Free The Colony by F.G. Cottam Page B

forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.’
    ‘Have you discussed it with her?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘But you do know her?’
    Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, ‘You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you’re aware of the answer already.’
    ‘It’s something you don’t wish to talk about?’
    ‘It’s a subject I can’t talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relationship. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would’ve made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that’s off the record, by the way. I can’t and won’t talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.’
    Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject’s patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.
    ‘Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?’
    Cooper didn’t answer her for a long time. Then he said, ‘Perhaps Jane’s right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It’s possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn’t expected.’
    ‘You don’t for a minute believe that.’
    ‘No. I don’t. I think the community was healthy and structured and prosperous. They were pious and industrious and sane.’
    ‘Then why were they taken?’
    ‘I suspect because they could be, without witnesses, without undue repercussions or fuss.’
    ‘But to what purpose, Karl?’
    ‘I don’t know. I could float a couple of theories Lucy, but I honestly don’t know. It’s exactly what I’m going to the Hebrides to try to discover and I won’t rest once I get there until I’ve succeeded in doing so.’
    It was Lucy’s turn to nod her head. He sounded a great deal more sincere outlining his expeditionary ambitions than he did mouthing platitudes about his jilted lover. I don’t like him, she thought, with a jolt of disillusionment. He’s dishonest and has far too much self regard. She thought that in person, she could conceal her dislike. But she thought it might be a more difficult thing altogether to hide in print.
     
    Jane Chambers drove the 60 miles to her daughter’s boarding school pretty much dreading the confrontation to come. There was no avoiding it, though. She was going to the Hebrides and that was that. Edith would have to stay with her father for the summer.
    She wouldn’t like it, she might even claim to hate it, but as a single mother Jane had a living to earn and the research funding at the hospital grew more precarious with each round of NHS budget cuts. Virology wasn’t exempt from the economies being made in every department. Her public profile was important in helping to sustain her stature in medicine. The hospital liked the prestige the publicity brought with it.
    A breakthrough such as she thought New Hope Island might offer would not exactly make her indispensible to her day to day employers, but it almost would. And it would place her at the front of the queue of medically qualified presenters when new TV programme ideas were being pitched. It was not a case of ego, but of necessity. There were times when a