The Colony (30 page)

Finally, there was fate. He really did believe he was fulfilling a duty made inevitably on the memorable day he tried to inventory the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest. If that moment had not occurred, he would never have come to believe in ghosts. But it had and he did. And he trusted that the ghost indirectly responsible for luring him to this place, had done so for a reason both important and urgent.

He was resigned to getting dirty. He thought that he might emerge from this experience bruised and grazed and would quite likely sustain the odd cut. Philip Fortecue tried not to think about the possibility of becoming trapped. The risk was there. Obviously it was. He was venturing underground and had told no one where he intended to go or what he intended to do. But there was no point dwelling on that, was there?

It took him forever, in his own mind, to clamber over the gate. He hadn’t climbed since childhood and had not done all that much of it then. His arms seemed much less strong now and his body seemed to weigh much more so that he could not haul himself up with his hands as he had as a kid. He had to find secure purchase for his feet to ascend. It was like climbing a ladder with no rungs and it was hard.

He got stuck at the top. One of his belt loops snagged on the tip of one of the gate’s vertical bars and it took him ages to free himself; anxious moments in which he thought a police car might hove into view and a couple of patrolling officers park up and observe his ridiculous plight with amused expressions through their windscreen. But the patrol car didn’t come and eventually he shrugged himself loose and over, scrambling and then falling the last few feet onto a carpet of coal dust still gleaming on the ground, crystalline after the morning’s rain.

There was a gap where the iron hatch met the lip of the shaft. Soil erosion or subsidence had created it. He looked through it and saw beneath him iron rungs hammered into the shaft wall descending into blackness and remembered that he didn’t have a torch or a rope or a whistle to signal alarm or anything else that even a schoolboy would have equipped himself with for a mission as hazardous as this.

His eyes would adjust, he thought, squirming through the gap feet-first, holding the cold and slippery edge of the hatch and committing the weight of his legs to one of the rungs. His eyes would adjust, because they would have to. He’d be blind down there otherwise and would find nothing.

Good sense or his instinct for self-preservation caused him to pause when he reached the bottom of the shaft. Before him would be what they called the gallery. And beyond that, was the tunnel which would dead-end at the point where the tunnel’s access to the seam had become exhausted. Gallery was a grand sounding name, but it was a space not tall enough for a man to stand upright in. And the tunnel would be very narrow. Men had hacked at the seam on their backs, prone rather than upright.

There was a reason for this. The smaller the dimensions of the tunnel, the less the risk of collapse, ran the theory. So at least Emma Foot had told him in his crash-course on early 19th century mining practice on the way to the Elsinore Pit.

He waited for his eyes to adjust. It was late afternoon. There was still plenty of light in the sky above the shaft. He just had to wait to become aware of the bit of it that penetrated this far through the gap he had squeezed through above him.

There was no water down there. At least, there was none around where he stood. He couldn’t hear it dripping. There were no puddles. This was both good and bad. A dry atmosphere was encouraging for the survival of a document written on paper or parchment. But drainage meant sink holes or subsidence to enable any rain water penetrating the shaft to escape, which was very bad if he happened to blunder somewhere where there was no longer solid ground beneath his feet.

He could not smell methane. That was another encouraging thing. He could smell only coal dust and the stale odour of undisturbed air signalling a century or more of abandonment.

Fortescue waited. He was in no hurry. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the scant light leaking into the shaft from the afternoon sky above. He hummed to himself. He hummed The Recruited Collier. And then he sang a bit of it. And then he stopped singing because it sounded as though someone was singing softly along with him and that was an unpleasant thought down there in the lonely darkness beneath the earth in a place far from home or safety or the kind of company he might welcome and not be made afraid by.

He was afraid. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He thought that only a fool would be unafraid in such circumstances. But his eyes grew sensitive at last to the limited light and he was able to see quite clearly in a monochromatic sort of way both the contours of the gallery and its shrinking, after twenty feet or so, to the black maw of the tunnel proper.

He thought that he would find what he was looking for in the tunnel. It would not be lying there in the gallery on a handy shelf or in a presentation tray. Life was not supposed to be easy. Everything was a trial. Everything worthwhile was difficult to accomplish. He had been brought up by his mother to believe that and it was a good belief because it never left you open to disappointment.

He took off his jacket. It was warm under the earth. His hands were already filthy and one of them was sticky with blood from his wrestle with the gate-top where he thought from the throb of pain that he might have lost a fingernail. He got down on his hands and knees. He crawled like that towards the tunnel mouth.

It was not necessary to see in the tunnel. It wasn’t wide or high enough for him to lose his way in. He could feel the iron rails to either side of his hands and knees. The trolley wheels had worn them smooth as the trolley’s laden weight of coal was pulled back into the gallery by the men working behind the cutter at the face.

They had toiled through 18 hour shifts, sweating and grimy in their grim and hazardous work. But there was no sense now, of all that industrious toil. Two centuries of silence and absence has stilled the place utterly.

He crawled. He crawled for what seemed a long time until he was fully immersedin blackness and silence, the blackness so complete and silence so profound that only his sense of touch anchored him any longer to the earth.

And then he bumped up against the trolley itself and its wheels creaked stiffly with lack of lubrication on the rails. And when he reached with a hand there was some cargo contained within the trolley, wrapped in what felt under his fingers, like oilskin. And he gripped and in the cramped black space hefted the stiff flat rectangle of something written long ago and stored there in dark secrecy.

By the time they realised he was missing, the weather had deteriorated to an extent that made searching for James Carrick a practical impossibility. The wind rose and strengthened on their descent from the heights and the settlement. The cloud lowered and thickened and the rain began to needle into their faces. It scoured off the vast Atlantic, propelled by a chilly Westerly wind. They reached the encampment cold and wet and tired, a bedraggled bunch of people collectively dismayed by the atmosphere of the place they had left and collectively defeated by the raw, dwarfing fury of the elements.

That was Lucy’s impression, anyway. Kale and Cooper looked suddenly like their men-of-action images were far more cosmetic than real. Jane and Alice looked as pissed-off and soaked through as she felt herself. Even Lassiter looked like a man who’d welcome a blue lamp signalling his local station and a mug of cocoa made by his old desk sergeant with something akin to relief.

It took them well over an hour to get back over the boggy exposure of the island terrain and only Paul Napier and the priest seemed unmoved by the ferocious violence of the still-gathering storm.

They assumed Carrick was in his room until Lassiter rallied knowing it was his turn first on their roster to prepare their evening meal. When he was ready to serve it, Lucy went and knocked on Carrick’s door, cursing him as a lazy bastard for missing the inaugural trip to the settlement and snoozing on the job.

He wasn’t there. He had left his computer switched on. Lucy noticed his screensaver, a picture of woman who wasn’t his wife pretending to read a book and smiling rather sardonically. She switched it off.

They could not find him in the compound. Lassiter asked her was it in character for him to wander off independently without leaving some indication of where he’d gone. She said she couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to do that than Carrick. He’d put on his McIntyre branded foul weather gear before climbing aboard the chopper confiding to her that it was his first practical encounter with Velcro. He was someone who thought of a round of golf as a wilderness experience.

Lassiter served up their food because if he hadn’t, it would have spoiled. Then without eating his own, the ex-policeman went and fetched Paul Napier from the security team’s camp. That was the moment, seeing the look on Lassiter’s face as he pulled on a cagoule with his own dinner plate untouched and ventured back into the storm to fetch Napier, that Lucy knew with a sick churn in her stomach that the disappearance was probably going to turn out to be serious.

It was just after eight by the time Lassiter returned with Napier and Davis, who seemed to be the security head’s nominal second-in-command. Everyone was assembled in the recreation suite. Everyone was asked by Lassiter when they’d last seen the man from the Chron. There was still over two hours of daylight left then, but the wind was so strong it was making the encampment buildings shudder and ripple with its force and the rain was a driven deluge and Lucy already had a very bad feeling.

Napier said the weather would prevent a proper search. The conditions were too severe. Visibility was poor and movement on foot around the island impractical and even dangerous. He said any search would be voluntary and of necessity, incomplete.

Then he went and fetched his man Walker. He told Walker and Kale and Cooper to sit tight and keep everyone together and remain vigilant. Then he volunteered himself and went out with Davis and Degrelle and Lassiter, who also volunteered, and they did all the looking they could practically do, searching in the obvious places and waving their flashlights and bellowing into the gale without response.

They had returned and reassembled in the recreation suite and darkness was falling when Lassiter, by now nursing a real cup of cocoa, asked Alice Lang would she touch something of Carrick’s to see if that could give them a lead.

Lucy took this to mean that the detective already suspected something really awful had happened to her department head. She offered to go and fetch something of Carrick’s from his room. She returned with his laptop and she switched it on and when the screen clarified Lassiter went very pale and Alice screamed a scream blood-curdling even against the wail of the storm outside.

‘He’s gone,’ she said simply, when she had composed herself.

To Lassiter, Lucy said, ‘Who’s the girl in the picture holding the book?’

‘Her name was Elizabeth Burrows,’ Lassiter said. ‘She stole something from the sea chest that used to belong to Seamus Ballantyne when she was a graduate student in Liverpool. She killed herself in 1971.’

Degrelle said, ‘And you believe those two events were linked?’

‘I had recent cause to inventory the contents of that sea chest myself. It wasn’t an experience I’d happily repeat.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Kale said.

‘All it means,’ Cooper said, ‘Is that Carrick had a rather morbid taste in screen-savers.’

‘Had?’ Jane Chambers said, ‘past tense, Karl? Do you know something the rest of us don’t?’

He shot her a vindictive look, but did not reply.

‘I’m going to the communications room,’ Napier said. ‘I’m going to have to call this development in.’

‘Good luck getting any sort of a signal in this shit storm,’ Kale said.

‘I have to try. It’s my job. You should all try and do something positive before you turn in tonight. Anything; action is therapeutic.’

Jane said, ‘Have you needed to resort often to therapeutic tasks in the time you’ve been on the Island, Sergeant Napier? Has this assignment been particularly challenging for you and your men?’

Kale said, ‘If you do get through, Napier, ask them will they come and take me off. Assuming we get a window in the weather.’

Cooper said, ‘Are you serious, Jesse?’

‘That guy Blake disappears. Then Napier’s people find a rigid inflatable missing its passengers and crew. Now Carrick vanishes. I’m seeing a pattern here, Karl. I was enthusiastic about the expedition in theory. But there’s a word for the atmosphere in that settlement we toured this afternoon and that word is menacing. The threat was palpable. I believe every one of us felt it. And I’ve no interest in the kind of scholarly triumph that only comes posthumously.’

‘Everything will seem much more mundane again when we find Carrick, alive, well, wind-bedraggled and highly embarrassed at the fuss he’s unwittingly caused. Will you stay if we find him?’

‘Only if we find him alive,’ Kale said.

‘We’ll find Carrick,’ Cooper said. ‘Blake was a classic candidate for suicide. Boats are inherently hazardous in these waters. You wouldn’t want to be out in one now. No one would. But we’ll find Carrick, I’m sure. Anyway, you can’t leave. We’ve only just arrived. The expedition needs you.’

To Lassiter, Degrelle said, ‘I’d like you to tell me about your experience with that sea chest in Liverpool.’

‘Not now, Father. It’s already been a very long day,’ Lassiter said. He was looking at the seated Alice Lang and his face wore an expression of naked concern.

Jane Chambers said, ‘I think you should tell all of us about your encounter with the sea chest, Mr Lassiter. It doesn’t seem either fair or scrupulous to withhold that kind of information.’

‘You’re a virologist,’ Cooper said. ‘You believe in science, not spooks.’

‘I believe in empiricism,’ Jane said. ‘I have an open mind.’

The inference being that you don’t, Mr Cooper, Lucy thought, thinking good for you, Jane, but not really sure where this was all going. As if on cue, thunder boomed right above them. She shivered at the suddenness and loudness of the sound. ‘The book Liz Burrows is holding in that picture seems to be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should all sit around and tell ghoulish stories, until dawn breaks.’