The Colony (31 page)

Kale said, ‘You’re the professional story teller, darling. The rest of us would be at a disadvantage.’

Lucy said, ‘We’re all at a disadvantage until Mr Lassiter tells us about his experience in Liverpool. Jane is right about that.’

‘Tell them, Patrick,’ Alice said. ‘I think they need to know.’

Jane said, ‘And then when you come back from sending your radio bulletin, Sergeant Napier, you can tell us all what it is about this island that’s made a tough man like you so mad keen on therapeutic tricks.’

He was filthy and afternoon had turned to early evening when he emerged from under the ground. His hair was caked in coal dust and his eyes rimed with it. His clothing was stiff with the stuff. He walked the distance to where he had parked his car with his package under his arm, completely oblivious to the people staring at him open mouthed on the pavements of Barnsley on the route.

In modern times the miners had showered after their shift. There was no one left living who remembered men looking like Philip Fortescue did now after a stint at the coal face.

But Fortescue did not think about that. All he thought about was the distance separating him from his flat in Formby. It was about 80 miles and around an hour and a half. It was a short jaunt and the blink of an eye, comparatively speaking. In the last couple of hours he had travelled 200 years back in time to reach something written in another world.

In some ways that world had been quite enlightened. But in other ways it had been quite deliberately dark. Children had manned the trapdoors in the mines meant to prevent the spread and build up of lethal methane gas during brutal shifts of work endured without a break.

That had not been the worst of it. Just how dark that period had been, he thought he would only discover truly when he un-wrapped the journal carried now in oilcloth under his arm.

The giddy thought hit him that he might actually be carrying nothing to do with the ship’s doctor, Thomas Horan. He might just as well be carrying a cache of old newspapers or religious pamphlets. In theory the parcel under his arm could be anything from the period of the south shaft closure at the Elsinore Pit. It could be an inventory of workshop tools or a wages list of the men who had worked there. It could be a print run of election posters dumped by a lazy canvasser.

But it wasn’t, was it. Because he knew that when he had imagined someone singing The Recruited Collier along with him back down there in the darkness under the ground, at that moment when his bowels had threatened to turn to liquid and the sweat had frozen on his forehead, he had not been imagining anything at all. He hadn’t been required to imagine it. The two-part harmony had been sly and sardonic and real.

He would unwrap and read what he’d discovered as soon as he got home. He would not take it to the museum. Generally he did all his serious, scholarly reading at his desk at work in the spacious office he had to himself and which he could lock from the inside because some of the artefacts he handled were so rare and valuable.

In a sense this was a work related find. If he had never accepted his current post, he would not be carrying it now. He owed Edith Chambers’ original call to his position at the museum. He owed Emma Foot’s priceless cooperation to his professorial status and exalted job title. But the methodology of the search and the nature of the object he’d tracked down would always remain a secret.

His experiences since opening the sea chest in the museum basement had made of him a circumspect and superstitious man. He felt that he would be very unwise to try to profit in any way from what Jacob Parr had obliquely led him to. It was not his to profit from. He would derive no academic glory from his discovery. He would read it and then pass it on and he felt truthfully that even reading it was probably a risk he shouldn’t take.

He had to read it, though. He felt his courage under the ground had earned him that privilege. If he read it, its contents might haunt him for the remainder of his life. If he didn’t, his curiosity would certainly torment him for as long as he lived.

He might sit with it in his favourite chair and glance up and see Liz Burrows in her double-button coat under her black bob watching him from across his lounge with a look of mordant disapproval twisting that scarlet mouth.

But he felt that he probably wouldn’t. He had seen less and less of her over recent weeks. He suspected that she must have urgent business elsewhere; someone more deserving than him to haunt. He certainly hoped that she did. Even a glimpse of her unnerved him. Where her ghost was concerned, familiarity would never breed contempt.

Only dread, he said to himself. He looked at his wristwatch. The experts were well and truly on the island, now. They were preparing for their first night under canvas, or the hi-tech modern equivalent. He wondered how Lassiter and the rest were getting on. He liked Patsy Lassiter. He hoped Alice Lang was drawing a happy blank on New Hope with her dangerous psychic gift. He thought inevitably then of Jane Chambers.

He had reached his car. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in, dirtying the fabric of the seat and seat back, smearing both beyond hope of ever being made properly clean again and completely oblivious to the fact. His mind was on Jane as he put her daughter’s prize on the seat beside him. She would be out and about on the island, skipping through the gorse and shingle, clad in one of those padded orange anoraks.

He thought that she was probably the only woman in the world who could make Gore-Tex waterproofs and Timberland boots seem a sexy ensemble. He’d buy the paper in the morning and read the first story proper, see the pictures of their arrival as they exited their helicopters and got down to the business of nailing the New Hope mystery for good and all.

He thought of Seamus Ballantyne, staring bleakly into the distance, awaiting the speck of hope that was his bird while his community became ever more restive in their suffering in the settlement below. He hoped the journal on the seat beside his would be less elliptical than the account he had discovered written on the island, years later.

Patsy Lassiter had said Ballantyne’s bird was a carrier pigeon and Fortescue felt slightly deflated that he had not and never would have worked that one out for himself. He figured the journal written by Horan would be a much more straightforward read. Its contents would lie comfortably within his area of academic expertise. It was intended for Jane Chambers and she was a virologist, a clever woman but a doctor with no claim to the sort of arcane nautical knowledge he possessed.

He indulged the fantasy for a moment of going through it with her, perhaps clarifying its more obscure passages with cogent verbal notes of his own that she would appreciate as her respect and liking for him grew exponentially into something resembling real infatuation.

He sighed, letting this silly daydream go. Then he opened his car’s glove compartment and took out the SatNav and with grimy fingers, tapped in his home address. In the sunlit warmth of its interior, in the early evening sunshine, his car had begun to smell not just like coal, but like a coal mine smelled. It smelled dank and sour and rank and dirty and he didn’t notice this at all.

He switched the ignition on and reached for the radio’s power button and then abruptly changed his mind. Philip Fortescue was prepared to allow the long arm of coincidence to stretch only so far. He could not remember ever having heard The Recruited Collier played on Radio 2. But the station was far from immune to the charms of the Barnsley Nightingale. He had been brave enough for one day. He knew if he heard Kate Rusby launch into the song on the way back to Formby, he might lose not just composure but control of the wheel as well.

Two hours later, he was showered and seated in his favourite chair and had just watched a spoiler bulletin on the TV news about New Hope Island. For once, the station had an item of hard information to compete with what emerged daily on the pages of the Chronicle. A team from an American broadcast channel had been lost off the Hebrides. Their mayday distress signal – the last contact with them – had been made two miles from the west coast of New Hope itself.

They had completely vanished and 48 hours on were believed to be dead, the victims of a freak wave. There was speculation the wash from a super-tanker could have swamped their rigid inflatable. A helicopter search had proven fruitless and though contact with the island was, according to the coastguard sporadic, the expedition security chief, the decorated Afghan War veteran Sergeant Paul Napier MC, was adamant no bodies or wreckage had washed up there.

Fortescue shook his head. He felt a stab of sympathy for Alice Lang. If wreckage did wash up, they would hand a piece of it to her and she might close her eyes holding this fragment and hear the drowning cries of the crew and passengers as they struggled in the freezing water and thought wretchedly of the spouses and children they would never lay eyes on again. The more he thought about it, the more horrible an affliction her gift was and the more Patsy Lassiter had his work cut out taking care of her.

He un-wrapped his oilskin package to reveal a stiff-backed book about a foot wide and fourteen inches high. The cover was marbled and the pages within edged in gold leaf. It was about an inch thick. Horan’s name was written in a bold hand on the flyleaf when he opened the volume, carefully, so that the stiffness of all the time it had spent closed would not crack the spine when he did so.

Being an account of the voyage of the Andromeda, it said on the title page; July 3rd to August 30th in the year of Our Lord, 1794.

Fortescue slipped on his glasses and licked his lips and began to read.

When Napier finished speaking, nobody said anything for a moment. They were still gathered in the recreation suite. His attempt to communicate Carrick’s disappearance to HQ in London had been a frustrating failure. They were completely isolated. None of the radio equipment functioned and no one could get an internet connection and the storm meant that for the present, they were stuck where they were.

The only recreation taking place was alcoholic. Lucy had raided their supplies for a couple of bottles of wine and two six-packs of beer. Everyone except Lassiter had accepted a glass or a can of something.

Cooper spoke first after Napier’s account. He said, ‘It doesn’t really amount to anything. A copper forced into early retirement by a drink problem gets spooked in a museum basement. An ex-soldier undone by battle trauma gets freaked out by a bit of dental enamel. Both of you could do with a dose of objectivity and a healthier perspective.’

‘So what’s happened to Carrick?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, what’s happened to him from your healthy perspective, Karl?’

Lucy said, ‘And who told you about Lassiter’s drinking?’

‘McIntyre did.’

‘You told me you didn’t know Alexander McIntyre.’

‘That was a little white lie.’

‘You denied it on the record.’

‘Nobody likes to be thought of as teacher’s pet.’

‘Deceit seems to come very naturally to you.’

‘I’m like the son he never had to your proprietor. You might want to bear that in mind, Lucy.’

‘You’re disregarding the word I saw written on the hearth when I went to the crofter’s cottage that day with Davis,’ Napier said.

‘If you saw it,’ Cooper said. ‘Davis didn’t see it. If it was there, it was a practical joke, done by one of your own boys, homesick and bored, trying to cheer a bleak situation up with a bit of ghostly mischief.’

‘I think it highly unlikely that Blake would have wrenched out one of his own incisors,’ Jane said. ‘The pain would have been extreme.’

‘He was a suicide,’ Cooper said. ‘Maybe he was a self-harmer, someone who despised himself. You’d have to despise yourself to take your own life. Anyway any other explanation is absurd.’

Kale turned to Alice. He said, ‘Earlier I called the atmosphere at the settlement menacing. I’m interested to know what you made of it.’

‘It didn’t suggest anything specific to me,’ Alice said. ‘The events there are too remote, I think. Beyond a feeling of desolation and gloom there was nothing. And as you remarked, I think we all felt quite similar there. It’s a sombre place.’

‘Except for Karl,’ Jane said. ‘Karl thought it was just like Alton Towers.’

‘Shut up,’ Cooper said. ‘If you can’t say anything positive, just keep your fucking trap shut, Jane.’

Napier said, ‘Why don’t you step outside with me, Mr Cooper? You need to learn good manners. I’ll teach you some.’

‘You’re not taking anyone outside,’ Lassiter said. ‘You’re going to behave professionally. We all are.’

Cooper grinned and pointed at Napier. ‘As soon as we re-establish radio contact, you’re fired,’ he said. ‘You’re history, soldier boy. You’ll be off this island and back in the Job Centre before you fucking know it. You have a great future, guarding the booze aisle at Sainsbury’s.’

‘I’ll hitch a ride out with you,’ Kale said, looking at Napier, ‘if that’s okay.’

Lucy said, ‘This expedition is in crisis. We’ve been here less than 24 hours and already we’re in meltdown.’

‘Our pretty little scribe, panicked into cliché,’ Cooper said.

‘It’ll make good copy,’ Kale said, ‘at least, it will if we ever re-establish contact with the outside world.’

‘We don’t need your waspish little one-liners,’ Lucy said. ‘What we do need is a viable plan of action on which we can all agree.’

Degrelle stood. He said, ‘I’m going to my room.’

‘I don’t think now is the time for sleep, Father,’ Lucy said.

‘I don’t intend to sleep,’ Degrelle said. ‘I intend to pray for James Carrick in the hope of his safe deliverance.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. There’s no need.’

‘Lucy’s right,’ Lassiter said. ‘We need to put our differences aside and agree on a crisis strategy.’

‘We can’t do anything until the storm abates,’ Napier said.

‘We can,’ Jane said. ‘We can stop arguing.’

‘That’s a bloody good idea,’ Cooper said. ‘I for one apologise for what I’ve said tonight. I mean that, folks. I’m sorry. We’re in this together, whatever it is. And we do need some strategic thinking.’