The Colony (12 page)

‘Good men then, reliable, presumably vigilant, well-qualified. Have they reported anything out of the ordinary?’

‘They’ve reported nothing whatsoever.’

‘There you are.’

‘There’s a construction crew there too as of this morning,’ McIntyre said, ‘building the living quarters you and the others will occupy. I suppose if New Hope was afflicted by ghostly goings on, someone would have radioed in to comment on it or complain.’

‘But no one has.’

‘Not yet.’

‘There are no ghosts, Alex. There was never anything magical or paranormal there. Not in the time of the settlement. There was no mass suicide induced by mass hysteria. There was no fatal epidemic of disease and the people didn’t embark from the island aboard a fleet of boats for pastures new without leaving a note. They were taken. They were chosen and taken by benign and curious visitors to our world and when I get there I promise you I’ll uncover the proof of that.’

‘And you still believe they left a calling card?’

‘Somewhere on the island, I’m convinced they did,’ Cooper said. ‘And when I find that, you’ll have your world exclusive. And I’ll have my first solid step on the route to establishing formal contact. It’ll be a moment for the world to gather breath.’

‘It’ll put both our names in the history books.’

The two men were poised, about to clink glasses in a toast to that happy thought, when the phone at McIntyre’s elbow rang. He picked up he receiver and listened for a while and then grunted one unintelligible word and replaced it.

‘Trouble?’

‘That was Carrick, the paper’s features editor. One of our team of experts has rendered himself indisposed.’

‘Which?’

‘Simon Hawsley-Smith, the spiritual medium.’

‘No great loss,’ Cooper said.

‘We need to be seen to cover every eventuality, Karl. We need to be authoritative and scrupulous and professional. This is the definitive investigation into perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery of modern times.’

‘So long as you don’t lose our forensic archaeologist,’ Cooper said. ‘The ground there is going to yield some interesting secrets. He’ll be more than useful. He’s indispensable.’

‘Lassiter knows a psychic,’ McIntyre said.

‘You put too much store in Lassiter, Alex.’

‘She’s genuine, he says, highly gifted, if reluctant.’

‘If she’s genuine then it’s no surprise she’s reluctant,’ Cooper said. ‘A dialogue with the dead can’t be a comfortable encounter.’ He emptied the contents of his glass into his mouth and gulped appreciatively. ‘Think she can be persuaded?’

McIntyre shrugged. ‘Everyone has their price, is my experience. ‘

‘Me included?’

‘You’re the exception that proves the rule, Karl. I’ll call Lassiter in the morning,’ he said.

Lucy Church was getting ready for bed when the call came from Carrick. Features wasn’t hard news and personal disinclination prevented him from doing late nights habitually so she knew that something pretty serious must be up for him still to be working.

‘We’re an expert short,’ he said. ‘Our medium has just suffered a stroke that’s likely to prove fatal. That’s the prognosis, anyway.’

‘You’d have thought he’d have known,’ Lucy said.

‘Very bloody funny, not. He’s an expert in communicating with the other side, not a clairvoyant. He never claimed to be able to see the future.’

‘If he was destined to make it so soon to the other side himself, you’d have thought one of his contacts there would have told him how welcome he was shortly going to be. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Jesus, Lucy. You’re all heart.’

‘So the interview I had planned with him for tomorrow is off, then,’ Lucy said.

‘I should think that’s fairly bloody obvious,’ Carrick said. ‘Why else would I call you up so late at night?’

‘Well, James, I didn’t think it was because I was in trouble for that last piece. All the interesting observations I had to make about Karl Cooper were subbed out of what I wrote. I don’t honestly know why you made me bother. We could’ve just run one of the puff pieces his PR people generate. It would have saved my time and effort and been a great deal better for my journalistic credibility.’ She closed her eyes. A phrase such as that last one was a contradiction in terms to a man like Carrick and she well knew it.

‘You called him a narcissistic womaniser.’

‘I didn’t. I let him condemn himself. He’s boastful and supercilious. I don’t think I’ve met a vainer man.’

‘He’s also a personal friend of our proprietor.’

‘He denied that. So he’s a liar, too.’

‘Really took to him, didn’t you?’

Lucy didn’t reply. Carrick said, ‘If we’d printed the profile you wrote, you’d probably be out of a job. You certainly wouldn’t still be going on the New Hope Island expedition.’

‘Cooper would’ve thrown his toys out of the pram?’

‘Not Cooper, McIntyre. Bigger pram, ergo, bigger toys.’

‘They’re that close?’

‘They are. Like father and son. Don’t know what the common bond is, but something links them. Anyway, you should be thanking me. You’re still onboard.’

‘Any word yet on who’s coming with me?’

‘I am.’

‘You’re kidding, James.’

‘I wouldn’t joke about being dispatched to the Hebrides. Not when I’ve got tickets for the Lords Test and Clapton at the Albert Hall.’

‘When was the last time you actually wrote anything?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carrick said. ‘The word has come from above. Ours is not to reason why.’

Or write the truth, Lucy thought. She could not remember the last piece she had read under James Carrick’s by-line. He was far more noted these days for sitting on the sofa as a regular guest on breakfast television, dishing out succulent morsels of celebrity gossip. She said, ‘Too early, I suppose, for a replacement medium to have been approached?’

‘Communing with the dead isn’t football, love. You don’t have an array of substitutes warming up on the touchline.’

‘It’ll be someone with a degree of notoriety, though,’ Lucy said, who was sorry for Simon Hawsley-Smith but not sorry that the following day’s interview with him had been cancelled. Or that he wouldn’t be coming to the Island. She had flicked through his books and watched his show-reel twice and considered him completely bogus.

‘Not necessarily,’ Carrick said. ‘We’ve already got the housewives’ choice in Karl Cooper. We have the only archaeologist in the country who could legitimately claim to be a household name. We have Doctor Eye-Candy, the hit series-fronting virologist.’

‘I was very impressed with Jane Chambers,’ Lucy said. ‘She sounded a damn sight more credible than Cooper, with his little green men.’

‘When are you doing the archaeologist?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ Lucy said. The archaeologist was actually a forensic archaeologist and his name was Jesse Kale and he was a burly, bearded Canadian who was a fixture on the History Channel. Lucy had rather gone off him after seeing him front an ad on telly for an absurdly macho brand of four-wheel drive. Then again, most television academics had their paws in any pot they could find. The public was fickle, fame precarious and life expectancy so long that everyone needed a pension plan. Jesse Kale was what, 38? He looked like the sort of bloke who might well live forever.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ Carrick said.

‘What?’

‘Never mind, love.’

He hung up. Lucy smiled wanly to herself. She was reminded of her own joke, taken by him as a compliment, that James had never knowingly entertained a thought that wasn’t a cliché.

Break a leg, she thought. She would try not to trip and do so climbing the stairs on her way to bed.

Jane put the song on again. In other circumstances, she thought that she would have been very taken with Kate Rusby’s singing. There was this poignancy to the way she interpreted a lyric and her voice had a tender, melancholic quality Jane didn’t think she had heard in any other singer’s delivery before. Maybe it was a folk thing, but she didn’t think so. It was a quality particular to the petite woman they called the Barnsley Nightingale. She was genuinely talented. The song, The Recruited Collier, was affecting and sad. Or it would have been, had Jane not become aware of it in so troubling a way.

She had met Edith in her dormitory and they had walked through the grounds because the day was so beautiful and the walk a part of the ritual they always indulged when Jane visited and it didn’t happen to be pouring with rain. Her first thought on properly seeing her daughter, once their embrace of greeting had broken, was of how well she looked. She seemed to have grown a bit and her eyes held a bright sparkle and her complexion glowed with health.

She could be cold with her mother. The break-up between her parents, the isolation it inflicted, had left her eventually with a capacity for objectivity most people only achieved in adulthood. School had further increased her independence. She was generally loving and open but never came across as needy, Jane supposed because she did not want to risk further disappointment.

Edith didn’t look to her parents for what she no longer expected them to be able to provide. The divorce had shaken her faith in them. This made Jane sad, but she thought it was better for her than it was for David. Edith blamed her father for the failure of her parents’ marriage and she hadn’t forgiven him and Jane thought it unlikely now that she ever would.

‘I’ve just finished speaking to Mrs Sullivan.’

‘But she wasn’t the reason you came.’

‘No. She wasn’t.’

‘You came because of New Hope Island.’

They had been walking, arm in arm. Jane stopped and so Edith stopped too. She smiled at her mother and Jane realised with a shock that their eye level shared parity. They were now the same height. Her daughter would soon grow taller than she was.

‘I read the article in the paper, mum, that one written by Lucy Church?’

Jane opened her mouth to chastise Edith for up-speak, but thought better of doing so straight away. They all did it. ‘What did you think?’

‘She was well impressed with you. Lucy Church thinks you’re seriously cool.’

‘I meant, what did you think of my going. What do you think?’

‘I think you have to go. Come on, it’s not even a question. Everyone here’s buzzing with it already. The whole world will be watching and you’ll be there. How cool is that? I just wish I was coming with you. Karl Cooper’s going. Jesse Kale’s going. For an old guy, he’s pretty cool.’

‘Other adjectives are available, darling.’

Edith smiled. ‘Next you’ll tell me how much it costs to send me here.’

‘Sorry. It will mean you spending the summer with your father.’

They had resumed their stroll. Edith didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, ‘I’ve been kind of off with dad, haven’t I.’

‘I’ve known warmer nuclear winters,’ Jane said.

‘What’s a nuclear winter?’

‘Honestly. Do you know what it costs to send you here?’

‘Relax, mum. I know what a nuclear winter is. We did the Cuban Missile Crisis in history last term. When the world was nearly destroyed by atomic war?’

‘So you’ve been thinking about your father.’

‘I’ve been unkind to him.’

Jane didn’t say anything. She thought what Edith had actually been was indifferent to her dad, which was worse.

‘I’ll probably even have fun.’

‘If he thinks you’re having fun with him, he will be happy. And then you really will have fun with him.’

‘Do you still love dad?’

‘No.’

‘Not even a teensy-weensy-‘

‘No. Mrs Sullivan is worried about these dreams, Edie. That’s what I talked to her about. And having spoken to her, I’m worried too. It’s a bit weird, to say the least. Tell me about them.’

‘He says it’s a song a woman should sing. He sings it, but that’s the reason he says he taught it to me.’

‘Who did?’

‘His name is Jacob Parr. He’s from the olden days. He smokes a clay pipe and his teeth are totally gross. He’s kind and patient though.’

‘You know the song. You can even play it. Why are you still dreaming about him?’

‘He says he has important things to tell me but the time isn’t yet right. I think the song was a sort of test.’

‘Testing what?’

‘That he’s not dealing with a total moron, when the time comes to tell me the important stuff.’

‘Are you afraid of Jacob Parr?’

‘No.’

‘How friendly is friendly?’

‘He doesn’t come on to me, mum. They’re not those types of dreams.’

‘They still sound a bit sinister.’

‘They’re not. He’s Jacob Parr. He’s just a guy from the olden days. He’s not exactly Freddy Krueger or Jigsaw.’

‘How do you know about Freddy Krueger?’

‘Some of the girls on the dorm are totally into horror.’

‘Who’s Jigsaw?’

‘You don’t even want to know.’

‘Do you watch horror DVD’s?’

‘No. I’m not into any of that stuff. Really I’m not.’

‘Promise me this, Edie. You’ll tell your father about the dreams?’

‘There isn’t much to tell.’

‘Promise me anyway.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled. ‘I love you, mum.’

‘And I love you, Edie Chambers. With all my heart, I do.’

Now, as bedtime approached, Jane listened to Kate Rusby sing the closing couplet of the song and pondered on what she had discovered about Jacob Parr.

Parr was a common enough English surname and Jacob was a once popular Christian name again enjoying a vogue among middle-class English parents. The Recruited Collier had been a popular song at around the time of the establishment of the New Hope Island settlement. So Jane, who had a scientist’s intolerance when it came to belief in coincidence, began to look for a Jacob Parr with a New Hope Island connection. If she did this on a hunch, it was a virologist’s hunch; the strong intuition of someone who believed in causal chains.

And eventually she found her connection. A man called Jacob Parr had been among the crew aboard Ballantyne’s slave vessel, the Andromeda. He had been a second mate and he had been twice flogged for drunkenness and eventually dismissed the ship’s company. After that, he disappeared from recorded history. He was certainly not among the men, women and children who founded the Island settlement in the Hebrides in the years following his dismissal. Probably he drank himself into the grave. Perhaps he sang well enough to earn coppers for doing so in the taverns where he drank.