The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  He could not seek the advice of the ex-detective on what to do next. He was on his own. He had hit a wall or drawn a blank or whatever other cliché applied to having exhausted the available clues. His trip to Barnsley had been a waste of time. He hadn’t even justified the cost of the fuel his car had consumed. He hadn’t even managed to establish for certain that Horan and Garland were one and the same. ‘I’ll take a look at that plot,’ he said. To himself, he sounded defeated.

  The Reverend tilted his head sympathetically. He said, ‘I’m truly sorry that I can’t be of greater help to you. But there is someone who might be able to shed further light on the life and times of Dr Garland. Emma Foot runs the local history society. She’d be thrilled to meet a professional historian. She’ll probably pick your brains, ask you for a few tips on conducting really thorough and scrupulous research.’

  I consult a former police officer who retired due to a chronic drink problem, Fortescue thought. At least, I do when I get properly stuck. He smiled wanly. He said, ‘Won’t Ms Foot very likely still be at work?’

  Deal smiled back. He said, ‘Emma was the local librarian, the head librarian, until she retired about four years ago. She’ll be at home. And if she can help you, she’ll be only too happy to do so.’

  ‘I’d be most grateful,’ Fortescue said.

  ‘I’ll give her a tinkle.’ Deal blinked up at the sky. ‘She’ll cycle over, now that the rain has cleared, if she isn’t tied up. She lives only five minutes down the road.’

  He spent the short wait looking at the monument above the mausoleum in which the Garlands were interred. It was a pillared marble and granite affair that suggested solid prosperity. He was reminded of the chasm that had existed between rich and poor until relatively recent times. Names and dates were etched.

  He ran a finger across the name of Thomas Garland hoping it was a lie hewn from stone and that the man reposing among his kin beneath this conceit of cold masonry was actually called Horan and had written something revelatory he would yet find.

  He felt nervous. He was almost consumed by trepidation. He’d last felt like this on the phone to Edith Chambers when she told him about Jacob Parr. He was involved in a chain of events that had begun for him when he’d opened that sea chest in the basement of the museum in which he worked. Perhaps it had actually started on the day he was offered his job there.

  He was a part of something ominous and fateful and it occurred to him that the spectre of Liz Burrows sometimes watched him only because she knew he was and was naturally curious as to how it would all play out. The thought was not a comfortable one for Fortescue, whose own opinion was that the world would be a much happier and more relaxed place if the dead would have the decency to remember that they were dead and be content to stay that way.

  Napier heard the distant whump of the twin Chinooks and saw them clatter low over the sea from the pink horizon to the east. He supposed it was a measure of his new-found status that McIntyre had instructed him to welcome the expedition members formally. It seemed a long time since he had taken part in any ceremonial parade and the ritual of buffing up stirred mixed emotions in him.

  He was a decorated soldier. He had served in Her Majesty’s armed forces with valour and distinction and doing so had almost robbed him of his sanity. He remembered having the Military Cross pinned to his peacock chest and he remembered soiling himself, unmanned, when the battle trauma got so bad afterwards that they sectioned him.

  He’d wept for a week. The medal lay untarnished in its velvet lined presentation case in his kitbag in his tent there on the island. He smiled as the choppers neared, wondering whether McIntyre would prefer him for this occasion, to wear it. He wouldn’t do that. He was shaved and showered and sober and the boys lined up looking like the crack troops they’d all once been. They looked dapper and alert and they looked a handful. If they were spooked by the island, and he knew they were, it didn’t show on any of their faces.

  If anything, they looked excited. Napier could understand that. The new arrivals were not just experts. They were some of them celebrities. Everyone had seen Jesse Kale and Karl Cooper and Jane Chambers on the telly. Whether Jane Chambers was hotter than the psychic, Alice Lang had become a subject over recent days among the lads of fierce debate.

  The boys all referred to the women expedition members only by their first names, as though they knew them personally and were already quite friendly with them. Celebrity was like that. You read about people and studied their pictures often enough and they became as familiar to you as the regulars in your local pub. It was the reason people nodded and smiled at soap stars in the street and the supermarket and then went home wondering why on earth they’d done it.

  He personally thought Jane a bit too much the icy blonde for his own taste. She was certainly beautiful, but in so immaculate a way it would make you feel a bit grubby by comparison. He couldn’t imagine having sex with her. And the idea of being romantically involved with a psychic, however physically alluring, seemed to him a completely outrageous prospect. Alice was a trained psychiatrist too. Talk about inviting trouble. Anyway it was Napier’s privately held opinion that the Chronicle’s own Lucy Church was hotter than either of them.

  He’d met Lucy once. He hoped she wouldn’t remember. She’d been embedded for a month at their forward base in Afghanistan. She’d been gutsy and no-nonsense and she’d had a store of filthy jokes. He’d taken her out on patrol. She’d even looked good in combat fatigues and a Kevlar blast vest. He hoped she wouldn’t remember because despite the regard in which Alexander McIntyre now held him, he’d fallen an awfully long way in his own estimation since those days.

  The choppers came in with their usual shit-storm of downdraft. Two photographers scrambled out of the hatch of the first to land and took pictures for the following morning’s paper of the experts disembarking. They huddled on the grass in their foul-weather overalls with McIntyre’s company logos plastered onto their backs and chests and sleeves.

  He was relieved to see that the women looked as lovely in life as they did in their pictures. Lucy stood, almost protectively, beside Jane. Alice actually looked more in need of reassurance than Jane did, pale and visibly apprehensive.

  Kale looked more like a wrestler than an archaeologist, with his brawny build and beard and abundant mane tied back in a ponytail. Cooper looked like he’d rather be wearing a tuxedo. The swarthy exorcist ostentatiously knelt and kissed the ground. There was a grim-faced, shaken seeming bloke in glasses Napier assumed was a staffer from the Chronicle. And there was a tough-looking sallow faced man, tall and in good shape, he recognised as the ex-detective, Lassiter. He saw Lassiter wink at Alice and Alice smile back at him, obviously grateful for the gesture in spite of her nerves.

  It was lazy and sometimes even dangerous to generalise. But Patrick Lassiter did not look very much like the drunks Napier had encountered in life. Preoccupied by the thought of their next drink, in his experience they always had in common a sort of willing insularity. Lassiter was alert and empathetic. He was physically fit and fully engaged in the moment. Napier’s first impression was that this was a man who would make a good ally and a formidable enemy.

  Lucy strode over, grinning and holding out her hand and Napier thought so much for remaining incognito. Behind her, a crew from the second chopper began unloading the experts’ gear. He nodded to Davis, the signal for Davis to show the new arrivals around their living quarters and field laboratory and communications centre.

  ‘Colour Sergeant Paul Napier,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Don’t tell me. You never forget a face.’

  ‘Not a face as handsome as yours.’

  He smiled and said, ‘You’ve already told me the one about the actress, the bishop and the egg-timer.’

  She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and proffered it.

  ‘I’ve given up.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said, extracting one from the pack with her teeth and lighting it wi
th the nickel plated Zippo he remembered from Afghanistan. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘We’re protecting your exclusive, predominantly.’

  She lifted her head and blew out smoke and said, ‘A dangerous assignment?’

  ‘One casualty so far, missing, presumed dead.’

  ’Blake,’ she said, ‘the former marine who walked into the sea.’

  ‘That’s a plausible theory.’

  She looked away from him, around at the island, bright and vivid and windswept in the sunshine, heather and granite and shingle and scrub. A vast sky above them, clouds shifting so fast they seemed to be fleeing it. ‘Hostile territory, would you say?’

  ‘I would,’ he said. ‘Very.’ Over by the nearest chopper, Kale was supervising the unloading of what looked to Napier like a portable gym.

  ‘You can elucidate when I’ve unpacked,’ Lucy said.

  ‘It might not sound very lucid,’ Napier said.

  She pinched out her smoke and flicked the butt onto the ground and turned away and said in her own wake, ‘My place at six.’

  She really did ride a bicycle. It had a basket attached to the handlebars. She was a tall, slender woman who looked younger than retirement age. She had gray hair and clear blue eyes and there was a notebook, Fortescue saw, in the basket. He took this to be an encouraging sign. The reverend made the introductions and then left them and he sat with Emma Foot on a bench in the churchyard and he asked her about Doctor Garland.

  ‘He was a compassionate man. He had a reputation for kindness,’ she said.

  ‘Why did you research him?’

  ‘I didn’t, directly. Do you know much about Barnsley’s history, Professor Fortescue?’

  ‘I know that its principle industries were glass manufacture and the mining of coal. I know that the town suffered economic hardship in the 1980s, in the Thatcher era.’

  ‘In common with most of the north of England,’ Emma Foot said.

  ‘How did you come across Garland?’

  ‘We’re in the middle of the South Yorkshire coalfield. We’re sitting right on top of the Barnsley Seam. Mining was the principle industry here at the time of Garland’s arrival. I came across him while examining the history of the Elsinore Pit.’

  ‘He was a physician and his professional experience was gained as a ship’s doctor. What did he do, buy shares in a mine?’

  Emma Foot smiled. ‘Mining was very dangerous, in those days. Methane gas poisoned the miners. Sometimes it built up and the flames from their candles and lamps ignited it and it exploded and they burned. Tunnels collapsed causing crush injuries. Breathing in coal dust triggered chronic bronchitis and emphysema.’ She stood. ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

  They went into the church and progressed along the knave. It was cool and very quiet. Sunshine was strong through the stained glass of the windows, making them glitter and glow in lozenges of coloured light cast onto the stone floor. She pointed to a small window, quite high up and narrower than the rest. The figure of a man was depicted in glass shapes between the lattices of lead. He wore britches and a cutaway coat and pointed with one hand towards the sky as if to symbolise hope or salvation.

  ‘I think that’s him,’ Emma Foot said. ‘There’s some evidence the money used to pay for that window was raised by public subscription. So I’m assuming, adding two and two together to make four, if you will. But I would safely bet it’s him.’

  ‘Garland treated the miners,’ Fortescue said, thinking that if his brain turned any slower it would constitute atrophy.

  ‘And he did so for nothing. They were little better than slaves, back in those days, Professor. No unions, no compensation, no sick pay. 18 hour shifts, often without a break. Many of them were children, by any definition. They worked for very low wages, the miners. And Garland treated those who worked at the Elsinore Pit and he did so free of charge.’

  Fortescue looked up at the window. ‘How would they afford to commission the stained glass?’

  ‘When Garland came here, at the turn of the century, there was an economic depression. Mining was much more prosperous an industry by the time of his death. Working conditions didn’t change, but wages improved. They were honourable people who would have wanted to show their gratitude.’

  Coal; the Barnsley Seam, The Recruited Collier, it was all of a pattern and a piece. The song he’d taught Edith wasn’t just a clue, it was Jacob Parr’s mischievous, posthumous jest. Fortescue was beginning to see to were this led. It didn’t lead to a churchyard grave, though the place it did lead to had no doubt been a makeshift grave for some. He said, ‘The Elsinore Pit’s played out?’

  ‘It was exhausted a hundred years ago.’

  ‘How many shafts were there?’

  ‘Three were sunk.’

  ‘Were any of them sealed in the lifetime of Thomas Garland?’

  ‘The first of them was. That was the south shaft. It played out in 1808,’ she said.

  Fortescue nodded. 1808 was the year that Ballantyne’s old maritime trade was abolished. Thomas Horan, who was by then Thomas Garland, had written a secret journal concerning events aboard the Andromeda. He had come to Barnsley and got to know the miners from the Elsinore Pit.

  He had no doubt become familiar with the mine itself. An abandoned mineshaft might have seemed to him a clever place to hide his secret. If it documented a time from a rejected life, he would not have been comfortable having it in his home. It would have sullied the home of a man so ashamed of his own past that he chose to live under his wife’s maiden name.

  ‘How dangerous would the south shaft be?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say, Professor. It would need a structural engineer’s assessment and perhaps even a geological survey to tell you that.’

  ‘And neither has been carried out because the shaft was sealed over 200 years ago.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Could I impose on you to take the time and trouble to show me the Elsinore Pit?’

  ‘I can take you to it. I can point out the location of the south shaft. What we can’t do is enter the mine. It’s very dangerous, with the risk of subsidence. It’s surrounded by fencing and barbed wire. But it’s located only a mile from here and I’ll be happy to guide you to the spot.’

  ‘That’s kind of you.’

  ‘Would you do something for me in return?’

  ‘I will if I can.’

  ‘I’ve written the synopsis for a book documenting the history of mining in this area during the Industrial Revolution. I’ve never met a professional historian until now. Would you read the synopsis and give me your considered opinion?’

  ‘Gladly,’ Fortescue said, thinking if I survive what I intend to try to do this afternoon.

  James Carrick unpacked in his room, placing the picture of his wife and children on the bedside locker where he could look at it before going to sleep. Then he switched on his laptop. His immediate task was to write a piece about the journey to the island.

  He was to cameo each of the experts in the piece and Marsden had told him to include a paragraph about Lucy Church. In true post-modern fashion its principle architect had become part of the Chronicle’s story. The readers thought of Lucy as every bit as integral to the expedition team as any of its other members.

  His article was to be couched as a thousand terse and urgent words. It was a bulletin, not a colour piece, its sketches rapid and its language punchy and its sentences brutally short. It was the kind of thing he was actually quite good at and he was really rather grateful for the diversion.

  He had awoken feeling no more optimistic about the trip to New Hope than he had at McIntyre’s reception the previous evening. The difference was that in the sober light of day, he knew that resignation from the paper was a gesture he couldn’t afford. It would cost him too much financially and as a journalist, would kill his reputation stone dead.

  He would not be forgiven for the timing of his exit. It was simply too abrupt. You could
n’t be a no-show on as story as big as this. There was no way he could rationalise his abstract unease over the trip to a future employer. He’d be written off as neurotic and unreliable. He’d make himself a Fleet Street pariah. And it wasn’t just about him, this decision. He was the provider for his family.

  He worked on his piece for a couple of hours, his concentration intense, thoroughly absorbed in the task, his fingers hovering over the keyboard as they habitually did until the apposite word slotted gratefully onto the blank page of his mind.

  He wrote the piece as a word file. When he had finished, he sent it to the office in London as an email attachment. To his slight exasperation, he had to repeat this process three times before the file was successfully received at the other end. And he had to do it using his room’s antediluvian plug-in modem because Wi-Fi didn’t work on New Hope.

  Neither did mobiles, he remembered. Neither did satellite or radio phones, with anything like reliability. He would try to use Skype to keep in contact with Lillian and the kids, but if that failed to function properly he didn’t really know what he would do. She would have to get down to Maplin and buy a long wave radio transmitter and tune it to the frequency they were using in the comms centre the security fellow Davis had shown them around. At least he could legitimately put the purchase on expenses, as long as Lily kept the receipt and if all else failed.

  He looked at his computer. He was using the portrait shot Lillian had downloaded from her Lumix as his screensaver. There was something fascinating about the woman with the black, geometric bob, seated at the pub table behind her Penguin paperback. Her expression seemed inscrutable until you really studied it. Then it seemed slightly hostile. Stare for longer, and it became vaguely threatening. It was almost as though the picture possessed internal life, a sly measure of intelligence. It was almost, wasn’t it, like a kind of warning about something.