The Colony Part 8

She wouldn't discuss the dreams with her ex-husband. Edith had promised to do that herself when the time came, so she had no need. She wanted to tell somebody, however. She needed to. And though it seemed ridiculous to confide in a journalist, she thought that the person she most wanted to discuss this strange development with was that sympathetic features writer from their expedition sponsoring paper, Lucy Church. She thought that her daughter had rightly judged that Lucy liked her. She needed to confide in someone who would not simply laugh in her face.

La.s.siter arrived at Alice Lang's house at lunchtime the following day. He was surprised, really, that she'd agreed to see him with so little apparent reluctance. The David Shanks business had been an ordeal for her. Her att.i.tude towards her gift was a complex one. She chastised herself for the things it made her feel. She interpreted the physical symptoms as weaknesses. If anything, La.s.siter saw her willingness to endure them as proof of enormous strength. He had never liked nor admired a woman more.

She'd prepared food, which was a welcome surprise. When he gave in to the urge to drink heavily, he was pretty indifferent to food. But sober, on his own tight leash, he had a healthy appet.i.te and breakfast had been a rushed business interrupted by a surprise call from McIntyre. His b.u.t.ter and Marmite had congealed on his toast as McIntyre thundered on and the bread hardened. He'd ended up sliding it uneaten from his plate into the kitchen bin.

They ate their lunch in the sunshine on her patio, amid spring blooms tended to by industrious bees, with Ellie Goulding playing from inside the open door on her Ipod dock. La.s.siter told Alice about his trip to Liverpool. He told her about his elliptical conversation with the museum's Keeper of Artefacts. He told her what he'd told McIntyre about Ballantyne's watch. Then he told her what he'd not told McIntyre, about the warning in the pub given him by a woman he was convinced was the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows.

'Did you come here to ask me to reach into the life of Elizabeth Burrows?'

'No. I didn't.'

'I'd be disinclined to do it. One suicide is enough in a week, Patrick. I'm not quite over seeing how David Shanks met his end.'

'That's not why I'm here. I'm sure enough in my own mind of who the woman in the pub was. She knew my name. And her warning to me was unequivocal.'

'Are you not frightened by any of this?'

'Of course I am. But I'm also intrigued. I'd like to discover what happened to the New Hope community, or at least play my part in finding out. If a crime was committed, it ought to be uncovered and solved.'

'A diabolical crime,' Alice said, 'If it was a crime.'

'An atrocity,' La.s.siter said, 'on that scale. But the truth should out. The victims deserve it. The perpetrator deserves to be exposed.'

'A policeman's instinct.'

He shrugged. 'It's a while since I've had the right to call myself a policeman.'

'Do you have any theories?'

'Not really. I tend to avoid theories until I've visited the crime scene and I won't be going on the expedition. I do think Seamus Ballantyne himself is the key to it, though. And I think there's much more to find out about him and his life and character somewhere. McIntyre's right about that.'

'And you'd still look, after the experience with the chest? After the warning you were given in Liverpool?

'Yes. I would.' He smiled. 'Less like an investigator really, than like a dog with a bone.'

'Why are you here?'

He looked down at the table, to where his hands rested before his now empty plate. 'I'm here on McIntyre's behalf. Simon Hawsley-Smith has suffered a ma.s.sive stroke. The expedition is a spiritual medium under-strength. McIntyre wants to know if you'd consider taking Hawsley-Smith's place.'

'I'm not famous.' It was her turn to smile. 'I'm not even infamous.'

'But your psychic gift is genuine. McIntyre knows about my work with you. He appears to trust my judgement. I told him I didn't think you'd for one moment seriously consider doing it, but I did promise I'd ask.'

'Will it affect your position with him if I turn the offer down?'

'No. I don't think it will.'

Alice was silent for a moment then she said, 'I'll go if you go.'

'What did you say?'

She rose to her feet. She smoothed the wrinkles from the sun dress she had on with her hands. 'Stand up,' she said.

La.s.siter stood.

'Now kiss me.'

He kissed her. He had not kissed a woman properly for a long time. He cupped her shoulders between his hands. He could feel her lips firm on his and the sun warm on his back. Her hair smelled of scented shampoo from her morning shower. She tasted wonderful.

'There,' she said when the kiss broke. 'Was that so difficult?'

'No,' he said, truthfully. 'No, Alice. It wasn't difficult at all.'

The communications expert accompanying the construction team sent to build the expedition base was a man named Charlie Brennan. Blake didn't think that he looked very much like a radio geek. He looked like someone who did fell running or maybe canoeing in his spare time. He was fit and sinewy and had an athlete's alertness. The weather was closing in by the time he sought out Blake, shortly before dusk.

Blake was in the cottage that had once belonged to David Shanks at the western extremity of the Island. It was becoming his habit to go there for a bit of seclusion, a respite from the lumpen presence of the Seasick Four, whenever he got the opportunity. In the field, routine was deadly because it led to ambush and the best way to safeguard your life was to vary your schedule so that your movements could not be accurately predicted. He was not in the field now, however. New Hope Island was not a combat zone. The trespa.s.ser whose presence he had sensed was not an a.s.sa.s.sin or even an enemy, strictly speaking.

So he sheltered in the cottage whenever he could, where the views out over the sea were the most spectacular on the Island and where the holed roof allowed at least some protection from the rain and the st.u.r.dy whitewashed walls formed an efficient windbreak.

Privacy was a strong part of the appeal of the cottage. There, he was out of sight of the Seasick Four and Napier. He thought there should be something kept apart in the character of any commander. You lost authority if the men under your leadership knew too much about you. You had to retain your capacity to surprise them to keep them on their toes. It was Blake's belief that there was something enigmatic about all the best military leaders. He had never taken part in the game, but he thought that if he did, he'd likely prove to be an excellent poker player.

Brennan knocked on the canted door of the cottage just as Blake was swallowing the last of a brew of sweet tea concocted over his Primus stove. He was seated in an oak rocking chair, one of the few pieces of Shanks' furniture that had not surrendered to the salt and damp of the Island atmosphere and simply rotted away.Brennan did not salute, but there was a formality about his body language as he stood in the doorway that Blake appreciated. It signalled respect. He stood and snapped off a salute of his own, thinking old habits and all that. It did no harm and it felt good.

'Captain Blake, right?'

'At your service,' Blake said.

Brennan had to raise his voice against the howl of the wind and the crash of the surf on the darkening sh.o.r.e to his rear. He wore a poncho and the waterproof fabric snapped wetly in the strength of the gusts, rippling against his torso and arms. 'I need to speak with you,' Captain,' he said. 'Would you come back with me now?'

'Sure.'

Blake followed him. The ground was a wet, uneven slog underfoot. Slippery tussocks of gra.s.s concealed boggy patches that would swallow a leg to the kneecap with a sudden plunge. Blake and his team had found it easier to travel the perimeter of the island, where the shingle at the edge of the water thinned and packed sand proved a more certain surface to walk on. But in severe weather the size and strength of the waves made that too hazardous and after nightfall, it was suicidal. And this weather was severe. And it was worsening.

They walked in silence. The wind as the ground rose at the island's centre was a banshee howl that made speech impossible. But Brennan was as fit as he looked and as Blake routinely kept himself and their progress was steady enough.

The construction crew had built the camp with impressive speed. It comprised a cl.u.s.ter of one-storey rectangular buildings, each with a rigid outer sh.e.l.l and as he saw when he entered one, an inner lining of some insulating material that retained warmth and deadened exterior sound. He a.s.sumed that the frames were built from some high-tensile metal such as t.i.tanium. As shelters they were state of the art. He could feel the thrum of a nearby generator providing the camp with electric light.

The communication centre had a table arrayed the length of one wall, bristling with a variety of receivers, speakers and microphones. Bunched cables were cuffed neatly with nylon ties. Needles wobbled across power metres ranged across displays. The consoles, with their complex arrangements of switches and b.u.t.tons and dials, seemed like very high-end items of apparatus to Blake.

He knew he was looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of gear. When the experts made their definitive findings and this story broke, communications failure was clearly not intended to be a factor in delaying the moment reaching the ears of an inquisitive world.

There was a third person in the hut. He was Troy, the leader of the construction crew, a stocky man with a heavy moustache and someone, to Blake, always characterised by a burly sort of self-confidence. Troy was the can-do type who led by determined and sometimes stubborn example.

Brennan invited Blake to sit in a chair next to that occupied by Troy, facing the comms hardware, where Brennan now sat on a stood pulled up to the table on which all the gear was mounted. Blake nodded a greeting to Troy. To Blake, Brennan said, 'What kind of call-in system are you guys operating?'

'We have a VHS two-way in the command tent. There's no strict call-in time and there's been nothing so far to call in. McIntyre's people told us you were coming and then we got a call to say you were on your way. Obviously I check the signal strength each day, and it's pretty variable. But we haven't needed to use the rig in anger and I don't expect that we will.'

Brennan nodded slowly after Blake had finished speaking. He looked at Troy. Then to Blake he said, 'How do you guys communicate on patrol?'

'Short-waves,' Blake said. 'We use walkie-talkies. They're a bit sensitive to atmospherics, obviously. But cellular phones are completely useless here. Why are you asking me this stuff?'

Troy answered him. He said, 'We're supposed to rely on a hi-spec digital system. It's a very fancy set-up technologically and on paper, has bags of transmission power. But it seems to be completely f.u.c.king useless. We're dependant for signal strength on a mast outside Inverness. I'm talking third-gen DAB here, but all we're getting is silence.'

It wasn't Blake's field. But he wasn't totally clueless on the subject. He said, 'Can't you get on the FM spectrum? There are millions of tons of shipping in these waters completely reliant on it. You must have some a.n.a.logue backup, surely?'

'We do,' Brennan said. 'We've got quite a strong a.n.a.logue signal, in theory. But there's some sort of interference on the waveband. Listen to this.'

He reached over and flicked a switch and a power light glowed green on one of the consoles. Then he twisted a tuning dial delicately as the three of them strained to hear anything except screeches of static. In the relative quiet, Blake had time to appreciate again just how good the build quality of the command centre was. It was in sad contrast with his own Alpine frame tent. That had collapsed twice on him now, in the ferocity of the gale ripping through the Island in the small hours.

He heard something clarify on the a.n.a.logue set. A sound he could make sense of was emerging from the speaker. It caused him to shake his head and suppress a shudder he didn't want the other two to see. The sound was an ordeal to listen to and he was grateful after about a minute when Brennan flicked the switch that killed the power and abruptly cut it off.

'What is that?' Brennan asked.

'You're the expert.'

'I'm asking you.'

'They call it squelch, don't they?' Blake said. 'It's signal echo or localised feedback or rogue interference or something.'

'What do you think it sounds like?' Troy said.

Blake shrugged. 'Like radio distortion.'

'It sounds human to me,' Brennan said. 'I know it can't be. But that's what it sounds like. It's f.u.c.king unbearable. It sounds like a child, screaming.'

'I have to apologise for my colleague,' Troy said to Blake. 'It's this place, if I'm honest. We're used to catastrophe and rapid deployment and a s.h.i.tload of corruption meaning bribes to pay if we ever want to get anything built in time to save lives in the locations to which we're usually sent. My lads are not used to creepy. Not when creepy seems to be intrinsic to the place.'

'You think the island a sinister location?'

'It has a pretty sinister history,' Brennan said.

Troy said, 'It's the outdoor equivalent of things that go b.u.mp in the night, if you get my drift, Captain Blake. I've had the feeling of being watched since I've been here. Not at night, because I'm asleep at night, so much as in the daytime. Three or four of my boys have commented on it. And these are guys who've worked in some pretty hostile environments, all over the world.'

'The bogeyman is not going to get you, Mr Troy,' Blake said. 'My guys are here to prevent that kind of s.h.i.t from ever occurring.'

He had decided to butch it out. These people were not his friends. If anything, he felt about them only their innate sense of superiority over him. They were specifically tasked and trusted with about half a million quid's worth of hi-tech hardware. They'd arrived aboard a brace of Chinooks, not some bilge filled tub of a fishing charter. They'd built a command centre and accommodation units that were substantial and comfortable. He was a has-been heading up a team of five washed-up losers. He was occupying a tent you could probably buy on offer in any high street branch of Millets.

He had his dignity, though. He would not buy verbally into their suspicions about the island. He shared their misgivings. Sinister was New Hope's default mode, in the language used by these people. They knew it and so did he.

But to confide that fact would be to betray weakness and undermine his position as the guy tasked to maintain the territorial integrity of the rock they happened currently to be calling home. At Troy's invitation, he cracked a comradely beer with them. Then he bade them goodnight and wandered back into the s.h.i.t-storm of Hebridean weather beyond their base.

He knew his way around the island. They all did. Even the Seasick Four could by now orientate reasonably efficiently, so long as they could see well enough to locate the landmarks he and Napier had painstakingly pointed out to them. He knew the place like the back of his hand and treacherous though its conditions could be, he considered himself the island's master, in the current situation.

The construction-stroke-logistics guys would fly out in a day or two. But even if the weather kept them on New Hope, they didn't really threaten his authority. They were too blinkered, too task-specific in their mission. His mission was much more free-handed.

He walked through the gale. The driven rain needled into his face, under the hood of his storm jacket. His progress was steady. He was comfortable with the terrain. His thoughts were on how well it would play with McIntyre's people when he nailed the island's intruder. It would play pretty well with McIntyre too, wouldn't it? It might just be the achievement needed to secure a permanent place on Alexander McIntyre's staff.

He was overqualified for the sort of jobs his expertise had been earning him. He craved more responsibility and better financial reward. In fact, he was indignantly convinced that he was a man who fully deserved those things.

He had arrived at his destination. He looked up, slightly surprised at where he found himself, in front of the cottage built from stone by the crofter David Shanks in the first half of the previous century. He had walked back to the southern tip of the island when his actual destination was the ragged little camp they had built on their arrival in the shelter of a rise behind the island's makeshift harbour.

How had he fetched up here? He nodded to himself. He thought it was probably because of an affinity with Shanks, the war hero and loner, the traveller and intellectual who had tried to make this place his home.

Blake had read a little about Shanks. He had distinguished himself on the Western Front in the greatest infantry conflict ever fought. He had been a nonchalant sort of a hero, cool and laconic and rather understated. They would have got on, the two of them. There would have been a natural affinity.

That was probably why he was spending so much time here. There was more to it than just the paradox of leadership; the needing to be at once a brother to, yet separate from the men under your command. It was not just that he sought seclusion and craved a degree of privacy. It was the bond between brave fighting men, stretching across the decades. It was as though Shanks had offered his hand in friendship from the past and the only man on the island worthy of the gesture, he had gladly taken it.

Blake stood there in the rain, in the lee of the cottage, listening to the waves. .h.i.tting the shingle on the beach beyond, their somnolent pounding a rhythm he thought would probably lull a man into restful sleep till morning.

He took a deep breath, thinking once more about the happy parallels between himself and Shanks. They shared the same defining characteristics of modestly and ruthlessness. They were similarly tough and self-reliant and essentially private men.

And then he heard something from within the cottage itself. It sounded like a snicker of secret laughter. He froze and the hairs bristled on his forearms and the back of his neck and he strained, listening intently. He was only a foot from the door, which stood slightly ajar. But it still masked the cottage interior from the scant ambient light there in the night at the edge of the sea.

He heard another noise. He swallowed. This one was unmistakeable because he recognised it. It had become familiar to him. He had made it so himself, during his cottage interludes. It was the creak Shanks's old rocking chair groaned out when its occupant tilted it back and forth.

Was the wind propelling the chair? Blake didn't think so. He was certain when he heard that snicker of suppressed mirth again from the cottage interior, sly and gleeful. And then there was the familiar wooden sigh of the weight of someone rising from the chair within, to stand.

He wished he was armed. The knurled stock of a 12mill Sig-Sauer automatic; its cold and solid weight in the grip of his right hand; he would have given anything at that moment for that rea.s.surance. But he didn't have a pistol. He didn't even have a knife. He stepped forward and pushed open the cottage door. He didn't have a choice. He was the man responsible for the Island's security and he was not a coward and had never run from anyone in his entire life.

It was a little girl. She looked waiflike, standing there, with a shawl around her scrawny shoulders, wrapped in the embrace of her own thin arms. She was smiling at him and her eyes glimmered blackly. There was some weird trickery of light and shade going on in the cottage that made it look to Blake like the little girl's feet did not quite rest on the flagged stone floor. They looked a good few inches above it, as though she floated or hung there. The top half of her seemed to drift back and forth, almost as if in the play of the wind, but the cottage walls stilled the air within, so that was impossible. Wasn't it?

'You shouldn't be here,' Blake said. His throat was dry and he felt in the grip of something between despondency and dread. It delivered a sort of paralysis. He could not properly move. He could not even blink.

'I like company,' the little girl said, the voice gravelly and dragged out of her, like something only half-remembered from a long time ago.

Chapter Five.

Napier slept with a bayonet under his pillow. Old habits died hard and he had done it whenever he kipped outdoors since an attempt to kill him as he slept in Bosnia 15 years earlier. He'd awoken then because he couldn't breathe, to discover a man straddling his chest and making a fairly good job of garrotting him. He still remembered how hard it had been to wrestle his way out of that predicament; to overpower and kill a strong and determined enemy in the confinement of a one-man tent with no weapon to hand.

His abiding memory of the incident was of the reek of Diesel coming off the man's clothes once he was safely dead and Napier was able to breathe properly again. His attempted killer was one of the warlord Arkan's bandit a.s.sa.s.sins and had spilled the fuel on his jeans siphoning it from one of the British military vehicles into a jerry can earlier in the day.

He'd been a thief as well as a murderer and Napier had felt no compunction at all about killing him. He just remembered afterwards the stink of Diesel and how long it took to accomplish a death inflicted with your hands alone. Thus the bayonet, whenever he slept under canvas, from that unpleasant evening on. He sharpened its edges on a whetting stone with the same unthinking regularity that he brushed his teeth before bed.

When he was rudely awoken on the island, he very nearly claimed another life. He had gripped the collar of the figure looming above him with the fingers of his left hand and held the bayonet in his right, about to draw it across the man's throat. But in the glow from a dropped flashlight, he recognised the face of Malone, the least clueless of the Seasick Four, and stopped himself before the cut was made and Malone's life bled away in an arterial eruption of gore.

It was some moments before Malone was capable of speech. The pause while he recovered from the shock enabled Napier to get dressed. Malone hadn't woken him for nothing. This was far from a routine event, whatever it signified. He laced on his boots and exited his tent aware of the percussive drumming of rain on taut canvas and the howl of the wind as it scoured their rag-tag camp.

Malone stood, shivering.

'Get over it,' Napier said. 'You're not dead. You'd know if you were. What's up?'