by F. G. Cottam
He gate-crashed the following morning’s editorial conference. He did not habitually do this. He was a benign ruler who did not generally meddle. He genuinely believed in the principle of editorial independence. He paid talented journalists and competent managers and he trusted that they knew better than he did all about the day to day running of the title that provided their livelihood.
But the circulation decline was relentless. The bottoming out predicted by Marsden, the editor, showed no sign it would happen this side of oblivion. He had diversified his media interests to the point where he was making money from the very websites allegedly to blame for killing newspapers off. But he cared in his heart about his flagship title. The other main participant in the conference was the features editor, Carrick.
He had not slept well. That ragged little girl had found her voice in his dreams and it had been a shriek of malevolent grief that had shaken him awake half a dozen times and made him afraid in the end to close his eyes again in the darkness. Finally, at four in the morning, he had called Lassiter.
‘Yeah,’ Lassiter said, thickly, sounding like a man who drank himself nightly to sleep; ‘it scared the living shit out of me, too.’
McIntyre felt better after that. Lassiter wasn’t his equal, but he’d been a very good detective before opting for the easy life of early retirement. He’d been a tough and uncompromising copper. And the film had frightened him. He felt better. But he did not feel relaxed enough to drop off again before it got light. He thought if he closed his eyes he might open them on an urchin, ragged above the foot of his bed, staring sightlessly as she leered down at him.
‘We’re going to New Hope Island,’ he announced to the conference.
The response was a burst of clapping, sustained applause around the table, spontaneous, not ironic he did not feel, in the slightest degree.
‘Thank God,’ Marsden said.
McIntyre didn’t think now was the time to remind his editor about his bottoming out circulation theory. Evidently he was aware of its flaws. He turned to Carrick. ‘Far be it from me to teach you your job, James. But I want two stars on this, one for the factual stuff and a human interest specialist. We can back up with staffers but those two have to be names. This is going to cost a great deal of money and it has to have every ounce of impact we can wring from it.’
‘I’d say Lucy Church for the human interest,’ Carrick said. ‘I’d like a think about whoever else I assign.’
‘Good. Start thinking now.’
Marsden said, ‘What’s the timescale?’
‘Is a week long enough for teasers?’
‘Yes. With today’s net surf attention spans, a week is more than adequate. We’ll run the Island’s history and mystery over a spread tomorrow. We’ll flag it with a front page banner. I take it the personnel are lined up?’
‘The key players, yes,’ McIntyre said.
‘What’s the team strength?’
‘Six.’
‘Perfect,’ Marsden said. ‘We’ll run a biog of each of them, one every day with a quote from the subject, explaining what it is they hope to bring to the party.’
The conference progressed. Logistics were discussed. The possibility of spoilers in other papers was raised. But McIntyre had thought of that. The security personnel positioned to repel nosy competitors would be in place on the island over the coming days. One of the great mysteries of recent centuries was about to be investigated and with any luck, solved.
The team would include a virologist and a forensic archaeologist. They were also going to send a self-styled expert on alien abduction and a well-respected medium. The personnel assembled covered every eventuality. McIntyre knew which of them he had his money on, but he wasn’t saying publically.
The subject of the Shanks film did not come up. He wanted to keep the conference mood upbeat. He had intended to mention it, but the general atmosphere had been so positive, it would have been like raining on his own parade. Besides, he was supposed to be the one with answers, not questions.
And the film provoked uneasiness in him. He could neither explain it, nor rationalise the fear that watching it provoked. So he didn’t bring it up. Later, much later, Alexander McIntyre was to regard this as the biggest mistake of his life.
It was almost lunchtime before the conference was concluded. He had arranged to have lunch alone at his club. The paper occupied a bold new glass and steel headquarters at Borough, overlooking the river. It was a pleasant day.
He decided he would walk along the river into the West End to give himself an appetite. On the way he was hardly aware of the bright water traffic or the culture hungry tourists he passed on the Southbank. He thought instead about his reading of the previous evening and the enigmatic Scottish island that had fascinated him since boyhood.
Seamus Ballantyne was the captain of a slave ship in the golden period when the British mercantile fleet made forty-percent of its total income from that profitable trade. He made most of his fortune in the 1790s, at the time when Wilberforce and the abolitionists were at their most vocal in decrying the trade and condemning British involvement.
He could not have been unaware of the controversy. The clamour made by the abolitionists in parliament and elsewhere was too great. There would have been pamphlets pressed upon him as he walked the streets of his native Liverpool between voyages. He would have seen their signs of protest pasted to the pillars of the port wharves.
When he repented, he did so without warning or preamble, in 1799. Ballantyne renounced slavery almost a decade before the bill was passed that abolished British participation in the trade. He became a preacher. He was charismatic and persuasive and over the next decade, developed a following that became a devoted congregation.
In 1810 he announced that he was to build a new community on a remote Island off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. When he departed on this adventure, he took 160 devout followers with him on the journey. They would live on a barren rock in the Outer Hebrides. God would care for them. Their industry and faith would find His reward. They would christen their windswept, granite home New Hope.
And for 15 years, the community thrived. At first, it did so purely on a subsistence level. Then a trade of sorts developed. Sheep were bred and wool was gathered and spun and the resultant garments sold. Whisky was distilled. And then the people of New Hope Island simply vanished.
No bodies were ever washed up on the mainland. There was no wreckage from boats. When curious neighbours went to investigate, they found the dwellings of the community intact. There was food on the tables and recent fires in their hearths. Books were left open at the page their readers had reached. The domestic beasts still grazed what little pasture land they had. But there were no people. Every man, woman and child had gone without trace.
To Alexander McIntyre, media magnate billionaire and ardent believer in extraterrestrial life, the answer to the question of what had happened was as obvious as the solution to the mystery of the Marie Celeste. He believed the same fate had met the crew of that ship as had befallen the New Hope community.
Privacy was the hallmark of alien abduction. There were probably many other unrecorded examples down the centuries. But the clue was obvious, wasn’t it? The visitors did not welcome witnesses when they took the humans away. New Hope had met those ideal conditions, in which they liked to harvest, perfectly.
He had to admit that the troubling apparition caught by David Shanks’ cine camera did not easily fit into this scenario. But it would. When they got to New Hope and his team began to put the pieces of the picture together, the floating girl would find a place in it all somewhere.
Ballantyne, he considered something of an enigma. Even given the harsh standards of the time, and the brutality common in seafaring life, he must have been a cruel man. The slaves were manacled and packed in rows on the voyage to be sold in the West Indies and America and many of those stored below decks did not survive the ordeal.
The mortality rate was shocking.
They were demonstrably fellow human beings, the argument Wilberforce used, going further and calling them brothers in the biblical sense.
Personal enlightenment had cost Ballantyne his wife. She preferred marriage to a prosperous master mariner to life with a self-styled preacher with a taste for hellfire rhetoric delivered on street corners. Losing her had clearly not broken his heart or deterred him from his elected path, however.
What had made Ballantyne tick? McIntyre wondered had the ship’s captain turned religious leader kept a diary on New Hope? He must have been in the habit of keeping a log from his old profession. A diary would only have been the natural expression of what McIntyre suspected had been a substantial ego. What a find that would be, if it still existed to be unearthed.
James Carrick briefed Lucy Church after lunch. In principle she had a choice about taking the assignment but in reality, neither of them felt she could turn it down. They were both familiar with the numbers, since their livelihoods depended on how McIntyre interpreted them and what decisions he made as a consequence. His business was buoyant given the general state of the economy. It had shown a 12 per cent profit in the previous year. But losses at the Chronicle had amounted to almost 20 million pounds. He was paying a lot for the prestige of ownership of a flagship Fleet Street title.
‘This story will cost him a fortune to orchestrate,’ Lucy said, after Carrick had told her about the array of experts on board and the security team already on their way to New Hope.
‘I think it will show a profit,’ Carrick said. ‘It’s a world exclusive.’
‘Only if it’s got the legs to run,’ she said.
‘It’s your job to help give it the legs. I want a thousand words for tomorrow’s edition on the human tragedy of the lost pioneers. Or lost apostles, or missionaries or whatever you think calling them will generate the most sympathy.’
She smiled at him. ‘Did you ever have a single thought that wasn’t a cliché, James?’
‘Not knowingly,’ he said.
‘It’s hard enough to evoke sympathy for last week’s earthquake victims. The whole world has compassion fatigue, our dwindling readership in particular. It’s almost impossible to humanise a community that died out two hundred years ago.’
‘Particularise it. Take a single family, a single child. We’ll illustrate it with contemporary etchings of swaddled babies with dimpled cheeks and cute milkmaids. Hand carved crosses above infant peasant graves bearing pitiful misspellings.’
‘For God’s sake, James.’
‘Quote some really sentimental poetry or a folk ballad from the period about someone’s lost sweetheart.’
‘You’re teaching me to suck eggs.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do it, Lucy, no one can.’
She grimaced. Although she was concealing it well, she was actually thrilled to be going to New Hope. It was summer, so the days would be long and the nights short and, she hoped, the weather merciful. The fact that Carrick had hand picked her for the job was a testament to her own political skill.
On her arrival at the paper nine months earlier, he had judged her on her leather jacket and jeans and her American Spirit cigarettes and the Zippo lighter she habitually lit them with. He really did think in clichés, which could be an asset in a features editor. But he had categorized her as a flinty exhibitionist.
She felt she had a right to her own dress code and bad habits and her own personality too. Being a journalist was no longer the respected profession it had once been, but neither was it penal servitude. She had a talent for empathy. She had it because she genuinely liked and was interested in real people. She was intrigued by their diversity and sometimes inspired by their independence and courage.
Send her to interview a brainless celebrity and the resulting piece would lie dead on the page. Send her to interview a Moss Side paramedic or a soldier maimed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan and she would return with something memorable. People sensed that she wasn’t just going through the motions with them and responded to that. There was nothing voyeuristic about her reportage. It had taken a while for this penny to drop with Carrick, but the New Hope assignment was solid proof that it finally had.
The array of experts recruited for the expedition was termed by Carrick, a team. That was a description Lucy thought likely to prove a hopeless misnomer. Each of them would compete to provide the most plausible and compelling answer to the mystery. That was only human nature.
It was her experience that highly qualified people were generally vain. In competition with other highly qualified people in other fields, they were likely to become hostile and insecure. She thought the resultant antics likely to make entertaining copy.
‘Are you going to have to shift a lot of domestic stuff around to make the trip?’
‘You mean am I screwing anyone?’
‘I don’t necessarily mean that.’
‘You know I’m not married, James. And you know I have no children to arrange care for. So I think that’s exactly what you mean.’
Carrick rewarded her with a blush. It wasn’t the full beetroot, but it was there.
‘Shame on you,’ she said. ‘Really, James, when I’ve met your wife and everything.’
She felt good teasing him. He’d given her a hard time on the basis of prejudice and preconception. It was both revenge and a bit of fun. She was in a very good mood. She was really excited at the idea of the expedition and not just because of the human interest angle.
She had been fascinated by the New Hope Island mystery since first reading about it as a little girl. She had come across the story at the age of eight in an old copy of Readers Digest. She had kept that issue, almost wearing it out studying and re-studying the account of the disappearance, its inexplicable abruptness, its enduring questions and the total failure of anyone to come up with a plausible explanation.
It had not frightened her. Not even the creepy anecdote at the end about the war hero crofter spooked by an apparition on the Island in the 1930s had frightened her. It had stayed in her memory, though. She had never forgotten it.
‘I’d better go and make a start on that piece,’ she said, looking at her watch.
‘Break a leg,’ Carrick said.
It was Paul Napier’s considered view that the five blokes he had the misfortune to be among were complete idiots. They had made the crossing aboard a chartered boat. He supposed it had once been a trawler, before the EU fishing quotas forced the men who hauled the nets to find another occupation.
The bloke in the wheelhouse had to be an ex-trawler man. You could tell by his attitude to the cold. He didn’t feel it. Sure it was June, but it was also the Atlantic Ocean, with the Scottish mainland dwindling in the distance. They were well north and the onshore wind was brisk. Yet their steersman had manned the wheel wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt.
Four of the blokes, the four who looked like failed nightclub bouncers, spent the crossing puking over the gunwale. They stared at the water as they did so with increasingly glassy eyes, watching it roll greenly and so making their sea sickness worse. Napier did not offer them any constructive advice on the subject. He was too disgusted at their inexperience.
The fifth idiot was their leader, Captain Blake. He insisted on the title of Captain, even though his regular forces days were a long way behind him and security was a low-rent, civilian occupation, largely the province of men like those who’d done the puking. There was no prestige, no honour, bugger-all camaraderie and not much money to compensate for the other indignities when you got your pay at the end of the month.
Blake had made the crossing with his lips pursed and a sour expression wrinkling his nose. Napier thought he was probably disappointed he wasn’t in the prow of a rigid inflatable with a Heckler and Koch nestled between his hands.
After they had navigated the breakwater and docked, Napier and Blake had to do most of the gear unloading because the others were too weakened by puking to help. They sat on the cobble
d quay, retching and gobbing and generally getting their land legs back while the boat skipper helped the two of them still able-bodied to recover their stuff from the hold.
There was a crofters’ cottage on the Island, they had seen an aerial reconnaissance photo of it at the briefing. There were remaining huts from the original settlement that could also have provided shelter. But all of these structures formed parts of the site and they were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. So they needed their tents, because the nights in the exposure of this low lying island could be cold enough to inflict hypothermia, even in the summer months.
Blake took out a compass. In a minute, Napier thought, he’s going to take out a tube of cam cream and start to smear it over his face.
‘What do you reckon, Napier?’
‘I reckon it’s almost dark, Captain.’ They had been forced to wait for the gale force weather of the morning to blow itself out before crossing. ‘I’d say we’ve got another half an hour or so of light. We should choose a piece of high ground and rig the tents before we lose it altogether.’
Blake gestured towards the men on the cobbles with a flick of his head. He nodded towards a gentle embankment a hundred metres away with another. ‘These boys can erect the tents and then recover with a brew. We’ll walk the Island perimeter. Arriving at night is never ideal unless it’s an assault you’ve got planned.’
Napier wondered what they might assault. Perhaps Blake was thinking puffins.
‘We should patrol the island perimeter. What say you?’
I hate everything about this fucker, Napier thought. I even hate his fucking phraseology. What he said was, ‘Your call, Captain.’
The island was roughly diamond shaped. The makeshift harbour where they had disembarked, and it was very makeshift, was naturally to the east, facing the direction of the mainland forty miles away. Given that the prevailing winds were westerly, it was the most sheltered spot the island offered for docking. The settlement of New Hope was at the Island’s centre, on ground that was exposed because it was relatively high. But the original settlers had needed the drainage gravity provided. So they had been obliged to tolerate the exposure of their hamlet to the elements.
