The Colony (20 page)

He knew no more about the vanishing than anyone else did. But he knew quite a lot more than most people about the nature of the community and the character of its charismatic leader. He knew something of the faith they had originated and their religious rituals. He knew what the community had been intending to achieve in its isolation. He knew about the polygamous way in which the community had lived and the customs and practices they had originated.

All of this knowledge was secret. Everything would be revealed only when his own skills had been used to crack the mystery of where the people of New Hope Island had gone. He didn’t want the plaudits for solving the New Hope enigma, so much as he sought closure for his family over their lost loved ones.

This was why, to his own mind, the interview he had given Lucy Church had lain so lifeless on the page when it was written up and printed. He’d come out with some garbage he didn’t believe about an improvised storm-weather shelter subsiding and suffocating them all. He’d played lip-service to Jane Chambers’ epidemic theory. He’d been diplomatic about Cooper’s belief that they had been plucked from earth by inquisitive aliens.

He’d kept quiet about what he really thought because discussing it would have told someone as sharp as Lucy Church was that he knew an awful lot about the New Hope community that simply wasn’t in the public domain.

Much as he admired Cooper as a media role model, Kale thought the man’s New Hope speculations a total crock of shit. He was so unconvinced by the possibility of alien contact, he sometimes watched Cooper wondering whether the man’s whole career was not some elaborate double bluff. It was plausible. It was convincing and it was all very stylishly argued. But essentially it was ludicrous, wasn’t it?

Kale didn’t believe in Alien life, beyond the odd microbe living a bleak amoebic existence on a far flung planet endowed with a bit of frozen hydrogen. Even if you accepted the possibility, why on earth would they travel to earth if they could? If they had that technology, they would be so far advanced intellectually, that they would be to human beings as humans are to slugs.

If NASA had the technology, would they send inter-galactic ships full of scientists off to bring back life forms from Planet Slug? Would they help the denizens of Planet Slug with their building projects? Of course they wouldn’t. What would be the point?

Cooper was an elegant theoriser. But did he really believe this stuff? Kale wasn’t convinced that he did. He had tapped, very lucratively, into the pervasive and growing need to believe in something that could exist in spectacular contrast to the mundane realities of life.

Life for most people, in most cities in most parts of the world, was a homogenised routine of Starbucks and MasterCard and Lexus and cholesterol level maintenance. Karl Cooper gave them something fabulous to speculate on. But intelligent alien visitors were no more a fact of human history than Hogwarts was a real school. That was Kale’s position and he didn’t even consider himself a sceptic on the subject. He was simply a rationalist.

The soil would surrender the secret of New Hope Island. The soil and the rock, the topography, would tell him what he needed to know to put paid to this enduring mystery. He would examine and chisel and dig. He would analyse samples. The science would be painstaking, the study rigorous and the findings definitive. He owed that to history, to his audience and not least, Jesse Kale owed it to his family.

He looked at his wristwatch. It was close to noon. He was in his kitchen, waiting for the coffee to percolate, enjoying his reflection in the polished steel door of his walk-in refrigerator. The tinted contact lenses had been a very good idea. He enjoyed 20-20 vision, but his own eye colour was a more watery blue and these gave his gaze an almost Celtic intensity. He’d been wearing them for the better part of a decade and the appearance they gave him never failed to please.

He still wore his dressing gown. They had enjoyed a late night at a discrete Soho bar. He debated with himself for a moment whether a visit to the gym would be compensation for the empty calories of all the beers he’d sunk the previous evening, or whether it would constitute burning the candle at both ends. He flexed his biceps inside his robe and decided upon the former. With the island coming up and the season being early summer, he really couldn’t be too buff.

First though, he would take Rupert his coffee. That was the one area in which he had signally failed to follow his mentor. He didn’t share Karl Cooper’s tiresomely documented and apparently insatiable appetite for womanising. He did not, frankly, share Cooper’s appetite for woman at all.

Gay men were accepted in media circles. They were probably accepted more freely there than in any other avenue of life except the theatre. But Kale thought his own orientation would play badly with his core audience of billing and cooing housewives. And while gay men could be extremely macho, he did not think the people at Hercules Autos or Tough-Time watches would be too ecstatic at their brand ambassador confessing that he was queer.

He would stay firmly locked in the closet. Rupert, about to be woken to fresh coffee upstairs, would remain under wraps, entirely a confidential subject. Even if he was prepared to come out, Rupert would remain an aspect of his life kept completely private. That was just being sensible, Kale knew, since the age of consent was still somewhat conservative in calendar terms and Rupe was still only 17 years old.

Fortescue took the call because he recognised the name. He knew that the television virologist, Jane Chambers, was going on the New Hope Island expedition. He read the papers. In doing so, in following the story, he had become rather a fan of Lucy Church’s writing in the Chronicle. And of course he had a vested interest in the expedition itself. It was a reluctant interest, but one he’d been unable to deny or effectively ignore since his own fateful close encounter with the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest, five years earlier.

The receptionist said, somewhat sniffily, that the caller sounded like a little girl. But Chambers took up a lot less space than Smith or Jones in the phone book and he had been expecting something, after whatever had afflicted Patrick Lassiter on his visit to the museum. Not a believer in coincidence, he suspected his caller, one Edith Chambers, might have something to do with the photogenic expert on disease whose surname she shared. So he took the call.

‘How can I help?’ he said.

‘I read about you in the Chronicle. You have Captain Ballantyne’s belongings in your basement, Professor Fortescue.’

‘It’s not my basement, not strictly speaking. Can I take it you are Jane Chambers’ daughter, Edith?’

‘I am. I mean in the basement of your museum.’

‘I do. We do. How can I assist?’

‘I rang the Maritime Museum in London. They wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Well, I’m speaking to you. Please call me Philip. How can I assist?’

‘Do you believe in ghosts, Philip?’

Fortescue, who very much believed in ghosts, closed his eyes and gripped the receiver so tightly that the plastic squeaked in his fist. This was a child, for Christ’s sake, a girl of no more than 13 or 14, from the sound of her voice. But some things were beyond decorum or shame. Malevolence did not observe boundaries. ‘Yes, Edith,’ he said. ‘I’ve been given cause to think ghosts could well exist.’

‘Then you might be able to help me.’

She told him about her ghost. She told him about Jacob Parr and about kindly Thomas Horan and Horan’s secret journal and Parr’s urgent instruction that she find the journal somehow and pass it on to her mother. But she didn’t know how to find it. The museum in Greenwich hadn’t put her through to anyone important enough to know whether it was there. She hadn’t got past reception. The British Museum had told her they only corresponded with members of their reading room and those members were all over the age of 18. And they all had account numbers and computer passwords and laminated passes. And Edith had none of those.

‘Who advised you to contact them?’

‘My history teacher, Mrs Atkinson did. I just said I wanted to trace an historical document. I said it was nautical. She’s mad for sources.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Fortescue said. ‘Who suggested you contact us?’

‘That was my own idea. I read about Ballantyne’s sea chest in the Chron. I thought you might be able to help. As a last resort.’

‘Cheers.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry. That was inappropriate. I was being sarcastic.’

‘Well. Adults are, sometimes. Can you help?’

‘There’s something you haven’t told me.’

‘There isn’t.’

‘There’s a detail you’ve left out.’

‘I hate it when adults do this. It’s patronising. I’ve told you everything.’

‘Trust me girl, there’s more.’

‘Girl?’

‘I have a sister not much older than you. A half-sister, actually, but that’s not the point. The point is, you’re not the only adolescent in the universe.’

‘There isn’t anything I haven’t told you.’

‘Does your mother know about Jacob Parr?’

‘Yes. The school told her.’

‘How did the school find out?’

‘Because of the song he taught me.’

Fortescue closed his eyes and smiled. His grip on the phone receiver was sweaty now. He made a deliberate effort to relax it. ‘Tell me about the song, Edith.’

So Edith did. She told him about The Recruited Collier. ‘My music teacher, Mr Clayton, says a lady called Kate Rusby sings the song. She’s quite famous.’

‘The Barnsley Nightingale,’ Fortescue said.

‘Where’s Barnsley?’

‘It’s in Yorkshire, Edith. It’s where I expect you’ll find Thomas Horan. Or rather, you’ll find there anything Horan might have left behind. Horan will have been a Barnsley man. Parr couldn’t tell you. So he gave you a clue.’

‘Why couldn’t he tell me?’

‘We don’t need to concern ourselves with that just now.’

‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’ She sounded suddenly forlorn. ‘My school is in Surrey.I’m 14 years old. I’m a boarder. I can’t possibly go to Yorkshire.’

‘No,’ Fortescue said. ‘But I can.’

Four days before the expedition’s scheduled departure for New Hope seemed rather late to be bringing up the subject of the priestly omission from the team. But Carrick’s professionalism obliged him to do it anyway.

That morning’s editorial conference was the last they would have before the experts assembled at a Heathrow photo-call and the Lear jet chartered to take them to Edinburgh. From Edinburgh a fleet of helicopters would chatter in squadron through the skies, transporting them and their packed and crated gear to the island.

McIntyre was there in person. Sometimes he participated by means of conference call, but did so rarely. This was only the second occasion on which Carrick could remember him having actually attended.

The first had been a few weeks earlier, when their proprietor had announced that the New Hope project was definitely going ahead. Since then, the paper’s circulation had climbed by more than 20 per cent. It had become the market leader and despite persistent spoilers in rival titles, it was holding its ground very firmly.

They had increased their page rate for advertisers by 25 per cent and such was the demand that pagination had almost doubled. They were running at a substantial operating profit. The projected cost of the expedition itself had been covered by the revenue increase within a fortnight of the original announcement being made.

‘You’re absolutely right, James,’ McIntyre said, ‘we should have included an exorcist. One of us should have thought of it. In hindsight, it’s a startling omission.’

‘Diabolical,’ Lucy said.

‘It’s not too late,’ Marsden said.

‘It is,’ Carrick said. ‘Lucy is a bloody good writer, but it’s too late to profile anyone now. It would need to be an in-depth piece. We’d have to debut them to the readership. I can’t think of an exorcist already well enough known to the public. Can anyone else?’

‘We run it as a news story,’ Marsden said. ‘We announce that an exorcist has been parachuted in. We hint that something disturbing or shocking has happened on New Hope Island that’s left us with no choice but to include a heavyweight man of the cloth. We don’t need to be that specific as to what. We just inflate our candidate’s credentials in a separate story on an inside page.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Lucy said.

Thank you, Lucy,’ Marsden said. ‘I want the interview from you you’re doing today with our psychic, by noon tomorrow. And I want a sidebar on this copper, Patrick Lassiter she worked in tandem with. Am I right in saying he’s going to the island, Alex?’

McIntyre said, ‘Your front page exorcist splash is only brilliant if we can find one prepared to do it at three days’ notice. That’s hardly feasible, is it?’

‘It might be,’ Carrick said. ‘There’s a Belgian exorcist who’s been involved in some high profile cases of possession over the years. I think he’s based in North London. He can’t be publicity shy, or I wouldn’t have heard of him.’

Carrick’s use of the double-negative registered with Lucy, who was more fastidious than her immediate boss was about good grammar. So did the name of the priest he was referring to. ‘Father Degrelle,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him in a TV documentary. He’s been on the radio quite a lot too. I think I might have seen him once on Question Time.’

‘He’d do Desert Island Discs if he was asked,’ Carrick said. ‘He’s addicted to publicity.’

‘Then he’ll fit right in with Cooper and Kale,’ Lucy said.

‘And Jane Chambers,’ Carrick said. ‘She’s not exactly been backward in coming forward over recent years, Lucy.’

Marsden said, ‘How do we land Degrelle, at three days’ notice?’

‘We contact his superiors in the Catholic Church hierarchy,’ McIntyre said. ‘I offer to make a substantial donation to the charitable cause of their choice. Theirs is a vast organisation with a constant and pressing need for funds for establishing missions and repairing buildings and remunerating lay staff.’

‘Not to mention paying compensations to child sex-abuse victims,’ Lucy said.