The Colony (3 page)

‘This story will cost him a fortune to orchestrate,’ Lucy said, after Carrick had told her about the array of experts on board and the security team already on their way to New Hope.

‘I think it will show a profit,’ Carrick said. ‘It’s a world exclusive.’

‘Only if it’s got the legs to run,’ she said.

‘It’s your job to help give it the legs. I want a thousand words for tomorrow’s edition on the human tragedy of the lost pioneers. Or lost apostles, or missionaries or whatever you think calling them will generate the most sympathy.’

She smiled at him. ‘Did you ever have a single thought that wasn’t a cliché, James?’

‘Not knowingly,’ he said.

‘It’s hard enough to evoke sympathy for last week’s earthquake victims. The whole world has compassion fatigue, our dwindling readership in particular. It’s almost impossible to humanise a community that died out two hundred years ago.’

‘Particularise it. Take a single family, a single child. We’ll illustrate it with contemporary etchings of swaddled babies with dimpled cheeks and cute milkmaids. Hand carved crosses above infant peasant graves bearing pitiful misspellings.’

‘For God’s sake, James.’

‘Quote some really sentimental poetry or a folk ballad from the period about someone’s lost sweetheart.’

‘You’re teaching me to suck eggs.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do it, Lucy, no one can.’

She grimaced. Although she was concealing it well, she was actually thrilled to be going to New Hope. It was summer, so the days would be long and the nights short and, she hoped, the weather merciful. The fact that Carrick had hand picked her for the job was a testament to her own political skill.

On her arrival at the paper nine months earlier, he had judged her on her leather jacket and jeans and her American Spirit cigarettes and the Zippo lighter she habitually lit them with. He really did think in clichés, which could be an asset in a features editor. But he had categorized her as a flinty exhibitionist.

She felt she had a right to her own dress code and bad habits and her own personality too. Being a journalist was no longer the respected profession it had once been, but neither was it penal servitude. She had a talent for empathy. She had it because she genuinely liked and was interested in real people. She was intrigued by their diversity and sometimes inspired by their independence and courage.

Send her to interview a brainless celebrity and the resulting piece would lie dead on the page. Send her to interview a Moss Side paramedic or a soldier maimed by a roadside IED in Afghanistan and she would return with something memorable. People sensed that she wasn’t just going through the motions with them and responded to that. There was nothing voyeuristic about her reportage. It had taken a while for this penny to drop with Carrick, but the New Hope assignment was solid proof that it finally had.

The array of experts recruited for the expedition was termed by Carrick, a team. That was a description Lucy thought likely to prove a hopeless misnomer. Each of them would compete to provide the most plausible and compelling answer to the mystery. That was only human nature.

It was her experience that highly qualified people were generally vain. In competition with other highly qualified people in other fields, they were likely to become hostile and insecure. She thought the resultant antics likely to make entertaining copy.

‘Are you going to have to shift a lot of domestic stuff around to make the trip?’

‘You mean am I screwing anyone?’

‘I don’t necessarily mean that.’

‘You know I’m not married, James. And you know I have no children to arrange care for. So I think that’s exactly what you mean.’

Carrick rewarded her with a blush. It wasn’t the full beetroot, but it was there.

‘Shame on you,’ she said. ‘Really, James, when I’ve met your wife and everything.’

She felt good teasing him. He’d given her a hard time on the basis of prejudice and preconception. It was both revenge and a bit of fun. She was in a very good mood. She was really excited at the idea of the expedition and not just because of the human interest angle.

She had been fascinated by the New Hope Island mystery since first reading about it as a little girl. She had come across the story at the age of eight in an old copy of Readers Digest. She had kept that issue, almost wearing it out studying and re-studying the account of the disappearance, its inexplicable abruptness, its enduring questions and the total failure of anyone to come up with a plausible explanation.

It had not frightened her. Not even the creepy anecdote at the end about the war hero crofter spooked by an apparition on the Island in the 1930s had frightened her. It had stayed in her memory, though. She had never forgotten it.

‘I’d better go and make a start on that piece,’ she said, looking at her watch.

‘Break a leg,’ Carrick said.

It was Paul Napier’s considered view that the five blokes he had the misfortune to be among were complete idiots. They had made the crossing aboard a chartered boat. He supposed it had once been a trawler, before the EU fishing quotas forced the men who hauled the nets to find another occupation.

The bloke in the wheelhouse had to be an ex-trawler man. You could tell by his attitude to the cold. He didn’t feel it. Sure it was June, but it was also the Atlantic Ocean, with the Scottish mainland dwindling in the distance. They were well north and the onshore wind was brisk. Yet their steersman had manned the wheel wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt.

Four of the blokes, the four who looked like failed nightclub bouncers, spent the crossing puking over the gunwale. They stared at the water as they did so with increasingly glassy eyes, watching it roll greenly and so making their sea sickness worse. Napier did not offer them any constructive advice on the subject. He was too disgusted at their inexperience.

The fifth idiot was their leader, Captain Blake. He insisted on the title of Captain, even though his regular forces days were a long way behind him and security was a low-rent, civilian occupation, largely the province of men like those who’d done the puking. There was no prestige, no honour, bugger-all camaraderie and not much money to compensate for the other indignities when you got your pay at the end of the month.

Blake had made the crossing with his lips pursed and a sour expression wrinkling his nose. Napier thought he was probably disappointed he wasn’t in the prow of a rigid inflatable with a Heckler and Koch nestled between his hands.

After they had navigated the breakwater and docked, Napier and Blake had to do most of the gear unloading because the others were too weakened by puking to help. They sat on the cobbled quay, retching and gobbing and generally getting their land legs back while the boat skipper helped the two of them still able-bodied to recover their stuff from the hold.

There was a crofters’ cottage on the Island, they had seen an aerial reconnaissance photo of it at the briefing. There were remaining huts from the original settlement that could also have provided shelter. But all of these structures formed parts of the site and they were under strict instructions not to contaminate the site. So they needed their tents, because the nights in the exposure of this low lying island could be cold enough to inflict hypothermia, even in the summer months.

Blake took out a compass. In a minute, Napier thought, he’s going to take out a tube of cam cream and start to smear it over his face.

‘What do you reckon, Napier?’

‘I reckon it’s almost dark, Captain.’ They had been forced to wait for the gale force weather of the morning to blow itself out before crossing. ‘I’d say we’ve got another half an hour or so of light. We should choose a piece of high ground and rig the tents before we lose it altogether.’

Blake gestured towards the men on the cobbles with a flick of his head. He nodded towards a gentle embankment a hundred metres away with another. ‘These boys can erect the tents and then recover with a brew. We’ll walk the Island perimeter. Arriving at night is never ideal unless it’s an assault you’ve got planned.’

Napier wondered what they might assault. Perhaps Blake was thinking puffins.

‘We should patrol the island perimeter. What say you?’

I hate everything about this fucker, Napier thought. I even hate his fucking phraseology. What he said was, ‘Your call, Captain.’

The island was roughly diamond shaped. The makeshift harbour where they had disembarked, and it was very makeshift, was naturally to the east, facing the direction of the mainland forty miles away. Given that the prevailing winds were westerly, it was the most sheltered spot the island offered for docking. The settlement of New Hope was at the Island’s centre, on ground that was exposed because it was relatively high. But the original settlers had needed the drainage gravity provided. So they had been obliged to tolerate the exposure of their hamlet to the elements.

David Shanks’ ill-fated crofter’s cottage was at the southern apex of the island. Sunlight had been his logic. He had anticipated growing things and the sun shone longest and brightest there. As Blake led their counter-clockwise trudge around New Hope, Napier wondered had shell-shock or battle trauma generally not clouded Shanks’ judgement of his prospects. This place was surely too bleak to endure living on alone.

The sods were soft under Napier’s booted feet. ‘There’s peat here,’ he said, surprised. The sea was to his right. In the darkening light it looked almost purple and gnarled with foam at its crests and altogether gigantic.

‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Blake said.

Napier thought the suggestion that he might like Captain Bollocks even a tiny little bit totally outrageous. He also thought it wise to keep his own counsel. He needed this job. He had fucked up a lot of jobs in quick succession and badly needed the money from this one, piss- poor as it was.

‘Marines and Paratroopers, Captain,’ Napier said. ‘The rivalry’s a tradition.’

‘That would be Royal Marines,’ Blake said.

Proving my point, Napier thought, you twat. The ground was surprisingly tricky underfoot. It was inconsistent. It was almost shifty in its character, he thought. It betrayed your weight.

‘I don’t give a shit whether you like me or not,’ Blake said. ‘It’s immaterial. Just don’t let the animosity interfere, Napier. Those four jokers we left struggling with the physics of a couple of frame tents back at the camp are about as useless as useless gets. If push comes to shove, watch my back and I’ll watch yours. Okay?’

‘With you all the way on that one, Captain,’ Napier said. And he was. Blake was right. The Sea Sick Four, as they would now remain collectively in his mind, were worse than useless.

It was fully dark now and not really dark at all. The sky was vast, moon and starlight reflected back off the glittering water of the ocean, the land mass relatively flat and so space all around them and this naked, empty exposure illuminated by a sort of monochromatic light.

It was a place like no other he had experienced before. On the skin, with the temperature and wind and salt prick, it felt a bit like parts of Scandinavia he had been to on manoeuvres back in the day. But you were never far from the scent and shade of trees in Norway and he had seen no trees at all so far on New Hope.

They walked. They did so in silence. But the silence felt slightly more companionable than it had. Napier had not exactly bonded with Blake, you did not bond with a man like Captain Bollocks, but their shared contempt for the Sea Sick Four elevated them to a level of shared professionalism and was at least one thing they could get through this particular job without arguing about.

Decisions needed to be made about inept people. Did you try to train them up? Or did you just task them with trivia? These were matters that would need to be discussed and agreed upon.

He could not have said at what point he became aware of the music. It sort of insinuated itself into his mind to the extent where he was almost singing along with it before it consciously impinged upon his hearing, rather than just his thoughts.

He stopped. ‘Hear that?’

Blake stopped in front of him. Napier saw the Captain’s shoulders tense. He was missing his firearm. He was a man who, in civilian life, always would. ‘I don’t hear anything. What is it?’

Maybe it was drifting on the wind from a fishing boat out there, Napier thought. Sound could carry without distortion an improbably long way over the sea. It could travel for a dozen miles with uncanny clarity. But it wasn’t coming from that direction, was it? It was coming from a spot just over a ridge to his left, to landward. And with a feeling of something akin to dread, Napier knew that he recognised the song.

‘Answer me, Napier,’ Blake said, ‘what do you think you can hear?’ His voice was low and urgent.

Napier walked up close to him. ‘Song,’ he murmured, ‘the sound of a human voice. Listen.’

Blake did. Then he shook his head impatiently. Very quietly, he said, ‘It’s your imagination.’

But Napier knew that it wasn’t. ‘I’m a Kate Rusby fan,’ he said.

‘Never heard of her.’

‘She’s a folk singer, the Barnsley Nightingale. Don’t you like music?’

Blake shrugged. ‘Phil Collins,’ he said, ‘a bit of Whitney.’

But what Napier was hearing wasn’t Phil Collins or Whitney. It was a folk ballad. Kate Rusby sang a lot of old ballads and sea shanties. The one Napier recognised now was called The Recruited Collier. It had been written during the Napoleonic Wars. But it wasn’t Kate singing it. It was being sung unaccompanied by a male voice in a sly and insinuating croon from the other side of the ridge. The melody wavered. The voice had a confidential quality that made it unpleasant to listen to. There was a repellent insistence to it as it quietly repeated the chorus.

‘I’ll take a look,’ Napier said. He did not really want to. He had never believed in phantoms. But he dreaded what he might see over the lip of that rise. It was the accent the singer pronounced the phrases in. It was the dialect of a remote time, when the song was still fresh. Napier was sure of it. After the two centuries elapsed since then, he did not think the singer would look fresh at all.