The Colony Part 9

'I heard a scream,' Malone said. 'I was patrolling the perimeter and I heard it over on the west sh.o.r.e, near the ruined cottage. I was heading for the cottage, for a break and a f.a.g. And I heard a scream.'

Breaks and f.a.gs were very much what you had when you weren't patrolling. Whatever Malone had heard had scared him into honesty. Napier was still sceptical, though. He said, 'Could have been a gull or a seal. Could even have been a whale, in these waters.'

'It was human and it was terrified,' Malone said. 'And when I looked there was no one around to do the screaming. And when I went to report it to Captain Blake just now, his sleeping bag was empty and cold.'

It wasn't just blowing a gale. It was p.i.s.sing down with rain. Malone's pal Jarvis was somewhere to the north of where they stood, still patrolling. The rump of the Seasick Four, Smith and Cartwright, were fast asleep in their tents.

'Who else knows?'

'n.o.body knows. I tried radioing Jarve for backup, but couldn't get a signal. I came to tell Blake and he was gone. Then you nearly killed me.'

'Stay here,' Napier said. 'Wake the others.' He handed Malone his bayonet. 'Sit tight. If anyone you don't know approaches, if you're attacked, use that. Do it. Don't hesitate.'

'Where are you going?'

'I'll wake up Troy and his team. They need to be warned and we need their help in searching for Blake.'

'What do you think it is? What made Blake scream? Where is he?'

'What do you think I am, Malone, the oracle of all f.u.c.king knowledge?'

'I know who you are. We all do. I read about you in the paper after the thing in Afghanistan.'

'Get Cartwright and Smith on their feet. Stick close and stay put. I'll be back as soon as I can.'

Alert to movement and sound, covering the distance to the project command centre, Napier refused to speculate in his own mind about what it was that was going on. He had no way of knowing. He didn't think a clay pipe smoking phantom could have crooned Blake into a state of terror with an old folk song and he only had Malone's word for it that the scream had been human.

Blake could have fallen badly somewhere or blundered into a bog or been swept out to sea by a freak wave. They were in a pretty elemental part of the world, all told. Speculation was pointless without some lead or clue. Waking Troy and his men was the imperative; doing that and then proceeding coolly and methodically.

Troy, once roused, fetched Brennan. The two of them told Napier about their earlier encounter with Blake. They told him Blake had drunk just the one can of lager prior to leaving them, sober and in good spirits, slightly preoccupied perhaps, but only with what his duties necessitated there on the island, if Troy was any judge.

'Do you have any weapons?'

Troy and Brennan exchanged a look.

'Level with me, boys.'

'A couple of hunting rifles,' Troy said, 'bolt-action, small-bore, not exactly private army specification.'

'Scopes?'

'Night scopes on both,' he said.

'Good. Load both of them and give one your lads here. Tell them to be vigilant. We'll take the other one.'

'Where are we going?' Troy said.

'We're going back for Malone. Then you and me and Malone and Brennan here are going to go and take a look at that crofter's cottage on the other side of the island. Then if necessary, we're going to come back here and Brennan is going to establish radio contact with McIntyre's people and we're going to call this in.'

Brennan and Troy just stared at him and nodded.

'Anyone have a problem with my taking charge over this?'

'No,' they said, together.

Lucy met Jane Chambers after her testosterone soaked encounter with the archaeologist Jesse Kale. Kale insisted on meeting her at the city boy boxing gym in Holborn he habitually used. He sipped at a high protein shake and teased the protective wraps from his hands and sweat smouldered off him photogenically. It was all a bit tragic, really, Lucy thought, since she hadn't been accompanied as she might have in the old Fleet Street days by a photographer.

Kale was polite enough but not really engaging. Like most celebrity academics, he clearly felt as secured in his own myth as his hands were in the lint bandages protecting them from bruising harm when he threw his punches at the heavy bag. She couldn't get past the wrapping to the flesh.

She thought Jane Chambers would be a relief. Not light relief, because she was an intellectually astute woman and hardly a lightweight as a personality. Her enthusiasms extended well beyond girly pastimes like gossip and shopping. But she had not been interested in emphasising her own credentials on the phone during their first conversation. She had been concerned only to try to provide a plausible scientific answer to the mystery of New Hope Island.

She had a history with Karl Cooper, but Lucy would not broach that subject. She would listen, was what she would do. She had an intuition that she and Jane might become friends, or at least allies on the New Hope expedition. They would be living in a compound as a community in a barren and remote location. Carrick, Cooper and Kale; they sounded like an old variety hall act. But what they actually were was a trio of alpha males. They could not help but attention-seek and compete. Their career success, to her mind, however bright they might be, was a function of driven personalities.

It could become unbearable, particularly if the island was slow and reluctant in surrendering its secrets. Carrick was her immediate boss and she was stuck with the hierarchy unless he did something really stupid and Marsden fired him and promoted her. That was an unlikely eventuality. Carrick was not an original thinker, but he was a shrewd and skilful corporate survivor. Professionally, he just never seemed to put a foot wrong.

She thought it likely that Cooper and Kale would clash. Cooper's mother had taken in washing so that the boy from Wigan could go to university. Kale came from an academic family so well-established it was almost a dynasty and there had always been money there. Or there had since his Scottish great-grandfather began mining in a mineral rich region of British Columbia.

They still didn't have their replacement medium. Or if they did, Lucy had not yet been told the ident.i.ty of the person. She was more open-minded about the possibility of contact with the dead than her jokes on the phone to Carrick on the subject had suggested. It was Hawsley-Smith she had objected to, not the principle of taking along someone who claimed to have second sight.

She considered the expedition's original choice of medium a fraud. She thought that his replacement would need a strong personality whatever their credentials. Cooper and Kale and Jane Chambers too for that matter were scientific in their approach. They were methodical and academically fastidious and above all, rational. Occult mysticism was something they would likely greet with nothing but scorn.

She had arranged to meet the virologist in Bloomsbury. During their second phone conversation, they forsook their earlier formality and became Lucy and Jane. They agreed to have lunch at a small restaurant with tables on the pavement in Lamb's Conduit Street. It was conveniently near the hospital building housing Jane's department. It was somewhere Lucy would be very unlikely to be seen by anyone connected to the paper.

Even if she was, it didn't really matter. She was expected to nurture these relationships in order to gain insights into her subjects. Even off the record meetings were considered constructive in that sense, because they fostered trust. And this meeting was off the record. Jane Chambers had been insistent on that in seeking it.

Lucy got to the restaurant deliberately early. She found a table outside and ordered a small gla.s.s of Chablis and fired up an American Spirit. She inhaled the smoke gratefully, luxuriating in the guilt-free ten minutes she had to indulge her habit before Jane was due to meet her there.

She saw a waiter young, Mediterranean studying her from behind the tinted gla.s.s of the restaurant interior. The expression on his face was appreciative. She looked away from him, at the Georgian terraces lining the pretty street in the bright June sunshine. Objectively, she was an attractive young woman. She sometimes forgot that. Such was the prevailing machismo of the newsroom and the editorial conference that sometimes she almost forgot she was a woman at all.

The tables were Formica topped in a deliberately retro nod towards the continental style of the 1960s. The ashtrays were crimped little circles of metal foil. She was able to discard hers, along with the two b.u.t.ts it by then contained, in a street bin prior to Jane's arrival. Her lunch companion was a medical doctor and Lucy liked to be approved of. It was a character weakness, she knew. But at least, she thought, seeing Jane approach along the pavement, svelte in a blue cashmere suit and sungla.s.ses, I'm aware of it.

They were at the coffee stage before Jane finally confided what she'd come there to tell Lucy. Up until that point they spoke about the expedition generally and about Lucy's earlier interview with the forensic archaeologist.

'Does he have a theory of his own?'

'He says he has an open mind. He says if your epidemic theory is correct, he's confident he'll find the ma.s.s grave. Kale actually thinks the explanation for the disappearance might be really mundane and so he's checking meteorological data from the years immediately prior to the event.'

'Why?'

'He says because of the Island's exposure to Atlantic storms. He believes that if the storms were particularly severe for a number of consecutive years, the Island community might have built a shelter underground to protect themselves from the worst ravages of the weather.'

'And the shelter subsided or collapsed,' Jane said. 'And all the people sheltering were crushed or suffocated and perished.'

'Pretty much.'

Jane smiled down at her plate. Her sungla.s.ses were perched in her hair and there was a persistent frown line creasing her forehead. She looked pretty and troubled. She said, 'Mundane enough, if a bit gruesome for the victims. But I don't buy it.'

'Neither does Kale, really. What's bothering you, Jane?'

And Jane told her about Edith's dreams and the song she had learned to play and sing in her sleep and about who Jacob Parr had been.

'There must have been lots of men about then called Jacob Parr.'

'I went back to the census of 1881,' Jane said. 'That's almost 90 years after a man named Parr crewed for Seamus Ballantyne, but as early as public records go. At that time there were over 2, 000 people with the surname Parr in the county of Lancashire alone. There were more than 600 just in London. In the time of the slave ship Andromeda, it was a common enough name and of course Jacob, being Biblical, was a very common Christian name in England then.'

'But you still think it's him. You think it's Ballantyne's Jacob Parr that's visiting your daughter in her sleep.'

'I do. I think it has to be. Otherwise it makes no sense at all. It can't just be arbitrary. The chronology is right, Jane. The song is of the period of the New Hope settlement. There has to be a connection.'

Lucy thought for a moment. She thought about her pre-lunch a.s.sumptions concerning Dr Chambers and scientific method. Parr's intervention in Edith's dreams did not exactly submit to what was rationally plausible or even frankly possible. If he existed, he was a spirit, a ghost. The proof that he existed lay in Edith's performing of the song she alleged he'd taught her. In order to buy it, you had to believe Edith Chambers was telling the truth. Evidently her mother did.

'What do you intend to do about it?'

'I don't know, Lucy. I don't even know why I'm telling you about it, really.'

'A problem shared,' Lucy said, with a bright cheer to her tone she didn't really feel. What she really felt was slightly hollow and a bit numb.

Jane said, 'I'd pull out of the New Hope project immediately if I thought for one moment Edith was in any physical or psychological danger. But that doesn't seem to be the case.'

'I'm not a mother,' Lucy said. 'This isn't really my area of expertise. But maybe you should do that anyway.'

'And risk antagonising Jacob Parr?'

'You trust your daughter?'

'I do, totally.'

'Then I think you have to wait,' Lucy said. 'I think you have to wait until Parr gives Edith this warning he's spoken of and Edith pa.s.ses on the warning to you.'

Jane nodded. Lucy thought that she looked grateful and a bit relieved. The advice was inadequate, in Lucy's opinion, but it seemed that sharing the detail of Edith's dream had unburdened her mother slightly. Lucy hoped so. She liked Jane Chambers a lot. The Parr revelation was disturbing and actually quite spooky but you couldn't really blame Jane for it or for wanting to confide in someone about it. Someone grown up and sceptical and cynical, Lucy thought. Someone exactly like I'm supposed to be.

Jane wanted to split the bill, but Lucy put it on her expenses. New Hope Island and its enduring mystery had prompted and dominated the lunch, so she thought there was no dishonesty in doing that. The two women embraced warmly at the kerbside in saying their farewell and Jane went back to the hospital and Lucy was treated to a shy smile from her l.u.s.t-stricken waiter before returning to the office to write something readable about the preening archaeologist with whom she had spent her morning.

All the way back, she thought about Jane Chambers' curious confession. She didn't have the slightest idea, really, of what to make of it. She had been fascinated by the New Hope enigma since devouring that Readers Digest article in her own childhood. She had never thought there to be anything genuinely supernatural about it. But she had a feeling, after her lunch with Jane, that the psychic chosen for the trip to the Hebrides might be in for a very interesting experience.

La.s.siter looked different, to McIntyre. There was something new and unexpected about the body-language. The ex-detective usually had an air about him McIntyre would have described as apologetic; as though he was embarra.s.sed about the s.p.a.ce he took up and did not really feel his presence anywhere fully justified. There was usually something not just deferential but almost cap-in-hand about him.

But that air was conspicuous by its absence today. He looked smart and alert and full of confidence. This might have irked the newspaper magnate in another mood. But having heard what he had that morning, this afternoon he was actually rea.s.sured by his visitor's demeanour. La.s.siter did not know it yet, but McIntyre had plans for him.

'Thanks for coming here at such short notice.'

'You pay me pretty generously for my time.'

'Not just for your time. Your talents are what I really pay you for. Did you put my proposal to Alice Lang?'

'You could've asked me that over the phone, Mr McIntyre.'

'I could have. But I asked you to come here in person.'

'Which is intriguing,' La.s.siter said, 'because I've always felt that you've deliberately kept me at arm's length. You've always treated me a bit as though I might be carrying something contagious.'

'When was the last time you had a drink?'

'Three days ago. I ordered a large scotch in a pub in Liverpool.'

'You remember the occasion?'

'I don't think I'll ever forget it, Mr McIntyre. I didn't drink the whisky, by the way.'

'You saw the light?'

'I saw something.'

They were on McIntyre's sun terrace. McIntyre's housekeeper had brought La.s.siter there after opening the front door to him. So far, he had not been invited to sit. McIntyre sat in an armchair facing the view down the hill towards London. It was one of a pair t.i.tled in that direction. It was late afternoon and smog glazed the city and made its landmarks ripple slightly so that it made a person wince to stare at them too hard.

'Alice says that she'll do it, but she has a pre-condition.'

'I'll pay her generously.'

'Money isn't what's on her mind.'

'Sit down,' McIntyre said. He gestured at the chair next to his own. 'Forgive me, La.s.siter. I'm forgetting my manners. What do I have to do for Alice Lang to get Ms Lang to go to New Hope Island?'

'She'll only go if I go.'

'Very romantic,' McIntyre said, smiling because he thought he understood suddenly the source of his visitor's new-found self-esteem. 'I'm touched.'

'Would that be a yes or a no?' La.s.siter said.

'How would you feel about going?'

'Scared, frankly.'

'Why?'

'Take your pick,' La.s.siter said. 'I didn't like the look of that spectral urchin Shanks filmed. I'm not crazy about the way Alice Lang says Shanks met his death. I did not like having that film can under my own roof. It made me suddenly accident-p.r.o.ne. And the business with Ballantyne's watch in that museum bas.e.m.e.nt in Liverpool gave me quite a turn, as you know.'

'Yet you'd go?'

'It's a mystery that wants solving, whatever happened on New Hope. The world has waited a b.l.o.o.d.y long time.'

'And you need to be there if things take a hazardous turn, I suppose. You need to be there if your damsel encounters distress.'

La.s.siter didn't reply to this remark. McIntyre's housekeeper wheeled in tea on a trolley and he smiled up at her in a polite expression of grat.i.tude.

'Funny,' McIntyre said. 'I'd never have cast you as the knight in shining armour before today. But now I think about it, the role quite suits you.'

'Thank you.'