The Colony by F.G. Cottam

unnerving footage shot by the unlucky David Shanks.
    ‘You were going to tell me about the second person to conduct an academic study.’
    ‘Elizabeth Burrows. She was a sociology graduate doing a PHD on the subject of the origins of feminism. She had a thing for Charlotte Corday. Her heroine was Mary Wollstonecraft?’
    ‘Neither name means anything to me.’
    ‘Wollstonecraft was a writer. You might have heard of her daughter, also Mary, who married the poet Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.’
    ‘I’m guessing Elizabeth Burrows was intrigued by the character of Rebecca Browning.’
    ‘She was. After the disappearance, Rebecca became the subject of local scorn, with a lot of ignorant people saying Seamus had fled to the Hebrides mostly to escape his scold of a bride. Liz Burrows thought that only the malicious gossip it was. She thought the contents of the chest might offer clues about the real nature of Rebecca’s marriage to Ballantyne.’
    ‘Did she lean anything?’
    ‘Hard to say. Her doctoral thesis was never completed. She hanged herself in her college room about six weeks after examining the contents of the chest.’
    Lassiter nodded, he looked at the little iron key, between his gloved fingers.
    ‘You go through the door there and then straight through the door opposite,’ Fortescue said, pointing. Lassiter could not help but notice that the extended finger trembled slightly. ‘You’ll see a set of descending steps. Take them. When you reach the bottom, take a longish corridor immediately to your left. The room you want is the last along it. You’ll find it unlocked.’
    The room was lined with furled banners and flags and pennants and there were spars and oars leant in its corners. It was illuminated, when he found the light switch, from overhead by a single feeble bulb in a canvas shade. A smell pervaded the room; a mixture of salt and varnished wood and brass polish and a hint of damp; the antique smell of the sea, he thought, thinking the room he was in as claustrophobic as an old ship’s cabin.
    The chest bore Ballantyne’s initials, described in brass studs embedded into its lid. It contained a telescope and a sexton and several navigation charts inscribed on vellum and tied with faded ribbons which once must have been crimson. There was an abacus with a walnut frame and painted ivory balls. There was a heavy cloth boat cloak which Lassiter took out and unfolded with almost exaggerated care. He thought that if he tried it on, it might almost be a perfect fit. Ballantyne had been a tall man for the period, but Lassiter had known that already.
    There was a dress sword and a pair of buckled shoes and a heavy set of polished stone beads and a bracelet made from drilled animal teeth with a fine sliver chain running through them. On closer inspection, Lassiter concluded with a shudder that the teeth, all incisors, were more than likely human. The third artefact from Africa was a carved ebony figure of the sort familiar in junk shops when Lassiter had been a boy growing up in North London. They had probably been faked. This one certainly wasn’t. He couldn’t decide whether the Deity depicted was male or female. The features of the carving had a look that was sexually ambivalent and almost sly.
    The most valuable item in the trove was the one Lassiter concluded David Shanks had stolen and then years later returned. It was a Breguet pocket watch, a minute repeater finely crafted in silver and enamel. The hands were blued and the face of the watch had endured two centuries without crack or blemish. It was an exquisite timepiece.
    He knew that they were the most reliable and accurate watches of their period, not robust by modern standards, but phenomenally exact because for purposes of navigation, they had to be. They were also very valuable to collectors. That would have been equally true in the lifetime time of David Shanks. Ballantyne’s watch would have been eminently collectible even eighty years