The Lucifer Chord

by F. G. Cottam

  The fashion business was amoral like that. You ignored the prima-donna tantrums and the drug habits and the depravity and general weirdness because all that stuff went with the territory. You kept your own nose clean – in Paula’s case literally – and you got on with things. The industry was what it was. And she was nostalgic sometimes for the brazen honesty and innocence of the world she’d shared with Martin Mear a lifetime ago. Though innocent, if she was totally honest, was an inexact word to describe any of it.

  Her phone hummed in her pocket. It was April. She answered it saying, ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Carter Fucking Melville,’ April said.

  ‘Had no idea he possessed a middle name. All these years, bastard’s been holding out on me.’

  April laughed. She said, ‘The whole thing’s whipping up a shit-storm of memories.’

  ‘Good and bad?’

  ‘Almost totally good, until the end, anyway, but the weird thing is I can’t control it. Some of this stuff I’m remembering for the first time since it happened. That’s pretty freaky.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s freaky,’ Paula said. ‘Freaky is realizing I’d have done none of this stuff I’ve done without your dad dying on us. I did it because I didn’t want to be a footnote to Martin’s story. The penny’s only really just dropped. Does that sound callous?’

  ‘It sounds normal, Paula. It’s always seemed pretty obvious to me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I did my degree in psychology, remember?’

  ‘I should do, darling, I attended your congregation. I was very proud. I believe I cried.’

  ‘What you did is normal. What’s abnormal is doing it so well.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And it’s a kind of compliment? Like you always knew Dad would end up a legend.’

  That had been a given, Paula thought. She’d known that even before properly knowing him, when she’d seen his spare, sinewy silhouette under its halo of backlit hair stride onto centre-stage for the first time. She’d known that before he sang a single phrase or picked out a power chord on the white Stratocaster guitar slung low across his bared torso. She’d felt the force of him ripple through the tiered audience like a high-voltage surge. Few people possessed what Martin Mear had been gifted with, but Martin had possessed it in a strength that was off the scale.

  ‘Do you still think we’re doing the right thing?’

  ‘Who knows?’ April said. ‘I want to do my dad justice. I think the time has probably come.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Paula Tort said. But as their conversation ended, her phone was slippery in the grip of her palm with sweat.

  Paula had checked out Ruthie Gillespie. She could have accepted Carter’s recommendation at face value, but felt that face value and Carter Melville were terms uncomfortable with close proximity. And so she’d had the researcher checked out and discovered she was a sultry looking Goth novelist with an artfully indulged taste for ink.

  She was from a port town named Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where she still lived. She wrote for children and young adults and latterly for a more mature audience. She’d done her degree in history, so she was no stranger to thorough research. Ruthie G hadn’t struck Paula as an obvious choice for the job, but she knew Carter worked on instinct and that his instinct had proven more often than not to be sound.

  That said, she didn’t think Ruthie’s looks would exactly have been lost on Carter Melville. Carter Fucking Melville, as April had called him, which in his younger days, would have been an apt description.

  Paula sighed and switched off the screen and scribbled a note on the pad on the arm of the chair she sat in about the shoot she had just viewed. It was wrong to judge people on their looks. Ideologically and politically, she believed that. She believed it personally too, the irony being that she had earned her fortune in an industry so vacuous that looks were the only criterion on which anyone was judged. Looks and age, she thought, thinking about the Thailand photographer and his dirty predilections and the fee he had just earned out of the company she ran for clicking his camera shutter on a beach.

  She would be truthful with Ruthie G. There was no point in being otherwise. What she had to say would be influential in determining Martin’s enduring legacy. She owed it to him, to herself, to April and even perhaps to Carter Fucking Melville to tell the truth. She would sell Ruthie short if she didn’t and she had decided that she was predisposed to liking the young Goth writer.

  There was only one experience she would not discuss. Since she had never discussed it with anyone, since it remained a secret almost from herself, she was confident it wouldn’t come up. This particular episode had been endured anyway after Martin’s demise, so she could fairly easily convince herself that it wasn’t relevant to what would eventually be included in the piece being researched and then written about his all too short tenure on earth.

  The grieving process after Martin’s demise had been long and horrible to endure. His departure from her life had seemed to Paula like some rude affront to nature. And they had been inseparable for the last two years of that life, for the whole of the time she had known him. She had loved him deeply and would not deny, if challenged on the point, that she did so still. April Mear knew that about her, she was sure. It was an insight that didn’t really require the degree in psychology Martin’s daughter possessed.

  So she had grieved for Martin. Then, after the shock and the accommodation of the loss, a couple of questions had occurred to Paula to which she could provide no answers. Those questions assumed the status over time of mysteries. They nagged at her and eventually, they seemed to her like a sort of taunt.

  In an effort to solve them, she went back to a location important in Martin’s life. She went looking for the clues that would give her answers. She travelled alone and told no one where she was going. It was an experience from which she considered afterwards she had barely escaped with her sanity. She was surprised, when she thought about it, that she had survived the episode at all. It hadn’t answered her questions, either, only deepening the mysteries that had compelled her in the first place to go.

  She wouldn’t discuss this event with Ruthie G. It had happened after Martin’s departure from life. Without Martin’s absence, it would never have happened at all. It wasn’t relevant, didn’t fit into the chronology, the time-frame the researcher was concerned with. It could be regarded as an adventure. It could be seen as an ordeal. It was an experience of which Paula, with her strong desire to rationalize, could still make no rational sense. She didn’t like to think about it and couldn’t see the value in sharing it with anyone.

  ‘Not now, not ever,’ she said aloud to the empty room she was in.

  She’d give Ruthie G a call. She’d do it herself rather than have someone do it on her behalf. She knew her own diary. She’d have thought herself pitiful if she hadn’t been fully aware of every engagement on her own busy schedule. The researcher had said that more than one long and exhaustive session would be necessary. She preferred a series of shorter interviews, she’d said in the message she’d left, saying, ‘What I’m able to determine as fact will dictate the nature of the questions I ask from one interview to the next.’

  It seemed a thorough and reasonable approach. She’d be speaking to the three of them in tandem. It would work fine for her and for April, they’d committed, after all. Terrible pun as it was, they both wanted the record put straight. She thought it a technique, though, that might test the patience of Terry Maloney, or Sir Terence, as he was now. She hadn’t spoken to him or seen him in person for thirty years. But she remembered him and the man she remembered had never been known for his patience.

  SIX

  At five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Frederica Daunt waited in a chair in her conservatory for darkness to descend. Her suitcase was packed and ready in the hallway by the front door. She was in the conservatory because that was the only place in the house she allowed herself to smoke. She
had smoked pretty steadily since waking that morning and recalling the events of the previous night.

  She could have smoked in the garden, but she’d had enough fresh air for one day during her meeting with the picturesque researcher being paid to investigate the somewhat troubled life of Martin Mear. It was Frederica’s belief that kindly eyeful Ruthie Gillespie was going to have her work cut out. She didn’t know the exact nature of the trouble Mear had got himself into but she expected it had to do with the subject that had fascinated him even as a teenager.

  That subject had been magic, and not magic of the Paul Daniels/Dynamo illusionist variety. When her father had first met Martin, he was a fifteen-year-old captivated by the possibilities of the occult. When her father had come up with the artwork for the King Lud record sleeve seven years later, he had been a young man about to be endowed with a fortune that would amply fund his fascination. Her dad had never doubted that Martin, in life, had taken this as far as it would go. In death, Frederica thought the previous evening had demonstrated that.

  Her ticket was at the check-in desk at Heathrow and it was one way. She tended to winter in her Algarve villa. It wasn’t quite winter yet, the weather wasn’t vindictive and the trees were a glorious russet and gold and the river had looked beautiful and tranquil at Barnes earlier in the day. But the nights were closing in, weren’t they? And there was such a thing as pragmatism, wasn’t there?

  She should not have indulged the deceit she had over Martin Mear. If his spirit had ignored it, it had done so perhaps out of gratitude. Her father had never been paid anything for the King Lud cover design. To have charged money for the work would have run counter to his hippie ideology. Her dad had believed art and profit irreconcilable.

  The design still held up, hadn’t dated, looked at once totally of its time and absolutely timeless. Its inspiration was those bearded images of Old Father Thames. He was portrayed in a full-face illustration on the sleeve as a mooring post, like the great bronze lions’ head mooring posts stained green with age and the submergings of innumerable tides dotted along the river embankment. Like them, he had a mooring ring in the grip of his jaws. Like them, he had a mane of hair and look of weary stoicism in his ancient eyes.

  Martin’s spirit had remained grateful. And so it had tolerated Frederica’s ongoing deception. But last night, with the researcher present, she had gone too far. She thought that when darkness fell tonight, and that moment was almost upon West London, there might be a repetition, or an escalation, and she would be forced now to flee her home and find some way in which to try to make recompense from a safe distance.

  If nothing happened, she would simply cancel her ticket and unpack her case. She would do so with a long sigh of relief and a resolute promise to finally kick her smoking habit. She might even retire. Her work had made her comfortably off. The proceeds of her five-year-old divorce settlement still lay untouched in a very healthy deposit account. Intimacy with the dead had been cold and uncomfortable even before the antics of the previous night. It was a clammy sort of contact; dark, shivery, stained always by grief.

  She had planned a little show. The buttons concealed under the table in the séance room would have reduced the temperature and generated a draught around their legs. There would have been the scent of Vetiver, which was the cologne she’d read Martin Mear had habitually worn. She’d mixed it with patchouli, which had been the signature scent of the heavy rock scene during his time. A ghostly wind would have moaned through the concealed speakers and the table would have rattled as she claimed contact with some skilful vocal projection.

  Her gift was genuine, but it didn’t always perform to order. She backed it up with a few tricks of the trade useful on those stubborn occasions when nothing manifested. She had got to use none of these though last night. Something had manifested, unexpectedly. She was still reeling mentally under the assaulting force of it. It had knocked her cold and ruptured her nasal membranes. It had brought on migraine and a buzzing that still pounded her eardrums. Mostly though it had terrified her, because she thought it only hinted at the real havoc Martin’s antic spirit could provoke.

  Shadows lengthened. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. She became aware that the birds that usually busily greeted the sunset were absent from her garden. She’d have heard them, faintly, through glass and she couldn’t.

  Rain rattled on the roof. Usually that was a cosy, comforting sound. Her conservatory was a warm, dry sanctuary from the weather. But this rain seemed frenzied, the drops spitting percussively like the mad skitter of drumsticks on a tautly stretched skin. She glanced up and saw of course that it wasn’t raining at all. And it was then that out of her peripheral vision, Frederica saw there was a pale figure standing on her lawn.

  She forced herself to look. He was tall and cloaked and had his head bowed. His long hair hung heavily in front of his face. Darkness had gathered about him, the last of the light leeching out of the lower extremities of the sky. It didn’t obscure him, the darkness. He was detailed at the centre of it, as though some force at once attracted it and held it slightly at bay.

  His fingers were very long, she saw. Then it occurred to her that it might be his fingernails only giving them the illusion of greater length. The nails continued to grow, didn’t they, after death? Sometimes they grew for weeks in a coffin on the still hands of a motionless corpse.

  She only became aware of how still the figure had been when he began to move. With slow deliberation he began to raise his head, the curtain of hair threatening to part and reveal his features as his head rose and straightened up.

  Frederica fled. She ran through the conservatory and through her house to a deafening wail of sound, a screeching rumble distorting the air with the sheer strength of its volume, a violent, vicious storm of noise that hit her almost like a physical barrier to her progress towards the front door.

  ‘Feedback,’ she said to herself, numbly, when she was seated in the taxi she’d hailed at the kerb outside her house, with her suitcase on the floor beside her. ‘He used feedback, didn’t he, when he played the guitar?’ She was deaf to her own question. She couldn’t hear herself. She was in the outer suburbs, the dismal uniform reaches on the Heathrow route to the west of London, when she became aware that her ears were bleeding.

  In Carter Melville’s own words to Ruthie at their face-to-face meeting, ‘Martin Mear was the fucking Legion.’ Certainly it was true that he had written their songs. It was also true that he had performed the lead vocal and taken the lead guitar part. At the time of King Lud’s release, the claim made by Melville was literally true, because the character and sound of the band had been determined before Martin had recruited any personnel. But he did recruit band members and when they were assembled, they were widely considered the best in the business.

  Drummers were traditionally half-insane in credible rock bands back then; a qualification taken seriously by the Who’s Keith Moon and by John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham of Led Zeppelin. Both of those drummers could be said, if you were cynical, to have died in action. They were killed while still in their thirties by their own reckless hedonism.

  The man behind the kit in Ghost Legion was Jason Ritchie. He was a Liverpudlian, the son of a docker and a school dinner lady. He’d been powerful through the arms and shoulders, as rock drummers tended to become. He’d had the obligatory mane of hair. He’d been heavily tattooed, decades before it became really fashionable among musicians like him to ink their skin. And though he’d outlived Martin, he’d done his best to live up to the tradition by drinking his liver into destruction before the remainder of his band mates perished. That had been in 1976, the year of punk, which Ruthie thought might and might not be a coincidence.

  Ghost Legion’s bassist was Patsy McCoy, who’d been in a rhythm and blues band with Terry Maloney when they’d still been at school in Dublin. A more talented musician than Terry, almost as soon as he joined the Legion he’d got his childhood friend the roadie job that would lead to
far greater things for the future Sir Terence. McCoy was a solidly rhythmic player, but he was considered a great deal more than that.

  There was something magical, the critics of the time said, when Ritchie and McCoy played together. They did a whole lot more than put down the beat. They swung and chugged and swaggered. It was alchemy. Patsy died when the converted Wiltshire barn he lived in caught fire in the summer of 1979. An accident investigator called to the scene as emergency crews damped down said that a cigarette smoked in bed was almost certainly the cause of the fatal blaze.

  On keyboards and backing vocals, the Legion were lucky enough to land James Prentice. Prentice was an ex-public schoolboy and chorister, classically trained, Ruthie assumed the only member of the band ever able to read sheet music.

  There was persistent speculation that if he hadn’t actually co-written some of their material, then he had at least had an influential hand in arranging it. His living relatives had taken this claim to court twice, but had failed in both attempts to have a portion of the band’s royalties diverted their way. James had not been able to contribute on either occasion to the argument. He had died at the wheel of his Porsche in a motorway crash in the spring of 1983, before either legal action was brought.

  They weren’t, in life, an acrimonious band. They got on with each other and they got on too with the bands they competed with. The egos back then had been gargantuan, but there’d been an ungrudging degree of mutual respect. Thus it was, ‘Yeah, the Legion, they’re hot, man, they’re really fucking good. You’ve just got to live with it. Go see them. That’s cool. Then afterwards come see us.’

  Jagger had said that. Or he’d allegedly said it. It was unsubstantiated, like the claim that Jeff Beck had said Martin Mear was the best guitarist he’d heard since Hendrix, like the story that Paul Rodgers of Free envied only Martin Mear’s set of lead singers’ pipes. There was a whole lot of bull in the rock world and it mired honesty and slowed progress and frankly, sometimes it beggared belief.