The Penal Colony Read online

  Alternatively, Billy might have been stolen by a raiding party from the Village. Even Peto admitted, though, that the Village stock was in every way superior to his own, Billy included. Although Franks was capable of anything, and the possibility could not be dismissed out of hand, there was no obvious reason for the villagers to have taken Billy.

  The third explanation was that someone in Old Town itself was responsible. That presupposed there was a way of keeping Billy or his remains concealed from Peto’s view, which there wasn’t. Besides, no one else in Old Town bred goats or took an interest in stock. Outside the Village, the only other man on the island who did that was Houlihan.

  There could be little doubt that it had been an act of deliberate provocation. Obie could even see an amusing side to it: dark, bizarre, grotesque, typical of Houlihan. But more than this, the development was ominous. It was tantamount to another declaration of war. The truce seemed to be coming to an end.

  “Get Martinson and Gazzer,” Peto told Obie. “Go over the light and see what you can see.”

  “Gazzer’s not here, Alex,” Obie said, apologetically. “He went up Perdew Wood. Him and Tortuga.”

  “Who else went up?”

  “Bruno, Zombie, Barry, couple of others.”

  “Where’s Martinson?”

  “In his place.”

  “Get him, then. And you, Jez. You go.”

  “Take the binocs?” Obie said.

  “Sure.”

  Obie stood up. “Reckon they got the new meat yet?”

  “Keep an eye out for that and all.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Routledge did not stop until, having scrambled across the warm slabs and boulders of the final outcrop, he had arrived at the ridge. The climb had exhausted him. His pulse was racing, fluttering, his heart palpitating, all his internal warning-systems far into the red zone. In the frenzy of his ascent he had somehow managed to convert a little of his mental distress into its physical counterpart, and that was easier by far to handle.

  Panting, wiping his brow, he found himself looking out over two kilometres or so of uneven gorse and bracken extending towards the interior of the island. Stretching away gently downhill, the scrub thickened to a distant stand of trees, less stunted and wind-formed than those on the cliffs; the main impression was one of desolation.

  He had been hoping for something different: he was not sure what. By now his hunger was making him light-headed. This was not a landscape which promised easy pickings.

  He had two choices. He could go inland, or he could stay with the coast. The sea, if only he could get down to it, might offer rock-pools with crabs, or limpets which could be prised off with the knife. And wasn’t seaweed supposed to be edible? There might also be birds’ eggs on the cliffs: Mitchell, the third man in the triumvirate, had said something about that. But surely by now the breeding season was over. Was there a better chance of finding food inland? Rabbits, perhaps, though they were also to be found on the cliffs. Last night he had already come across one warren.

  On balance, he decided, the coast would give more opportunities for finding food. Following the coast would also enable him to explore the island more systematically and get an accurate idea of its size. The terrain on the clifftops seemed marginally easier to traverse.

  Unfortunately, for this same reason there was a greater danger of encountering further outsiders on the cliffs. The cliffs themselves, by cutting off one line of retreat, would make it harder for him to evade capture.

  A mewing cry above him and to his left caused him to look up. A large, ragged bird of prey, brown and paler brown, was soaring on broad, slotted wings, sailing in circles fifty metres over the scrub. Then he saw there was another beyond, and another. The first bird was joined by the others and for half a minute all three engaged in a sort of aerial display during which some question of pairing or territory seemed to be settled. As the party split up, one of the birds flew directly over his position, examining him briefly as it passed.

  Routledge realized that, for the last half-minute, while watching the birds – at first he had taken them for eagles, but now he thought they must be buzzards – his mind had been relieved of its preoccupations. For that short but merciful period he had been allowed to forget himself. The likelihood that he had already taken leave of his sanity appeared to have receded; there was still a chance that he would not go mad.

  He watched the buzzard’s lazy course towards the south. With one last wide, graceful circle, it vanished behind a rise in the land.

  Even in the short time since he had left the rill, a faint white haze had robbed the sky of its clarity. The sun had become an amorphous region of brilliance, too bright to be looked at. The breeze had dropped. Without it the air felt close and sticky.

  The Village lay in that direction, south. He considered returning to the outskirts to do what he should have done at dawn – make a thorough reconnaissance. What difference would it make if he were observed by the guards? But then that was where the outsiders would be concentrating their efforts. Reconnaissance of the Village could wait a day or two until things had died down.

  He did not know what to do. Still he had no plan, beyond searching for something to eat.

  “Logic,” he said aloud. The cliffs: food, but danger. Inland: less danger, food uncertain. What was easier to face at the moment? Hunger, or the chance of getting caught and killed?

  It was easy, after all. Logic dictated that he should go inland.

  Just as he began to move forward again he noticed that the knife had disappeared.

  The sheath was empty. With mounting panic he searched the pockets of the jacket, knowing perfectly well the knife would not be there. He saw himself once more down by the rill, making practice grabs at the hilt, playing the Red Indian: hadn’t that been at the back of it? God, how ridiculous he was! Without the knife there was no possibility of food, or of defending himself from another attack. No self-respecting savage – not even one of his friends under the cliff – would have made such an elementary blunder. He had let the bracken take away his most valuable possession.

  He could have dropped it anywhere. There was no choice but to go back and look. That meant exposing himself to view for at least three times as long as he should; it meant leaving a trail three times as prominent as it need have been; and, what seemed at this moment infinitely worse, it meant making all over again the wearisome ascent of the hillside. And at the end of it there was no guarantee he would even be getting the knife back.

  He was again close to tears, but was so angry with himself that he refused to allow them to come. He could see that, until now, he had been indulging himself like a child. They were dead, those two. They’d asked for it, and he’d given it to them. That was all. It was not in his nature to go around killing people: there was no need to regard himself as a murderer. No need for remorse, or self-pity, or anything but relief that he had been strong and quick enough when the moment came.

  Above all, there was no need to let scum like that bring him down. He was determined to get into the Village. That was his goal, and they weren’t going to stop him.

  Yes. He found he had made the decision to survive. Perhaps he had made it just now, or perhaps it had been formed last night, when he had awoken in King’s shack, or when he had decided to let his urine flow, or on the cliffs, when he had successfully defended himself against murder. Perhaps the decision had been reached in stages.

  However it had happened, it had changed entirely the way he perceived his plight. He saw now that state of mind was just as important as finding the means of physical subsistence, if not more so. Loneliness, guilt, fear: all these weakened the will to survive. Even more corrosive was the stupidity which had already cost him his knife.

  As he retraced his path he wondered how many more such body-blows there would be to his self-esteem. Even after his experiences in prison, the Anthony John Routledge who had landed here yesterday had been a man of insufferable conceit. He was conc
eited still, so conceited that he was pluming himself with the thought that he was beginning to come to terms with his fate. There was no reason to suppose he was doing anything of the kind, or that the violent fluctuations in his mental state would not continue or get worse, plunging him yet deeper into derangement and despair.

  The idiocy with which he had behaved so far appalled him. First, he had muffed the interview with Appleton. No – even before that, he had wasted the time he had spent with King. Then he had failed to make a proper reconnaissance of the Village. After that he had literally allowed two outsiders to catch him napping. Finally, and most shameful of all, he had lost the knife.

  Was this the same man who had held such a high opinion of himself on the mainland, who had silently sneered at and looked down on everyone else? What must he have been like at home, with Louise? Or in the office? In his everyday dealings with people in shops, on the telephone, everywhere?

  The bracken was not menacing, or merciless, or anything but a living organism doing its best to look after its own interests. It had not taken his knife. He had, moron that he was, simply gone and lost it, and now he was having to pay the price.

  6

  To be entrusted with Peto’s binoculars was a sign of high rank at Old Town. Obie, lying flat on his stomach, Martinson on his left, Brookes on his right, was making the most of it.

  The binoculars had once belonged to a man named Barratt; Peto had acquired them during the war with Franks. They were small and squat, covered in green rubber. A red badge on the front said Leitz in white script. They magnified by a factor of eight, and even now, having circuitously arrived in Peto’s hands, and after several subsequent years of hard use, they were in perfect working order. More than once the binoculars had saved Peto’s skin, or given him advantage over Houlihan or one of the others who had been and gone.

  Obie turned the focusing wheel and again brought the lenses and prisms to bear on the rooms below the gallery.

  “Let’s have a go,” Brookes said.

  “In a bit.”

  Obie and his two companions had taken up a position on the cliffs overlooking Angara Point and the lighthouse, four hundred metres east of the light and about a hundred above it. Seen from here, the upper part of the structure was set against the sea, the rest against the brambles, turf and rocks of the cliffs. The base of the lighthouse was about fifty metres above high water mark. Beyond it, the rest of Angara Point extended, in a broken group of outcrops and islands, another three hundred metres out to sea.

  Once pure white, the walls of the lighthouse were now streaked and stained with rust from the twisted remnants of the gallery, and blotched with scabrous patches where the rendering had fallen away; none of the windows in the turret had survived.

  At one time a deep-cut concrete road had led up to the light from a jetty in Crow Bay, but Houlihan had half-filled the road with rocks to make it impassable and secure his defences on that side. A number of sheds and other buildings, more or less temporary, had surrounded the lighthouse. All had been demolished or burned.

  “In’t that Feely?” Martinson said.

  “Where?”

  “On the helicopter pad.”

  Obie switched to the old asphalt landing pad, now covered with weeds and tufts of grass. A bald man in a red shirt was climbing the steps leading to the lighthouse door.

  “Yeah. That’s him.”

  Martinson’s eyesight was impressive. Obie looked aside from the binoculars. Without them he could hardly even make out Feely at all.

  “The old stonk,” Martinson said.

  “I wouldn’t put it past him to have had that goat,” Brookes said.

  “Boffed him, you mean?” Martinson said. “No, I wouldn’t put it past him, neither.”

  Feely, so named for his wandering fingers, belonged to what Houlihan called his “brain gang”, three or four advisers who lived with him in the lighthouse itself.

  The rest of the lighthouse citizens were consigned to the “tombs” – small, dome-shaped dwellings made of stone, scrap iron or timber, roofed with wood and turf. Nineteen of these structures were grouped around the light, and another thirty-two a little further down, by the well. They varied in size, housing between one and five men: most held two or three. At any one time about a quarter were in disrepair.

  Billy was not on view. There was nothing unusual about the scene, nor even any clue that the atrocity had been committed. Two men were prodding with hoes at Houlihan’s vegetable garden; another had just milked his white goats. The rest of the lighthouse goats were feeding on the cliffs above Crow Bay and in the designated areas beyond. Billy was not among them.

  “They’ve got him under cover,” Brookes said.

  “My turn,” Martinson said, holding out his right hand for the glasses.

  Obie, and Brookes, decided not to argue. Like a number of people on the island, Martinson was a psychopath: at least, that was the conclusion Obie had reached after long acquaintance with the man. He was supposed to have murdered seventeen women, though the total kept increasing. Martinson himself had never spoken of his crimes, and no one wanted to ask.

  Obie watched him adjusting the focus. Despite his usual laconic, easy-going manner, Martinson was one of the few white men Obie really feared. He was well over one ninety, more like one ninety-five, with massive shoulders and long, powerful arms and legs. The word was that he had Swedish blood, even though he had reddish blond hair and a pale complexion, rather like Franks, who came from County Cork. Martinson could well have been Irish too, though he spoke with a Birmingham accent. Or perhaps he was of Danish origins. The way he wore his hair, in flowing locks tied up with leather braids, and the abundance of his mattress-like beard, reminded Obie of the lunatic death-dealing Norsemen, insanely brave, whose longboats had brought terror to the English coast. His taste in garments had something of the Viking about it too. He would have looked good in a horned helmet, carrying off the head man’s daughter.

  Obie had never known Martinson to have anything to do with sex. He lived alone in his hut. For food he relied mainly on hunting. Rabbits he chased and killed with a mallet, an amazing feat of agility for so big a man. In season he ate eggs, young puffins and shearwaters, and fulmars, kittiwakes and guillemots from the cliffs. He also made regular excursions to the Village to steal their stock. In addition he received, from the other towners, occasional Danegeld of oatmeal or vegetables.

  Martinson was one of the first convicts to have arrived on Sert. During the war with Franks he had sided first with Barratt, then Houlihan, then Tompkins, then gone over to Peto, and so had never even been invited to join the Community or given Franks a chance to kick him out. Barratt and Tompkins were dead now, the first murdered by Peto and the second beaten to death by his own men. Since the present state had been established Martinson had shown no interest in telling others what to do, though he was regularly employed by Peto as a bodyguard or to discharge missions, such as the present one, which contained an element of danger. To that end Martinson maintained in his hut an alarming array of weapons: most fearsome, perhaps, was a captured Village crossbow, one of several built for Franks by Randal Thaine.

  This morning the crossbow had remained behind. Obie’s brief was simply to try to establish that it was indeed Houlihan who had taken Billy.

  “See anything?” he asked Martinson.

  “No. We’re going to have to go down.”

  Obie agreed. “Jez,” he said, accepting the binoculars from Martinson and handing them to Brookes, “you wait here. If we aren’t come back by noon, go and tell Alex. Right?”

  “Sure thing, Obie.”

  They passed unchallenged among the upper tombs; Obie even paused to talk to a former towner who had fallen out with Peto and moved. At the helicopter pad, though, they were stopped, disarmed, and questioned by three of Houlihan’s retinue, and only then were they admitted to the tower.

  The double oak doors at the main entrance were set at the top of a low flight of rei
nforced concrete steps. Painted bright green, the woodwork was now flaking, the bare patches weathering to silvery grey. Inside the threshold was a storm lobby, and beyond this lay the large ground-floor room which had been the communications centre. Two doors led off to the kitchen and mess; an iron staircase gave access to the upper floors. Under the staircase, an open hatchway led down to the cellar.

  “Wait here,” said McGrath, one of the guards. “I’ll get Himself.”

  Obie had not been inside the lighthouse for three months, not since the grazing agreement had been reached. Nothing much seemed to have changed.

  None of the windows, set deep in the thickness of the walls, had more than half a pane of double glazing left, and the steel shutters had gone. There was nothing to keep out the ferocious northerly and westerly gales of winter: the cellar, its drainage blocked, was almost permanently flooded with black bilge. The smell, together with the universal stink of stale fulmar oil, pervaded the whole building. Obie would have known where he was with his eyes closed.

  The lighthouse also smelled of burnt wood; the white-painted interior walls had been scorched and blackened by a series of both accidental and wanton fires. Houlihan’s personal apartments, though, were said to be relatively habitable. He occupied the two floors above this one.

  “Yes?” said Feely, appearing on the staircase.

  “We want to talk to Houlihan,” Obie said.

  “Well you can’t.”

  Feely was one of the few lighthousers who shaved, using a cutthroat razor which he honed on his belt. Like Martinson, and Houlihan himself, he was a founder member, a child killer who had almost been too old for Category Z. What remained of his hair was grey. He had lost his dentures last year, so that he could no longer eat raw meat and had become virtually dependent on cooking. That meant he was dependent on Houlihan, since Franks wouldn’t have him in the Village, Peto hated his guts, and wild men seldom had the means or opportunity to cook their food. Feely had been a professor or something on the mainland. He was clever. He was also a homosexual by preference. Obie despised him.