The Colony (10 page)

‘Fair enough,’ Lassiter 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 Lassiter. 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,’ Lassiter 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.

Lassiter 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,’ Lassiter 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,’ Lassiter 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 documentary.’

‘A spoiler,’ Lassiter 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 Lassiter 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 Lassiter.’

‘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, Lassiter 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 Lassiter would not do that. He thought Fortescue a courteous individual, as cooperative in the circumstances 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 Shelley 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.’

Lassiter 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. Lassiter 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 brass 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 brass studs embedded into its lid. It contained a telescope and a sexton 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 balls. There was a heavy cloth boat cloak which Lassiter 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 Lassiter 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, Lassiter 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 Lassiter 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 sexually ambivalent and almost sly.

The most valuable item in the trove was the one Lassiter 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.

Lassiter 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, Lassiter almost dropped the living object cradled in his palm.

Mechanical life, he thought. The watch possessed only mechanical life. Someone had surreptitiously 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.

Lassiter 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 space 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. Fuck 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 basement 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 Lassiter.’

‘Is it always like that?’

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

Lassiter 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,’ Lassiter 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.’

‘Did he or she comment on the experience?’

‘I’ve no idea of who the photographer was. An agency was commissioned to carry out the assignment. Sygma, I believe.’

Lassiter nodded and peeled off the cotton gloves. They were slightly damp now to the touch. He turned and made to leave.

‘Spend tonight in company, if you can, Mr Lassiter,’ Fortescue said into his wake.

Gloom had descended when he left the museum. The sky had become overcast and the cobbles were greasy with rain. When he got out of the museum precincts, to where the traffic flowed, the dimmed headlamps of cars were streaks and daubs of light emerging and disappearing through grey air. The weather had been sunny for so long he had forgotten how gloomy the world could appear.

He very badly needed a drink. There was no waiting today for the healer. He needed it before nightfall.

He found a pub and bought a double scotch. The place was busy, nowhere to sit at the bar among the press of thirsty customers vying to be served. A football match, he thought, but then noticed how well-dressed the punters were, men and women both. Football matched weren’t played in England in June. A race meeting at Aintree, he thought, it was the height of the National Hunt season, wasn’t it?

The pub was late Victorian, engraved ornamental windows, heavy oak fixtures, a heaving saloon and a snug to the rear which looked a quieter refuge to a man seeking somewhere peaceful in which to sip a restorative drink.

All the tables but one in the snug were taken and the one was half taken, a woman seated at it with her head over a book and no glass in front of her. She didn’t look as though she was waiting for a companion to return from the bar or lavatory.

She had a self-contained air. She wore her hair in a precisely cut black bob and its geometric frame emphasised the paleness of her skin and the vivid red of the lipstick she wore. She was a strikingly attractive woman and she would probably suspect his motive in asking but he needed somewhere to sit. She’d soon realise her caution unnecessary. Fearful and distracted as he was, he was in no mood to chat anyone up.