The Colony (18 page)

He knew that McIntyre planned for this to play out as an old fashioned rolling exclusive confined to his newspaper. But stills pictures would accompany the story each day and a film was being shot to be shown at a later date. He needed to cut a dash on the island. That was absolutely vital.

The competition style-wise would come directly from Kale, who was 15 years younger than he was and had a legitimate reason in the public mind to dress like Indiana Jones. It was Cooper’s privately held opinion that Kale was an outrageous exhibitionist. But he had the credentials and he got good ratings, which would be no bad thing when they were obliged to share screen-time on the trip. Their joint billing would deliver a huge audience when the film came eventually to be released.

Cooper had decided already that he would be publically matey with Kale. Superficially, he would be wise to foster a mood of upbeat camaraderie. He could maybe establish a big-brother to little-brother relationship with the archaeologist, so coming across as warm and affectionate, whilst undermining him by posing subconscious questions about his experience and maturity.

There was time for a workout, before looking at the clothes. He would hit the gym. For a moment, he imagined the appreciative look on the pretty face of Lucy Church when she saw his ripped body naked for the first time. Life is good, he thought, thinking that over the forthcoming weeks, it was going to get immeasurably better.

James Carrick could think of nothing he wanted less in life than to waste the next few weeks of it in the God forsaken Herbridean wilderness of New Hope Island. It was one thing maintaining his bluff philistine persona on the editorial floor. And he could do it effortlessly on the breakfast television sofa for an hour as he talked celebrity cellulite and super-injunctions. He suspected it would be a struggle, though, on the forthcoming expedition. It would mean living with the loud and odious twat he pretended to be not just for eight hours a day, but constantly.

Only two elements in his existence were really important to Carrick. The first of these was his family. He loved his wife and his children and had never sought a social life since marriage and the birth of his two kids that took him very much beyond his own front door.

The second priority was the novel he’d spent the better part of a decade trying to craft. His novel was a big and unwieldy and sometimes impossible-seeming ambition, but his creative commitment to it was total. He had written 120, 000 words and believed himself to be only a tantalising couple of months away from completing it. He thought that when it was finished, he’d take a pride in it he’d never been able to take in any other professional accomplishment.

He knew he had to go. The word had come from Marsden, but really it had come from McIntyre and though he was a benevolent proprietor most of the time, the owner’s word was law and always had been in Fleet Street. What possible excuse could he have given for refusing? He was in robust health. He earned a generous salary. He was supposed to be as curious as everyone else seemed to be about the New Hope enigma. His loyalty to the title he worked for should have made him eager to have his paper crack the puzzle and help deliver the great exclusive of the age.

It was funny, when he considered it. Lucy Church was of the sincere belief that he thought in nothing but clichés. That was because to his colleagues, their features editor was himself a living breathing cliché who spoke in banner headlines using a tabloid vocabulary and delivered his one-liners in conference as though they were written in bold.

It had worked for him, this method. More accurately, this method acting had worked for him. He’d invented a character who perfectly fitted his job title and it had given him years of prosperity that had funded those aspects of his life that were real and precious and private to the James Carrick only his wife and children knew existed. New Hope didn’t threaten all that, he did not think. But it would be a strain. Even the world’s greatest actor would find it a strain to inhabit a character they despised, without respite, for weeks on end.

He would miss his family. He could count the nights he had spent away from his wife in single figures. He always tried to get home in time to bath his children for bed or to read them a bedtime story. After they had been lulled into slumber, he liked to watch them as they slept before stealing a goodnight kiss. Then he went downstairs and shared a drink with his wife and then he would spend an hour in the study writing. This was his ritual and he treasured it.

He was in the study now. There was an image on his computer screen. It was a photograph his wife, Lillian, had asked him to look at. She hadn’t explained why. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the shot, though he didn’t recognise the subject as one of Lily’s friends. Distractedly, he brought the image up to full screen size. He would have to wait for Lily to finish whatever it was she was doing in the kitchen and come and tell him what the significance of the picture was.

He hadn’t given the New Hope mystery very much thought at all. He thought the Jane Chambers killer virus theory the most plausible of the various explanations he’d heard. But he didn’t care, frankly, what had happened to the island community. They’d been cultists, a motley collection of the impressionable and the weak and led by a demagogue lunatic had gone somewhere barren and inhospitable at a time when transport and communication networks were primitive.

They’d tempted fate by going in the first place, should not have gone at all and having gone, had got what they fucking well deserved. What precisely had been the nature of their fate, Carrick did not in the slightest feel the need to know. Cholera, lead poisoning, a pirate massacre, it didn’t fucking matter. It was of far more interest to him that his daughter’s braces had finally stopped hurting her mouth a full week after the orthodontist fitted them. He cared more, frankly, about whether the breakfast mangoes his wife had just brought back from Tesco were nice and ripe.

Had McIntyre or even Marsden been aware of how profoundly indifferent he felt about the New Hope expedition, he suspected that he’d probably by now have been sacked. If not sacked, he would have been punished in some other cruel way, such as exile to the Outer-Siberia of the sports desk; except that Outer-Siberia actually sounded quite inviting, to Carrick, compared to the Hebrides and No Hope Island.

He was not very much relishing the company he would have to endure on the trip, though he rather admired his colleague, Lucy Church. He thought that she was talented and principled. She smoked and drank too much and there was something strident about the way she dressed, but she wasn’t yet 30 and she was single and perfectly entitled to a bit of adventure and experimentation in the way she lived her life.

He suspected that perhaps she was over-compensating. In a sometimes blokey profession, she out-bloked most of her male colleagues with regard to the social side of things. Her lifestyle had not yet impaired her looks in the slightest, though. Sultry, would be the cliché of choice to describe Lucy’s physical appeal. And he would use it unashamedly because it genuinely suited her.

Because he admired her, he’d always been uncomfortable with the deception his professional relationship with her involved. Lucy had never seen the real James Carrick and he would make damn sure that she never would. This was dishonest of him and also patronising. But it was necessary. Carrick didn’t think the real James would have survived very long in so ferociously competitive an arena as a national newspaper’s editorial floor. With him, Lucy got what Lucy saw. In return, he got a first rate features staffer. On No Hope, they would rub along okay.

Jane Chambers, he thought of as a fairly typical 21st century career woman. She was obviously very bright and had been academically disciplined enough to accrue an impressive array of medical qualifications.

She’d discarded an under-achieving husband early on, a testament to her own ambition and ruthlessness. She’d become a successful television personality; presenting one-off documentaries, fronting her own series about the Black Death and doing the odd appearance on Question Time, where her combination of glamour and gravitas gave her undeniable impact.

She also had a beautiful daughter, he remembered, of about 14. Jane figured in best-dressed magazine polls. She drove a Lamborghini. In the world of the journalistic cliché, Carrick could not resist summing Jane Chambers up as one of those women who had it all; perfectly balancing professional and home life in a way that seemed, to an envious world, completely effortless.

On No Hope, he’d have little to do with her. Lucy had already established a rapport with her and anyway, cold women repelled him.

Karl Cooper was not just a cosmologist. He was also, to use an appalling pun, a star. Carrick did not think Cooper burned as brightly as he once had in the firmament. Maybe he was a dark star. There was some detail concerning the relationship between Cooper and Jane Chambers that had remained deliberately murky. And he had lied to Lucy Church about his relationship with McIntyre.

What was his relationship with McIntyre? Marsden had hinted that McIntyre was a repressed homosexual infatuated with Cooper. But he had aired this theory after a cosmic proprietorial bollocking over something, in a resentful sulk and after several double vodkas. Carrick didn’t believe it. The friendship had more substance and he had the feeling personally that the admiration was entirely mutual.

Carrick would have to be careful with Cooper. What he felt towards him, was a natural antipathy. But he knew he must be cautious not to make an enemy of a man so highly thought of by his paper’s owner. No hope of an expose there, then.

Jesse Kale was a preening narcissist who happened to know an awful lot about archaeology. You watched him on telly for twenty minutes and it became obvious that his real subject was himself and that he found the study of it endlessly fascinating. He was an attractive presence on camera; articulate, persuasive, lantern-jawed and with bigger biceps than Carrick thought were strictly necessary for a man his students were obliged to call, ‘Professor.’

His appeal was formulaic, really. He was representative of a flourishing televisual type. He was the Hunter-gatherer reassuring his predominantly female fan base with gruff and manly expertise.

No hope at all, was Carrick’s verdict. He thought Kale essentially a dull man involved in a sometimes intriguing area of work. He would become briefly the focus of attention when he found the mass grave Jane Chambers believed awaited discovery. But that would be the virologist’s coup in the end, not his.

Easily the most interesting member of the party was the psychiatrist Alice Lang. Carrick had dug out the cuttings on the two murder cases she’d assisted with. Both had been handled back in his Met police days by McIntyre’s pet detective, Patrick Lassiter.

There was no doubt whatsoever in Carrick’s mind that the psychic powers she claimed to possess were genuine. Without what she had told them, the police would not have been able to solve the crimes. They had no evidence and they had no suspects. They had no leads at all until her intervention. Lassiter had been emphatic on that. And since the second case had involved a serial killer, the police had been both grateful and relieved at her involvement.

It was admirable the way Lassiter conceded the psychic all the credit. He would have had colleagues who might have thought him credulous for doing so. He would have had colleagues who, in the same position, would have been eager to claim the credit for themselves and so minimise the importance of her role. Perhaps the detective had carried a torch for her. Coppers always carried torches in the clichés concerning the police.

She was a good-looking woman. By happy accident, all three of them were. There was sultry Lucy, glacial Jane and there was sensitive Alice Lang. That was how psychically gifted people were described, wasn’t it? They were termed sensitive. He actually thought sensuous a better description of her physical attributes. She had a heavy mane of dark hair and a figure voluptuous by today’s standards and her full-lipped mouth had an inviting ripeness to it.

Carrick was not the sort of man to stray. But if he was, he thought of the three women going on McIntyre’s expedition to No Hope Island, Alice Lang would be the most interesting candidate in whose company to do any straying.

She wasn’t just physically compelling. There was the tension she represented between the orthodoxy of her psychiatric training and the arbitrary madness of her psychic gift. She must be emotionally and intellectually cleaved, he thought, whenever her gift intervenes. It’s rationality confronted by chaos. Lassiter had told McIntyre; who had told Marsden who had told him, that she regarded this talent of hers almost as an affliction. Thinking about it, he could see why she would.

Now that he did think about it, it occurred to Carrick they were an obvious member light in their array of experts. Ballantyne had been a very bad man, before his attempt to represent himself as just the opposite. Surely they should take a priest with them to the Hebrides. Surely the expedition was crying out for a legitimate man of the cloth. What if what had happened there had been demonic in its origin? In that case a well respected exorcist would round out the team very nicely.

He didn’t seriously think that anything satanic had occurred on the island. Carrick was not a natural believer in conventional religion. He did believe though, that McIntyre and Marsden too had missed a trick in not addressing the theoretical possibility.

It was certainly the speculative area offering the juiciest teasers in the lead up to the expedition itself. Devil worship was something all their readers had heard of and most of them believed went on. Demonic possession had provided the plot of the most notorious horror film in cinema history.

It was too late now, which was a pity. They could have had a lot of fun with it. Evil became contagious when the Devil was involved. Places were contaminated by it. They became damned and haunted and intrinsically bad. Suddenly, the phrase No Hope Island, seemed less a jocular pun than a grave warning above a story in a late edition; a sombre picture of a suitably photo-shopped rock outcrop accompanying it, some goat head bit of granite with anthropomorphic horns. What a wasted opportunity!