The Lucifer Chord

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘A lot of people were intimidated by me back then. I haven’t always been an old man. I was a bruiser, one who looked like a bruiser. When you fight for prize-money you develop an instinct about people. You become a sort of connoisseur of fear. There was no fear in that man, not an ounce of it.’

  ‘He was buried alive digging a grave as a teenager,’ Ruthie said. ‘The fact that it didn’t become his tomb apparently had a big effect on him.’

  ‘We’re none of us immortal, Ruthie,’ Ginger McCabe said. ‘And sometimes fear’s your friend.’

  She got back from Bethnal Green to Veronica’s flat at noon. A large sleek grey car idled at the kerb. Ruthie, indifferent to cars, didn’t know the make, but it was an ostentatious vehicle. There was a liveried chauffeur at the wheel and Carter Melville sat in the rear, with an open laptop across his knees and a phone secured by his shoulder to his ear. He said something into the phone on seeing her and allowed the phone to drop onto the leather upholstery next to him.

  He pushed a button and the window next to him swiftly rolled down.

  ‘Get in.’

  She did.

  ‘The dirty stop-out finally gets home,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t answer your calls.’

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘Unfinished business.’

  ‘Presumably he has a name?’

  ‘Private unfinished business.’

  ‘How I know you weren’t home is your flat-mate was when I arrived. She was just leaving for work. Cute chick, Veronica. Good manners. Invited me to wait for you inside. But small rooms give me claustrophobia.’

  ‘You’ve been here for three hours?’

  ‘And you don’t have the remotest idea of what three hours of my time is worth.’

  ‘Why are you here at all?’

  ‘Max Askew. Proctor Court. A young estate agent, an ex-estate agent when they found him, discovered there yesterday afternoon. It made the late edition of the Standard. And you weren’t picking up your calls. I’m employing you, which means I have a duty of care. Just like you have a responsibility to respond when I try to contact you.’

  ‘I’ve already said I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s a question of priorities. Nothing comes in front of me. Savvy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Put your seatbelt on. We’re going on a little trip.’

  ‘I’d like to put fresh clothes on, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘They’re yesterday’s threads?’

  ‘And this morning I cleaned my teeth with a borrowed toothbrush.’

  ‘Which suggests last night was a spontaneous thing. Interesting,’ he said, grinning. He stopped short of a wink, which Ruthie thought just as well. Had Carter Melville winked at that moment, she would have told him precisely where he could stick his job.

  Carter did plenty of talking on their journey, but none of it to her, which Ruthie considered a blessing. Instead he was involved in what she supposed was deal-making. There was lots of ball-breaking type terminology and much discussion of bottom lines. He spoke to several people, but it was impossible to keep track because he called everyone ‘baby’, seemingly regardless of their gender. Ruthie spent the journey wondering whether Carter Fucking Melville was an unwitting self-caricature or a man striving hard to live up to his own myth. By the time they reached their destination she’d decided he was both, simultaneously.

  They rolled conspicuously through the dreary wastes of south Wimbledon and pulled up outside a large building in a heavily guarded storage facility. Melville unlocked an outer door with a key produced from his own pocket. He gestured for Ruthie to follow him through it. His chauffeur stayed in the car.

  About ten feet beyond the front entrance, a wall obstructed their progress to the full height and width of the building’s interior. This wall had a metal security door cemented into its centre. To the right of the door was a number pad. Melville entered an eight-digit code far too dexterously for Ruthie to have observed the number sequence. She wouldn’t have remembered an eight-digit number anyway.

  The door unlocked and Melville stepped through it and switched on an interior light. Ruthie stepped through the door following Carter’s beckoning arm and he closed it behind her.

  ‘Temperature and humidity control,’ he said. She nodded. He’d whispered the words, as if in some place of worship. Looking around, Ruthie could fully understand this, for she saw that they had entered a shrine.

  It was a shrine to Martin Mear and it seemed to her both pristine and complete. She saw his guitars first, racked vertically on a stand. From left to right they were the Yamaha FG acoustic on which he’d composed King Lud; the oxblood-red Gibson Les Paul he’d first used as the Legion’s strutting axe-man and the white Fender Stratocaster Eric Clapton had given him as a birthday present in the summer of 1971. He’d mostly used the Strat on the three nameless albums Legionaries claimed would orchestrate the Clamouring. Though on ‘Cease All Mourning’, he’d famously used the Gibson.

  Ruthie shivered. She had just seen the cloak among a display of hung stage clothes Martin had worn in Montreal when he’d apparently levitated in front of his adoring, spellbound audience. There was a story it had belonged once to Aleister Crowley, for which it was one of her tasks to try to establish provenance.

  Martin Mear had been a collector of weaponry. He’d had a sword belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte and a pair of duelling pistols Lord Byron had once owned. A cutlass wielded once by the pirate Blackbeard. A bayonet last fixed in the Zulu War at the battle of Rorke’s Drift. There was modern as well as antique stuff, though. The shotguns and semi-automatic rifles and racked revolvers and automatic pistols looked far more deadly than they did decommissioned.

  There were several motorcycles. There was even a car. It was a purple E-Type Jaguar convertible with purple leather seats.

  ‘Martin pimped his ride before the TV show was ever thought of,’ Carter Melville said from behind Ruthie.

  ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  ‘It’s hard to separate man and myth. I thought that seeing his things up close and personal might help that process.’

  ‘The problem being that it’s pretty mythic stuff.’

  ‘The release date of the box set is December 15.’

  ‘Just in time for Christmas.’

  ‘This lot, most of it, goes on show at the V and A to coincide with that.’

  ‘Like the Bowie exhibition?’

  ‘It’ll be bigger than the Bowie exhibition. Trust me.’

  She bit her lip on the cliché that she would trust him really no further than she could throw him.

  There was some esoteric stuff. There was a pack of Tarot cards and a pair of ivory dice and a set of black rosary beads with a large crucifix, a bronze Christ writhing nailed to it. There was a crystal ball and a bleached willow fork she thought probably for water divining. There was a staff of the sort Morris sets clatter together in West Country summers on English village greens or outside Cornish pubs. A pair of the bells on leather pads they buckle around their knees.

  ‘Is all this yours?’

  ‘Of course not. Most of it was bequeathed to Paula and the rest pretty much to April. April still wears her daddy’s wristwatch. I’m curating, is all.’

  Something in a small glass display case on a table-top caught Ruthie’s eye. She went over for a closer look. It was cream coloured, faded and hand-torn. It was about an inch square and had smudged ink fading on it in letters too small and indistinct to properly make out. Ruthie picked up the case for a closer look, squinted at the artefact inside.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s Martin’s return ferry ticket to Wight, when he went there to compose King Lud. He’d have had the Yamaha six-string strapped to his back and his head filled with dreams.’

  ‘And chords. And lyrics.’

  ‘They didn’t come to him until he got there.’

  Ruthie didn’t say anything. She’d remembered Paula
Tort’s warning about the Fischer House, convinced looking at Martin’s old ferry ticket that after his death she had indeed gone there herself. She could smell Carter Melville’s aroma from behind her, his signature scents; hair tonic, expensive cologne, the pungency of smoked cigars. He was much more in the moment to her than the ghost of a dead rock star was.

  ‘In a way that’s the most important single item in this room,’ Carter said. ‘Peacock Blue by then was ancient history. Tallow Pale was behind him too and the path was clear and the Legion lay ahead. There’s a real sense in which what you’re holding in your hand is Martin Mear’s birth certificate.’

  SEVENTEEN

  (Transcript of April Mear interview session 19 October)

  He was my dad. I didn’t see him every day and won’t pretend I did, though I wish I had. He was famous, obviously, and the band was something of a treadmill. They toured and the tours were lengthy and often in far-away places. Pre-internet and MTV you toured to promote every new album. No promo videos. No YouTube. The Legion didn’t even release singles. That was just the way the industry worked back then. The top bands were very industrious. The tours were arduous and the gigs were marathons.

  So I didn’t see my dad sometimes for weeks on end. But when I did, he was wholly there. Nothing intervened or interfered or competed. There were no distractions or interruptions. He gave me 100 per cent of his attention. And he was wonderfully normal. No ego. No black moods. No mystique. All the bullshit associated with his legend was totally absent.

  We’d go on camping trips he always called our expeditions. Or he’d rent a cottage in rural Wales or the Highlands of Scotland. That was at the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but we still went to the South, to County Clare for a week in a fisherman’s or crofter’s cottage. To the Wexford coast. The more remote the better. He was quite courteous when Ghost Legion fans recognized and approached him, but he didn’t like it. Or at least, he didn’t like it happening when he was with me.

  I asked him about it once, when we were in a bothy halfway up a Scottish mountain. We’d sheltered there after our tent became waterlogged and collapsed. My dad had lit a fire and heated us broth and it was quite cosy really, watching the lightning through the window, listening to the rumble of thunder above us. My dad had placed a plaid rug around my shoulders and had made a sort of turban for my wet hair with our one dry towel. I asked him why he was so attracted to the wilderness, though I might not then have been aware it was called that.

  He replied by quoting some lines from Shelley. My dad loved poetry, everyone from Dryden to Philip Larkin. Shelley and Tennyson were his favourites. And Eliot, they were his top three. He said: I love all waste/ And solitary places; where we taste/ The pleasure of believing what we see/ Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

  It’s from Julian and Maddalo, which is really about Byron and Shelley and their friendship during their self-imposed exile together in Italy. I wouldn’t have known that then either, but the words stayed with me. It was the one occasion in my entire life when I got a glimpse of my dad’s power as a performer. He quoted four lines. I could have sat there with the soundtrack of that thunderstorm and listened to him recite another thousand. He always had the charisma, the presence. And the looks and the physique, obviously. But just for a moment I’d seen and heard him perform and the power of it matched the elemental stuff booming above us and giving us strobed flashes of the wet crags around us. It was an immense gift he possessed. Truly immense. It was almost scary.

  He saw the look of nervousness or trepidation or maybe just of awe on my face and remorse and something close I think to self-disgust flickered over his features because he never, ever wanted to be anything other than authentic with me. He wanted me to get the part of him no one else did, the piece of him reserved solely for his daughter. He really didn’t want to waste time with me trotting out the act. He just hugged me then and untied the towel turban and began to dry my hair with it very gently. He was always gentle. He never physically chastised me. He never even raised his voice.

  Some people will tell you that my dad was enigmatic. Some people will tell you he was basically shy. I think that’s Carter Melville’s take on him, and Carter knew him pretty well and also in fairness for a lot longer than I did. But I think the truth is more paradoxical and less obvious than that. I think my dad was basically a very private person. He was thoughtful and articulate and unbelievably well read. If he had an interest in the esoteric, he never discussed it with the child I was and I never saw a shred of evidence.

  Like I’ve said, he never shouted. He laughed at silly things, banana-skin moments. He really liked old Laurel and Hardy films. The silent, slapstick ones. He thought Garbo the most beautiful woman ever to appear on celluloid. May was his favourite month. He liked that line from Chaucer about the squire, ‘He was as fresh as is the month of May.’ He said if he ever wrote a single line of a song with that gleaming clarity of that one, he’d die a happy man.

  But he didn’t really talk about death. At least, not to me. He was knowledgeable enough and interested enough to answer most questions posed by the slightly precocious child his daughter was and on the rare occasions he didn’t know the answer, he’d find it out and report it back.

  I never saw him smoke or pop a pill. I never saw him drink anything more potent than Diet Coke. If he was critical of my mother for putting me in an orphanage, he never let it show in my presence. What else can I tell you? I didn’t know him for anything like long enough. And he was everything to me.

  April Mear reached for the glass of water on the table between them and Ruthie observed that her hand shook slightly lifting it, the surface tremoring. She didn’t turn off her tape machine. She’d noticed the wristwatch straight away. She liked watches and April’s heirloom was conspicuous. It was an Omega Speedmaster Professional, the moon watch bought by NASA for their Apollo astronauts on their voyages into space. It was too big really for April’s wrist, but still looked very cool to Ruthie on its vintage bracelet.

  She gestured at the watch. ‘That was your father’s, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Someone gave it to him. Someone from Omega, or maybe one of the NASA people or maybe even an astronaut. He met lots of different people.’

  ‘It must be very precious to you.’

  ‘Carter Melville wants me to loan it for the exhibition. I’m frightened it could get lost.’

  ‘More likely stolen,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘I’m not materialistic. I don’t drive a fancy car or bedeck myself with diamonds.’

  ‘Which presumably you could.’

  April held out her wrist. ‘This is priceless to me.’

  ‘Do you listen to the records?’

  ‘Only the acoustic numbers. They’re sung in something closest to his speaking voice.’

  ‘You make him sound misunderstood.’

  ‘He’s deliberately misunderstood. It’s like the old newspaper guys used to say. If it’s a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend.’

  ‘Today’s the first time you’ve spoken about this stuff?’

  ‘On the record, to a stranger, yes.’

  ‘But you and Paula have talked?’

  April smiled. ‘Paula has the reputation in the fashion industry for being a real ball-breaker. She’s another misnomer victim.’

  ‘You and she have a lot in common.’

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘I liked her, April. No vanity. No bullshit.’

  ‘And she liked you. And so do I.’

  ‘I’m being well remunerated.’

  April smiled again, this one more complex than the last. ‘Not really why you’re doing it. Paula thinks you’ve had your heart recently broken.’

  ‘As I told her to her face, she’s perceptive. But my heart’s on the mend.’

  ‘You needed a distraction.’

  ‘I needed an escape. But I intend to do a good job. I intend to earn what Carter Melville pays me.’

/>   ‘He’ll see to it that you do,’ April said. She looked around. They were in a quiet corner of a coffee shop in the Kingston branch of John Lewis. They had a view of the river below them. Or April Mear did. Facing her, Ruthie Gillespie had her back to the water.

  ‘We’ll do the next one at my home,’ April said. ‘We won’t have to murmur there like spies.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You can switch the recorder off now. No more revelations for today.’

  ‘Do you find the process tiring?’

  ‘What’s tiring, Ruthie, is processing the grief. No one gets over losing their father as young as I did.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘No, you can’t. Have you heard of Otto von Bismarck?’

  ‘Prussian aristocrat, became Chancellor, unified Germany.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘I took my degree in history,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘Bismarck said that the only true immortality is posthumous fame. And he was right. His fame keeps my father alive for everyone but the people who loved him. It doesn’t remotely work for us.’

  Ginger McCabe spent the early part of Thursday afternoon mulling over the death of Malcolm Stuart. He was over eighty and his womanizing days were a warm and misty recollection somewhat distorted both by nostalgia and exaggeration. But he thought Malcolm had been right on the money with the picturesque researcher. She was a looker who behaved as though she didn’t know she was. She was a stunner, but she was very approachable. It was a winning combination in a woman. And it was rare.

  He couldn’t work out what it was he might have said to Malcolm to send the lad back to Proctor Court. He’d told his Martens and Degrue story to Malcolm and then he’d repeated it verbatim to Ruthie Gillespie and he still couldn’t determine what the trigger had been or when he’d unknowingly pulled it. Ginger woke from his post-lunch nap mulling over the whole mysterious business and then decided he’d go and take a look at Proctor Court for himself. Just from the outside, though he knew a bit about by-passing locks from his own largely misspent East End youth.

  He arrived outside the block at a quarter to five. It was still light and the sunsets that close to the river could be spectacular in late October. But it was a grey sort of day, one of those autumnal London days that never really seems to get going in terms of light; bland, undistinguished, damp and pewter-tinted. He climbed the steps up the stone stairwell to Max Askew’s front door remembering the man. He’d been blond, blue-eyed, unremarkable. He’d been as undistinguished as the day was, quite difficult to describe. He’d been a liar, because his pledge to attend that long-ago union AGM had been deliberately insincere. And he’d disappeared after his retirement, slipped into obscurity in the same vague way his employer had gone, just vanishing, without fanfare or even any sort of notice.