by F. G. Cottam
She was seated in Michael’s study, at his desk. The door opened and he came in and kissed the back of her neck and slid a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. He said, ‘You remembered Rosebud.’
‘In Citizen Kane, Rosebud is the name of the sled Charles Foster Kane had as a child, before he became a newspaper magnate monster. It’s his last word, uttered on his death-bed.’
‘I knew that, Ruthie.’
‘Orson Welles based Kane on the real-life media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had a mistress named Marion Davies. Rosebud was his pet name for a part of her anatomy of which he was particularly fond.’
‘That, I didn’t know.’
‘You might want to change your password.’
‘And I might not. I’ll never forget it now.’
They shared the journey aboard the fast train from Surbiton and parted at Waterloo Station. Ruthie walked the ten-minute distance to Veronica’s flat from there and resumed her research quite confident of the links she thought she might now discover.
According to his Wikipedia entry, Rhodes Scholar Carter Melville had taken first-class honours in PPE at University College, Oxford. Ruthie was too fastidious a researcher to think the online encyclopaedia an infallible source. But she thought this information probably spot-on.
There was going to be an archivist, she thought, at University College. The colleges competed these days both for prestigious students and the high fees they brought with them and the endowments that sometimes followed from wealthy families either grateful or just star-struck by all that august tradition their precious son or daughter had just become a part of. Peddling that tradition would be the archivist’s principal job. Once, that would simply have been keeping an accurate record. But times and values had changed.
She waited until ten-thirty rolled around before calling the college. She made more coffee and smoked a cigarette in Veronica’s garden to pass the time and contemplate on what she’d already learned. She was finding out more, but it was incremental and a bit like the mental version of what it had been physically to find a route out of the maze at Hampton Court. Lots of dead ends and false trails. Time-consuming distractions such as the Clamouring had proven to be. The ceremonies were redundant. Martin wasn’t coming back. He wasn’t coming back, because he had never gone away.
Her thoughts turned to Frederica, who she liked. And to Frederica’s father, who she thought she liked even more. In six months or so, Frederica would enter a season of grief. It would be hard and bitter and lonely and irrevocable. Ruthie wondered what it would be like for Sebastian to be reunited with the prodigal one last time before death claimed him.
‘It would mean the world to him,’ she said aloud, aware that this talking to herself lark was getting totally out of hand.
The University College archivist turned out to be a woman named Dora Steel. It wasn’t an encouraging omen, but she sounded friendly and intrigued by what Ruthie was engaged in until she mentioned its link with the Fischer House. When she did that, Dora did indeed turn steely.
‘Not one of our greatest successes,’ she said.
‘So you’ve heard of him?’
‘He became quite notorious. There was some sort of scandal or disturbance. I honestly don’t have any detail on that. He seems generally to have been an insalubrious character. Some sort of character flaw. He was sent down halfway through his second year. So obviously he didn’t complete his degree.’
Ruthie said, ‘Can you tell me any more?’
Dora Steel was silent. Then she said, ‘Look, I was a researcher too, before I landed this job, so I’m not unsympathetic and I do appreciate what you’ve told me about the Fischer House and the King Lud album. I mean I get the significance. But honestly? I can only help you if you don’t cite me as the source. Understood?’
‘You have my promise on that,’ Ruthie said. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling as she said it. These were the bits that made the work worthwhile and there’d been precious few of them so far.
‘He was a member of some sort of secret society. It was so secret that the college authorities were never able to discover its name, despite stringent efforts. And these were people with very sharp minds. And they exerted considerable pressure. But the feeling seems to have been that breaching this cult’s secrecy was a greater threat to its members than any formal punishment the university could mete out.’
‘How were they discovered?’
‘There’s no account of that,’ Dora Steel said. ‘I’m guessing Fischer might though have been personally culpable. He was weirdly contradictory, secretive and flamboyant at the same time. But he was vulgarly wealthy and of course twenty is hardly a mature age in a man.’
‘What do you mean by vulgarly wealthy?’
‘Splashy opulence. Even then, how many undergraduates do you think owned a Mercedes Benz and retained a chauffeur?’
‘Fischer did that?’
‘Indeed he did, Ms Gillespie.’
A thought occurred to Ruthie. She said, ‘Do you by any chance have the name of the chauffeur?’
‘It’s not to hand. I’ll see if I can find out for you.’
Dora Steel called Ruthie back fifteen minutes later. She said, ‘Klaus Fischer’s chauffeur had to register for a pass to enter college grounds to pick up his charge. He was a man named Terence Askew.’
It was eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning and Ruthie had a meeting scheduled with Carter Melville at twelve.
‘Ruthie, baby,’ he said. ‘What gives?’
She gave him a truncated account of what she’d been doing. She said she’d got some great material from Wight that would establish an atmospheric tone from the outset. She reprised what Paula and April had told her and mentioned the Shelley poem with its line about loving all waste and solitary places. She said that since Martin had so successfully compartmentalized his life, it was difficult to provide a coherent linear narrative.
‘He’s a jigsaw puzzle to which I’ll never have all the pieces.’
Carter Melville snapped his fingers and pointed at her breasts. ‘Great line, baby. Going to use it?’
‘I don’t know Martin Mear at all.’
‘You’re getting to know Martin better than anyone.’
‘Except you. And April Mear and Paula Tort and Eddie Coyle and Sebastian Daunt.’
‘And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all,’ Melville said. ‘We none of us knew anything other than the fraction of himself he chose to show us. I get your jigsaw analogy. But, hon, you’re getting a more complete picture than anyone’s ever gotten before.’
‘Should a Rhodes Scholar really be saying gotten?’
‘An American Rhodes Scholar? Damn right.’
‘Did you know Klaus Fischer attended the same university as you and Martin?’
Melville steepled his fingers and blinked. ‘Don’t recall seeing him there.’
‘It’s a coincidence. If it is, actually, a coincidence.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ll tell you this, honey,’ Melville said, pointing at her cleavage again, ‘Restrict your conspiracy theorizing to the Clamouring and you won’t entirely be wasting your time. That stuff intrigues people. It embellishes the legend. It keeps Martin today’s news if not even tomorrow’s. It’s Mystic Meg with balls.’
‘It’s a crock,’ Ruthie said.
And Melville grinned. ‘That boarding-school language, Ruthie?’
‘How do you know I went to boarding school?’
‘Relax. It was on your CV, which I took the trouble to read.’
Ruthie had moments earlier been about to ask him whether Martin Mear’s uncle and Klaus Fischer’s chauffeur having the same surname was another coincidence. But something had stopped her. Now, she opened the briefcase on her lap and took out a folder full of notes.
‘This is my progress so far,’ she said. ‘Facts, testimony, contemporary critical appraisal of Ghost Legion, the transcripts of the Joan B
akewell interview and the one he did with Norman Mailer for Rolling Stone. All the plausible theories, as comprehensive an account of the circumstances of his death as I’ve been able to put together. And two first-hand Clamouring Experience reports.’
‘You’re gold dust, baby,’ Melville said, waving it away. ‘Outline your essay plan and email it to me. This is a bitch of a gig I’m trusting you with. Don’t make me regret it.’
Ruthie smiled tightly and got up to go.
Outside on the street, she wanted to find a Costa branch where she could switch on her laptop and do a bit of research. Then she changed her mind about that. Much of Soho had succumbed to luxury flat developments and boutique coffee shops. But central London was still encouragingly full of alluringly old-fashioned pubs and the Carter Fucking Melville Experience had made her feel like something stronger just then than a flat white. She didn’t like being drooled over and she liked being played even less.
About the responsibility of penning the box-set’s definitive Martin Mear essay she felt a bit numbed, curiously neutral, compromised by being obliged by circumstance to say less than she already knew or strongly suspected about Ghost Legion’s founder and the eventual fate of his band members. The real story simply couldn’t be substantiated and would therefore never be told. And its last chapter, Ruthie felt, had anyway yet to be written.
She found a double-fronted pub with a pillared porch and mullioned windows and went in. It had a low ceiling and horse brasses behind the bar and a thankful absence of piped music and gurgling fruit machines. She ordered a large glass of house white which when she sipped it was as surprisingly good as it was staggeringly expensive. She found a vacant table and got out her laptop. And a few seconds later she’d learned that there were approximately 8,211 people with the surname Askew in the UK. That was around 130 out of every million people in the country. Askew was the UK’s 1,309th most common surname overall. How far, she wondered, was the long arm of coincidence permitted to stretch?
The origin of the name was Saxon and Danish. An ‘acksheugh’ was an area of hilly land covered with oaks. Or there was Aschau, a town on the bend of a Danish river in Sleswick. Askew in Danish meant crooked.
‘They got that bit right,’ she said, attracting a sharp glance from a florid-faced man in a pinstripe suit. Someone better able than her to pay London’s surreal pub prices, she thought, switching off her laptop and putting it away, concentrating fully on enjoying her drink.
The Jericho Society membership was dynastic. Terence Askew had been either Max Askew’s father or his grandfather. Max had been childless, so had inducted his nephew. Martin Mear had met Carter Melville at the same university that Klaus Fischer had attended more than sixty years earlier. What had dictated that choice for either man? Whose idea had it been for Martin to travel to Fischer’s derelict mansion on Wight to hear his Master’s voice?
Ruthie Gillespie had previous with the Jericho Society. She’d helped outwit them twice. The first occasion had involved Michael Aldridge and the second Veronica Slade. She strongly suspected that they knew she had achieved at least one of these feats. They knew her capabilities and Michael was right, she’d always been the person who was going to be picked to do this particular job.
Outside on the street again she called Jackie Tibbs, the schoolfriend from Ventnor who’d tipped her off about the gig.
‘How did you come to work for Melville Enterprises in the first place?’
‘I was headhunted, two months ago. They offered me a salary I couldn’t realistically turn down.’
‘Was it really just the kindness of your heart, thinking of me for the Ghost Legion thing?’
The silence on the other end of the line was to Ruthie very eloquent. And also, she thought, quite chilling.
‘It’s true that I’d heard you were in a bit of a trough, Ruthie. I’d heard you were drinking quite a lot.’
‘Which isn’t really answering the question, is it?’
The voice on the other end of the line was a whisper now. ‘Mr Melville put out a memo, asking could any of us think of someone literate with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the music industry, maybe someone passionate about a particular genre, who could do a research job. They had to have the availability to start right away. There was a finder’s fee of a thousand pounds. I naturally thought of you.’
‘Naturally,’ Ruthie said.
She called Frederica Daunt. Frederica answered, her voice tremulous, broken.
‘You’ve had the conversation with your father?’
‘This morning.’
‘I’m so sorry, Freddie.’
‘I’m not giving up on him. There’s a clinic in Germany. I’ll have plenty of money for the treatment from the sale of the Chiswick house. I’ll happily spend every penny.’
Ruthie didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
‘Why have you called?’
‘To ask a favour.’
Frederica laughed. It was a shrill sound. ‘There’s only one kind of favour you’d ever ask of me.’
‘Maybe another time,’ Ruthie said.
‘No time like the present, Ruthie. I learned that from my dad this morning.’
‘My recent acquaintance, Ginger McCabe?’
‘The old man whose death wasn’t accidental.’
‘I need to know where and when he went into the water. I need the exact time, the precise location.’
Frederica was silent. Then she said, ‘No guarantees. But I’ll try this evening,’
‘Thank you,’ Ruthie said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ruthie Gillespie spent Wednesday evening in her Lambeth flat with Veronica Slade. Veronica opened a bottle of wine and they ate dinner and Ruthie brought her up to speed on events of the previous few days and her theories concerning them.
When she’d finished, Veronica said, ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. As our meeting concluded today Carter Melville presented me with a corporate Amex card. Has my name on it and everything.’
‘A credit card is basically a tracking device.’
‘Only if you use it,’ Ruthie said.
‘Do you think you’re being followed?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. But that just might be me being paranoid. Or egotistical.’
‘Your ego isn’t that big. Anyway we could find out,’ Veronica said. ‘Work’s pretty dead until December. I could take tomorrow off. We could both travel to somewhere completely unrelated to what you’re doing. Except your tail wouldn’t know it was unrelated and would be obliged to follow. He follows you and I follow him. Simple.’
‘Unless it’s a she. If anyone’s following me at all.’
‘Where should we take them?’
‘Lewes is nice.’
‘Brighton’s more interesting.’
‘I’m not up to Brighton,’ Ruthie said. ‘I spent quite a few weekends there with Phil.’
‘Michael Aldridge not doing it for you?’
‘He is and he isn’t,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think it’s just that the heart works to its own timetable.’
‘Spoken like a writer,’ Veronica said.
‘Yes, well I used to be one of those.’
‘You still are, love.’
After dinner and in the company of a second bottle of white, they watched the notorious Montreal concert footage together; the event at which it was claimed Martin Mear had levitated from the stage. The quality, transposed to Blu-Ray and viewed on Veronica’s high-definition flat-screen, was superb. But it still looked inconclusive to Ruthie. The quantity of dry ice on the stage just made it so. It was too densely billowing to properly see his booted feet.
When they’d watched it twice, Veronica said, ‘Unless he invented moon-walking a decade before Michael Jackson started doing it, my money says he’s off the floor.’
‘He describes the shape of a pentagram,’ Ruthie said.
Veronica sipped wine. She didn’t look completely sober. But she didn’t drink
much, didn’t drink every night and held down a high-pressure job. She said, ‘I think there was probably an actual pentagram painted onto the stage.’
‘Probably in goat’s blood,’ Ruthie said. She was thinking of the painting Ginger McCabe had glimpsed at Martens and Degrue’s warehouse on the Shadwell dockside. Then she thought of the stamping feet and human hum of the Clamouring event she’d witnessed at the circle of standing stones in Dorset. She touched the scab, a hard ridge healing reluctantly at her hairline, where a bruise lay underneath it. All the people who’d attended that event would think this footage genuine. The pervert thug with the Viking helmet who had groped her breasts would believe it too. Martin as a deity would permit that kind of thing of his true believers. He might even approve.
‘I think the significant thing is the direction in which he’s moving,’ Veronica said.
Ruthie said, ‘I think the significant thing is that his feet appear to be trailing the ground by an impossible distance.’
‘I’m serious, Ruthie. I don’t know a great deal about the occult, but I do know acolytes of black magic refer to it as the Left-Hand Path.’
‘And Martin’s moving to his right,’ Ruthie said. ‘He’s tracing the pentagram in a clockwise direction.’
‘Like he’s trying to undo something,’ Veronica said. ‘Whether he’s off the floor or he’s not, that little dance is recompense.’
‘Bloody hell, it is too. I never thought of that.’
After the Dora Steel revelations of the morning, after enduring the Carter Melville Experience and afterwards learning how she’d been lured into his orbit, after studying the concert footage with Veronica, Ruthie felt all in. She climbed the stairs to the guest bedroom wearily. As she did so, an incoming email signal pinged in the phone in her hand. She read it in bed. It was from Frederica Daunt and it was a precise time and a precise dockside location picked out on a Google Maps image. She texted her sincere thanks and descended through velvet veils of fading consciousness into a blissful sleep.
The rail journey to Lewes involved a change at Clapham Junction. But they took the train because they could travel to Waterloo Station separately. Then they could travel on in separate carriages. Over breakfast, Ruthie had sketched out a map of the route she’d take to the various locations she’d visit once there. She had the advantage of knowing the Sussex market town they were headed to, which Veronica didn’t.