The Colony Trilogy

by Cottam, F. G.

  Rose Brennan said, ‘And two pensioners who lived alone in remote homes went missing in that period. And a 14 year old boy with Down’s Syndrome. And every time I read about any of them in the newspapers, I thought of Dennis and Patricia and Jennifer Spring.’

  Rose was wringing her hands, saying this. They were red and her palms and fingertips on the way to becoming raw. McClain had of course heard the expression, but had never actually seen anyone do it. There were tears coursing down her face in a dribbled path through the freckles. She began to weep. Wilde reached out and put a compassionate hand on her shoulder and squeezed and McClain felt a strong surge of respect and liking for him. He liked O’Casey too.

  He said, ‘Do you actually believe the missing were victims of sacrifice? Are we talking here about ritual killing?’

  Rose Brennan nodded. For the moment, she wasn’t capable of coherent speech. Then she said, ‘None of them admitted that, it was only ever hinted at.’

  ‘But you thought him capable of it,’ Wilde said.

  ‘He couldn’t help hinting at what they’d done. He’s quite boastful. He never trusted me enough to take me into his confidence fully but certain things were implied.’

  ‘Tell Mr. Rattigan about the episode in County Cork,’ Wilde said.

  Rose said, ‘Some lads from a travellers’ camp made fun of him once at a table on the street outside a café in Cork City when I was there. Things took a physical turn, which was a bad mistake on their part. Dennis might dress foppish, but he’s strong and quick-tempered and exceptionally fast with his fists.

  ‘Because they came off worse they came back after with a game dog, one of those Pit Bull Terriers or American Bulldogs the knackers make money breeding. Dennis grinned and a dead look came into his eyes. He muttered something and made a sign in the air in front of him with his hand and the dog cowered to the floor and whimpered and then coughed up its lungs right there on the pavement with Dennis watching and grinning with that dead-eyed expression. Sir, I think he’s capable of anything.’

  O’Casey said, ‘It’s the key, apparently. It’s the direct route to ultimate power. It’s why Thorpe organised his New Hope Island jaunt. And when she read about that and put two and two together, it’s why Rose here went to her confessor.’

  McClain asked, ‘But why New Hope? I know Shanks lived there for a while, is it sentiment, a sort of homage or pilgrimage?’

  ‘Some places have great potential for magic,’ Rose Brennan said. ‘Clare is one, but Dennis always insisted that nowhere compares to the island.’

  O’Casey said, ‘Did you never think to leave him, child?’

  ‘All the time once the glamour faded, and it faded pretty fast, but I never dared.’

  ‘What are your thoughts, Mr. Rattigan?’ Wilde said to McClain.

  ‘I’m not really buying the abracadabra stuff,’ he said.

  Rose looked at him for a long moment and then rose slowly with a sigh from her chair. She walked deliberately across the room, turning against the wall facing the windows. She stood a dozen feet away, staring at them like some trapped and timid creature, like Bambi, McClain thought, shy and nervously young, big-eyed, fragile-seeming against an austere backdrop of panelled Georgian wood blackened to an antique hue. She stood perfectly still, rigid, unblinking. And he watched as her outline faded and became indistinct and as the substance of her seemed to drain like the sand in an hourglass entirely out of sight.

  Chapter Ten

  The knock at her door came as a surprise to Ruthie, but not an unpleasant one. She was clear-headed this morning, having kept to the promise made to herself to abstain from the gin and the vodka the night before. She was ahead of schedule with her latest novel. She’d drunk her pot of coffee that morning pondering on the physical resemblance between David Shanks and Dennis Thorpe, so strong as to insist a shared bloodline.

  She hoped DS McClain was getting his answers, the missing pieces of the complex puzzle he was assembling. She was an hour into her writing when the knock came and she just assumed it was the postman with a package too big for her letterbox. Sometimes her publishers sent her books they thought she might enjoy. Mostly, they were miles off.

  When she opened the door, it was Edie Chambers. Well, Ventnor was a small town and she was on the electoral role, so Ruthie supposed she could be tracked down. Edie looked svelte and composed and very blonde in the June sunlight. Her sunglasses were perched on her head and she smelled of Jo Malone perfume. She smiled and Ruthie smiled back, doubly grateful now she hadn’t gone to the dogs the previous evening. Edie wouldn’t necessarily tell tales, but she was close to her step-dad and he was someone Ruthie would rather impress than disappoint. Disappoint a man with his obvious integrity and you’d be a disappointment to yourself for having done so.

  Thinking, ‘What on earth can you possibly want,’ instead she said, ‘Edie! What a lovely surprise! Come in!’

  Edie Chambers did.

  Ruthie made her guest tea, wanting nothing herself, having drunk her fill of coffee. She suggested they sit in her garden. The sky was practically cloudless and the birds sang loudly and the air had the salt presence of the sea. Ruthie thought that whatever Edie wanted, she’d warm them up conversationally with some platitude about the weather or how lucky she was to live somewhere so picturesque and charming and quaint.

  Instead, she said, ‘Six years ago, when I was 14, I was haunted by a ghost. This ghost had been Jacob Parr in life, a second-mate aboard Seamus Ballantyne’s slaving vessel, Andromeda.’

  It seemed wisest to see where this was going before making any meaningful comment, so Ruthie just said, ‘Go on.’

  Edie shrugged, remembering the wheals Parr had revealed to her on his back, the deep scars inflicted by a flogging he’d been given for drunkenness, his dark, spectral relish at the recollection. What he’d been when alive had been nothing more than low-life. She didn’t share that observation with Ruthie, though.

  She said, ‘He taught me to play a song called The Recruited Collier. Then he told me I had to find a journal written by the Andromeda’s physician, Thomas Horan. He said it contained a dire warning for my mother. The warning was to do with the New Hope Expedition, which made it urgent, since they were going there only in a matter of days.’

  ‘He’d given you a tall order.’

  ‘It was hopelessly beyond me. I called the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and got given the bum’s rush, understandably. Then I remembered the Andromeda had been registered to Liverpool. By some miracle I got through to Philip Fortescue at the museum there. I was overwhelmed, probably in shock from Parr’s visitations. I began to cry and he said he’d help.’

  ‘He strikes me as a kind man.’

  ‘He promised he’d help and he always keeps his promises.’

  ‘That’s very admirable.’

  ‘He’s clever as well as kind. He joined the dots. The Recruited Collier is a Kate Rusby song. She’s nicknamed the Barnsley Nightingale. He knew that. He tracked Horan down to Barnsley and his journal down to a derelict mine-shaft there.’

  ‘That song-title was the second of Parr’s clues?’

  ‘And the journal told Phil what it was they were facing on New Hope and how to counter it and so he went there and did it and saved their lives. Those that were still alive, I mean. He saved them all.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Edie?’

  ‘I don’t know. Actually, I do. I think he might ask you out for a drink, or dinner, or something. If you turn him down, I want you to be kind and do it tactfully.’

  ‘Does he know you’re here, talking to me, today?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t. He thinks I’ve gone up to London to research something at Greenwich I can find out in half an hour on the internet.’

  ‘I can’t possibly date Philip Fortescue,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘Why can’t you?’

  ‘He’s totally out of my league.’

  ‘I’d let him be the judge of that.’

  Al
exander McIntyre, media-magnate proprietor of The Chronicle, features grimly set under his leonine head of silver hair, struck a series of indignant poses about his company’s boardroom as the only other person present watched him do it, without comment. McIntyre was demonstrably not in the mood for idle chatter this morning. In the five years spent working for him, Paul Napier had become an excellent judge of his disposition.

  Magisterial, imperious, patriarchal, majestic, epically grave and almost biblically aloof; they were the phrases his wife, shortly he thought to be his ex-wife, had coined for McIntyre. Although Lucy was chief features writer of McIntyre’s flagship newspaper title and thus had a vested interest in inflating his myth, Napier thought the descriptions no more than sincerely accurate.

  ‘Let me ask you a question. Would you go back there?’

  Napier had first gone to New Hope as one of the security team intended to protect the Chronicle’s exclusive. By the time McIntyre’s expedition proper arrived, he’d already endured a couple of unsettling weeks there. He said, ‘You swore none of us would, chief. You stated publicly that the island was entitled to its secrets.’

  ‘That was before this morning’s story in the Daily Mail. The mystery deepens on my island and the Chronicle’s not involved? It’s fucking intolerable. And don’t call me chief. I’ve warned you about that.’

  ‘It’s not your island.’

  ‘The money for that expedition came out of my pocket.’

  ‘It actually came out of company coffers.’

  ‘Since the company’s privately owned and I’m its owner that amounts to the same thing.’

  Napier said, ‘It was my understanding that the increase in the Chronicle’s sales and the hiked-up ad rates in the run-up to New Hope more than covered the expedition costs. People lost their lives, but you actually turned a hefty profit.’

  ‘You’re splitting hairs, Paul. Would you go back?’

  Napier thought about the expedition, about the nightmare into which it had swiftly descended. Six years had not diminished the memories. It had been the start of things with Lucy. That hurt too because those memories were so fond and he so cherished them.

  ‘I’ll ask again, would you go back?’

  ‘Why would you want me to?’

  ‘How long were you there for?’

  ‘You know the answer to that, chief.’

  ‘And you patrolled the island daily?’

  ‘Night and day,’ Napier said.

  ‘You know New Hope better than any man living. If anyone can find out what’s become of that creative writing group, it’s you.’

  ‘My money would be on the wake of a supertanker washing them out into the Atlantic. They were likely collecting shells or pebbles, something whimsical like that.’

  McIntyre raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  ‘Or they were on a little pilgrimage to the crofter’s cottage David Shanks built there. That would be a writerish thing to do and the easiest way to walk anywhere on the island is along the shore, except they were ignorant of the dangers of doing that.’

  ‘Go back there and prove that’s what happened.’

  Napier shrugged.

  ‘There was something demonic on that island,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘There was, chief, and Phil Fortescue destroyed it and we both know that because we were both there when he did it.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean the thing Shanks shot on the cine film Patrick Lassiter sourced for me.’

  ‘He’s Commander Lassiter now.’

  ‘You’ve all thrived.’

  ‘Really, chief? Jane Chambers is dead, Phil’s desolate and my marriage is on the rocks.’

  McIntyre didn’t reply to that. Instead he made a needless adjustment to the knot of his Garrick Club tie.

  ‘I was already on the island by the time Patsy discovered that footage,’ Napier said. ‘So I never saw it. And I never saw any suggestion there of the thing Shanks filmed. That said though, there was never a waking moment on New Hope when I didn’t feel I was being watched.’

  ‘And the scrutiny was hostile?’

  ‘Very.’

  McIntyre went back to the table at the centre of the room, not striding now, Napier observed, but sauntering, giving himself time to think, scheming. He picked up that morning’s Mail, the banner headline on the front page bellowing about the missing group, the exclusive first-person torment of the vanished banker’s wife spread across three torrid inside pages.

  ‘Don’t torture yourself, chief.’

  ‘Do you still love Lucy, Paul?’

  ‘That’s an intrusive question.’

  ‘I take the emotional wellbeing of my staff very seriously.’

  ‘I love her with all my heart.’

  ‘Then what’s gone wrong?’

  ‘People grow. If you’re lucky and careful, you grow together. Or you take your eye off the ball and you grow apart.’

  ‘Does taking your eye off the ball mean straying?’

  ‘No,’ Napier said. ‘I’ve never been unfaithful.’

  ‘Has she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  McIntyre said, ‘I’m minded to send Lucy to New Hope. She’s fearless and ambitious and so she’ll go. The man leading the police investigation is a Detective-Sergeant Nick McClain. He’ll no doubt be replaced by someone more senior now the disappearance is in the public domain. Lucy can sweet-talk whoever takes over the case and she can bone up on the retreat members on her way to the Hebrides.’

  ‘You’re a piece of work, chief.’

  ‘We’re behind on this and the only way to get ahead on it is to send my star writer to the scene without delay. She’s a more than competent photographer. And I’ll hire one of those Ray Mears types to build her a camp and provide her with rations and protect her from natural hazards.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Or I could send a decorated veteran of Afghanistan, someone who learned his survivalist and logistics expertise in the Parachute Regiment and who badly needs an opportunity to re-connect with his wife.’

  ‘That’s within your power, chief.’

  McIntyre looked at his watch. ‘Best pop down to Millet’s, Paul.’ He winked. ‘There’s a half-price sale on just now and you’re in urgent need of some new outdoor kit.’

  By the following day, calmer weather had finally returned to the waters surrounding New Hope Island. McClain disembarked there at noon. He was behind schedule. He had mustered a mixed group of 20 officers and Stornoway volunteers for a thorough search. They had tents and supplies with them, should they need to stay overnight and bivouac. The boat that had brought them there, anchored off the Colony’s old dock, could berth ten passengers at a push.

  He had brought the death dogs and their handler and a forensics team in their white paper overalls in case they found anything human and deceased, or anything incriminating. He thought it unlikely that they would. Thorpe had planned meticulously and the previous morning’s events had proven that he had a novel talent personally for avoiding discovery.

  Everything he’d learned in Ireland had been ominous. Dennis Thorpe was a cunning schemer with considerable physical strength and a strong streak of sadism and two acolytes whose loyalty seemed nothing short of fanatical. He was secretive and ambitious, a practitioner of black magic rituals who might well have resorted to ritual killing in the past. He believed New Hope a place of potent enchantment. Ireland for McClain had relegated the rogue wave disappearance theory from likelihood to wishful thinking.

  There was an app on his phone that gave him an update on meteorological conditions in the Outer Hebrides every hour. He’d been on his way to Limerick Airport and his return flight the previous day when he saw that conditions were improving. He called Area Command and requested the craft to take them to the island, the team he’d require and the appeal for volunteers. When he’d been assured all that was in motion, he called Paul Lassiter.

  ‘Detective-Sergeant,’ Lassiter said.

  �
�It’s Detective-Inspector,’ McClain said. ‘As of thirty minutes ago.’

  Lassiter was quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘You put in for a promotion I’m guessing around 18 months ago. You ticked all the necessary boxes. But it was deferred by budgetary constraints. Then this morning the Mail splashed on the New Hope disappearances and the public scrutiny meant your bosses needed someone with a more senior rank in charge of the investigation. You’re the best man for the job, so that became you.’

  McClain just smiled in his taxi seat. There was no point commenting. Deductive reasoning was what Lassiter did for a living. He told Lassiter where he was. Then he told him about Rose Brennan and the story she’d told.

  Lassiter said, ‘The man whose death Shanks orchestrated on the Ypres Salient was a second-lieutenant named Robert Cross. I’ve reason to believe he came from the Shaftesbury area of Dorset, not that it’s relevant.’

  ‘Information you owe to your gifted wife?’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘I followed the progress of the expedition six years ago. I bought and read the Chronicle like everyone else did.’

  ‘Do you believe in fate, son?’

  ‘I don’t know what I believe, after this morning.’

  ‘Congratulations on your promotion. I mean that.’

  After his conversation with Lassiter, McClain had debated calling Ruthie. He felt an obligation to tell her that her alert observations concerning Mabel Farrow and Jennifer Spring had resulted in gathering important information about Dennis Thorpe, his clandestine life and his real motivation in going to New Hope.

  But he didn’t call her. He didn’t feel it was appropriate to discuss alleged ritual killing and demonstrable occult powers with a sensitive woman over a phone line. It might be different face to face. But he didn’t want Ruthie speculating on her own gruesome fate had she travelled to New Hope. He wanted more answers on the island and then to see her face to face, before he discussed the case with her further.