by F. G. Cottam
A dream troubled my sleep that inaugural night. At least, I think it was a dream. I dreamt I woke and padded across the bare bedroom floor and opened the curtains and unlocked the floor to ceiling glass wall and slid it open on its silent runners and stepped out onto the balcony. I’d dreamt a sound had woken me, I dream-remembered then. The sound was the creak of rope, straining taut under the wind as if in the rigging of a sailing boat.
She sat at anchor, moored on the open sea before me. She was pale and somehow huge in anaemic moonlight. She was the schooner I had seen twice before at much greater distance than this and in full sail on those occasions. Now her sheets were furled and her twin masts were bare and her white hull moved only with the subtle roiling motion of the water on which she floated.
Her name was painted onto her bow but in the night gloom, I could not properly make it out. In the dream, this was a comfort, or more accurately a relief to me, because the boat seemed threatening in some morbid, unsafe way and my dream logic insisted that the less that was known about her, the better it would be.
I saw that she was crewed, then. Figures little more than shadows in reefer jackets and whites and canvas shoes stole and flitted about her deck in what seemed in the dream like slow-motion. They should have seemed languid, moving at that pace, but with the warped reason of dreams they didn’t; they seemed instead furtive and sly. Then I realised that there was a practical reason for this impression. It had seemed contradictory, but it made perfect sense when I saw that when the crewmen walked about the deck, their feet did not quite actually reach it.
In the dream, I turned and walked back into the house and closed the glass wall and locked it and went back to bed, where I lay between my crisp new sheets and wrapped my head in a pillow that muffled the sound a few minutes later when I dreamed of someone uninvited hammering at my door.
The following morning I was outside Ventnor Rare Books in time to see its proprietor open up at 9.30am. I wasn’t after a book, not even a rare book. I was there to ask him did he happen to have contact details for a local historian by the name of Ruthie Gillespie. My dream, what I remembered of it, had convinced me that I’d better learn what I could about the building that had occupied my island property before its deliberate destruction and subsequent demolition. I thought I needed to know this before the arrival of my family in what was now only three days’ time.
The bookshop owner called her on my account. I’d become a familiar face in his premises since my arrival in Ventnor at the end of March and the girls had shopped there what seemed that fresh June morning like a very long time ago. He recognised me and he remembered them and was happy to oblige me by making the call and then handing me his phone.
I told Ruthie Gillespie that I had need of her local knowledge. I didn’t tell her precisely about what or why, but got the impression that she already knew, or at least knew something. Of the dozen-plus men and women who’d worked on my island build, all had been from Wight and at least two from the town I was in. She agreed to meet me at 11am on the seafront, at the Minghella ice-cream parlour.
‘You must have a very sweet tooth,’ I said, ‘that early.’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘You’ll find they do excellent coffee.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s so good, Mr. Aldridge, you’ll kick yourself for not finding out sooner.’ She sounded younger than I’d imagined she’d be.
‘It’s Michael,’ I said.
‘Then it’s Ruthie,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see you at 11.’
With time to kill, I searched the shelves surrounding me for a book about Ventnor’s architecture, a volume about its religious buildings, a tome concerning itself with local criminal history or acts of civic vandalism. Eventually I found what I was looking for in an album of photographs entitled Wight from the Sea. The shots were all either black and white or sepia toned and they reflected two things in their quality, or lack of it. The first of these was the technological limitations of the camera and the film. The second was the instability of a boat as a platform when your camera equipment requires a long exposure time to achieve any sort of detailed clarity.
Wight from the Sea, as a book of photographs, struck me as an idea that had occurred about 50 years before its time, though some of the more iconic landmarks were at least recognisable and it was where I saw the building that had first, once, occupied my land.
Its large rectangular footprint had hinted at something substantial, but the building had about it the character more of a tower than a temple. It was taller than it was wide and had it been crenelated, would have resembled in its proportions nothing so much as a medieval keep. There was a smudged reluctance to the photograph that blurred any detail. You couldn’t really make out doors or windows in this grim, soot-coloured monolith, but there was something other than the oaks, younger and more slender in the shot, to give it scale. There was a blurred male figure at the base of the building. This person appeared to be in the process of turning quite swiftly away. Maybe they’d been publicity shy. Unless it was a child, the scale given by this figure put the height of the building at about 40 feet.
The caption under the picture read simply, South of Ventnor, The Jericho Redoubt.
I frowned at that. So far as I was aware, a redoubt was a fortress, not a temple and certainly not a place of prayer or spirituality of any sort. The word had military connotations. Perhaps the worshippers who’d gathered there had been particularly aggressive in guarding the tenets of their faith. Looking at the picture, I thought their taste in the design of their chosen place of worship at once sullen and boastful. It was an ugly and grandiose building and on an aesthetic level alone I could quite see why someone had seen fit to put it to the torch.
There was a Goth-type girl seated outside the ice-cream parlour, pale-skinned, quite heavily inked, smoking and reading a paperback book as I passed her and went inside, where the only customers were a young mum with toddler twins, an elderly retiree couple and a back-packer with the flag of New Zealand stitched to his rucksack.
I ordered an espresso and took it back outside to the pavement where the Goth-girl looked up from her book, ground-out her cigarette in the zinc ashtray on her table and blew out a perfect smoke ring before smiling up at me. She had very white teeth when she smiled and was strikingly pretty under the neat fringe of the black hair framing her face. She motioned for me to sit and join her.
‘Good morning, Ruthie.’
‘Good morning, Mr. A.’
She appraised me for a moment and then said, ‘How did you know? About the Barrett hoard, I mean.’
‘He came across as secretive in a monograph I read.’
‘He wasn’t very secretive when he was goose-stepping around his estate in the 1930s. He gave a speech to the British Union of Fascists. Oswald Mosley escorted him personally to the podium. 1936 that was, in Bloomsbury, where he was shitting mightily on his own doorstep when you think of how pally he’d been with Leonard and Virginia and their chums.’
‘He lived a long life. People change. He became secretive and then he upped the ante and matured into a full-blown recluse, Ruthie. He’d learned a harsh lesson in distrusting the world. I thought he’d likely hide the things he most valued and the false ceiling above the library he’d built just seemed the most obvious hiding place.’
She looked at me, I thought taking my measure. Then she said, ‘There’s a bit of resentment locally towards you.’
This came as a shock. I said, ‘Really?’
She nodded and sipped coffee. She said, ‘There’ve been some murmurings about a reward. People would rather the paintings had been found and any windfall pocketed by someone from the island. Since he did them here, that’s only natural.’
‘I’ve been spending money on Wight like it’s going out of fashion,’ I said. ‘All of it pocketed by natives.’
‘Who was she, do you think?’
I took out my phone. I’d photographed one of the Barrett portraits, the most
detailed representation of all of them of his subject’s facial features. It wasn’t full-length. He’d painted her in this one from her bared-breasts up. But the brushwork was skilled and precise. I found the shot and handed my phone to Ruthie, who studied it.
‘Shame she can’t speak,’ she said.
‘She’ll have spoken at some time, to someone.’
Ruthie stared hard at me. It was quite difficult, if I’m honest, to meet her gaze. There’s something almost voyeuristic about full eye-contact with a really sexually attractive woman when you haven’t yet had a chance to get used to her. It’s not quite carnal and not quite predatory, but could very easily be both of those. I looked down at my phone, which she’d placed back on the table.
‘I don’t know anything about the building you say once occupied your land. That’s unusual. There’s a story attached to every building, particularly one deliberately destroyed, as you say this one was. But if there’s anything at all worth discovering, I’m well-placed to do it.’
‘How come?’
‘Nepotism, Mr. A,’ she said. She took the packet from her pocket and lit another cigarette with a pink Bic lighter. The lighter was at odds with everything else about her, which was calculatedly monochromatic.
‘Would you like another coffee?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
When I’d returned and sat back down she said, ‘My granddad was the mayor here and before that he was a prominent town councillor. He did a lot for the place. I’m the nearest thing Ventnor has to a full-time writer and I took my degree in history. I’ve been commissioned to write a history of the town. When it comes to its archive, its files and records, I’ve got access all areas.’
‘Are there secrets?’
‘Of course there are, Mr. A. Everywhere inhabited has secrets. It’s human nature.’
‘I’d be much more comfortable if you’d call me Michael.’
‘I don’t think you’re comfortable with me at all,’ she said. ‘But I’m taking that as a compliment.’
‘What do you do for work?’
‘I write children’s stories. I make a good living out of digital publishing.’
‘You fleece them for their pocket money.’
‘It’s the parents I fleece.’
‘What kind of stories?’
‘Phantoms and faeries,’ she said, exhaling smoke, ‘none of your Tracey Beaker kitchen-sink children’s fiction.’ She smiled and her dark eyes glittered in the light reflected off the sea.
‘Anything you can find out,’ I said, I’d be grateful to learn. Obviously I’ll compensate you for your time.’
‘Who put you on to me?’
‘Charlie Bradley did.’
Ruthie Gillespie frowned. ‘You’re nice looking and I like the way you fill your clothes, Mr. A. But cute isn’t a license to jerk my chain.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of jerking your chain.’
‘A charismatic guy, Charlie Bradley,’ she said. She’d raised a hand to shield her face from the sun, at its apex now in the sky above us, casting her pale and lovely face into its shadow, ‘outstanding at the helm of a racing yacht and pretty damned heroic. But two things happened in 1969.’
‘The Americans put a man on the moon,’ I said. My mouth felt unaccountably dry.
Ruthie nodded, ‘That was in July. And in September, Charlie Bradley died.’
He’d been just short of 80 when he went. He’d volunteered to fight in the Great War and survived the Passchendaele Offensive and been awarded a Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry. He’d crewed for a rich Bostonian playboy who’d raced his schooner at Cowes and owned a bull mastiff named Toby. That was in the 1920s. In World War 2 he’d joined the coast guard and volunteered his fishing smack for makeshift mine-sweeping patrols in the English Channel. He’d crossed the Channel aboard Esmeralda at the age of 43 amid the flotilla of little ships that rescued the defeated British Army from the beaches at Dunkirk.
Ruthie Gillespie told me all this about the firm friend of her mayoral grandfather who’d probably witnessed Neil Armstrong’s lunar landing on his little black and white television set a couple of months before passing away. I would never know for sure whether he had or he hadn’t and it didn’t really matter very much. I knew only two things for certain about Charlie Bradley. The first was that I had significantly underestimated the man. The second was that I would never see him again.
I took the book I’d bought that morning out of my bag and opened it at the page I’d marked and showed Ruthie the photograph of the building that had once occupied the space where my family’s dream home now stood.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said, staring at it, the brow under her black fringe creased in a slight frown, elbows on the table top, the heels of her hands supporting her chin.
‘Quite,’ I said.
‘We need to exchange numbers,’ she said, lifting her eyes to meet mine.
She called me at eight o’clock that evening. I was enjoying the pre-sunset vista and a cold beer on our balcony. The sea view before me was not just mercifully schooner-free but emptily magnificent. I’d spent the afternoon mostly buying stuff for Molly’s bedroom. It was now equipped with a cuddly Paddington Bear, a Frozen-themed duvet cover, some posters (Minecraft, Despicable Me, Maleficent), and a couple of faux sheepskin rugs just to ramp up the level of coziness.
‘This is really fucking weird,’ Ruthie said.
She didn’t sound completely sober.
‘What is?’
‘Have you heard of something called the Jericho Society?’
I hadn’t.
‘They were a pagan religious sect set up in the French Revolutionary Terror, when all sorts of cults and creeds were encouraged as a slap in the face to Catholicism.’
‘Go on.’
‘They must have been too extreme even for the guillotine-happy Jacobeans. They were forced out, exiled to the New World.’
I looked out, over the vacant water.
‘They were Satanists, I think. They went underground. Real information on them is scarce. They existed in a condition of extreme secrecy. The FBI got onto their case big-time in the early 1920s.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I’ve found a memo, a Xerox of a memo dated October 1925 from the Boston Area Station Chief to the Police Commissioner of the Hampshire Constabulary. It’s an intelligence warning that the Jericho Society is planning activity on the island. It describes them as extremely bad news.’
‘You’ve done well,’ I said.
‘I’ve hit a wall,’ she said. ‘You’d think there’d be something in the police files on an arson attack on a major building on Wight but there’s no record of any investigation. There was no allegation of a crime, no insurance claim, no listing of attendance at the scene by a fire or ambulance crew.’
Again, I said nothing.
‘Mr. A?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Orchestrated, is what it looks like. Collusion, I mean. Everything expunged from the logs. The Jericho Redoubt was deliberately destroyed and the destruction covered up. I can’t see any other explanation.’
‘You’ve done well,’ I said again. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m outside the Spyglass.’
‘How many have you had?’
‘Only the two, so far, so more lubricated than inebriated, Mr. A. Did you really talk to Charlie Bradley?’
‘Unfortunately, yes.’
‘Then I think you might be in a bit of trouble.’
‘You should worry about yourself, Ruthie.’
‘I’m planning to chain-smoke my way through a pack of cigarettes and drown in gin and tonic. Or you could come here now instead and save me from myself. You’re what, a fifteen minute walk away?’
‘That’s a really bad idea,’ I said.
‘I’m a bad girl.’
I didn’t say anything. The sea was torpid, listless and vast under late sunlight.
‘I don’t know what’
s worse,’ she said, ‘whether it’s the guilt of propositioning a married man or the disappointment I’m about to feel at your turning me down.’
I’d learned nothing further about the Jericho Society and their burned-out redoubt by the time Katie and Mollie arrived on the island. They had a week of settling in so manically happy and eventful that I pretty much forgot about the mystery of the temple, at least consciously.
Katie’s first domestic contribution was putting a custom-made Charlie and the Chocolate Factory lampshade over the light above Molly’s bed. Then she boxed up all the seafaring stuff I’d bought at the ship’s chandlery in Cowes and put it in a storage cupboard saying that we didn’t inhabit a pub. After my weird dream of the moored schooner and its ghostly crew, I discovered I felt quite relieved to see the back of my collection of nautical props.
I was barbecuing down on the shore and the girls were reading behind me on the balcony when my phone rang and it was Ruthie Gillespie. I felt a cold flutter of something close to panic when I saw her name on the display.
She said, ‘I can’t help you anymore, Mr. A, with your Jericho Redoubt investigation.’
‘Can’t, or won’t?’
‘I’ve managed to resist the temptation to be puerile and I think you should too,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. And I was.
‘I’ve been sent a Cease and Desist letter. It’s a legal shot across my bows. I’m using a nautical metaphor because it’s been sent by a nautical firm called Bullen and Clore. But Bullen and Clore are really just a front for an Antwerp based company called Martens and Degrue and Martins and Degrue are what I strongly suspect to be the acceptable face of the Jericho Society.’
‘You think they’re still around?’
‘I’m taking the letter I’ve been sent as proof. People with nothing to hide don’t hit freelance researchers with gagging orders.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She laughed at that, without mirth. ‘It’s more what I’m not going to do. I earn about thirty-thousand a year. It covers the mortgage on my cottage. I like the pace of life on the island. A court case would ruin me. I like solving mysteries, but I’m not risking homelessness over one. I’m going to cease and desist, as of this morning.’
