by F. G. Cottam
‘And you shouldn’t make snap judgements about people.’
‘What happened next?’
‘They mostly refurbed. Some of them re-sold and moved on. That flat was never successfully reoccupied. It remains an asset worth a theoretical fraction of its market value to all of the block’s freeholders. But an asset you can’t realize is actually worthless.’
‘How many times have you been in there?’
‘Half a dozen? It merry-go-rounds from agent to agent, we take turns at putting it on, except it isn’t exactly merry, is it? Everyone knows about it, nobody really says anything. Makes you look foolish, if you do.’
‘What’s the longest time you’ve spent in there?’
‘Really starts to get to you after about twenty minutes.’
Ruthie nodded. She’d managed no more than eight or nine. She wondered how Frederica Daunt would cope if she visited Max Askew’s old docklands flat. She thought the medium would probably light up like a Christmas tree. Or maybe her nose would bleed, like someone struck heavily by a blow to the face as it had in Chiswick on Friday night.
The estate agent’s name was Malcolm Stuart. He told her he was a graduate of Birkbeck College, one of the more prestigious bits of the University of London, where he’d taken a degree in history. History didn’t naturally suggest a career path, so he’d taken this job, because the only qualifications required were ownership of a suit and a driver’s licence. He had those, along with his trophy watch.
‘You know quite a lot about Proctor Court.’
He sipped his lager. ‘I know quite a bit about this locale generally. Industrial decline in the Wapping area in the post-war period was the subject of my thesis. I distilled it down to eight thousand words, but there was a lot of source information.’
‘Ever heard of a docks-based company called Martens and Degrue?’
‘You never had any intention of buying 77 Proctor Court, with or without its peculiar atmosphere, did you, Ms Gillespie?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘I knew that from the start. You develop an instinct for time-wasters, property voyeurs. Generally, they’re a pain in the arse.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Tell me what your real interest is and I’ll tell you what I know about that firm you’re curious about.’
‘Done.’
They shipped religious art and artefacts, he said. They’d had a bonded warehouse, which was long gone. They had been unpopular with the archbishop of the Catholic diocese, though the reason for this hadn’t been made public. They’d been unpopular too on the docks, again for reasons that were obscure. Their employees were shunned among the wharves and in the ale houses and pie-and-mash and betting shops around them.
‘So Max Askew wouldn’t have been welcome here.’
Malcolm shrugged. ‘He was white-collar so he wouldn’t have drunk with the dockers and stevedores anyway. The Prospect wasn’t full of locals with loft apartments and German tourist coach parties then. The wharves were rough and ready and the boozers crowded and volatile.’
‘What do you think is wrong with that flat?’
He didn’t answer her. Instead he said, ‘My sister’s a bit of a hippie. Second-generation, only twenty-three, but she goes to Glastonbury and believes all that stuff about ley lines and crop circles. She’s heavily into Ghost Legion. She reckons there’s an answer to the mystery of what happened to Martin Mear and it’s all there on the second sides of the albums with no names.’
‘What do you mean, the “mystery”?’
‘She says he didn’t die.’
‘There was a funeral.’
‘The box was empty. They dug it up a decade after his supposed death and it was full of bricks.’
‘That’s an urban myth.’
He smiled. He had an attractive smile. He was an attractive young man, despite the vanity. She’d got that bit right about him and everything else wrong.
‘I don’t take much notice of what my sister says. But her crowd believes it. They’re all waiting for the Second Coming.’
‘That’s blasphemous.’
‘The archbishop would certainly have thought so.’
‘The same one that took exception to Martens and Degrue?’
‘The very man,’ he said. Then he frowned.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’d like to ask you would you like another drink. But I think if I do you’ll say no and it’ll just make you leave that bit quicker than you would have otherwise.’
‘I’m a good ten years older than you are, Malcolm.’
‘I was also afraid you might say that.’
‘And actually, I should be going.’
‘You gave the office your mobile number when you made the appointment. I might be tempted to ring it.’
‘Don’t do that. But give me your number.’
He did. He said, ‘You’ll delete it the minute you get out of the pub.’
‘I might,’ she said, smiling. ‘Then again, I might not.’
She stood. She began to button her coat. He glanced up at her and said, ‘I think Martens and Degrue might have had some connection with Satanism.’
She sat back down again, heavily.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You’ve got my full attention.’
‘They pulled out of Shadwell in 1970. Max Askew would have retired by then, if my sums are right. Their offices were subsequently occupied by a firm of fruit importers that didn’t hang about in their new premises for very long.’
‘Shades of Proctor Court?’
‘The fruit rotted in its crates with uncanny speed, is the story I heard. They were followed by a firm of cheese importers, but the cheese turned green with mould. It would happen overnight, apparently. Food didn’t work.’
‘Or it worked overtime,’ Ruthie said.
‘A rite of exorcism was performed in a warehouse building there at the beginning of 1971. It was done twice, apparently. The first time that didn’t work, or take, or whatever the correct terminology is for something like that. It had to be done again.’
‘And what do you make of that?’
‘There was a bit of a craze for it, wasn’t there, back in the ’70s?’
‘There was,’ Ruthie said. ‘But not until after the film came out, and The Exorcist wasn’t released until 1973. Earlier than then it would have been highly unusual for anyone to request the rite and even more unusual for the Catholic or Anglican Church to act on the request.’
‘Spoken like a professional researcher.’
‘You’re not a bad researcher yourself, by the sound of things.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I’m not paid to do it. Another drink? Go on.’
‘One,’ she said. ‘Then I really am leaving.’
EIGHT
Ruthie had been listening quite intently to the Ghost Legion albums. They were steeped in religious and folkloric myth. Their lyrics were full of a dark and broody symbolism. That was true even of the first three, let alone the ones Malcolm Stuart’s dippy sister had down as a kind of secret code. Listening to them had understandably made her highly suggestible to the weird.
She’d had his uncle Max Askew down as the character likely to have most influenced Martin Mear’s tastes and thinking before ever setting foot in his old abode. She’d convinced herself of it before seeing or hearing even a shred of evidence. Lots of people had a Green Man door knocker. It might even have been a present from his sister, Martin’s mum. The Green Man was considered a good-luck talisman in rural England, and Shaftesbury was both rural and far enough west to be in England’s pagan heartland.
The noises she thought she had heard from the parlour, the foot-scrape and clock ticking, had come from an adjacent flat or from outside. They’d been noises generated by a neighbour, pretty obviously.
That still left the pentagram. It still left Askew’s sinister old employer, Martens and Degrue, who had antagonized the archbishop and provoked an exorcism at the offices t
hey’d vacated in the aftermath of their unlamented departure. Ruthie knew from personal experience that Martens and Degrue were the public face of the Jericho Society. That experience had taken place on Wight and had involved Michael Aldridge. She’d learned two things from it. The first was that the Jericho Society was extremely bad news. The second was that it remained very much in business.
What else did rationalizing the oddities of Proctor Court leave? It left Frederica Daunt’s bluntly ominous warning. It left the unsettling experience at the séance.
Frederica had reached the point where her Martin connection had morphed into personal hazard. That was the difference between their attitudes. Ruthie had twenty thousand good reasons to put up with a bit of weirdness. It hadn’t so far harmed her health and she didn’t think it would. Delving into Martin’s life was a dark business because there’d been so much darkness in the man. But she’d known that when she took what Carter Melville called the gig, hadn’t she? Friday night hadn’t given her cold feet. She’d told Carter that truthfully. It had just made her more curious to discover the facts.
Something odd was going on that might evolve into inexplicable. But whatever it was, it wasn’t about her. She couldn’t really interpret anything that had happened as a warning not to pry. For the present, she thought she might as well just continue to discover what she could. If Martin Mear had harboured secrets, and she thought he had, he had also possessed a thrilling glamour. He’d been a massive star. He still was, still living in the minds of those who helped the Legion shift what Carter Melville claimed was five million units a year.
She wouldn’t delete Malcolm Stuart’s number from her phone. She wouldn’t call him, obviously, but she wanted to recognise the number as his if he called her. He was a bit too young for her but he was nice and clever and interesting and though he wore the obligatory shiny suit and pointy shoes, she doubted the word ‘chillax’ existed in his vocabulary. She felt guilty about the deception. He’d enjoyed her company in the end, possibly a bit too much, but she’d been there under false pretences and he’d earned their little flirtation.
She needed to prepare for her encounter the following day with Paula Tort. She believed it would be a mistake at their first meeting to assault the woman with a long list of intrusive questions. Paula was media-savvy. She’d never spoken about her relationship with Martin, but she’d given plenty of interviews to the fashion and lifestyle press over the last two decades. In common with people like Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart, she was a living advert for what she did.
Ruthie didn’t want to put Paula on the defensive and didn’t want to risk antagonism. She had decided that during their first meeting, she would simply listen and record. She’d have six or eight questions prepared as prompts if Paula got tongue-tied, but she thought that very unlikely to happen. This was a confident woman, a fluent and practised communicator. And the subject was one that couldn’t have been closer to her heart. If she’d committed finally to discussing it, that could only be because she had plenty to say.
They were to meet at Paula’s Mayfair atelier. Neutral ground might have been better, but there was something to be said, if you were intent on breaching years of secrecy, for doing it in your comfort zone, Ruthie supposed.
From the outside, Ruthie admired Paula Tort. She’d bought a suit and a coat from her diffusion range in a sale the previous January, but it was more than thinking she was a designer who created elegant clothes. She had come a long way since leaving her rural Californian home to follow the Stones on a West Coast tour. She’d begun adult life as a plaything for the rock stars of the period. She’d achieved an awful lot, from such an unpromising start, and she’d done it all herself. It was entirely down to her talent and will and ambition.
She didn’t look like she’d had the obligatory face-lift, which was something else Ruthie admired. She looked pretty sensational, with her American thoroughbred bone structure, for a woman in her mid-sixties. But asked about cosmetic procedures in a clipping Ruthie had read from a Vanity Fair profile she’d said, ‘Honey, I’ve earned every line on this face and some of them are priceless.’
It was a good soundbite and might have been scripted for her but Ruthie’s instinct was that it hadn’t been. It was defiant and slightly ironic and totally characteristic. She’d have an early night and in the morning do her hair and apply her make-up carefully and dress her best for Paula. She’d be a polite and scrupulously attentive listener. She’d make a good audience. She was greatly looking forward to it.
What she wasn’t looking forward to was the trip she’d earlier told herself she would make to Brightstone Forest. She had committed in her mind to visiting the derelict mansion where in the late summer of ’69 Martin Mear had written and recorded King Lud. She’d thought that an essential element of her research, exposing her to clues about his state of mind she wouldn’t get anywhere else. It was the start of him, creatively. In a sense, it was the spot where Ghost Legion was born.
Ruthie didn’t want to go back to the island. In a way that was ridiculous, because it was home. But home had associations she didn’t feel she could deal with in her current state of mind. She hadn’t so much left Ventnor as fled the place. Thank God for Veronica Slade. Thank God, so far at least, for Carter Melville.
When she got back from Shadwell to Lambeth, she called Michael Aldridge, unaware she was going to do it until the moment she did, unaware of what she was going to say until he answered the phone and she spoke awaiting the calm reassurance of his voice in response to what she said.
‘There’s a connection between Martin Mear and the Jericho Society.’
His end of the conversation contributed nothing but silence for a long moment. Then he said, ‘You never were one to beat about the bush, Ruthie.’
‘You remember that from our first meeting?’
‘I remember everything about first meeting you. Not being able to look at you. Not being able to do it comfortably, at least.’
‘You were married then.’
‘I was.’
‘Tell me what you think about what I’ve just told you.’
‘During our last conversation, outside that cafe on the river, I said something about you and this job you’ve secured and fate. Or could it merely be coincidence?’
‘Martin’s uncle worked as an import/export clerk for Martens and Degrue at the Port of London when Martin was a child. I believe Martin was a pretty frequent visitor back then. And I don’t believe at all in coincidence.’
‘My unwitting involvement with the Jericho Society almost cost me my daughter. Not to mention my sanity. They’re capable of things for which I can provide no rational explanation. You know that. You’ve seen it.’
‘Warning me off, Mr A?’
Aldridge laughed. ‘I know better than to try. Wilful is your middle name.’
‘My middle name is May, after the month I was born in.’
He was silent. Then he said, ‘Now I know something else about you I didn’t know before.’
‘And knowledge is power?’
‘Be very careful. These people aren’t just about secrecy and Satanic dabbling. They’re powerful and completely ruthless.’
‘And I don’t intend to rain on their parade any more than I already have.’
‘Which is substantially.’
‘I’ve lived to tell the tale.’
‘On the contrary. You’ve lived because you’ve kept it to yourself. It’s my heartfelt wish that you go on living.’
‘Heartfelt?’
‘It was never just lust, Ruthie. I’ve had feelings for you since the afternoon we first met on the seafront at Ventnor and I think you knew that then and I’m sure you know it now.’
Should she tell him those feelings were reciprocated then and revived less than a fortnight ago? She didn’t honestly think it was the moment. Instead she said, ‘Take care, Mr A. If you like, I’ll keep you in the loop.’
‘Please’ do,’ he said. ‘And Ruthie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re the one right now who needs to take care.’
She could forget about Wight for the present, though. Over the next couple of days, it was the living and not the dead that were her direct concern, having Paula Tort and Terry Maloney to meet and talk to. They weren’t phantoms, were they? Except that Ruthie didn’t forget about Wight, or the house in Brightstone Forest, because after she’d spoken to Michael Aldridge it was still only six o’clock. She didn’t want to spend the evening thinking about him and she didn’t want to think about why she’d very recently become free to do that without guilt. Without guilt, she thought to herself, but with a sadness that felt in her recent loss much more akin to grief. She’d distract herself with a bit of research.
The Fischer house had been built in the 1920s. In pictures it looked much older. This was because it had been allowed to fall into dereliction, but also because the style in which it had been built was easily suggestive of a ruin. It was Gothic and constructed of massive stone blocks to soaring dimensions. There were high arched windows and an iron-studded oak front door as solid and substantial-looking as in a fortified castle’s keep. There was a high six-sided tower with mullioned windows and the stone in the building’s buttresses was everywhere carved and etched and embellished.
The mansion had been built for a German industrialist named Klaus Fischer. Ruthie could find scant reference to what he’d actually made, but he’d been industrious enough to prosper. The Fischer House was testament to that. He had also been something of a socialite. He had been friendly with people from Hollywood and some of the Paris expat crowd of the period. His acquaintances included a famous escapologist and a notorious duellist for whom he’d once apparently stood bail. He’d been a friend of the occult novelist Dennis Wheatley. He had also been an intimate, it was said, of the English magician Aleister Crowley.
Fischer threw extravagant parties. These must have been sufficiently remote from other Wight residents not to cause a nuisance, because his house really was isolated. But there was a suggestion that he was unpopular on the island. Ruthie thought that party guests arriving by luxury yacht and seaplanes putting down on their pontoons, the furs and jewels and retinues of staff and stately cars would likely have provoked a bit of local ire.
