The Colony (42 page)

Websites reinforcing this fallacy have been set up in honour of Cooper and Kale. They are viewed as fitting ambassadors for earth on other planets, heroes who will one day return to a triumphant reception from a world grateful for their diplomatic efforts on humanity’s behalf.

Were a poll to be taken in the average British pub, most of those casting votes would confidently agree that aliens were involved in both sets of New Hope disappearances. It just seems, to most people, more plausible than the darker and disturbing alternative. Human nature is optimistic. It seeks a happy ending. That’s why we’re attracted to the light.

Lillian Carrick moved in with the Chronicle’s editor, Marsden, three months after the island survivors limped into the port of Mallaig aboard McIntyre’s elderly tub of a fishing boat.

Stories of a whirlwind romance convinced none of the staff on the paper. Eventually the widow Carrick confessed that their affair had been going on for four years and she’d been on the verge of demanding a divorce. A lawyer had already been consulted by the time of her husband’s reluctant departure for New Hope.

McIntyre failed to see the funny side of this revelation. He sacked his editor. The Chronicle did not champion Victorian values in the manner of some of its more sanctimonious rival titles. But its proprietor, Karl Cooper apart, regarded himself as a shrewd judge of character. He had liked James Carrick and considered him a decent man deserving of a better domestic epitaph than the one allowed him by his faithless wife.

Those who survived the New Hope expedition are reluctant to discuss it and consistently vague on the detail. Philip Fortescue has attained a degree of academic notoriety for being the man who discovered the journal written by Thomas Horan. He’s become a popular talking head on more serious-minded TV programmes whenever maritime history or customs are discussed. Jane Chambers jokes that when they go out to dinner, her boyfriend is recognised in restaurants almost as often as she is.

Edith Chambers already calls him her wicked step-dad. Fortescue is young enough to understand that this is doubly a compliment. He is considering a job at the Greenwich Museum that would put him in closer proximity to Jane and her pushy, infuriating, adorable daughter. A pragmatic man most of the time, he would also like to put a few substantial miles between himself and the sea chest stored in the basement of the place where he currently works. It’s just a bit too close to him for comfort.

He could keep in touch with his roots. He still has the babe magnet car his brother sold him, when necessary, to get him back and forth to Liverpool.

He drove it over the Pennines to Barnsley a few weeks after returning from his sea voyage to New Hope. He had a promise to keep to an amateur historian there and remains a man always insistent on keeping his word.

He was not surprised at all to discover that the synopsis written by Emma Foot was thorough, well-organised and suggested her account of mining in the locality at the time of the Industrial Revolution would turn out to be an impressive piece of scholarship. He made a few suggestions. He further promised to look at the first draft of the book as soon as she’s completed it.

He has only the vaguest recollection of what happened in the windowless church. He cannot recall anything in detail about the appearance of the creature he confronted. He had faithfully learned the words of the ritual. He had prepared to recite them and he remembers feeling as much indignant, when he entered the darkness, as he was afraid. He was steeled for the confrontation.

But when he began to speak, his voice possessed a power and fluency not quite his own. And his body dictated movement to him over which he felt he had little if any control at all. It was as though his steps and gesticulations were somehow choreographed. There was a weird absence of self-will in this performance, almost suggestive of puppetry.

He chooses not to dwell on it, but suspects he was given crucial help from somewhere or more accurately, given help from someone, obliged to wait two remorseful centuries to be given the chance to offer it.

None of the survivors would ever return. The ritual invoked seemed to have the effect that Thomas Horan’s sorcerer had said it would, on the demon he brought into being and described as spite made flesh. But nothing was done about the spectre David Shanks shot with his cine camera there in 1934.

Everyone who has seen it thinks the film is genuine. None of them doubts that the child is a ghoulish doppelganger of long-dead Rachel Ballantyne. No one can explain the spectre in any other, convincing way. The resemblance probably grows less acute as the years pass and take their physical toll on this restless apparition. But she is a baleful spirit and her antic ways would make the island an unnerving place on which to try to settle.

Wind howls through the empty New Hope settlement, even in the most innocent summer weather. The church without windows remains an unhappy construction. It was built in desperation for a bleak and bloody purpose. Around it, anguish seems to seep through the very stones of the dwellings that once housed the vanished community. It is a place as if in mourning for its own tormented passing. It seems not quite capable of peaceful repose. It is, somehow, unstill.

There is also the question of the crofter David Shanks. Or more pertinently, the vexed question of the place he built and for a short time, lived in. Passing boats have reported seeing lights on at night in the vicinity of his cottage. The island has no known inhabitants. The lights could be fishermen’s lanterns except that the surf is too high on the stretch of beach near the cottage for the casting of lines to be practical there. And what promise of a catch would tempt an angler to so remote and inhospitable a location?

Alexander McIntyre believes the island is entitled to keep its remaining mysteries unsolved. This is the view too of Paul Napier, who now heads up McIntyre’s security team. Chief Inspector Patrick Lassiter, invited by the Met to rejoin the force as part of its cold case review section, heartily agrees.

Lives were lost on the New Hope Island expedition and lives were rediscovered. For some it was a tragedy and for others a sort of rebirth. It was an experience that forged friendships and fostered romance and taught people much they did not know about themselves. Some lost everything and some benefitted immeasurably from their participation. But none of those who lived through it all would ever dream of going back there.