The Penal Colony Read online

  Houlihan’s indignant counter-attack would come tomorrow afternoon, once he had assembled and armed his troops. The towners would be taken by surprise. Peto would see the assault as completely unprovoked, a further act of aggression to add to the theft of Billy. His mistakenly feeble response to Billy’s disappearance, he would tell himself later, had been interpreted by Houlihan as a virtual invitation to step things up. The battle would be violent, with several scraggings, and then the war would begin again.

  At bottom, neither Houlihan nor Peto would be sorry. The peace had lasted too long already. It was just that Peto wasn’t prepared to resume hostilities yet, and that would give Houlihan the advantage.

  Martinson had been monitoring the situation very carefully. He had shown superhuman patience and restraint, and taken a tremendous amount of shit from Peto. He wasn’t going to let a bit of rain stop him now.

  Besides, he had rehearsed this climb three times without mishap. On the last occasion, the day before yesterday, he had even reached the landing pad and overheard Houlihan’s voice from the window above. There wasn’t that much risk; much less than was entailed by an approach from the east, where the guards might expect an intruder to come. Not that they were expecting him.

  The main problem was to get down there unseen. In the dark the retreat would be simple.

  As he climbed, he couldn’t help himself smiling. Long-term plans or no, he would have done this anyway, just to relieve his boredom. He only wished he could be there to see Houlihan’s face.

  There were several possible eventual outcomes. The best would be if it went through exactly as planned, but he did not really care which way it turned out. As long as, in the end, Franks got what was coming to him, Martinson would die happy. Sometimes he pictured the helicopter in flames. Sometimes he pictured Franks in various attitudes of torture and death. The torture would be administered by himself. Subsidiary images of Peto – for some reason, usually involving crucifixion – impinged on these fantasies, and then he thought of all three of them on crosses, as at Golgotha, with Franks in the middle, Houlihan the one to repent. He, Martinson, would offer up the sponge soaked in vinegar.

  “Eli, Eli, lama sabach-thani?” he whispered, and rammed the pick into another crevice, tested it, and gave it his weight. Those apocalyptic words uttered on the verge of death, flung into the supernatural thunderous gloom. Only Mark and Matthew had had the bottle to report them. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? The other Evangelists had kept their traps shut, falsified the record. Knew what was best for the family firm.

  At the age of thirteen, in the backstreets, he had been a Crusader, well versed in the scriptures, primed by his grandmother to sing hymns in the white-emulsioned hall which had smelled musty, like old suitcases. The man in charge, he now realized, had been a closet grunt. Those words, when he had been old enough to understand them, had explained a lot. They certainly explained this island and its colonists.

  It was blasphemy. But then so was everything. “Eli, Eli,” he whispered again, the evening rain trickling down his neck, his hands covered in mud and grit. “Well you may say, Liam Franks. And you, my fine friend,” he told himself. “And you.”

  When he reached the bottom it was dark. The only guards seemed to be those on the approach path from the upper tombs.

  He found Houlihan’s milk-white billy in the covered pen behind the lighthouse. The other goats stirred uneasily and bleated a little as he led it away, but the billy itself came quietly and, calmed by stroking and soothing words, did not have time to react when Martinson, with a sudden upward stroke, plunged the blade into its throat, up through the thinnest part of the skull and into the brain.

  The new meat’s sheath-knife was sharp and quickly cut through the muscles and bones of the neck. Martinson felt the hot, sacrificial gush of blood across his hands.

  Holding one of the horns, allowing the weight to dangle easily from his fingers, Martinson mounted the landing pad and left the head on the lighthouse steps. A moment later, soft and silent as a shadow, he melted into the night.

  9

  At last Routledge decided to risk calling out.

  “Martinson! Martinson!”

  No answer.

  “Martinson, are you there?”

  Routledge had not decided what he would do if the man responded to his call and came in. There was nothing in the room to serve as a weapon; his only advantages were surprise and his own desperation. For he knew this was probably his last chance. If the auction went ahead in the morning, he would be killed. He had nothing left to lose.

  It had taken him at least an hour, perhaps more, to get free of his bonds. The hardest part had been to sever the length binding together his wrists and ankles. Strand by strand, he had picked at the cord with the blunt edges of the screw-threads. At one stage he had thought he would never do it. The pain had been almost intolerable: of the agonizing contortion needed to manipulate the screw, and of the screw-head biting into the flesh of his fingers and thumbs. Quite early on he had begun to bleed.

  When his wrists had parted from his ankles he had rested for a while before continuing. Only the fact that the screw was seven, rather than six, centimetres long had allowed him to fray the cord holding his wrists. Even so, it had been relatively slower and much more awkward than the first part of the operation. He had thought, just before the miraculous feeling of relief when his hands had come free, that this too would be impossible.

  He had untied his ankles without difficulty, and then, in the dark, had started to explore the room. Moving with infinite slowness and caution to preserve the silence, he had groped his way round the walls, getting several wood-splinters in his fingers. On reaching the door he had remembered the faint scraping sound he had heard earlier, and had put his ear to the boards to listen for Martinson’s breathing.

  The dimmest of dim lamplight was showing at a narrow crevice in the wall. He was not able to see into the room.

  The lamplight did not necessarily mean that Martinson was awake. Just before Martinson had cleared away the dishes, Routledge had heard what he now guessed was the noise of flint striking steel. In the absence of electricity or matches, with a prisoner under his roof and a possible need for light at any moment, Martinson would, Routledge supposed, keep a flame burning all night.

  Try as he might, Routledge could hear nothing from the adjoining room. His hearing may not have been as good as he imagined; the curtain Martinson had hung there may have been acting as a muffle; or Martinson may have been able to sleep without making the least sound.

  There was one other possibility.

  Since the moment of his arrest, Routledge had felt his life accursed. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. At every turn, in his choice of counsel, in the lottery of the bench, in the abysmal standard of discernment collectively possessed by the jury, and, most of all, in the fabricated evidence and breathtaking lies of the police and their expert witnesses, luck had turned its face away. There had been no deviation in his long, long decline, only an unrelenting increase in speed and momentum. Finally, landing here in Martinson’s hut, he had reached bottom. Tomorrow he would die.

  The possibility that the next room was empty, that Martinson had gone elsewhere, was at first simply too remote for him to grasp. The fact that he had already managed to escape from his bonds did not for a few seconds yet strike him as a favourable omen: he had not seriously expected any advantage from his labours.

  Then it began to dawn on him.

  “Martinson!” he said again, more loudly. “Martinson!”

  Still no reply.

  Where had he gone? To the hotel? To some other hut? Was he so confident of the security of his prisoner? If Routledge was indeed a valuable property, why had Martinson risked losing him for something as trivial as social entertainment?

  But surely Martinson had been planning all along to leave him unattended. Why else the curtain hung across the door? Why else the elaborate charade about his need
for silence?

  So Routledge had not been mistaken about the sound of the outer door scraping open. Martinson had been absent since then, throughout the whole time Routledge had been struggling with the screw. And he might be back at any moment.

  Routledge eventually, after trying to force the door and attempting to kick out planks in the walls, started to attack the roof. The laths were just above head height. He found the weakest and broke it, then broke those on either side. Once the first slate was loose, it was relatively easy to dislodge others. Above the slates he found a thick layer of turf, the earth heavy with water. Routledge clawed it away with his fingers, burrowing vertically, face averted and eyes shut against the cascade of wet soil and pebbles.

  He realized he had made an opening when he smelled fresh air and felt the softness of the rain. There was nothing in the room to stand on except the mattress, which he now rolled into a ball.

  When he had enlarged the hole sufficiently, he reached up and spread his hands on the surface of the roof.

  It was not easy to hoist himself out. Even discounting his fatigue and all the privations he had endured, he was just not strong enough. His arms were those of a quantity surveyor, a man who had spent most of his working hours behind a desk. The heaviest thing he had lifted then was a hundred-metre tape measure. But fear lent him strength: once out, he crawled to the edge of the roof and let himself down.

  He had done it. He was free.

  All his instincts told him to run away, into the dark, to get as far from this place as he could before Martinson came back. That, however, would represent the waste of an opportunity, an act of timidity. Survival did not go to the timid or wasteful. It went to the strong.

  He found a rock and hammered at the catch on the outer door. At the fourth attempt he broke it and flung the door aside.

  The lamp was standing on the table under the window. It consisted of a ketchup jar with a doubled length of canvas for a wick, held in place with a wedge.

  Routledge enlarged the flame and, lifting the lamp, entered the second of the two rear chambers, which he had, correctly, taken to be Martinson’s storeroom.

  The two side walls were lined with untidy shelves and racks of boxes, canisters, bags of food. The far wall appeared to be devoted to weapons, more carefully arranged: axes, machetes, flails, hammers, spears, clubs, knives, each hanging on its own peg. In pride of place, suspended stock-downwards, was a crossbow. Hanging beside it he found a kind of tool-roll containing ten steel bolts and a curiously shaped metal stirrup.

  His own PVC jacket had been thrown down on top of the pile of clothes which occupied part of one corner. He put it on. More clothing, mainly of goatskin, hung from pegs on the wall. He hurriedly selected a sheepskin waistcoat, too large for him, but worth taking anyway, and a broad-brimmed goatskin hat, which fitted reasonably well. On another peg he found a crude haversack. The contents – bundled twine formed into loops, perhaps snares of some sort – he tipped out, and immediately began filling the haversack with food from the shelves, scarcely bothering to look what was inside each bag. He took oatmeal, hard cheese, two polythene packets of salted fish, some beetroots, a bag of carrots. In the kitchen he found a small joint of cooked goatsflesh, and a flat gin-bottle with a screw cap, which he filled with water from the tank. When the haversack was almost full he slipped three knives into it, added a machete, the tool-roll, and fastened the straps.

  He took down the crossbow. It was much heavier than he had expected, and he wondered whether he would be able to work it; that was something he could discover at his leisure.

  His plunder of Martinson’s hut had been brief but effective. He returned the lamp to the kitchen table and pocketed the flint and steel firemaking pouch he found there.

  Ten seconds later he was outside, in the rain, climbing the slope, leaving Old Town behind.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  He passed the night in the scrub behind the town, huddled against the rain, wrapped in the PVC jacket and with Martinson’s hat pulled down over his eyes. Towards the middle hours he slept, dreaming again of Louise and of Christopher, his seven-year-old son, and also of Martinson and the two men on the cliff. The woodscrew featured in the final dream, together with a consciousness of the approaching auction. “They got their screw, after all,” his own voice said, waking him up.

  He felt wretched. His limbs were stiff and his joints ached with the cold and damp. He sniffed at his armpits and then at his crotch. He could not remember having been unwashed for so long before. The previous day he had noticed that the skin under his clothes was sprinkled with tiny red insect-bites, probably acquired in the bracken. The irritation was now much worse, as was the itching of his rapidly growing beard.

  Dawn came slowly, warm and wet, with a lethargic south-westerly wind. As soon as it was light enough to see, he circled round behind the bay and headed south, along the east coast. The tide was low, just about to turn; at the next cove he clambered down to the beach, which here was of predominantly grey shingle.

  He began walking at the water’s edge. Two hundred metres on, he climbed back into the scrub and continued moving south, keeping to open ground, treading wherever he could on bare rock. After ten minutes of this he returned to the beach, followed the surf once more and then, well before the next headland made the beach impassable, climbed back to the scrub. Switching back and forth like this, using the cover of the bushes when in the scrub, he pursued an irregular path southwards, finally going back to the beach and staying with it.

  He had learned his lesson yesterday, and would do his best to leave no tracks for Martinson to find. For undoubtedly Martinson would not be pleased, especially by the loss of his crossbow.

  Routledge did not fully appreciate what he had stolen until much later in the morning when, having put about six kilometres between himself and Old Town, he felt it would be safe to stop and rest. A little farther along he found a suitable place, an overhang of rock hidden from view but impossible to approach unseen. He sat down, sheltered from the rain, faced by the emptiness and quiet surging of the sea.

  From Old Town southwards, the east coast had become gradually more rugged and desolate. He had passed several groups of islets. The cliffs behind him, mazed with cracks and fissures and outgrowths of scrub, rose to a height which, had he not seen the cliffs on the west coast, he would have thought imposing.

  These cliffs, like the others, were of stratified rock, the plates aligned in much the same direction. Here and there the formation had collapsed, producing caves in the undercliff. Most were small and shallow, easily invaded by the tide, but some were large and extended a long way into the rock. At one or two he had found traces of occupation: piles of bones and shells, the remains of fires. Otherwise, except for large numbers of seabirds, the east coast seemed deserted.

  He had now gleaned an idea of the size of the island. It was larger than he might have guessed. At this point the coast had already begun trending towards the south-west, which indicated that the north-south length was about eight kilometres. Assuming the width of the island to be about the same, that gave an area of roughly five thousand hectares. Not allowing for bays and peninsulas, the coastline would be at least twenty-five kilometres long.

  After much debate with himself, he had decided to remain as much as possible on the beach, making occasional forays inland if need be. He would find a cave and spend most of the time in hiding, emerging at dawn and dusk to collect fresh water. It was now the 17th, Thursday. The Village gate would open for him on Monday evening. That was the danger point. He would have to be ready for the bell, and he did not know exactly when it would ring: about eleven, perhaps. Again he gave thanks for the fact that he had lied to Martinson about the length of his ordeal.

  Just offshore he noticed something round and shiny-grey, rising and falling with the swell. It had large, dark eyes, a flattened, dog-like face – a seal, watching him curiously, letting itself be carried southwards on the tide.

  He unscrewed the
cap of the gin-bottle. “Your health,” he said under his breath, raising the bottle and taking a gulp. The seal, still watching, drifted gradually out of sight.

  “Be like that, then,” Routledge whispered.

  He ate some cheese and meat, but postponed sampling the salted fish. He then busied himself with the contents of the haversack, sorting them into order. If he rationed himself, there would be enough food for three days at least.

  Taking occasional bites from a carrot, he examined the knives and machete, and began to familiarize himself with the crossbow.

  It had been designed and executed with astonishing skill. The stock had been fashioned, without decoration, from a heavy plank of densely grained wood. Whoever had made it – Martinson himself? – had had access to a comprehensive variety of woodworking tools, as well as files, hacksaws, and a vice, to make the metal parts. The propulsive power came from a springy length of shaped steel, fitted in the stock with a wedge of black heel-rubber and secured with three brass plates. The string was made of braided twine, meticulously finished and waxed, reinforced in the middle where it hooked over the nib of the trigger release. The trigger mechanism showed an especially remarkable degree of ingenuity. Spring loaded, it consisted of two plates of case-hardened steel which, operating on two pivots, allowed an apparently smooth and jerk-free release of the string.

  The trigger-nib was concealed by a shallow wooden hood which carried an adjustable, beaded backsight in brass; the brass foresight, mounted beyond the recoil of the string, terminated in a semicircle which neatly coincided with the size of the bead.

  Each of the bolts was twenty-five centimetres or so in length, cut from steel rod and flighted with small tinplate vanes. These vanes, as much as the crossbow itself, gave an overwhelming impression of ruthless utility. It was a horrible thing. At school Routledge had been told about the medieval French and the disdain and resentment their use of the crossbow had excited among the English longbowmen. The history master had regarded the crossbow as unsporting, unfair, not quite cricket.