The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  Sipping his freshly percolated breakfast espresso, tapping out his blog update and attired to hit the gym, he realised how very much he was looking forward to the field discoveries and academic glory New Hope offered him personally.

  Much as he admired Cooper as a media role model, Kale thought the man’s New Hope speculations a total crock of shit. Kale didn’t believe in Alien life, beyond the odd microbe living a bleak amoebic existence on a far flung planet endowed with a bit of frozen hydrogen. Even if you accepted the possibility, why on earth would they travel to earth if they could? If they had that technology, they would be so far advanced intellectually, that they would be to human beings as humans are to slugs.

  The soil would surrender the secret of New Hope Island. The soil and the rock, the topography, would tell him what he needed to know to put paid to this enduring mystery. He would examine and chisel and dig. He would analyse samples. The science would be painstaking, the study rigorous and the findings definitive. He owed that to history, to his audience and not least, Jesse Kale owed it to his family.

  Fortescue took the call because he recognised the name. He knew that the television virologist, Jane Chambers, was going on the New Hope Island expedition. He read the papers. In doing so, in following the story, he had become rather a fan of Lucy Church’s writing in the Chronicle. And of course he had a vested interest in the expedition itself. It was a reluctant interest, but one he’d been unable to deny or effectively ignore since his own fateful close encounter with the contents of Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest, five years earlier.

  ‘How can I help?’ he said.

  ‘I read about you in the Chronicle. You have Captain Ballantyne’s belongings in your basement, Professor Fortescue.’

  ‘It’s not my basement, not strictly speaking. Can I take it you are Jane Chambers’ daughter, Edith?’

  ‘I am. I mean in the basement of your museum.’

  ‘I do. We do. How can I assist?’

  ‘I rang the Maritime Museum in London. They wouldn’t speak to me.’

  ‘Well, I’m speaking to you. Please call me Philip. How can I assist?’

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Philip?’

  Fortescue, who very much believed in ghosts, closed his eyes and gripped the receiver so tightly that the plastic squeaked in his fist. This was a child, for Christ’s sake, a girl of no more than 13 or 14, from the sound of her voice. But some things were beyond decorum or shame. Malevolence did not observe boundaries. ‘Yes, Edith,’ he said. ‘I’ve been given cause to think ghosts could well exist.’

  ‘Then you might be able to help me.’

  She told him about her ghost. She told him about Jacob Parr and about kindly Thomas Horan and Horan’s secret journal and Parr’s urgent instruction that she find the journal somehow and pass it on to her mother. But she didn’t know how to find it. The museum in Greenwich hadn’t put her through to anyone important enough to know whether it was there. She hadn’t got past reception. The British Museum had told her they only corresponded with members of their reading room and those members were all over the age of 18. And they all had account numbers and computer passwords and laminated passes. And Edith had none of those.

  ‘Who advised you to contact them?’

  ‘My history teacher, Mrs Atkinson did. I just said I wanted to trace an historical document. I said it was nautical. She’s mad for sources.’

  ‘Aren’t we all,’ Fortescue said. ‘Who suggested you contact us?’

  ‘That was my own idea. I read about Ballantyne’s sea chest in the Chron. I thought you might be able to help. As a last resort.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry. That was inappropriate. I was being sarcastic.’

  ‘Well. Adults are, sometimes. Can you help?’

  ‘There’s something you haven’t told me.’

  ‘There isn’t.’

  ‘There’s a detail you’ve left out.’

  ‘I hate it when adults do this. It’s patronising. I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘Trust me girl, there’s more.’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘I have a sister not much older than you. A half-sister, actually, but that’s not the point. The point is, you’re not the only adolescent in the universe.’

  ‘There isn’t anything I haven’t told you.’

  ‘Does your mother know about Jacob Parr?’

  ‘Yes. The school told her.’

  ‘How did the school find out?’

  ‘Because of the song he taught me.’

  Fortescue closed his eyes and smiled. His grip on the phone receiver was sweaty now. He made a deliberate effort to relax it. ‘Tell me about the song, Edith.’

  So Edith did. She told him about The Recruited Collier. ‘My music teacher, Mr Clayton, says a lady called Kate Rusby sings the song. She’s quite famous.’

  ‘The Barnsley Nightingale,’ Fortescue said.

  ‘Where’s Barnsley?’

  ‘It’s in Yorkshire, Edith. It’s where I expect you’ll find Thomas Horan. Or rather, you’ll find there anything Horan might have left behind. Horan will have been a Barnsley man. Parr couldn’t tell you. So he gave you a clue.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he tell me?’

  ‘We don’t need to concern ourselves with that just now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’ She sounded suddenly forlorn. ‘My school is in Surrey. I’m 14 years old. I’m a boarder. I can’t possibly go to Yorkshire.’

  ‘No,’ Fortescue said. ‘But I can.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Four days before the expedition’s scheduled departure for New Hope seemed rather late to be bringing up the subject of the priestly omission from the team. But Carrick’s professionalism obliged him to do it anyway.

  That morning’s editorial conference was the last they would have before the experts assembled at a Heathrow photo-call and the Lear jet chartered to take them to Edinburgh. From Edinburgh a fleet of helicopters would chatter in squadron through the skies, transporting them and their packed and crated gear to the island.

  McIntyre was there in person. This was only the second occasion on which Carrick could remember him having actually attended.

  ‘You’re absolutely right, James,’ McIntyre said, ‘we should have included an exorcist. One of us should have thought of it. In hindsight, it’s a startling omission.’

  ‘Diabolical,’ Lucy said.

  ‘It’s not too late,’ Marsden said.

  ‘It is,’ Carrick said. ‘Lucy is a bloody good writer, but it’s too late to profile anyone now. It would need to be an in-depth piece. We’d have to debut them to the readership. I can’t think of an exorcist already well enough known to the public. Can anyone else?’

  ‘We run it as a news story,’ Marsden said. ‘We announce that an exorcist has been parachuted in. We hint that something disturbing or shocking has happened on New Hope Island that’s left us with no choice but to include a heavyweight man of the cloth. We don’t need to be that specific as to what. We just inflate our candidate’s credentials in a separate story on an inside page.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Thank you, Lucy,’ Marsden said. ‘I want the interview from you you’re doing today with our psychic, by noon tomorrow. And I want a sidebar on this copper, Patrick Lassiter she worked in tandem with. Am I right in saying he’s going to the island, Alex?’

  McIntyre said, ‘Your front page exorcist splash is only brilliant if we can find one prepared to do it at three days’ notice. That’s hardly feasible, is it?’

  ‘It might be,’ Carrick said. ‘There’s a Belgian exorcist who’s been involved in some high profile cases of possession over the years. I think he’s based in North London. He can’t be publicity shy, or I wouldn’t have heard of him.’

  Carrick’s use of the double-negative registered with Lucy, who was more fastidious than her immediate boss was about good grammar. So did the name of the priest h
e was referring to. ‘Father Degrelle,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him in a TV documentary. He’s been on the radio quite a lot too. I think I might have seen him once on Question Time.’

  ‘He’d do Desert Island Discs if he was asked,’ Carrick said. ‘He’s addicted to publicity.’

  Marsden said, ‘How do we land Degrelle, at three days’ notice?’

  ‘We contact his superiors in the Catholic Church hierarchy,’ McIntyre said. ‘I offer to make a substantial donation to the charitable cause of their choice. Theirs is a vast organisation with a constant and pressing need for funds for establishing missions and repairing buildings and remunerating lay staff.’

  ‘Not to mention paying compensations to child sex-abuse victims,’ Lucy said.

  ‘James is right,’ McIntyre said. ‘The expedition needs an exorcist. And so we buy one.’

  When the testosterone took over, Lucy tended to let the men get on with it. She found the chest beating a bit tedious.

  Degrelle, if they got him, would be the last of the interviews. Technically it was second to last, because she had the Lassiter side-bar to write. But that was only a 500 word phoner and would concentrate on the police work he’d done in the past with the help of the psychic.

  Detectives were dull men generally. They were methodical types who spoke in that weird constricted phraseology the Met seemed to indoctrinate them all with at the Police Training College at Hendon. Lassiter would have no quirks or individuality. He was interesting only by association because he’d worked with Alice Lang.

  Soon after conference had broken up, she brought up a number on her cell phone and made a call.

  ‘Jane Chambers.’

  ‘How do you avoid catching all the horrible diseases you research? Are you just inoculated against everything?’

  ‘Lucy! I’ve been meaning to call you.’

  ‘I’m the one who should have called. You’re fully occupied with a grown-up job.’

  ‘You’re a very good writer.’

  ‘And I haven’t lost the hope of one day writing something very good. In the meantime, I do this. How’s that daughter of yours?’

  ‘The dreams have stopped.’

  ‘Is that good, or bad?’

  ‘It’s good. Edith sounds relieved. I don’t think she was telling me the whole truth about Jacob Parr. I don’t think he was quite as wholesome as she made him out to be to me.’

  ‘She didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘Anyway he’s gone. And it doesn’t sound as though he’s coming back.’

  ‘Are you all packed and ready for the trip?’

  ‘I very nearly pulled out. I think you’re aware of that. The Hebrides seems an awfully long way from Surrey, when your daughter’s sleep is disturbed in such a sinister way. And it was sinister.’

  ‘There’s no other word,’ Lucy said. ‘But it’s stopped. And you’re going. Think you’ll rub up alright against Karl Cooper?’

  Jane was silent for so long that Lucy thought the connection severed. Then her voice came on the line. She coughed to clear her throat and said, ‘I’ll have as little to do with him as I possibly can.’

  ‘I asked him about you.’

  Again, the silence. Then Jane said, ‘You didn’t include anything about me in the piece you wrote about him. I didn’t read it, but a colleague would have mentioned it if you had. What did he say about the affair?’

  ‘He came out with some self-serving crap about how the press had distorted the facts to make him look like the villain of the piece and you the victim of a broken heart. He said it was a distortion of the truth.’

  ‘He hit me.’

  Lucy was stunned. She thought she must have misheard. ‘He did what?’

  ‘He hit me twice. I mean he hit me on two occasions. I should have left after the first time he did it. I didn’t. I am very ashamed of that, of just how badly I let myself down.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘This is between us.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘I’ll see you at Heathrow. Keep the seat next to yours vacant for me, if you board before I do. I’m a nervous flier.’

  ‘I’m not great myself.’

  ‘Then we can be terrified together. Sheer good luck, by the way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In avoiding diseases, Lucy. I’ve just been lucky.’

  Lassiter strongly suspected that his encounter with the ghost of Elizabeth Burrows was an experience familiar personally to Professor Fortescue. He knew that the museum’s Keeper of Artefacts had once inventoried the contents of Ballantyne’s sea chest because Fortescue had admitted doing so. Further, he had said it was not an ordeal he would be willing to repeat. And he had warned Lassiter that the period immediately following his visit to the museum’s basement would be time most sensibly spent in company.

  The ex-detective in him wanted to know what it was that had driven the woman whose spectre he had seen to self-murder. He had not felt suicidal after examining the contents of the chest. Fortescue was still alive. Shanks had been a suicide though, if what Alice saw in her mind after touching the film can was to be believed.

  Lassiter did believe it. He had every faith in the powers Alice possessed. He was not falling in love with her; he had already done that. But she had demonstrated her psychic talent to him before his feelings for her had really had time to develop. He believed in her not out of infatuation, but because when he’d still been drawing a Met Police salary, he’d seen the proof of what she could accomplish.

  Shanks had stolen something from the chest. Doing so had triggered a run of ill-fortune that had dogged him and persuaded him eventually to return the stolen object. His luck didn’t change though and eventually, he despaired to the point where he threw himself off a cliff.

  Elizabeth had hanged herself in her college room in one of the halls of residence at Liverpool University. She hadn’t left a note. She had left behind an unfinished thesis on the proto-feminism of Rebecca Browning, the woman who had married and then abandoned Seamus Ballantyne after his conversion to his self-elected ministry.

  The chest was the connection between Shanks and Elizabeth and the obvious conclusion was that Elizabeth had stolen something, just as Shanks had, and had paid the price for doing so with her life.

  The disparity was that Shanks had waited years to do it. Elizabeth had been driven to take her life in a period of less than two months. And she had been a woman with far more than the itinerant Shanks to live for. She’d been young and quite strikingly beautiful. She’d possessed brains and a passionate ideological commitment. She’d not had the time to grow disillusioned with life and for a lifetime’s drinking to undermine her physical health, as he had.

  Looked at another way, she’d been much more vulnerable than he had been. Shanks had been a naturally courageous man, further steeled by his experiences as an infantry officer on the Western Front in the Great War. He’d been totally self-sufficient; a man able to survive as a crofter on a remote and otherwise uninhabited island. Perhaps most significantly, he had dabbled willingly in magic.

  He’d been an acolyte of the black arts. It was what had got him excluded from the bohemian Cornish commune to which he’d belonged back in the 1950s. If there had been something of George Orwell about David Shanks, there had been something of Aleister Crowley, too.

  If he had stolen something malevolent from the chest, its magic might not have surprised him too greatly. If Elizabeth had stolen something with similar powers, it would have shocked and dismayed her and undermined her belief system. She would have doubted her sanity. Logic would suggest to her that it wasn’t the object at all. Reason would insist she was losing her mind.

  A brilliant and fiercely independent woman, threatened with what she thought was the onset of madness, might be driven to kill herself. She might see no viable alternative to the degradation of being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Lassiter just couldn’t picture the poised woman he had seen in that dockside pub, buc
kled into leather restraints in a lunatic asylum’s padded cell.

  This was all speculation on Lassiter’s part. In looking for a causal link, he had created one. But he didn’t think the supposition all that far fetched. He’d seen what he’d seen in Liverpool. He’d felt what he had felt. And before he left for the Hebrides, he wanted as many answers as his training and talent for detection could provide him with. For the first time, he began to suspect that the object Shanks had taken from the chest, had been something other than the slave captain’s pocket watch.

  Again, this was only a hunch. But it was a suspicion growing in strength. If Shanks had stolen an object that valuable, he would have done so for financial gain. He would have found a way to sell it. He’d been resourceful, he’d had a cool nerve and he’d been without scruple. You didn’t need to go through an auction house to profit from an object as rare as that. There were private collectors, all over Europe and throughout America. Shanks had been a relentless traveller. He would have found a discrete buyer somewhere for Ballantyne’s Breguet.

  Elizabeth Burrows had lived in a hall of residence in Bootle. She’d killed herself in the autumn of 1971. There would have been a post-mortem. Drugs had been ubiquitous at that time among students, even more so then than they were now. They had possessed a cache then; they were a rebellious lifestyle statement, taking them a pre-requisite if you were a part of the counter-culture and hostile to the status quo and the Establishment.

  The college authorities and presumably her parents would have wanted to know whether she took her life under the influence of LSD or cannabis or amphetamines. Her body would have been tested for drugs and her room would have been searched and the contents duly listed. Even 40 years ago, the Merseyside force would have been diligent and professional in dealing with the violent death of a young woman.

  Lassiter paced the carpet of Alice Lang’s sitting room. They had been more or less living under her roof since that lunchtime kiss she had requested and got. Personally, he had never felt happier. It was like living in the exhilaration of a waking dream. He hadn’t felt like a drink since she had taken him to her bed for the first time on that dappled afternoon of sunlight and pasta salad and Ellie Goulding in her garden.