The Colony Read Free Page A

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