The Penal Colony (17 page)

Sleep was a long time in coming. No sooner
had it arrived than Routledge awoke, sweating, from a nightmare
involving the man he had shot.

He thought he must have shouted himself
awake, but the darkness inside the shack was utterly still. King,
in the far corner, was, as before, breathing regularly and deeply,
fast asleep.

Routledge was afraid of going back there, to
the place he had so vividly inhabited just now, the silvery vista
of rock and unreal sea, the bracken stretching for ever up the
hill. Most of all he was afraid of seeing those features again, or
hearing the name
Karen
, uttered in the mocking voice of her
lover.

The silence was being punctured steadily,
relentlessly, by the officious ticking of King’s clock. Between
each tick came a slight noise of springs, and beneath this,
underlying the heavy silence of the night, came the faintest and
most distant sound of breaking waves. Lying there, wearing only his
underpants and shirt, vainly trying to ignore both the musty smell
of the blankets and the acrid, indefinable, salt-laden smell which
permeated every corner of the shack; vainly trying to get
comfortable on the lumpy stuffing of which his mattress was made,
his thoughts still resonant with the mild inflection of King’s
voice and the man’s shabby, threadbare, and essentially pathetic
appearance, Routledge was again overcome by the feeling of
disbelief which had been with him since his arrival on Sert, and
which had beset him with even greater force since his entry to the
Village. This could not be true: like everything that had happened
since the moment the police had knocked on his front door, it was
impossible. Impossible that he would not wake up tomorrow in his
own bed, read the paper, eat breakfast, catch the train and go to
the site or the office. That he would not come home again for
supper, walking from the station portico to his house, avoiding as
always the shorter route along a footpath illuminated by
swan-necked street lamps striving to hold back the night. The lamp
standards painted that obnoxious Metropolitan Railway green and
their broad shades lined with grimy white enamel. Despite the wire
grids, many of the bulbs were smashed and there were extensive
intervals in the line of light. Behind the diamond-mesh fence, much
holed and damaged by trespassers, lay an overgrown embankment
almost buried under tin cans, sweet wrappers, hamburger boxes,
plastic sacks of builders’ rubble. It was there that her body had
been found. “Good evening, sir.” The flash of a warrant card: and
the nightmare had begun.

It was true that Routledge had spoken to her
on the train. The witnesses said he had tried to pick her up. Not
so. She had spoken first, a pleasant young woman, girl, sitting
beside him in a navy blue raincoat, wearing sensible black shoes.
Not overtly pretty, but sexually attractive just the same. Would he
mind opening the window? The heating was on full blast. He had
complied. A short conversation had ensued, a few empty exchanges.
She ended it by asking him for his copy of the
Daily Mail
.
He had finished with it; she said she was planning to follow the
serialized diet, but had been unable to get today’s edition.
Routledge gave it to her. It was Louise’s paper. He had only
brought it to read on the train coming home. Then at
Harrow-on-the-Hill a window seat on the opposite side of the
carriage had become vacant. She had taken it, sat looking out into
the rainy October night, at the passing lights of streets, houses,
factories.

She had remained there at each stop while the
carriage had slowly emptied.
Northwood Hills. Northwood. Moor
Park.
And it was true, God help him, that he had fantasized
about inviting her back. Louise and Christopher had gone to her
parents’ house for the half-term holiday. That was why he had taken
the
Mail
as well as his usual
Times
. This was Friday
night: an empty weekend had stretched before him. But even as the
thought had entered his mind he had known it to be nonsense. He had
never tried anything like that; probably never would.

At Rickmansworth he had perforce followed her
along the platform. She had given in her ticket; he, just behind
her, had shown his season-ticket. Leaving the portico, he had
turned right. She had turned left, towards the footpath. He had
never set eyes on her again.

Because Louise was not there to switch on the
porch light, the front of the house was in darkness. The York stone
steps up to the front path were always slippery: now they were also
strewn with wet leaves. On the second step he missed his footing
and fell, letting out an oath of surprise. He came down awkwardly,
hitting his elbow and wrist, tearing open the skin on his left
knee.

The police called on Saturday evening.
Apparently they had traced him by using the newspaper. It had been
found near the body, among the scattered contents of her
shoulder-bag. On the margin of the front page, with a distinctive
violet felt-tip pen, the newsagent had scribbled
44
, the
number of his house.

There were two of them, detectives in
raincoats. The younger one was the more suspicious. In the hall he
craned his head, looking into the kitchen, where Routledge had just
been eating baked beans and the sink was full of washing-up. Would
he account for his movements on Friday evening? How had he managed
to bruise his hand and wrist? Could they see the clothes he had
worn on Friday?

He reacted badly. He had always feared the
police, especially since the notorious Whiting case, and especially
since the start of the Government’s vigorous new drive to improve
the figures for violent crime and hence its own figures at the
polls. He said he wanted his solicitor present. The older detective
said there was no need for that, they just wanted to eliminate him
from their inquiries. Their inquiries into what? They were not at
liberty to say. Would he be at home for the rest of the weekend?
Not planning to leave the district?

On the local television news that night he
saw what it was all about. Her picture was shown, an unsmiling
passport photo taken in a booth. She was called Jacqueline Lister.
She had been raped and strangled.

After the broadcast he rang the police
station and said he felt he ought to make a statement. He did not
take his solicitor.

Then on Monday the police were on the train,
interviewing the commuters. One of the chief witnesses for the
prosecution, a woman who had been sitting opposite, said he had
been leering at the girl. That was the word she used in court. Two
other passengers came forward to denounce the lecher. But this was
nothing, a mere foretaste of the forensic evidence. First, the copy
of the
Daily Mail
, incontrovertibly his, which none of the
keen-eyed witnesses had seen him giving to the girl. Then his
injuries and the damage to his trousers and sleeve. Then the
seminal fluid was matched to his own comparatively uncommon blood
group. And finally, the genetic typing of the sperms was declared
to be identical to his own.

This last piece of evidence, which even
Routledge’s counsel did not believe had been fabricated, was the
hammer blow. Beside it his previous good character counted for
nothing. Nor did the variable quality of the testimony of the
witnesses from the train. The jury, which Routledge had had ample
time to study, was composed of an all-too-representative
cross-section of his peers. A gormless youth in a windcheater,
wearing a digital watch which bleeped every hour, on the hour. An
Asian woman who could scarcely speak English, let alone understand
the evidence. The foreperson, so called, was a middle-aged
housewife who seemed to regard the proceedings as an entertainment
devised solely to give her an opportunity to display her wardrobe,
consisting of a variety of suits from high street multiples. In one
of these, green velvet and beige, she had stood up to deliver the
verdict.

Have you reached a unanimous verdict? No.
Then have you reached a majority verdict? Yes. What is it? We all
think he’s guilty.

Condemned by a panel of illiterates. But the
judge was not illiterate. And he was scrupulously fair. Especially
to poor student nurses who were raped and strangled while walking
home to their lodgings.

In the end, only Louise believed; and, on one
visiting day at Exeter, just after the failure of the final appeal,
he began to fear that even her support might eventually
crumble.

“Louise,” he breathed, drifting unwillingly
at long last towards sleep, “Louise.” He did not care what happened
to him, as long as he was not separated from her, or from
Christopher. If there was a God up there, which there wasn’t, why
was it that he worked so hard to identify whatever thing a man
dreaded most, and, having identified it, why did he always, always,
vindictively succeed in making that very thing come to pass?

When the alarm clock rang Routledge took a
moment to realize where he was.

The inside of the shack was in semi-darkness;
there were no proper windows, only two shutters covering apertures
in the wall. King had gone, leaving his cot neatly covered with
blankets. It was almost five fifteen.

Routledge briefly heard voices nearby, and
then they were still. The sound of a barrow being pushed over
shale. Chickens some way off. Gulls overhead. Distant laughter. The
wind. The barrow again.

From his bed he examined the ceiling, the
pillars, the walls and floor, King’s pitiful collection of
furniture and belongings. His eye took in the crude sideboard,
equipped with a washing-up bowl and an enamel jug, which served the
shack as a bathroom. And King seemed to occupy a position of some
responsibility: what would Routledge’s own living quarters
eventually be like?

For all that, for all his apprehensions about
his future here, he allowed himself to acknowledge a sense of
achievement, almost of elation. He had got in. Despite Martinson,
and Peto, and Gazzer and Tortuga, despite the man at the ruins, he
had beaten all the odds and got in. Really it had been luck,
mostly, that and the cave. Without the cave he couldn’t have done
it.

He wondered how long the Community had been
in existence, how long Franks had been in charge, and how many of
those in the Village had undergone the same ordeal. King, for
instance. How would he have fared? Or Franks himself, or Appleton?
If they had all undergone the same test, or something similar, then
the Village was populated with a formidable collection of men
indeed.

The test had two main objects, Franks had
said: to show what a man was made of, and to give him practical
knowledge of life outside. If “practical knowledge” meant a
bottomless dread of the outsiders and a frantic resolve to avoid
them evermore, if it meant a resolution to do everything in his
power to ingratiate himself with the leadership and advance to a
position of privilege in the Community, Routledge conceded that, in
his case, the test had been spectacularly successful.

His arms and legs ached. He still felt deeply
fatigued. His night’s rest had refreshed him hardly at all. Worse,
he had been dreaming again.

Anxious now for his first daylight view of
the Village, he got up, pulled on his sweater and trousers, and
slipped his feet into his boots.

On the table he found a plastic mug and a
plastic plate with three slices of coarse bread, a blob of jam,
some butter, and a hard-boiled egg. Beside the plate lay a scrap of
paper bearing a pencilled note written in a hasty, cursive hand. He
held it up to the light.
Water in tank (in corner). Latrine
behind house – corrugated iron roof. Will be in potato fields if
I’m needed – B.K.

Routledge went outside.

The sun had just risen; the sky was clear. It
looked as though the day would be fine.

From what he had previously seen, he already
knew quite a lot about the topography of the Village. The Village
peninsula, at the south-western corner of the island, was roughly
oblong in plan view and covered an area of about two hundred and
fifty hectares. The border fence ran from north-west to south-east,
and had two gates, one near either end. Most of the peninsula
seemed to be under cultivation of one sort or another, with
scattered areas of natural vegetation and here and there a barn or
byre. The main concentration of buildings, assorted in size and
style and huddled together for safety, was not far from the
north-west gate, on fairly sheltered, sloping ground running down
to the western cliffs.

King’s shack was near the middle, one of
about twenty grouped round the broad, shale-surfaced precinct in
front of the bungalow steps. Beyond the bungalow stood a line of
fir trees, more shacks, and, just visible from this angle, the
posts and framework of the gate through which Routledge had entered
last night.

The bungalow was not technically that, for
there were two dormer windows on this side. Built of stone, with a
slate roof, it had a slightly institutional appearance. The design
was not the usual compromise between cost and someone’s idea of
domestic bliss: it achieved a close accord between its function as
both a residence for the warden and headquarters for visiting
scientists. The most prominent feature of its broad façade was the
wide veranda, supported on stone pillars and with a teak
balustrade, where even now a guard was seated by the reinforced
front door, nursing a crowbar. As Routledge watched, another man,
dressed in jeans and a green and yellow sweater, mounted the steps
and engaged him in conversation. No one else was in sight.

Routledge found the latrine, which appeared
to serve at least a dozen shacks, and noted with displeasure the
open pit and the fenestrated plank serving as a seat. But there was
no smell. Below the seat a faded polythene sack was being held open
on a wickerwork frame. The sack was a third full of water; the
frame allowed it to be easily lifted for emptying. A rota in
ballpen was fixed to the rush-and-lath wall: