by F. G. Cottam
By ten o’clock on Saturday evening, seated in front of her laptop, Ruthie Gillespie was developing a suspicion of her own about Martin Mear’s early life, something that had never been speculated on or even publicly discussed. His father had been a farm labourer and his mother a domestic cleaner and both of them were long dead and he’d had no siblings. But he’d had an uncle, his mother’s younger brother, who’d lived in Shadwell and worked as a shipping clerk in the London docks, back in the time when the Thames had still been a working river.
Ruthie strongly suspected that Martin must have gone to visit and stay regularly with his uncle Max. He’d been raised in Shaftesbury, studied hard at school, got excellent A levels and gone to Oxford as an undergraduate. But after three years of education in the west of England, his debut album had taken London as its theme.
You had to wonder why, if he had no personal experience of the capital. He had to have been there, didn’t he? And not just on a day trip to some museum or gallery organized by his school. He had to have explored the city, to ever become as beguiled as he’d evidently been by its history and legends and landmarks that it became the subject of his first substantial and mature artistic endeavour.
His parents had been poor. He had relied on his paper round for pocket money. He had saved for and bought his first guitar himself, just like he’d saved for and bought the bike he pedalled to the hippie commune a few miles from his home where he joined jam sessions to practise playing his guitar in his teens. The only way he could have experienced London was if he stayed with his uncle Max and though Max Askew was long gone, Ruthie had discovered the address at which he’d lived until his death a few years after the death of his nephew.
Ruthie thought the London angle quite exciting. It wasn’t yet proven, but it was as close as she had so far come to a fresh discovery. Verifying facts didn’t deliver job satisfaction. Intuiting facts and then proving them when they’d been previously unknown did that.
It was at 10.35 pm and she was seriously thinking of calling it a day – and a night – when Carter Melville called her for a progress report. He’d done this the previous evening and she imagined it would become a regular thing, their habitual little phone ritual. If so it was another good reason for staying off the slosh. He wouldn’t appreciate his pet researcher hiccupping and slurring through an account of her progress so far, losing her thread, repeating herself, brain drowning in Chablis. Or possibly something stronger.
‘Can I ask you a question, Carter?’
‘You don’t ask, baby, you sure as damn don’t get.’
‘Did Martin ever discuss going to see his uncle Max in London?’
‘Nope, never did.’
‘Did he never mention his uncle Max to you?’
‘Yeah, once, guy was named Max Askew and crewed in the war aboard one of the flotilla of little ships that got the beaten British army guys off the beach at Dunkirk. Martin thought that was very cool. I mean a cool experience to live through and all, with the German dive-bombers strafing the shit out of everything. Can’t remember how it came up, but it did.’
The next question was a long shot, but still worth asking. ‘Did he happen to say who it was Max Askew worked for?’
‘Funny, I’ve got total recall on everything Mear-related until matters got galactic after the second album came out. It’s after Black Solstice and the first really big American tour that things get blurry for me. Oxford, I remember like it was yesterday. And Max Askew was a college conversation.’
‘Go on.’
‘Max lived in Shadwell. He was a shipping clerk for an import and export outfit with a name that sounded French or maybe Belgian. I’ll have it in a second. Yeah, the postcard just dropped through my door, Ruthie. Uncle Max worked for a firm called Martens and Degrue.’
Ruthie ended this conversation looking down out of the spare room window at the Hercules road railway arches. She was at eye-level with the passengers on the trains on the rails above, the numerous parallel lines in and out of the Waterloo terminus. She could see indifferent figures reduced by perspective seated in the carriages bathed in yellow light. She observed that it wasn’t raining. The evening was fine. It was mild enough that she had the window open just a chink.
She got her coat and bag and exited the flat and walked the short distance to the Pineapple pub. She ordered a large vodka and tonic and took her drink and went and sat at one of the bench seats at the wooden tables outside on the street. She took a long swallow of her drink and then lit a cigarette and inhaled gratefully. There was a group of men at an adjacent table and she was aware of them noticing her but thankfully, none of them made any attempt at chat. She thought probably the expression on her face likely to discourage them from trying to flirt with her.
Martens and Degrue were a part of her personal history. They were why she had come originally to meet Michael Aldridge almost three years earlier on Wight. They were why she had subsequently come to meet and befriend Veronica Slade, in whose flat she was currently staying as an un-paying guest. They were the respectable face of the Jericho Society, a secretive cult that wasn’t respectable at all. And the Jericho Society was the original reason Ruthie had become less than cynical personally on the subject of the occult.
She felt like calling Michael Aldridge. She felt like confiding this development in him. She felt like calling Veronica and telling her about it too. But she felt also that to do either of those things would be an unfair imposition. Neither of them was involved with this. She was, and voluntarily. It was a well-paid gig. It was her baby, she thought, taking another sip of her drink, thinking that Carter Melville’s ghastly phraseology was dismayingly contagious.
Ruthie heard and felt the ice clack against her teeth as she raised and emptied her glass, her lips numb with cold and the warmth of the alcohol spreading through her chest and stomach. She looked at her wristwatch. She had time for another before last orders were called. She’d have another and then she’d go back and sleep on what she’d discovered. She didn’t, suddenly, feel entirely comfortable with the thought of spending a second night alone at somewhere that wasn’t home to her. But the Jericho Society had a long reach and she knew at heart that really, nowhere was beyond it.
She’d sleep on what she’d found out. She’d have a better idea of what strategy to take in the morning. Max Askew’s employment might have nothing whatsoever to do with the dark reputation engendered by his nephew both in life and in death. It might be an innocent coincidence. Except that Ruthie didn’t really believe very much in coincidence. More and more, to her, Michael’s words about fate outside the Riverside Café were proving ominously prescient.
But the evening hadn’t quite yet finished with Ruthie. She was twenty feet on from the pub, taking the short walk back to the flat, when her phone buzzed in her pocket and it was Frederica Daunt.
‘Ruthie? I’m at Heathrow. I saw him, after sunset, in my garden.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘You need to drop this.’
‘You ran away?’
‘Present tense, I’m running. Flight was delayed, so only about to board now. Had to call you, in the end. Had to tell you, you should leave this alone.’
Ruthie bit her lip, the phone tremoring slightly in her grip. She said, ‘I need to ask you a question, Frederica. Have you ever heard of something called the Jericho Society?’
‘Never, and this isn’t the time for trivia quizzes, dear. You need to back off this one. It isn’t remotely worth it.’
‘You’re shouting. You don’t need to shout.’
‘It’s not deliberate. My hearing’s been damaged. I can’t hear myself. I’m going now. I sincerely hope we’re speaking for the last time.’
She broke the connection.
Ruthie looked around at the night street, a car speedily whizzing by, lights lit in the Blake House flats behind the iron railings beside her, an eruption of laughter from outside the Pineapple to her rear. I’m going nowhere, she said to herself. I
’m not a quitter and never have been. I’ve taken on a job and mean to see it through.
Besides, she thought, I’m in the middle of a mystery here and mysteries are for solving.
But the real reason she would carry on became clear to her in bed, just in the moment before fatigue claimed her and deep sleep descended. And it was nothing to do with unravelling old enigmas or with the substantial sum she stood to earn for doing so. The truth was that recent events had broken Ruthie’s heart. She felt cleaved inside. A big part of her wanted to surrender to her feelings, to despair and just be broken. Doing what she was doing now was the only strategy she felt she had for avoiding that.
SEVEN
The flat Max Askew had lived in was in a post-war council block behind the now-fashionable wharves in which he’d worked. But even council blocks were highly desirable these days in that part of London. Most of the original tenants had bought in the 1980s and then sold and moved on she supposed in retirement to Essex and Kent. Max had lived at number 77 Proctor Court. It was unoccupied she discovered on Sunday morning, for sale. Estate agents worked weekends. She could go there posing as a potential buyer and get a feel for the place. There would be nothing of Max left there, Ruthie knew, but she could explore the locality, walk through the door and see the view out of the windows through the eyes of a teenage Martin Mear.
Estate agents. Bloody hell. As the wan sunlight of Sunday morning rose and Ruthie sipped her breakfast coffee, she pictured a young man in a tight suit and pointy shoes, the sort who talked about chillaxing and drove one of those Mini Coopers that looked like a steroid-fed version of the original. Estate agents were all essentially the same pushy, eager, superficial character. But he’d have the keys to the door of a place in which her subject had absorbed important influences. He’d have the power to unlock secrets.
At least, he might.
She was going to go to the residence where Martin’s uncle Max had lived in Shadwell in the days when he worked for Martens and Degrue. She was determined.
She got a two o’clock appointment to view Max Askew’s old flat, which suggested to Ruthie that the property wasn’t quite the easy sell it should have been in that coveted location. There could be all sorts of reasons for that, though, and she’d keep an open mind until she’d seen the place personally.
She lavished £20 of Carter Melville’s expenses money on a cab to Shadwell and her destination. Other than driving a Golf rather than a Mini, the estate agent was exactly as she’d pictured him in her mind. He was preening himself in a wing mirror when she approached him, parked outside a walk-up block with Proctor Court picked out helpfully in tiled mosaic above a communal archway entrance.
‘Number 77’s on the third floor,’ he said, when they’d introduced themselves.
‘I’ve got this thing,’ Ruthie said, ‘about viewing properties alone. I got the asking price and basic spec from the website. I’d like to take a look unaccompanied, if you don’t mind?’
He shrugged. He held out a set of keys. He said, ‘It’s a vacant flat. No residents to tiptoe around, nothing valuable there to nick.’
‘Charming.’
He had a nice smile. ‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Thanks.’ She took the keys from him.
‘I’ll wait for you here.’
He didn’t seem particularly hopeful about the verdict. Maybe he was just pissed off at having to work when he could have been with his mates, in a pub outside Upton Park, getting nicely oiled prior to the afternoon’s West Ham home game.
The entrance to number 77 was distinguished by a heavy bronze knocker. She thought this rather florid, mounted on the front door of a council flat. But the block wasn’t typically utilitarian, like most of the social housing erected in inner London after the Second World War. There were a few arts and crafts movement nods and signatures in the brickwork and window frames.
The knocker reminded her of the cover of King Lud. But it wasn’t a cast representation of Old Father Thames, was it? He was more magisterial. This was another folkloric character entirely. This was the Green Man, similarly bearded and wild-haired, but always with an antic grin and a look of mischievous glee in his eyes. The Green Man always looked ready to party. Ruthie didn’t think she’d have liked his parties though and the thought of them made her shudder slightly. Paganism could be seriously dark. She let herself in.
The first thing she noticed was a smell, subtle but distinctly there and rather like the incense burned during the mass and benediction services celebrated in a Catholic church. She sniffed at the air and looked around, but could not readily determine where the odour was coming from. The flat was unfurnished and its wooden floors were bare. There was no fabric for a scent to cling to. The walls were painted rather than wallpapered, so there didn’t seem to be anything in which a smell could really linger. It was curious.
The second thing she noticed was an absence of available light. The windows were quite large, even generous and their glass seemed spotlessly clean. But they didn’t let much light in. The flat’s interior was still and silent and dull; opaque, almost gloomy. And it seemed smaller than it should have. The rooms were not large, but there was a sense of confinement in all of them that she thought almost physically unpleasant. She felt a subtle, cramped sensation. The word for the place was dingy.
Ruthie noticed the design on the fireplace in the sitting room straight away. It was large and ornate, a heavy wooden construction rather grand-seeming for such a small dwelling, but quite in keeping with the arts and crafts touches she’d noticed on the stairwell and communal walkways of the block. It had been carved and then varnished. She ran a hand across it. She thought that there were many layers of varnish. They had obscured its grain and darkened the patina of the wood to something close to black.
Carved into the centre of this chest-high feature was a five-sided star with a circle around it. The circular groove touched the apex of each point. It was precisely done and prominently placed and Ruthie knew that it was a pentagram. She traced the design with the tip of her index finger. She didn’t know precisely what it signified, but she knew that it was a symbol important to practitioners of the occult.
There was a slight tackiness to the wood. It was more than just a sweaty fingertip on paintwork. Her fingertip wasn’t sweaty because the room was too chilly to provoke perspiration. There was something not quite gluey there, but a definite residue, unpleasant to the touch. It was as though the wood itself excreted something moist and very slightly sticky.
She made a fist and rapped her knuckles hard, once, against the wood. She was rewarded with a jolt of pain and a sound that seemed curiously dull. She stamped a heel on the bare boards under her feet and the impact, again, seemed muffled. She coughed, deliberately, and the cough seemed to her own ears to have the quality of a noise more remembered than spontaneously heard. It was odd. All of it was odd. And it was disconcerting. She remained still for a moment. She thought that the incense scent was growing in strength the longer she remained there.
She experienced a start, then, as though seeing someone appear suddenly behind her in a mirror. So vivid was the sensation that she turned swiftly around to confront whoever had stolen up on her. But there was nobody behind her. Just as there had been no mirror hung on the wall she’d faced to see them in. In the silence, from the parlour or lounge giving onto the sitting room from the open door to her left, she heard the distinct ticking of a clock she knew from examining it moments earlier that the room didn’t possess. She could hear a sound too like a rusty pendulum swing.
The ticking got louder. It seemed somehow disapproving, reproachful. She imagined someone black-clad, swinging an incense burner in the parlour where she couldn’t see them, yawing it back and forth to the rhythm of the clock that wasn’t there, filling the air with a tainted, ceremonial smell. She thought she heard a dragged footstep, teasing and sly, but she knew there was no one in the room. There couldn’t be. She’d only left it a mome
nt earlier.
As calmly as she was able to, Ruthie turned and walked out of the flat. She locked the door securely behind her. She glanced at the Green Man knocker, which seemed to be grinning even more widely than it had at her original approach. That part, she knew, was her imagination, just as the feeling of a human presence had been her imagination. But she hadn’t imagined the odour or the ticking clock and she certainly hadn’t imagined the carving on the sitting-room fire surround. They’d all of them been real.
‘How long’s it been on the market?’
‘On and off, for ever,’ he said.
They were in a pub, the Prospect of Whitby, which had a prospect through the window only of a turgid, drizzly river.
She didn’t resort to this tactic generally. It was specific to the circumstances. He was young and shallow and vain and probably enough of a chancer to see a pointed drinks invitation as the prelude to sex. Thinking with his dick didn’t make a man blind, but it got in the way of him seeing straight. She didn’t want evasion or the runaround, she just wanted clear and honest answers to questions she had no real business asking.
He sipped his lager. He fingered his wristwatch bracelet and then looked at the face of it. He did that a lot. The watch looked expensive. He was probably just concerned to get his money’s worth out of what he’d bought.
‘Original occupant died in 1978. The Court had been respectable but was on the way to becoming a sink estate back then and various homeless families were in and out of the property on short lets.’
‘How short?’
‘The shorter the better, apparently. No one liked it there, is the story.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘There was a mass buy out in ’87. All the tenants got together and bought the block from the council. Kind of a class action, Margaret Thatcher’s aspiring working class, fulfilling the Tory dream by investing in property ownership.’
‘You’re better educated than you look.’