The Colony (2 page)

The camera panned left from the sea across the land and cottage towards a high and majestic crag and then back again, tentatively, because Shanks must have seen something not right in that second swift viewing of the usually familiar vista of his home.

He tracked back. The cottage came into view. He centred the image. Then he brought it into clearer relief. The figure in the cottage doorway clarified and sharpened and became a female child, a little girl attired in bed clothes from the period before children’s pyjamas had really been thought of, the time when they were put to rest as little adults in long night dresses and sleeping caps. So it was with this child.

But other things about her were different from the norm. The first was that she hung or floated a good foot off the ground. The blackness of the cottage interior was underneath her just as much as it was above her head and to either side in the doorway of her small frame. The second oddity was that her lips were pulled back from her stretched open mouth in a snarl of pure terror. Most unusual among her features, though, were her eyes. They were just black, empty sockets framed by the unruly blonde tresses emerging from beneath the cotton cap.

There was quite a lot of camera shake, by now. Shanks had been physically unnerved, filming this. The apparition moved. And this was the really shocking thing. It moved so fast it seemed to disappear. Shanks pulled the focus back to get some perspective on the movement. The figure tore across the screen and stopped abruptly.

Nothing human had ever shifted at such speed. McIntyre knew this for certain because he had paid a technician to calculate the velocity of the child’s travel across the space she covered in the film. She seemed to be looking for something, shuttling back and forth, stopping suspended there, a foot off the ground, bedraggled and inhuman, eighty years distant in time.

Then she turned her head slowly to the camera. The snarl shrank and was transformed under the sightless eyes into a smile, sly and knowing. And McIntyre assumed she had found what it was she was looking for. And Shanks came to the same conclusion and presumably he fled, because the film became a mad jumble of blurred images as he ran with the camera still strapped to his hand.

McIntyre switched off the DVD player and stood up and walked around the room. He knew that David Shanks had survived this encounter. He’d described it in a newspaper interview and he had later arranged a public showing of the film. It added a little colour and deepened slightly the existing mystery of New Hope Island. The film was persuasive. But press and public scepticism duly followed and with it scorn and ridicule and Shanks stopped talking about it and the film disappeared from public view and eventually, from collective memory.

Shanks had been too much the itinerant outsider to be thought really credible. His character had been dubious and he was not a Scot. The suspicion had been that he was an opportunist trying to profit from the Island’s ghoulish reputation.

Britain was still in the grip of the Great Depression then. The nation had endured five years of economic hardship by 1934 and there had been no end to it in sight.There were a lot of jobless men about, desperate enough to try to con a living out of the gullible.

His critics had not thought about the amount of labour Shanks had invested in building his cottage on that isolated rock. They remained unimpressed, as the years elapsed, by the detail that after taking flight on the day of the film in the rowing boat he had planned to fish from, he had never set foot on the island again.

The film was the problem, McIntyre thought. The film elevated the event from an anecdote into a genuine mystery. Without it, reliant on a verbal account, you could just say Shanks had allowed the legend of the Island to take hold of his imagination. You could say isolation and weather and maybe even war trauma was responsible. But the film was irrefutable fact. It was genuine. It was evidence of something.

McIntyre was almost tempted to call back Lassiter. An ex-detective with a Scotland Yard pedigree would have a view on the significance of the film, wouldn’t he?

He decided instead he would look at the history again. He would examine the known facts. In his mind, the New Hope Island Expedition, the scale and composition of it, was already taking shape. He had been pretty committed to it before the Shanks film. He was totally committed now.

Maybe he would celebrate the decision by giving Lassiter a modest bonus. It was the circulation builder his paper so desperately needed. The search for a definitive answer to the New Hope Island mystery was a story that would grip the world. He walked out of the screening room and into his adjacent library. He didn’t put the DVD back in its jewel case, though. Despite his usual punctilious neatness, he felt quite strongly that he didn’t really want to touch it again.

He gate-crashed the following morning’s editorial conference. He did not habitually do this. He was a benign ruler who did not generally meddle. He genuinely believed in the principle of editorial independence. He paid talented journalists and competent managers and he trusted that they knew better than he did all about the day to day running of the title that provided their livelihood.

But the circulation decline was relentless. The bottoming out predicted by Marsden, the editor, showed no sign it would happen this side of oblivion. He had diversified his media interests to the point where he was making money from the very websites allegedly to blame for killing newspapers off. But he cared in his heart about his flagship title. The other main participant in the conference was the features editor, Carrick.

He had not slept well. That ragged little girl had found her voice in his dreams and it had been a shriek of malevolent grief that had shaken him awake half a dozen times and made him afraid in the end to close his eyes again in the darkness. Finally, at four in the morning, he had called Lassiter.

‘Yeah,’ Lassiter said, thickly, sounding like a man who drank himself nightly to sleep; ‘it scared the living shit out of me, too.’

McIntyre felt better after that. Lassiter wasn’t his equal, but he’d been a very good detective before opting for the easy life of early retirement. He’d been a tough and uncompromising copper. And the film had frightened him. He felt better. But he did not feel relaxed enough to drop off again before it got light. He thought if he closed his eyes he might open them on an urchin, ragged above the foot of his bed, staring sightlessly as she leered down at him.

‘We’re going to New Hope Island,’ he announced to the conference.

The response was a burst of clapping, sustained applause around the table, spontaneous, not ironic he did not feel, in the slightest degree.

‘Thank God,’ Marsden said.

McIntyre didn’t think now was the time to remind his editor about his bottoming out circulation theory. Evidently he was aware of its flaws. He turned to Carrick. ‘Far be it from me to teach you your job, James. But I want two stars on this, one for the factual stuff and a human interest specialist. We can back up with staffers but those two have to be names. This is going to cost a great deal of money and it has to have every ounce of impact we can wring from it.’

‘I’d say Lucy Church for the human interest,’ Carrick said. ‘I’d like a think about whoever else I assign.’

‘Good. Start thinking now.’

Marsden said, ‘What’s the timescale?’

‘Is a week long enough for teasers?’

‘Yes. With today’s net surf attention spans, a week is more than adequate. We’ll run the Island’s history and mystery over a spread tomorrow. We’ll flag it with a front page banner. I take it the personnel are lined up?’

‘The key players, yes,’ McIntyre said.

‘What’s the team strength?’

‘Six.’

‘Perfect,’ Marsden said. ‘We’ll run a biog of each of them, one every day with a quote from the subject, explaining what it is they hope to bring to the party.’

The conference progressed. Logistics were discussed. The possibility of spoilers in other papers was raised. But McIntyre had thought of that. The security personnel positioned to repel nosy competitors would be in place on the island over the coming days. One of the great mysteries of recent centuries was about to be investigated and with any luck, solved.

The team would include a virologist and a forensic archaeologist. They were also going to send a self-styled expert on alien abduction and a well-respected medium. The personnel assembled covered every eventuality. McIntyre knew which of them he had his money on, but he wasn’t saying publically.

The subject of the Shanks film did not come up. He wanted to keep the conference mood upbeat. He had intended to mention it, but the general atmosphere had been so positive, it would have been like raining on his own parade. Besides, he was supposed to be the one with answers, not questions.

And the film provoked uneasiness in him. He could neither explain it, nor rationalise the fear that watching it provoked. So he didn’t bring it up. Later, much later, Alexander McIntyre was to regard this as the biggest mistake of his life.

It was almost lunchtime before the conference was concluded. He had arranged to have lunch alone at his club. The paper occupied a bold new glass and steel headquarters at Borough, overlooking the river. It was a pleasant day.

He decided he would walk along the river into the West End to give himself an appetite. On the way he was hardly aware of the bright water traffic or the culture hungry tourists he passed on the Southbank. He thought instead about his reading of the previous evening and the enigmatic Scottish island that had fascinated him since boyhood.

Seamus Ballantyne was the captain of a slave ship in the golden period when the British mercantile fleet made forty-percent of its total income from that profitable trade. He made most of his fortune in the 1790s, at the time when Wilberforce and the abolitionists were at their most vocal in decrying the trade and condemning British involvement.

He could not have been unaware of the controversy. The clamour made by the abolitionists in parliament and elsewhere was too great. There would have been pamphlets pressed upon him as he walked the streets of his native Liverpool between voyages. He would have seen their signs of protest pasted to the pillars of the port wharves.

When he repented, he did so without warning or preamble, in 1799. Ballantyne renounced slavery almost a decade before the bill was passed that abolished British participation in the trade. He became a preacher. He was charismatic and persuasive and over the next decade, developed a following that became a devoted congregation.

In 1810 he announced that he was to build a new community on a remote Island off Scotland’s Atlantic coast. When he departed on this adventure, he took 160 devout followers with him on the journey. They would live on a barren rock in the Outer Hebrides. God would care for them. Their industry and faith would find His reward. They would christen their windswept, granite home New Hope.

And for 15 years, the community thrived. At first, it did so purely on a subsistence level. Then a trade of sorts developed. Sheep were bred and wool was gathered and spun and the resultant garments sold. Whisky was distilled. And then the people of New Hope Island simply vanished.

No bodies were ever washed up on the mainland. There was no wreckage from boats. When curious neighbours went to investigate, they found the dwellings of the community intact. There was food on the tables and recent fires in their hearths. Books were left open at the page their readers had reached. The domestic beasts still grazed what little pasture land they had. But there were no people. Every man, woman and child had gone without trace.

To Alexander McIntyre, media magnate billionaire and ardent believer in extraterrestrial life, the answer to the question of what had happened was as obvious as the solution to the mystery of the Marie Celeste. He believed the same fate had met the crew of that ship as had befallen the New Hope community.

Privacy was the hallmark of alien abduction. There were probably many other unrecorded examples down the centuries. But the clue was obvious, wasn’t it? The visitors did not welcome witnesses when they took the humans away. New Hope had met those ideal conditions, in which they liked to harvest, perfectly.

He had to admit that the troubling apparition caught by David Shanks’ cine camera did not easily fit into this scenario. But it would. When they got to New Hope and his team began to put the pieces of the picture together, the floating girl would find a place in it all somewhere.

Ballantyne, he considered something of an enigma. Even given the harsh standards of the time, and the brutality common in seafaring life, he must have been a cruel man. The slaves were manacled and packed in rows on the voyage to be sold in the West Indies and America and many of those stored below decks did not survive the ordeal.

The mortality rate was shocking. They were demonstrably fellow human beings, the argument Wilberforce used, going further and calling them brothers in the biblical sense.

Personal enlightenment had cost Ballantyne his wife. She preferred marriage to a prosperous master mariner to life with a self-styled preacher with a taste for hellfire rhetoric delivered on street corners. Losing her had clearly not broken his heart or deterred him from his elected path, however.

What had made Ballantyne tick? McIntyre wondered had the ship’s captain turned religious leader kept a diary on New Hope? He must have been in the habit of keeping a log from his old profession. A diary would only have been the natural expression of what McIntyre suspected had been a substantial ego. What a find that would be, if it still existed to be unearthed.

James Carrick briefed Lucy Church after lunch. In principle she had a choice about taking the assignment but in reality, neither of them felt she could turn it down. They were both familiar with the numbers, since their livelihoods depended on how McIntyre interpreted them and what decisions he made as a consequence. His business was buoyant given the general state of the economy. It had shown a 12 per cent profit in the previous year. But losses at the Chronicle had amounted to almost 20 million pounds. He was paying a lot for the prestige of ownership of a flagship Fleet Street title.