The Colony Part 23

'The walkie-talkies are unreliable,' Napier said, speaking equally softly. 'They're good kit normally, but nothing requiring a signal or wavelength seems to work here with any dependability.'

La.s.siter said, 'How long does it take to identify a ma.s.s grave? That's a rhetorical question by the way, Sergeant, because it doesn't take very long at all. Not when you're someone with Kale's level of expertise. Recovery is the time consuming bit. He was only trying to establish that the bodies were there.'

'He could have got carried away,' Napier said, aware of the ambiguity of his words before he'd even completed the sentence.Carried away like Blake and Carrick were, he thought.

'If he'd found anything, he'd have been back here boasting about it,' La.s.siter said, 'and recruiting helpers to rig a shelter over the site. I'm concerned.'

The Chinook that had unloaded the Land Rover Kale had taken had also deposited a pair of quad bikes for the expedition's use. Both of the men knew it. La.s.siter glanced around.

They were in the galley, which most people seemed to prefer to the recreation room as a place to gather and socialise. It was as though the bickering of the previous evening had left a bad atmosphere there. He saw that everyone but Cooper and the priest were present. And Kale of course, he was absent too. A meeting had been called for six to discuss the events of the day. A quad bike could easily get to the peat bog and back in less than an hour.

'I'll go,' Napier said.

La.s.siter nodded. 'Be careful, Paul,' he said.

Napier felt quite relieved to get away for a bit. He thought the tension in the compound was growing all the time. The search had brought home to all its partic.i.p.ants just how wild and barren and remote the island was. Their failure to find any trace of the man they were searching for was a frustrating blow to general morale.

The women had got back from the cottage shaken by whatever experience the three of them had shared. They looked scared, frankly. And he thought that Alice Lang had aged about five years since their shared banter at breakfast.

n.o.body had really forgiven Karl Cooper his boorish digs at Jane Chambers of the previous evening. He had sulked his way through the search for Carrick, seemingly aware of this. Then against Napier's tactful advice, he had gone off to the settlement on his own. They could hardly forbid him from doing so; the weather was benign and he was a grown man there to investigate a mystery, not to be chaperoned. All they could say to him was to make sure he was back for six and the meeting, which Patrick La.s.siter duly did.

The priest was behaving oddly. Father Degrelle didn't seem to Napier like the man he'd seen pulverizing Karl Cooper verbally once on an edition of Question Time. He seemed withdrawn and preoccupied. Generally he was a galvanic advert for his faith. Since the chopper had touched down on the island, he'd become almost unrecognisable.

He hoped the meeting would clarify a few things. The main mission of the day had been the search and that had ended in failure. The experts were supposed to be there to solve a mystery, not to create more of them. It seemed callous to carry on without James Carrick but he supposed that was what they would do.

Practically, they had to try to re-establish radio contact with the mainland. That was the urgent priority now that hope of finding the missing man seemed to be exhausted. Napier thought that if they did that, a sense of urgency would return to the experts who were after all competing to be right about the cause of the New Hope vanis.h.i.+ng.

He was there. He could see Kale's land Rover in front of him as he crested a ridge and nursed the bike into the shallow vale where the peat bog lay below. He could smell the peat. Gra.s.s ruffled beneath him fingered by a slight breeze. The ground dulled when the sun slipped behind one of the small clouds dotting the sky.

There had been a couple of showers earlier in the day. Here there had been, anyway. He saw that the Land Rover's canvas roof was up. The windows were rolled fully shut and the interior of the vehicle was invisible behind gla.s.s reflecting the scenery. He saw the neat turf rolls of Kale's punctilious handiwork and the black exposure of peat under which the archaeologist thought bodies might lie.

Of Kale there was no sign at all. Napier switched off the ignition and climbed off the bike. It was very quiet there. He could hear the ticking of his engine as it cooled and the metal contracted. There was no birdsong. He approached the vehicle. He cupped his hands to either side of his head and stooped forward against the pane on the drivers' side so that he could peer in at the Land Rover's interior.

He saw what he suddenly knew he'd been looking for and swallowed hard and recoiled. A white incisor lay on the fabric of the driver's seat, its root a torn encirclement of bloodied gum.

He blinked and regulated his breathing and looked around. He was alone there. Kale was as absent as though he had been plucked right off the earth. He opened the driver's door. There was a slight odour in the cabin that smelled to Napier like camphor and fish oil. It was vague, subtle. But it was there and it wasn't a scent the archaeologist wore. Kale wore the brand of cologne he was paid to endorse. Or he had. He didn't anymore, because he was dead.

Napier didn't know what to do. It's picking us off, he thought. He had to get back. They had to consolidate. He had to get his men out of their encampment and into the compound. They could bunk down there as well as guarding its perimeter, there was ample room and it was much less vulnerable structurally than their tents.

That begged the question, vulnerable to what? He didn't know. Perhaps he would have some insight after the six o'clock meeting. He was only certain that Kale was dead and that for the time being, his death was a fact it was probably wisest to share only with Patrick La.s.siter.

Fortescue drove. He'd bought the car he was driving because his brother, who'd sold it to him, had said it was a babe magnet. This had not proven to be the case. It was a 14 year old Fiat Coupe Turbo with a thirsty two litre engine. It was not the run-around he had driven to Barnsley but he was driving to Scotland now and whatever its faults, the Fiat was a mile-eater. It hadn't lived up to his brother's claims, not even once, actually. But the leather bucket seats were comfortable on a long drive and it was powerful and extremely fast.

He was quite surprised that McIntyre had agreed to see him so readily. He'd first recounted his tale over the phone to the Chronicle's editor, a man called Marsden. Marsden had said that there was only merit in his plan if he brought Edith Chambers along with him. But Marsden was seeing the whole thing as a sensationalist news story and Fortescue was seeing it as something else entirely. Eventually he lost his temper and demanded to speak to the man whose idea the expedition had originally been.

McIntyre called him back. He did so almost immediately. He was polite and attentive to what he was told. And then he asked a lot of questions Fortescue thought not strictly necessary or relevant about La.s.siter's visit to Liverpool. He asked about Fortescue's own experience with Seamus Ballantyne's sea chest. He asked about Elizabeth Burrows; about her physical appearance and the manner of her death and what an encounter with her apparition could possibly signify and whether it was a portent of personal danger. Eventually, the penny dropped.

'You've seen her, haven't you, Mr McIntyre?'

'Last night.'

'Quite glamorous, I've always thought, for a radical feminist.'

'Dead people are not glamorous, Professor Fortescue. They are disconcerting. I took to my bed afraid.'

'I don't think she is a harbinger of death or anything like that. I think she's prevented from resting in peace because she took something that didn't belong to her. And she took her own life, which makes her a puppet of Horan's sorcerer.'

'David Shanks took something. And he killed himself too, according to Alice Lang. And he doesn't pop up frightening people.'

'He put the thing he had stolen back. Anyway, I don't have all the answers, Mr McIntyre.'

'And it wasn't Horan's sorcerer, Professor. In the end it was much more Ballantyne's, would you not say?'

'Will you help me to get to the island?'

'Come here. Show me the journal. I want to read it for myself.'

'I'm genuinely sorry to be bothering you like this.'

'I'm enormously relieved that you've called, Fortescue. I've had a bad feeling about New Hope for weeks. I've ignored it because I'm a stubborn man and I was reluctant to appear foolish in the eyes of the world. I just hope the doc.u.ment you have in front of you is genuine. I hope it's fate that's put me in a hotel on Loch Awe in Scotland and not in some other part of the world where people gather to be rich together.'

'Scott Fitzgerald.'

'What?'

'That phrase about gathering to be rich together is Nick Carraway's in The Great Gatsby.'

'Never read it. Get here as quickly as you can.'

Fortescue drove. He did not switch on his car radio. He didn't wish to hear the mournful opening chords of The Recruited Collier insinuate their way into his personal s.p.a.ce. Whatever lurked on New Hope Island, whatever Shaddeh had unleashed, was capable of mischief and of real malevolence. But there seemed to be something gleeful in the malice. Some of the tricks, like the one played on La.s.siter with Ballantyne's watch, seemed to have been played simply for amus.e.m.e.nt.

Between where the Sat-Nav told him the speed cameras lurked, he averaged 130 miles an hour. He thought they would get him at some point and that if he came out of this the penalty points would mean he would be cycling to work for the next six months. But he also thought if he came out of this, he would have a good case for asking Alexander McIntyre to pay any speeding fine he incurred.

He had a bad moment just beyond Carlisle, when he began to ponder on what McIntyre had said about Elizabeth Burrows. And what he had said himself. He should not have said she was glamorous. It trivialised her and was disrespectful. It ran counter to her pioneering student ideology. If she appeared in the seat beside his, fusty and grinning and dead, with her straw hair and facial skin restless with the inward toil of maggots, she would not be glamorous at all. He would lose control and leave the road and the Fiat, with its full petrol tank, would become his funeral pyre.

For several miles he drove expecting just such a visitation, his arms locked at the elbow and his hands clammy on the wheel and his eyes rooted to the road ahead of him. But it didn't come.

Eventually the sheer, drear monotony of motorway driving re-imposed itself and he chastised himself in ripe thought-language for his own spineless cowardice. He was an odd choice for this sort of task, he knew. He was the only person who could have done what he had and the least well qualified he could imagine for what he was about to. If everything worked out, he would at least meet Jane Chambers. For the rest of the drive, he took what consolation he could in that prospect.

Cooper switched on his hand-held Geiger counter and took a reading. Nothing registered on the gauge. That didn't prove anything, though. He thought that the radiation might be variable and depend upon the proximity of the visitors or their hardware.

He shook his head and switched the device off. He seemed to be the only person on New Hope Island still capable of rational thought. Radiation wasn't the only thing contaminating the place. There was a sort of panicky, irrational mood of fear and superst.i.tion than seemed contagious. Even the ex-cop and the security guy had fallen prey to it. They'd seemed capable men when he first met them. It was genuinely disappointing. It was disillusioning.

He reminded himself to talk to McIntyre once radio contact was re-established. He would do it discreetly, because he didn't want to alienate Lucy Church and she was clearly attracted to Paul Napier. But he'd meant what he'd said about getting him fired. No one was going to make a physical threat against Karl Cooper and get away with it. It was something he just wasn't prepared to tolerate.

And anyway the last thing he needed was a love-rival. If he was going to f.u.c.k Lucy and he was he needed her undivided attention. Napier's rightful place was in a Polyester uniform and a cheap peaked cap chasing shop-lifters around the aisles of an inner-city supermarket. He'd got above himself and needed putting back in his sad little slot. A few choice words in McIntyre's ear would see him sent there. There was no point having influential friends if you didn't use the influence they had.

The tooth discovered in the crofter's cottage had led him to his current theory about matters on the island. It had not belonged to Blake. It had belonged to David Shanks. Loose teeth were one of the cla.s.sic symptoms of prolonged exposure to low to medium levels of radiation. They loosened and eventually they fell out. Obviously the tooth hadn't belonged to Blake. He hadn't been on the island for long enough. f.u.c.kwit Napier had put two and two together and characteristically got five.

Radiation did occur on parts of Britain's Atlantic coast. It came from the coastal nuclear power stations such as the fairly notorious plant at Sellafield. They used sea water to cool their reactor rods. But the level of radiation was negligible and anyway, there had been no nuclear plants in Britain until the 1950s, two decades after David Shanks lived on the island.

The radiation had to have come from the visitors. And its implications were, for Cooper, extremely exciting. It meant that they had not just arrived one day in 1825 and whisked the community members away with them. It meant that they had hung around. It might mean that they had re-visited and kept on returning. And it might mean that they had left something tangible there on the island itself.

It was dangerous intellectually to try to second-guess the motives of a sophisticated alien civilization. But Cooper did it anyway. There were few cosmologists, he thought, with his natural empathetic understanding of why the visitors came and what they wanted from humbler and simpler cultures than their own.

He figured that they had probably returned to New Hope to see if life on earth was viable and sustainable for them. They would not want to colonise the planet. Their ambition would be more enlightened than that. They would want to see if it was possible to co-exist with human beings.

He was in the settlement. And Jesse Kale was right, it was creepy. Its emptiness was not so much mournful as threatening, somehow. It was bleak and silent and so still that his eyes kept catching phantom movement that couldn't really be there at the very edge of his peripheral vision. He heard what sounded like a furtive, girlish chuckle and shook his head and smiled. Just a breeze teasing a route through loosened roof-slates.

The tooth was a clue. The church at the centre of the settlement was another. It had been built in the shape it had because to Ballantyne's community, the visitors must have seemed G.o.d-like. They could perform what would have been perceived by the people of the early 19th century as miracles. They were deities. So the dwelling built for them would naturally resemble a place of wors.h.i.+p. Logic insisted upon it.

But it had no windows. There was not another church in Christendom that shared this curious characteristic. At first, Cooper had thought this might be because the visitors were too sensitive to sunlight to tolerate exposure during the day. Then he developed another theory more suited to the notion that they kept coming back.

It was the hangar in which they kept their s.h.i.+p. Their s.h.i.+p was the source of the radiation. And if he was right, the church was not only windowless but lead-lined under the plaster that concealed its stone composition within.

He had brought with him the tools to test this theory. He had a hammer and chisel and a drill and a honeycomb cube of little samples boxes. He would take a lead core away for proper a.n.a.lysis. Later, he would get Kale to help him excavate the church floor. He had an excited hunch that the visitors had left something down there; stored and quite possibly intended both as a clue and a gift for whoever had the insight to discover it.

He paused on the threshold of the church, outside the dark arched maw of its entrance, thinking that he was perhaps on the brink of greatness. In some significant ways he knew that he was a flawed individual. He was far from perfect, a long way from the finished article. But he'd worked b.l.o.o.d.y hard and been very determined and come a long way since the Wigan terrace of a youth dreading what new shame the bailiff's knock would deliver this time to his poor mother.

He went in. The building's interior was completely dark. He knew that some light must be allowed in there, spreading from the doorway now behind him. Light travelled. That was a basic law of physics. But it seemed pitch black, nevertheless. He thought that what ambient light there was would enable him to see once his eyes had adjusted after the exposed brightness of the afternoon outside.

There were no pews. There were no pictures or hangings, he remembered, and there was no altar up ahead of him in the single vaulted chamber formed by the walls and the roof. There was something, though. There was movement. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out a shape, denser than the surrounding darkness. There was something solid in the gloom. It s.h.i.+fted and he thought confusedly that what he was seeing made no sense. He could just make out the dimensions of the figure when it moved and it was huge.

Then it spoke to him. And what it said made his bowels void and he stood amid the rising smell of his own s.h.i.+t too petrified to move and it laughed gleefully. And the wreckage of his mind exposed a last living thought and it was the stolen quote he'd given Lucy Church in describing the universe: Not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

The first person Napier saw on returning to the compound was Lucy. She was standing outside, smoking in the windbreak formed by the crates of gear unloaded from the chopper that had carried their cargo to the island. Most of the stuff was still waiting to be unpacked. He saw the boxes containing the mobile gym equipment belonging to their forensic archaeologist, his name stencilled on their sides.

'Kale's gone,' he said. He hadn't meant to say it. It just came out. Was there any point in secrecy? No, there wasn't, the body count was too high. Except that there were no bodies to count.

Lucy just nodded. He thought that in other circ.u.mstances she would have looked really lovely, with her dark hair blowing about her face the way it was. It was why she was standing in her makes.h.i.+ft shelter. The weather was deteriorating again.

'Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.'

'David Shanks spoke to us through Alice this morning,' she said. 'He warned us to get away, said there's something on the island we have to escape. He said we can't fight it. You'll hear about it at the meeting in a few minutes. Will you break the news about Kale?'

'No point trying to conceal it. Any luck with the radio?'

'None. Your guys are trying to get a signal in s.h.i.+fts. That feedback's driving them mad.'

'That feedback isn't feedback,' Napier said. 'We're being toyed with. It's been going on since the day I got here. But it's taken a vindictive turn.' He looked upwards, at the cloud thickening in rapid scuds across a sullen sky. 'Even if we had a boat, we couldn't risk the crossing. Not with night coming and another storm on the way.' He smiled.

'What's funny?'

'When it started, I thought maybe McIntyre had a covert special effects team here in case you lot didn't produce the necessary fireworks. What an innocent theory that seems now.'

'Get me out of this, Paul, and I'll buy you a very big drink.'

'If I get you out of this Lucy, I expect you to sleep with me.'

'Now you sound like Karl Cooper.'

'Sorry. That was a bad joke.'

'He hasn't come back from the settlement yet, by the way. Arrogant f.u.c.ker, excuse my French.'

'I've noticed how fluent your French is.'

'Another bad habit,' she said, flicking away the b.u.t.t of her cigarette. 'Shall we go inside?'

He didn't think they were going to get out of it. He didn't think she did, either. Her nonchalance was put on. It was an act. But it was a courageous act. He admired her. And he couldn't honestly remember being more attracted to a woman.

Chairs had been arranged around the main table in the galley. Some of them were unoccupied. When Napier and Lucy sat, he thought that the chairs remaining empty looked very empty indeed.

He'd asked Davis and Walker among his own men to attend. The others there were La.s.siter, Jane, Alice and Degrelle. They comprised a forlorn little group. In his absence, it made Napier realise just what a charismatic man Kale had been. He'd possessed energy and presence and Napier felt guilty about him. He'd been the one who'd advised them all the previous night to counter the crisis by resorting to their skills. He thought of the good cheer and positivity Kale had radiated over breakfast and pictured the grisly relic left of him in the Land Rover's empty interior.

Jane Chambers spoke first. She told the group about that morning's events at the cottage. The chief sceptic about the paranormal among them wasn't present. Cooper was still apparently searching for evidence of little green men from another galaxy amid the ruins of the settlement. But Napier thought that even Cooper would have been disconcerted by Jane's account of what had occurred.

She spoke with the absolute conviction that Shanks had come and communicated with them. He had done so churlishly and perhaps even a little reluctantly. But it had been his voice and his warning to them could not have been more explicit or grave. They were in mortal danger. They were not asked to leave. They were implored to escape.

When Jane had finished speaking Napier looked at La.s.siter and La.s.siter raised an eyebrow in a.s.sent and he told them about his trip aboard the quad bike to check on Kale at the peat bog and the gruesome evidence he'd discovered there.

None of it looked like news to the ex-detective. But then La.s.siter's conviction that Kale should have returned sooner was what had prompted Napier to go looking for their archaeologist in the first place.

There was a silence after Napier had finished speaking. He began his account thinking that it would conclude with general dismay and possibly a bit of panic and the need to talk one or two of his listeners down.

That didn't happen, though. There was no one present who any longer believed they were confronted by imaginary fears. They were all genuinely scared. There was no discord. There was only the need for a coherent strategy to try to save their lives.

There was silence in the galley in the aftermath of his story. Outside the wind howled, growing in strength, buffeting the fabric of their shelter, making the t.i.tanium struts shaping it and the steel cabling keeping its shape taut, groan and sing with the effort. Rain hammered relentless on the roof.

Davis said, 'Where's Karl Cooper?'

La.s.siter looked at his watch. He said, 'He should have returned from the settlement an hour ago. He's on his own. That was made clear to him before he set off. No one's going out there after him in this.'

'He could shelter in the tannery or the distillery,' Alice said. 'He might be better doing that than trying to walk back here in this weather.'

'I wouldn't fancy a night up there alone,' Davis said. 'Even before what we've just been told, I wouldn't have fancied it.'

'Ignorance is bliss,' Walker said.

'He won't be alone,' Jane said. 'The little green men will have invited him to supper.'

n.o.body laughed at the joke.

Degrelle cleared his throat with a rumbling cough. He said, 'There is something I need to tell you all about the island and what happened here. It may not effect matters materially, but it informs what I intend to do tomorrow. I would prefer to do what I intend to in an atmosphere of hope and belief rather than general incredulity and scepticism. So I will tell you what I know.'

He smiled. It looked an effort for him to do so. 'Let us take a short break before I begin,' he said. 'And I think a drink might be a sensible preparation for what I have to say.'

Napier looked at Alice, who looked sharply at La.s.siter. He smiled at her and shook his head slowly and Napier felt relieved. He thought the ex-policeman his wisest and most resourceful ally in all this and so the last thing he wanted was to see him back on the bottle.