Authors: F.G. Cottam
The Colony
F.G. Cottam
For Miranda,
for everything.
Copyright © 2012 Francis Cottam
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McIntyre sat in his screening room with a single malt at his elbow and Mahler’s 9th unfurling around him through the concealed speakers housed in the ceiling and walls. He decided that he would switch the music off before watching the film again.
The original footage had been shot in the summer of 1934 and was silent. But he thought that his emotional reaction to what it showed might be influenced by the dramatic scale and melancholy character of his preferred soundtrack. He wanted to impose neutrality on the film. He wanted, if he was honest, to diminish what he had just watched. He wanted to do this before watching it again because it had unnerved him so badly.
The man with the cine camera had been a crofter called David Shanks. He had settled on New Hope Island in the spring of that year. He had not come from the humble, hardy stock which generally bred men who scraped a living off the Scottish land.
He was an ex-soldier. He had served with distinction as an officer in the Great War, earning a Military Cross fighting with an infantry battalion on the Ypres Salient.But after the conflict, he had led a platoon of Black and Tans in the Irish Rebellion and had been unable to reconcile his conscience to the things he had seen and done in the scorched earth campaign there against the rebel counties.
To McIntyre’s mind, Shanks had been a sort of prototype drop-out. Men like Robert Graves and Sassoon and Orwell had done the same thing in the same period with greater notoriety. But that was what Shanks was. He was someone who had rejected the conventions and strictures of life as lived by the majority of his middle-class contemporaries.
Instead, he had done itinerant jobs. He had crewed aboard a trawler for a while and worked manning a lighthouse. He had washed up eventually at New Hope Island, where his public school education and experience in the trenches had no doubt enabled him to dismiss with amused contempt the persistent stories of mischief and terror that blighted the place.
Less easily dismissed, was the evidence of the film. McIntyre had paid for the footage to be digitally enhanced. It now resided on a disc rather than a reel and showed its subject matter in greater detail than had been originally apparent. In McIntyre’s state-of-the-art DVD player, it could also be slowed down. He did not believe that the speed at which you watched it mattered greatly. The subject could not be made to look ordinary by altering the pace at which it progressed across the screen. Neither could it be made to appear more easily explicable.
He picked up his remote and switched off the Mahler. He steeled himself to watch the film again. And on the table bearing his whisky glass, the phone began to ring. He sighed and picked up the receiver.
‘Mr. McIntyre?’
‘I’m at your service, Mr. Lassiter.’
The sarcasm would be entirely lost on his researcher. McIntyre thought this was a pity. He was paying him handsomely. But Lassiter did not understand protocol and the notion of hierarchy was irritatingly alien to him. He spoke to McIntyre as though on the assumption that they were equals. McIntyre was confident he had yet to meet the man who could qualify as that. He tolerated Lassiter’s insubordinate tone. But only because he was capable of finding forgotten rarities such as the Shanks home movie. He had discovered it in a junk shop in Finchley. He was earning his retainer.
‘Have you watched it?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Oh.’ He sounded slightly crestfallen. ‘You’ve had it for a week.’
‘And I’m a very busy man. I have a business to run.’
‘More like a business empire.’
McIntyre liked compliments. He would throw the dog a bone. ‘I shall watch it tonight.’
‘Pour yourself a stiff one before you do.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my nerves.’
‘Shanks would probably have said the same, Mr. McIntyre.’
‘Take me through the provenance.’
‘Do what?’
‘Convince me the film isn’t a fake.’
Footslogging had been the key to the find. Lassiter had followed the trail left by David Shanks though a peripatetic life. Scotland had evidently become less appealing to him after the New Hope Island experience. But he had still shown a predilection for remote and rugged country. He had lived for a while near Barmouth, on the Welsh coast. Then after the Second World War he had settled in a sort of commune in Cornwall run by a clique of abstract expressionist artists.
He had prospered there, running a bakery, with a weekend sideline in game fishing boat charters. That was where his son had been born, out of wedlock; the community he was part of remarkably free and easy about such things for the times. His son Peter had been born in 1948.
Shanks had not been much of a father. Something Lassiter was vague about had soured his relationship with the commune and with his common-law wife. He had left abruptly in the early 1960s and ironically, given his Black and Tan epiphany forty years earlier, had lived out his last years in a cottage at Liscannor Bay on the coast of County Clare in the West of Ireland.
He had died in 1970. He had never bothered to write a will. But he had amassed some savings and had owned the cottage in which he died. What few possessions he had possessed at the time of his death were eventually passed on to his son.
Peter had led a rather more humdrum life than his father. Despite his exotic childhood in Cornwall, he had grown up into a resolutely conventional man as far as career was concerned. He had become an insurance salesman, eventually running his own modest insurance firm from a small office in Camden. He had never married. He had commuted from his home in Finchley until late-stage lung cancer was diagnosed in 2008, when he was sixty. He had died in a privately run Finchley hospice.
This was where Lassiter’s intuition had come into play. A man without living relatives would rely on the hospice staff for favours in making his last months and then weeks bearable. There was generally someone on the staff roster of anywhere private ready to accommodate requests, albeit at a small profit.
Greed played a greater part than compassion in these transactions. A cautious man who’d made a living out of insurance would have put something by for his old age. But greed was no respecter of limitations. And Peter Shanks had been a dying man without anyone to leave his legacy to.
After two sessions in the pub along the road, timed to coincide with the change from afternoon to evening shift, Lassiter knew quite a lot about the hospice, its staff and the routine there. The word was that though the place was managed by a former civil servant with a diploma in business administration, it was really run by a handyman turned ward orderly called Gerry Sykes. He guessed that private sector pay in the field of full-time care for the terminally ill would run to about 18 grand a year. When he saw Sykes pull up in the hospice car park in a Range Rover less than a year old, he therefore thought he had his man.
Lassiter was not interested in the morality or legality of what Sykes was up to. He just wanted to trace any possessions that had been in Peter Shanks’ possession. Eighty years earlier, the film had caused a furore. It had generated national newspaper headlines and brought denunciation from church pulpits throughout Scotland. Now, though, it was forgotten about. Lassiter’s only interest was in discovering whether it still existed and in recovering it, if it did.
‘He left me a few bits and pieces, on account of my kindness to him,’ Sykes confirmed, once he’d established he wasn’t talking to an official from the Inland Revenue. ‘Some of them do. It’s no use to them when they’ve gone, is it?’
Absolutely not, Lassiter confirmed.
‘It was just a couple of boxes of junk, really, souvenirs, bric-a-brac. There was one nice set of silver candle holders. Everything else I gave to my brother-in-law. He has a junk shop here and does a stall at Camden Lock at the weekend.’
The cine camera had gone. But the film David Shanks had shot using it was still on a neglected shelf at the back of the shop, stored in circular metal containers, the alloy they were made from tarnished by time, but each tin encouragingly tightly sealed. They bore his initials and the dates the footage covered, in faded ink on strips of adhesive fabric. When Lassiter took them to the shop counter and paid for them with McIntyre’s expenses money, he was pretty sure that Peter Shanks had never even opened them, much less sat and viewed their contents on a screen.
Lassiter took the film straight from Finchley to a Soho processing facility where he kept an account. There, a technician he trusted opened the can dated 1934 and examining it between delicate fingers in white cotton gloves, said it was in excellent condition. Lassiter had him mount it on one of the old projectors they still kept for the purpose and he ran it, pulling it into focus.
Then he forced himself to watch it once again. Then he had it rolled carefully back into its original container. And he went for the stiff restorative drink he would, a week later, suggest McIntyre might benefit from, while viewing it.
It was Lassiter’s guiding belief that the deeper you dug, the more dirt you came up with. He had read a monogram about one of the painters prominent in the commune David Shanks had briefly prospered among on the Cornish coast. There had been some folkloric dabbling. It had progressed from the relative innocence of Morris Dancing to the making of corn dollies and the weaving of wicker shrines. Cornwall had been far more remote in the middle of the twentieth century than it was today. Its pagan traditions were then still fairly strong.
There was a veiled suggestion in the monogram that some of the commune’s members had gone rather too far than was proper or even safe with the rituals in which they had indulged. Had David Shanks been one of those? Had an unsavoury appetite for black magic been the reason for his hasty departure? There was nothing to suggest an interest in the occult in his earlier, military life.
But he had rebelled against the suffocating orthodoxies of Imperial Britain in the aftermath of the Great War. Others had done that by exploring magic. Crowley, of course, had been chief among them. Was its mysterious reputation the reason Shanks had gone to New Hope Island in the first place? Lassiter didn’t know. He thought, though, that Shanks had got more there than he’d bargained for. And he thought it had been an experience that would have deterred any sane man from looking any further.
‘The film is not a fake,’ Lassiter said.
His voice was emphatic over the line. McIntyre believed him. The fraudulent stuff was always easier to find. The people who counterfeited it wanted money or attention and were generally too impatient to hide what they manufactured so convincingly. Shanks’ film was genuine. It really had lain neglected on a junk shop shelf for a couple of years. It might never have been discovered there. And it wasn’t just Lassiter’s word. McIntyre had had the stock authenticated.
‘Did you call me for a particular reason?’
‘I just wanted your reaction to the film.’
‘You’re impertinent.’
‘I am curious, Mr. McIntyre. If I wasn’t curious, I wouldn’t be any good at my job.’
‘Nobody can say you’re not good at your job.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t call me again, Lassiter, until you’ve a fresh revelation for me.’McIntyre hung up. He pressed the play button on his remote, but not until he had emptied his glass of the last of his whisky.
Across a vast Scottish island sky, summer clouds scudded and seabirds were caught in flight, in the black and white of cine film exposed to light through the eye of a lens looking at the world eighty years ago. The camera swung through 360 degrees and offered the first brief glimpse of the cottage. It was constructed from dry stone and whitewashed and McIntyre assumed that David Shanks had built it himself.
Next, he focussed on the sea, Atlantic waves tumbling onto a kelp littered shore glazed with sunlight. Further out, the restless whitecaps suggested a considerable swell. There was no sound to the film, of course. In the absence of the Mahler, McIntyre could imagine its elemental soundtrack, the tear of the summer wind and the gull cries and crashes of surf that would have accompanied the sights he was looking at. There would have been a salt tang to that breeze he could almost smell.