The Colony (7 page)

Alice wished that Lassiter would call and she could get it over with. She knew some effective techniques for erasing bad memories from the conscious mind and they had always worked for her, however recent the memory concerned. As soon as she had spoken to Lassiter she would employ the most effective of those techniques and banish forever from her mind the event touching the film can had encouraged her to see.

Lucy Church went to see Karl Cooper at his home in St John’s Wood. The editor, Marsden, had ordered the profile written, very probably as the consequence of a command direct from McIntyre. The proprietor would probably have expected James Carrick to do the interviewing and writing personally. He was features editor, after all. It was rumoured that McIntyre and Cooper were friends and so it was not in the interest of the editor to be seen to be delegating important assignments down the chain of command.

Perhaps James was just being characteristically lazy in passing on the job to her. Or it could be a question of practicality. He did not do much actual writing and would be rusty; hardly ideal with so high-profile and sharp-minded an interview subject. On the other hand, her being given the assignment could be construed as further evidence that she was excelling at her work and gaining further stature on the paper as the New Hope expedition and it’s attendant hype gathered impetus.

She was glad to be doing the job. Cooper had long intrigued her. Of all the New Hope experts, the cosmologist had the highest public profile because of his television series ratings and the best-selling status of the books he had written. Of all of them, he was the one with the most legitimate claim to being a household name.

Other scholars had speculated about the possibility of alien tinkering with human history; of course. Structural enigmas from the pyramids in Egypt to the Roman catacombs had made it a tempting and profitable area of discussion for better than half a century.No one with Cooper’s academic credentials had done it though and no one, until him, had done it with quite the compelling force of argument he had consistently demonstrated.

It did not hurt that he was so handsome a man. Even approaching 50, he remained as telegenic as he had been in his thirties. He still regularly topped magazine style polls. He was an impressive physical specimen with an air of authority, a natural charisma and a twinkle of sly humour in his pale blue gaze. They were the assets of an academic turned natural media success. His charms seemed not so much assumed as completely instinctive. Pushing at the bell outside his front door, she wondered would he possess all or any of them in the flesh.

She had a moment to envy him the trappings of his success in the location and grandeur of the house he occupied. She knew that the dome of an observatory capped the building outside of which she stood. She hoped that her interview would be conducted there. Though she couldn’t see it from where she stood, so substantial and imposing were the lower reaches of his home.

He opened the door himself. He flashed his celebrated smile. He did not treat her to a ritual of luvvie air kissing, though. Instead, he rather formally offered his hand and introduced himself before ushering her into his domain of speculation about the unsolved mysteries of the physical world.

Lucy made a mental note concerning the specifics of the handshake. It had been insistent but not bone-crushing; the palm encountering hers smooth and dry but firm rather than soft. Such details were important to some of their female readers in a Mills and Boonish sort of way and she was only really comfortable recounting them if she could do so honestly.

There was a waft of aftershave. It smelled lemony and expensive. He was dressed in faded jeans and a chambray shirt and gray stubble glittered slightly on his unshaven jaw. She saw with relief that he was as tall as he was supposed to be; or assumed to be from the rangy way he strode around the ruins of places he claimed had been built with the assistance of technologies from far flung galaxies.

‘Ms Church, or Lucy?’

‘The latter.’

‘Then please do call me Karl. Come in, Lucy. I’m delighted to make your acquaintance.’

He was light on his feet, lithe on the tread of the stairs. She assumed they were headed for the observatory. It was daylight and the dome would be redundant in the most important sense, but it was the spot from where he studied the heavens in what she further assumed was the wait for the moment when the alien visitors overcame their reserve and made formal contact with the inhabitants of earth. It was the intimate space where his eye was given licence to roam through the glass of the dome to infinity. She smiled to herself. She’d have to remember to write that sentence down.

She’d caught the merest hint of a regional accent in the few words he’d spoken. It was not really discernable on television. But she knew from her research for this interview that he was originally from the town of Wigan in the north of England. His father had been a tool fitter. It had been a modest trade of sorts; the sort of occupation made obsolete during Britain’s Thatcherite years. Unemployment and hardship had come to the Cooper family in the early 1980s, when his mother had taken cleaning jobs to enable Karl to go to university.

It was what you had to look for. The past informed the present. People were where they’d come from and how they’d grown up. She would get beyond the doctorate in cosmology, the PHD in astrophysics, the clutch of broadcast industry awards. She would get beneath the urbane extra-terrestrial television pundit. She would overcome the clichés and arrive at the man. It was her job and she was good at what she did.

They had arrived at the observatory. The dome was vast and the light so brilliantly generous it was as though the heavens poured it in. Cooper walked over to a glittering chrome refrigerator as tall as he was and pulled open the door. Chilled drinks were frosted at their necks with cold within.

‘Regular or diet,’ he said.

‘Diet,’ she said. She was still panting slightly with the steepness of the climb. She’d have to hit the gym a bit harder before New Hope Island. God forbid, she might have to lay off the smokes, too. ‘I understand you’re a friend of my boss?’

Cooper answered without turning around. He said, ‘I’ve never met your paper’s editor.’

‘Not Marsden. I’m talking about my ultimate boss. I mean Alexander McIntyre.’

‘No,’ Cooper said. Now he did turn around. He’d pried the tops off the bottles and they were beading at their necks in the grip of his twin fists with condensation. He was grinning. ‘I may have been in the same room as your proprietor, but I don’t believe I have ever spoken to him in my life.’

Lassiter left it until noon before calling Alice Lang. He considered himself a man curious by temperament. He did not think it was possible to be good at detection without possessing a strong degree of natural curiosity. So he wanted to call her, really, from the moment he awoke. But he decided to leave it out of consideration and tact until a time when she might have regained some sense of self possession.

She had blacked out. She had gripped the film can briefly in the fingers of her left hand and lifted its insubstantial alloy weight from the table and then her shoulders had sagged and her chin slumped onto her chest and he had in a snapshot of self-loathing been aware of what she would look like in middle-age.

He lifted her from the chair and placed her carefully on the floor. He put her into the recovery position and pinched her nose upwards and opened her mouth with gentle pressure to the sides of her jaw and was gratified, when he listened, to hear that she was breathing normally.

Her eyes started open. She saw him, kneeling on his thin carpet beside her. Her body juddered with remembered shock. ‘Hold me,’ she said.

And Patrick Lassiter held Alice Lang as he had not held a woman for a decade or more. He held her tenderly and he stroked her cheek and shushed whatever silent noises gave rise to the current turmoil in her gifted mind.

Now, on the phone, almost 19 hours later, he coughed to clear his throat and said, ‘Tell me, Alice. Tell me what it was you saw.’

She answered with a question. She said, ‘What do you know about the death of David Shanks?’

‘Not much,’ Lassiter said. ‘He died in County Clare in the West of Ireland. I don’t know the specifics. His body washed up on a remote beach, not far from the Cliffs of Moher. It was 42 years ago. He must have set out in his fishing boat and then foundered in a squall. The Atlantic is an unforgiving ocean, violent and cold. The weather off Clare is unpredictable. It was not one of those whiskey and fiddle-playing Irish deaths. It was bleak, no music or laughter. All that I think can be said for certain is that he died as he largely lived, alone.’

‘I know the specifics,’ Alice said. ‘You’re wrong in one important regard. Yesterday afternoon, I saw his death. He didn’t die alone, Patrick. Though I am fairly certain he would’ve wished he had.’

Napier waited by the makeshift harbour for the arrival of the choppers bringing the construction crew. They were a specialist outfit, experts at what they did. They were most often deployed building relief shelters and crisis headquarters all over the world in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes and catastrophic floods.

They would build the command centre from which the investigation into the New Hope vanishing would be organised and run. They would build the media centre from which the world would receive its carefully rationed revelations. They would build the accommodation in which the team of disparate experts would shelter and sleep when they weren’t on site.

They had, each and every man of them, been thoroughly vetted. They had all signed lengthy confidentiality agreements threatening punitive action if these were breached. They were probably being extremely well paid with a generous bonus if they completed their assigned work ahead of schedule.

Even before their arrival, Napier envied them. He possessed a set of job skills that made him a misfit in civilian life. They, by contrast, were knowledgeable and respected professionals. He hoped they would also be better company that Captain Bollocks and the Seasick Four.

At that moment, the former had deployed the latter on sentry duty, no doubt to impress the new arrivals with a show of vigilant authority. The captain himself was probably on the south of the Island in David Shanks’ crofter’s cottage. Strictly that was out of bounds, but the captain was the sort who enjoyed pulling rank and he spent more and more of his time there.

There was a window in the weather. It was not just mild, it was glorious. Generally you heard the heavy thrum of the choppers before they came into sight. That was particularly true of the Chinooks, with their twin rotors and the mighty turbines powering them. Today, though, he thought that he would see them before hearing the sound of their approach. Visibility seemed boundless, nature benign, the island positively Famous Five like in its picturesque appeal.

Despite this, Napier brooded. He brooded on his clay pipe find because the circumstances gave him no choice. He could not share the discovery with Blake. Captain Bollocks was the status conscious sort. Whatever his own private opinion about New Hope’s mysteries, the captain’s public attitude would be bound to be one of cynical disbelief.

There was no distance between open-mindedness and gullibility with blokes like Blake. They were too distrustful of their own judgement and ever wary of the wind-up, for that. With a bloke like Blake, incredulity was the default setting. He was the granite-hard combat veteran who believed in nothing he couldn’t poke with a bayonet blade.

He was an insecure wanker desperate to prove a toughness he had never actually possessed. That was Napier’s considered opinion, who liked his commanding officer less with every strange occurrence this peaty northern paradise threw at him. Except that Blake wasn’t really his commanding officer because the days of command structure and with them respectability had long gone. He was just the man in charge. He was the gaffer, whatever his military pretensions. And Napier had no respect for him or trust of his judgement at all.

The Seasick Four?

Do me a fucking favour, he thought. Napier reckoned he would tear out his own finger nails with his teeth before confiding anything that might come across as remotely inexplicable or spooky in any of them. It might amuse them. It might scare them. What it would most likely do would be to baffle them and alienate them even further from someone they already considered aloof and probably odd.

It left him alone. He was entirely alone. Whatever was happening on New Hope, and he had no fucking idea what that might be except for its apparent fidelity to a period theme, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.

Was he scared? Yes and no.

He was not unaware of the wider imperatives of the world. He knew about hype and sensationalism and the urge for publicity and vindication that would fuel a media mogul such as Alexander McIntyre in pursuing a project such as this. The stakes were vast. He had worked briefly as a bodyguard for a major Hollywood player and seen up close what megalomania could do to distort the values and perceptions of a man at the centre of things and addicted to remaining there.

What if New Hope Island produced nothing of interest? What if the wind scoured topology surrendered no new clues as to what had happened to its vanished inhabitants? Would McIntyre tolerate that? Could he endure such a crushing anti-climax to his expedition? Probably not, was the answer. He would fabricate things, wouldn’t he? He would conjure and invent them to provide a world hungry for sensation with what it craved most from his investigation of the great unsolved enigma.

That was possibly what he, Napier, had experienced. It was just conceivable. It was more plausible physically than any other explanation he could think of. McIntyre hoped for revelations but in their absence had a stock of special effects to fool the world into believing along with him in some paranormal phenomena, something terrifying and malevolent involving ghosts and their attendant paraphernalia. He hoped something real would manifest itself. If it did not, these tricks would be used and interpreted as hard evidence of something other-worldly. They would insure he would not face ridicule.