by F. G. Cottam
‘We’re not going straight to the site,’ he said. ‘I’ve organized a beach barbecue as dinner for a few of my English Legionary friends. We’ll eat and then go on. It’s another thirty minutes on along the sand. Thus the four-wheel-drive. Quite a remote spot, as I think I’ve already told you.’
‘And the attendance will reflect that?’
Coyle laughed. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘This is a very committed group of people. The ink suggests otherwise, but are you a prudish person, Ruthie?’
‘Why should my morals concern you?’
‘They don’t, directly. It’s just that some of tonight’s attendees are likely to be naked. And some of them are likely to be uninhibited too.’
‘I thought Portugal was a Catholic country,’ Ruthie said.
‘The location’s more or less incidental,’ Coyle said. ‘The Clamouring is essentially a pagan ceremony. In Catholic terms, it would count as blasphemous.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘We believers are expecting big things ultimately from Martin Mear. Well, actually one big thing. But coming back from the dead is a trick only Christ has successfully performed in the past. He did it with Lazarus and then took a personal turn.’
‘Allegedly.’
‘Cynic,’ Coyle said.
And Ruthie realized that now they were nearing their destination, he was getting some of his bounce back. And she wondered if she was an unwitting guest at her first ever orgy. She hoped not. She wasn’t about to participate. And she didn’t think she’d get off on watching either.
There were a dozen of Eddie Coyle’s guests at the barbecue and Ruthie thought that all of them were likelier to look better in their clothes. There were nine men and three women. Half a dozen – including one of the woman – were bikers. The rest looked like academics, except for a very chic couple she judged to be in the Paula Tort class of affluence.
She remembered Paula’s words concerning Eddie Coyle then, He’s a fucking idiot. And she smiled to herself. She was eating bread and cheese, keeping things light, and drinking only cola, keeping things sober. Everyone else was drinking wine or beer and some of them shipping quite a lot of it. One of the bikers had lit a Withnail and I-sized spliff. It smelled strong, probably packed she thought with lethal Amsterdam skunk. It reminded her that drugs and the occult had always gone hand in hand. And that reminded her of the debauched tone and rich Turkish tobacco scent emanating from an empty bathroom at the derelict Fischer House and despite the southern European warmth of the oncoming evening, Ruthie shivered.
The barbecue wrapped up and they set off in a convoy of two Jeeps and four powerful motorcycles with what Ruthie judged to be no one completely sober at the wheel. She was glad that the soft sand they travelled over restricted their speed and happier to be on a beach that she would have been on a Continental road. The sun was setting and it set quickly in Portugal. She couldn’t help thinking that the pagan rite she was about to witness was little more than an excuse for a piss-up attended by a bunch of hedonists with a taste for mysticism. She’d noticed one of bikers wore a horned Viking helmet.
The atmosphere, when they reached the site, was very different from what it had been at the stone circle in Dorset. There, everything had been serious and no one had been drunk. Here there was a restlessness to the mood of a much bigger crowd. There was a circle, but it comprised nine enormous bonfires built on the sand. There was an effigy mounted at the top of each but the bonfires had been lit before their arrival and the flames were too fierce to make out who the burning figures were meant to resemble.
There would be no communal singing either, Ruthie realized, noticing a huge pair of Marshall speakers rigged on a platform erected behind the bonfire furthest from the sea. They crackled and squawked with feedback at a volume that made her flinch. Ash burned the back of her throat. Smoke made her eyes smart and she knew that she was sweating. The radiant heat from the bonfires was fierce and the crowd dense, jostling, volatile and maybe even dangerous. The opening chord of ‘Cease All Mourning’ thundered through cinder-filled air and a huge triumphant cheer went up and people all around her started wrestling themselves out of their clothes.
Someone grabbed at her breasts from behind her and Ruthie wrenched herself effortfully free and turned and it was the biker in the horned helmet, his eyes glazed and his lips foam-flecked as though he’d taken a draught of poison or just become deranged. He’d grabbed her roughly and hard. She felt a flare of pain from the bruises on her back inflicted when she’d been trampled at her last Clamouring event. She tried to get out of the circle, stepping over and around coupling bodies, already grunting and thrusting urgently.
Someone grabbed her hand and it was Eddie Coyle. ‘We’re getting out of here,’ he shouted over the music vibrating through them. ‘This is going wrong.’
Stronger than he looked and sobered by events, he pulled her through the throng to where they’d parked the Jeep.
‘My God,’ Ruthie said, risking a glance back. ‘Look at that.’ She pointed. By moon and firelight, half a dozen figures seemed to be standing, rigid and unsinking on the surface of the sea. Each of them was naked. And they all had their arms raised, as if beseeching the heavens.
Eddie Coyle confirmed to Ruthie that the Viking-helmeted biker wasn’t staying with him at the rented hunting lodge. ‘No one’s staying, it’s just us,’ he said, ‘and your tits are perfectly safe, darling, with me.’
He drove slowly, sand swapped for scrub now in the headlamp beams, their progress on an upward incline, the odd sapling a spindly hint at the forest they would enter before they reached their shelter. Ruthie wasn’t in truth paying much attention to the terrain. Her reeling mind was struggling to make sense of what she’d seen.
If she didn’t take it at face value, then it was trickery. Skilled illusionists such as David Blaine or Dynamo could pull off that sort of stunt convincingly. But what would be the point? She thought she knew the answer to that question. The point was reinforcing Martin Mear’s mystique. It was helping that mystique grow. It was about enhancing a legend that helped shift five million units a year. It was about money, about profit, about guaranteeing a bottom line. And for that reason, the person most likely to be behind the smoke and mirrors was Carter Melville.
Was the man sitting next to her in on it? She thought that he probably was. Which made him not quite the idiot Paula Tort dismissed him as. He’d told her he was rich, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t also greedy and Carter Melville paid well above the going rate.
‘Penny for them,’ Eddie Coyle said.
‘How often does it go wrong like that?’
‘There’s a sense that we’re reaching the end-game,’ he said. ‘It’s encouraged a bit of hysteria and slightly altered the demographic. So we’re getting die-hard Legionaries but also sensation-seekers and an element of what back in the day was called the lunatic fringe. I don’t think synthetic drugs exactly enhance matters. When a crowd reaches a tipping point it becomes a mob. There was a contagious quality to the rutting back there. Didn’t you feel that?’
‘I wasn’t even tempted to take off my coat. The bloke who groped me looked deranged.’
‘I’d like to apologize for him.’
‘Some friend.’
‘More an acquaintance. Nobody’s searched. Nobody’s vetted or drug-tested. No one’s asked for a character reference. You get the odd bad apple.’
‘Back there you had a barrel full,’ Ruthie said.
‘Most of it looked consensual to me.’
Ruthie touched her sore forehead. ‘On the whole, I preferred Dorset,’ she said.
‘Are you up for a drink?’
‘Are you suggesting a date?’
‘You’re the wrong gender for me, darling,’ Coyle said.
‘Oh. But you said you had a daughter.’
‘Youthful aberration.’
‘I see.’
‘Frankly, your tits could be in Fort Knox for all the danger they’re i
n from me. What I’m suggesting is a drink at the lodge, which has a well-stocked bar for when the hunters want to wax nostalgic in the evening about all the wildlife they’ve butchered during the day.’
‘I think a drink is an excellent idea,’ Ruthie said, failing to add that she almost always thought that.
‘Would you do me a favour, Ruthie?’
‘Out of gratitude for letting me keep my bra on?’
‘I’m serious,’ he said.
‘I will if I can.’
‘Don’t let on to Carter about what an unholy mess tonight became. He doesn’t react well to any kind of negativity around Martin and Martin’s legend.’
Ruthie said, ‘You want it whitewashed?’
‘I’d just be grateful if you could tone it down,’ Coyle said.
‘I’ll confine myself to a description of that sea stunt,’ Ruthie said.
‘It wasn’t a stunt,’ Coyle said.
‘And I’m really looking forward to that drink.’
After breakfast the following morning, Eddie Coyle insisted on driving Ruthie the seventy miles to Frederica Daunt’s villa. She said she was more than content with a lift to the nearest place she could rent a hire car, but he was adamant. It was as much a gesture of contrition, she thought, as it was a bid to guarantee her silence concerning the ceremony on the beach of the previous night. She accepted because though she thought of herself as resilient, being groped had been one of her more unpleasant adult experiences. It could have been worse, but it was still a nasty violation.
She knew she had the right place as she waved Eddie off because a Mini Moke was parked outside it and Ruthie remembered Frederica’s choice description of the vehicle her father drove. They must have been looking out for her because Frederica opened the door before she got there and danced down the short flight of wooden steps and opened her arms and embraced her, hugging her hard. ‘Feels like it’s been years,’ she said.
It had been a little over a fortnight. But it felt a lot longer to Ruthie too.
She looked past Frederica to where a man now stood in her doorway. He had grey hair and a white beard and his skin was deeply tanned. He was wearing combats and one of those canvas jerkins fishermen were partial to, with ammo-pouch pockets everywhere. He had bunches of gap-year bangles on the wrists of both bared arms. He didn’t wear a wristwatch. And there was only one person he could really be. He came down the steps, openly scrutinizing her. It was like waiting for a verdict.
‘So you’re the spectre haunting Martin Mear,’ he said.
‘More stalking than haunting,’ she said.
‘I think he’d have been flattered,’ Sebastian said.
‘Oh? Why?’
‘Because you’re suitably picturesque, my dear. Martin valued beauty and brains in equal measure.’
‘You don’t know I’m smart.’
‘Freddie says you’re as sharp as a knife and I trust my daughter’s judgement in all matters except the consumption of tobacco.’
Ruthie pulled a face. ‘Is that going to be an issue?’
‘Probably not, now there are two of you to gang up on me,’ he said.
He wore flip-flops and when he turned his head, she saw he wore his hair in an abundant ponytail. He’d already proven himself physically vain and at least borderline sexist but he had to be over eighty and Ruthie liked him. There was something noble about someone who’d spent his entire life being so resolutely non-conformist as this man evidently was.
‘That was Edward Coyle at the wheel of the car you just got out of,’ he said. ‘The hair-style has changed, but he still attires himself like someone out of Thomas Hardy.’
‘Or Jethro Tull,’ Ruthie said.
That made Sebastian Daunt laugh. ‘On the cover of The Heavy Horses,’ he said.
‘You a Tull fan, Sebastian?’
‘Probably as keen on them as you are on Twisted Sister. What were you doing with him?’
‘He’s one of the Legionaries’ star turns. He’s a big cog in the Clamouring.’
‘That nonsense.’
‘There was an event last night, seventy miles south of here, on the coast. It very quickly became heavy nonsense.’
‘Come inside,’ Frederica said. ‘I’ll make us some lunch. It’s really good to see you, Ruthie.’
‘In one piece, you mean?’
‘I’ve spent the last fortnight worrying about both of us. I won’t lie about that.’
‘Shouldn’t lie about anything,’ her father said. ‘Tell one, you end up telling a hundred.’
Ruthie felt encouraged by his saying that. Carter Melville had kept things back from her she sensed, and Paula Tort had been forthright but still not entirely truthful in their formal interview. Sebastian was speaking off the record, which meant he could do so without repercussions. She thought the Martin Mear he’d tell her about as close to the man as anyone living could describe.
After their lunch, Sebastian Daunt slept for an hour, as he explained to Ruthie beforehand had been his regular habit for the last decade of his life. ‘You slow reluctantly. But you can rage against the dying of the light all you want, you still slow. Age is a bitch, Ruthie. I’ll nap and then we’ll talk.’
Ruthie spent that hour seated on Frederica’s balcony, shaded from the strong autumn sunshine by a table parasol, bringing her up to speed on where she’d got in the pursuit of her research, omitting some detail but telling her most of it, aware that Freddie had ways of finding things out unavailable to most people.
‘I came into contact with three versions of Martin,’ Sebastian Daunt said. ‘The first was the sweet boy who came to the commune to learn to play the guitar, to lose his virginity and to become a father far too young. The second Martin, the one I found dark and intimidating, arrived shortly after the success of King Lud. The third Martin was mellow and seemed to have achieved a measure of serenity and I didn’t know him for anything like long enough, because that Martin died prematurely.
‘My own relationship with the man was complex. I played a significant part in the success of Ghost Legion’s first album, which Martin actually composed and wrote and played and sang on solo, using a four-track tape machine. He was literally a one-man band. The cover art, according to the A&R men and the marketeers and the proprietors back then of record shops, suited the mood of the music with an almost uncanny aptness and played an iconic part in defining the future character of the Legion, the band’s perception in the minds of the press and wider public.
‘King Lud was the template, yet I honestly think Martin came to hate that album. I was on a car journey with him once, can’t remember where to or where from, and one of its tracks began to play on the radio. He grimaced and went pale and quite rigid. And then he reached out and turned it off. Black Solstice and Exiled Souls are better records, because by then James Prentice was on board and the band had discovered their groove. And the three albums with no names are peerless. But King Lud was where it all began and yet if he could have, I think he would have disowned it completely.
‘He wouldn’t even discuss it. Martin didn’t do many interviews. I think there’s the one carried by Rolling Stone and the televised one with Joan Bakewell and that’s pretty much it. Extraordinary really for someone so famous. But Martin was never a one for Lennon-style soundbites. This was way before the internet and even promo videos were still in their infancy because MTV was still a good decade away. Anyway, every journalist knew back then that if they ever got the chance to interview Martin, mention of King Lud would conclude matters very abruptly.
‘So there you go, Ruthie. A complex character. Quite a contradictory sort of man in some respects. A mesmeric performer, a devoted father and according to Paul Tort, a faithful lover. But not a man anyone knew everything about, partly because he was private but also because he was fundamentally unknowable.’
‘A keeper of secrets?’
‘I strongly suspect he had some of those. And suspect too that they were big ones.’
; ‘Thank you,’ Ruthie said. He had confirmed something she’d already strongly suspected. She switched off her tape machine.
‘This is all strictly off the record. Terrible pun but I want nothing to do with Melville’s ghastly commercial circus.’
‘I’m a researcher, Sebastian. I’m not a clown.’
‘No offence intended. Would you like a drink, Ruthie? All this talk has made me thirsty. I’m going to have a beer. I assume you’re staying here tonight?’
‘No offence taken. Carter Melville is a ring-master, right down to the red frock-coat and the whip. I’m staying at Frederica’s invitation until tomorrow. And white wine, if you have some.’
It was four in the afternoon. They joined Frederica in the kitchen where the three of them drank and ate tapas she’d prepared. Ruthie could not later have said at what time it was decided that they should get out the Ouija board. She thought they must have shipped quite a lot of alcohol for it to have seemed a good idea. She thought that the wisdom of age might have intervened in other circumstances, that Sebastian Daunt might at least have sounded a note of caution. But he was tired after his Martin Mear recollections and a bit lager-befuddled and so he just went with the flow.
They did it there in the kitchen, by candlelight. They did it at an old oak table far too sturdy to shiver or tilt under the joint pressure of their fingertips. Ruthie tested it with a knee and reckoned it probably weighed a quarter of a ton. A bodybuilder couldn’t have shifted it.
Ruthie liked candles in the same way that she liked incense burners and joss sticks and songs sung by Siouxsie and the Banshees. But these were tallow candles and smelled strongly of animal fat and made her feel queasy and bilious after all the wine she’d drunk.
Sitting with them around the table, she could smell beer on Sebastian Daunt’s breath and tobacco on the breath of his spirit medium daughter. These scents mingled into an aroma very similar to that Ruthie remembered from pubs before the smoking ban. She’d been twenty-three when the ban had come into force. She’d known several people who had died since then. She really didn’t want to commune now with any of them. Why on earth was she doing this?