by F. G. Cottam
Albums without titles weren’t unprecedented when Ghost Legion failed to provide names for theirs. The Beatles brought out the White Album in 1968. The album that came to be known by the band’s fans simply as Led Zeppelin 2 was released the following year. But the Beatles were jaunty and Led Zep bluesy and much less dark and more straightforward than Martin Mear’s outfit. Where their songs tended to be collaborations, Martin’s by contrast were all his own solo compositions. He wrote the lyrics and the tunes and he was the lead vocalist. By the time of 1, 2 and 3, he was an established star and the inclusiveness that had characterized Tallow Pale was a definite thing of the past.
Ruthie was studying a rare Pale-period photo of Martin Mear on her laptop screen at Veronica’s flat just after 11am on Tuesday when her phone rang and she recognized the number on her display for Melville Enterprises and it was her old Wight school friend Jackie Tibbs, telling her she’d got her interview, asking was four o’clock on Thursday afternoon a convenient time. She replied that it was. She swapped pleasantries, knowing that Jackie’s office was more than likely open-plan and that she’d have colleagues casually eavesdropping on the call. She said goodbye and cut the connection aware only that she was unaware of where any of this was really going.
She focused on the image on her screen, on the muscular, long-haired figure caught in the snapshot and frozen in time, attired in purple loons and a paisley shirt, not androgynous as had been the prevailing fashion among front-men then but instead, emphatically masculine. There was a six-string acoustic slung around his neck and his long fringe partially concealed his eyes, giving him a shy look.
Martin Mear had been anything but shy. She knew that about him, if she didn’t yet know much else. She’d been listening to Ghost Legion as she worked, had played the albums sequentially and then gone back to King Lud and as close as she was going to get to the musical birth of the band. Most of the mad fan speculation about Martin and black magic centred on the later, nameless records. But it was Ruthie’s abiding belief that the beginning of anything was always the best place to start if you could.
She scrolled through more pictures and came across one that made her heart lurch. It was Martin Mear pictured on Wight, the Needles and their red and white hoop-painted lighthouse behind where he stood on the clifftop against an azure summer sea. Of course, the Legion had played there, they’d headlined at the festival, hadn’t they? For a moment Ruthie endured a pang of homesickness so strong and piercing it felt like a knife-thrust. She waited for it to pass, which eventually it did.
She wondered when this self-imposed exile of hers would end. Veronica had told her she could stay for as long as she wanted to. She supposed that it depended on the outcome of Thursday’s interview, on whether she got what Carter Melville would inevitably term the gig. Securing the job wasn’t life and death but would be of practical help in enabling her to stay away from home for a while. And she thought the more she learned about the enigmatic Mr Mear, the more interesting a figure he became. It was as though the more she discovered the less she was sure of, and Ruthie found that an intriguing contradiction. It was to her a challenge.
She looked at her wristwatch. Her appointment with the man who had steered Ghost Legion to their colossal commercial success was just over fifty hours away. She thought that the time between now and then might drag. But she busied herself with her own writing through Wednesday and boned up some more on the Legion on Thursday morning and the time of her appointment arrived fairly quickly.
Fate, Michael Aldridge had called it. Ruthie had time to ponder only briefly on that claim before the appointed hour was upon her. She did so on Wednesday evening, just before descending into sleep, aware of the thin wall to her right and Veronica Slade beyond it and the knowledge now that her troubled dreams had been heard. She knew too that Veronica cared about her, but that thought didn’t really offer Ruthie much consolation.
‘I wasn’t expecting a Goth.’
‘I’m not a Goth.’
‘The ink tells me different. So do the threads.’
‘I wear black because it’s slimming.’
‘Then there’s the haircut. Jesus.’
‘I’m interviewing for a job, Mr Melville, not auditioning for a part. It’s not very PC for you to comment on my appearance.’
‘I’m not a very PC guy. But you stand up for yourself and we’re only forty seconds in.’ Carter Melville pointed for emphasis. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I like.’
Ruthie shrugged. She was there to secure a paid commission, not to have an argument.
‘Tell me what you know about Martin Mear.’
‘Rather less than I will if I get the gig.’
‘Which isn’t really answering the question.’
‘He was arguably one of the biggest rock stars of the early 1970s. He fronted a band he formed called Ghost Legion. He was exceptionally charismatic. He did all the usual stuff they could get away with much easier back then and he also had what was alleged to be a fairly serious interest in black magic. He died like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and Hendrix did, when he was twenty-seven. There’s some dispute about the circumstances of his death, but I don’t know the specifics.’
‘You don’t know the specifics yet.’
‘I’ll acquaint myself with the specifics, should I get the gig.’
Melville appeared to ponder, swivelling in his leather chair behind the steeple of his fingers on the other side of a desk she thought the biggest she had ever seen. His office was like a trophy room. There were gold records on the walls, awards in gold and silver gilt cluttering wall-length shelves. Some kind of animal pelt still in possession of its claws was splayed across the marble floor. Ruthie assumed he’d shot its original owner himself.
‘You got one thing wrong,’ he said.
‘Only one thing?’
‘Martin wasn’t arguably anything. He was the biggest, bar none. He was the outright winner of the swinging-dick competition without ever having to whip it out of his pants. There was absolutely no contest.’
‘Mick Jagger might disagree with you. Robert Plant, too.’
‘I was there, baby,’ Melville said, after a pause. He dropped his hands and swivelled to face her directly. ‘Nothing could touch him alive and nothing can touch him dead. Ghost Legion still shift close to six million units a year and Martin Mear was the fucking Legion.’
‘You don’t sound like you need a researcher at all. The salient facts all seem to be at your disposal.’
He chuckled at that. He looked at the chunky watch on its bracelet of yellow ingots adorning his wrist. ‘Three minutes in and already I get sarcasm,’ he said. ‘Good for you.’
She didn’t reply.
‘I have zero objectivity where Martin is concerned. We met when we were eighteen and our lives were inextricably linked for the next nine years. Plus, I was a doer in what got done back then. I’ve got gaps. I’ve got a mess of blurs and intervals. One of your tasks will be to fill those gaps, accurately, dispassionately.’
She’d looked him up. Of course she had. He’d been born in Maine in New England. He’d gained a scholarship to study at Oxford, where he’d first met Martin Mear. He’d become a recording-industry mogul and somehow over the decades his accent had drifted softly into the mid-Atlantic. She got the feeling he swore more often, usually. He was self-censoring on her account, she thought. He’d stop doing that should she get the job. Courtesy was an effort for him. Courtesy to this man was a drag.
Carter Melville gave Ruthie his spiel. He told her he planned the definitive collection documenting Martin Mear’s musical career. This stretched from his experimentation with the early bands right through to the last studio recording completed by the Legion. It was to include alternative takes, stuff from the BBC radio archive, the celebrated bootlegs and much other material never before released. Everything was to be re-mastered and a version on audio-grade vinyl complete with original artwork and lyric sheets was going to be cut for the purists as a li
mited edition at a premium price.
A twenty-thousand-word essay would accompany the discs, perfectly bound as a glossy booklet and replete with photos, some of which were being published for the first time. It would be Ruthie’s task to research and write those twenty thousand words. She would separate the reality from the hype, rumour and the apocryphal. At least, it would be her job to do all that if she agreed to the gig.
‘The fee is twenty large. Do it right, sister, and I won’t quibble.’
‘Jackie Tibbs told me ten thousand for something half that length.’
‘Yeah, but I changed my mind. Downloaded a couple of your books and did some browsing last night. You’ve a nice turn of phrase and you’re very atmospheric.’
‘That’s when I’m writing fiction.’
‘Which some of this shit is far stranger than.’
‘A pound a word’s a hell of a rate.’
He pointed at her. ‘Lady, you’ll earn it,’ he said. ‘It’s also source material for the biography I plan to write about Martin myself next year. No one was closer to him and the public interest is just as intense now as it was on the day he died. It’s an investment, baby. Where Carter Melville is concerned, method always accompanies the madness.’
She nodded. She wasn’t sure if any of this added up terribly well. And wasn’t talking about yourself in the third-person what megalomaniacs did? But she was already spending the twenty thousand pounds the project would earn her in her head. She said, ‘What’s the deadline?’
He smiled, properly this time, a brief smile that begged for its own encore from a man she saw with a jolt possessed surprisingly potent charm. ‘Two months,’ he said. ‘Tell me you’re on board, Ruthie. Please tell me we’re pulling together on this. Don’t disappoint an old man nurturing visionary dreams.’
‘I’m in,’ she said.
He told her then about the three people from Martin’s old life prepared to discuss their part in that life and their impressions of the man they knew, publicly, for the first time. She took out her Moleskine and made notes. He gave her an envelope he said contained contact details for the three, adding that he would not feel comfortable committing anything so confidential to email.
‘Email can be hacked and leaked.’
‘This isn’t espionage.’
‘There’s a lot of prurient interest still in Martin’s life. If any of these people get cold-called by the press, we can kiss their cooperation goodbye. And I’ve worked hard to get it.’
‘They’ll expect my call?’
‘They will once I’ve told them to, which I’ll do as soon as this meeting is over.’
There was a silence between them.
‘I’ll see you’re forwarded some expenses cash today.’
‘Thank you.’
Then he surprised her. ‘What do you know about Frederica Daunt?’
‘I don’t watch much television.’
‘But you’ve heard of her?’
Ruthie said, ‘In so far as any spirit medium could ever be said to be credible, she ticks all the necessary boxes. She appears regularly on sober programmes on the themes of mortality and bereavement broadcast on terrestrial channels. Her books sell briskly. She can fill provincial concert halls with respectful audiences when she tours. She has a huge and I think mostly sympathetic following on social media. She’s articulate, good-looking and comes across as too convincingly posh to be a vulgar trickster.’
‘Jackie scored big, recommending you.’
Ruthie didn’t reply to that.
‘Where do you stand on mediums?’
‘Grief shouldn’t be an industry. I don’t believe in profiting from pain.’
He chuckled at that. He said, ‘Carter Melville’s shrink has been profiting from his pain for forty years. His lawyer, too.’
Ruthie wondered, did he talk about himself in the third person to his shrink?
‘Frederica Daunt claims to communicate regularly with Martin from beyond. She sounds quite plausible. It seems a good place to start.’
‘It sounds a highly dubious place to start.’
Melville chuckled again. ‘Then it will probably set the tone,’ he said. ‘You should attend one of her meetings, check out what the old chick’s up to, whether she’s got the goods or whether it’s just a crock,’ he said.
‘My hunch is she’s a plausible fraud.’
He smiled. It was an ambiguous smile, one without much humour. ‘Take this gig on and you might find your scepticism challenged, honey. You might find that happening on a regular basis.’
Ruthie was taking it on. She didn’t like the chicks and honeys that were, with the babes and old ladies, the tedious way rock-industry dinosaurs like Carter Melville habitually referred to women. But the work sounded genuinely intriguing and the money was far too incredulously good to turn down. She couldn’t yet face going back to her home on the island. This job gave her every excuse to avoid doing that.
THREE
Frederica Daunt’s address was in the affluent riverside district of Chiswick. The house when Ruthie arrived there isolated in the gloom, sizeable enough almost to merit the term stately, suggestive that spiritualism was a more profitable practice than she thought something usually so bogus had any real right to be.
It was Friday evening. She’d called the medium on a contact number given her by Carter Melville as soon as she’d got back to Veronica’s flat on Thursday afternoon. Though it wasn’t explicitly said, she assumed her call had been anticipated. She thought that the only plausible explanation for Ms Daunt’s diary being so improbably clear of engagements. She’d apparently kept it clear, waiting for the call.
Now, Ruthie sat in Veronica’s borrowed car parked at the kerb, smoking with the driver’s window open and the rain percussive on the roof and sodium lit in the rectangle of pale droplets falling to her right. There was a bottle of Febreze on the passenger seat to eradicate the tobacco smell later and Ghost Legion playing on the stereo, their songs becoming more familiar and more alien at the same time to her with every listen. She felt already that there was much more to this job than research and writing. She remembered once again what Michael Aldridge had said about fate. She finished her cigarette, closed the window, climbed out of the car and locked it behind her.
The bell chimed. The door was answered by Frederica Daunt herself, slender and petite in a green evening gown and a purple shawl, her hair tightly braided, skin porcelain-smooth over the cheekbones that made her look a good decade younger than her fifty years.
Her eyes were the same bright emerald as the gown, Ruthie saw, in the light of the spacious hallway. Attractive eyes, a compelling gaze. Her hands fluttered in front of her. They fingered and tugged at the fringed and tasselled edges of the shawl.
She said, ‘I’m not quite ready for you.’ She crossed the hall and opened a door; ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting in here, Ms Gillespie? I do apologize. I can assure you it won’t be a long wait.’ Her voice, familiar from TV and radio, still sounded surprisingly husky and deep emerging from someone with so slight a frame.
The room was panelled in oak. It was lit from its high ceiling, four lamps with conical shades screwed into short brass tube fittings casting a glare that prevented any shadows. The wallpaper was florid, something expensive, Ruthie thought, from somewhere like Liberty, in the style of William Morris. Its pattern overpowered the framed prints hung from the walls at precise intervals, making them pallid, bloodless. Rain worried the windows of the exterior wall in capering gusts. Ruthie already craved another cigarette.
She wondered if Frederica Daunt had gone to arrange her phony ectoplasm or rehearse the sounds that would emerge from cleverly concealed speakers. Once they sat down, the table between them might thump and vibrate. Maybe there would be a hologram of the deceased rock star. Modern technology would enable convincing effects, but awareness of its capabilities would just as much lessen their impact on someone already predisposed to distrust them.
The me
dium reappeared, framing herself in the doorway and coughing into her right fist. The hand was small and the fist so tightly clenched that the knuckles appeared bloodless under stretched skin. The cough had been a nervous reflex, Ruthie thought. She’s tense, though she must have done what she’s about to dozens of times before.
‘I’m ready for you,’ she said.
Ruthie rose from and followed. After a hesitation, she left her coat where she’d draped it across the arm of the chair. She’d anticipated a bit of ice-breaking, an offer of tea or coffee possibly even with a biscuit on the side, a prelude of domestic normality to relax her prior to the ritual proper. Evidently there was to be nothing of that sort forthcoming.
She followed the medium up three flights of stairs. The room she was shown into was small, its single large window heavily curtained. There was a circular wooden table at which had been placed two opposing chairs. Séances were performances, weren’t they? She was being treated to a solo performance and she’d witness it from the best possible seat.
There was nothing on the table. No crystal ball, no tarot pack, none of the paranormal paraphernalia associated with ghostly fraud. There was the smell of beeswax from wood polish, the scent her hostess wore, which she thought she recognized as the Guerlain fragrance Chamade. And there was the churchy odour of the three burning candles in wall sconces providing the room’s only illumination. The table wasn’t even antique. It looked like the stolid sort of item you might pick up from the furniture floor at a branch of John Lewis.
‘Sit down,’ Frederica Daunt said.
Ruthie sat. She rested her hands on the table top, where they immediately began to feel sweaty. She put them in her lap and watched the smears of moisture they had left on the wood evaporate and disappear. ‘What happens now?’
