Mo Hayder: Pig Island

I've got a trick, a way of nodding and keeping up the small-talk while another part of me detaches and floats free. I was smiling and nodding but inside I was off, unravelling what Blake had said: Malachi not dead. Was that why I still had my peace of mind? How had he just slipped off the radar like that? If he'd started up another ministry somewhere else I'd have known about it. I thought of all the places he could have gone, the connections he had. He was from London. Weird if he'd been living in the same town as me for the last twenty years.

Whatever had happened to their founder it wasn't on the minds of the Psychogenic Healing Ministries members. Once you tuned into it, it was as plain as anything. There was something else happening here. There was a division. Trouble in Paradise.

At the far end of the table a group of about eight people sat morosely, not making the effort to come and introduce themselves. I noticed them whispering nervously among themselves, and some couldn't resist glancing over their shoulders up at the cliff when they thought I wasn't watching. Blake saw I'd clocked them. He took his glass, patted my arm, and said, 'Come on. Let me introduce you to the Garricks. It'll have to happen sooner or later.'

Benjamin Garrick, the centre's treasurer, was a tall, pinched-looking man with a severe haircut and a buttoned-up grey shirt. His wife, who sat to his right, was big-boned, man-faced, dressed in a kingfisher blue kaftan and headscarf, gingerish ringlets peeking from the headscarf. They nodded, they greeted me, but I wasn't welcome. You could just tell. Susan Garrick especially would've liked to see me dead. She sat stiffly, pointedly averting her eyes, while her husband gave me stilted details of the community's financial situation, saying nothing, until about five minutes into the conversation she lowered her fork and sniffed the air. 'It's a southerly,' she said, the ringlets shivering and bouncing. 'We shouldn't have come out here if there was a southerly due.'

'Not now,' muttered a nearby woman in a battered straw boater.

Benjamin Garrick dropped his face, and subtly covered his mouth with his napkin, murmuring under his breath, 'Darling, let Blake deal with that.'

But she'd started something. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other women making faces and wrinkling their noses, one or two turning so their backs faced the cliff. I put down my fork and sniffed the air. There it was — the smell of something rotten. Dying vegetation? Or the community's septic tank? It was unmistakable — the smell that is the purest distillation of sickness and death. I thought about the rotting meat clotted behind the outlet pipe.

At the tables one or two of the women had pushed away their plates, others sat with unhappy expressions, trying to eat their potato salad. One pulled out a handkerchief and covered her nose.

'Hey,' said Blake, leaning over to them, using his knife to indicate their plates. He continued chewing, giving them a meaningful nod. They hesitated, and after a few seconds, wan expressions on their faces, bravely picked up their forks and pushed some food into their mouths, looking down at their plates as they chewed.

'What can you smell?' I said, leaning past Garrick so I could see his wife.

She shook her head and pinched her nose, glancing at Blake and muttering, 'Nothing, absolutely nothing,' under her breath.

'What is it?' I asked again, my eyes straying up to the clifftop where the sun was so strong it cut out the shapes of individual leaves, like cacti in the desert. 'Tell me.'

'All in good time,' Blake said, flashing me his reassuring smile. He lifted a carafe. 'More wine? We want you to enjoy yourself.'

'What's at the top of the cliff?' I said. 'I'll enjoy myself more if you tell me what you're all staring at.'

'You see?' Susan Garrick said abruptly, pushing back her chair and standing, her eyes locked on Blake. 'I told you he'd interfere. That's what journalists do. He's just going to tempt the-'

'That's enough, Susan,' said Blake. 'Hold your counsel.'

Benjamin put a hand on his wife's arm, drew her back to her seat. Slowly she subsided into the chair, staring red-faced at Blake as if she hated him more than anything in the world.

'Now,' Blake said with a smile, taking my arm and raising me kind of forcefully to my feet, 'come along, Joe. Let's show you the rest of our Paradise.'

As the afternoon wore on all my questions were answered the same way. Malachi is gone. Gone. He's left us. Blake will tell you everything in God's good time. While the meal was cleared away by two elderly men in blue cambric aprons, I was treated to a tour of the community. You know the kind of thing: the generator, the sewage system, the orchards and the bean rows. I was handed unripe plums from the trees and a fresh oyster shucked off the rocks near the jetty. I was dragged into a giant barn and made to watch while slate was passed through cutting equipment, turned, polished and rubbed with linseed oil to make the Celtic crosses the community sold on the mainland for an income. A contingent of people came with me everywhere, hovering at my elbow, eagerly pointing out how well they took care of the place. But wherever we went we stuck to the slopes at the bottom of the cliffs.

'Where are the pigs?' I asked Blake, as we entered a small forest and at last started to climb a path in the direction of the cliffs. By now we'd been going for over two hours and the welcome party had dwindled to him and a sullen teenage girl with toothpick-thin arms who'd offered to hold my camera bag while I took photos. 'It's called Pig Island, but I haven't seen any pigs.'

'Yes,' he said, taking my arm with a smile, 'but that's just a nickname. The real name is Cuagach Eilean. "Limping Island." Nothing to do with pigs.'

'So there are no pigs here?'

He paused — seemed about to answer. After a moment's thought his face cleared and he said cheerily, 'Look at this!' He headed off along a path that led away from the one we stood on, off into the dark of the woods. 'Here we are! We're coming to the real heart of our community.'

I followed him, and a few yards along the path we came to a weathered clapboard church half hidden in the trees ahead, only picked out by patches of sunlight. It had a rectangular tower ending in a small steeple and two stained-glass, Gothic-style windows, several panes replaced with clear glass. Over the years ivy had clung to it and been removed so you could see where the suckers had been painted over, leaving strange textures like tidewater along the walls. Standing in a patch of sunlight in the grass to the left of the doors was a life-sized crucifix — like the Celtic cross on the green, it was carved out of stone. An effigy of Christ, it had been clumsily made: Christ's face was like the weird Filipino iconography I'd photographed in Manila, the skin drawn back from his teeth, like a howling animal in agony. His body was pocked with small darts and other marks. When I shaded my eyes and studied them I saw they were a series of numbers scratched into the skin.

'The projected populations of every country in the world in the year twenty twenty,' said Blake. 'Because of medical intervention in the natural cycle of life and death we believe that these numbers are branded in Christ's flesh, that even now where He sits with His father, He feels the agony of the planet. Come in.' He held the door open for me. I saw cool flagged floors in the gloom, and caught a whiff of camphor, wood polish and red wine. 'Walk past Him, Joe. He looks at you with only love. Only love and compassion. Walk past Him. Come inside.'

I was a bit weirded out to go so close to the crucifix. It was almost my own height and so lifelike that going past its eyes was like being in the presence of the dead. I looked straight ahead and ducked into the gloomy vestibule to where Blake stood facing me in the semi-darkness.