The Penal Colony Page 6

  “It’s important,” Obie said.

  “If Peto wants to talk, he can come himself. Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say to me.”

  Obie glanced at Martinson, who gave a slight shrug.

  “It’s just,” Obie began, “it’s just that Alex’s billy has disappeared.”

  “‘Disappeared’?”

  “Last night,” Martinson said. “He thinks Archie might know something about it. He thought, seeing as how Archie’s his friend, Archie wouldn’t mind if we had a quick look round.”

  “Are you accusing Mr Houlihan of stealing Peto’s goat?”

  “No, course not. It’s just that, like Obie says, Billy’s disappeared. He might have wandered this way, like. One of youse lot might have taken him in, not knowing who he was. That’s all we’re saying, in’t it, Obie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I seem to remember Mr Houlihan giving his word of honour on the goat question last April. I seem to remember him and Peto making a covenant. He gave his word, which is to say, his sacred bond. And now you two come here with a demand to search his property.”

  “It’s not like that, F—” Obie began, just stopping himself in time. “It’s not like that, Harold.”

  Feely crooked his finger at McGrath. “Show these men the way back to Old Town.” Then, ignoring Obie, he addressed his final remark to Martinson. “If you two pillocks come round here again, you’ll be sorry.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Martinson saw him first.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Quick. Give us them glasses.”

  After leaving the lighthouse, Obie and Martinson had returned to the cliff to collect Brookes before continuing with their mission. Since Houlihan, through Feely, had denied the charge so strongly, Martinson had suggested that it might be worth taking a look at the Village stock, just in case Franks had, after all, been responsible for stealing the goat. They had now followed the coastline as far south as Illislig Bay.

  Martinson raised the binoculars to his eyes. “That’s it, dummy,” he said. “Go on. Show us what you got.”

  “What?” Brookes said. “What is it?”

  “If I in’t mistaken, I’m looking at the new meat. Buggeration, the way he’s looning about he must want to get caught.”

  Obie took the binoculars. “Where? I can’t see nothing.”

  “Inland, about a kilo from the crest. In line with Pulpit Head.”

  Among the low gorse and bracken scrub a distant figure came suddenly into Obie’s view: a dark-haired man in a blue shirt and dark trousers, clutching some black clothing in one hand and something else – perhaps a stick – in the other. It seemed he had just come down from the ridge and was making his way towards Perdew Wood and the middle of the island. Even at this range it was apparent, both from his general demeanour and from the mere fact that he was crossing such a visible stretch of ground, that he was completely ignorant of the basic rules of Sert. Either he was a wild man gone off his rocker, or he was, as Martinson had surmised, the new meat.

  “How do you want to play it?” Obie said: for it was Martinson’s privilege, having found the quarry, to decide.

  “It could just be a trap,” Martinson said. “It could be wild men. They could’ve seen us coming. Still, he’s clean-faced. It’s got to be him.” He smiled at Obie. “We’ll get him in the wood. If someone else don’t get to him first.”

  At least seven men from Old Town, and probably a similar number from the lighthouse, had set out to look for yesterday’s arrival. The Prison Service helicopter had touched down at its usual hour, in the early afternoon, and Bruno had reported a prisoner deposited for Franks’s people to find.

  The landing place was well inside the Village boundary, impossible to get at from outside, an expanse of close-cropped turf where the pilot was guaranteed a clear view in all directions. From the hedge, Bruno had watched the usual routine of boxes and sacks of stores being left, and had seen the full plastic canisters of mail unloaded and the empty ones taken away.

  During this process the pilot always kept the rotors turning. Despite the cosy agreement with Franks, the crewmen never wasted any time on the ground. As soon as they could they would scramble into the hatch, the turbines screaming and a widening gap already appearing between the undercarriage and the turf, leaving, as often as not, one more unfortunate wretch to join the population of Sert.

  But new meat was new meat: the only source, outside the Village, of factory-made clothing, boots, and news of the world at large. Thanks to the system of initiation Franks had adopted, the outsiders had at least a chance of exploiting this one commodity.

  The weekly or fortnightly hunt was becoming something of a sporting occasion. Obie had even detected a certain rivalry between the towners and the light. Because of Franks’s terror of AIDS and HVC, if and when new meat was caught, the growing custom among the more rampant stonks was to make sure it failed the medical examination performed at bell-time by Sibley, the Village vet.

  Quite often the hunt drew a blank. Occasionally the wild men got there first and only a corpse, perhaps mutilated, would be found.

  Martinson did not normally deign to participate. Kept supplied with island-mades by Peto, he had little need of factory clothes, and very few new arrivals wore boots large enough for Martinson’s feet. As for the outside world, Martinson was interested in that not at all. Like anyone, though, Martinson presumably saw the value of catching the meat as far as rank was concerned. It would do him no harm with Peto and the others to bring back the spoils.

  Perdew Wood occupied part of Sert’s central plain. The wood was merely a continuation and intensification of the scrub on its northern and western sides. In few places did it attain the status of real woodland; few of its rowans, thorns, and oaks could be classified as more than stunted versions of mainland trees. However, the wood provided the largest single area of cover on the island. For that reason it was almost invariably the choice of new arrivals, especially when they were not too bright; and, inevitably, the wood attracted the largest numbers of hunters.

  As it was so late in the day it seemed likely that most of the hunters had by now given up or gone elsewhere. This, at least, was the hope Brookes had expressed on entering the wood; certainly there was no sign of any competition.

  Among all the men at Old Town – and at the lighthouse too, for that matter – Martinson had developed the most formidable outdoor skills. He had adapted completely to his new life; it was unimaginable that he could ever go back to the way he must have been before. On those few occasions when he had accompanied Martinson on food-gathering expeditions, Obie had been able to observe at first hand Martinson’s awesome tracking ability.

  He found the trail without difficulty, separating it from those made earlier by the passage of other legs through the undergrowth. After striking for the middle of the wood, the trail turned more to the north, passing through a glade of gnarled oaks and rowans scarcely more than head-high. The undergrowth here contained clumps of bluebells as well as brambles and bear’s-garlic and male fern. Martinson squatted to examine the colour and texture of some damaged leaves. Then, from the soil near by, he plucked a tiny brown toadstool. It had been trodden on: the cap was bruised, and colourless juice had seeped from the stem.

  He arose, grinning malevolently, and presented the toadstool to Obie.

  “Ten minutes?” Obie guessed.

  “Five.” Martinson raised a forefinger and touched his lips. “Listen.”

  Almost on cue came the sound of a dead branch snapping underfoot, like a dull pistol-shot echoing through the trees.

  It was followed by more sounds of clumsy progress, no more than two hundred metres ahead.

  7

  The search for his knife had taken Routledge as far down as the rill. It had not been there, so he had again turned back on himself and eventually, after a meticulous examination of every centimetre of ground, had found it not fifty
paces from the ridge. The knife had fallen and been caught by the bracken in such a way that, the point uppermost, it had scarcely been visible to someone coming down the hill.

  He estimated he had wasted at least two hours on the search. The sky had clouded over completely by the time he had returned to the ridge and set out, down across the bracken and gorse to this area of more imposing scrub, even woodland, wind-shaped and flattened when seen from above, greenly gloomy and claustrophobic once inside. The undergrowth, deprived of light, was relatively sparse and easy to get through.

  He had dug up a few bulbs and roots and had cautiously tasted them. The first he had spat out instantly: it had tasted vile, like concentrate of garlic. Even the leaves of this plant, resembling those of lily-of-the-valley, generated a revolting musk. He had got some sap on his fingers and now could not rid himself of the smell. None of the other roots had been edible.

  He had never been really hungry before. His stomach hurt; he felt dizzy. For the first time in his life he began to know what hunger meant.

  He crouched and turned over a flat rock, looking for he knew not what. A woodlouse scuttled away from the light; three more were clinging on blindly. A small, pale brown slug. Two blue-black beetles. In Africa the natives ate termites, or their larvae, or something, by pushing a twig into the nest. The twig, with its cargo of grubs, was carefully extracted and then pulled between the lips. In France they ate snails. What was a slug, if not a snail without its shell?

  Routledge put the rock back.

  The decision to forage inland was already looking like a mistake. There was nothing in these woods for him. He should have trusted his instinct and stuck with the coast. There had to be easier ways of finding food than this. Real food: rabbits, seabirds, shellfish.

  Several times since retrieving it, he had taken the knife out of its sheath and examined the details of its construction. The banded pattern, fawn and brown and black, of the hilt; the brass guard, the long, strong steel of the blade, were the products of a technology which, compared with anything available to him now, was fantastically advanced. On the mainland he would scarcely have looked at the thing twice. Now he admired it as a collector might admire his most coveted possession. The knife belonged to him: it was his. He valued it, in a way he had not known since his childhood. And the knife was already his accomplice, his trusted friend. It knew his secret. On his service its point had entered and breached a human heart.

  He stood up. He would definitely take his chances and go back to the coast.

  “You won’t be needing that,” the white man said.

  He was the tallest of the three, the heaviest and the most frightening in appearance, with ginger hair tied in a pony-tail, a huge red beard, and a goatskin jacket which in style owed more to the Visigoths than to contemporary Britain. Only his incongruous Birmingham accent gave him away.

  His two companions were younger, both black, dressed in ragged jeans and sweatshirts. The first, who also wore a skimpy and much stained leather waistcoat, was wiry and small, carrying a spear, a length of reinforcing steel rod sharpened to a point, below which hung a bunch of seagull quills. Round his neck Routledge was amazed to see a pair of rubber-armoured roof prism binoculars costing, at current prices, some seven hundred pounds. The second black, of average build, with a sheepskin headband and wristlets, had a felling axe at the ready, held across his chest. His expression indicated that he would not mind using it.

  It was impossible that the three of them could have crept up behind him in total silence; yet that was exactly what had happened.

  This time there would be no escape. The white man was armed with an S-shaped crowbar.

  “Chuck your blade down here,” he said, and Routledge complied.

  “Standard issue, that,” said Spear, giving it to the white man.

  “Now the club,” the white man said.

  Felling Axe retrieved it. “Here, this is Tortuga’s kerry.” He looked up at Routledge. “Where d’you get this?”

  “I found it on the cli—. I found it.”

  “On the cliffs. Was that what you was going to say?”

  “Yes. No. I just found it.”

  Keeping the club. That too had been monumentally stupid. Now they would kill him for sure, in revenge, if nothing else.

  “Look on his knees, Obie. It’s blood. He’s croted Tortuga.”

  “Gazzer and all,” said Obie, the one with the spear.

  The white man uttered a quiet, inward laugh. “What’s your name?”

  Routledge decided to lie. “Roger,” he said, borrowing the identity of a former colleague. “Jenkins.”

  “Well, Roger, you done a naughty thing there, croting our two stonky mates.” He laughed again. “He don’t look the part, do he, Obie?”

  “Looks like a bit of a sperm artist, if you ask me. Talks like one, too.”

  “What about their stuff?” said Felling Axe.

  “The meat’s mine,” the white man said. “That makes their stuff mine and all.”

  “He’s right, Jez,” said the one called Obie.

  Routledge did not fully understand what was going on, but it seemed that he was the “meat”. It also seemed that they were not after all unduly exercised by the revelation that he had “croted” the first two. What concerned them more was the ultimate destination of the dead men’s “stuff”.

  “Did they slake their jakes?” said the one called Jez. When it became apparent that Routledge hadn’t understood, he rephrased the question. “Did they prong you?”

  Routledge feigned incomprehension.

  “You ever been plugged?”

  “Shut up, Jez,” the white man said. “Where’s your stuff, Roger?”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “Where’d you put the rest of your issue? What they give you in the Village. The clobber and that.”

  “This is all I took.”

  “Just the knife and the jacket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Want to get in there, do we? That Franks.” He sneered. “How long d’they give you outside?”

  “Nine days.”

  “He’s lying,” Jez said. “Where’d you hide your stuff, bastard?”

  “No,” the white man said. “He in’t lying. You wouldn’t tell us no fibs, would you, Roger? Thought not. You’re coming with us now, Roger. This is Obie, this Jez. Me I’m Martinson. Ain’t got no first name, have I, Obie?” He smirked again. “Let’s go.”

  With the spear at his back, Routledge was made to walk. Martinson led the way.

  As they passed through the undergrowth, Routledge remembered the newsreels he had seen of prisoners forced to appear before the cameras and recant, not knowing whether in the next moment they would be shot or beaten or merely dragged away once more and thrown into their cells. While watching he had been more or less indifferent; but now he found the faces of those men returning to haunt him. Was that how he looked now, at this moment, not in the forests of Vietnam or Central America, but on an island a mere forty kilometres from mainland Cornwall?

  “Don’t try and run, Roger,” Martinson said over his shoulder. “We won’t like it if you do.”

  “Where are we going?” Routledge made himself say.

  “Mystery tour.”

  It came fully home to him then just how barbarous was the policy his peers had adopted to rid themselves of murderers, rapists, terrorists. No man slept on Sert who was not a fully paid-up member of Category Z. Only the helicopter’s tenuous touch remained to link him with the past. His sentence was final, inexorable. His future was this, indivisible from the present. It was as though he was already dead. With this one difference: part of him, the part determined to survive, refused to acknowledge it.

  That tiny corner of his mind had not forgotten the resolution he had made on the ridge. It enabled him to take in details of the journey, and remained sufficiently functional to file away information for later use. The white man, Martinson, appeared to be in charge. Obie he treated with resp
ect; the other one, possibly a homosexual, he didn’t. Routledge he virtually ignored, except, from time to time, for telling him to keep up: even had Routledge not been weak from hunger and lack of proper sleep he would have found the pace gruelling.

  Martinson, in particular, seemed to pass over rough ground almost as easily as one might walk through a shopping mall. He rapidly led them to the edge of the wood and out across the thorn scrub.

  The land sloped generally downhill. After a few minutes they came to an area of more open heath, with more bracken, where Routledge noticed another buzzard in the sky. The bracken gave way to vegetation more open yet: a wide expanse of low heather, dusty purplish and just coming into bloom.

  If Martinson ignored the captive, Obie did the opposite. As they walked, with Jez bringing up the rear, he badgered Routledge with questions about the mainland. His interest centred on the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, about which Routledge was able to provide no information whatever. He then asked, with similar success, how preparations for next year’s World Cup were coming along.

  “Ain’t you interested in football, then?”

  “No. I’m afraid not.”

  “Franks’s got radios. Got a telly too.”

  “I expect he does the pools and all,” Jez said.

  “Who is Franks?” Routledge brought himself to say.

  “Don’t you know? In the Village. The ‘Father’, he calls himself. That’s so his boys have to use his shit for toothpaste. Ain’t that right, Jim?”

  “That’s right.” Martinson glanced over his shoulder. “Leave the meat alone now, Obie. You can see he’s puffed out.”

  For that Routledge found himself grateful.

  The heather came at last to an end, replaced by rough turf with scattered outcrops of rock and scree. The ground began to rise once more, the grass dotted with minute yellow flowers. By now Martinson had joined a distinct path worn in the soil. It threaded its way over a ridge and into a large, bowl-shaped depression, a kind of natural amphitheatre where a flock of scrawny and ill-kempt goats was feeding. The flock was being guarded by four armed men, three whites and a mulatto, wearing much the same rags and skins as the other outsiders Routledge had seen.