CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The lake was a still sheet of glass, broken only by the occasional stream of bubbles from the fish that swam beneath the surface. Robert Carter sat on an old wooden jetty, his legs dangling over the edge, his boots inches above the water. A fishing rod was propped on a wire stand to the left of him, to the right a bait box, its plastic tray filled with hooks, spools of line, spherical lead weights and a polythene container with hundreds of ivory-colored maggots, writhing and wriggling on a bed of sawdust. Hanging from one of the jetty’s stanchions was a keep net, mostly submerged, containing half a dozen perch swimming listlessly in circles: the day’s catch.
He sat, smoking a cigarette, watching the fluorescent orange float bobbing gently twenty yards away, waiting for a fish to strike. The day was the best summer had to offer; a clear blue sky, streaked with thin wisps of cirrus; a gentle breeze tempering the heat of the sun before it could become oppressive. High above him in the trees, jays, thrushes and blackbirds serenaded him with their summer songs and once in a while a kingfisher swooped low over the water looking for its next meal.
The Lake District of England was a beautiful natural wonderland of lake and forest. The different lakes, Ulleswater, Derwent, all had their own unique attraction, and the entire area was a magnet for tourists all through the year.
‘Hello, Rob.’
He hadn’t heard her approach. He didn’t look round. ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘You’re the last person I expected.’ He always knew someone would come for him. Knew there would be at least one more job that only he was right for. His research had given him a pretty good idea what that job would entail.
Jane moved the bait box to one side and sat down next to him. ‘Do you mind?’ She settled herself on the bank and looked out over the calm water.
‘Feel free.’ He flicked the cigarette into the lake and emptied his lungs of smoke. ‘So what brings you all the way up here?’
‘A fool’s errand, I suspect.’ There was a sigh in her voice. She had thought about what she was going to say, tried to plan little speeches, but now she was here, in this beautiful setting, and she had to admit to herself, now she was with Robert, none of her preparations seemed to matter much.
He took another cigarette from the pack and lit it.
‘You still smoke too much,’ she said, though she had a smile in her voice.
‘Sorry, did you want one?’ He offered her the pack.
She took one and leaned in so he could light it with his gold Dunhill lighter. The lighter had been a gift, from her to him. She was surprised he still carried it. ‘Thanks,’ she said, breathing smoke out through her nose. ‘You realize we’ll probably both die of cancer.’
‘Probably.’ He was surprised they had sent Jane.
‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ She sucked down the smoke and suppressed a small cough as it caught in her throat.
‘Dying, or cancer?’ His gaze was fixed on the float; he was still avoiding making eye contact. It was starting to unsettle her.
‘Either. Both.’ She had known this wasn’t going to be easy.
He shrugged. ‘Not really. So, what are you doing here?’
She took a breath and came straight to the point. ‘Simon needs your help on an investigation.’
‘Then why isn’t he asking me himself?’
‘He thinks I might have more success.’ All the practiced phrases she had rehearsed in the car were abandoned. Now she was with him she instinctively knew that only honesty would work. She owed him that much.
‘Do you think you’ll succeed?’ He turned and looked at her for the first time.
‘No, I don’t. I think it’s a bad idea, but Simon wants you in on this one, or more specifically, the Minister wants you involved. Simon’s worried that if he doesn’t give him what he wants, the Department will lose his support in Whitehall, and that could be the end of it.’
‘And that concerns me how?’
‘Come on, Rob, I know you better than that. Once upon a time the Department meant everything to you. It was your life.’
Carter took a drag of his cigarette and shook his head. ‘It was, and then when I screwed up I was dropped like a stone. I owe Crozier, or the Department, nothing.’
‘He thought that might be your reaction.’ She was surprised at the depth of his bitterness.
‘Then he was right. I’m not coming back.’ It sounded final.
She sighed. This was going exactly as she had expected. She tried a different tack. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is we’re investigating?’
He finally turned to look at her. ‘I’ve a feeling you’re going to tell me.’ He smiled at her for the first time and she was pleased.
She briefed him quickly. Kulsay, the disappearances, the mystery. ‘Still not interested?’
‘No, Jane, I’m not.’ He pointed to the keep net. ‘Look there.’
Jane looked. ‘What am I supposed to see, apart from a few poor fish that’ve been dragged away from their simple lives by a hook and line.’
He smiled at the implied criticism. ‘Watch them swimming round and around. You’d think they were quite content. Then occasionally one of them will swim deliberately into the net. Do you know why?’
Jane shrugged, not sure where this was going.
‘They’re looking for a way out, for a gap in the mesh. Well, after all this time, I’ve found my gap and now I’m in open water, swimming free, and I have no desire to jump back into the net again.’
She nodded her head slowly and ground out her cigarette on the jetty. ‘A bit dramatic for you, but I get the point. I think I’m wasting my time here. I’d better go.’
He laid a hand on her arm as she began to stand up. ‘Stay a while,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time since we talked. How are David and the girls?’
She sat back down, pulled a stem from one of the reeds growing at the side of the jetty and twisted it in her fingers. ‘The girls are fine. Becoming more beautiful and more of a handful every day.’ She lapsed into silence, staring down at the reed stem twined through her fingers. She’d twisted it around her wedding ring, hiding it from view.
‘And David?’
‘I really don’t know,’ she said, very quietly. ‘He’s left me.’
He looked at her sharply. ‘That’s very sad. I thought you two would be together forever.’
She laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, don’t write us off yet. It’s early days. He only left last night and, to be honest, it’s knocked me sideways. I really wasn’t expecting it. I knew things had been a little sticky lately, but…’
Carter said nothing but slid an arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off brusquely. ‘Don’t!’
He let his arm drop. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry. That was very rude of me. It’s just that I’m a bit raw at the moment and very edgy. I cried three times on the way up here, and I don’t have to tell you how out of character that is for me.’
‘Hard as nails, you,’ he said with a smile.
‘It’s a facade. Inside I’m marshmallow.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Do you want to talk about it?’
She shook her head. ‘Not really, it’s one of those things we have to work out for ourselves.’
He stood. ‘Come on; let’s go back to the house. I’ll make you a coffee.’ He reached down and released the cord tying the keep net to the jetty, letting the fish swim free. Then they walked back through the wood that surrounded Carter’s small picturesque cottage. The path was well used.
In the kitchen he boiled the kettle while Jane sat at the long pine table. ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself, you know,’ she said as she watched him move from the sink to the range cooker.
‘For what?’
‘For what happened to Sian.’
He joined her at the table, pulling out a wheel-backed chair and sitting down heavily.
‘I don’t know what happened to Sian,’ he said. ‘Nobody does.’
‘She might have just taken off. If the manifestations in the house were as frightening as you described in your report, no one would have blamed her for making herself scarce.’
‘True, but I don’t think that’s what happened. According to the official version, don’t forget, there were no manifestations. No one’s had any contact from her since that day. Not her family, not her friends.’
‘What’s your theory?’
‘I haven’t got one.’ He sounded as if he had exhausted every possible avenue.
‘No one’s heard anything from her at all?’ Jane knew people disappeared all the time. It was a recurring nightmare that one of her children went missing and she spent the rest of her life searching for them. She would never be able to accept a loss like that.
He shook his head. ‘Besides, the car was locked. She couldn’t have left the car and locked it after her. I had the key.’
The kettle started to whistle.
‘What really happened the day Sian disappeared?’ she said as he put two steaming mugs of coffee down on the table.
‘You know what I know. You read my report,’ he said defensively.
‘Yes, that’s right, I did. Now I’d like you to fill in the gaps. In the report you said you blacked out for a “considerable length of time.” ’
‘I did. Over four hours.’ He took a mouthful of coffee and swallowed.
‘And nothing happened in that time?’ She tried not to sound doubtful.
‘How would I know? I was unconscious.’ He made no attempt not to sound defensive.
Her eyes narrowed. She looked at him closely. Okay, she knew he had been suspended, but his reaction to Sian disappearing seemed out of proportion to her. He and Sian had worked together a while but there was no logical reason why Carter should seem so devastated. He avoided her gaze by staring down into his mug, swilling the liquid around the cup and watching the light reflecting on its surface.
‘No. You’re bullshitting me, and I’ve known you too long to be taken in by it,’ Jane said.
This was the Jane Talbot of old; perceptive, intuitive and dogged. It’s what made her such a damned good investigator. She wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
He sighed. ‘Okay,’ he said, finally meeting her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you everything I remember.’
By the time he’d finished, the coffee had grown cold. Jane went across to the sink to fill the kettle again.
‘I think I can understand the symbol of the operating theatre in your vision.’ Jane said. ‘It’s a place of uncertainty, of the unknown, of possible danger. But why should your subconscious be placing such significance on something as mundane as having your tonsils out?’ she said, putting the kettle on the range to boil.
He looked at her bleakly. ‘It’s quite simple really. That was the day I died.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Jane said.
Carter took a breath. ‘I’ve had this power, gift, what ever you want to call it, for as long as I can remember. Up to the age of seven it was undefined and fairly random, just the odd flash of precognition, nothing very clear. I was a fairly sickly child; all the usual ailments—measles, chickenpox, mumps—but I suffered quite badly from throat infections. So much so that our doctor recommended I have my tonsils out.
‘I was too young to realize what was really happening, but a few days before the operation I started getting very clear visions. I knew with absolute clarity that if I went in for surgery there was a good chance I wouldn’t survive it. As I said, the odd flash of precognition. I told my parents, but of course they didn’t understand. I was only seven years old after all. They knew I was prone to flights of fancy, as my mother liked to call them. So the operation went ahead.
‘The procedure was routine. The surgeon operating had performed hundreds of tonsillectomies; he could have probably operated them with his eyes closed. But this time it went wrong. In the final stage of the operation, complications developed with the anesthetic. My heart failed and for several minutes they had to fight to revive me. For those minutes I was clinically dead. They brought me round, of course, but things were never quite the same again.’
‘In what way?’ Jane said. He had never told her this before.
‘It was as if my powers shifted up a notch. The precognition intensified; I started displaying signs of telekinesis, and I also started to see and hear people who were supposed to be dead. The visions were very clear, and sometimes very frightening.’ As he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, Jane noticed his hands were shaking. He blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling. ‘My mother was something of a crank. She belonged to a Spiritualist church and used to go to regular meetings. When she realized what was happening to me, she called in the church elders, who confirmed that her son really was something very special. After that she embraced my new powers with something like an evangelical zeal. Suddenly she had something of value to offer her church; a currency that she could use to raise her standing, so she started to take me along to the meetings.
‘Not long after that the circus began. Slowly at first; she’d get me to give clairvoyant readings to the other members of the church and, though I say so myself, I was pretty damned accurate.
‘But it was my father who saw the potential for making money out of it. He’d always been something of a wheeler and dealer, always on the lookout for a way to make a buck. He was like that up to the day he died, and I think even then, with death staring him in the face, he was still looking for some kind of angle on it; some way to turn it to his advantage. Well, to him I was like the proverbial goose laying golden eggs. And the next ten years were a blur of séances, readings, palmistry…you name it, all organized by him. Thanks to me they lived very well for a decade. The money poured in and I became something of a celebrity. TV talk shows, radio interviews. Little Bobby Hinton, the psychic wonder.’ He didn’t try to disguise the bitterness in his voice.
‘Hinton?’ Jane said.
‘Carter’s my mother’s maiden name. I adopted it when I decided I’d had enough of living under a microscope. I grew to hate being treated like a performing seal. I knew instinctively that I’d been given this ability for a higher reason and I was sure it was not to be prostituted.’ He paused. ‘Christ, that sounds pompous, but that was genuinely how I felt.
‘When I hit seventeen I left home. My father was very ill by then, and I knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. Mother had been uncomfortable with the commercial side of things for a long time—it didn’t sit well with her religious beliefs—but she was too afraid of my father to say anything. He was a bully, and he had a terrible temper. When I told her I wanted to leave home she was upset, but supported my decision. It was tough for her, knowing that her husband only had a short time to live, but she put her feelings on the back burner for my benefit. I’ll always be grateful for that.
‘I left home, changed my name, and set about finding ways to use my gift to help others rather than turning a profit.’
‘So what happened next?’ Jane said, probing deeper. In the years since they’d first met she’d never known him to open up like this. She was seeing a completely different side to Robert Carter; a softer, more vulnerable side. It made a refreshing change.
‘I’d had enough of England so I went to America. I’d heard about a research center in Kansas dedicated to exploring psychic phenomena in a totally scientific way. It was an antidote to all the Spiritualist mumbo jumbo. When I arrived I met others with powers similar to my own, and I had a chance to talk about them, to explore ways to use them. For the first time in a decade I stopped feeling like a freak, a sideshow turn. The three years I spent out there were the happiest time of my life.
‘I’d heard of Simon Crozier, and was aware he’d recently taken over for Sir George Logan at Department Eighteen. Walt Whitney, the director of the Institute, was a friend of Crozier’s and put my name forward as a possible candidate for the new regime. The picture Whitney painted was very attractive so I flew back to England to meet with Crozier. I can’t say I liked him—still don’t—but the idea of the place intrigued me enough and I found the invitation hard to resist. It was everything I’d been looking for. I knew there were only a handful of people in the world who had the same kind of psychic range as me, and so did Simon Crozier. Of course, by inviting me to join the Department, he was pandering to my ego and I let him. But for a long time, working there, I felt I was doing something worthwhile with my life.’
‘Until Sian disappeared.’ Jane began to understand why it had hit him so hard.
‘Yes.’ He ground out his cigarette.
‘And as I said before, you can’t blame yourself for that.’
Carter swallowed the dregs of cold coffee. The bitterness of the coffee was mirrored in his words. ‘That’s the problem, you see. I can and I do, because I knew something terrible was going to happen that day. Just as clearly as I knew I was going to die on the operating table when I was seven years old. I knew even before I entered the house that there was something awful waiting just over the threshold. Something that would change my life forever. But I thought that what ever was going to happen would happen to me. I just didn’t foresee it happening to Sian. I should never have taken her along. I should have gone alone.’
Jane said nothing. She got to her feet abruptly and walked to the door.
‘Going?’ Carter said. ‘You’re probably as disillusioned with me as I am with myself.’
‘It’s a long drive back to London.’ She paused, her hand on the latch. ‘Yes, I’m going, but no, I’m not disillusioned with you. Quite the reverse. I shouldn’t have come here. It wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t fair of Simon to ask me.’
‘When do you leave for Scotland?’
‘There’s a briefing first thing Thursday morning, then we’re flying up to Aberdeen.’
‘I see.’ He lit yet another cigarette. ‘Why did you and David split up?’
The question jolted her. ‘I can’t even begin to get into that one,’ she said.
‘It was the job, wasn’t it?’
She hesitated, and then nodded her head sharply.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It has a habit of ruining lives. Take care, Jane.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, and let herself out of the house. As she walked to the car, a single tear seeped out from her eye and rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away impatiently with the back of her hand and got in behind the wheel, then drove away from the cottage without looking back.
She’d gone no more that five miles when her cell phone rang.
She punched a button. There was a brief silence, then Carter said, ‘Where are you?’
‘About a mile from the motorway. Why?’
‘Can you come back?’
‘Why?’ But she was already looking for a place to turn round.
‘There’s something you should see.’
The door opened at her first knock. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Come on through to the kitchen. I want to show you something.’ It was as if he was resigned to show her something he had been reluctant to share.
Spread out on the kitchen table was a map of the British Isles. He’d marked four stars on it with red pen. ‘The stars are the sites of my last four investigations.’ He took a ruler and laid it over the stars. They formed an arrow-straight line.
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘Ley lines?’ Jane was as familiar with the ancient passages as she was with her own history.
‘It certainly looks that way.’ With a pencil he drew a line all the way down to Weymouth on the coast. ‘I wouldn’t mind betting there’s been more activity along that line. The incidents have been gradually moving south.’
‘I haven’t heard of anything,’ Jane said.
‘Maybe, but the Department only gets to hear about a fraction of these occurrences. After you left I looked at the map again. A straight line from Redditch all the way down to Warminster.’
‘Which was where Sian disappeared.’
‘Exactly. And what happened to the management team on Kulsay Island?’
A frown creased her forehead. ‘They disappeared.’
They disappeared! Vanished without a trace, except for the blood.
It was suddenly so obvious. She picked up the pen and drew a line north. It traveled through the Midlands, through Newcastle upon Tyne, and then out into the North Sea. She followed the line and drew another star.
‘Kulsay,’ she said. Though she didn’t yet know what it meant.
‘Kulsay.’
‘So Sian’s disappearance could be connected to what’s happening on the island.’
‘It’s possible.’ He wasn’t yet ready to share the rest of his conclusions with her. He wasn’t yet ready to show her the other map. The one where he had overlaid all the ley lines that connected known supernatural incidents during the past fifty years. The map that showed the straight lines from Kulsay, all the way to Rome, and the Vatican City.
‘And you still won’t join the investigation?’ Jane opened her hands to him in a helpless gesture.
‘I don’t have a choice now, do I?’