The Colony (35 page)

The work was routine and repetitious and he thoroughly enjoyed losing himself in the completion of it. He prided himself on causing no unnecessary damage or upheaval to a site. He worked fastidiously and was scrupulously neat and always methodical. He scented the rich aroma of peat growing stronger as the turf was lifted in strips that were then carefully rolled at the edge of what would become eventually a dig.

He looked up because he noticed that the birds were no longer singing. The area around the peat bog had grown totally quiet. It had also grown very still. Wind had been a feature of the island since his arrival. Now it had died down completely. He thought this unusual for the Hebrides. He blinked and looked at his wristwatch and saw that two hours had elapsed since his arrival there.

He thought sombrely for a moment about those ancestors of his own who might lie beneath this black earth. He thought about the bleak obedience of their lives and about the bloody deaths they might have endured because of Ballantyne’s cruel and barbaric system of belief.

He would discover the truth. It was the real reason he had come. There would be a measurable benefit to his unravelling the enigma of the vanishing. There was far more to it for him that the kudos and notoriety the other expedition members sought.

His fame and his sexuality had become obstacles in his relationship with his family and with his father in particular. Daniel Kale was an austere and academically inclined man uncomfortably with both his son’s celebrity and his predilection for other men. When Kale solved the mystery of how their New Hope ancestors had died, his dad would see him in a completely different way. He would be grateful and impressed. The achievement would warm his cold heart, wouldn’t it? It would thaw their frozen feelings for one another.

After three hours of deliberate and dogged work on the site, he decided he would eat some lunch. His stomach was growling emptily. The temptation was to work on in a state of excitement, but he had to resist that. Frenetic was fine for those hit feature films in which Harrison Ford had made his occupation glamorous. It did not do for real life. Haste was amateurish and made you miss or overlook significant clues. He went and sat back in the Land Rover and took the sandwiches he had prepared in the compound galley that morning out of the glove compartment.

He poured a cup of Earl Grey tea from the flask he had brought for himself, rather than the one he had filled with Bovril and boiling water in the hope he should come across James Carrick. He sipped tea and bit into a sandwich filled with strong Scottish Cheddar and wished that he had a radio to listen to. It was impossible to sing, even difficult to hum, through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

The sun was strong overhead. Heat was drowsy through the windscreen. He thought he might snatch a short nap before continuing, once he had finished his lunch. He had turned in late the previous evening. They all had. He had done so after several more beers than he would normally consume. He did not feel exactly hungover. He felt good and positive. But he also felt a little bit sleepy and thought that a twenty minute power nap would give him an energy and alertness that was currently slightly lacking in him.

He woke up suddenly and completely disorientated. It had grown gloomy outside. The Land Rover’s roof was up; he could hear rain pattering gently on the canvas. It had become chilly and overcast and there was somebody sitting beside him. There was a strong smell of loam and something else he thought might be camphor or fish oil.

The person beside him was a little girl, ragged in a shawl, wind-bedraggled and smiling. Her teeth were a snarled jumble and her eyes no more than empty sockets, when he looked. She said, ‘I like games, Mr Kale. Will you play with me?’

Her voice sounded deep, dragged up reluctantly, from depths so small and ragged and frail a creature could not remotely begin to possess. Kale felt his crotch grow suddenly warm as he lost control of his bladder and pissed himself in terror.

August 17th 1794

Our sorcerer is dying. His wounds have turned gangrenous and he has not much longer to suffer the indignity his life has become. The whole ship knows it. The crew see the fact of the fatal infection as their captain’s vindication. Fate favours us and God is on our side and there is nothing evil or corrupt about the trade we prosper in. The weather grows more clement every day. We approach the West Indies where we will barter those that still live among our cargo for sugar and molasses and tobacco.

I have asked the captain for permission to talk to Shaddeh one last time. I am convinced he believes profoundly in his talent for magic. This has made me very curious about his history and character.I wish to know what formed and informed the man dying in the hold. Sometimes he is in the grip of delirium, like an opium eater, Parr jokes, with his rotten-toothed grin. But sometimes he is sensible to what is said to him.

To my astonishment, the captain has said yes to my request. I do not know why he has relented in this way. He has shown not an ounce of regret or remorse at what he did to the man. His reasoning is that he reacted to a personal threat. The Albacheian attempted to blackmail him. His response was swift and severe but fully justified. Parr would have told other members of the crew about the threats emanating from the hold. Such stories spread rapidly aboard a ship. Had he not acted, the captain would have seemed weak and indecisive.

I do not take issue with this rationale. I keep my own counsel. I wish to speak once more with the sorcerer before death deprives me forever of his secrets. I could pick holes all day in the captain’s argument.I could grow bored listing its contradictions. I will say nothing, though, because I want to know more about the man from the dark interior of the continent forbidden us by its natives. I hope to have my curiosity at least partially satisfied.

August 18th 1794

‘Does life end with death?’ I asked him.

‘That is not a question I can answer. We have very different ideas about what constitutes a death, Doctor Horan.’

‘Where did you learn our language?’

‘Mostly I learned it from a priest.’

‘I did not know our priests were allowed beyond your country’s borders.’

‘He was a priest intent on sainthood, I think. He certainly achieved martyrdom.’

His joke provoked in him a rasping chuckle that became a short coughing fit. His fetid breath filled the cramped space we occupied, he in his chains, me hunched beside him, his brothers in bondage enduring the hypnotic sleep he still seemed able to inflict on them at will. The stink of his rotting flesh was fearful. Flies were soporific around him. They had no cause for urgency around their supine human meal.

‘You are a man of considerable intellect, I think. Yet you persist in this stubborn belief in magic. It is a contradiction.’

‘Your captain delivered me into bondage. He stole from me. He has maimed and murdered me. Yet if I could I would lift the curses I have placed on him. But I cannot. I have neither the time nor the strength. His daughter will perish a child and she will return to him a demon and the being that hungers in the darkness is born now and will seek out and find him eventually.’

‘You are convinced,’ I said.

‘I know, Doctor Horan. I have recited the spells. I have incanted the rituals.’

His voice was a whisper. He was weak and seemed very close now to the conclusion of his life.

‘What is this being that hungers in darkness?’

‘It is a feeling given form. It is spite made flesh. It will seek out your captain and find and devour him.’

‘Can it be stopped?’

‘Not by me. Not now. I am too weak.’

‘You believe in what you are saying. You are convinced of it.’

‘As will you be, Doctor, should you remain in your captain’s service.’

There was no point in arguing against his malevolent faith. It was obdurately held and his life was ebbing away. I asked him about the country in which he had lived before his capture. I asked him about its customs and values and laws. He answered patiently and in detail and I think that doing so diverted him from his physical suffering for the hour we spent together there. Then he told me something he said it might be vital for me to know. He asked did I have pen and paper and I produced paper and a pencil stub and he made me write this item of information down.

He died a short time later. I was only certain that he had expired when his spell cast on them weakened with his passing and his shackled neighbours began to stir and waken around him with confused shivers and groans.

I went to fetch Parr then, to send him for the key that would release my dead acquaintance from his chains. I would sacrifice a bed-sheet as a winding shroud, I decided, so that he would not suffer the humiliation of going naked into the sea. He had suffered more indignities than a noble man should endure in his time on earth.

Thus did the strangest association of my own short life, conclude. In doing so it left me with a strong and willing conviction. I would never serve again aboard a vessel plying that desperate trade. I would quit the company’s service as soon as we reached Liverpool. I would take no share of the bounty either. I would not have the blood of Shaddeh on my conscience or my hands.

They reached the cottage a little later than Alice had suggested to Lassiter they would. Jane thought this was partially because of the weather. The effect it had on the coastal stretches of the island was quite startling. The sea was transformed into an emerald tumble of whitecaps and the shingle was a glittering, multi-coloured display of stone. Kelp gleamed wetly at the tide line and the horizon was vast. It was beautiful, magical seeming rather than downcast and threatening as the settlement had been the previous grey and poisonous seeming afternoon.

Their lateness in arriving was also a consequence of how well the three of them got on. Lucy treated them on the route to a sort of stream of consciousness portrait of the men on the expedition. Alice and Jane found themselves frequently having to stop to wipe tears of mirth from their eyes.

This was partially hysteria, Jane knew. They had been collectively unnerved at the settlement. They’d been alarmed and upset afterwards by the disappearance of Carrick. They remained concerned about him, none of them more so than Lucy, who was his colleague. And they were not exactly looking forward to the psychic experience to come at the crofter’s cottage.

But they were only human, when all said and done. And Lucy’s verbal portraits were mercilessly funny. It was therapeutic. Perhaps it was not therapeutic in quite the manner he’d meant when the handsome Sergeant Paul Napier had cautioned them to discipline themselves the previous night. It would do, however, in the circumstances. And Napier was Lucy’s business, if Jane was any judge at all of the rules of attraction.

She liked Napier and she liked Patrick Lassiter. She thought Alice and the ex-policeman very well suited. They were stronger as a couple than they were as individuals. Lassiter was intelligent and capable and suggested a selfless sort of strength and courage would come to the fore in his character and behaviour in a crisis. But she thought that without Alice in his life, he would probably revert to the man who had been forced to resign from his job. It took her to make him dependable. He lacked the self-regard to want to do it on his own.

She hadn’t bought Cooper’s public apology. That hadn’t been made because he had insulted her. He was only sorry he had allowed the mask to slip. His apology had been prompted only by the constant, craven requirement to be liked by other people that determined his public persona.

Kale was Kale; all pectoral muscles and telegenic smile and pony tail. But Jane was genuinely puzzled by the demeanour of the priest. Lucy had made him out in the Chronicle to be a belligerent champion of his faith. On the island, so far, he’d seemed subdued; as though he’d come there for a fight for which he no longer had the stomach.

The cottage looked almost picturesque in the sunshine, against the shimmering backdrop of the sea. They had all three the previous evening heard Napier talk about his experiences there. But its whitewashed walls looked sturdily normal and surprisingly few of its roof slates were missing.

It didn’t seem sinister in the ominous way the buildings in the empty settlement did. It looked like it could be spruced up and made habitable again in no time. Give it some chintzy curtains and a brightly painted new door and it would appear quite cosy, Jane thought. Then she remembered the story of David Shanks, the tough recluse obliged to flee the home he’d built, so fearful he never returned to it.

They went in.

Its interior was not the wholesome refuge suggested by seeing the cottage from the outside. Its stone flagged floor was stark and the windows allowed in less light than Jane thought plausible given how bright a day it was. It was chilly in there too. The hearth was cold with neglect and the two surviving armchairs sagged bleakly angled towards the centre of the single room in which they stood.

She looked at Alice, who looked pale. Alice returned the look and then said to both of them, ‘I’ve always thought of this so-called gift of mine as an unwelcome intrusion into my life. I came here because I thought it might find some useful application in solving the mystery. If murder was committed here, I’d like closure for the victims. But I can’t dictate what happens when I see things. If it’s upsetting for you, I’m sorry. I’m sincerely grateful to you two for coming.’

Lucy said, ‘What are you going to do?’

Alice smiled. She was so pale that her skin seemed almost translucent in the feeble cottage light. Jane thought her incredibly brave. She could feel her own heart thumping in her chest. The goose-bumps were crawling across her skin the way they had that day at the school when she had been told about Edie and the folk song. That seemed a hundred years ago and this was infinitely worse.

‘I’m going to sit in Shanks’ chair,’ Alice said.

Lucy said, ‘There are two chairs.’

‘Only one of them is a rocking chair,’ Alice said. ‘That was the one he favoured.’