It would give his broadcast career the boost it needed, take him to the next level. No longer confined to the subject of space, it would be a short step to sharing the stage with world leaders as his interview skills teased out what the global public wanted to hear. He would have the profile and status he craved and, frankly, deserved.
The competition on the expedition would come directly from Jesse Kale, 15 years younger than he was and with a legitimate reason in the public mind to dress like Indiana Jones. It was Cooper’s privately held opinion that Kale was an outrageous exhibitionist. But he had the credentials and he got good ratings, which would be no bad thing when they were obliged to share screen-time on the trip. Their joint billing would deliver a huge audience when the film came eventually to be released.
Cooper had decided already that he would be publicly matey with Kale. Superficially, he would be wise to foster a mood of upbeat camaraderie. He could maybe establish a big-brother to little-brother relationship with the archaeologist, so coming across as warm and affectionate, whilst undermining him by posing subconscious questions about his experience and maturity.
There was time for a workout, before looking at the clothes his stylist had brought him to consider for the trip. He would hit the gym. For a moment, he imagined the appreciative look on the pretty face of Lucy Church when she saw his ripped body naked for the first time. Life is good, he thought, thinking that over the forthcoming weeks, it was going to get immeasurably better.
James Carrick could think of nothing he wanted less in life than to waste the next few weeks of it in the God forsaken Herbridean wilderness of New Hope Island. It was one thing maintaining his bluff philistine persona on the editorial floor. And he could do it effortlessly on the breakfast television sofa for an hour as he talked celebrity cellulite and super-injunctions. He suspected it would be a struggle, though, on the forthcoming expedition. It would mean living with the loud and odious twat he pretended to be not just for eight hours a day, but constantly.
It was funny, when he considered it. Lucy Church was of the sincere belief that he thought in nothing but clichés. That was because to his colleagues, their features editor was himself a living breathing cliché who spoke in banner headlines using a tabloid vocabulary and delivered his one-liners in conference as though they were written in bold.
He would miss his family. He could count the nights he had spent away from his wife in single figures. He always tried to get home in time to bath his children for bed or to read them a bedtime story. After they had been lulled into slumber, he liked to watch them as they slept before stealing a goodnight kiss. Then he went downstairs and shared a drink with his wife and then he would spend an hour in the study on the novel only she knew he was writing. This was his ritual and he treasured it.
He was in the study now. There was an image on his computer screen. It was a photograph his wife, Lillian, had asked him to look at. She hadn’t explained why. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary about the shot, though he didn’t recognise the subject as one of Lily’s friends. Distractedly, he brought the image up to full screen size. He would have to wait for Lily to finish whatever it was she was doing in the kitchen and come and tell him what the significance of the picture was.
Obliged to consider the New Hope expedition, it had occurred to Carrick that they were an obvious member light in their array of experts. Ballantyne had been a very bad man, before his attempt to represent himself as just the opposite. Surely they should take a priest with them to the Hebrides. Surely the expedition was crying out for a legitimate man of the cloth. What if what had happened there had been demonic in its origin? In that case a well-respected exorcist would round out the team very nicely.
He didn’t seriously think that anything satanic had occurred on the island. Carrick was not a natural believer in conventional religion. He did believe though, that McIntyre and Marsden too had missed a trick in not publicly speculating on the demonic possibilities.
It was too late now, which was a pity. They could have had a lot of fun with it. Evil became contagious when the Devil was involved. Places were contaminated by it. They became damned and haunted and intrinsically bad. Suddenly, the phrase No Hope Island, seemed less a jocular pun than a grave warning above a story in a late edition; a sombre picture of a suitably photo-shopped rock outcrop accompanying it, some goat head bit of granite with anthropomorphic horns. What a wasted opportunity!
If the place were evil, in the absence of a cross-carrying Vatican veteran that would have to be Alice Lang’s territory. With her sensitivity, she would surely be aware of it the moment her feet hit the ground. He’d have to keep an eye on her. It would, though, be a purely professional eye.
Carrick forgot about Alice Lang when his wife walked through the study door a moment later. He was reminded, as he was every time he caught sight of Lily, of the reason he had married her. He was not smug or self-congratulatory. He just considered himself an exceptionally fortunate man.
She gestured at the picture on the computer screen. She said, ‘It was on my camera. The little Lumix you bought me? The camera you bought me for my birthday?’
‘That’s what I bought it for, darling,’ he said. He stood and kissed her on the mouth. ‘I bought it for you to take pictures with.’
‘But I didn’t take this one.’
‘You must have.’
‘I took 20 pictures of Martha’s birthday party.’ Martha was their daughter. They had celebrated her eighth birthday the previous weekend. ‘This is number 21. I was downloading the birthday pictures onto my laptop. And this pops up.’
‘You must’ve taken it.’
Lillian shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of exasperation. She smiled, but the smile was tight. ‘Where did I take it?’ She said.
Carrick glanced down at the screen. It was a good question. The florid carpet and heavy wooden fittings suggested nothing so much as the interior of a Victorian pub. His wife did not frequent pubs. Not alone, with her camera, she didn’t.
‘Who the hell is she?’
The subject of the picture was a tall and striking woman seated behind a pub table gripping a book. She wore a black tailored coat with a double row of gilt buttons. She had pale skin made even paler by the geometric severity of the black bob in which her hair was styled and lipstick that was a vivid red on her unsmiling mouth. She had eyes a brown so dark they almost matched her hair. They were staring into the lens. The stare was frank, disconcerting.
‘Who is she, James?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Carrick said.
Chapter Ten
Napier’s new recruits had been on the island for 48 hours. There were eight of them, him commanding them and Brennan still in the communications centre, homesick now and increasingly frustrated with the high tech kit still stubbornly failing to function properly.
Brennan could establish no consistent communication with London at all.
‘You know what I think,’ he said to Napier, after a fruitless morning fiddling with various dials. ‘I think that when the aliens landed here and took all the settlers away, their ship did something weird to the island’s mineral deposits.’
Napier sipped coffee and considered this. ‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know, precisely. But their ship would have been massively powerful. It could have corrupted the island, geologically.’
‘You mean like radioactivity?’
‘Sort of, but not exactly, or we’d be dead, or dying of leukaemia, or developing tumours and going bald and blind. But sort of like that, some sort of sonic discharge.’
‘That’s without question the most stupid theory I’ve ever heard,’ Napier said.
Brennan smiled. The smile was rueful. ‘I know it is,’ he said. ‘But something is blocking our signals. I mean, listen to it, Paul. You ever heard anything quite like it?’
‘Just turn it off,’ Napier said. ‘That little girl crying noise is depressing. And it gives me the creeps.’
There was a knock on the door. Napier opened it to see Davis, one of the new men, lean and alert, every inch the ex-commando he was. ‘A word, Sir?’
They all called him Sir. He possessed no military rank. And he was not a status conscious man by nature. But he was in charge and he knew the men were more comfortable acknowledging the fact. They were all ex-soldiers and they felt more secure with a command structure. The British army was not a democracy and they liked what they were used to.
Napier sensed a shit-storm approaching. The radio failure he was sure was a part of it. He had established no clear pattern to it yet but the storm was on its way and he thought it would hit them sudden and severe. That was his instinct. They needed to maintain their discipline for when it came.
‘What’s up, Davis?’
‘Not exactly sure, Sir. I thought I saw movement up by the crofter’s cottage on the western point.’
‘What sort of movement?’
‘A figure, Sir.’
‘A seal, maybe?’
Davis shook his head. ‘It moved too fast. And it was slight, and clothed.’
Davis; 38 years old, hair worn in a salt and pepper crew cut, shrapnel graze on his left cheek, eyes hard and hazel coloured and pretty much unreadable at that moment. Eyes that had seen quite a lot, Napier thought.
The men had orders not to enter the cottage David Shanks had built. That didn’t really affect the integrity of their perimeter security. There were high points from which anyone approaching the cottage by sea could be clearly seen. They were manned and the new men were vigilant.
There were ten men including Brennan on the island. The expedition personnel were due to arrive in five days’ time. The vague sense of being spied upon had not left Napier but he no longer entertained the notion that New Hope was covertly occupied by any other people. Something was there, but it wasn’t human. Even if it had been once, it wasn’t human anymore.
He looked around. It was a grey morning, the light limited by louring cloud, the sea a limpid green toiling, almost motionless. The air smelled of rain and salt and wood smoke from the driftwood fire the men kept burning in the camp. It wasn’t particularly cold. They kept the fire burning for good cheer, Napier thought, rather than for warmth. That and perhaps as men had in camps since ancient times, as a means to keep unwelcome spirits at bay. Some things mankind did compelled by instinct, or collective memory.
‘Come on,’ he said to Davis. ‘We’ll take the scenic route.’
They walked around the island, from east to west, at the edge of the water. Napier was tense, expecting his short-wave to crackle into life with a burst of static as one of the two men occupying their observation posts on the high ground spotted movement at the crofter’s cottage and radioed to report it in. But that didn’t happen.
He was aware of the crunch of shingle under his booted feet. He was aware of sluggish waves breaking to his right without rhythm. He was aware of his companion in his combat fatigues, an unreadable look still in his eyes when he glanced at Davis.
He felt a sense of wariness growing with every stride he took. He kept picturing the pale incisor with its skirt of torn gum ripped from the mouth of Blake, left lying on the flagstone floor of the one room hovel to which they were headed. And he had to fight within himself for wariness not to descend on the route into a mood of abject dread.
They saw the roof of the cottage come into view. Its remaining slates glimmered wetly in the greenish light. It seemed to rise before them as they approached, its walls wet with sea spume and its windows ragged, like an absence.
They stopped about 50 feet away.
‘Can you feel it?’ Davis said. He shivered.
‘Feel what?’
‘Come on, Sir. Don’t play dumb with me.’
‘Yeah,’ Napier said. ‘I can feel it.’
And he could. He felt watched. It was a coldly uncomfortable sensation. It was not the vulnerability you felt sometimes in the field. It was not precisely hostile. It was curious and contemptuous and, Napier thought, it was gleeful, as though they were being toyed with. His skin pricked with it and his scalp itched. He could not stay there and endure it.
‘I’m going in,’ he said.
It seemed to take longer than it should have to walk the distance to the half-ajar cottage door. He became aware of the silence, a numb departure from the island norm of screaming gulls and crashing surf. The air felt thick, tangible. He felt almost giddy, breathing it. He thought he heard a snatch of song and it stopped him dead for a moment. It had drifted through the open cottage windows.
He’d imagined it. There was no one in there. His sentries would have spotted their approach. Davis had just imagined what he thought he’d seen earlier. It had been a trick of the light, no more than that. He’d seen for just a fragmentary glimpse the wing of a scavenging bird, perhaps. It had been a frond of sea kelp, borne by the wind.
Except there was no wind, was there? And there were no birds about. Stillness ruled this region of the island. It had the mood about it of approaching death.
‘Don’t, Sir.’
Davis, behind him, spoke as if from a vast distance away, his voice dreamy and disembodied.
Napier pressed on. It was what you did. He remembered Blake’s constant bleating about not being armed. Funny the things you remembered at such moments. Had he ever in his life experienced a moment like this? He didn’t think the weapon existed that could help him just then. Nor did he think he had ever been so frightened. Fear filled his mouth with a coppery taste and foreboding gripped his stomach so it felt as though his entrails churned between strong and playful fingers.
He had reached the cottage door. He pushed it open. The silence was so profound now it felt like a rebuke. He looked around at the bare stone of the walls. He looked at the naked flags on the floor. He saw that a single word had been scrawled in chalk on the flag directly in front of the cold and derelict cottage hearth. The word was Hell.
The scrawl was childish. There was no stub of chalk. The characters were fresh. The work had been done recently. Davis had been right. There was a faint odour in the cottage, but Napier couldn’t identify it. It was corrupt, a hint of something decaying or decayed, but he couldn’t have said what. He dropped to his haunches and spat on the scrawled word and rubbed the chalk away with his sleeve. He didn’t want the others seeing it. He did not want the dismay he felt at seeing it scrawled there shared.
He rose to his feet and walked out into light and space. The air felt fresher and a gull shrieked in the sky and a wave tumbled and he no longer sensed the chilly prick of observation on his skin. He looked at Davis. He managed a smile and a shrug. ‘Nothing,’ he said, thinking, we’re in a lot of trouble here. The badness has not left this place. Over time, it has just grown more bitter and stronger, hasn’t it?
They trudged back without speaking, eyes on the shingle, thoughts unshared. They were about 500 metres from the camp when Davis stopped and turned and looked Napier directly in the eye. ‘Don’t laugh at what I’m about to say,’ he said.
Napier said, ‘I don’t think that’s very likely.’
‘I did a training secondment in Africa about 15 years ago, in the Congo, with the French. There was an atrocity there. There was a ritual killing. A child was killed and mutilated. It was black magic, powerful Ju-Ju.’
Napier licked his lips. They were dry. The chalked word had claimed all the spit he’d had.
‘You know what Ju-Ju is, Sir?’
‘I can imagine.’
‘You could feel it,’ Davis said. He glanced around, at the sea and the sky and the land; a visual inventory of their remote little wilderness. ‘I could feel it there and I can feel it here. Do you believe me?’
‘Well,’ Napier said, quietly. ‘I’m not laughing, Davis, that’s for sure.’
Jesse Kale felt nothing but admiration for the cosmologist, Karl Cooper. He considered that Cooper had provided the template for his own media career. Cooper had proven that th
e formula worked and Kale had simply worked the Cooper formula in turn. He looked forward greatly to meeting the man who had inspired him. He thought it would be a privilege to work alongside his unwitting mentor on such a high profile project as this one seemed likely to be.
But that was not his reason for agreeing to participate. Nor was he doing it just to further his own reputation. A family secret explained the reason for his agreeing to go on the expedition and it was one his family had closely guarded down the generations.
Kale had a blood link with New Hope Island. He was related, on his mother’s side, to three members of Seamus Ballantyne’s vanished community. They had not been Kales but Morgans – sharing his mother’s maiden name. He had been brought up on the story of the vanishing and the opportunity to try to solve the mystery was one he could not in all conscience resist.
He knew no more about the vanishing than anyone else did. But he knew quite a lot more than most people about the nature of the community and the character of its charismatic leader. He knew something of the faith they had originated and their religious rituals. He knew what the community had been intending to achieve in its isolation. He knew about the polygamous way in which the community had lived and the customs and practices they had originated.
All of this knowledge was secret. Everything would be revealed only when his own skills had been used to crack the mystery of where the people of New Hope Island had gone. He didn’t want the plaudits for solving the New Hope enigma, so much as he sought closure for his family over their lost loved ones.
This was why, to his own mind, the interview he had given Lucy Church had lain so lifeless on the page when it was written up and printed. He’d kept quiet about what he really thought because discussing it would have told someone as sharp as she was that he knew an awful lot about the New Hope community that simply wasn’t in the public domain.
The Colony Trilogy Page 12