The Lucifer Chord

by F. G. Cottam

  She decided she would toss a coin over future involvement with the Martin Mear box-set project. The heads or tails wouldn’t be definitive, but it was a good way of gauging how she actually felt about continuing with it. Either she’d feel disappointed or she’d be relieved. But she wouldn’t honestly know which of those it was until the coin fell flat and still.

  ‘Heads I carry on, tails I pack it up and go home,’ she said aloud.

  It was tails. She felt a tinge of anti-climax and then the overwhelming certainty that she couldn’t go home. Not yet, she couldn’t. She had unfinished business with Michael Aldridge. She had unfinished business with Paula Tort and April Mear and Sir Terence Maloney and Carter Fucking Melville. She would hire a car in the morning and drive to the Dorset village near the stone circle earmarked for Sunday’s Legion-inspired ritual. She would get to the heart of the enigma that was Martin. She would solve his mystery. She had a proven knack for doing that.

  She looked up and saw the split-screen Morris Minor parked a little way down Hercules Road. She couldn’t tell at the distance whether there was anyone at the wheel. She wasn’t headed in that direction and it didn’t matter anyway. She finished up her second drink, got up from where she sat as planned and buttoned her coat for the short walk home. When she got to the door, with her key in the lock, her phone rang. And Frederica Daunt’s number showed on the display.

  NINETEEN

  The circle of standing stones was five miles to the south of Shaftesbury, on private land owned by a farmer named Edward Coyle. Coyle was a committed Ghost Legion fan who Ruthie thought privately might well deserve to be committed. He maintained a Ghost Legion fan-site on the internet. He seemed to credit Martin Mear with the status of a prophet, if not some kind of deity. Some of what he claimed struck Ruthie just as classic conspiracy theorizing.

  The salient facts about Martin Mear’s death were scarce and becoming increasingly difficult to verify. 1975 was a long time ago and the people directly concerned with the event sometimes misremembered and in some cases had died. He was believed to have been killed by electrocution while rehearsing for a concert in Morocco. There was heavy rain, a leaky roof and miles of exposed power cables used to generate noise on a stage. But the location had been remote and the weather sultry and once pronounced dead, he was buried without a post-mortem. There wasn’t a death certificate. No one had thought to photograph his corpse. His grave had gone unmarked.

  There had been attempts over the years to locate the grave with a view to disinterring his remains and re-burying them with suitable ceremony in a suitably lavish tomb. But Paula Tort had been extremely hostile to this idea. Paula had not been the main beneficiary of Martin’s will, that had been his daughter, April. But Paula Tort built her business in the years following Martin’s demise. She had extremely deep pockets and a talent for getting what she wanted – or didn’t want – done. She wanted Martin spared the indignity of exhumation. She’d apparently been with him on that fatal day in Morocco but if she knew where he was buried, she wasn’t saying.

  According to Edward Coyle’s fan-site, Martin had been murdered.

  ‘Well of course he was murdered,’ Ruthie said to herself, puffing away against the rules at the wheel of her hire car, door windows optimistically open a chink, a bottle of Febreze ready for action later on the front passenger seat.

  A disparate group had conspired to kill him because he undermined the American values they so treasured. The group included then President Richard Nixon, NATO General Alexander Haig and Evangelist Billy Graham.

  ‘And probably Elvis Presley,’ Ruthie said, to her audience of no one. ‘Elvis wouldn’t have liked the competition.’

  Ruthie thought Edward Coyle an object lesson in what happens when fandom turns into obsession. She thought that she might explain her research brief to him and get a few outrageous Mear-related quotes. It would add colour to the essay and surely fans who’d become fanatics had their place in a world as excessive and distorted as the world of heavy rock. Idolatry and delusion weren’t terribly far apart. In fact, she thought, idolatry was a sort of delusion.

  The significant thing about Edward Coyle in practical terms was that everyone was welcome at the event he was staging. You didn’t even need to think that the Clamouring would work, or would ever really be enacted on a sufficiently epic scale to have a chance of working. You just had to be a sincere liker of Ghost Legion’s music. And speeding along a blessedly uncluttered A303, listening to them on the car’s hi-fi system, Ruthie realized that somewhat to her surprise, she’d become very much that now.

  She was staying in Shaftesbury, in Bell Street, in a cottage with a wood-burner and a pretty garden she’d found on AirBnB for not very much of Carter Melville’s expenses money. She’d booked it for two nights and had arranged to collect the keys from a Mrs Hughes, a volunteer staffing the public library on the opposite side of the road. The cottage was charming and cosy with only one real problem, which was the thatched roof. Thatch meant spiders and autumn was the season for them and Ruthie didn’t like spiders at all. So she’d gathered some conkers from under the horse-chestnut trees in Archbishop’s Park before setting off. They were in a paper bag in her travel case in the boot.

  She parked in the Silver Band car park, which was free, and walked the short distance to the library and then on to where she was staying. She made herself a cup of tea. She checked her phone for messages and saw that the reception wasn’t great. She unpacked and fired up her laptop and re-read the stuff on Edward Coyle’s fan-site; not the mad stuff, just the stuff about the timetable for tomorrow’s event at his circle of stones. Then she read an independent history of the stone circle. But before she did any of that, she took out her conkers and left them in little trails under the doors and windows, wishing she’d known conkers were a spider deterrent for many years longer than she had.

  Ruthie shopped for wine and other essentials at the Co-op branch she’d been told she’d find at the end of the road. Then she lit the wood-burner. And then she pondered on her strange conversation of the previous evening with Frederica Daunt.

  Frederica hadn’t dusted down her Ouija board again. She’d succumbed to the heat of Portugal’s apparent Indian summer and taken a siesta. She’d dreamed of an angry man. The anger was in the man’s tone and gesticulation. His features were nondescript and bland. She said he was a man it would be difficult to pick out at an identity parade or to photofit even with the new computer software police forces used.

  ‘What was he angry about?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘How was he dressed?’

  ‘Like a geography teacher,’ Frederica said, ‘the sort that taught me, anyway. Tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows.’

  ‘I’ve seen him,’ Ruthie said. ‘I saw his parked car tonight.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s real, Ruthie. Not in the way that you would understand the word. If you see him again, on no account engage with him. Act as though he isn’t there, as though he doesn’t exist. Engaging is very dangerous.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I mean it, Frederica.’

  There was a silence. Then, ‘My friends call me Freddie.’

  ‘Goodnight, Freddie.’

  ‘Goodnight, Ruthie. And take care.’

  The stones were Neolithic. The site had been erected five thousand years ago, for what purpose nobody knew. There were twenty-four stones in total and they’d been quarried in Derbyshire. The circle they formed was geometrically precise. They were each about sixteen feet high, but six of those feet were their foundation, buried firmly in the ground. They each weighed around ten tons. Quite a feat logistically for a Bronze Age tribe. Unless the tribes had come together to achieve the feat collectively. And a feat dwarfed by Stonehenge, where some of the sarsens weighed forty tons and had somehow been transported to Wiltshire from a quarry in Wales.

  Sheep kept the grass neatly clipped at Edward Coyle’s
stone circle. The stones themselves were granite and rose like gaunt enigmas from the ground. The weather forecast was good and there was to be a side-show of festival-type entertainment. A fire-eater and a team of acrobats were billed. There were to be beer and cider tents and stalls selling food. Profit wasn’t the motive – Coyle owned five thousand acres of prime arable Dorset farmland. Paying proper tribute was the motive. Around a thousand people were expected to attend and they would come from all over the world.

  Just after nine o’clock on Saturday evening, Michael Aldridge called her. Ruthie went into the garden to speak to him, where the signal was slightly stronger.

  ‘How’s your week turning out?’

  ‘Eventful.’

  ‘Why does that sound so ominous?’

  ‘I’ve got no proof anything’s ominous, Michael. I’ve just got a feeling that the truth about Martin Mear is going to turn out to be really weird. How’s your gorgeous daughter?’

  ‘Fast asleep, as of five minutes ago.’

  ‘You’re an architect,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  ‘And you do restoration work, old houses.’

  ‘Grand old houses,’ Michael said.

  ‘Have you ever been in one that’s haunted?’

  ‘Where’s this going, Ruthie?’

  ‘There’s something odd about that address I told you about in Shadwell. Would you come there with me on Monday afternoon?’

  ‘If the alternative is you going there alone, then yes.’

  ‘What are you like with locks?’

  ‘I know how to get through them,’ he said.

  ‘Then we’re in business.’

  ‘Breaking and entering on a Monday afternoon,’ he said. ‘Probably a routine assignment for you. Probably just your way of staying young.’

  It was a comfort to hear his voice. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d felt ever since Frederica Daunt’s warning of the previous evening until relaxing now, smiling to herself, listening to Michael’s words. She was alone in a strange place in a quite remote part of the country. And all she had for protection was her conkers for the spiders. She remembered the concern in Carter Melville’s tone when he’d told her to watch her back. Both generally and specifically, he’d said. There were things people knew that she wasn’t being told and the deception was deliberate and she knew that now. She was sure of it.

  ‘The address you’re talking about belonged to the man who worked for Martens and Degrue, didn’t it, Ruthie?’

  ‘Proctor Court,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something there. I need to find it.’

  ‘We both know who Martens and Degrue are really.’

  ‘That’s my point.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Try me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m in Dorset. The Legionaries have these warm-ups for the big event when they orchestrate the Clamouring and bring Martin Mear back to life.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Not quite, but the same principle, I suppose,’ Ruthie said.

  ‘Except occult, or pagan, rather than Christian.’

  ‘I suppose. I’ll have a clearer picture this time tomorrow. I’m going to try to speak to the lunatic responsible for organizing it. They’re doing it at a stone circle.’

  ‘Course they are,’ he said. ‘And it’s Dorset, so there’ll be cider involved. The Wurzels. Maybe Mumford & Sons.’

  ‘Ghost Legion only,’ she said. ‘And they take it extremely seriously. People attend religiously.’

  ‘Sacrilegiously.’

  ‘That too, I suppose.’

  He didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘I wish you were here.’

  ‘And I wish you were here, Michael. But you’re on Mollie-time.’

  ‘No hot date then?’

  ‘I’ve got one of those on Monday,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the plan for the rest of this evening?’

  ‘A bit of exercise,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Wrestling the top off a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.’

  TWENTY

  There were probably five hundred people gathered at the site when Ruthie got there on a bright Sunday shortly before noon. She followed cardboard signs attached to wooden posts along a lane that petered into a track before opening out into a meadow become temporary car park. From there she could see a trail of people headed for a low hill. She assumed that the standing stones would be on the other side of it. Cake stalls and tightrope walkers might be OK, but Coyle evidently didn’t want vehicles ruining the mood anywhere within sight of his ceremony.

  She studied the cars. She was no one’s idea of a petrol-head, but she thought the vehicles might provide a first insight into the socio-economic status and also into the age of the Legionaries. And there were a few real classics sprinkled among them. She saw a Bristol, a Jensen, several MGs and a smattering of original VW Beetles. There were at least three E-type Jags. There were a couple of Triumph Stags, some wire-wheeled Morgans and a beautiful old Sunbeam Rapier. Audis and Saabs from more recent years proliferated. There were several Harley Davidson motorcycles and a disproportionately high number of Land Rover Defenders, even for the West of England.

  People straggled over the hill brow in small clusters, in conversation, some of them gesticulating, none of them paying any undue attention to her. She was attired in black jeans and a black pullover under a black wool coat. Her boots were black Doc Marten’s and only a red silk scarf worn around her neck broke the monochromatic Goth rulebook. Most people there, when she summitted the hill and saw what lay on the other side, were dressed the way people had dressed at festivals in the early 1970s. There were Afghan coats and what looked like authentic WW2 flying jackets. There was a lot of denim and a lot of hair and the crowd were split roughly seventy–thirty, she thought, in favour of men.

  The atmosphere was quite subdued. Ruthie, who had a natural distrust of the outdoors, didn’t do festivals and never had, but she thought there would have been more excitement, more of an anticipatory buzz at one of those. She thought that probably this was a reflection of the fact that the headline act here were all of them deceased. And that statistical anomaly struck her again. She didn’t know the odds against there being no survivors into their seventies of the four members of Ghost Legion, but she knew there were several very pickled rock gods still breathing. Still, for that matter, performing.

  She saw a man approaching her like someone swimming against the tide. He wore a battered brown leather coat like an aviator from Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus in about 1917. He had on cavalry boots and jodhpurs. The coat was unbuttoned and open to reveal a mint-condition vintage Ghost Legion tour T-shirt probably worth close to a grand on eBay. He was smiling at her, beaming in a way that made her think she must have met and then forgotten him at some point in her past. She smiled back, mortified, desperately trying to remember. He stopped in front of her and thrust out his hand and she felt obliged to shake it.

  ‘Edward Coyle,’ he said, ‘Eddie to you.’

  ‘Ruthie Gillespie.’

  ‘I know. I got the press release. Oh, it’s all embargoed until the week of the actual release and Carter’s a bugger for protocol, but I know you’re doing the research for the book in the box-set goodies. My daughter’s thrilled. She’s your biggest fan.’

  The boots and the coat were antique and the jodhpurs beautifully tailored. He was probably wearing a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of clothing. As if to emphasize the point, he pushed his sleeve back to look at his wristwatch and she caught a glimpse of a Tudor Black Bay. She’d described this man as a lunatic to Michael Aldridge the previous night, but he’d have been the most flamboyantly dressed in the asylum by a mile. He was evidently a prosperous lunatic with rather distinctive taste.

  ‘Do you own the Sunbeam in the car park?’

  Eddie Coyle grimaced. ‘Defender, I’m afraid. Bit cliched, but what can
you do? Most of my driving’s off road.’

  ‘How long have you been a Ghost Legion fan?’

  The grimace became a wide grin. ‘For ever,’ he said.

  Which Ruthie knew was an exaggeration. It had to be because the man standing in front of her couldn’t have been over forty.

  ‘You’re on first-name terms with Carter Melville?’

  ‘No biggy. Carter’s hot on protocol but doesn’t do formality at all. Unless your experience has been different to mine and he calls you Ms Gillespie, which I somehow doubt.’

  ‘Can I take up a few minutes of your time, Eddie?’

  Coyle looked again at his wristwatch. ‘Things to do, Ruthie, people to see. Maybe after the fireworks?’

  ‘Literally fireworks?’

  He grinned again and winked. ‘You’ll see,’ he said.

  More and more people were arriving. And Ruthie noticed that the sky was darkening. Rain hadn’t looked likely earlier, but it was beginning to now. She saw that the refreshment tents were firmly shut and she hadn’t seen a single acrobatic tumble or a solitary tongue of bellowed flame. The food stalls had not yet opened. There was no smell of hog roast or burger meat on air untainted by fried onions or the sickly drift from a waffle iron. There were to be no preliminaries, she realized. The business end of things came first. The fun and games would follow the solemn ceremony.

  People were forming a circle of their own around the stones. In some places, they were tiered three-deep. Ruthie estimated there had to be at least a thousand people there, each holding the hands of their neighbour, most with their eyes closed, some wearing beatific smiles, no one actually touching the stones in the circle they surrounded.

  Ruthie became aware that a drone was sounding, somewhere. People were starting to hum. A noise grew from the back of a thousand throats and became a note and then a hummed song. She recognized the melody. It was ‘Cease All Mourning’, the sixth and final song on the sixth Ghost Legion album. It was noon and the sun had disappeared behind a low, stretched veil of thickening grey. Someone poked Ruthie hard in the back as her prompt to join the singing and she stumbled forward and almost fell and for the first time had the inkling that the afternoon might not go well as the first fat raindrop hit in front of her right ear and dribbled down her cheek.