The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  The coffee would have to wait. The boat was a rigid inflatable and would not. As Napier got his gear together to go and take a look, it occurred to him that the recent wars had done this. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had made these ex-servicemen very alert and careful and observant. Perhaps, though, it had been ever thus. His father had served in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and Geoff Napier had been nobody’s mug.

  The first thing about the beached craft was that it was military specification. Napier had not only seen the model before but had been aboard one on a few occasions. It was the vessel used by the Royal Marine Commandoes and the SBS. It was powered by an outboard, but the engine had been angled inward, with the propeller raised out of the water. This suggested that its approach to the island had been achieved by hand, by paddles, which was ominous.

  Davis and Walker had hauled the craft up onto the sand, beyond the gentle waves of a supine morning sea. Conditions were perfect for the boat coming ashore. Or they were at this spot, because there was no surf. Napier went and put his hand on the engine cowling. It was cold. So was the cylinder casing, stone cold. This inclined him to believe that the boat had not in fact been paddled, but had drifted ashore. So did the fact that the boat was there at all.

  ‘Davis?’

  ‘No attempt to deflate or scuttle it, which is odd, because that’s precisely what you’d expect of a crew attempting a covert occupation of the island. If on the other hand it had ferried passengers here, it would have been long gone by the time we found it.’

  ‘It’s an eight man boat,’ Napier said.

  ‘I’ve seen them take twelve at a push,’ Walker said.

  Weight had beached the boat. Empty of cargo, she would have drifted offshore again. She was anchored by the poundage of the equipment stored aboard. There were two tents, stoves, a radio transmitter, three pairs of binoculars, distress flares, a compass and boxes of sealed foil packs of field rations. There were drums of fuel and two video cameras of the same type Napier had seen photo-journalists use shooting combat and background footage in Afghanistan. There was no mistaking that their specification was of professional broadcast standard.

  ‘Not bird watchers,’ Walker said, reading Napier’s thoughts. ‘Not hobbyists.’

  Davis said, ‘I don’t think they made it.’

  ‘If they had foundered, their gear would be in disarray,’ Napier said. ‘It doesn’t look like a wave hit them. This stuff is bone dry and still squared away. But you’re right. It doesn’t look like they made landfall. They wouldn’t abandon their shelter and sustenance and they wouldn’t leave the evidence of their arrival in plain sight for us to find. The cameras alone must be worth twelve or fifteen grand apiece.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ Walker said.

  ‘Everything about this island is fucking odd,’ Davis said. He looked at Napier, ‘With respect, Sir.’

  Napier just nodded. He could hardly disagree. His predecessor had been in denial about the island’s mysteries and it had cost him his life. Or Napier assumed it had. He certainly never expected to see Captain Bollocks in this world again.

  ‘Puncture it,’ he said, gesturing at the boat. ‘Put sand in the outboard’s fuel tank. Then we’ll drag it up to the bog land behind us and conceal it under scrub. I think you’re right, Davis. I don’t think they made it, whoever they were.’

  ‘They weren’t military. There’d be markings and the ration packs would be standard issue and they’re not,’ Walker said.

  ‘Rivals of McIntyre’s media outfit. Poor bastards,’ Davis said.

  ‘We’ll bury the boat and the food and the jerry cans and remember where we’ve done it in case we have cause to dig it up in the future and salvage rations and fuel,’ Napier said. ‘Doesn’t do any harm to have a supply dump on the island. The other gear we’ll hump back. McIntyre’s people might want it as evidence of something in the future. Get on the shortwave, Davis. Rouse everyone. We’re going to do a thorough search.’

  ‘There’s no one here, Sir,’ Walker said. He shivered, despite the mild breeze of the temperate morning. ‘Only us, I mean. They didn’t make it.’

  ‘We’ll search anyway,’ Napier said. ‘It’s our job. It’s what we do. You know that.’

  Davis said, ‘And if bodies have drifted ashore?’

  ‘We call this in whether we find corpses or we don’t,’ Napier said. ‘McIntyre’s people need to know about this right away. I’ll have to try to get through on the radio.’

  ‘Good luck locating a signal,’ Walker said.

  Davis said, ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about keeping it confidential, Sir. It’ll probably be all over tomorrow’s paper. Empty boat, chock full of gear washes up on New Hope Island? It just adds to the mystery, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a pretty good story,’ Walker said.

  Not when you’re living it, Napier thought. His mind was on the cameras aboard the boat. He wondered what the film inside them had recorded. If something unusual occurred, it would be a cameraman’s instinct to start shooting it. Had they filmed their own approaching death? Had they documented their own last terrifying moments of life? It was a morbid speculation, but the place they were in encouraged those. Davis and Walker were probably the most phlegmatic of his lads and even they were pretty thoroughly spooked.

  These cameras had a monitor enabling you to view what you had just shot and self-edit, didn’t they? He would have to take a look. He did not greatly look forward to doing so but to do otherwise would be negligent and even foolish. Forewarned is forearmed, the saying went, and Napier as a soldier had pretty much lived by that conviction. On New Hope, though, it was becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

  Fortescue called Lassiter. He made the call for two reasons. The first was that he had enjoyed no success at all in trying to track down Thomas Horan in Barnsley. There were a handful of residents there sharing the ship’s doctor’s surname. But the genealogical records he perused showed no connection among any of them with a physician ancestor who had once served aboard the Andromeda.

  He had a growing intuition that there was not much time left to locate the lost journal and heed whatever warning it contained for McIntyre’s expedition and its assorted members.

  His second reason for calling Lassiter was the document he now held between his white-gloved hands. It was a slender booklet, just a few pages hand-sewn at the spine, mottled with age but still legible, its words described in sooty ink in a slightly shaky hand. Given its contents, he thought the tremor perfectly understandable.

  He had found it, shortly after reading the newspaper article, on the library shelves of his own museum. He was not absolutely certain of what it was. But if it was what he thought it might well be, it was a document history insisted simply did not exist.

  There were believed to be no written accounts anywhere of life among the New Hope Island community. But Fortescue was convinced he had stumbled upon exactly that. He further believed, on the basis of the events it described, it had been written at a time very close to the vanishing.

  There were barely 24 hours left before the expedition team were scheduled to leave for New Hope. Lassiter was booked to go.

  The document between his hands was not dated. But he thought it too obscure to be a forgery. Provenance was not really an issue. Neither was authenticity. He looked from the desk he occupied in the library, up to the shelves which had concealed it. He looked at his mobile, placed neatly parallel with the edge of the desk. He had the room to himself. He had the necessary privacy. He was, though, a punctilious man. Before he made the call, he would give what he had discovered one last read.

  Each morning the Master ascends to the heights and awaits the arrival of the bird that never comes. Seeking guidance in this manner is a thing that sorely hurts him. We have never been obliged or beholden. It is not our way to beg or beseech. But we are no longer blessed, either, it seems. We must do what needs to be done to lift the Great Affliction and the master as ever leads by e
xample in his humble and desperate compromise.

  This morning another two were gone. That is five to feed the hunger in a week. The Morgan girls were taken from us. The loss is terrible. We cannot endure it. Our family will simply perish over a season of anguish and despair if this continues.

  It is the devil’s work and horrible. It also seems to us all to be unjust. We have lived humbly and austerely. We have traded honestly. We have hurt or offended no one. Our isolation has always been more a condition to endure than to celebrate; the elements harsh and the situation bleak and the comforts sorrowful scant.

  Faith has been our consolation. But was ever faith tested in such a manner as this among men and women who love and worship their God? In my old life I was a scholar, a studious man and a student of history. I can recall no ordeal I have read of the equal of the Great Affliction for the fear and crushing hopelessness it provokes.

  Each day the Master rises from his sleepless bed and climbs to the heights and awaits the bird that never comes. His patience and fortitude are quite wonderful qualities. Those of us who still survive wonder how he sustains them as he watches his Kingdom of Belief erode and dwindle.

  Faith also erodes and with it, authority. There are voices among us speaking openly now in discordant tones. The family is cleaved, no longer one. There are those among us but no longer of us saying that the Master has himself delivered the Great Affliction. It sounds like treachery. Worse, it sounds almost a heresy to make this claim. No man could have expressed his remorse more convincingly. None could have paid a heavier price in repentance than he has for his past sins.

  Aye, say the dissenters, but we are all paying the price for his past. And we will go on doing so until the last of us is gone before the debt to God is finally honoured.

  Forgive me for the impertinence of committing such an arrogant claim to the page, but God does not work in this way. The Master may have jeopardised his own immortal soul. That is a matter between him and the Almighty. It may be that he has been responsible for deeds so dark and outrageous to our Maker that he is indeed damned. But the Great Affliction is not the work of God. Of this, I am convinced even if recent events have dulled the distinction between that which I can and cannot rationally accept is true and real.

  The weather has brightened. The sky is an unsullied blue and the sea azure beneath its colossal canopy and calm. The sun shines, bathing the land in a warm light that stirs scents from the ground, subtle and sweet. On such mornings it is almost impossible to believe the predicament in which our settlement finds itself. Then you look up and see the Master perched like a statue on the heights, or like some carved figurehead, its wooden gaze unblinking, waiting for the first glimpse through that endless blue vista of the bird that is never going to come.

  The Great Affliction claimed three victims last night. The Morgan girls were taken, as I have stated already. Young Barton was found hanged by his belt from the pulley gantry at the harbour when dawn broke. He was already stiff, had resolved to end his life by the look of it the previous night not long after darkness fell. It was pitiful, watching them cut him down. He was only 13 years old.

  The grief was evidently too great a burden for his young heart to bear. He was all that was left of his family and could not tolerate their absence from his life. Either that or he could not endure the dread of awaiting his turn to become himself one of the perished at the Great Affliction’s whim.

  We carry on. Somehow, the dull routine of toil seems to make men and women oblivious in the immediacy of what they do to their general plight. And so we fish and weave baskets and distil the whiskey that will now never be sold and gather wool and sow oats and mend nets and patch clothes and school children in the matters of reading and writing and arithmetic.

  And for all I know, as a single man and life-long bachelor, the married among us still couple in the night for comfort or through passion in the warmth and intimacy of their beds. Intimacy is an illusion now, of course. But all comforts here are an illusion, truth be told.

  The evil come among us makes hope seem a scornful jest and prayer for deliverance a babbled nonsense. There is no hope. There is no prospect of deliverance. Even should the impossible happen and the bird come, nothing will change. Will Barton, wise beyond his tender years, knew that. But self-murder is a mortal sin and so offers no escape for a devout soul.

  Fortescue called Lassiter. There was silence on the other end of the line until he had finished speaking. Then there was a pause so charged it was almost audible.

  Lassiter said, ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘There are some books here at the museum salvaged from New Hope after the vanishing was discovered. One of them is an atlas. Some of the really detailed maps are folded flat into envelope arrangements so they can fold out bigger than the dimensions of the book when you study them. I opened out a map and there it was, concealed in the fold, tucked and hidden there.’

  ‘Why were you studying the map?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘It was reading that piece Lucy Church wrote about the psychic, Alice Lang. I thought that if I handed something from New Hope from the period of the vanishing, I might have an intuition, the way that she does.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want one of her intuitions.’

  ‘She’s very attractive. Either that, or she takes a very good picture.’

  ‘She’s the former.’

  ‘You’re a lucky man.’

  ‘Read it out to me.’

  ‘Read the whole account?’

  ‘You said it wasn’t particularly long. Read it aloud.’

  Fortescue did. When he had finished he said, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s genuine and doesn’t tell us very much. Except that whatever the Great Affliction was, it panicked Ballantyne into communicating with the outside world.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘What do you think the bird is all about? You think old Seamus was a twitcher?’

  ‘I thought it might be symbolic, a metaphor or bit of religious symbolism. Birds feature heavily in religious mythology. Doves are connected to peace and hope. Ravens are harbingers of death, aren’t they?’

  ‘The bird he’s looking out for is a carrier pigeon. He’s waiting for information from someone, which means that he’s asked someone somewhere other than New Hope for advice or assistance.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘How the bloody hell would I know?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Anyway you should be asking who, not where. And a more pertinent question would be, about what? We can now safely rule out mass suicide. And this Great Affliction doesn’t sound much like any epidemic I’ve ever heard of. The spread of contagion is too slow.’

  ‘Unless you think of AIDS,’ Fortescue said.

  ‘That’s a fair point, which I’ll concede. So none of the major theories are either ruled out or confirmed by what you’ve found.’

  ‘There’s a hint of mutiny. Of mutinous thoughts, there is.’

  ‘There is. But a mutiny would either have been successful or successfully suppressed. Everyone wouldn’t have just vanished as a consequence of rebellion. Obviously something nightmarish was occurring on New Hope. But I think this account poses more questions than it answers.’

  ‘Will you help me track down Thomas Horan?’

  ‘Your timing isn’t the best, professor.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  ‘Will you?’

  Lassiter was silent. Then he said, ‘Was Horan married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the lucky lady was named?’

  ‘Martha Jane Garland.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Good because Garland isn’t Smith or Brown. Trace the genealogy of Barnsley families with his wife’s maiden name. He would have changed his to hers. That’s my hunch.’

  ‘Why?’ />
  ‘Out of shame, Professor. He was ashamed of what went on aboard the Andromeda. He colluded in it. He drew his pay from the profits of a trade he knew was evil. He enjoyed an officer’s status aboard the ship. The company that owned the ship saw to it that he was clothed and fed and berthed. He may have suffered sufficient remorse in later life to try to become someone else. When people do that, the first thing they change is the obvious thing. They change their name.’

  ‘He might have used his mother’s maiden name.’

  ‘He wouldn’t. To have done that would have been a perceived slight on his father. He did not wish to slight his father, but himself. In a sense he will have wanted to eradicate himself. He’ll have taken his wife’s surname. I’d bet money on it.’

  ‘You were a really good detective, weren’t you?’

  ‘You’ve no idea how cruel the past tense can be, Professor.’

  ‘You were though, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Thirst intervened.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I was a drunk.’

  ‘Past tense again?’

  ‘I very much hope so, Professor Fortescue.’

  ‘I’d actually prefer it if you called me Phil.’

  ‘Then I’m Patrick to you. Just don’t do that Scouse abbreviation thing, because I can’t abide being called Patsy.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Keep me up to speed on your Horan journal search, Phil. Edith Chambers is right. It is important. Something specific and highly significant occurred aboard the Andromeda and we need to know what it was.’

  ‘I’d probably find it quicker if we looked together.’

  ‘I’ve a personal interest in the continued wellbeing of Alice Lang, Phil. I’m not delaying my departure for New Hope even for a day. I’m going with her.’

  ‘I thought you’d be more willing to help, after your experience in the basement here and after your encounter in that pub, when you left the museum.’

  Silence.

  ‘Patsy?’

  ‘What did I just tell you about calling me that?’