confiding to her that it was his first practical encounter with Velcro. He was someone who thought of a round of golf as a wilderness experience.
Lassiter served up their food because if he hadn’t, it would have spoiled. Then without eating his own, the ex-policeman went and fetched Paul Napier from the security team’s camp. That was the moment, seeing the look on Lassiter’s face as he pulled on a cagoule with his own dinner plate untouched and ventured back into the storm to fetch Napier, that Lucy knew with a sick churn in her stomach that the disappearance was probably going to turn out to be serious.
It was just after eight by the time Lassiter returned with Napier and Davis, who seemed to be the security head’s nominal second-in-command. Everyone was assembled in the recreation suite. Everyone was asked by Lassiter when they’d last seen the man from the Chron. There was still over two hours of daylight left then, but the wind was so strong it was making the encampment buildings shudder and ripple with its force and the rain was a driven deluge and Lucy already had a very bad feeling.
Napier said the weather would prevent a proper search. The conditions were too severe. Visibility was poor and movement on foot around the island impractical and even dangerous. He said any search would be voluntary and of necessity, incomplete.
Then he went and fetched his man Walker. He told Walker and Kale and Cooper to sit tight and keep everyone together and remain vigilant. Then he volunteered himself and went out with Davis and Degrelle and Lassiter, who also volunteered, and they did all the looking they could practically do, searching in the obvious places and waving their flashlights and bellowing into the gale without response.
They had returned and reassembled in the recreation suite and darkness was falling when Lassiter, 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 Lassiter 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 Lassiter, Lucy said, ‘Who’s the girl in the picture holding the book?’
‘Her name was Elizabeth Burrows,’ Lassiter 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 sig
nal in this shit 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 assignment 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. Assuming 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 passengers 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 embarrassed 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 classic 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 Lassiter, 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,’ Lassiter 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 Lassiter. 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 shivered at the suddenness and loudness of the sound. ‘The book Liz Burrows is holding in that picture seems to be Mary Shelley’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 Lassiter 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 shift. 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 shifts 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 ship’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 canvasser.
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 spacious 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 title. 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 basement had made of him a circumspect and superstitious 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 pass 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-button 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 wristwatch. 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 Lassiter and the rest were getting on. He liked Patsy Lassiter. 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 shingle, 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 sexy 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 Lassiter 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 passages 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 sunshine, 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.
He switched the ignition on and reached for the radio’s power button and then abruptly changed his mind. Philip Fortescue was prepared to allow the long arm of coincidence to stretch only so far. He could not remember ever having heard The Recruited Collier played on Radio 2. But the station was far from immune to the charms of the Barnsley Nightingale. He had been brave enough for one day. He knew if he heard Kate Rusby launch into the song on the way back to Formby, he might lose not just composure but control of the wheel as well.
