by F. G. Cottam
She left the flat, locking the door behind her, and walked the five-minute distance to the river and the foot of Lambeth Bridge. There was a cafe on a short pier to the right of the bridge where Veronica had told her they made excellent coffee. They sold sandwiches and pastries too. It was after lunch and she hadn’t eaten but Ruthie couldn’t face any of it. She sat on a walled stretch of manicured grass and smoked a cigarette, watching the water course by in those rippling patches where the river wasn’t slack. It was sunny in a pale, gentle sort of way. It was windless and benign and a day young Malcolm Stuart hadn’t lived to see.
Ruthie called Michael Aldridge. She did it just to hear a sympathetic voice. She told him about what had happened. Or she told him as much as she knew, because she felt there were large and important unanswered questions about this particular turn of events. Michael listened in silence.
Eventually he said, ‘You’re blaming yourself. It’s in your tone, Ruthie. You sound as guilty as sin about something that can’t possibly be your fault. Think about it logically.’
‘About which bit? About how I learned about it via a bloody Ouija board?’
‘You’re upset.’
‘Of course I’m bloody upset.’
‘There’s traffic noise. Where are you?’
‘South side of Lambeth Bridge.’
‘Are you wearing a coat?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘A practical one. Stay put. I’ll be there in forty minutes.’
‘You’re at work.’
‘I’m the boss. I can delegate. Sit tight.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There might be strings.’
Despite herself, she smiled. His voice, his humour. ‘There are always strings,’ she said.
‘What have you got on your feet?’
‘Black Doc Marten’s. Black jeans. A black pullover under a black wool coat. I like black.’
‘Perfect,’ he said
They took the fast train from Waterloo to Surbiton. They walked down to the Riverside Café and Michael persuaded Ruthie to eat a tuna melt ciabatta washed down with a can of Orangina. She felt better with her belly full, hollow only when her thoughts turned to 77 Proctor Court. She could imagine few bleaker places in which to end your life than Max Askew’s strangely unstill Shadwell flat.
They walked along Kingston Riverside to Kingston Bridge and then crossed the bridge to the towpath on the other side. Michael told her that the towpath led to Hampton Court and that the distance was about three and a half miles.
‘All flat,’ he said.
‘Is this where you do your running?’
‘It is, but we’re not running today and we’re getting the last ferry back and that will be before dark.’
‘Where is this going?’
‘I told you, Ruthie. Hampton Court.’
She punched his shoulder. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘It goes only as far as you want it to,’ he said. ‘There are no strings. I’ve got no shortage of faults. But crassness isn’t one of them.’
The sun had begun its autumnal descent by then and the riverbank was abundant with wildlife. There were rabbits and squirrels. Ruthie saw a heron. Murderously territorial parakeets squawked, a vivid green in the trees above them. There was an urban myth about how they’d got to south-west London when they were essentially birds of paradise, but Ruthie couldn’t remember what it was.
‘Jimi Hendrix owned a breeding pair when he lived in London,’ Michael said, reading her mind. ‘The story is, he let them go.’
Rowing eights practised on the river coached by a man with a megaphone and a boat on floats in an accent Ruthie thought honed at public school. The water flowed serenely by, travelling in the opposite direction from the one in which they walked. They passed an island Michael told her was named Raven’s Ait. Shortly after, a pheasant exploded out of the undergrowth to their right and hustled off the way they’d come. The odd mountain biker passed them. They saw no other walkers. The ground was pale orange clay, potholed, under their feet.
‘Boots holding up?’
‘Better than their wearer. How far have we come?’
He pointed to a huge water-pumping station building on the bank opposite. It was Victorian, she thought, stone soot-stained by the coal fires of earlier decades and constructed to resemble a fortress.
‘That marks the halfway point,’ he said. A little further on, he offered her his arm without comment and without comment, she took it.
Hiking wasn’t really Ruthie’s thing and by the time they got to Hampton Court, it was almost time for the last ferry to take them back. She looked at the Tudor facade, flushed by the sunset, its centuries-old brickwork almost blood-red, its chimneypots a haphazard cluster of silhouettes against the darkening sky.
‘Do you think when things become that old, they’re indifferent to the world, Michael?’
‘I think when things become that old, they’re like querulous elderly people, requiring a great deal of care and attention and blithely ungrateful for it. But then I’m an architect and I’ve specialized in restoration. You’re a romantic.’
‘I’m not a romantic.’
‘I think you are.’
They were silent for a moment. Michael said, ‘What went wrong, Ruthie? With your maritime scholar; with Phil Fortescue?’
She thought about this. She said, ‘It was wonderful. It really was. And then suddenly it wasn’t. Suddenly it was nothing at all.’
‘Why wasn’t it?’
‘He never got over the death of his wife. Eventually I realized that sustaining the grief was his way of keeping her alive. The only way he could, really. That penny dropped with an almighty thud.’
‘I’m sorry to ask.’
‘I didn’t have to answer. And you’ve been very kind to me today.’
They walked back from where the ferry dropped them to the Waggon and Horses pub in Surbiton. It was shortly after 7 pm by then. Michael ordered food for them and bought drinks while Ruthie found somewhere quiet for them to sit and took off her coat. She took her phone out of her pocket and saw that she’d missed two further calls from Carter Melville and that Veronica had sent her a text which read: Saw the detective’s card on the mantelpiece. You OK Hon?
She texted back that she was. She knew she wasn’t, but she also knew that things could be a great deal worse. She smiled thanks as Michael Aldridge handed her a large gin and tonic and then sat down opposite her. She sipped from her drink and said, ‘What about you?’
‘I’m not involved with anyone. Haven’t been since the business on Wight with Ashdown Hall. Not since my marriage imploded.’
‘It was an imperfect match.’
He laughed. ‘You can say that again.’
‘Once is enough.’
He sipped beer and held her eyes frankly in a way that made her realize he’d spent the whole day so far with her avoiding doing that. He said, ‘The truth is that I fell for you the moment I sat down to talk to you outside the Minghella Ice Cream Parlour on Ventnor seafront almost three years ago. I saw you and I heard your voice and I was utterly captivated. But I was also spoken for. And by the time I was free, you were with your scholar of the sea.’
‘Bad timing,’ Ruthie said.
‘The worst. Will you persist with this research work?’
‘I don’t honestly know. What do you think?’
‘I gave you the reference that you say got you the job. I’d hate to have you on my conscience.’
‘It shouldn’t be intrinsically dangerous.’
‘Someone’s been scared so badly they’ve fled the country,’ Michael said. ‘And now someone has died. And the Jericho Society is always extremely bad news. Why are you smiling?’
‘Without the Jericho Society, we’d never have met.’
‘What’s the next step?’
‘I’ve an interview with Martin Mear’s daughter on Thursday and another to schedule with his pet roadie from back i
n the day. I want to go to one of the festivals die-hard Legion fans organize where they rehearse this bonkers ritual they call the Clamouring. I want to get a sense of who they are and sample the atmosphere. There’s one coming up on Sunday at a stone circle in Wiltshire.’
‘So you’ll carry on?’
‘I want to know what or who killed Malcolm Stuart.’
‘Probably depression.’
‘It absolutely wasn’t,’ Ruthie said.
Her phone rang. She’d hung her coat over her chair. She fished it out of her coat pocket expecting to see Carter Melville’s name on the display. But it wasn’t him, it was instead her London agent. ‘Excuse me,’ she said.
She went outside. She wondered what Eileen Masterson could possibly want. She was a good agent, calm and loyal and supportive, but Ruthie wasn’t working on anything worthy of Eileen’s attention currently. And it was eight o’clock in the evening.
‘I’m working late, running on New York time, talking to an American publisher where it’s three in the afternoon.’
‘What’s this to do with me?’ Ruthie said.
‘Nothing. Not directly. But I’m in the office, where I’ve just taken a call from a very persistent man named George McCabe. Ginger to his friends, he informs me. He wants to see you and he doesn’t want to wait. 9 am tomorrow morning, he says. Claimed to be an old actor. So I googled him before calling you and he’s exactly who he says he is. Colourful career. I’ll text you his contact details and address.’
‘Did he tell you what it was about?’
‘That’s for your ears only, darling. In person.’
Ruthie couldn’t imagine what a veteran actor could possibly want with her. Since she was outside the pub, she lit a cigarette and pondered on it. Once or twice she’d been approached by younger industry people trying to get film rights to one of her stories without paying an option fee, but this sounded completely different from that. That was cheeky. This sounded somehow ominous. She smoked and paced and considered, and then she decided with a shrug that she could do nothing that might enable her to learn anything now and might as well forget about it until the morning.
Back inside the pub, Michael had bought them fresh drinks. They talked and drank and then quite close to closing time he said, ‘I’d very much like you to stay with me tonight.’
‘No strings, you said.’
‘Not to do anything. I don’t think you should be alone. Sometimes a bit of human warmth is welcome and valuable. It’s comforting. I think this qualifies as one of those times.’
‘Human warmth?’
‘Yes.’
‘So this isn’t a gender-specific offer, Michael? You’d as willingly cuddle up to a man?’
‘You can tease all you want, Ruthie. And I’ve been honest about my feelings towards you. But this is a suggestion sincerely made for entirely the right reasons.’
Ruthie rose and grabbed her coat.
‘So it’s a no,’ Michael Aldridge said, quietly.
‘Phone reception isn’t great in here. I’m going outside to text Veronica not to expect me back tonight. I need to do it before she turns in, worrying. Then I’m coming back inside and we’re having one for the road. I hope you’re as fastidious as I am about clean laundry, Michael. Dirty sheets are gross.’
In the event, Ruthie awoke early the next morning unable to think of very much they hadn’t done. But since she’d instigated most of it, she didn’t think she had any great cause for complaint.
‘I might have been a bit forward last night,’ she said to his sleeping back.
He stirred and turned to face her. He said, ‘I was afraid to wake up in case I was just dreaming.’
‘I don’t normally do one-night stands, Michael.’
‘An excellent principle. One I very much hope you stick with.’
‘Really?’
‘I’ve been wooing you for three years, on and off.’
‘Mostly off.’
He raised a hand to stroke her hair and kissed her. ‘Good morning, Ruthie.’
‘Good morning, Mr A.’
SIXTEEN
The mostly black-and-white photographs on the walls of Ginger McCabe’s parlour made of it a rogues’ gallery of mid-to-late-twentieth-century celebrity. Ginger had anticipated the selfie by half a century. The man himself looked less flamboyant today than he did in the framed images, sharing space with dead film stars and long-retired sportsmen. He was over six feet tall and broad and had a boxer’s emphatically flattened nose. He looked extremely fit for his age in a charcoal three-piece suit. He also looked more than subdued. He looked sorrowful.
‘Only met the lad twice, miss, but he was a very amenable boy,’ he said. ‘Respectful of his elders. Appreciative of tradition. A good listener. It’s a terrible shame.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Copper came round. Irish moniker.’
‘Sorley.’
‘That’s the feller. I was a diary entry in Malcolm’s phone. Last person to see him alive, allegedly.’
‘I doubt that,’ Ruthie said.
‘Foul play?’
‘He wasn’t suicidal.’
‘No, miss, he wasn’t. But he did leave here half-cut.’
‘You told him something that made him go back there. Will you tell it to me, Ginger?’
‘Not here,’ he said, looking around, grimacing. ‘I need fresh air, revisiting that particular story.’
They walked to the river. Then they walked along the river and Ginger recounted his story about Max Askew’s broken union promise and the picture hung behind a velvet curtain on Peter Clore’s office wall at the Martens and Degrue building first contaminated and afterwards dynamited into oblivion.
He finished his story. They’d found a bench. Ruthie took out her cigarettes and lit one with a pink Bic lighter.
‘Haven’t had one of those for over fifty years,’ Ginger said.
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘Only after meals.’
‘Still?’
‘And when I have a pint, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Ruthie said.
‘Do you believe in atmospheres, Ruthie?’
‘You mean like at Proctor Court?’
‘Never been to Proctor Court. Hospitals, hospices, sometimes churches and funeral parlours. Cemeteries. Old houses, sometimes. Seaside guest houses of the seedier variety. There’s a reason they demolished the place Fred and Rose West lived in.’
‘Some of the victims were under their garden,’ Ruthie said. She’d sourced an archive photo of Klaus Fischer’s mansion on Wight before it became a ruin. He stood before the main entrance in broadcloth suiting and spats. It flashed suddenly into her mind and she shivered.
‘Some places feel diseased,’ Ginger said. ‘As though the evil things thought about and done there are contagious.’
‘The place where Max Askew worked was like that?’
Ginger nodded slowly. ‘The place where he lived too, according to Malcolm.’
‘I went there. He took me there but I went in alone. It felt funny; sort of cold and restless at the same time. Like something squirming, almost. Hard to describe in words.’
‘Words don’t get close,’ Ginger said. ‘They’re feelings we had before words were ever thought of and first voiced. They’re ancient feelings. They’re the oldest part of us.’
‘Why did you want to see me today, Ginger?’
He was silent for a long time before answering. Then he said, ‘I wanted to warn you. The inquest will say Malcolm Stuart died by his own hand. But we both know he didn’t. He came to me to ask about Max Askew to learn something he could pass on to you. He just wanted an excuse to see you again. If that was enough to get him killed, you’re probably in a lot of trouble. I don’t think Martin Mear is a healthy subject to be researching.’
‘What did you tell DC Sorley?’
‘Nothing to make him change what passes for his mind. He’s one of those young coppers who thinks
everyone over the age of forty senile.’
Ruthie smiled. ‘You’re a long way off senile.’
‘Senile or punch-drunk,’ Ginger said. ‘I met Martin Mear, once. I didn’t tell Malcolm that, but I did. He didn’t much resemble his Uncle Max, I can tell you. Max Askew you’d have trouble picking out in an identity parade. His nephew was charismatic, a human klieg light, lighting up the room, making it glow around him. It was at a wrap party for a movie I was in. They’d used a couple of Ghost Legion songs on the soundtrack and the whole band was there, all dead now, bless ’em.’
‘Which strikes me as odd. Or it would if I were an actuary.’
That made Ginger McCabe chuckle. ‘You don’t much resemble an actuary, miss.’
‘What was he like, Martin? At the party?’
‘He was making stuff disappear. Coins, wristwatches, wallets, all this women’s tomfoolery.’
‘Tomfoolery?’
‘Jewellery.’
‘Oh.’
‘The director’s Rolex came off his arm and somehow Martin got it onto mine. Director wasn’t happy about that but pretended to be amused. Martin was a big star, after all. I couldn’t see how it was done. Couldn’t see the join at all, if you get my drift. Told him it was a bloody good trick.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was smiling but he had this detachment, this look in his eyes. Could’ve been drugs, don’t think it was. Like someone amused by something secret they’re not going to amuse you by sharing. He told me I was mistaken. Said there was no need for trickery.’
‘How did he strike you?’