There was no distance between open-mindedness and gullibility with blokes like Blake. They were too distrustful of their own judgement and ever wary of the wind-up, for that. With a bloke like Blake, incredulity was the default setting. He was the granite-hard combat veteran who believed in nothing he couldn't poke with a bayonet blade.

He was an insecure w.a.n.ker desperate to prove a toughness he had never actually possessed. That was Napier's considered opinion, who liked his commanding officer less with every strange occurrence this peaty northern paradise threw at him. Except that Blake wasn't really his commanding officer because the days of command structure and with them respectability had long gone. He was just the man in charge. He was the gaffer, whatever his military pretensions. And Napier had no respect for him or trust of his judgement at all.

The Seasick Four?

Do me a f.u.c.king favour, he thought. Napier reckoned he would tear out his own finger nails with his teeth before confiding anything that might come across as remotely inexplicable or spooky in any of them. It might amuse them. It might scare them. What it would most likely do would be to baffle them and alienate them even further from someone they already considered aloof and probably odd.

It left him alone. He was entirely alone. Whatever was happening on New Hope, and he had no f.u.c.king idea what that might be except for its apparent fidelity to a period theme, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.

Was he scared? Yes and no.

He was not unaware of the wider imperatives of the world. He knew about hype and sensationalism and the urge for publicity and vindication that would fuel a media mogul such as Alexander McIntyre in pursuing a project such as this. The stakes were vast. He had worked briefly as a bodyguard for a major Hollywood player and seen up close what megalomania could do to distort the values and perceptions of a man at the centre of things and addicted to remaining there.

What if New Hope Island produced nothing of interest? What if the wind scoured topology surrendered no new clues as to what had happened to its vanished inhabitants? Would McIntyre tolerate that? Could he endure such a crushing anti-climax to his expedition? Probably not, was the answer. He would fabricate things, wouldn't he? He would conjure and invent them to provide a world hungry for sensation with what it craved most from his investigation of the great unsolved enigma.

That was possibly what he, Napier, had experienced. It was just conceivable. It was more plausible physically than any other explanation he could think of. McIntyre hoped for revelations but in their absence had a stock of special effects to fool the world into believing along with him in some paranormal phenomena, something terrifying and malevolent involving ghosts and their attendant paraphernalia. He hoped something real would manifest itself. If it did not, these tricks would be used and interpreted as hard evidence of something other-worldly. They would insure he would not face ridicule.

Old folk songs mordantly sung at sunset by singers who weren't there and clay pipes smoked by phantoms were probably only the start of things. There would be wraiths in moonlight, the weeping of infants carried on a midnight wind. There would be the creak of spectral vessels approaching the sh.o.r.e. It would scare the s.h.i.t out of the a.s.sembled experts and their contagious fear would afflict the readers of McIntyre's paper as they shuddered, reading it over their bowls of muesli or aboard their commuter trains on the way to work.

It was the most plausible explanation. It was quite a seductive theory. He had experienced only the tentative rehearsals for the bogus haunting to come. McIntyre had employed a crack team of special effects people and they were already secretly occupying the island, perfecting their smaller turns and preparing the larger set-pieces for when the show properly began.

It was always tempting to believe what was rational. The human mind was too tidy for ready acceptance of the inexplicable. What was inexplicable generally became unpredictable and from there it was a very short step indeed to uncontrollable. People liked to be in control. It was a lot safer than the alternative. And they liked to be able to determine events for themselves. Surprises, once a person achieved adulthood, were almost always of the unpleasant variety.

But despite agreeing intellectually with all of this, Napier did not really buy the plausible explanation for the mysterious oddities he had heard and smelled and seen and touched since arriving on New Hope Island. In his past, before he lost his self-respect and his professional status in the world, he had been a highly trained and formidable soldier; an expert at tracking and concealment, someone who could live covertly in hostile terrain for as long as a mission took to successfully complete.

Blake and the Seasick Four were the only other human beings on the island. If it had any other mortal inhabitants, he would have detected the evidence of their presence by now. He would have sensed their spoor, even if they hid themselves, in the manner of the predator he used to be. He was certain of this, even if it was not a terribly comfortable conclusion to have reached. Did it mean then that he now had to believe in ghosts? He had never done so before. But he thought that in that small and barren place, with its mysterious past, he might over the coming days and weeks, have to accommodate the possibility.

The nights, he muttered to himself. The days would likely be alright. The nights, however, he thought might prove to be altogether trickier.

Lucy asked Karl Cooper would he mind if she taped the interview. He was a media veteran and she could think of no conceivable reason why he should object to the recording, but asking was a necessary courtesy and she'd decided a sort of exaggerated professionalism might be the best way to get her subject to drop his guard. He was a vain man. That was her instinct. He would relax into himself if made to feel important. Pandering to his substantial ego was the admission price paid for entering his comfort zone.

'Have you always believed in alien life?'

'Certainly I have for as long as I can remember.'

'How did that belief originate?'

He smiled. He said, 'to paraphrase a far more eminent scientist than I will ever be, I always thought that the universe to be not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.'

'Haldane, the biologist,' Lucy said.

'Very good, you've done your research.'

'So you a.s.sume the aliens are superior to us intellectually?'

'That's a given,' Cooper said. 'If they've been here, and I believe they have, then in order to get here, they have to possess technologies light years ahead of ours.'

'Pun intended?'

'Absolutely.'

'So at a young age you decided that there was compelling evidence of alien life. And then you concluded that those aliens had visited earth?'

'No. It was really the other way around. I looked, as a child, at the anomalies of history. The Aztecs constructed buildings of breathtaking intricacy yet an invention as fundamental as the wheel apparently never even occurred to them. Colossal sa.r.s.ens hewn from a Welsh quarry somehow got to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to form Stonehenge; a structure of such geometric complexity we still debate its true purpose. Hauled there by Bronze Age man? Erected by Bronze Age man? I don't think so. I could go on. But your readers have most of them heard me argue this stuff already on their television screens.'

'Yet the general level of scepticism concerning alien life remains high.'

'Does it? It might at the shabbier end of media, Lucy. It might in the halls of academe. It might among the scientific community, though that hasn't been my personal experience. My peers don't regard me as a laughing stock.'

'I didn't for a moment mean to imply they did, Professor Cooper.'

'Karl, Lucy. Please. And anyway, I suspect the scepticism is a recent thing. You know about the ancient temple at Alexandria, about the library there?'

'It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.'

Cooper nodded. 'The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn't for centuries.'

'It burned down. The knowledge was lost.'

'And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That's the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and a.s.sembled it there?'

'A blueprint for civilization, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?'

Cooper smiled. 'I could hardly have put it better myself,' he said.

The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. 'Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.'

Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.

'What do you think of that theory?'

'I think that she's ent.i.tled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.'

'Have you discussed it with her?'

'No.'

'But you do know her?'

Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, 'You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you're aware of the answer already.'

'It's something you don't wish to talk about?'

'It's a subject I can't talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would've made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that's off the record, by the way. I can't and won't talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.'

Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject's patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.

'Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?'

Cooper didn't answer her for a long time. Then he said, 'Perhaps Jane's right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It's possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn't expected.'

'You don't for a minute believe that.'

'No. I don't. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.'

'Then why were they taken?'

'I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.'

'But to what purpose, Karl?'

'I don't know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don't know. It's exactly what I'm going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won't rest once I get there until I've succeeded in doing so.'

It was Lucy's turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing plat.i.tudes about his jilted lover. I don't like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He's dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.

Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter's boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.

She wouldn't like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn't exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.

A breakthrough such as she thought New Hope Island might offer would not exactly make her indispensible to her day to day employers, but it almost would. And it would place her at the front of the queue of medically qualified presenters when new TV programme ideas were being pitched. It was not a case of ego, but of necessity. There were times when a woman had to do what a woman had to do and for Jane, this was one of them.

The day had started badly. She had opened the newspaper in Costa over her habitual flat white and seen the splash on Karl Cooper with the picture by-line above it of the smiling Lucy Church. Smiling and increasingly prolific, she thought, folding the paper and consigning it to a rubbish bin without further study of the piece. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper. Her confrontation with Edith was going to make the day painful enough without exposing herself again to past emotional bruises.

She had failed in her relationships with men. That was the brutal truth of the matter. She hadn't brought enough to the party. Neither was she a very good mother, she didn't think. On the day their divorce had been finalised, Edith's father had sent her a text message saying that she lacked the gift for intimacy most people who commit to marriage seem naturally to possess. She thought when she considered this, that it was a harsh judgement but probably also true.

Edith was 14 now. Jane had given birth to her too young. She had only been 18, practically a child herself. She had married. She had continued with her education. Her parents-in-law had seen more of her daughter than she had in those early years of Edith's infancy. Her father, Michael, had been reduced to the role of a house husband during the first, hectic, burgeoning years of Jane's professional success. And then six years ago he had packed his bags and left. And then when she reached eleven, as soon as it did not seem actually to construe an act of child cruelty, Jane had despatched Edith off to school.

A failed wife and a neglectful mother reminded of her own gullibility in love prior to setting out to break her daughter's heart over a summer of callous abandonment. It was fair to say that Jane was not having one of her best mornings. She was wondering what else could possibly go wrong when she was pulled over by a police patrol car for doing 40 in a 30 mile an hour zone.

She could have wept. But the officer driving the car recognised her from the telly and asked her for an autograph and gave her only a telling off pitched between sternness and flirtation. She tried to tell herself this reprieve was the start of better things, but then drove the remainder of the journey cautiously and with a heavy heart at how she thought Edith was likely to react to the news of her plans for the summer.

Her first appointment at the school was not with Edith but with the pastoral carer, Mrs Sullivan, who wanted to raise a matter she had claimed was too delicate and confidential for discussion over the phone.

Jane didn't think it worth speculating on the nature of whatever it was her daughter had done to earn Mrs Sullivan's attentions. She considered the school's pastoral arm an unnecessary concession to political correctness. The woman herself was a bit of a jobs-worth with a manner that had always seemed to Jane both pompous and condescending. The refusal to disclose details over the phone was entirely characteristic. Edith was a good girl, moral and rather serious and not given to delinquency. At least, that was how she had been a few weeks ago at Easter, when her mother had last had her at home.

The school was neo-Gothic, set in grounds that sumptuously reflected the fees paid by the parents of the pupils there. Raked gravel crunched under Jane's tyres along the neat drive stretching from the pillared and gated main entrance. She was shown into Mrs Sullivan's office after only a short wait. She was aware of heavy furniture, a tall arched window, the smell of freshly cut flowers and carpet pile deep under the soles of her sensible shoes. She was invited to sit on a leather Chesterfield under a portrait of the school's proto-feminist founder. Mrs Sullivan, tall and slender, was more glamorous but even more grave, if possible, than she remembered.

In a brief preamble, Jane declined tea, coffee and water and allowed that the current spell of good weather was indeed very agreeable. There followed a moment of silence. Footsteps carried on the parquet in the corridor outside, their progress along it sounding suitably urgent. The school encouraged an air of purposeful industry.

'I want to talk to you about your daughter's musical gift.'

'Edith doesn't possess a gift for music, Mrs Sullivan. She is 14. If she did, it would've manifested itself before now.'

'Perhaps she's a late developer.'

'On the contrary, she's always been a rather precocious child. But she's never shown an interest in music.'

'Until now, that is.'

Jane frowned. She had an ominous feeling. It had raised goose b.u.mps on the flesh of her arms, under her tailored suit, despite the warmth of the sun bathing the room through its tall west-facing window. She said, "I think that you had better explain.'

Mrs Sullivan looked no more comfortable about this than Jane suddenly felt. She was pale and when she tried to smile her mouth merely twitched. She said, 'It began, Edith says, with a dream. Are you familiar with a folk song called The Recruited Collier?'

'No.'

'You do not listen to folk music?'

Jane shrugged. 'Not really, maybe a bit of Laura Marling.'

'The song was written in the eighteenth century. It was included in a collection of c.u.mbrian ballads compiled and then published in 1808. In recent years it has been recorded in versions by Anna Briggs in the 1960s and latterly by Kate Rusby. The Rusby version is the first track on an alb.u.m of the singer's favourite songs, ent.i.tled 10 and released in 2002.'

'I'll take your word for it,' Jane said. 'Why are you telling me this stuff?'

'You've never heard the song?'

'I've vaguely heard of Kate Rusby. I've never owned or played any of her music. I've never heard of Anna Briggs and I can a.s.sure you, I've never in my life heard The Recruited Collier.'

'Edith first performed the tune a little under a week ago. We encourage the children to improvise their own entertainment. It keeps them away from computer screens and games consoles.'

Jane knew this. It was one of the reasons she had chosen to send her daughter there. The goose b.u.mps were still p.r.i.c.kling at the lining of her suit coat sleeves. The ominous feeling in her stomach was churning now, like dread. She said, 'How do you mean, she performed it?'

'She played it on a penny whistle. She played it not only note perfectly, but with the panache of a virtuoso. Our music teacher, Mr Clayton witnessed the moment. He was moved to ask where Edith had learned the tune. She said that a man had taught it to her in a dream.'

'Go on.'

'Mr Clayton recognised the song. He asked Edith did she know the words. She led him to the music room and sat at the piano and she sang and played it for him there. Her pitch was perfect and the playing accomplished. It was the dialect she sang in that unnerved him.'

'Even more than the way she claimed to have learned the song?'

'He said if you closed your eyes, you were listening to an accent unheard in England for at least a hundred years.'

'So he's a linguist, on top of being a music teacher.'

'I'm only repeating what he said.'

'My daughter cannot play the piano.'

'I'll accept that she could not. She can now.'

'I don't know what to say,' Jane said. 'Except that I'd like to see Edith, right away.'

'Of course,' Mrs Sullivan said. She looked directly at Jane, making Jane realise that it was the first time she had really done so since the moment she had entered the room. Then she said, 'I'd consider it an act of kindness if we could speak again when you have talked to her.'

There was something about working for Alexander McIntyre that sometimes left Patrick La.s.siter feeling slightly grubby. He did not feel his professional integrity compromised by the first cla.s.s return rail ticket from London to Liverpool. He felt that his expertise earned him the comfort of his seat and whatever refreshment he chose to select from the snack trolley. Just as he felt he deserved his room at Liverpool's five-star Adelphi Hotel for the duration of his stay. It made sense for him to arrive un-rumpled and free of fatigue and be comfortably berthed once there. That was just McIntyre trying to ensure he got the best from the man he was employing.

What did it, what left him feeling less than wholly honest, was what McIntyre termed the oiling of the wheels. In his past life, La.s.siter's warrant card had given him access to the places to which it was sometimes difficult to gain entry. Now, McIntyre's money and his influence were doing that.

The Ballantyne artefacts he was curious to see were housed at the Liverpool Maritime Museum. They were not on public display though and they never had been. La.s.siter's first attempts to get to see and examine them had been coldly rebuffed. It was not in the interest of the museum to foster publicity for the New Hope Island expedition, it was explained. To co-operate with a project so blatantly sensationalist would undermine the academic credentials of the museum and the authority and morale of its staff would subsequently be bound to suffer.