The Colony Read Free

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