by F. G. Cottam
‘So give it some consideration.’
‘It doesn’t explain what happened at the séance. There was a witness to that. Or maybe more accurately a participant.’ Frederica realized she was still fairly sober. ‘Participant’ was a minefield of a word to someone pissed.
Sebastian reached for the rattan table in front of him and his daughter’s phone. He’d earlier in the evening used it to source a picture of Ruthie Gillespie. It was a press-shot taken at some reception or launch of something and used as publicity material by her publisher. She looked happy, clutching a champagne flute. She looked exotic in an evening dress with her precise black fringe and crimson smile and elaborately inked arms.
Sebastian studied the image, suppressing a slight smile. He said, ‘An author of stories about elves and curses written for children.’
‘She’s a respected researcher.’
‘One with a florid imagination.’
‘I saw what I saw.’
‘I wouldn’t call Ruthie Gillespie to the stand with anything approaching confidence.’
‘That’s unfair. Yes, she’s on the picturesque side.’
‘Picturesque is one word for it.’
‘She’s also intelligent and shrewd. And when I was shaken and bleeding she was kind to me. She was cool-headed. She took control.’
Her father merely shrugged.
‘I saw what I saw, Dad.’ There was an edge to Frederica’s voice, suddenly. A touch of steel: ‘I heard what I heard. We both did. It was him. One way or another, Clamouring or no Clamouring, he’s back. Maybe I did imagine what I thought I saw in the garden the following evening. I was alone and frightened and pretty suggestible, I suppose. But Martin Mear is back and I don’t find that thought terribly relaxing.’
‘You should turn in, love. We both should.’
‘I’m reluctant to sleep.’
‘That’s just silly.’
‘I’m frightened of what I might dream about.’
Sebastian sipped more beer and turned his gaze to the fire. It was fading now, diminishing; the feeble orange of a small sun extinguishing the world it had faithfully enabled. Carefully, he said, ‘Martin was a keeper of secrets. I wouldn’t pretend to have known the half of what he thought or much at all about any dark stuff he got up to privately after the Legion went global. But if anyone could cheat death, he’d be my candidate.’
‘I’m not seeing your point here.’
‘Assume he’s done this by some occult means. The preparation would be elaborate and the effort enormous. He wouldn’t do it just to put the wind up a medium, not even one as high-profile as you’ve been over the last few years. He’d have an agenda. It would be serious and ambitious and he wouldn’t be sidetracked or distracted.’
‘You’re just telling me what you think I want to hear.’
Sebastian frowned. He said, ‘What I’m doing is applying logic to a supposition that beggars sane belief. But if Martin’s really back, he’s got bigger fish to fry than you, Freddie.’
Frederica peered through the wood-burner’s soot-smeared door. She said, ‘Our fire’s gone out.’
Gently, her father said, ‘A good moment for us both to admit that we’re tired and need some rest. Is the bed in the spare room made up?’
‘Of course it is, Dad. I don’t see much of you. Doesn’t mean I don’t always live in hope.’
Malcolm Stuart called Ginger McCabe at a quarter to nine on Monday morning, forty-five minutes before he was due to be at his desk, making the call on his mobile from a Costa coffee boutique not far from Shadwell underground station. The street outside was cobbled and slick with rain and rain streaked the window through which he watched the wet stones reflect the headlamps of cars passing streakily by. Ginger answered on the third ring.
‘Mr McCabe?’
‘Who wants him?’
‘It’s Malcolm.’
There was a pause. ‘Remind me.’
‘Malcolm the student?’
‘Don’t do that upspeak thing, Malcolm the student. Drives me potty the way all you young people do that. Anyway, I’ve got you now. Social history. What can I do for you that I haven’t already done?’
‘There’s a company I want to talk to you about. Bloke worked for them I’m hoping you might remember.’
There was another pause. Then, ‘This pan have a handle?’
‘Max Askew. He lived in Shadwell, at an address at Proctor Court.’
‘He did indeed, Malcolm the Student.’
‘And he worked for—’
‘I know very well who he worked for and if I were you I’d avoid mention of the name on an open phone line.’
‘Isn’t that being a bit you know, paranoid?’
‘It might be. And it might only be taking a sensible precaution. Come and see me tonight. Don’t come alone.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’ll be accompanied, Malcolm the student. Mr Chivas and Mr Regal are coming with you. Seven o’clock.’
TWELVE
(Transcript of Paula Tort interview session 16 October)
I’m going to tell you something about him no one else knows. No one alive knows it, anyway. As far as I’m aware, I’m the only person to whom Martin ever confided this particular detail about his life.
He would do that, you see. It was one of the principal things about his character. I don’t know if he deliberately followed that maxim which suggests you divide and conquer, but certainly he divided. Everyone, even those closest to him, got their own individual Martin. He was never quite the same person to any two people. He was an incredibly devoted father to April; but I didn’t witness that side of him. He was supposedly pretty debauched with the boys in the band but I only have hearsay where that’s concerned. I never saw it personally. The version I got of Martin seemed wonderfully complete, but it was mine alone.
People who can present themselves in that way sometimes have something wrong with them, something like Asperger’s syndrome, leaving them emotionally detached. It wasn’t like that with him, though. I think it was a mathematical skill. He was brilliant at mathematics. That was why music came so easily to him. He understood the chromatic scale immediately. He taught himself to read and write music when he was still a child. He divided himself up and the part of him I got was dedicated to me alone. I knew how precious it was, even before knowing how short-lived it would be.
But I was going to tell you a secret, wasn’t I? I was going to confide something and it’s this. He endured an experience once that took away his fear of death. He came so close to dying that the terror of it perished in him. He said there was nothing mystical or sinister about the process. It was dark, he said, but only as dark as you would expect it to be.
You’ve seen what he looked like? The first time I ever saw him was on stage and he looked like a god, like Thor or Parsifal, something epic and Wagnerian about his features and his musculature. I’ve been in this business for thirty years. That’s a lot of catwalk shows, a lot of ad campaigns, hundreds of hours of castings and model portfolios from every corner of the world and I’ve never once seen a man as physically beautiful as Martin Mear was when he strode into that spotlight that night in Berlin.
Men didn’t go to the gym back then. You had to be Arnie or you had to be Ali to go to the gym back in the 1970s. Either that or you were gay. It certainly wasn’t something rock stars did. They tended to be thin; pre-pubescent thin was the voguish look, not like now. Some of them looked like girls who’d somehow eluded puberty. Bowie looked a bit like that, before he became Ziggy Stardust. Jagger and Marc Bolan, before he bloated, looked that way.
When Martin was twelve, he began to help his dad with the supplementary work his dad had taken on digging graves. His dad was dying of asbestosis, though nobody knew that then. Martin and his mother put the persistent cough down to tobacco and the damp West Country weather. But asbestosis was killing Martin’s dad and he could hardly get through his farm chores, let alone the added toil
of shifting six feet of earth with a hand-held spade.
Martin did it, or he did the lion’s share of it, while his dad wheezed and watched gratefully and talked about the weather and the prospects of the harvest and probably the life and death of the person whose coffin they were digging their hole for. It was a small community, close-knit, everyone knowing everyone else.
The earth was heavy and reluctant and the digging made Martin strong. And his father got sicker and the pretence that he was doing the work was abandoned as he was forced to leave their cottage less and less. And one rainy afternoon in December, when Martin was fourteen, the grave he’d almost finished digging alone collapsed on him. Its walls buckled and sagged and fell in on him and he was buried under the black weight of the soil’s immensity.
So great was the weight of it, he said, it pushed him down and pressed on him so that he couldn’t move his chest to breathe, had there been air to breathe, which there wasn’t. For a moment in the blind, suffocating silence, he thought he was dead. Then he thought with certainty that he would die, crushed. Then he gathered himself and set about digging himself out, with his hands, while he still retained the strength to struggle to live.
He never knew how he survived that experience. He always suspected afterwards that he shouldn’t have. As near-death experiences go, I suppose there’s none so vivid as being buried alive in a pit you’ve dug for someone already cold and mourned and awaiting their interment in their coffin. Martin escaped the grave and thought he’d also, in some significant way, cheated it. I think that experience informs a lot of the songs he wrote. Death preoccupied him because he thought very seriously that he’d outlived his own.
His father was near to death by the time of Martin’s graveyard ordeal. He said for that reason, he never mentioned it to him. He didn’t want his father’s conscience burdened, as it would have been, by having a boy do a man’s work to supplement the family’s sparse income. And after his father’s death, he never mentioned it to his mother, either. I was the first person he told and I was the last and now I’ve told you.
Do you want to know something else? I’ll tell you anyway, my dear. April is going to be proven right about this, there is something liberating about setting the record straight. In the lazy liner notes and Ghost Legion album reviews I’m always referenced as a groupie. Actually, I’m referred to as a legendary groupie, as though my talent for getting laid defined me, like it was a full-time occupation requiring boat-loads of rock bands coming ashore on a daily basis.
I never sought to make a sexual conquest of Martin Mear. It wasn’t like I needed to cross him off my list. There was no list. By ’71 on that German tour I was making a good living designing stage costumes for some of the biggest acts in the industry. I was in West Berlin researching the leather scene. There was a shoe designer I knew there who made Martin’s boots. He always wore these engineer-type boots and she had a spare ticket. I went to their gig out of curiosity and he saw me from the stage.
The rest, as they say, is history. But most of it’s speculation and rumour, because no one knows the real history except me and I’ve never told anyone until now. And I’ve never minded the hype and distortion, or even the outright fabrications, if I’m honest. I’ve always had my memories and they’ve remained unsullied and absolutely clear. They’re also very dear to me, which has made sharing them hard. If there’s a part of me liberated by this process, there’s another part of me that feels I’m giving too much away.
You could have privacy back then. Fame carried a price, Lennon was right about that and God knows John paid it, but beyond the reach of the autograph-hunters bothering him in restaurants and hotel lobbies it was possible for Martin to have a private life in a manner that no longer exists. Everyone now has a movie camera in their phone. The curious world is a mobilized army of citizen reporters. In the early 1970s it was completely different. I don’t think Martin would have been all that impressed by Facebook and Twitter and social media generally. He performed on the stage and people paid to watch and listen. That was the deal. The rest of the time was entirely his own. I think he liked it that way. In fact, I know he did. And now you can switch off your tape machine. I’ve told you enough for today.
Ruthie Gillespie was a habitual early riser. She had woken at 6 am and brewed a pot of coffee and taken it out to drink in the cool darkness of Veronica’s small back garden where she had smoked two cigarettes pondering on how nervous she was already about the interview with Paula Tort scheduled for noon.
Ruthie was nervous for two reasons. She was a researcher when she wasn’t writing fiction but wasn’t a reporter or features writer and considered interviewing a journalistic skill she couldn’t to any great degree really claim to possess. She’d done her research. The rest was down to hope, more than it was down to expectation or interview technique.
The second, slightly vaguer reason for the butterflies of trepidation fluttering in Ruthie’s stomach as dawn broke was the Max Askew revelation. He’d worked for Martens and Degrue. Martens and Degrue were the acceptable face of the Jericho Society. Ruthie had endured personal experience of this mysterious and always menacing cult and consequently felt staying free of their tentacles an extremely sensible thing to do.
Michael Aldridge had warned her about pressing on further. He’d done so explicitly. And he’d done so because he had her welfare at heart, whether things evolved romantically between them or whether they didn’t. He was a good, sober, sensible man and he didn’t want her endangering her safety for Carter Melville’s temptingly lavish fee.
Ruthie wondered if the fee was lavish only as a consequence of the risk. Did Melville know about Max Askew’s dubious employers? Ruthie didn’t think he would. He’d barely remembered the name of Martin’s uncle. And Melville struck her as a man who would place self-preservation high on his list of personal priorities. He wouldn’t deliberately shine a light on something not only dark, but innately hostile.
‘And secretive,’ Ruthie murmured out loud. ‘If he knew anything at all about them, he’d know how secretive they are and the steps they’ll take to stay that way.’
After coffee in the garden there was the domestic whirlwind of Veronica going from a pyjama-clad mumble to a svelte and feted fine-art expert in about five minutes flat before she slammed the front door on the way to Lambeth North underground and her daily commute to the auction house where she worked.
After that, the hours delivering Ruthie’s noon appointment dragged. The nerves got no better. She successfully avoided smoking any more than she already had. She showered and dressed demurely – or at least as demurely as she felt capable of dressing. She put on the black Paula Tort diffusion number she’d scored in the sales. And when a quarter to eleven finally came around she tested her tape machine and packed her notebook and two Uni Ball pens and put on her coat and walked the distance to Paula’s Sloane Street atelier through wan October sunshine and the kaleidoscopic crunch beneath her feet on the pavements of fallen, un-swept leaves.
Ruthie felt the first real thrill of achievement, with that opening interview recorded, she’d felt since taking on the project. Being right about Martin Mear’s inspirational visits to stay with his Uncle Max had proven a discovery with too ominous repercussions for her to regard it as an unmitigated triumph. But Paula’s story about Martin being buried alive was a dream revelation, the sort of story that would have Legionaries listening to the catalogue afresh to learn whether the experience had informed any of their idol’s song lyrics. It was a thematic earthquake, a cataclysm of experience and destiny. He’d been served up a slice of immortality when not yet out of his teens. What had it done to him in terms of belief and faith? An ordeal like that would surely make a boy feel singled out for something extraordinary.
These thoughts occurred as Ruthie sat on one of a set of wicker chairs, sharing a table with Paula in the perfectly manicured garden at the back of her building, drinking Earl Grey tea with a woman who seemed in no hurry for her to leave.
‘I’m grateful to you.’
‘Why?’
Paula hesitated. Then she said, ‘I was able to go back just now without the attendant grief. Remembering those times is usually a bittersweet experience. Not today.’
‘It sounds as though the two of you made the most of your time together.’
‘I suppose that’s true. But there’s never enough time, Ruthie. As you’ll discover.’
Ruthie looked down to the rim of her cup and sipped tea.
‘If you haven’t already.’
‘You’re very astute.’
‘And you’ve bandaged the wound. But the bleeding hasn’t really stopped. Was he worth it?’
‘I thought so.’
‘The past tense sometimes hurts, doesn’t it?’
Ruthie looked at the woman looking back at her. At the subtly layered and coloured hair framing her face. At the black leather jacket that contrasted so pleasingly with those blonde tresses. At the man’s Rolex Explorer ticking expensively on her wrist. Her right wrist, in the American manner. It wasn’t hard to feel inadequate in the company of such a woman. It wasn’t a push to feel clumsy and inept and altogether a bit of a failure at life.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Ruthie. Let me tell you something. That dress you’re wearing is five seasons old and you totally pull it off. And I’ve looked you up and don’t think you’re lacking either in the talent department.’
Ruthie thought Paula Tort a woman so perceptive she made Frederica Daunt seem like someone blindly groping along a cul-de-sac. She said, ‘We should talk about you. It’s what I’m being paid for.’
‘We’ve talked enough about me for today.’
‘I can’t really argue with that.’
‘Will this whole project be London-based?’
Ruthie thought about the concert footage from Montreal. She thought about the party in Montevideo where Martin had apparently repeated the trick and levitated, as Aleister Crowley was said to have been able to do. She remembered that Crowley had been a guest at Klaus Fischer’s parties on Wight before Fischer’s sudden vanishing in 1927. Before the trail had gone abruptly and completely cold on Klaus Fischer.
