The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  James Carrick, she was starting to worry about. He had a slightly haunted look. His usual bonhomie was missing. His hail-fellow-well-met persona was absent without leave and Marsden and McIntyre were highly likely to notice it had gone and demand it return immediately. It was much of what the paper paid his salary for. They had not hired a gloomy introvert. He had aged about ten years in the two weeks since he had announced, in that late night phone call, that he was the second staffer going to New Hope. He had sounded casual. Fraudulently so, she now realised.

  ‘There’s less to me than meets the eye,’ he had always been fond of saying. ‘Deep down inside, I’m really shallow.’ Lucy was beginning to think that the opposite was true. To her own astonishment, she felt a stab of pity for her department head she had never dreamed he would evoke in her.

  Patrick Lassiter was the major surprise. In the file pictures, in his Met days, he had looked rather sallow and slightly hollow-eyed. In the flesh, he was tall and handsome and his brown eyes were shrewd and focussed. He held your gaze when he spoke to you and he was articulate and considered and sometimes mordantly funny in what he said.

  She had expected all the personality of an online application form. It should have occurred to her that a detective as successful as he had been in solving crimes would at least be clever. It hadn’t, though. She had not been able to get past the stereotype of the time-serving copper who struggled with drink. She did not often get it wrong, but she had with him, spectacularly so. And it had been down to misconception and prejudice. They were cardinal errors in her profession and the lesson of Lassiter was one she had been grateful to learn.

  Looking at them all, chatting casually to them in McIntyre’s cathedral-sized atrium, she felt quite proud of the work she had accomplished for the paper in the lead up to the moment of departure. Her profiles had made a family of them. She had skilfully fostered the feeling that they were united in their cause, bonded in their ambition to finally crack one of history’s most stubborn mysteries.

  She could have gone the other way. She had been given more or less a free hand. Nothing had been subbed out except her snide references to Karl Cooper’s air of preening narcissism. She could have made them seem like an unmatched set of competing prima donnas. It would have been unfair on the women and pointless with Alice Lang because she was not really well known enough. She did not have a pedestal from which to be knocked off.

  It would have been fair enough with Kale and Cooper, but both were popular with the public and her feeling was that the nation was collectively rooting for the New Hope expeditionaries. They were intrepid and adventurous. They were knowledgeable and fearless and were widely admired as such. She had written her features about them with that supposition in mind.

  Almost as if reading her thoughts, McIntyre approached her. He beamed. He seemed not so much happy as exultant.

  ‘Seeing them assembled like this makes me realise what a grand job you’ve done, Lucy, and just how hard you’ve worked on this. You deserve to be congratulated.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ve never enjoyed working on a series more.’

  McIntyre sipped champagne. His eyes roamed the room but she had his attention. ‘Do you say that out of vanity?’

  ‘It’s nice to get the prominent by-lines and have an audience of millions reading and discussing your stuff. But I think it’s because I’m so sold on the story myself. I’ve been fascinated by the mystery since I was a child. Rather like you, I imagine.’

  His eyes swivelled to meet hers. They narrowed. ‘Think we’ll solve the mystery?’

  To her own surprise, she realised it was not a question to which she had given sufficient thought. She had not really considered it, since doing so briefly prior to her initial phone interview with Jane Chambers and their discussion of the epidemic theory.

  ‘I do,’ she said. And suddenly, she knew with certainty that she really did. ‘I don’t see how we can fail.’

  ‘Frankly, neither do I,’ he said. ‘You’ll be there when the moment of revelation occurs. You will witness history.’

  ‘You won’t be there yourself, Mr McIntyre?’

  ‘Wouldn’t wish to steal someone else’s glory,’ he said, ‘though I shall visit, once the mystery is irrefutably solved.’

  He treated her to a courtly bow and moved away. And Lucy wondered which of the competing theories her paper’s proprietor believed would finally prove correct. He was rumoured to be close to Karl Cooper. Cooper denied it, but Carrick’s gossip was almost always factually reliable.

  Despite the alleged warmth of this relationship, she couldn’t really see a man as hard headed as Alexander McIntyre believing in abduction by little green men equipped with those obligatory anal probes. Nor could she see him going for demonic possession, even if he did have a Catholic background.

  He had personally wooed Degrelle after speaking to his friend the Cardinal. But Degrelle’s participation was a stunt, really. It was a hyped-up inclusion based on the notion that people believed what they saw when they watched priests incanting stuff in horror movies. They were taking Degrelle and his ritual and his holy water and candles because as Carrick had rightly said, they couldn’t do otherwise and claim to be covering all the possibilities.

  Perhaps McIntyre just kept an open mind as to how the vanishing had been accomplished. That was the sensible thing to do. Cooper and Jane were the most strident theorists and at least one of them was going to be proven spectacularly wrong.

  Lucy thought that between the two of them, the expert left looking foolish would be Karl Cooper. That was certainly what she hoped. The journalist in her should have wanted the biggest story, and alien abduction was a much bigger deal than a deadly outbreak of disease, even if the disease was still virulent and contagious on the island. But for her, the New Hope expedition had all become rather more personal than professional. She despised Cooper wholly and she liked Jane a lot.

  She saw Carrick, standing by himself, staring into his champagne cocktail with unfocussed eyes over by the main entrance. Or exit, she thought, thinking that doors worked both ways in her capricious trade and that James needed to shape up pretty soon or Marsden would be shipping him out.

  That was the sort of mixing of metaphors that the old James would have celebrated gleefully. But the new James didn’t look in the mood at all for wordplay on the subject of dismissal. Lucy wondered could he be talked round. Loyalty obliged her to try so she walked across to where he stood.

  ‘I’d offer you a penny for them,’ she said, ‘but that would be a grossly inflated price.’

  He smiled, or tried to. The result was not a success. ‘I’m thinking of resigning, Lucy.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I’m not. I have two kids, a wife with a heavy shopping habit, a large mortgage and negligible savings. I also have a really terrible feeling about this whole misguided adventure.’

  ‘Why do you think it misguided?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean I don’t know specifically. I just know that the thought of getting on that plane tomorrow morning fills me with dread. There’s no other word. I’m not just not looking forward to this. I’m actually dreading it.’

  ‘Are we discussing a premonition?’

  Carrick blew out air. ‘I think it might be.’

  ‘Premonitions are surely Alice Lang’s department,’ Lucy said.

  ‘No, they’re not. She’s psychic. But she sees the past, not the future.’

  A waiter came by bearing a tray of tiny biscuits piled with caviar and soured cream. ‘The condemned man ate a heart repast,’ Carrick said. But he shook his head and waved the man away without taking anything from the tray.

  ‘I’ve never seen you like this.’

  ‘I’ve never been like this, not in public.’

  ‘Don’t do what you’re thinking of doing. Don’t throw your career away, James. Not over the prospect of a few windswept weeks off the Scottish coast. It’ll be tolerable. It might even offer moments of fun.
The New Hope mystery will get nailed for good and all and a delirious McIntyre will sanction generous bonuses all round.’

  Carrick tried to smile again, his second unsuccessful attempt. ‘If you sold mobile phones for a living,’ he said, ‘you’d starve to death.’

  ‘I’m not the one about to jack in my job.’

  ‘Which you’ll probably inherit, yet you’re trying to convince me to keep. You’re a very nice person, Lucy. You’re both talented and good. I don’t think I’ve told you that often enough. I might never have said it, in fact. There’s a lot of things I should’ve said but never did.’

  ‘You’re sounding like a suicide note.’

  ‘There are other jobs. I’m not unemployable.’

  ‘When are you thinking of doing it?’

  ‘No time like the present,’ Carrick said.

  ‘Sleep on it. Please just sleep on it. It won’t be the end of the world if you’re a no show at the airport. Give yourself between now and tomorrow morning. You might see things completely differently in daylight, James.’

  He frowned. He leaned forward and kissed Lucy tenderly on the cheek. There was nothing sexual in the gesture. It was a spontaneous display of fondness and respect and she took it as the compliment it was. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Lucy. I’ll do as you suggest.’

  Kale was talking to Degrelle, who looked only slightly incredulous at whatever it was he was listening to. Jane was talking to Lassiter and seemed fascinated by whatever it was he was saying to her. McIntyre was involved in a fairly intense looking conversation with Alice Lang, someone for whom his body language suggested he had a wary sort of respect. Lucy felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to face Karl Cooper, smiling his stellar smile, his eyes gravitated firmly towards the cleavage her Empire style dress revealed.

  ‘You don’t normally dress like that.’

  ‘I’m dressed for the occasion.’

  ‘Jeans and a leather jacket are more your style. And that Zippo lighter for your American cigarettes and the Harley Davidson, of course. Practically trade marks.’

  ‘The bike was a Triumph Bonneville and I sold it last year. I don’t court celebrity, Mr Cooper.’

  ‘Karl, please,’ he said. ‘You might not court celebrity, but thanks to the expedition, you have a high public profile. Lucy Church is practically a household name.’

  She nodded. She knew what his inference was. Thanks to people like me, was his unspoken coda. It was undeniably true. She was becoming famous, or at least sort of famous, by association. ‘Do you think I should feel grateful?’

  ‘I think you should agree to have dinner with me.’

  ‘Share dinner for two, on New Hope Island?’ She laughed. She was incredulous. ‘Boil in the bag over a Primus stove?’

  ‘Conditions might be more luxurious than you think,’ he said. ‘Our patron has deep pockets and a considerate nature.’ His voice was deliberately soft but his cheeks had coloured. He was not a man who enjoyed being made fun of and it showed.

  ‘I think I’ll take a rain check, Karl.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘rain is something the Hebrides has plenty of.’

  He winked at her conspiratorially and wandered on to where McIntyre and Degrelle conversed. She had noticed he was keeping a wary distance from Jane Chambers. His was a conspiracy of one, as far as Lucy was concerned. She shuddered at the thought of sharing an intimate moment with him.

  Nothing at all had registered on the first of the cameras. It looked brand new to Napier, as though the lens cap had never been removed and it had never even been switched on. The lens cap had been removed from the second camera, though. In common with the first, it was digital and again, no images had been captured on it. It had been turned on, but there had not been time to point it at anything and the monitor just registered a dark flicker he assumed was the out of focus hull of the boat, pictured in cloudy darkness.

  There was sound, though. The second camera had recorded the sound of what had gone on. The screams of the men who had been aboard were anguished and terrified and though this deathly soundtrack was only a couple of minutes long, it seemed to go on and on to those enduring hearing it. Then it finally stopped. The men listening to it looked at one another without apparent surprise.

  ‘You were right, Walker,’ Napier said. ‘None of them made it.’

  ‘It came at them too fast,’ Davis said, ‘and in darkness.’

  ‘They saw it though,’ Walker said.

  ‘Unless they just felt it,’ Napier said, ‘whatever the fuck it was.’

  No man is an island. That was Napier’s belief, unless maybe if your name was Seamus Ballantyne. Except that Ballantyne and his entire community had come to a sticky end, hadn’t they? No man is an island; it was the reason he had shared this experience with Davis and Walker. He hadn’t been able to face it alone.

  Earlier, he had shown them the gruesome relic retrieved from the crofter’s cottage after Blake’s disappearance. They were good men. He needed allies in this, whatever this transpired eventually to be. He even told them about The Recruited Collier and the clay pipe he’d discovered, still warm, what seemed about a century ago, but was only a fortnight past. Neither of them laughed. It transpired that Walker was a Kate Rusby fan himself. He’d seen her at the Cambridge Folk Festival two years on the trot, he confessed.

  They were silent together after listening to the sound of the crew and passengers aboard the rigid inflatable perish in the night. Napier knew it had not been the sound of men in the water, drowning. He had heard that once after a NATO training fuck-up in heavy fog off the coast of Norway and awful as it had been, this was worse. Something predatory had got them, something hungry and formidable in water too cold for sharks.

  He reached for the whisky bottle. Troy, the construction ganger had left it for him as a parting gift and he was grateful for it now as he poured a slug into each of the mugs of tea the three of them had. It took the dry edge off the powdered milk. It delivered much needed warmth to the belly. It was wholly against the rules laid down by the people paying them but Napier was of the belief that the game had changed to the point where entirely new rules were required. In the material absence of a superior, he felt wholly justified in framing them.

  To Napier, Walker said, ‘Davis told me about that stuff he saw in the Congo, Sir. Wasn’t talking behind your back. He told me he’d told you too.’

  ‘And I told him about that morning at the cottage,’ Davis said. ‘The point is all the lads have sensed it, Sir. The island isn’t right. It’s wrong in a powerful way. It’s corrupt in a way that’s much worse than Africa was.’

  ‘Worse in what sense, Davis?’

  ‘Bigger. More powerful. It’s concentrated near the crofter’s cottage. But it’s everywhere on the rock.’

  ‘It was offshore when it got those blokes,’ Walker said, nodding at the camera.

  Napier was silent for a long moment. Then he said to Davis, ‘What’s the mood?’

  ‘It’s pretty sombre, Sir. The lads are spooked. They’re game enough but none of us is armed and even if we were, you can’t fight shadows.’

  ‘You can look at the positives,’ Walker said. ‘We’ve taken no casualties. Our unit is intact. We have food and fuel and shelter. We’re being paid.’

  ‘We’re doing our job,’ Davis said. He laughed, without humour. He gestured at the camera, ‘When someone’s not doing it for us.’

  Napier said, looking at Davis, ‘Your word, corrupt, strikes me as the right one to describe this place. But Walker’s right too. We’ve taken no casualties. We’ve retained our unit strength and capability. The integrity of our camp remains uncompromised. I’m as unnerved as anyone on the island. But we’ll be at full expedition strength here in less than 24 hours. The island will be crawling with new personnel. Now is not the time to request evacuation, boys.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Davis said, nodding.

  ‘Walker?’

  ‘I’m like all the lads, Sir. I shi
t bricks at night here, but I trust your judgement. We all do. We know what you did in Afghanistan. The bottom line is you lead and we’ll follow.’

  It was difficult not to look at the camera, not to think about the murky anguish of the night screams it had recorded. Napier had lost his nerve in Afghanistan. He knew that, just as he knew that to some extent at least, he had recovered it since. He thought it would be tested here, again, in this awful place. The experts and their various bits of pricey paraphernalia would arrive in the morning. And his private belief was that they would make no difference to the threat they faced at all.

  McIntyre brooded in his library after the departure of his last guest. He sipped brandy and pondered on the events he had personally sent careening into motion.

  Latest figures showed the circulation of the paper had now risen 40 per cent since the announcement that the expedition was scheduled to begin. Ad revenues were up 60 per cent. Pagination had increased by 30 per cent. They had gone from running two to four editions on the newsstand every day. New Hope Island had captured, or recaptured, the imagination of the world.

  Cooper and Kale’s most recent books had re-entered the non-fiction chart’s top ten. The BBC was re-running Jane Chambers’ series about the Black Death and gaining higher ratings in doing so than for the original broadcast. Lucy Church was a shoo-in already for Feature Writer of the Year at the National Newspaper Awards. And in the face of all this achievement, McIntyre felt none of the triumph he had anticipated he would. Instead, he felt hollow and even slightly afraid. These were new and unwelcome sensations and he thought that he knew what had engendered them in him.

  It was doubt. He was beginning to doubt his own theory as to the nature of the New Hope vanishing. He still believed that aliens had visited the earth. The evidence for that was, to his mind, irrefutable. But ever since Lassiter’s discovery of the cine film shot on New Hope by David Shanks, the case to be made for activity there beyond the rational had been steadily stacking up.

  He could no longer dismiss the spectre on the film as something Shanks had conjured in his own amateur dabbling with magic. Lassiter’s experience in the basement of the Maritime Museum in Liverpool contradicted that theory. There was something malevolent and unnatural about the contents of the sea chest and the chest had belonged to Seamus Ballantyne.