The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  It had to be a ‘they’. Dennis Thorpe was their leader, but he wasn’t acting alone. Freddie hadn’t been the only retreater to arrive on New Hope harbouring secrets. Of course he knew none of this for sure, it was all supposition, but the whole New Hope jaunt had been Thorpe’s brainchild and the barren and uninhabited location he had handpicked suited ideally whatever purpose there was to drugging and binding him. There was no one here to witness them do it and no one to stop them or to catch them when it was done.

  Terry wondered, creeping over the night ground having found the roof for his intended hide, what fate they’d had in store for him. And then he stopped dead, not because he’d heard an approaching or following sound, but because it had occurred to him that he wasn’t the only victim.

  Thorpe had help. But the idea that all five of them were involved in this scheme seemed ridiculous. That scenario only worked if they were all five of them members of some sort of gang or cult. He couldn’t see that at all. William Thompson was a merchant banker. He was cold, detached and as rigidly conventional as the garters he probably wore on his pale shins to keep his socks from wrinkling.

  How many victims would they need to make their plot worthwhile? Terry wouldn’t be able to answer that question until he knew what they’d intended to do with them. And at that moment, with his mouth birdcage-bottom dry and his head thumping from the narcotic used to knock him out, his priorities were water, rest while he recovered and concealment.

  He found his water source at a freshwater tarn, drinking as much of it as his belly would hold, cursing the fact that he had no means of bottling and taking any of it away with him. Then he trudged silently towards the coastline, the stars his route map, to put the rest of his immediate plan into urgent practice.

  One element of his reasoning was flawed, he thought now, as he kneaded numbed muscles in preparation for leaving his shelter. He’d been wrong to think the island uninhabited. He’d heard that weird rendition of the Kate Rusby song. He’d heard Who Will Sing Me Lullabies ground soullessly out in a tone that sounded unlike any other singing voice he’d ever heard. He hadn’t dreamed or imagined it.

  It was this phantom he feared, rather than Dennis Thorpe and his allies. A couple of uncanny incidents in the Province, on remote farmland at night, had left him with an appreciation that the world was a stranger place than people generally assumed. He believed there were things beyond the rational it really didn’t do to joke or be complacent about. He had that in common with many of his old comrades in arms. Soldiers were a superstitious lot and rightly so.

  As far as Thorpe and his cronies were concerned, they really didn’t know what they were dealing with. He could improvise a weapon. And he’d remembered in his temporary tomb how to use his hands and feet and head and at a push, his teeth. Jovial, easy-going Freddie Boyle was entirely extinct in him now. He was Colour Sergeant Terry Conway. Hidden away though they were, he had the medals to prove it. And they had it fucking coming. He’d slot them. But he’d capture and confine and interrogate them first, just out of curiosity.

  The clatter of shingle was unavoidable, exiting his hide. He minimised this as best as he was able by moving incrementally and he was somewhat reassured as he did so by the audible impact of the waves below, which crashed heavily and rhythmically and smothered the sound of his pebble avalanches, making of them noiseless trickles instead.

  It was just before dawn. The sun was a cloud-covered blear of orange on the eastern horizon. It was blowy and raining, out in the open. The barometric pressure had changed. He could feel the density of wet air on his skin. He was buffeted by a sudden gust, crouched there, by his hide. It wasn’t cold, which was something. He was wearing only jeans and a denim shirt over a T-shirt and trainers. But he could tell from the weight of the air, gravid and pungent with the odour of sea-salt, that there was a storm coming and in this part of the world, knew they could be prolonged and very severe.

  He was mobile, that was a start. He was uninjured and his mental clarity had fully returned to him. He was hungry and thirsty. He would backtrack to the freshwater tarn and think about where to find food. A raid on the eggs of nesting birds was probably his best bet in the immediate term. He might find some wild berries. He’d come around deprived of his wristwatch and wallet and useless iPhone. And if he didn’t find some weatherproof clothing or proper shelter and the storm worsened, he’d risk dying of exposure.

  He couldn’t return to a hostile reception at their camp, near the island’s most easterly point, a few hundred metres inland from Ballantyne’s dock, without a weapon. He thought that the best place to improvise one of those was the old colony settlement. There was wood there and slate from the roofs of their tannery and distillery. He could fashion an axe or spear. An old iron nine inch ship’s nail was a makeshift dagger. The place was easy to find because so long as the land continued to incline in front of you, you eventually came to it. He’d set off for the settlement and forage for food on the way.

  The wind was already strengthening. Before he left, he filled the hole he’d dug and spread the shingle over it so it looked no different from the terrain surrounding the spot. Then he took its Kevlar cover, flapping and pulling in his arms, down to the edge of the water. Either it would look like it had washed up there, or the waves would carry it away. They would know he’d escaped, but he wanted them to know nothing else. That was dictated by his training. Knowledge was power. You didn’t willingly surrender it to your enemies.

  On the way to the settlement, he realised that through the gathering whistle and roar of the approaching storm, his ears were straining to identify another sound. He didn’t hear it, but he knew what it was. He was listening out for singing that hadn’t, when he’d last heard it, sounded altogether human.

  Terry didn’t think anyone would be up this early or out in the deteriorating weather. Even if all five of the other retreaters were in something together, they didn’t have the manpower for an adequate search party. The island wasn’t vast, but it was largely a craggy wilderness and much of the lower-lying area between where they’d encamped and the rising ground towards the settlement was a peat-bog.

  The quickest and safest route from one end of the island to the other was along its coast. But that presented its own hazards, with the rising swell of a strengthening storm. Big waves would make New Hope’s coastline a no-go area just now for anyone unwilling to risk being engulfed, washed out to sea and drowned.

  The bottom line was that to come looking for him, without dogs or quad bikes, they’d need more than half-a-dozen fit and alert searchers. Despite this conclusion, he was careful to keep a vigilant, 360 degree watch on his surroundings. It got gloomier as the sky darkened above the heavy downpour now soaking him. And he got colder with the steady ascent in altitude in the rising gale. Shivering, he became more confident that no one was coming after him in this elemental weather.

  Nor was he going to find any food. There were cormorants, gannets, guillemots, puffins and razorbills aplenty on the islands of the Outer Hebrides, but they’d all hatched their eggs the previous month and were feeding their chicks now. And it was too early in the year for berries. Eating would have to wait until he’d made his weapon and confronted whoever was left back at their camp. Because he’d been trained to see the positive side of the negatives, his hunger gave him even more cause to look forward to that confrontation.

  He’d reached the settlement’s wall. He shivered as he walked to the gap from where the wall’s great gate had long ago disappeared. The perimeter wall should have provided some shelter from the elements but the rain was close to torrential now, needling out of a black sky and drumming on the granite and scabs of thin turf under his soaked feet. And the wind clamoured and howled through the broken roofs of the hovels there without respite.

  There was a modest porch around the door of the church without windows. It had kept the ground within it mostly dry despite the downpour. So it had not washed away the single bloodied footprint Terr
y noticed immediately, noticing also that the church door, a half-ton of obdurate oak, was unsecured, opened a chink, offering a vertical glimpse of the blackness inside the building.

  The smell of blood when he opened the door further was coppery and fresh and almost overpowering. He pushed wide the door and walked through it and the soles of his trainers were instantly sticky with gore. It sucked and pulled at his feet with each step. There wasn’t much light in the day at his back, but there was enough to see the blood-spill by. Someone had bled to death there. He wondered which of his erstwhile companions it was. And he knew the fate that had been planned for him.

  There was another smell, when he got further into that single, gloomy chamber. It was incense, the sort swung in a brass burner over a roundel of glowing charcoal at a Catholic mass.

  ‘Sacrifice,’ Terry said.

  From outside, he heard then a single, sharp, snarl of ungoverned glee. Having heard it so recently before, it was sufficient for him to recognise the voice. Terror dazed him and he turned and stumbled back into the lowering half-light of the storm outside. There he saw a figure, small and frail and tattered, eyeless, her feet trailing above the rain-slicked cobbles of the tannery floor, stretching the black maw of her mouth to grin at him. Her hair was a brittle straw halo curiously untouched, like the rags clothing her, by the deluge.

  ‘Hello, soldier-boy,’ she said, her voice a whisper that carried with cold clarity over the howl of the wind and the thrum of the downpour. She held her arms wide and her mouth stretched further, the grin becoming a leer. ‘I’m lonely,’ she said. ‘Play with me.’

  Chapter Six

  Ruthie woke up hung-over. She had drunk outside the pub with Phil Fortescue and then inside the pub for a while with Fortescue and Edie Chambers and then outside again for a last cigarette, when he showed her the watch. And then on the Ferry on the return journey to Wight. Drinking aboard the ferry had been her mistake, she reasoned. A girl could only take so much. But she always told herself that and it never seemed to make any difference. She’d thought about booze in lots of ways, right from the cider-fuelled Goth house-parties of her mid-teens half a lifetime ago. A drink could be a comfort or a mood-lifter, it could break the ice or mellow you out. They were all positives. But in her current, rather ominous predicament, Ruthie was staring to think of alcohol less as a friend than as fallibility in a glass. She was in a very sober situation, wasn’t she?

  Fortescue had been sociable despite himself. She’d had the strong intuition meeting him that he was plagued by his past. She’d sought him out seeking answers or at least clues about New Hope because she’d thought him likely to be the most approachable and informative of the expedition’s survivors. But, she’d learned nothing from him really, and nothing about him, except that he was nicer than he pretended to be and a physically attractive man.

  Careening around her small cottage kitchen, brewing a pot of coffee and trying to assemble a breakfast with a reasonable chance of staying down, she decided that 2,000 words would be a suitable self-administered punishment. She was on schedule with the story she was writing and if she completed another eight pages today it would help her stay that way. The straight and narrow, Ruthie, she chided herself, no more meandering.

  She drank all the coffee, the entire pot, checking her emails and updating the Twitter account and Facebook page her publisher had advised her no modern author could exist without. Then at a quarter to nine she opened her word document and began, with two fingers, to type. She’d never learned to touch-type. Her fingers only had to tap out the words at the speed at which her mind could formulate them. Hangovers tended to impede her physical movement more than they did her thought processes and the coffee helped. She began to write without any hesitation.

  When her phone rang at 11am she hadn’t yet stopped for a break and her bladder had begun to complain. She saw that it was Nick McClain. She answered telling him she’d call him back in five, saved her document, had a pee and then, walking outside into the suntrap of her little back garden, did so.

  ‘Are you on New Hope with your death dogs?’

  ‘If I was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. No phone masts on the island.’

  ‘Why aren’t you there?’

  ‘The weather’s intervened. So I’m still on Stornoway, at my desk, the dogs kennelled, waiting for this storm to blow itself out.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Predicting Hebridean weather’s an inexact science.’

  ‘Which is a long-winded way of saying you don’t know?’

  ‘There’s no great urgency. There’s no one on the island, no one living, anyway.’

  ‘Unless they don’t want to be found and are deliberately concealing themselves.’

  ‘When did that possibility occur to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Just now,’ she said.

  ‘I had the same thought last night after you told me what you did about your suspicion that Mabel Farrow and Jennifer Spring might not be total strangers to one another.’

  ‘It was more in the nature of a hunch than a suspicion, Nick. Only paranoid people have suspicions.’

  ‘Paranoid people and police officers,’ he said.

  ‘Are they ever one and the same?’

  ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But you weren’t paranoid about the Reverend Mabel. And I’m checking now on Jennifer Spring and if there’s the link I suspect there is, I’ll look for a prior connection between the pair of them and Dennis Thorpe.’

  ‘Weatherproof detective work,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘Work all done in the warm and dry at a computer terminal.’

  ‘What’s the Reverend Mabel done?’

  ‘I’ll let you in on that later today when I’ve found out anything else, or not.’

  ‘You’re a terrible tease, Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘I’m not in your league, Ms. Gillespie.’

  Ruthie wrestled with her demons. More accurately her brother-sister characters Tom and Martha wrestled with their demons, emerging from a compost bin on their dad’s allotment punctually at 9pm every second Sunday of the month. The book was one in a series of 30, 000 word stories aimed at under-12s. It was very definitely not the sort of book she had planned to go to New Hope Island to contemplate and then begin. That was for an adult audience and was intended to be the stuff of nightmares.

  By lunchtime she was three-quarters of the way to her penitent word-count target. The hangover had happily departed her. She was pleased with what she’d written. She thought the key to keeping children’s fiction interesting, or one of the keys, was to give the principle characters a challenge or responsibility so big it almost overwhelmed them. Tom and Martha were 12 and 11 respectively.

  Their demons had to be kept secret from their dad, recovering from heart surgery, and from their mum, anxious about their dad. They had to be tricked back into the netherworld they’d come from while they were still small because they grew alarmingly quickly once they emerged from the compost. Because they were demonic, they were tricky to deal with; cunning, dishonest, sneaky, unreliable, charming and masters of disguise.

  It was whimsical stuff. Because she’d been reminded of New Hope and her fiction writing ambitions for the island, Ruthie remembered Freddie Boyle and his therapeutic story of the bullied boy. She figured it was probably autobiographical and would have been moving because authentic. She hoped he was okay. She hoped he’d get the opportunity to write something he’d seemed in their brief acquaintanceship quite passionate about.

  She’d done her 2,000 words and was enjoying a celebratory glass of Chablis at her garden table just after 3 o’clock, when DS McClain called again.

  ‘Bingo,’ he said.

  ‘A game played in seaside arcades by old ladies,’ she said, ‘inexplicably popular with the Royal Navy, unless that’s just a malicious myth.’

  ‘The Church of England is a very forgiving employer. There are practicing clergy with serious criminal records, though they
’ve done their time and repented, of course.’

  ‘Christianity is supposed to be about forgiveness, isn’t it?’ Ruthie said.

  ‘They didn’t need to be forgiving where she was concerned. Her only sin was one of omission in not telling them who she’d been before. Until five years ago, Mabel Farrow didn’t exist. Her name is a deed-poll invention. Before that, she was someone else.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because the name changed, but the National Insurance Number didn’t. Before she became Mabel Farrow, she was Patricia Anderson. And Patricia Anderson resided for the first 10 years of the century in County Clare in the Irish Republic.’

  ‘What about Jennifer Spring?’

  ‘You want to work for HMRC and you have to endure some pretty comprehensive background checks. Jennifer has no criminal record, no penalty points on her driving license and her credit rating is unblemished. But between 2005 and 2010 she too lived in Liscannor on the coast of County Clare.’

  ‘David Shanks committed suicide in County Clare.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. His home was about a mile to the south of Liscannor.’

  ‘This is getting creepy, Nick.’

  ‘It gets creepier. Dennis Thorpe lives in Lewes in Sussex, has done all his life. You don’t need a visa to visit the Irish Republic. You don’t even have to have a passport to travel there. But I‘ve seen his tax returns. He spent the whole summer of every year between 2005 and 2010 in Clare. His debit and credit cards crop up used for pub and restaurant meals and baskets of supermarket shopping in Ennis, the county town, but never for accommodation. He claimed these were research trips on his self-assessment forms.’

  ‘He’s never set a book in Ireland. I’ve read them all.’