by F. G. Cottam
Ginger knew that most men of his vintage struggled with more than one or two flights of steps. But he was a vigorous man for his age. He was still fairly agile and his wind was good. He thought of himself as similar really to a cared-for vintage car, old, but regularly serviced. He still attended his old gym three times a week. His days of skipping over a heavy leather rope were behind him, but he still did a bit of round-shadow and he was still capable of three or four rounds on the heavy bag. So he got to Max Askew’s door breathing normally, his heart thudding away at a respectable sixty beats a minute.
The upper third of the door was paned glazing, nine little square lozenges of frosted glass above an over-large Green Man knocker, bronze and truly greened over time and grinning evilly. It seemed melodramatic to Ginger McCabe to think that way but think it he did, standing there as a light rain began to fall from a sky turned gunmetal now and the raindrops hitting the brittle leaves of the pavement trees lining the block with a sound like a ghost ordering the world to hush.
Ginger shivered. It wasn’t cold. He was wearing a Crombie overcoat over a three-piece suit and there was a woollen scarf around his neck and he had just climbed three flights of stairs. But he shivered anyway. Proctor Court was entirely still and but for that whisper of rain, all was silent. The Green Man grinned and glared, the knocker redundant, for of course, no one was home. For a mad moment, Ginger thought about using it anyway, as a sort of dare with himself, just to see what doing so would summon, or conjure. But he didn’t, because at that moment something caught his eye, entering his peripheral vision from the right, from the street.
Where a grey Morris Minor had come to a halt at the kerb. Which prompted Ginger to think that you didn’t see those too often these days. Not in that condition you didn’t, because this example was weirdly pristine, the coachwork and split windscreen gleaming as though with a factory finish. Ginger had time to wonder how the car lustred so in the falling rain before the driver wound his window down and the bland features of Max Askew arranged themselves into a smile and Askew waved at him before driving serenely on. Max Askew, aged not a day.
Ginger McCabe collected himself. He was not a man easily spooked. He could not remember enduring the feeling he felt now since an afternoon more than fifty years earlier, catching a glimpse of a painting in a building on the Shadwell docks.
He went for a much needed drink. He got to the Prospect of Whitby at six-thirty. The Prospect was a historic pub and rightly famed for its perfectly preserved decor. It was also a horrible tourist trap usually full of German and Japanese coach parties taking endless selfies sipping token pints; but Ginger remained badly shaken even after the twenty-minute walk to the pub and he needed a stiff one and beggars couldn’t really be choosers, could they?
After two large White & Mackay whiskies and a pint of Guinness he felt much better. Not quite yet his old self, but getting there. Ginger McCabe had ridden a lot of hurtful punches in his time and he’d taken a fair few right on the chin, but he’d never been off his feet and he’d never taken a standing count either.
Three doubles in, he began to rationalize what he’d seen.
He’d been suggestible, was all. He’d had to revisit his Martens and Degrue story not once but twice, after an interval of half a century. Malcolm Stuart’s death had been grisly, sad, shocking and suspicious. The Green Man door knocker had been right out of a Hammer Horror movie. And Ginger had featured briefly in a couple of those. He’d played a grave robber in one, a phantom horseman in another. The Morris Minor had been real. It was a collectable car but hardly unique, you could bid for them on eBay. It hadn’t been Max Askew at the wheel. It had just been a blond young chap, a car enthusiast, waving from the wheel, full of neighbourly joys on a dismal day.
Ginger liked this version of events. They emboldened him. Or maybe the drink did that, or a combination of alcohol and positive thinking. He’d got his swagger back, or at least he’d get his swagger back when he got up from the table he sat at near the pub’s picture window overlooking the river. He’d go and look at whatever now occupied the spot where Martens and Degrue’s baleful old building had been before someone public spirited – probably the Port Authority – had had it blown to smithereens at the start of the 1970s. He’d lorded it, had Ginger, back in the day on the docks. He’d go back there. It was no distance. He’d do a bit of gloating.
Getting to his feet and weaving through the throng was trickier than he thought it would be and Ginger realized that he was actually a bit pissed. He’d always had a strong head for drink, but you had to make allowances for age and he’d eaten nothing since a light lunch prior to his afternoon siesta. Then he’d had a shock, hadn’t he?
It was fully dark when he got outside. Breathing fresh air wobbled him a bit further, but then his oxygenated lungs cleared his head and he set off at a determined lick, a big, dapper, distinguished-looking man with a prosperous air and a purposeful stride.
The river’s edge was even more sobering, when he got there. The commerce was gone, the bustle absent, the sights and importantly the smells of the docks nothing more than a cherished memory soon not to be even that. Wharves and warehouse buildings were now luxury flats. Ginger breathed in the dank Thames odour remembering when the spot he stood on had smelled of hemp rope and fruit cases and baled tobacco. It was almost completely quiet. All he was aware of hearing above distant traffic noise was the gentle lapping of water. He went to look.
As he toppled down, before he hit, Ginger McCabe had time to think the job expertly done. Two simultaneous knees buckling his, the single, firm, flat-handed push to coincide with it between his shoulder blades. A generous target. He had a broad back. Two men? One, if he really knew what he was doing. Ginger surfaced gasping at the cold, thinking he did.
He mumbled a useless prayer he was in slack water as the current took him and the weight of what he wore dragged him under to travel its length unseen.
EIGHTEEN
Veronica Slade was the possessor of a Ph.D. in the history of art. She held a job at one of London’s most venerable and most esteemed auction houses. She worked in Mayfair and was a frequent business traveller. Her job involved authentication and establishing provenance and evaluating the worth of artefacts before they went under the hammer in the sales room. She was highly respected and generously paid. She owed her friendship with Ruthie Gillespie to Michael Aldridge.
Veronica’s firm had come into possession of a goblet of dubious provenance that proved to have been not just a goblet, but a ceremonial chalice once owned by the Jericho Society. It had been at the centre of their rituals and they badly wanted it back. She linked the chalice to a long-demolished building on Wight on property now owned by Aldridge. She cold-called him and he agreed to meet her. At their face-to-face, he told her truthfully that no one knew more about this sinister cult than Ruthie Gillespie did. Their temple on Wight had been reduced to rubble in the time of Ruthie’s grandfather, who’d had a hand in that event. Aldridge had been the victim of a Jericho Society conspiracy from which Ruthie had basically saved him. His marriage had not survived the fallout from that, but Michael believed he owed Ruthie his daughter Mollie’s life.
Veronica travelled to Wight to meet Ruthie. And Ruthie helped Veronica extricate herself from a situation that had seemed to her both deadly and inescapable. She did this partly out of a natural inclination to help those in distress. She was motivated also by an energetic hatred of everything the Jericho Society represented. And there was the fact that from the moment they met, Ruthie Gillespie and Veronica Slade established that strong bond of friendship which sometimes occurs only when people are opposites as characters.
On Friday morning, Veronica phoned in sick to work. This was a lie. She wasn’t sick. She made the call because at 8.45 am, Ruthie was seated in her garden, weeping and already halfway through a bottle of white wine. Chablis, probably, she thought. Though Ruthie would drink Sauvignon Blanc or Blanc de Blanc at a stretch. This looked like a stretch. Ve
ronica thought that today, turpentine might very well do the job.
Veronica went outside. She’d dressed for work before abandoning her schedule and her heels sank into the well-tended turf of her neat little lawn. Ruthie looked a mess. Up close, her eyes were raw and she reeked of booze and tobacco. Her glass was almost empty. Her ashtray already teemed. Veronica moved the chair opposite where Ruthie sat closer to her and sat down beside her and put an arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. She hugged Ruthie hard and Ruthie sobbed and hugged her back.
‘What happened?’
‘Somebody died.’
‘I know. The boy.’
‘Not him, someone else. Because of him. Because of me. An old man. Kind. Courtly. Found in the Thames in the early hours at Greenwich. It was on the news. The regional news. He was quite well known. I mean, he’d been quite well known, in his day.’
‘Accident?’ Veronica said. ‘Suicide?’
Ruthie shook her head. ‘He and the boy had something in common. An address.’
‘And this is all to do with Martin Mear?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Maybe you need to leave that alone.’
‘Probably. Except I signed a contract.’
‘With someone litigious?’
Ruthie sniffed. ‘I’d think very.’
Veronica was silent. Then she said. ‘On Tuesday night, you slept with Michael Aldridge, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was that?’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Planning to see him again?’
‘He has his daughter, Mollie, for the weekend. I’m seeing him on Monday night.’
‘I know you, Ruthie. When you’ve sobered up and slept, you’ll feel inclined to visit this address, wherever it is. But you’re not going back there. Not without Michael Aldridge holding your hand. Promise me?’
‘I promise.’
Veronica stood.
‘Where are you going?’
‘On a mission of mercy. Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, that kind of thing. Orange juice, freshly squeezed. Hot buttered toast. I’m going to feed you and then you’re going back to bed. Even in your world, darling, wine before noon is a bit extreme.’
By four o’clock on Friday afternoon, Ruthie felt slightly parched but completely sober after a few extra hours of sleep and what she thought of as a good cry. She considered it entirely possible that Ginger McCabe had met with a mishap. He’d been spotted early on Thursday evening by a film buff who’d recognized him in the Prospect of Whitby, drinking alone and liberally. He was a man elderly by any standards and drink affected the elderly more potently than it did the young. He’d gone into the river fully clothed. The police were saying there were no suspicious circumstances. The post-mortem would confirm that he was intoxicated at the time of his falling into the river. He was a classic accident victim.
Except that Ruthie didn’t believe in coincidence and two people had died in under a week and there was a connection between them and it was Max Askew or it was Proctor Court, where Max Askew had lived.
Ginger had been a thorn in the side of Martens and Degrue in the 1960s, but he’d been no more really than a minor irritant. They’d dealt with him with a combination of brazen contempt from Peter Clore and patronizing dishonesty from Askew himself. Basically, they’d just brushed him off and he’d not been in a position to do anything significant about it. If they’d threatened him, he’d probably have been sufficiently brave and headstrong to do something about it physically, to retaliate with his educated fists. But that hadn’t happened. He would have told her if it had. His experience with Martens and Degrue had been strange and strangely incomplete, but that was often how life happened. Life wasn’t the same as a feature film with everything neatly tied up in an emphatic ending. Life was what John Lennon said it was; what happens when you’re making other plans.
If Ginger’s death had been deliberately contrived, it wasn’t the settling of an old score. It was about what was happening now. And it involved Max Askew or his old flat at Proctor Court or maybe both.
Ruthie called Carter Melville.
‘Baby. How was April?’
‘Forthcoming. Sweet, actually. Rather poignant. She still misses him.’
‘So would you, if you’d known him like I did. A day doesn’t go by I don’t miss Martin.’
‘He was a contradictory man, Carter.’
‘All of us are, baby. Different people to everyone who knows us. All that existential bullshit.’
Ruthie thought bullshit was precisely what it was.
‘What’s next?’
‘Some Legionaries are planning a Clamouring rehearsal at a stone circle in Dorset on Sunday afternoon. You OK with me hiring a car?’
‘Invited or gatecrashing?’
‘Anyone can turn up.’
‘They’re a bit dark, some of them. It’s a ghoulish agenda.’
Ruthie said, ‘Is that a warning?’
‘People with extreme beliefs can be paranoid is all, hon. But the car’s totally cool. Expense anything you need. Hotels, flights, no one makes an omelette and all that.’
‘Can’t really imagine you making an omelette, Carter.’
‘But I’m capable of a figure of speech.’
‘No argument there.’
‘Baby?’
‘Carter?’
‘Book a nice hotel for Sunday night in Devon.’
‘Dorset.’
‘Whatever. And watch your back.’
‘Generally?’
‘And specifically,’ he said. ‘Watch your back.’
After her conversation with Carter Melville concluded, Ruthie deliberated over calling Frederica Daunt. She thought she might profit from Frederica getting out her Ouija board again. She might get some clue as to whether malice had been involved in the death of Ginger McCabe. Or she might just trigger some jeopardy risking the wellbeing of Frederica and her father. She didn’t think Ouija boards inherently magical or evil. She thought if they were anything at all they were catalysts. As such, though, they could be dangerous.
She decided against it, because she thought the risk likely to outweigh the reward. She was still mindful of how badly wrong the séance had gone, still able to remember Frederica shrieking over the phone as her damaged ears bled in the taxi as she fled for the airport the following day.
Ruthie was alone in Veronica’s flat, contemplating all this. Veronica tended to spend weekends with her French farmer boyfriend. She was a person who valued routine. Ruthie’s routine had involved her cottage in Ventnor, her sea-scholar boyfriend and her word count when writing. All that remained of all that was the cottage. She couldn’t really imagine writing fiction again. It was a life of surprises, as the old song went, and some of them weren’t very nice.
She was seated by the window in her guest bedroom with a view of the street outside. Friday afternoon was lulling its way into Friday evening and she had no immediate plans. There was a car parked opposite, an old Morris Minor, grey coachwork, split windscreen, mint condition. A man leaned against it, smoking. He had blond hair and a bland expression and he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches stitched to the elbows. He glanced up, perhaps sensing her scrutinizing him and his expression was too distant or just too noncommittal for Ruthie to read. Then he blew smoke at the sky and got into the car and it trundled away.
Her phone rang. She saw with no surprise whatsoever that it was Frederica Daunt.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Just sitting here trying not to smoke.’
‘With you on that one. Daddy disapproves.’
‘Your father still there?’
‘He’s babysitting. He says he’ll leave when he thinks it safe for him to leave. He’ll probably be here till Christmas.’
‘Well. It’s a family time.’
‘You sound upset.’
‘Someone died. Two people. I didn’t know either well, but both were nice and I feel to blam
e.’
Frederica was quiet. Then she said, ‘Are you to blame?’
‘One of them tried to warn me. Warn me off, really. Martin Mear might have been involved with some very unsavoury people. I think it likely, actually. They’re Satanists. They’re secretive and absolutely serious.’
‘Do you want to tell me about the two people who died?’
‘Is that wise?’
Carefully, Frederica said, ‘It isn’t like googling someone, Ruthie. It isn’t straightforward and it’s far from unequivocal. But you can learn things. And sometimes the things you learn are quite valuable.’
‘I think one of them has communicated with you already, through the Ouija board. The name you got is mine. I’m Ruthie May. The numbers you gave me were where he was found.’
‘I see. Tell me about the other one.’
‘You can google him,’ Ruthie said. ‘He was once quite famous.’
At eight o’clock, she went to the pub. The Pineapple was only a five-minute walk from Veronica’s flat. Going to the pub wasn’t the same as going to the dogs and she’d resolved only to have a couple of drinks before turning in for the night. It was a mild evening and she sat at one of the vacant bench seats attached to the tables outside. If she was hassled, she’d just drink up and leave. But she didn’t think she would be. The pub was close to Kennington Police Station and quite a few off-duty officers drank there at the end of their shifts. That tended to give the place a bit of decorum, better manners than would otherwise have been the case.