The Colony Part 5

La.s.siter persisted. But the answer remained the same. He rather admired the austere and sn.o.bbish stance taken against his enquiries. It was inconvenient, but he could see and appreciate the museum's rationale.

Then something changed. McIntyre casually mentioned that he would have one of the people who ran his charitable foundation call the person responsible for raising and sustaining the museum's public funding. This was an inst.i.tution vulnerable, in the current economic climate. It had lost its central and local government support. It had seen its lottery grant substantially reduced.

La.s.siter never learned the specifics. A donation, when all was said and done, was a completely different thing in law from a bribe. All he knew was that the att.i.tude of the people responsible for the museum's archive suddenly changed. They became cooperative where they had been obstructive and cordial where there had previously been only disdain. McIntyre, being McIntyre, had facilitated this. And La.s.siter felt in some subtle way that he had been tainted, guilty by a.s.sociation, a party to a procedure that was less than wholly honourable.

Did it matter? Not really, he thought, in the scheme of things. He was no longer employed to be the honest copper, clear of any hint of corruption or collusion. He worked for McIntyre now and he did as he was bid. But he still entered the museum building at the appointed hour on the morning after the night of his arrival in Liverpool feeling a shabbier man than he could remember having been in his sometimes prestigious past.

The museum itself was opulently appointed; a Gothic-revival extravagance of scrolls and etchings and reliefs in its ornamental stonework. Compa.s.ses and coils of rope and capstans and ships wheels were prominent themes in the carved granite and marble. To the right of the main entrance a colossal old anchor sat heavily barnacled on a section of chain with iron links the thickness of a man's forearm. La.s.siter had always thought the sea an alarmingly alien and violent element and the iconography of this building dedicated to the subject did nothing whatsoever to change his mind.

The museum was sited on a stretch of still-cobbled street behind where the wharves of the West Dock had once been. It was a quiet location. You would not happen upon the building without knowing it was there. He fancied he could smell the sludge of the Mersey on a light summer breeze and gulls wheeled crying a few feet above his head. He noticed that there was no traffic noise.

He was ten minutes early for his 11.15 appointment. During those ten minutes, as he stood in a high vestibule lined with oiled wood and waited for the time to tick by on a handsome Victorian clock, excited mounted in him at what he might yet discover there.

He kept an open mind about the mystery of New Hope Island. He believed that the Shanks footage was authentic and could not explain it in rational terms. And he had told McIntyre the truth in saying that watching it had scared him pretty badly.

He did not really know what to make of the death of David Shanks his suicide in that cliff edge ritual described by Alice Lang. He did not know whether to believe it had taken place or not. But he knew for certain that she believed it and her psychic gift was something he had seen emphatically proven, twice during his police career.

He did not know what to make of his own accident p.r.o.ne existence when harbouring the Shanks film can in his flat. He just knew that it had stopped, as abruptly as it had started, since he had quarantined the container in a safe deposit box at a storage facility, rented with McIntyre's money in Wimbledon, a dozen distant miles from where he lived in Waterloo.

He was aware of McIntyre's theory that Shanks, having dabbled in demonology, had brought the manifestation he had filmed to New Hope Island with him. Either that or it had pursued him there. McIntyre believed it had nothing to do with the mysterious fate of the island community. But La.s.siter thought that was most likely to be because the existence of the apparition rested uncomfortably with McIntyre's own, privately held theory as to the community's actual fate.

He went over in his mind what he knew about the cache of belongings held by the museum in a sea chest that had once been owned by Seamus Ballantyne. The chest and its contents had been donated by his estranged wife. Her name had been Rebecca and her maiden name Browning prior to her marriage to the slave ship master.

He had been prosperous, successful and respected when they had met. They had done so at a hunt ball held at Fleetwood, on Lord Hesketh's estate. Rebecca's father had been a local magistrate and she had been a beauty, by all accounts, naturally blonde and finely boned if considered slightly tall and a bit too slender by the voluptuous standards of the time. Hunting had been her pa.s.sion and she had caused a minor scandal by refusing to ride side-saddle in pursuit of the fox.

She had been strong willed, much more independent than was common among even women of her privileged cla.s.s in her day in provincial England. She had set fashions. In later life, she had campaigned for the education of girls. Her radicalism had not extended, though, to the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves.

La.s.siter thought that she must have been a cruel woman. But that was what the historians called revisionism, wasn't it? He could not judge her by the standards of a more compa.s.sionate and enlightened age that hers. In the late 18th century in England, slavery had not just been a legitimate trade. It had been entirely socially acceptable. House boys from Africa, dressed in picturesque costumes, had been a domestic fashion in Georgian English homes.

Rebecca Browning wouldn't have seen the conditions aboard her husband's ship. She wouldn't have seen the corpses freed of their manacles to be thrown over the side in the morning when the first mate inventoried the body count in the stinking hold from the night before.

She had been thirty when her husband's epiphany arrived and totally resolute in rejecting his new faith and his makeshift ministry on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour. She could hardly really be blamed for that. Marriage was a contract in those days and the New Hope adventure was not something really covered by the vows she took at the altar. Perhaps she had been a religious woman. If she had been, his conversion would simply have been heresy to her.

From her perspective, Seamus must have become a stranger overnight, in the grip of a religious zeal that must have seemed obsessive. Maybe she simply thought he had lost his mind. That happened a lot in those days to men who spent their lives at sea. They went mad on solitude and over-proof rum and the sheer incessant hardship of life before the mast. His conversion could easily have been interpreted by his wife as nothing other than the onset of lunacy.

This reverie was something La.s.siter rather enjoyed. He had a taste for psychology and his interest in history had grown since his work concerning New Hope Island on behalf of Alexander McIntyre. The characters were intriguing. David Shanks had been a private, flawed, shiftless puzzle of a man. But Seamus Ballantye, more remote in time, was a genuine enigma.

His speculations were interrupted by the arrival of the individual he was there to meet. Professor Fortescue was the museum's Keeper of Artefacts. It sounded an ominous and even slightly sinister sort of job. Everything the man handled had belonged to someone long perished. And Fortescue, slender and bespectacled, looked a good decade too young to be the occupant of such a portentous role.

He also looked distinctly nervous. He had before him what La.s.siter a.s.sumed was a sort of manifest. It was a doc.u.ment curled and yellowed with age and written freehand by someone with perfect copperplate. It was torn in tiny fissures at its edges and obviously stiff. He might have been nervous about this doc.u.ment incurring damage in the ambient humidity and overhead light. But observing his discomfort, La.s.siter thought there was likely rather more to it than that.

Fortescue cleared his throat. 'Are you familiar, Mr La.s.siter, with how common superst.i.tion is in regard to the subject of the sea? I mean with the prevalence and sheer persistence of some of those superst.i.tions?'

His voice was characterised by the nasal tw.a.n.g of Liverpool. He was educated, probably the bright and studious product of somewhere like Merchant Taylor's, the elite grammar school in Formby. No doubt the Keeper of Artefacts had a good degree from somewhere to his name. And his phraseology was pompous. But he was local, from a local family, which was to La.s.siter's advantage in helping provide context.

'I am, Professor Fortescue, though obviously I'm not the authority you are on the subject. Can I ask why it is that you bring it up?'

Fortescue wore gla.s.ses. They had gold frames. The frames glittered in the sunshine coming through the high windows of the vestibule. He put down the manifest on a large marble topped table bearing a single flower vase over in the corner. He played with and then removed his gla.s.ses. Then he polished their lenses on his tie and put them on again. It was an old-fashioned gesture for so young a man and one dictated, La.s.siter thought, totally by nerves. The lenses of his gla.s.ses had not been smeared.

He raised his head and gave his visitor a frank look. He said, 'I know that you used to be a police detective. No one gains access to our private collection without screening.'

'I see.'

'It's a formality. Some of the objects we house are very valuable. Our insurers insist. A questionnaire was filled in by Mr McIntyre's people on your behalf.'

'Fair enough,' La.s.siter said. 'What's your point?'

'You'll probably scoff at what I have to say.'

'Try me.'

'Fortescue glanced across at his manifest, as though it might have fluttered off somewhere, or was about to. It lay where he had left it. 'The sea chest belonging to Ballantyne came into out possession when the Maritime Museum was founded in the 1880s. Prior to that time, it was in the possession of the Browning family. Since that time, it has gained a reputation for bad luck.'

'I thought that the contents had never been publically displayed.'

'They haven't.'

'Then how can they be thought unlucky?'

'They've been studied, Mr La.s.siter. They've been the subject of study on two occasions. The first occasion was a few years after the conclusion of the Great War. A man called David Shanks asked to see the contents of the chest. He was a distinguished former soldier and something of a writer in the Orwell mode.'

'Yes,' La.s.siter said. 'I've heard of him.'

'So obviously he was allowed access to Ballantyne's artefacts.'

'Obviously.'

'He stole something.'

'He did what?'

'The theft wasn't discovered.'

'Careless.'

Fortescue tried to smile. The smile was unsuccessful. He had become too pale to smile heartily and the expression was anyway unsuited to the sweat now beading his waxy forehead.

La.s.siter said, 'Warm for you in here?'

'One or two of my predecessors in this job were less than punctilious in their care of the chest. They were not careless men by nature. Nor were they lacking in conscientiousness.'

'They were afraid of the chest,' La.s.siter said. 'At least, they were afraid of what it contained.'

'Yes,' Fortescue said, 'I think it's fair to say they were.'

'Go on.'

'Shanks returned the stolen object, by post, in the autumn of 1937. He wrote both an apology and a warning to others about the item he'd returned.'

'Do you have the letter?'

'No. It was lost, or destroyed. I suspect the latter. In it, I believe he blamed the thing he'd taken for a run of bad luck he said had blighted his life.'

'Tell me about the second study of the contents of the chest.'

'You might wonder why there's not been more academic interest.'

'Because it doesn't help solve the mystery,' La.s.siter said. 'The chest contents are a snapshot, presumably, of the life Ballantyne left behind. They were abandoned a good decade before whatever happened on New Hope Island to cause the community to vanish. They are not clues to anything except who Ballantyne was before he established his cult. I'm surprised there hasn't been greater public interest, though, of the more prurient sort.'

'These things go in cycles,' Fortescue said. 'We've always tried to discourage press interest in the existence of the chest.' He nodded in the direction of the manifest, 'That's there, for anyone who wants chapter and verse. And of course the individual items have all been photographed. And anyone can request to see the photographs. Every decade or so, someone stirs some interest in the New Hope Enigma and we get a fresh spate of enquiries. We're getting them now. The most recent came from a television production company shooting a doc.u.mentary.'

'A spoiler,' La.s.siter said, 'A knee-jerk reaction to the McIntyre expedition.'

'We said no to them, as we tend to do.'

'Yet you said yes to me.'

Fortescue reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves. They were the type used to handle the contents of evidence bags and seeing them made La.s.siter momentarily nostalgic for his old job.

'We said yes to Mr McIntyre's largess,' Fortescue said. 'Here. Put these on.' He handed over the gloves and then produced a small iron key. 'You'll need this. I'll explain to you where the chest is located.'

'You won't accompany me?'

'You don't need a chaperone, Mr La.s.siter.'

'You're not afraid I'll steal something?'

'You have an honest face.'

Not afraid I'll steal something, just frightened to death of the chest and its benighted contents, La.s.siter thought. It was dereliction of duty and almost certain an offence for which the Keeper of Artefacts would be disciplined, were he to report it to someone more senior at the museum.

But La.s.siter would not do that. He thought Fortescue a courteous individual, as cooperative in the circ.u.mstances as his evident terror made him capable of being. He just wondered what it was that could possibly have spooked the man in this way. Objects were objects, weren't they? He had certainly thought so, until his recent encounter with a cine film can used to store some rather unnerving footage shot by the unlucky David Shanks.

'You were going to tell me about the second person to conduct an academic study.'

'Elizabeth Burrows. She was a sociology graduate doing a PHD on the subject of the origins of feminism. She had a thing for Charlotte Corday. Her heroine was Mary Wollstonecraft?'

'Neither name means anything to me.'

'Wollstonecraft was a writer. You might have heard of her daughter, also Mary, who married the poet Sh.e.l.ley and wrote Frankenstein.'

'I'm guessing Elizabeth Burrows was intrigued by the character of Rebecca Browning.'

'She was. After the disappearance, Rebecca became the subject of local scorn, with a lot of ignorant people saying Seamus had fled to the Hebrides mostly to escape his scold of a bride. Liz Burrows thought that only the malicious gossip it was. She thought the contents of the chest might offer clues about the real nature of Rebecca's marriage to Ballantyne.'

'Did she lean anything?'

'Hard to say. Her doctoral thesis was never completed. She hanged herself in her college room about six weeks after examining the contents of the chest.'

La.s.siter nodded, he looked at the little iron key, between his gloved fingers.

'You go through the door there and then straight through the door opposite,' Fortescue said, pointing. La.s.siter could not help but notice that the extended finger trembled slightly. 'You'll see a set of descending steps. Take them. When you reach the bottom, take a longish corridor immediately to your left. The room you want is the last along it. You'll find it unlocked.'

The room was lined with furled banners and flags and pennants and there were spars and oars leant in its corners. It was illuminated, when he found the light switch, from overhead by a single feeble bulb in a canvas shade. A smell pervaded the room; a mixture of salt and varnished wood and bra.s.s polish and a hint of damp; the antique smell of the sea, he thought, thinking the room he was in as claustrophobic as an old ship's cabin.

The chest bore Ballantyne's initials, described in bra.s.s studs embedded into its lid. It contained a telescope and a s.e.xton and several navigation charts inscribed on vellum and tied with faded ribbons which once must have been crimson. There was an abacus with a walnut frame and painted ivory b.a.l.l.s. There was a heavy cloth boat cloak which La.s.siter took out and unfolded with almost exaggerated care. He thought that if he tried it on, it might almost be a perfect fit. Ballantyne had been a tall man for the period, but La.s.siter had known that already.

There was a dress sword and a pair of buckled shoes and a heavy set of polished stone beads and a bracelet made from drilled animal teeth with a fine sliver chain running through them. On closer inspection, La.s.siter concluded with a shudder that the teeth, all incisors, were more than likely human. The third artefact from Africa was a carved ebony figure of the sort familiar in junk shops when La.s.siter had been a boy growing up in North London. They had probably been faked. This one certainly wasn't. He couldn't decide whether the Deity depicted was male or female. The features of the carving had a look that was s.e.xually ambivalent and almost sly.

The most valuable item in the trove was the one La.s.siter concluded David Shanks had stolen and then years later returned. It was a Breguet pocket watch, a minute repeater finely crafted in silver and enamel. The hands were blued and the face of the watch had endured two centuries without crack or blemish. It was an exquisite timepiece.

He knew that they were the most reliable and accurate watches of their period, not robust by modern standards, but phenomenally exact because for purposes of navigation, they had to be. They were also very valuable to collectors. That would have been equally true in the lifetime time of David Shanks. Ballantyne's watch would have been eminently collectible even eighty years ago.

Except that Shanks could not have sold the Ballantyne Breguet at auction. Auction houses demanded provenance. He had not come by the watch legitimately. He had stolen it and so it had never actually been his to sell.

La.s.siter frowned and looked at his own watch. He did so because the one which had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne was showing the correct time. Well, every stopped watch did that, as every schoolboy could probably still tell you. They showed the right time exactly twice every 24 hours. A moment later, when the minute hand stroked and he felt the movement purr with life inside its silver case, La.s.siter almost dropped the living object cradled in his palm.

Mechanical life, he thought. The watch possessed only mechanical life. Someone had surrept.i.tiously wound it and its two hundred year old innards were performing with robust health.But who had resurrected it? He thought the winding of the watch a joke too far for the frightened man who had directed him here. Perhaps Ballantyne's chuckling old ghost had done it; Ballantyne, who gray and decaying would shuffle out of the shadows down there in a moment to retrieve his old boat cloak and so restore forgotten warmth to his dead flesh.

La.s.siter put the objects carefully back into the chest. He did so alert to sound. He did so sweating and with hands that would not quite obey his mind in the way they fluttered, clumsily. The bracelet of teeth chattered like laughter when he put it back. The impression of being watched down there in the quiet depths of the building was so strong that he almost looked behind him, to where he sensed the scrutiny was coming from. But he didn't. He ignored instead an instinct he knew only fear and not the fact of observation could have provoked.

The thing was, that the scrutiny he felt wasn't merely curious. It wasn't even particularly hostile. It felt more contemptuous than that. It seemed whoever studied him did so disdainful and almost amused. It made him feel frayed and naked, childlike and with a child's trapped helplessness. He had the feeling of being toyed with.

It changed abruptly, this mood of whatever presence there secretly shared that ill-lit s.p.a.ce with him. He felt a black shadow of spite and rage envelop and then clutch at him unwilling to let go. It was pure malevolence and it was engulfing.

Closing the trunk lid brought no relief. Locking it required an immense effort of will because his instinct, which police work had taught him to trust, insisted he should bolt for the door and safety without a moment's further delay. f.u.c.k dignity and decorum. So overwhelming did the danger seem to him by that point, he felt as though it oozed like a gleeful threat from between the flags and banners lining the bas.e.m.e.nt walls.

He stopped feeling scrutinized, started once again to feel safe, only when he reached the vestibule. He saw that the shadows there had lengthened. Fortescue awaited him. There was a curious look on the keeper's face.

'How long was I gone?'

'You were down there just under an hour, Mr La.s.siter.'

'Is it always like that?'

'Did you get what you came for? Did you get your snapshot in time of Seamus Ballantyne?'

La.s.siter said again, 'Is it always like that?'

'I can't say. Not for certain. I only inventoried the contents of the chest the once. It was not an experience I'd choose to endure again.'

'I didn't steal anything,' La.s.siter said.

'No one in their right mind would.'

'You said the items from the chest have been photographed.'

'That was done a long time ago, back in the 1950s. The pictures are black and white but very detailed. Whoever did the job was a skilled still-life photographer.'