by F. G. Cottam
He shrugged. ‘I can afford it.’
‘And I think the flight logs you’re obliged to keep are completely bogus. Martin Mear is alive, but he isn’t totally self-sufficient. The place he’s hiding isn’t altogether self-sustaining for a human resident. It’s remote. It’s inhospitable. From time to time he needs supplies. You’re his supplier.’
That earned a burst of laughter. ‘It’s a bloody long time since I was Martin Mear’s fetcher and carrier, darling. Are you saying once a roadie, always a roadie? Because if you are that’s absurd. I know you’re a novelist. But that’s not a licence to involve me in your outlandish flights of fancy. Martin is dead. He’s been dead a long time. And I wouldn’t waste my time flying a ghost supplies of anything.’
‘You’re thinking Paula cracked. But Paula didn’t crack. She didn’t need to. I uncovered evidence of my own. I know for certain that Martin didn’t die in Morocco in 1975.’
Sir Terence stared at her. He still seemed amused. He said, ‘How is that proof Martin Mear is still alive?’
‘You’re the proof, Sir Terence. Summoning me here today is the proof. You think the closer I get to Martin, the more imperilled your best and oldest friend becomes. I’m only here because you want to know how close I am to finding him.’
‘You’re nowhere near as clever as you think you are, Ms Gillespie.’
‘I don’t think I’m clever at all.’
‘Any woman who willingly gets into bed with Carter Melville—’
‘Charming phraseology.’
‘I’m quite serious,’ Sir Terence said. ‘He’s an extremely ruthless and dangerous man.’
‘I know that,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think he’s something to do with the Jericho Society. I think he wants me to lead him to Martin so they can take their revenge on him for walking away from them. For defying them. Nobody does that without them exacting a price.’
Sir Terence Maloney had gone pale. Under his tan, his skin had a taut sickly look, suddenly. He had taken his eyes away from Ruthie and was staring through the window at London’s gunmetal air. At the falling rain.
He said, ‘You shouldn’t even mention them by name.’
‘Like Voldemort?’
‘This isn’t funny. How did you hear about them?’
‘I came across them a couple of years ago,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think Carter Melville knows I did. He knew I’d find out about Martin’s Uncle Max, that I’d understand the significance when I did.’
‘You’re playing with fire.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘Martin is my friend.’
‘Present tense?’
‘This conversation’s over,’ Sir Terence Maloney said.
Outside the club’s ornate entrance, Ruthie raised the collar of her buttoned coat against the rain. It was teeming now, and she did not possess an umbrella. She crossed King Street and walked along Bedford Street to the Strand. She turned right and then crossed for Villiers Street, the bulk of Charing Cross Station to her right, ramshackle shops in a faded parade to her left, the road descending as it ran down towards the Embankment. Her immediate destination was the Victoria Palace Gardens, where she could shelter under a tree and smoke the cigarette she craved. Then she’d walk over Waterloo Bridge towards her temporary home in Lambeth.
She had gambled with Sir Terence and considered that she’d won but felt no sense of triumph or even of vindication. She felt that he’d confirmed her suspicions with his denials. Martin Mear might well love all waste and solitary places, as his melancholy daughter had insisted he did, but as another poet had written in an earlier century, no man is an island.
Her audience with the esteemed businessman had actually reminded her of something more recent, a song lyric written back in the decade when he’d still been hauling amps and tuning guitars and brokering Ghost Legion’s drugs deals; and it was the line from the Eagles anthem Hotel California, about being able to check out any time you like but never being able to leave. That one had come out three or four years after Martin’s apparent death and burial. But she’d have bet money he’d have heard it and thought it would resonate very strongly with him if he had.
Ruthie had another task to perform in London that Thursday but knew with a heavy heart that it would have to wait for dark before she could carry it out in a meaningful way. It was now only just after noon. She had a long and nervous wait until then. But the somnolent rhythm of the rain dripping through the trees was calming, the hiss of impact on rigid, autumnal leaves a hypnotic backdrop, nature making sweet music in dismal light in the subdued heart of the city.
Michael Aldridge called her as she smoked her cigarette in her imperfect, leaky shelter. She didn’t pick up the call. She thought she might cry if she tried to speak to him just then. Her voice might break and she might sob, the phone trembling in her uncertain grip. She would call him later, when her self-possession had more fully returned to her than was currently the case. She liked to hear the kindness in his voice. It would be in pleasant contrast to the derision and contempt with which Sir Terence Maloney had greeted her. But she didn’t condemn Sir Terence at all for that. She thought fear and loyalty in equal measure had prompted his scornful denials. The loyalty was an admirable quality. And Ruthie knew his fear to be fully justified.
She would go back to the home that wasn’t her home and would try to calm the butterflies spreading wings in her stomach suddenly at the thought of the evening to come. She would take a shower and wash her rain-drenched hair and dry out and try to warm herself. She would try to fool herself that she could find the appetite to eat something. Her efforts to try to forget Phil Fortescue by relocating and doing something different to earn a crust were, she had to admit to herself, at least to some extent working. Just not in a way she would have expected or wanted them to.
Ruthie walked back through the rain to Veronica’s flat over Westminster Bridge. She arrived there at 1 pm. She ate scrambled egg on toast and drank a cup of Earl Grey tea. She powered up her laptop and prepared for the sorrowful ritual of opening a Word document and staring emptily at blankness for an awkward and painful period of time as her redundant fingers drummed an absent tattoo on the wood of the desk in front of the keyboard. Instead, on this occasion, without rhyme, reason or preamble, the words tumbled out of her mind and onto the page.
She wrote solidly for three hours, saved what she’d written and looked at the word-count. There were just under 2,000 of them and when she read them back, they made complete sense and began a coherent story. She pressed save again and closed the file and went out into the garden to call Michael Aldridge feeling almost stunned with relief. She was no longer blocked. Her mind had found the key to a door that had been locked to her. It had done so without her knowledge and it was a delightful surprise. The rain had stopped.
‘I’d very much like to see you tonight,’ he said.
She remembered it was his weekend to have Mollie.
‘There’s something I need to do first in town,’ she said.
‘I hope to God it doesn’t involve Proctor Court, Ruthie.’
‘Close,’ she said, ‘but no cigar, Mr A.’
‘Call me as soon as you’ve finished?’
‘I will.’
She’d picked up on the concern for her in his voice. He was worried on her behalf, but would never make the mistake of trying to tell her what to do. Only men who were insecure or jealous did that and he manifested neither failing. At least with her, he didn’t. She wasn’t so rose-tinted as to think he might not have been different with his former wife. Maybe he had been but if he had, he was proof now that people could wilfully change.
Ruthie decided when she got to Shadwell as dusk descended to do it exactly as Ginger McCabe had, with a drink in the Prospect of Whitby beforehand. She honestly needed to do that, to steady her nerves before seeing the spot where Ginger had gone into the water. Unlike what the film buff who had spotted him in the pub said he’d done though, she confined herself to jus
t the one gin and tonic. Her hand when she picked the drink up off the bar was encouragingly steady, really.
She thought she knew what had taken Ginger to the edge of the water in that precise spot. He’d recounted his strange story about his solitary visit to Martens and Degrue’s dockside building in the 1960s. He’d told her about it on the Tuesday morning of their single face-to-face encounter. He’d told her about its subsequent demolition. Blown to kingdom come had been his expression, his tone gleeful even fifty-odd years after the snub he’d endured there. Dynamited, unless they used TNT.
Ruthie suspected that something had spooked Ginger. She didn’t know and never would know precisely what had done that. But whatever it was, it had been connected to Martens and Degrue. Which meant it had been connected to the Jericho Society. Maybe he had gone back to the spot just for the reassurance of seeing all trace of that baleful place vanished from the earth; from the docks, a place where Ginger had habitually walked with a swagger, where he’d been a face and a hard man both and earned the respect of his peers. She would never know. But Ruthie could speculate.
The feeling that she was being followed wasn’t immediate. It was subtle, ambiguous, almost incremental. It was the rhythmic tapping of iron on stone, as though from a cane or stick, someone who laboured in their progress, the chink of a metal ferrule striking home with every second step.
Except that when she turned to look, the tapping stopped. And there was no one visible behind her. The streets were dark, street-lighting scant, few people walking the pavements, the rain cleared now, the air cold enough without cloud cover for Ruthie to be able to see each billowed breath plainly when she exhaled.
After each pause, every time she resumed walking towards her destination, after a few steps the tapping noise would also begin again. It was as though she generated it herself. She wondered if it did not actually resonate through Shadwell’s gloomy thoroughfares; perhaps it began and ended only in her own head. That percussive echo of her own progress might actually exist only between her ears. In plainer language, she was merely imagining it. Except that Ruthie knew bloody well she wasn’t.
Eventually she got to where she was going. She felt the chill of the night river envelope her like a ghost’s embrace and she shivered. All trace of commerce had vanished through recent decades. There were sumptuous vestibules and bored concierges behind hotel-sized desks. The dockside buildings were luxury flats. She walked between them, past stern signage warning against trespass, seeing on the corners of the buildings what she’d been looking for, watching as their motion sensors picked her up and they stirred into life, precisely aimed at her like curious, gimlet-eyed, perching metal birds.
She was at the quayside. She could hear water lap and gurgle against masonry twenty feet beneath her feet. She could see a thin sliver of moonlight, a reflection from the sky, ripple glimmering out near the far bank. This was a wide, deep stretch of river, braided with current, colossal and cold.
Ruthie heard music then, something antic and scratchy, vintage jazz, she thought, someone hardy enough for an open window in one of the opulent apartments to her rear. And she smelled brilliantine and brandy, as though sweetish on breath and then the pungent exhalation of a cigar. And the tapping, which had stopped, resumed now, much closer and more rapid than it had seemed to her before. Louder, nearing her.
She had what she needed. She did not need to linger at the spot. She turned and walked back rapidly in the direction she had come with her eyes held rigidly forward, trying to block out sound, barely even breathing until she reached the warm and welcoming yellow light of Shadwell Underground Station and the safe refuge of a westward-bound train. In under an hour, she’d be in the company of Michael Aldridge. And it would only be 8.30 or so by then and they’d have the whole evening. Close but no cigar, she’d said to him. Except there had been a cigar, a fat and reeking Havana at that. Even aboard her underground train, surrounded by indifferent week-night travellers, her skin was coarse still under her clothing with gooseflesh. There were times, Ruthie knew, when a person was wiser to say nothing at all.
THIRTY
They went to the Waggon and Horses, where Michael Aldridge said, ‘Is this routine becoming tedious?’
‘Is it tedious for you?’
That made him laugh. ‘One on one with the most beguiling woman I’ve ever met? I’m bored to distraction.’
‘I like the routine,’ Ruthie said. ‘It’s at odds with everything else in my life just now. It’s a comfort. Do you think we have a chance?’
He looked down at the table between them. He rubbed at the circle of condensation revealed on the wood when he’d picked up his beer glass to take a sip. He said, ‘I remember what you said about one-night stands. But my fear is that you’ll go back to Ventnor and think of this as a holiday romance. You’ll relegate it to the past.’
‘I’m not on holiday.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling, ‘we’ll know soon enough.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘On the way here, I called Carter Melville. Carter Fucking Melville, to give him his full title. I requested and got a meeting with him tomorrow morning. Actually, I demanded it. Then over this weekend I’m planning a trip. And then I’ll be done, I think. I’ll go back home to Ventnor. And I wish you were coming with me.’
‘I think I can manage a few days,’ Michael said. ‘All of next week if you like.’
‘What about work?’
‘I keep telling you, Ruthie. I’m the boss. It’s Aldridge Associates. The associates can survive a week without me.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Ruthie said.
‘Don’t deprive me of the detail,’ Michael said. ‘Tell me what you’re up to.’
‘Not here,’ Ruthie said. ‘Too many prying eyes and ears. That can be your bedtime story.’
They ate dinner at the pub. Ruthie was quite surprised she had any appetite after the Shadwell experience, something she wasn’t going to describe in any unnecessary detail to Michael. She might have imagined it, though she didn’t think she had. She had entered Klaus Fischer’s derelict mansion and the dereliction hadn’t quite been as complete as she had supposed it would be.
Since then, on two occasions, in two separate countries, a price had been exacted of her for doing so. And on the first occasion, she’d also been delivered a warning. Could the indignant ghost of Klaus Fischer hurt her? She didn’t think so. She thought the two deaths so far deliberately inflicted, achieved by someone all too human. Ruthie had been given ample cause in her life to have a healthy belief in events that didn’t conform to logic, in phenomena that weren’t easily explicable or at all straightforward. But most mischief was done by people, not phantoms. And the motives were a squalid assortment of greed, fear, lust and revenge. And panic, she thought, which had prompted the death of poor Ginger McCabe. That particular capital offence had been committed with indecent haste.
They left the pub well before closing time. They shared an urgent need to get the physical stuff accomplished before Ruthie was ready to elaborate on her plans. Afterwards, lying entwined, regaining their breath, she realized as he tenderly kissed her on the mouth that it had suddenly and quite overwhelmingly become more than physical. The human heart was resilient. It could also be sometimes surprising.
‘I began writing again today,’ she said, speaking into the bedroom darkness. ‘I mean stuff of my own, not just commissioned notes about Martin Mear and Ghost Legion.’
‘You’ve been blocked?’
‘For a while, yes. I think I’m unblocked now because of you.’
‘That’s quite a compliment.’
‘Yes, Mr A. It is.’
They lay silently for a while. And then Ruthie outlined her scheme. Michael didn’t interrupt or ask for clarification, he just listened as she explained her reasoning and subsequent intentions until she’d finished.
‘How dangerous is all this?’
‘
That really depends on how my meeting concludes tomorrow with Carter Melville.’
‘Assuming it goes as you expect it to?’
‘Then I’ll be in less danger on Sunday evening than I am now.’
‘I pick Mollie up from school tomorrow afternoon,’ Michael said. ‘I take her back to her mum on the Sussex coast on Sunday evening. Will you be back by then?’
‘God willing,’ Ruthie said.
‘Do you believe in God, Ruthie?’
‘Only under duress,’ she said.
He was quiet again, thinking, she supposed. Then he said, ‘What’s your guiding principle in all this?’
‘That’s an easy one to answer, Mr A. Better the Devil you know.’
‘Know thine enemy?’
‘That one too.’
He was quiet again. Minutes ticked by. She thought of the morning, in the rain after the storm that Sir Terence Maloney had proven to be, how close she’d been then to tears. Now, she thought Michael Aldridge was probably asleep. So she whispered what she said to him next. She said, ‘How tired are you?’
‘Not tired enough,’ he said.
She reached for him. ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’
Ruthie hired a car an hour after her meeting with Carter Melville concluded the following day. She hired a nippy two-seater, a mile-eater of a vehicle that would go fast without consuming a huge quantity of fuel. She wouldn’t do it on a single tank, but she wanted to get the driving done with as little drama and as few stops as possible.
She remembered her last car trip north, in the driving seat of Phil Fortescue’s Fiat Coupe, him a nervous passenger in the seat beside her at the beginning of the summer just passed. She did so with a wrench of loss and absence in her stomach that felt like a betrayal of Michael Aldridge. It wasn’t that, though. It was just that what she had said to Veronica was true. The heart healed to its own timetable. Her feelings for Michael were strengthening. Her feelings for Phil hadn’t weakened as much or as quickly as she’d hoped they would.
