by F. G. Cottam
They each put a forefinger on the planchette, which moved indeterminately about the board. It felt slightly slick with her own sweat to Ruthie, touching it as lightly as possible so as not to dictate the direction of its movement even subconsciously.
There was noise in the kitchen. But it had reduced to their shallow breathing, the hiss of tallow burning against wicks, the mouse-squeak of the planchette on polished board. It didn’t seem to be working and Ruthie was about to voice that thought in a tactful murmur when something about the room shifted. Suddenly it was full of the heady reek of Vetiver cologne and Havana cigars and brilliantine. There was a loud swell of accordion music, mushy and imprecise. Ruthie’s finger recoiled and Sebastian muttered something she didn’t catch and she became aware that Frederica was staring at her with someone else’s eyes out of a face tilted in an attitude of cold contempt.
The voice that emerged from her wasn’t hers either. It was a man’s voice, the nicotined baritone of someone corpulently male, strongly accented, the words grunted out like heavy blows.
‘Most unwise to meddle, Fräulein,’ it said. ‘Impertinent to trespass, which you barely got away with. Foolish to persist, don’t you consider?’
Ruthie didn’t say anything. You didn’t engage. That’s what Frederica had told her; Frederica, who was at that moment absent from her body and the room, inhabited by someone else, long dead. Squatting, rude and imperious.
The mouth opened and a laugh emerged from it, a fat man’s laugh, high and girlish and in horrible contrast to its speaking voice.
‘Cat got your tongue, Ruthie?’
It knew her name. Probably it knew everything and she knew who it was. It was Klaus Fischer, into whose domain she had stumbled without its owner’s consent. She stayed silent, her skin coarse with gooseflesh under her shirt, aware that Sebastian Daunt was shaking next to her, not sure how much of this ordeal they were sharing an old man’s heart could endure.
The candles extinguished themselves.
A stench of corruption, a strong smell of human ordure blossomed over all the other smells in a sensory cocktail that seemed stifling and unbreathable. And Ruthie forced herself to her feet gagging and groped by the kitchen door for the light switch.
When the lights came on, Frederica’s head had slumped forward, her chin on her chest, a string of drool hanging from her lower lip.
‘Help me with her,’ her father said. And together they carried her to the sitting-room sofa. She seemed physically relaxed now, just sleeping deeply. Ruthie put a blanket over her and wiped her mouth with a clean tea towel.
‘Has anything like this happened before?’
‘Are you out of your fucking mind, woman? Do you think I’d risk something like that happening again to my own daughter if I’d witnessed it before? I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Have you?’
‘No,’ Ruthie said.
Frederica’s eyes snapped open then. And she screamed.
TWENTY-SIX
Sebastian Daunt drove Ruthie Gillespie to Faro airport the following morning at the wheel of the Mini Moke. They were silent until they got there. Then he turned to her and said, ‘There’s more to tell you than I told you yesterday.’
‘I know there is.’
‘Do you think my daughter’s going to be OK?’
‘Has she told you about the Chiswick séance?’
‘Only the bare bones.’
‘We think James Prentice came calling,’ Ruthie said. ‘He put on quite a show, if it was him. It left Freddie much more beaten up than last night did. I don’t think it was anywhere near as gruelling. I think it was actually worse for the two of us than it was for her.’
‘James Prentice had a royalties beef with Martin. He died an angry and bitter man. That dude last night was Klaus Fischer. You’d been to his house and he didn’t like it.’
‘He didn’t seem to mind Martin squatting there.’
‘Martin was into some serious occult shit. So by all accounts was Fischer,’ Sebastian said. ‘Maybe Fischer admired Martin. Maybe he even got an invitation.’
Ruthie said, ‘Why don’t you tell me what you didn’t tell me yesterday?’
‘Because it’s going to sound crazy.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘OK,’ Sebastian said. ‘The old mansion when Martin got there in the late ’60s was devoid of furniture except for two items. One was in the cellar and it was a full-size snooker table. Martin told me there was a big black stain on the baize. Organic matter degrades over time, but Martin figured it was blood-spill. And there was a lot of it. He thought something might have been sacrificed there at one time in a ritual. The victim could have been anything from a chicken to a child.’
‘Chickens don’t bleed hugely,’ Ruthie said.
‘No, they don’t.’
‘What was the other item?’
‘You may have seen that yourself. It was an old gramophone player with a winding handle and a horn. His Master’s Voice, white dog logo enamelled on its side.’
‘Black and white dog. I did see that,’ Ruthie said. ‘It was broken.’
‘It was all busted to shit even back then. Didn’t stop Martin hearing it.’
‘The song cycle from King Lud?’
‘Just the tunes. He dreamed the lyrics, sleeping there on his camp-bed during the night. Wrote them up in the morning, he told me. But he heard the tunes, coming out of that gramophone horn, one every day for seven days, until they stopped.’
‘How did he engineer that?’
‘Don’t know the specifics. Never wanted to know.’
‘Why do you think he eventually told you the truth; that King Lud was gifted to him?’
‘That I do know, Ruthie,’ Sebastian Daunt said. ‘That was repentance.’
‘Repentance for what?’
‘Whatever it was he did to be gifted King Lud.’
The sun was shining quite brightly and of course, the car was roofless. In this merciless light, Ruthie noticed that Sebastian’s ponytailed hair didn’t quite look so abundant as it did indoors. There were dark shadows under his eyes and a scrawny quality to the skin of his neck, as though through sudden, recent, unplanned weight-loss.
He smiled ruefully at her. ‘Six months,’ he said. ‘Maybe a little longer if I take things easy. Which I will. I’m in no rush.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s been a full life.’
‘Does Frederica know?’
‘Frederica has a random gift from which family seem to be immune. Gift apart, you’re a much more intuitive woman than she’s ever been.’
‘Your relationship with Martin was basically paternal, like a father to him after his own father died.’
‘He first learned guitar from me. I was more John Martyn than Clapton, but it was a start.’
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
‘The good book got that bit right, Ruthie. A father always loves the prodigal.’
Ruthie spent most of the duration of the return flight trying not to think about the hazards of occupying an aluminium tube six miles above the earth for almost four hours. She knew that statistically flying was probably the safest form of travelling. She was helped more in truth by the large gin and tonic she drank before boarding and the two she sipped at demurely strapped in her seat on both occasions the trolley came around. What she tried to concentrate on was her research conclusions so far.
She didn’t believe anything she had witnessed at either of the two Clamouring events she’d attended anything but bogus. They had contrasted widely because the demographic had been so widely different. The Dorset event had been very middle-aged and middle-class; Morgan Roadster and Sunbeam Rapier owners of classic cars and New Age hipsters drawn because they were searching for a new faith and a new Messiah to lead it. There had been a definite quasi-religious feel to the ceremony at the circle of standing stones.
Portugal had been much more sybaritic; hard-core cultists frenzied into orgy b
y drink and drugs and the intoxication of believing something both occult and blasphemous might be about to manifest in their presence.
Both events had been pagan. Both had brought forth apparent miracles. But Ruthie thought them just slick tricks orchestrated by the man who stood to profit most from broadening Martin Mear’s constituency of fans and encouraging their commitment to their idol. Carter Melville had invented the Clamouring motivated by the oldest of impulses – the desire to make money. And Eddie Coyle was in on it. Even if the Clamouring events occasionally got out of control, it was in his interest financially to spread the word, to make it seem if not plausible then at least convincing. He’d told Ruthie himself that the walking on water she’d seen was no mere theatrical contrivance. He was lying because that’s exactly what it had to have been.
She thought Frederica Daunt’s psychic gift genuine at least some of the time. For the previous evening’s events and sensations to have all been faked required a lot of preparation and Sebastian Daunt’s complicity. He generally disapproved of his daughter’s spirit-medium antics, at least when he was sober. He wouldn’t have contrived with his daughter to fool her with no real motive. Plus they hadn’t known she’d been to Klaus Fischer’s house. It was a detail she hadn’t shared. And the idea that Paula Tort might have told them was laughable. Paula didn’t do gossip.
Ruthie wasn’t sure what to make of the gramophone story. It was the kind of thing a bombed-out rocker might imagine in the grip of LSD or on a booze and Quaaludes binge. But Martin Mear had been initiated into the Jericho Society and to them, his Master’s voice was something specific and real and never lightly invoked. Sebastian had said Martin became repentant. Maybe he really had had something to be repentant about.
She’d been right in what she’d said at Faro airport, seated beside Sebastian in his parked-up Mini Moke. The Klaus Fischer interlude had been worse for them than it had for Frederica because she hadn’t really been present for it. A glass of brandy and a cigarette on the terrace in the fresh air and she’d been fine, after she woke up properly and got back her bearings. But Fischer had warned Ruthie off. And sitting there in her British Airways seat, she wondered at the wisdom of persisting with this. £20,000 was a lot of money, but she couldn’t spend a penny of it dead. Two people had already died. Michael Aldridge, a sensible man, had told her to give it up.
Carter. Carter Melville. Carter Fucking Melville.
‘You think he’s alive,’ she said aloud to no one. ‘The people closest to him are telling me things they’d never in a million years share with you. You think I can lead you to him and until I do that, I’m probably safe.’
Ruthie didn’t like the ‘probably’ in that sentence very much. But it was a question of degrees. The man in the business suit in the seat next to hers didn’t look as though he’d enjoyed any of it. He continued to stare at his in-flight magazine, but the perfume ad on its double-page-spread apparently claiming his rapt attention just wasn’t as arresting as his glare made it look.
‘Rehearsing a play,’ she said to him with a smile and he smiled back, looking less than fully convinced.
Maybe she should write a play. It was possible that wrestling with a new form would help unblock her. Or she might sit there in front of an empty screen, searching her blank mind for lines of dialogue that just didn’t wish to be voiced. She didn’t think it worth the risk. It would be painful and humiliating and would give rise to the panicky conclusion that she might never write creatively again.
Michael Aldridge was in the arrivals hall to greet her. That was a surprise and it was a pleasant one. She shook her head though and tapped her wristwatch in mock admonishment as he took the travel bag from her hand and he kissed her.
‘It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ve an office to run.’
‘I’m delegating.’
‘Skiving, is what you’re doing.’
‘They work better when I’m not there. They’re always telling me to take up golf. My car’s a more relaxed ride than the Heathrow Express. And instinct tells me Portugal wasn’t relaxed at all.’
‘Bang on.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Yes, if only to get it all straight in my mind. I have a noon meeting with the man employing me tomorrow and very little of substance to share with him.’
‘You knew at the outset Martin Mear was a secretive man.’
‘He compartmentalized his life. And he covered his tracks, Michael.’
‘North Lambeth or Surbiton?’
‘The latter’
‘Thank you. My reward for skiving?’
‘Skiving is its own reward. I didn’t sleep well last night and I don’t want to sleep alone tonight, is the truth. And you’re lovely company and I feel safe with you.’
They were on the M4 when a brown panel van rattled past them at speed, Martens and Degrue coach painted onto its side in white italic script, Michael’s car rocking on its suspension with the draught created by the mass and velocity of the vehicle overtaking it. The co-driver glanced down at them as it passed and he made a comment to his colleague as he looked. Michael Aldridge kept his own speed steady and his expression neutral and Ruthie was about to ask him had he seen it as the van shrank into the distance in the lane outside theirs.
‘Of course I saw it,’ he said. ‘I saw it a mile or so back in my wing mirror.’
‘Coincidence?’
‘You don’t think so,’ he said.
‘What then? A warning?’
‘Tell me about Portugal.’
So Ruthie did. When she’d finished, he was silent, pondering.
Then he said, ‘They like people to know nothing about them. But they like the few people who do know about them to think they’re omnipresent and omnipotent too. I don’t think that was a warning of anything specific. I think it was just them flexing their muscles.’
‘We know where you live,’ Ruthie said.
‘Exactly that.’
‘I’m tired, Michael.’
‘And hungry?’
‘Very.’
‘Let’s go for the hat-trick,’ he said. ‘Cold?’
‘No. Not with you sitting beside me.’
‘We’ll have an early dinner at the Waggon and just turn in,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I deserve you.’
‘But happily, that’s not your decision to make.’
Traffic was heavy and a lane ahead of them blocked by an accident and what should have been a forty-minute journey took an hour longer than that. Ruthie spent that last hour fast asleep and woke feeling revived, just as Michael parked on his spot on the drive outside his flat. They walked straight to the pub and bought drinks and ordered food. When it arrived, Ruthie was ravenous and the conversation was sparse until she’d cleared her plate.
She looked around the pub. Most of the patrons were threes and fours of men having a pint before making the commute home. She thought maybe academic and admin staff from the Kingston University building just down the road. Or maybe from the crown court, which was opposite that. Normal people leading conventional lives to an established routine. It even described the man in whose company she ate. It didn’t at all though describe her in her present role or disposition. She wondered was she slipping into depression. Ruthie had once, naively, thought herself immune to that.
‘What are you thinking?’ Michael asked.
‘I’m wondering whether I’ll ever write again. I mean write fiction. The other stuff I can do by rote.’
‘Do you need to be happy to write?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s more that writing makes me happy. But I need to be rooted and contented or it doesn’t come.’
‘Leave it alone, Ruthie. Give up and go home.’
She shook her head again. ‘I won’t be scared off by a bloody panel van. I’ll find Martin Mear, then I’ll go home. And you can come and visit when I do.’
‘Find him symbolically? Or do you mean literally?’
TWENTY-SEVEN
The following morning, on no more than a hunch, Ruthie Gillespie rose early and switched on Michael’s desktop computer. She’d asked him for his password just before they descended into sleep the previous night and he’d mumbled, ‘Rosebud.’ It was easy to remember if you’d seen the movie Citizen Kane and Ruthie had.
She wanted to know where Klaus Fischer had been educated. She thought probably Heidelberg, maybe the Sorbonne, possibly the London School of Economics. That had been founded in 1895 and Fischer had been forty-six in 1927 when he disappeared, so it was plausible he could have been a student there at about the turn of the century. Did industrialists become such after studying economics? When Ruthie thought about it, chemistry was probably just as likely. But he’d been an anglophile, the owner of a house in Mayfair, a hunting lodge near Dartmoor and a mansion on Wight. Had he been educated in England?
She discovered that he had. Using Michael’s computer and doing a Google image search she found a formal study of eight students seated at dinner in evening wear. Klaus Fischer was the cold-eyed, corpulent, swarthy young man pictured third from left. He looked uneasy at being photographed, as though trapped or compromised.
‘Still a student, and already plenty to hide,’ she said aloud.
The caption hand-written in ink faded to bronze under the photograph was copperplate and easily legible. Fischer’s alma mater had been University College, Oxford. The caption failed to provide any information on what course he’d been studying. And if the group or the dinner they were attending had any special significance, the caption wasn’t saying.