The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  ‘Well, I’m smoking.’

  ‘You are, unarguably.’

  ‘I gave up smoking seven months ago. It’s genuine, isn’t it?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Patrick. The first time I helped you, the O’Grady case?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I went to the boy’s house, like one of those ghouls who treats a murder scene as a shrine to which they feel obliged to pay a pilgrimage. I went to the house and put my hand on the brass door knocker. And that was when I knew.’

  Lassiter thought for a moment. ‘The camera has long gone,’ he said. ‘The original film is vacuum sealed to preserve it wrapped in special packaging in a strongbox in a vault somewhere. Probably Coutts Bank, if I know McIntyre, or one of those secure facilities in Knightsbridge or Mayfair beloved of secretive billionaires. I can get you the container the original film was stored in.’

  ‘You know that David Shanks touched it?’

  Lassiter nodded. ‘He labelled it. He had it in his possession from the time he shot the footage until his death. It housed the film for all that time.’

  ‘What kind of man was Shanks?’

  ‘Elusive. I don’t think he ever really recovered from his experiences in the Great War. He was in the infantry at Ypres. He kept it together well enough to become a decorated soldier. But that wasn’t an achievement he built on in his life. He seems to have spent most of his time running away. There’s some suggestion of involvement with the occult.’

  ‘I’ve heard of New Hope Island. I suppose everyone has. The apparition seemed to be dressed in period clothes.’

  ‘He could have been an innocent witness to a paranormal event. He could have conjured or summoned the apparition in some way. If it is faked, it was very cleverly faked. The original film has not been tampered with.’

  ‘Why would he fake it?’

  ‘To raise money showing and talking about it, but the theory doesn’t stand up. He spent too much time and effort building the cottage on the island. And he was a loner, not a showman. He was on New Hope in the first place because he liked isolation. That was a consistent factor throughout his whole life.’

  She pulled heavily on her cigarette and exhaled. It was obvious to him that Dr Lang had really enjoyed smoking, before her successful attempt to quit. Under the glamour and serenity, he suspected that she was quite highly strung, as anyone with her unwanted gift would be.

  ‘I can’t promise anything. But if you give the film container to me, if I can handle it, something helpful might occur to me.’

  Lassiter rose to go. He had already taken the DVD from her player and put it in his pocket in its case. It felt intrusive and awkward there, too big for the space it occupied, almost as though the two-dimensional image it bore had a three-dimensional life. ‘When,’ he said, ‘shall I come?’

  ‘I need to go into town this afternoon. You live in town, don’t you?’

  ‘My flat is in Waterloo.’

  ‘Don’t come to me, Patrick. I’ll come to you.’

  Two things occurred to him when she said that. The first was that he could not remember the last time he had received a domestic visitor. Apart from utilities people, no one ever came to the flat. It was an indictment, really. It was an admission of his social and personal inadequacy.

  His second conclusion was no more comfortable and was a copper’s intuition. She would come to him because she did not want the film can in her house. She would help him for old time’s sake. But she had considered the apparition on the screen an abomination, hadn’t she?

  She paused on the doorstep, showing him out. She blinked in the bright sunlight of the afternoon and opened her mouth as though to say something and then closed it again, the well-shaped lips pressed firmly together, having apparently changed her mind concerning the wisdom of saying anything at all.

  His mobile rang. McIntyre’s name appeared on the display. He stopped in the street and answered it.

  Several books had been written about the New Hope enigma. The principle theories about the disappearance were mass suicide and some kind of disease epidemic. In a weird reverse take on Ballantyne’s earlier career, one theory held that the whole population of the island had been abducted and sold into slavery.

  Lucy Church favoured the suicide theory. The idea of women walking into the sea with their children held in their arms was a morbid one. And no bodies had been recovered, washed up on the coast of the Scottish mainland. But the other hypotheses made even less sense. Atlantic currents could have taken bodies out to sea where they would have been food for the ocean’s scavengers.

  Her first New Hope piece had appeared in that morning’s edition, which broke the news about the expedition in a front page lead story. She had personalised what she had written in the way discussed the previous afternoon with Carrick. She had concentrated on the children. Their school had been a simple hut made from driftwood and tarred canvas. After the disappearance, the books had still lain open on the tea chests the pupils had used as desks. They had been reading Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, but had never got to finish the story.

  Their oilskins had still hung on their schoolroom pegs when they vanished. Lucy speculated in her piece on whether they had lived to reach adulthood. It seemed extremely doubtful. But there was the remote possibility that Ballantyne had moved his people on to another location without sharing his plans with the people they traded with or anyone else.

  Their destination would have needed to be impossibly remote and he would have required a large vessel, or a convoy of smaller ones, in order to transport the entire community. But Lucy felt that she had to speculate on survival in her piece. Poignancy was good, but the idea of a classroom of seven and eight year olds all just perishing at once, was far too bleak.

  Carrick had dropped by her desk an hour before to say that early reaction to her feature had been very positive. The breaking story of the expedition had raised single copy sales in their rough early estimate by 25 per cent. Most of the national radio and television news programmes were doing pieces on the New Hope mystery and this ambitious effort finally to solve it. They were getting massive airtime in Scotland, of course.

  Lucy’s task for the day was to write up a profile of one of the expedition’s team of experts. It was the virologist Dr Jane Chambers. She was one of the most brilliant specialists in her field. She was also stylish, good-looking and a shrewd self-publicist, Lucy thought, who had maximised her assets to achieve a high-profile and probably quite lucrative sideline in science based television. There wasn’t time for a face to face. She rang her on her hospital department extension at 2.15, the agreed time, and made do with a brief phone interview.

  ‘Do you have a thesis about the disappearances?’

  ‘I have a theory.’

  ‘Would you care to share it, Doctor?’

  She heard her subject draw in an audible breath. ‘Pen poised?’

  ‘I’m taping this.’

  ‘Okay. We are talking about a time when cholera and typhus virtually wiped out entire villages in England and in continental Europe too, for that matter. Disease was more often fatal than not. They simply didn’t have the medical knowledge or resources to cope with it. Bad diet and poor hygiene undermined their immune systems. In modern times, think of the 1980s, before the retro-viral drugs, when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. In the early 19th century a whole range of infections were just as deadly.’

  ‘Would there not have been graves?’

  ‘I think there is one, a mass grave. It just hasn’t been located yet. Whatever hit them spread with the speed of the Black Death and they buried their dead in the same way as they did during that epidemic. It was very virulent. We’ll find a plague pit, Ms Church. I will stake my reputation on it.’

  ‘How do you think the outbreak began?’

  ‘My guess would be that there was a carrier. My money would be on that being Seamus Ballantyne himself. He’d travelled to Africa
and the West Indies, hadn’t he, in his occupation as a sea captain. I think he brought something deadly back in his blood and passed the infection on.’

  ‘Why were there no bodies?’

  ‘I’ve told you, there are bodies. They just haven’t been found. There’s a plague pit on New Hope Island.’

  ‘But Ballantyne was a carrier in your hypotheses. He didn’t get infected. And others must have helped him bury the victims.’

  ‘A handful, in the end,’ Dr Chambers said.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Ballantyne wouldn’t have known he was the carrier. He was a hellfire preacher, not an epidemiologist. The survivors quit the island in haste and in a small boat and the boat foundered and their bodies were torn to pieces over time on the reef that surrounds all but the eastern approach to New Hope. They were food for the fishes, Ms Church.’

  Lucy had to admit this was the most convincing explanation of events she had come across so far. She said so.

  ‘Thank you. I enjoyed your piece about the school. It was moving without being maudlin and very atmospheric. I could see their little stools with the embroidered cushions still on them. You can certainly write.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Lucy put down the phone with a higher opinion of Jane Chambers than she had possessed a few minutes earlier. And it was not just because of the compliment she had been paid. All of McIntyre’s team were of a high calibre, when she thought about it. It made her think the New Hope mystery might actually be in danger of being definitively solved.

  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 non-existent 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 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.

  Chapter Four

  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. 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 New 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 fac
ts 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 New 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.