The Colony (22 page)

Struthers had stayed with the photo agency after that commission. He had not deliberately walked into the path of a Deansgate tram, or been found one cold and lonely morning hanging from the iron girders supporting the end of Southport Pier – the subject of an excellent black and white photo essay he’d done for the town council earlier in that monochromatic decade. He had not just been a still-life man, but a highly competent all-rounder able to get interesting results from pointing his lens at virtually any subject.

He had stayed with the agency, but he had shifted hemispheres. The first Struthers commission completed after the Ballantyne chest contents was a piece done for Picture Post on the Sydney Harbour Yacht Race. In 1960, he covered an Australian election campaign and in 1961 he was responsible for a charming set of portraits of the more illustrious inmates of the Zoo at Perth.

Struthers died of heart failure in his sleep at his home in a Melbourne suburb one night in August of 1976. That was a full 19 years after the museum commission. There was no evidence to suggest he had married and he had left no children in whom he might have confided uneasy secrets. ‘You didn’t deliberately end your life,’ Lassiter said to himself, ‘but I’ll bet you took fright and ran away from something. You ran all the way to the other side of the world.’ He closed the pages he’d been looking at and switched off Alice’s computer and returned to the sitting room and resumed his pacing across the floor.

Who did he know on the Merseyside Force? He didn’t know anyone. But he did have a Scouse ex-colleague based at Fulham who would. Jimmy Daley was a D.I. who had transferred from Liverpool to the Met after meeting and marrying a girl from Kingston-upon-Thames. He had been a Detective-Sergeant back then and he and Lassiter had become mates. They were both on the up back in the late ‘90s, rivals in crime solving and drinking buddies before Lassiter’s drinking had really got out of hand.

Lassiter still had Jimmy Daley’s mobile number. He rang it. Daley answered. They chewed over old times for about ten minutes and then Lassiter told Daley what it was he was after. Daley said it might take a day or so to source the information required.

‘It’s funny you should call, Patsy. I was only thinking of you this morning,’ Daley said.

‘Spooky.’

‘Not really. I read about you in this morning’s paper. You’re going on that New Hope Island thing with Alice Lang.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘She’s very easy on the eye, if the picture in the Chronicle’s anything to go on.’

‘Yes, Jim. She’s certainly a beautiful woman.’

‘A bit too complicated for my tastes. I don’t mind the trick cycling part. But the second-sight thing would completely freak me out.’

‘I can see your point,’ Lassiter said, which he could.

‘I’ll call you back on the Bootle business. Expect it can wait till tomorrow?’

‘It’s waited since November of 1971,’ Lassiter said. ‘It can wait another day, Jim.’

In the event, Detective Inspector Daley called him back later the same afternoon. Lassiter was running in Regent’s Park, when his mobile rang. He had tucked it down his sock. McIntyre did not pay him to be out of reach at any time. Taking his phone when he went running was a necessary precaution, working for such a capricious and demanding boss.

‘She had a bit of cannabis resin, what they used to call Lebanese, back in prehistoric times,’ Daley said. ‘Enough to get busted for in those days, but there was nothing in her system. No drugs, no alcohol.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A bottle of absinthe. That was illegal too back then. The seal wasn’t broken. She’d brought it back from somewhere as a souvenir, by the look. France or Corsica would be my best guess.’

‘France. She had a thing for this French revolutionary martyr, Charlotte Corday.’

‘There you go, then. France.’

‘And that’s it, Jim?’

‘Not quite. She had a bracelet, an ethnic item. It didn’t look like she wore it. Maybe Indian or possibly African in origin, it’s described as a fine antique silver chain strung with about 30 human teeth.’

The sun shone above him from a blue afternoon sky. He’d been sweating with exertion. Now, he felt suddenly cold and a shiver ran through his panting frame. ‘Cheers, Jim,’ he said. His voice had become hoarse.

‘You alright, mate?’

‘Yeah,’ Lassiter said, not feeling alright at all, not feeling remotely all right, in fact. ‘I owe you one.’

Alexander McIntyre went personally to see Father Degrelle at the seminary in Highgate where the veteran exorcist resided in a modest cell. Raised a Catholic, the media magnate had allowed his faith to lapse over the years of his success and enterprise. But conscience, or possibly nostalgia for his more innocent youth, had influenced his charitable activities. He had given sufficiently generously to Catholic causes to have the ear of the Cardinal.

‘Vanity,’ the Cardinal told him over the phone, ‘is Degrelle’s great weakness. He goes on your expedition with my blessing. But he can be a contrary man. At three days notice, he will know he had been at best, an afterthought. I hope you can persuade him, Alex. I would suggest flattery is the key to doing so.’

‘Shall I woo him personally, Your Eminence?’

‘Always wise, I think, with a man like Degrelle. He has a very high opinion of himself. But then his strength and will make him enormously formidable at the ritual. And there is his faith, of course, which is unflinching and unwavering. He is the best at what he does. The problem is that he knows it. He will watch for your arrival through his window. I suggest the Bentley. You still own the Bentley, Alex?’

‘I do.’

‘Excellent. And have your chauffeur wear his full livery. And have him salute you when you exit the car. Father Degrelle appreciates status. And he loves ceremony.’

They walked together through the seminary’s ornamental gardens so that Degrelle could smoke. This was something McIntyre observed he did ceaselessly. Physically, he was imposing, both tall and heavily built. He had the wary tread and club fists of an ageing pugilist. He’s God’s prize-fighter, McIntyre thought, smiling to himself. He’d go the championship distance with Satan himself. He’s perfect material for the expedition and in the hands of the gifted Lucy Church would make riveting copy on reputation and appearance alone.

Was he quotable, though? And there was the more immediate question of whether he would even agree to go.

He listened in silence as McIntyre offered a brief history of events on New Hope and then outlined the aims of the expedition. Then McIntyre, tired of his own voice, said, ‘Do you think demonic possession could have destroyed the New Hope community?’

‘Destroyed it, no.’ Degrelle said; ‘afflicted it, without reasonable doubt. The heretic Ballantyne was almost certainly a servant of Satan.’

McIntyre had never heard the reformed slave master called a heretic before. Degrelle’s use of the term reminded him that the Vatican had its own historians, its own intelligence network and its own take on theology.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘There is compelling anecdotal evidence that Ballantyne was able to work what his followers construed as miracles. He got the power to play his tricks from somewhere. It was not from the Almighty.’

When Degrelle spoke, it was like listening to words chiselled from stone. He was a gift from God, McIntyre thought, if he could be persuaded to go.

‘Your Cardinal has sanctioned your participation in the expedition.’

‘I have no interest in debating the theoretical fate of the New Hope blasphemers with your motley collection of so-called experts.’

‘But your Cardinal would like you to go.’

‘What he actually said, Mr McIntyre was that the choice was mine. The notice is short. I suspect the task will be arduous. The island is damned. But the tormented souls there deserve a chance of salvation, however misguided and sinful they were in life.’

‘You’re saying you’ll go?’

‘I have my duty as an ordained priest. My mission is to save, Mr McIntyre. My vocation is to serve. Therefore, I will travel on your expedition.’

‘We would like to break the story of your participation on the front page of tomorrow’s edition of the Chronicle,’ McIntyre said, reaching into his pocket for his mobile.

‘How many column inches are you thinking of?’

‘The whole of the front page,’ McIntyre said. ‘Interest is at fever pitch. Your eleventh hour recruitment is a dramatic development. We’re literally talking breaking news.’

‘Excellent. You can send a photographer round to do a portrait shot in situ this afternoon. I take it you will have a background story on an inside page?’

‘Of course we will.’

‘I have some pictures, career highlights, if you will, inside. They should illustrate the story very nicely. I will email high resolution scans to your picture desk as soon as we conclude our conversation.’

‘I cannot tell you how pleased I am you’ve agreed to do this,’ McIntyre said.

‘It’s my calling,’ Degrelle said. ‘I know the history of the island. The entreaty comes late, but it must be answered. The will of God must prevail if we are to be spared. One cannot escape one’s duties in life. The circumstances really give me no choice but to go.’

‘Great,’ McIntyre said. ‘Terrific.’ The deal was done. The exorcist was in. His mind had already moved on, was now on those Ballantyne miracles, which a little extra-terrestrial technology would have enabled, he thought, with consummate ease.

‘You ought to know, if you don’t already, that I have what is these days termed a history, with one of your experts.’

‘Oh? Which one is it?’

‘Karl Cooper,’ Degrelle said, ‘the cosmologist who believes humanity has had a helping hand from elsewhere in the universe.’

‘And what’s your take on that?’

‘God made man in his own image, Mr McIntyre. Or so it is written in the Book of Genesis. And the Cardinal told me you were raised a Catholic, so you should be familiar with the first commandment.’

‘The one about worshipping false idols,’ McIntyre said, with a smile.

‘Indeed. Who do you have in mind to write the background piece about me in tomorrow’s paper?’

‘Lucy Church is already on it, in the hope that you would agree to participate. Are you familiar with her writing?’

‘I am a fan,’ Degrelle said.

Philip Fortescue had suspected for quite a long time that the fate would link him in some important way to the long dead slave vessel master whose sea chest lay in the basement of the museum where he worked.

His own experience with the chest had been an unpleasant one. It had taken place during his one inventory of its contents, five years earlier. And it had come as a dismaying shock to him. He’d been completely unsuspecting of anything out of the ordinary. His predecessor as Keeper of Artefacts had died suddenly and left his successor no warning concerning the old iron-braced box and its hoard of maritime keepsakes.

Fortescue had only learned of the chest’s accident-prone reputation after his own encounter with it. What had happened that afternoon five years ago had made him curious to discover more about both Seamus Ballantyne and his malicious hoard.

It was only after his ordeal in the museum basement that he learned about David Shanks and the theft. He learned too about Elizabeth Burrows. When he saw her picture, a formal shot taken in cap and gown at her degree congregation, he recognised her straight away. By then, the suicide with the pale face and dark eyes had become familiar to Philip as the apparition sometimes haunting him.

His mistake with the chest was provoked by disrespect. He should have trusted the growing feeling of dread he felt as he lifted out the items it contained and examined them. It was not a normal feeling. It was the sort of fear he thought later that enabled our primeval ancestors to survive when stalked by some large and cunning beast. They had escaped only because they obeyed the instinct and bolted.

He didn’t. He told himself not to be so stupid. He was six months into his new job and finding it an excellent fit. He wouldn’t run away from a routine task in the museum basement on the strength of a feeling for which he could find no rational cause. No matter how strong the presentiment; and it was almost overwhelming in its clammy grip on him, he resolved that he would ignore it and complete the task in hand.

He came across the bracelet of teeth that Lassiter would be disturbed to identify as human carrying out the same rite five years on. He held it up to what limited light the feeble overheads down there allowed, stretched taut between his extended thumb and forefinger. The teeth glittered and the bracelet, shaped thus, seemed to grin gleefully at him.

He slipped it over his wrist. It felt loathsome across his fingers and he was forced to swallow in terror as his heart thumped and fluttered with an accelerating beat. So he slipped it over his wrist, defying his screaming nerves, to do what he would have done had he felt in the mood for a bit of jocular mischief; instead of filled, as he actually was, with abject terror.

The teeth closed around the skin. They moved and chattered and then bit him hard and he screamed and wrenched the circle of dead bone and enamel off and did what he should have done much earlier and slammed shut the chest lid and fled.

There had been two bracelets, originally. Elizabeth Burrows came to him one night, months later, and confided that. He woke and she was there, silhouetted by the pale curtain over his tall bedroom window, standing poised in the still darkness an hour before dawn. There had been two bracelets, she said. And she had stolen one of them during her scholarly examination of the contents of the chest in the autumn of 1971.

She couldn’t explain why she had taken it, she said. She could have understood her own motive had she taken something that had belonged to Rebecca Browning. She had admired Rebecca Browning greatly. Had Ballantyne’s chest contained something of hers, a locket or a ring perhaps, she could have understood herself coveting and stealing such an intimate keepsake in a moment of impulsive weakness.

The bracelet she had taken had never belonged to Rebecca. Elizabeth was sure of that. It had been in Ballantyne’s possession, must of course have been to have been in the chest at all. But she did not honestly think it could have been his, either. She could not imagine him adorning himself with such a gruesome and barbaric embellishment. He’d been a mercantile seaman from Liverpool, not a Barbary pirate.