The Colony (8 page)

Old folk songs mordantly sung at sunset by singers who weren’t there and clay pipes smoked by phantoms were probably only the start of things. There would be wraiths in moonlight, the weeping of infants carried on a midnight wind. There would be the creak of spectral vessels approaching the shore. It would scare the shit out of the assembled experts and their contagious fear would afflict the readers of McIntyre’s paper as they shuddered, reading it over their bowls of muesli or aboard their commuter trains on the way to work.

It was the most plausible explanation. It was quite a seductive theory. He had experienced only the tentative rehearsals for the bogus haunting to come. McIntyre had employed a crack team of special effects people and they were already secretly occupying the island, perfecting their smaller turns and preparing the larger set-pieces for when the show properly began.

It was always tempting to believe what was rational. The human mind was too tidy for ready acceptance of the inexplicable. What was inexplicable generally became unpredictable and from there it was a very short step indeed to uncontrollable. People liked to be in control. It was a lot safer than the alternative. And they liked to be able to determine events for themselves. Surprises, once a person achieved adulthood, were almost always of the unpleasant variety.

But despite agreeing intellectually with all of this, Napier did not really buy the plausible explanation for the mysterious oddities he had heard and smelled and seen and touched since arriving on New Hope Island. In his past, before he lost his self-respect and his professional status in the world, he had been a highly trained and formidable soldier; an expert at tracking and concealment, someone who could live covertly in hostile terrain for as long as a mission took to successfully complete.

Blake and the Seasick Four were the only other human beings on the island. If it had any other mortal inhabitants, he would have detected the evidence of their presence by now. He would have sensed their spoor, even if they hid themselves, in the manner of the predator he used to be. He was certain of this, even if it was not a terribly comfortable conclusion to have reached. Did it mean then that he now had to believe in ghosts? He had never done so before. But he thought that in that small and barren place, with its mysterious past, he might over the coming days and weeks, have to accommodate the possibility.

The nights, he muttered to himself. The days would likely be alright. The nights, however, he thought might prove to be altogether trickier.

Lucy asked Karl Cooper would he mind if she taped the interview. He was a media veteran and she could think of no conceivable reason why he should object to the recording, but asking was a necessary courtesy and she’d decided a sort of exaggerated professionalism might be the best way to get her subject to drop his guard. He was a vain man. That was her instinct. He would relax into himself if made to feel important. Pandering to his substantial ego was the admission price paid for entering his comfort zone.

‘Have you always believed in alien life?’

‘Certainly I have for as long as I can remember.’

‘How did that belief originate?’

He smiled. He said, ‘to paraphrase a far more eminent scientist than I will ever be, I always thought that the universe to be not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’

‘Haldane, the biologist,’ Lucy said.

‘Very good, you’ve done your research.’

‘So you assume the aliens are superior to us intellectually?’

‘That’s a given,’ Cooper said. ‘If they’ve been here, and I believe they have, then in order to get here, they have to possess technologies light years ahead of ours.’

‘Pun intended?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So at a young age you decided that there was compelling evidence of alien life. And then you concluded that those aliens had visited earth?’

‘No. It was really the other way around. I looked, as a child, at the anomalies of history. The Aztecs constructed buildings of breathtaking intricacy yet an invention as fundamental as the wheel apparently never even occurred to them. Colossal sarsens hewn from a Welsh quarry somehow got to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire to form Stonehenge; a structure of such geometric complexity we still debate its true purpose. Hauled there by Bronze Age man? Erected by Bronze Age man? I don’t think so. I could go on. But your readers have most of them heard me argue this stuff already on their television screens.’

‘Yet the general level of scepticism concerning alien life remains high.’

‘Does it? It might at the shabbier end of media, Lucy. It might in the halls of academe. It might among the scientific community, though that hasn’t been my personal experience. My peers don’t regard me as a laughing stock.’

‘I didn’t for a moment mean to imply they did, Professor Cooper.’

‘Karl, Lucy. Please. And anyway, I suspect the scepticism is a recent thing. You know about the ancient temple at Alexandria, about the library there?’

‘It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.’

Cooper nodded. ‘The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn’t for centuries.’

‘It burned down. The knowledge was lost.’

‘And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That’s the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and assembled it there?’

‘A blueprint for civilization, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?’

Cooper smiled. ‘I could hardly have put it better myself,’ he said.

The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. ‘Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.’

Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.

‘What do you think of that theory?’

‘I think that she’s entitled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.’

‘Have you discussed it with her?’

‘No.’

‘But you do know her?’

Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, ‘You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you’re aware of the answer already.’

‘It’s something you don’t wish to talk about?’

‘It’s a subject I can’t talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would’ve made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that’s off the record, by the way. I can’t and won’t talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.’

Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject’s patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.

‘Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?’

Cooper didn’t answer her for a long time. Then he said, ‘Perhaps Jane’s right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It’s possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn’t expected.’

‘You don’t for a minute believe that.’

‘No. I don’t. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.’

‘Then why were they taken?’

‘I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.’

‘But to what purpose, Karl?’

‘I don’t know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don’t know. It’s exactly what I’m going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won’t rest once I get there until I’ve succeeded in doing so.’

It was Lucy’s turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing platitudes about his jilted lover. I don’t like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He’s dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.

Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter’s boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.

She wouldn’t like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn’t exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.

A breakthrough such as she thought New Hope Island might offer would not exactly make her indispensible to her day to day employers, but it almost would. And it would place her at the front of the queue of medically qualified presenters when new TV programme ideas were being pitched. It was not a case of ego, but of necessity. There were times when a woman had to do what a woman had to do and for Jane, this was one of them.

The day had started badly. She had opened the newspaper in Costa over her habitual flat white and seen the splash on Karl Cooper with the picture by-line above it of the smiling Lucy Church. Smiling and increasingly prolific, she thought, folding the paper and consigning it to a rubbish bin without further study of the piece. She knew all she ever wanted to know about Karl Cooper. Her confrontation with Edith was going to make the day painful enough without exposing herself again to past emotional bruises.

She had failed in her relationships with men. That was the brutal truth of the matter. She hadn’t brought enough to the party. Neither was she a very good mother, she didn’t think. On the day their divorce had been finalised, Edith’s father had sent her a text message saying that she lacked the gift for intimacy most people who commit to marriage seem naturally to possess. She thought when she considered this, that it was a harsh judgement but probably also true.

Edith was 14 now. Jane had given birth to her too young. She had only been 18, practically a child herself. She had married. She had continued with her education. Her parents-in-law had seen more of her daughter than she had in those early years of Edith’s infancy. Her father, Michael, had been reduced to the role of a house husband during the first, hectic, burgeoning years of Jane’s professional success. And then six years ago he had packed his bags and left. And then when she reached eleven, as soon as it did not seem actually to construe an act of child cruelty, Jane had despatched Edith off to school.

A failed wife and a neglectful mother reminded of her own gullibility in love prior to setting out to break her daughter’s heart over a summer of callous abandonment. It was fair to say that Jane was not having one of her best mornings. She was wondering what else could possibly go wrong when she was pulled over by a police patrol car for doing 40 in a 30 mile an hour zone.

She could have wept. But the officer driving the car recognised her from the telly and asked her for an autograph and gave her only a telling off pitched between sternness and flirtation. She tried to tell herself this reprieve was the start of better things, but then drove the remainder of the journey cautiously and with a heavy heart at how she thought Edith was likely to react to the news of her plans for the summer.

Her first appointment at the school was not with Edith but with the pastoral carer, Mrs Sullivan, who wanted to raise a matter she had claimed was too delicate and confidential for discussion over the phone.

Jane didn’t think it worth speculating on the nature of whatever it was her daughter had done to earn Mrs Sullivan’s attentions. She considered the school’s pastoral arm an unnecessary concession to political correctness. The woman herself was a bit of a jobs-worth with a manner that had always seemed to Jane both pompous and condescending. The refusal to disclose details over the phone was entirely characteristic. Edith was a good girl, moral and rather serious and not given to delinquency. At least, that was how she had been a few weeks ago at Easter, when her mother had last had her at home.

The school was neo-Gothic, set in grounds that sumptuously reflected the fees paid by the parents of the pupils there. Raked gravel crunched under Jane’s tyres along the neat drive stretching from the pillared and gated main entrance. She was shown into Mrs Sullivan’s office after only a short wait. She was aware of heavy furniture, a tall arched window, the smell of freshly cut flowers and carpet pile deep under the soles of her sensible shoes. She was invited to sit on a leather Chesterfield under a portrait of the school’s proto-feminist founder. Mrs Sullivan, tall and slender, was more glamorous but even more grave, if possible, than she remembered.

In a brief preamble, Jane declined tea, coffee and water and allowed that the current spell of good weather was indeed very agreeable. There followed a moment of silence. Footsteps carried on the parquet in the corridor outside, their progress along it sounding suitably urgent. The school encouraged an air of purposeful industry.

‘I want to talk to you about your daughter’s musical gift.’

‘Edith doesn’t possess a gift for music, Mrs Sullivan. She is 14. If she did, it would’ve manifested itself before now.’