The Colony (6 page)

She was about to start to write up her interview when her phone rang. When she picked it up, the switchboard asked her could Dr Chambers be put through. She said yes, of course.

‘There is one more thing you might wish to include in your piece,’ she said. ‘If I am right about this and it was an epidemic, the virus or bacillus is likely to be live. It’ll be present in the corpses, in their bone marrow or their teeth or the roots of their hair. It’ll be highly infectious and we might not have an antidote to it.’

‘Would that not deter you from going?’

‘I’m not a dilettante, Ms Church. Some people are prey to that misapprehension about me because I drive a sports car and wear good clothes and appear on their television screens from time to time. Fripperies aside, I’m first and foremost a scientist. The New Hope mystery has fascinated me since childhood. Nothing would deter me from going.’

On the morning of his first full day on New Hope, Napier decided that going for a run would be the best way to familiarise himself with the Island’s topography. He was in the habit of keeping fit. It would also get him away from the company of the Sea Sick Four and their conversation, most of which seemed to comprise accounts of the various confrontations they had enjoyed manning the doors of the nation’s nightclubs in their past lives.

Blake’s banter was of a slightly different order. He had endured some of that over breakfast.

‘Wouldn’t have had you down as a poof,’ Blake said.

‘Come again?’

‘Your partiality to folk music is a dead giveaway. The Barnsley Nightingale, isn’t that what you called her? Do you crochet as well?’

‘Of course I do. Doesn’t everyone? And my wallet is full of supermarket loyalty cards. And nothing gives me the satisfaction that bleeding radiators does.’

‘And you window shop at Homebase.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Napier said. ‘It’s too exciting for me, Homebase. Wouldn’t want to raise the blood pressure and put myself at risk of a stroke.’

‘Seriously, though,’ Blake said, ‘folk music. It’s a bit left-field for a bloke like you.’

‘You should rest Whitney and give it a listen.’

‘I’ve read your file. As the leader of this outfit I was obliged to read your file. You’ve been involved in some pretty tasty bits and pieces, over the years.’

‘All behind me, Captain. What do you have planned for us for today?’

Blake shot a contemptuous look at the Sea Sick Four, huddled over their breakfast skillets on the ground thirty feet away. ‘Orientation,’ he said.

‘I thought I’d go for a run.’

‘Fine, you can orientate yourself doing that. But, a word of advice?’

‘Go on.’

‘When you hear voices singing rural ballads, just keep going and remember it’s all in the mind.’ Blake tapped his temple with a forefinger and grinned.

Up until that moment, Napier hadn’t minded any of what had been said. He had quite enjoyed the give and take of it. At that moment though, he felt very much like throwing a short left hook and breaking the captain’s jaw.

Instead he went over and had a conversation with the others, trying to keep it light and friendly, aware of his past reputation as someone who could be a bit aloof, appreciative of the fact that they were drawing the same pay and wearing the same uniform and of the same nominal rank.

He had a mug of tea with them. He learned that none of them had been to Scotland before. He listened to their complaints about not arriving aboard a chopper and pretended to agree and thought that after the incident in Helmand, if he never saw the interior of a chopper again as long as he lived, it would be far too soon.

After that he changed and went for his run. The day was bright and blowy. A Kate Rusby song insinuated its gentle rhythm into his mind. He never ran wearing an Ipod. He liked to be alert to ambient sound and old habits died hard. He hummed along with the melody in his head. It was the song Sweet Bride from Kate’s masterpiece, Sleepless. Captain Bollocks didn’t know what he was missing. And he never would, because he was the sort of stubborn bloke of whom life’s bigots are most naturally made.

His heart rate rose and he started to work hard, the undulating ground forcing him to think about his pace and technique over it as the endorphins began to flow and his mood lifted as it always did when he ran. Running was the easy bit, he had long concluded. All the difficulties started only when you had to stop.

He thought about the event of the previous evening only when he neared the point at which it had occurred. He would pause for a breather and examine the spot. There was no confidential murmur of sad lyrics now, only the wheal of the wind over razor grass and scrub. And there was the sound of the sea of course, there was always that.

He jogged lightly over the lip of the ridge and looked down into the scooped depression below. And his eye caught something pale on the green ground. It was a clay pipe, small and white and when he picked it up, the bowl of it still warm.

Alice Lang occupied some of her morning reading a speculative newspaper piece about the New Hope Island mystery written by a journalist called Lucy Church. If the picture by-line was an accurate indication, Church was a good-looking woman enjoying a high profile position on the paper. Alice thought that the subject matter held such intrinsic interest it might more accurately be termed fascination.

The disappearance was one of the great enigmas of recent British history, after all. But there was no denying the writer’s gift for orchestrating facts and presenting plausible theories. And she couched what she wrote in phrases that were both original and vividly evocative of time and place.

Alice was grateful for the diversion the piece provided her with. She did not wish to dwell on the experience of late the previous afternoon at Lassiter’s flat. She knew that eventually he would ring her and that she would be forced to relive the moment. But she would not choose to relive it; she would endure that only when doing so became a moral obligation, forced to warn the detective when finally he called.

Warn him of what, though?That he was out of his depth? That he was up against forces that were malign and dangerous? Could she convince him that the threat was way beyond a policeman’s powers of deductive reasoning? She wasn’t really optimistic that she could. She didn’t think he would be easily scared or easily deterred either.

She knew what he was doing. It was more than just the courtesy of waiting for a civilised hour at which to make the call. He was busy. He had other business to attend to. He was at Alexander McIntyre’s beck and call and McIntyre wanted more information on the Hope Island settlement’s founder than seemed to be readily available in the public domain.

A bright eleven year old with a casual interest in history or mystery could probably recite most of the salient facts about Seamus Ballantyne. This was because they were well known. But when you thought about it, they were actually remarkably few. Most accounts tended to concentrate on his epiphany, the moment on the cobbles of Liverpool harbour at which he suddenly became aware of how monstrous a commercial enterprise the slave trade actually was. Even that, though, was the subject of some dispute.

One account had it that his conversion came as he waited in the offices of the mercantile maritime board to collect his ill-gotten wages. Another claimed the moment occurred on a Sunday morning as he lay at home in bed and heard a church bell toll. A third recounted how the revelation came to him as he dipped his fingers into a christening font to make the sign of the cross in holy water as he left the funeral service of an old shipmate fallen victim to cholera.

In a way, that particular detail did not really matter. The fact of his conversion was the thing. But other, more significant facts were scarce. There was almost nothing on record about the belief-system his remote community clung to in their storm afflicted isolation once on Hope; nothing about the powers of oratory or personal presence Ballantyne must have possessed merely to recruit and convert and get them there.

It was known that his adoption of religious faith and leadership had cost him his marriage. It was believed that he had sunk his considerable personal fortune into the New Hope project. It was assumed he had been ruthless and industrious in his trading of slaves, captured in Africa and bartered in the West Indies and America for the sugar and rum and the cotton he brought back from those places to be spun in the mills of Lancashire.

But almost everything about Ballantyne was supposition and McIntyre quite naturally wanted verifiable facts about the man. And he thought his tame detective the ideal person to provide him with them.

Lassiter had told Alice as much the previous day, making her welcome during her visit to his spartan home; pouring her tea and putting biscuits onto a side plate on his tiny dining table as he explained about McIntyre’s earlier phone call and the visit to Liverpool it would necessitate. He had sounded more intrigued than put out about the Liverpool trip. It was not quite police work, but it was investigation and he was both comfortable in working to his strengths and intrigued to gather fresh information about his somewhat elusive subject.

‘When will you leave?’

‘In a couple of days, I should think.’

She nodded, thinking that there would be no one left behind to miss him. No pining children, no faithful wife to offer a tender kiss of farewell and a heartfelt wish that he should travel safely.

‘I’ll go and get that film can,’ he said, then.

She smiled. Butterflies fluttered suddenly in her stomach. She became aware in the shudder of an aircraft overhead that Lassiter’s neat and dowdy bachelor home lay directly under a flight-path. The bulk of the aircraft cast the room into gloom as it briefly crossed the sun in the sky outside and then brightness returned to it. Lassiter re-entered the room, carrying something matt and metallic and circular and closed the door softly behind him. He put the object onto the table top and a sour aroma rose as Alice sensed the milk curdle in its jug among the tea things and the fillings in her rear teeth start to throb and she was obliged to blink and swallow back vomit welling sourly from deep in the back of her throat.

‘I can’t do this,’ she said.

‘You look pale,’ Lassiter said, sitting down in the chair opposite hers, on the other side of the table. ‘Here.’

He handed her a linen napkin. She dabbed at her forehead aware that the napkin, pale and blamelessly white, smelled of mothballs. The smell was probably only a suggestion, but it was strong enough to sear her nostrils and water her eyes with tears that made her wince. It was always like this. It had never been this strong before, though. And she had not even touched the film can yet. She had not even properly looked at it lying next to the biscuits on the tablecloth.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said again.

‘Then don’t,’ Lassiter said. His tone was at once firm and kind, no suggestion at all of resentment in it at her having wasted his time with this neurotic show of theatricality.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said out loud, to herself, her hand reaching for the film container before his could to put it back, her fingers closing around the curved matt metal as darkness imploded blindly in her and her mind groped through an abyss more dismal than she could have imagined possible.

She had been right about one thing, she thought now, remembering. She had been right not to let him bring the film can to her home. She did not honestly know how he could bear to have that object remain there in his. Then again, he did not possess what was widely regarded as her gift but she now knew without question to be more in the nature of a curse. He could live with the film can under his roof and it would give him no great cause for concern.

Or would it? Alice shivered, though the day was bright outside and the room she occupied already warm. Had Lassiter been entirely straightforward with her? Was there more to his own experiences since locating the film than he had shared with her? It was possible. His alcoholism had surely encouraged years of secrecy and addicts were good, weren’t they, at hiding things.

She looked at the landline, mounted on the wall. She looked at the mobile sitting, slightly sweaty in the palm of the hand not occupied with her cigarette. She was aware that she was pacing the floor, as she had pretty much since the start of the day and her sustenance free breakfast of black coffee. She did not need sustenance. She had not really needed caffeine, even after a mostly sleepless night. Chemical stimulation had not been necessary at all. She was raw with alertness. Fear could do that. Dread could, too.

She had only sat, when she thought about it, to read the piece in the paper written by Lucy Church. The rest of the time she had spent standing and pacing and waiting and trying not to recollect.

It had been night time. The man had unlatched the door of his cottage and exited and she had seen that he still possessed the spare build of someone young. His cheeks were gaunt though, in moonlit shadow, and the hair on his head white and unkempt in the wind she thought probably always a feature of the place. He had worn no coat, as though the decision to leave or the summoning had been a sudden one.

He walked to the cliff edge. Hundreds of feet beneath where he stood, at the base of that granite rampart, she could hear the ocean in waves that boiled and foundered on the rock. Sea spray rose and gathered in droplets in his hair and beard as he braced himself against the withering gale. The sky was cloudless. Stars gaped in the blackness before him and grass in tussocks rippled around his naked feet. She could smell the Atlantic salt and shuddered with vertigo at the edge of an abyss of space.

And she realised the man was not there alone. There was a presence, studying him, a dozen feet from where he stood. It was entirely still and she could make out no individual features. It was just a shape, a denser darkness than the night, more solid than the air, still and watching. And then it spoke. It recited words from a language unfamiliar to her ears. Its voice was deep and deliberate, a shudder of sound, not human at all. And the man at the cliff edge glanced across at where it came from and grinned back and winked conspiratorially and he stepped from the cliff edge into the void and slipped from sight with what seemed like a last, abject sigh of relief.