The Penal Colony (7 page)

“Gazzer’s not here, Alex,” Obie said,
apologetically. “He went up Perdew Wood. Him and Tortuga.”

“Who else went up?”

“Bruno, Zombie, Barry, couple of others.”

“Where’s Martinson?”

“In his place.”

“Get him, then. And you, Jez. You go.”

“Take the binocs?” Obie said.

“Sure.”

Obie stood up. “Reckon they got the new meat
yet?”

“Keep an eye out for that and all.”

* * *

Routledge did not stop until, having
scrambled across the warm slabs and boulders of the final outcrop,
he had arrived at the ridge. The climb had exhausted him. His pulse
was racing, fluttering, his heart palpitating, all his internal
warning-systems far into the red zone. In the frenzy of his ascent
he had somehow managed to convert a little of his mental distress
into its physical counterpart, and that was easier by far to
handle.

Panting, wiping his brow, he found himself
looking out over two kilometres or so of uneven gorse and bracken
extending towards the interior of the island. Stretching away
gently downhill, the scrub thickened to a distant stand of trees,
less stunted and wind-formed than those on the cliffs; the main
impression was one of desolation.

He had been hoping for something different:
he was not sure what. By now his hunger was making him
light-headed. This was not a landscape which promised easy
pickings.

He had two choices. He could go inland, or he
could stay with the coast. The sea, if only he could get down to
it, might offer rock-pools with crabs, or limpets which could be
prised off with the knife. And wasn’t seaweed supposed to be
edible? There might also be birds’ eggs on the cliffs: Mitchell,
the third man in the triumvirate, had said something about that.
But surely by now the breeding season was over. Was there a better
chance of finding food inland? Rabbits, perhaps, though they were
also to be found on the cliffs. Last night he had already come
across one warren.

On balance, he decided, the coast would give
more opportunities for finding food. Following the coast would also
enable him to explore the island more systematically and get an
accurate idea of its size. The terrain on the clifftops seemed
marginally easier to traverse.

Unfortunately, for this same reason there was
a greater danger of encountering further outsiders on the cliffs.
The cliffs themselves, by cutting off one line of retreat, would
make it harder for him to evade capture.

A mewing cry above him and to his left caused
him to look up. A large, ragged bird of prey, brown and paler
brown, was soaring on broad, slotted wings, sailing in circles
fifty metres over the scrub. Then he saw there was another beyond,
and another. The first bird was joined by the others and for half a
minute all three engaged in a sort of aerial display during which
some question of pairing or territory seemed to be settled. As the
party split up, one of the birds flew directly over his position,
examining him briefly as it passed.

Routledge realized that, for the last
half-minute, while watching the birds – at first he had taken them
for eagles, but now he thought they must be buzzards – his mind had
been relieved of its preoccupations. For that short but merciful
period he had been allowed to forget himself. The likelihood that
he had already taken leave of his sanity appeared to have receded;
there was still a chance that he would not go mad.

He watched the buzzard’s lazy course towards
the south. With one last wide, graceful circle, it vanished behind
a rise in the land.

Even in the short time since he had left the
rill, a faint white haze had robbed the sky of its clarity. The sun
had become an amorphous region of brilliance, too bright to be
looked at. The breeze had dropped. Without it the air felt close
and sticky.

The Village lay in that direction, south. He
considered returning to the outskirts to do what he should have
done at dawn – make a thorough reconnaissance. What difference
would it make if he were observed by the guards? But then that was
where the outsiders would be concentrating their efforts.
Reconnaissance of the Village could wait a day or two until things
had died down.

He did not know what to do. Still he had no
plan, beyond searching for something to eat.

“Logic,” he said aloud. The cliffs: food, but
danger. Inland: less danger, food uncertain. What was easier to
face at the moment? Hunger, or the chance of getting caught and
killed?

It was easy, after all. Logic dictated that
he should go inland.

Just as he began to move forward again he
noticed that the knife had disappeared.

The sheath was empty. With mounting panic he
searched the pockets of the jacket, knowing perfectly well the
knife would not be there. He saw himself once more down by the
rill, making practice grabs at the hilt, playing the Red Indian:
hadn’t that been at the back of it? God, how ridiculous he was!
Without the knife there was no possibility of food, or of defending
himself from another attack. No self-respecting savage – not even
one of his friends under the cliff – would have made such an
elementary blunder. He had let the bracken take away his most
valuable possession.

He could have dropped it anywhere. There was
no choice but to go back and look. That meant exposing himself to
view for at least three times as long as he should; it meant
leaving a trail three times as prominent as it need have been; and,
what seemed at this moment infinitely worse, it meant making all
over again the wearisome ascent of the hillside. And at the end of
it there was no guarantee he would even be getting the knife
back.

He was again close to tears, but was so angry
with himself that he refused to allow them to come. He could see
that, until now, he had been indulging himself like a child. They
were dead, those two. They’d asked for it, and he’d given it to
them. That was all. It was not in his nature to go around killing
people: there was no need to regard himself as a murderer. No need
for remorse, or self-pity, or anything but relief that he had been
strong and quick enough when the moment came.

Above all, there was no need to let scum like
that bring him down. He was determined to get into the Village.
That was his goal, and they weren’t going to stop him.

Yes. He found he had made the decision to
survive. Perhaps he had made it just now, or perhaps it had been
formed last night, when he had awoken in King’s shack, or when he
had decided to let his urine flow, or on the cliffs, when he had
successfully defended himself against murder. Perhaps the decision
had been reached in stages.

However it had happened, it had changed
entirely the way he perceived his plight. He saw now that state of
mind was just as important as finding the means of physical
subsistence, if not more so. Loneliness, guilt, fear: all these
weakened the will to survive. Even more corrosive was the stupidity
which had already cost him his knife.

As he retraced his path he wondered how many
more such body-blows there would be to his self-esteem. Even after
his experiences in prison, the Anthony John Routledge who had
landed here yesterday had been a man of insufferable conceit. He
was conceited still, so conceited that he was pluming himself with
the thought that he was beginning to come to terms with his fate.
There was no reason to suppose he was doing anything of the kind,
or that the violent fluctuations in his mental state would not
continue or get worse, plunging him yet deeper into derangement and
despair.

The idiocy with which he had behaved so far
appalled him. First, he had muffed the interview with Appleton. No
– even before that, he had wasted the time he had spent with King.
Then he had failed to make a proper reconnaissance of the Village.
After that he had literally allowed two outsiders to catch him
napping. Finally, and most shameful of all, he had lost the
knife.

Was this the same man who had held such a
high opinion of himself on the mainland, who had silently sneered
at and looked down on everyone else? What must he have been like at
home, with Louise? Or in the office? In his everyday dealings with
people in shops, on the telephone, everywhere?

The bracken was not menacing, or merciless,
or anything but a living organism doing its best to look after its
own interests. It had not taken his knife. He had, moron that he
was, simply gone and lost it, and now he was having to pay the
price.

To be entrusted with Peto’s binoculars was a
sign of high rank at Old Town. Obie, lying flat on his stomach,
Martinson on his left, Brookes on his right, was making the most of
it.

The binoculars had once belonged to a man
named Barratt; Peto had acquired them during the war with Franks.
They were small and squat, covered in green rubber. A red badge on
the front said
Leitz
in white script. They magnified by a
factor of eight, and even now, having circuitously arrived in
Peto’s hands, and after several subsequent years of hard use, they
were in perfect working order. More than once the binoculars had
saved Peto’s skin, or given him advantage over Houlihan or one of
the others who had been and gone.

Obie turned the focusing wheel and again
brought the lenses and prisms to bear on the rooms below the
gallery.

“Let’s have a go,” Brookes said.

“In a bit.”

Obie and his two companions had taken up a
position on the cliffs overlooking Angara Point and the lighthouse,
four hundred metres east of the light and about a hundred above it.
Seen from here, the upper part of the structure was set against the
sea, the rest against the brambles, turf and rocks of the cliffs.
The base of the lighthouse was about fifty metres above high water
mark. Beyond it, the rest of Angara Point extended, in a broken
group of outcrops and islands, another three hundred metres out to
sea.

Once pure white, the walls of the lighthouse
were now streaked and stained with rust from the twisted remnants
of the gallery, and blotched with scabrous patches where the
rendering had fallen away; none of the windows in the turret had
survived.

At one time a deep-cut concrete road had led
up to the light from a jetty in Crow Bay, but Houlihan had
half-filled the road with rocks to make it impassable and secure
his defences on that side. A number of sheds and other buildings,
more or less temporary, had surrounded the lighthouse. All had been
demolished or burned.

“In’t that Feely?” Martinson said.

“Where?”

“On the helicopter pad.”

Obie switched to the old asphalt landing pad,
now covered with weeds and tufts of grass. A bald man in a red
shirt was climbing the steps leading to the lighthouse door.

“Yeah. That’s him.”

Martinson’s eyesight was impressive. Obie
looked aside from the binoculars. Without them he could hardly even
make out Feely at all.

“The old stonk,” Martinson said.

“I wouldn’t put it past him to have had that
goat,” Brookes said.

“Boffed him, you mean?” Martinson said. “No,
I wouldn’t put it past him, neither.”

Feely, so named for his wandering fingers,
belonged to what Houlihan called his “brain gang”, three or four
advisers who lived with him in the lighthouse itself.

The rest of the lighthouse citizens were
consigned to the “tombs” – small, dome-shaped dwellings made of
stone, scrap iron or timber, roofed with wood and turf. Nineteen of
these structures were grouped around the light, and another
thirty-two a little further down, by the well. They varied in size,
housing between one and five men: most held two or three. At any
one time about a quarter were in disrepair.

Billy was not on view. There was nothing
unusual about the scene, nor even any clue that the atrocity had
been committed. Two men were prodding with hoes at Houlihan’s
vegetable garden; another had just milked his white goats. The rest
of the lighthouse goats were feeding on the cliffs above Crow Bay
and in the designated areas beyond. Billy was not among them.

“They’ve got him under cover,” Brookes
said.

“My turn,” Martinson said, holding out his
right hand for the glasses.

Obie, and Brookes, decided not to argue. Like
a number of people on the island, Martinson was a psychopath: at
least, that was the conclusion Obie had reached after long
acquaintance with the man. He was supposed to have murdered
seventeen women, though the total kept increasing. Martinson
himself had never spoken of his crimes, and no one wanted to
ask.

Obie watched him adjusting the focus. Despite
his usual laconic, easy-going manner, Martinson was one of the few
white men Obie really feared. He was well over one ninety, more
like one ninety-five, with massive shoulders and long, powerful
arms and legs. The word was that he had Swedish blood, even though
he had reddish blond hair and a pale complexion, rather like
Franks, who came from County Cork. Martinson could well have been
Irish too, though he spoke with a Birmingham accent. Or perhaps he
was of Danish origins. The way he wore his hair, in flowing locks
tied up with leather braids, and the abundance of his mattress-like
beard, reminded Obie of the lunatic death-dealing Norsemen,
insanely brave, whose longboats had brought terror to the English
coast. His taste in garments had something of the Viking about it
too. He would have looked good in a horned helmet, carrying off the
head man’s daughter.

Obie had never known Martinson to have
anything to do with sex. He lived alone in his hut. For food he
relied mainly on hunting. Rabbits he chased and killed with a
mallet, an amazing feat of agility for so big a man. In season he
ate eggs, young puffins and shearwaters, and fulmars, kittiwakes
and guillemots from the cliffs. He also made regular excursions to
the Village to steal their stock. In addition he received, from the
other towners, occasional Danegeld of oatmeal or vegetables.