The Colony (27 page)

It was a pioneering piece of forensic examination of which Degrelle thought Patrick Lassiter would probably have been proud. He thought it likely to have been fairly accurate too.McCloud dealt in whisky but had not shared Lassiter’s taste for the stuff. He was totally abstemious, his judgement completely sober.

Some of the livestock on the island were discovered by McCloud living feral. Most of the beasts had starved to death in their pens when they ran out of food. The extent of the decomposition of the carcasses was another clue as to the date of the vanishing. The trader put it at about the third week in March.

McCloud did not dwell for very long on New Hope. He had sailed there with his regular boatman and a burly labourer called David Cantrell. Cantrell was the sort of highNapier who won caber tossing competitions when he wasn’t brawling in taverns or sleeping one off. He was a giant with a troublesome reputation, but he could lift and haul a full whisky barrel between the ham-locks of his arms which to his employer, was a useful accomplishment.

After a thorough search of the settlement, the three men decided to eat the meal of mutton broth and barley cakes brought with them aboard the boat. The outward leg of their voyage had been stiff and they needed sustenance before the hard tack across the water back to the mainland.

They did not at this point fear anything. McCloud though the disappearance singularly odd. Bowls had been left half finished, the bread rolls grown stale on the tables beside them. Fishing nets lay on the quayside in a state of semi-repair. The catch still sat, rotten and stinking now, in the hold of one of the anchored smacks. Books lay open halfway through an arithmetic lesson in the small schoolhouse; coats and shawls still on pegs and shoes laid in a neat row at the door.

But he knew from his business dealings with the settlers that Seamus Ballantyne was a mercurial man, governed entirely by the messages in his head delivered by a capricious God. He assumed they had gone in the way that they had originally come, 15 years earlier, on their leader’s whim and without a single murmur of disobedience. He thought they must have chartered a couple of large craft from one of the mainland ports and set out to start again, somewhere else.

It was only after he sent Cantrell to forage for kindling for the fire to heat their broth that McCloud suspected anything really sinister afoot on New Hope. Cantrell habitually sang as he worked, songs delivered in a strong dialect and a sweet tenor voice. McCloud became aware of an abrupt silence and rose from where they had planned to eat before departure and went to find his quieted man.

He came across Cantrell sitting on the ground, cross-legged and weeping, outside one of the settlers’ dwellings. Drool hung from his lower lip and he pointed a shaking finger towards its closed door. McCloud observed that his man was rocking slightly back and forth, like elderly people did in their fireside chairs sometimes when age had robbed them of the capacity to think.

McCloud opened the door. The single room inside was cold and dark and empty. There was an odour the trader later described as a mixture of camphor and fish oil but it was very slight and could have been of no real consequence. He took off his boat-cloak and placed it around the mighty shoulders of the trembling man and coaxed him to his feet as someone might an infant child or someone feeble minded.

Cantrell never disclosed what it was he saw on New Hope that day. Whatever confronted him, if anything actually did, remained forever a mystery. Nor was he ever heard to sing again. The story was that he never uttered another single word until his premature death, a few years later, at the tender age of only 28.

Thus was the legend of New Hope born, to be fostered and then distorted down the years and passing decades. The truth was elaborated. Then stories were simply invented. The island became unlucky, or cursed, or haunted; depending upon to whom it was you spoke. Facts were in short supply concerning either the island or its pious, vanished tribe.

More was known, though, than existed in the public domain. Degrelle had hinted as much to McIntyre when McIntyre came wooing. He had only recently then heard for himself the new detail from the Cardinal when he nearly let some of that slip. Excitement may have prompted the indiscretion, he thought, though more probably it had been down to fear.

In February of 1823, a 14 year old boy called Samuel Trent had fled the island in an open boat. Against the odds, he had survived the crossing and made landfall about eight miles from Ullapool. He was on the shore, aboard his stolen craft, dying of exposure when a shrimp fisherman found and rescued and resuscitated him. He was grateful to the shrimper, but he never told the man from where it was he had come.

Five years after the New Hope vanishing, in 1830, Trent converted to Catholicism, wishing eventually to take instruction and enter the priesthood. He was by then 21. He had successfully kept his personal history a secret to that point from everyone he had encountered in his years on the mainland. He made his first confession. And what he had to say about his life on the Island so disturbed the priest to whom he made it, that he broke his own vow of confessional secrecy and disclosed the information to his bishop.

It was the detail of Samuel Trent’s confession that the Cardinal had shared with Degrelle to help prepare him for the expedition. He was told about the sins committed on the island. And it was the exorcist’s considered opinion that if his new colleagues on this adventure knew what he was now aware of, they would not for one moment entertain the prospect of going.

Philip Fortescue was fairly confident that he had successfully identified and located Horan, the Andromeda’s physician. Working on Lassiter’s hunch, he had discovered that a doctor by the name of Thomas Garland had settled in St Bride’s parish in Barnsley in the summer of 1797.

That was a full two years before Seamus Ballantyne swapped slavery and seafaring for the freelance saving of souls; but the chronology was still convincing enough. Horan had in all probability resigned his commission in disgust in the period during which the vessel he had served aboard still plied its lucrative trade.

Garland had been married to a woman named Martha. He had fathered two daughters. Both of the girls had been baptised at St Bride’s. Fortescue did not know whether or not he had been a pious man. Everyone had been a church-goer in the period in which the doctor had lived. Thankfully for genealogists, everyone had been baptised and every surviving parish was obliged to keep its records.

The bad news was that Horan had no living relatives. There was no cache of papers in a precious family archive stored lovingly in a loft trunk at an ancestral pile somewhere. He was not going to get the fairytale ending to this particular quest he had hoped for. The last of the doctor’s bloodline had expired in the summer of 1916 on the Western Front in the First World War when his great-grandson was blown to pieces taking part in a dawn assault.

Fortescue wasn’t put off by this. He had asked the vicar of St Brides could he look at the Parish records personally and had been granted access and an interview with the amenable cleric. He was a professor, after all. He had academic credentials and a job title and every justification for researching a man who had served as an officer aboard a mercantile vessel with the home berth of Liverpool harbour at the end of the 18th century.

He drove through the sunshine and rain showers across the Pennines, wondering what it was he would find when he got to his destination. There had been no municipal library yet built in Barnsley at the time of Garland’s death. No one called Garland had donated papers to any of the two likeliest scholarly archives he had identified in the locality. It was possible that Garland’s account of life aboard the Andromeda existed in private hands. An advert in the local paper was something he would place only as a last act of desperation.

At the wheel of his Saab, with rain wicking off the canvas roof, he couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was going to Barnsley at the urging of an adolescent girl. He was doing so because she claimed a ghost had asked her to find something important written by a man in secret. She had asked for his help and he was giving it and the Barnsley bit was his idea because the song the ghost had taught the girl to sing in a dream was sung in life by a singer from the locality.

He wondered which part of all of this was the most tenuous and ridiculous. And then he stopped wondering because Patrick Lassiter had found none of it funny and he had come to think Lassiter a clever and hard-headed and intuitive man.

He started to hum to himself. The sun splayed onto the road in a riot of gold and odd patches of vermillion from spilled fuel and the clouds parted before him. It was only when the rain had stopped completely, when it was no longer drumming on the taut fabric above him that he became aware the melody he hummed was, of course, The Recruited Collier.

The Reverend Deal was plump and red faced and as friendly as he had sounded over the phone. He was obliging in the access he offered Fortescue to his registers of births, marriages and deaths. He showed his visitor the christening font at which the Garland girls had been baptised. But he could offer no enlightening clue about a man who had first settled in his parish more than two hundred years earlier.

‘Typhoid killed him,’ he said of the physician who called himself Thomas Garland. ‘I can tell you that. I can tell you he received last rites administered by one of my own predecessors. I can show you the family plot. But I can tell you nothing about the life or character of the fellow whatsoever.’

The family plot. Fortescue wondered would Horan have had his clandestine journal buried with him. Was it clasped in the grip of his mummified arms? Did he literally take his secret to the grave? For a wild moment he imagined himself in the churchyard at midnight, shovelling out the earth, a hurricane lamp swinging from a handy tree to light the scene as he toiled to pry the lid from a lead-lined coffin.

He wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t the type. It was against the law and would cost him his job and it was a ridiculous course of action even to contemplate. He looked at his watch. It was midday. The expedition members would be in the sky above the Atlantic aboard their Chinooks, clattering towards the island. Lassiter would not be able to talk to him on his mobile now, not with the deafening engine noise inside one of those. Nor would he be able to do so when they landed because there was no cell phone signal on New Hope.

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.