The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  She thought it likely that Cooper and Kale would clash. Cooper’s mother had taken in washing so that the boy from Wigan could go to university. Kale came from an academic family so well-established it was almost a dynasty and there had always been money there. Or there had since his Scottish great-grandfather began mining in a mineral rich region of British Columbia.

  They still didn’t have their replacement medium. Or if they did, Lucy had not yet been told the identity of the person. She was more open-minded about the possibility of contact with the dead than her jokes on the phone to Carrick on the subject had suggested. It was Hawsley-Smith she had objected to, not the principle of taking along someone who claimed to have second sight.

  She considered the expedition’s original choice of medium a fraud. She thought that his replacement would need a strong personality whatever their credentials. Cooper and Kale and Jane Chambers too for that matter were scientific in their approach. They were methodical and academically fastidious and above all, rational. Occult mysticism was something they would likely greet with nothing but scorn.

  She had arranged to meet the virologist in Bloomsbury. During their second phone conversation, they forsook their earlier formality and became Lucy and Jane. They agreed to have lunch at a small restaurant with tables on the pavement in Lamb’s Conduit Street. It was conveniently near the hospital building housing Jane’s department. It was somewhere Lucy would be very unlikely to be seen by anyone connected to the paper.

  Even if she was, it didn’t really matter. She was expected to nurture these relationships in order to gain insights into her subjects. Even off the record meetings were considered constructive in that sense, because they fostered trust. And this meeting was off the record. Jane Chambers had been insistent on that in seeking it.

  Lucy got to the restaurant deliberately early. She found a table outside and ordered a small glass of Chablis and fired up an American Spirit. She inhaled the smoke gratefully, luxuriating in the guilt-free ten minutes she had to indulge her habit before Jane was due to meet her there.

  She saw a waiter – young, Mediterranean – studying her from behind the tinted glass of the restaurant interior. The expression on his face was appreciative. She looked away from him, at the Georgian terraces lining the pretty street in the bright June sunshine. Objectively, she was an attractive young woman. She sometimes forgot that. Such was the prevailing machismo of the newsroom and the editorial conference that sometimes she almost forgot she was a woman at all.

  The tables were Formica topped in a deliberately retro nod towards the continental style of the 1960s. The ashtrays were crimped little circles of metal foil. She was able to discard hers, along with the two butts it by then contained, in a street bin prior to Jane’s arrival. Her lunch companion was a medical doctor and Lucy liked to be approved of. It was a character weakness, she knew. But at least, she thought, seeing Jane approach along the pavement, svelte in a blue cashmere suit and sunglasses, I’m aware of it.

  They were at the coffee stage before Jane finally confided what she’d come there to tell Lucy. Up until that point they spoke about the expedition generally and about Lucy’s earlier interview with the forensic archaeologist.

  ‘Does he have a theory of his own?’

  ‘He says he has an open mind. He says if your epidemic theory is correct, he’s confident he’ll find the mass grave. Kale actually thinks the explanation for the disappearance might be really mundane and so he’s checking meteorological data from the years immediately prior to the event.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He says because of the Island’s exposure to Atlantic storms. He believes that if the storms were particularly severe for a number of consecutive years, the Island community might have built a shelter underground to protect themselves from the worst ravages of the weather.’

  ‘And the shelter subsided or collapsed,’ Jane said. ‘And all the people sheltering were crushed or suffocated and perished.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Jane smiled down at her plate. Her sunglasses were perched in her hair and there was a persistent frown line creasing her forehead. She looked pretty and troubled. She said, ‘Mundane enough, if a bit gruesome for the victims. But I don’t buy it.’

  ‘Neither does Kale, really. What’s bothering you, Jane?’

  And Jane told her about Edith’s dreams and the song she had learned to play and sing in her sleep and about who Jacob Parr had been.

  ‘There must have been lots of men about then called Jacob Parr.’

  ‘I went back to the census of 1881,’ Jane said. ‘That’s almost 90 years after a man named Parr crewed for Seamus Ballantyne, but as early as public records go. At that time there were over 2, 000 people with the surname Parr in the county of Lancashire alone. There were more than 600 just in London. In the time of the slave ship Andromeda, it was a common enough name and of course Jacob, being Biblical, was a very common Christian name in England then.’

  ‘But you still think it’s him. You think it’s Ballantyne’s Jacob Parr that’s visiting your daughter in her sleep.’

  ‘I do. I think it has to be. Otherwise it makes no sense at all. It can’t just be arbitrary. The chronology is right, Jane. The song is of the period of the New Hope settlement. There has to be a connection.’

  Lucy thought for a moment. She thought about her pre-lunch assumptions concerning Dr Chambers and scientific method. Parr’s intervention in Edith’s dreams did not exactly submit to what was rationally plausible or even frankly possible. If he existed, he was a spirit, a ghost. The proof that he existed lay in Edith’s performing of the song she alleged he’d taught her. In order to buy it, you had to believe Edith Chambers was telling the truth. Evidently her mother did.

  ‘What do you intend to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Lucy. I don’t even know why I’m telling you about it, really.’

  ‘A problem shared,’ Lucy said, with a bright cheer to her tone she didn’t really feel. What she really felt was slightly hollow and a bit numb.

  Jane said, ‘I’d pull out of the New Hope project immediately if I thought for one moment Edith was in any physical or psychological danger. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.’

  ‘I’m not a mother,’ Lucy said. ‘This isn’t really my area of expertise. But maybe you should do that anyway.’

  ‘And risk antagonising Jacob Parr?’

  ‘You trust your daughter?’

  ‘I do, totally.’

  ‘Then I think you have to wait,’ Lucy said. ‘I think you have to wait until Parr gives Edith this warning he’s spoken of and Edith passes on the warning to you.’

  Jane nodded. Lucy thought that she looked grateful and a bit relieved. The advice was inadequate, in Lucy’s opinion, but it seemed that sharing the detail of Edith’s dream had unburdened her mother slightly. Lucy hoped so. She liked Jane Chambers a lot. The Parr revelation was disturbing and actually quite spooky but you couldn’t really blame Jane for it or for wanting to confide in someone about it. Someone grown up and sceptical and cynical, Lucy thought. Someone exactly like I’m supposed to be.

  Jane wanted to split the bill, but Lucy put it on her expenses. New Hope Island and its enduring mystery had prompted and dominated the lunch, so she thought there was no dishonesty in doing that. The two women embraced warmly at the kerbside in saying their farewell and Jane went back to the hospital and Lucy was treated to a shy smile from her lust-stricken waiter before returning to the office to write something readable about the preening archaeologist with whom she had spent her morning.

  All the way back, she thought about Jane Chambers’ curious confession. She didn’t have the slightest idea, really, of what to make of it. She had been fascinated by the New Hope enigma since devouring that Readers Digest article in her own childhood. She had never thought there to be anything genuinely supernatural about it. But she had a feeling, after her lunch with Jane, that the psychic chosen for the trip to the Hebrides might be
in for a very interesting experience.

  Lassiter looked different, to McIntyre. There was something new and unexpected about the body-language. The ex-detective usually had an air about him McIntyre would have described as apologetic; as though he was embarrassed about the space he took up and did not really feel his presence anywhere fully justified. There was usually something not just deferential but almost cap-in-hand about him.

  But that air was conspicuous by its absence today. He looked smart and alert and full of confidence. This might have irked the newspaper magnate in another mood. But having heard what he had that morning, this afternoon he was actually reassured by his visitor’s demeanour. Lassiter did not know it yet, but McIntyre had plans for him.

  ‘Thanks for coming here at such short notice.’

  ‘You pay me pretty generously for my time.’

  ‘Not just for your time. Your talents are what I really pay you for. Did you put my proposal to Alice Lang?’

  ‘You could’ve asked me that over the phone, Mr McIntyre.’

  ‘I could have. But I asked you to come here in person.’

  ‘Which is intriguing,’ Lassiter said, ‘because I’ve always felt that you’ve deliberately kept me at arm’s length. You’ve always treated me a bit as though I might be carrying something contagious.’

  ‘When was the last time you had a drink?’

  ‘Three days ago. I ordered a large scotch in a pub in Liverpool.’

  ‘You remember the occasion?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, Mr McIntyre. I didn’t drink the whisky, by the way.’

  ‘You saw the light?’

  ‘I saw something.’

  They were on McIntyre’s sun terrace. McIntyre’s housekeeper had brought Lassiter there after opening the front door to him. So far, he had not been invited to sit. McIntyre sat in an armchair facing the view down the hill towards London. It was one of a pair titled in that direction. It was late afternoon and smog glazed the city and made its landmarks ripple slightly so that it made a person wince to stare at them too hard.

  ‘Alice says that she’ll do it, but she has a pre-condition.’

  ‘I’ll pay her generously.’

  ‘Money isn’t what’s on her mind.’

  ‘Sit down,’ McIntyre said. He gestured at the chair next to his own. ‘Forgive me, Lassiter. I’m forgetting my manners. What do I have to do for Alice Lang to get Ms Lang to go to New Hope Island?’

  ‘She’ll only go if I go.’

  ‘Very romantic,’ McIntyre said, smiling because he thought he understood suddenly the source of his visitor’s new-found self-esteem. ‘I’m touched.’

  ‘Would that be a yes or a no?’ Lassiter said.

  ‘How would you feel about going?’

  ‘Scared, frankly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Take your pick,’ Lassiter said. ‘I didn’t like the look of that spectral urchin Shanks filmed. I’m not crazy about the way Alice Lang says Shanks met his death. I did not like having that film can under my own roof. It made me suddenly accident-prone. And the business with Ballantyne’s watch in that museum basement in Liverpool gave me quite a turn, as you know.’

  ‘Yet you’d go?’

  ‘It’s a mystery that wants solving, whatever happened on New Hope. The world has waited a bloody long time.’

  ‘And you need to be there if things take a hazardous turn, I suppose. You need to be there if your damsel encounters distress.’

  Lassiter didn’t reply to this remark. McIntyre’s housekeeper wheeled in tea on a trolley and he smiled up at her in a polite expression of gratitude.

  ‘Funny,’ McIntyre said. ‘I’d never have cast you as the knight in shining armour before today. But now I think about it, the role quite suits you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Just don’t get drunk and fall off your horse.’

  Lassiter reached for a slice of almond cake from a tiered arrangement on the trolley. ‘Does that mean I’m going?’

  ‘There’s been a spot of bother on the island,’ McIntyre said. ‘As yet, it’s unresolved bother. We’ll drink our tea and I‘ll tell you about it.’ He shuffled forward and reached for the teapot. ‘I’ll be mother,’ he said.

  The head of McIntyre’s security team had disappeared from the island the previous night. A member of the security personnel, a man called Malone, claimed to have heard a scream in the vicinity of the cottage built on the island by David Shanks while on patrol at roughly the time of the disappearance. A second member of the security team, Jarvis, had been patrolling the opposite end of the island from Malone and was adamant that he had seen or heard nothing out of the ordinary.

  The missing man was a former Royal Marine captain called Richard Blake. He was a veteran soldier with combat experience and though weather conditions on New Hope had been severe the previous night, he was expertly trained in endurance and survival techniques.

  Blake had not had a designated second-in-command among his team of five. But a former Parachute Regiment NCO called Paul Napier had assumed the role. He had requested and received the help of the construction experts building the expedition’s headquarters. He had requisitioned firearms they had with them. He had secured the perimeters of both their HQ and his own team’s camp and then organised a search for Blake. They had found nothing. In the small hours, after several hours of trying, they had finally patched through a radio message to McIntyre’s London office to advise them about events on the Island.

  Napier had requested permission to inform the coastguard of the disappearance, a legal and moral obligation McIntyre had been woken to personally accede to. The search had resumed in the morning. There was still no sign of Blake. The coastguard helicopter had been scrambled and awaited weather fit to fly in to begin a search for the body off the Island’s coast.

  Lassiter said, ‘Would that be the Paul Napier? The same bloke who was awarded the Military Cross a couple of years ago in Afghanistan?’

  ‘I don’t think there can be two of them,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘He sounds like an impressive individual.’

  ‘Pure luck on our part,’ McIntyre said. ‘I delegated recruitment of the security personnel. I can’t do everything myself. It seems the company was chosen on the most competitive quote. They were just the cheapest outfit, frankly. A head rolled in my London office over that particular false economy last night. I’ve also sacked the existing team.’

  ‘You mean the surviving team. Blake will almost certainly be dead.’

  ‘The surviving team have been dismissed. Better people, in stronger numbers, are already on their way.’

  ‘That seems a bit hard on Napier.’

  ‘I spoke to Napier personally in the early hours of this morning. He advised me on the new security recruits. Effectively they’re hand-picked. He’ll lead them. I’m hoping this is his first and last experience of crisis management on the island, but I feel happier knowing he’s there.’

  ‘Pay rise?’

  ‘Let’s not get carried away,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘I wonder what happened to Captain Blake.’

  ‘That trail will be very cold indeed by the time you get there, Lassiter. We’ll have a better idea in the meantime, if the coastguard recovers a body.’

  ‘Any theories you’d like to float?’

  McIntyre shrugged. ‘Blake was single and he had no children. He was a combat soldier age had obliged to leave the military. The suicide rate is disproportionately high among men sharing his profile when they leave the only family they’ve known. I suspect he felt he’d endured enough of life. I suspect he waded into the sea. He could avoid the stigma of self-murder because no coroner could rule out the possibility that he slipped or was taken by a freak wave.’

  ‘And the scream heard by Malone?’

  ‘Maybe the water was cold.’

  Alice had not derived the information she wanted to when she’d touched the cine film can that had once been labelled
and stored by the soldier of fortune and sometimes crofter and suicide David Shanks. She was not in control of her gift. It dictated to her what it was that she saw. She had actually wanted to know something about the nature and fate of the apparition Shanks had filmed on New Hope Island on that blustery, black and white day back in 1934.

  She had not expected to witness his last moments of life. She felt no empathy for the man or sympathy for his predicament. Patrick Lassiter had told her that he’d been expelled from an artistic community in Cornwall for dabbling in black magic. She thought that people who did such things probably deserved what they got as a consequence. As someone endowed with an uncanny ability she had never sought and only reluctantly acknowledged, she could not imagine courting such powers through the enactment of rituals and the deliberate evoking of spirits.

  She had not even been curious about Shanks, really. But she had been very curious about what had happened to turn a little girl into the spectral predator that was the subject of the film shot by Shanks on New Hope.

  Her clothing had put the apparition firmly in the period of the disappearance. And of course, the disappearance of the Hope Island community was one of the great unsolved enigmas of modern history. If they had been the victims of some awful crime, as Patrick seemed to suspect, they were beyond the reach of justice after all this time. Neither did Alice share Patrick’s conviction that the person or people responsible should face the verdict of history. Damning them now did so far too long after the fact for it to be perceived as any kind of retribution.

  It was the little girl. She had been transformed into something lurid and terrifying. She was a ghost, wasn’t she? She was a tormented soul who represented all the children lost to their own rightful futures on New Hope Island. Alice wanted to know what had happened to her and her brothers and sisters and cousins and schoolmates and friends.

  She had to know and she believed when she got there, her gift would enable her to see it. She might even be forced to see it, she thought, with a shudder. It would be a revelation of awful clarity. But she suspected that this task was what she had been given the gift to accomplish.