The Penal Colony (11 page)

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.

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.