by F. G. Cottam
She’d booked a B&B room at a country pub just the other side of Carlisle. She’d paid for that and for the car hire with Carter Melville’s money. She was quite confident now that she wouldn’t be followed but had used her own debit card rather than the corporate Amex card he’d given her. The events of the past couple of weeks had encouraged a certain caution in Ruthie Gillespie. And though she expected not to be followed, that was only by anyone living. She didn’t expect to see a Martens and Degrue liveried panel van flash past her on the motorway. If she saw Max Askew’s split-screen Morris Minor in her rear-view though, she didn’t think she’d be at all surprised. That she even half expected, like she half expected a Ghost Legion anthem to leak out of the car stereo’s speakers without her having to trouble to turn the system on. There was a saying, wasn’t there, one she hadn’t referenced the previous evening with Michael, but one she thought nevertheless probably true. The Devil has all the best tunes.
There were tricks like those indulged by Eddie Coyle and his clever and clandestine band of technicians at the Clamouring events that kept Martin Mear’s brand current with new-agers and conspiracy theorists and biker gangs and vogueish academics and the heaviest of heavy rockers. There were the tricks the mind played on people who were tired or in the grip of psychotropic drugs or just over-imaginative. And there was the other stuff, the strange and bizarre stuff that ambushed and dismayed you and paralysed you with terror because you simply couldn’t process it in any rational way.
The car duly ate the miles. To try to keep herself calm, Ruthie turned her thoughts to the story she’d unexpectedly begun the previous day. She tried to map out some of its progress in her mind. And to her own relief, she discovered that she knew quite firmly and clearly the direction in which she would take it. She’d found her lost fictive voice again and was grateful for that.
She thought about Frederica Daunt and her dying father, Sebastian, and Frederica’s self-imposed exile in Portugal. She didn’t think the expensive alternative therapies in Germany would work in prolonging his life. The cancer had a firm hold on him. People talked – mostly in obituaries – about fighting the disease. But that was a meaningless cliché. No one was equipped with the weaponry to fight it once it got a firm grip on its victim. She thought that Sebastian would die and that his death would achieve only one positive outcome. Frederica would in her grief lose her enthusiasm for communicating with unrestful spirits. She would be finished as a medium and it would be a blessed relief for her. She’d struck Ruthie as quite a lonely woman. She could only redress that by existing more among the living than she had.
Afternoon turned to evening and Ruthie Gillespie drove. It was six o’clock before she saw her first road sign signalling a Scottish rather than an English destination ahead of her. She reached Carlisle and her B&B shortly before seven, weary and stiff, eyes tired from their forced alertness on the road. She took her bag out of the boot and smoked a cigarette in the pub’s car park and went in and ordered a bottle of Chablis and a chicken casserole. She was aware of the humdrum nature of her actions in the momentous face of what she planned to try to do the following day.
What had brought her to this? Fate, she thought, recalling that meeting outside the cafe on Queen’s promenade with Michael Aldridge not quite a month ago. She’d brought her laptop with her with the intention of writing herself to sleep and drinking nothing stronger than tonic water. But she knew she had neither the concentration nor the stamina to conjure fiction tonight. She needed to sleep on the eve of what was likely to be the most difficult day of her life. A couple of glasses of wine and she knew she’d be slumbering deeply by nine o’clock at the latest.
She was in bed and about to close her eyes when she heard the ping of an incoming text. It was from Michael. It read: Thinking of you. Stay safe. Much love x. Ruthie closed her eyes smiling and went straight to sleep.
She checked out of the B&B immediately after breakfast at first light on Saturday morning. She had a drive and then a walk ahead of her. The weather was capricious in Scotland and in the Highlands could be severe. She’d packed the right clothing and her hiking boots but hoped the walk wouldn’t be too arduous. She’d been strong and fit and her endurance had been good on the cadet-force exercises at boarding school. But that had been almost twenty years ago. She did the Tennyson trail a few times every summer on Wight. But the Scottish mountains were a more formidable proposition, glowering and wind-scoured and remote. And it wasn’t summer, was it? It was a long way north at the end of October.
Ruthie eventually ran out of road what she estimated was about eight miles short of her destination. There was still a track of sorts, but it was so bumpy she thought she risked breaking an axle if she persisted along it at the wheel. And it looked anyway like it would peter into nothing in another few hundred yards. She could see the rectangular ruin ahead that was all that was left of the farmhouse to which it once must have led. She had a map, a compass and her mobile phone, fully charged, if she got into distress. ‘Difficulties’ was the euphemism most often used by mountain-rescue volunteers when townies bit off more than they could chew in the wilderness.
She thought that with caution and a bit of luck she could avoid the natural hazards. It was the unnatural ones she was honestly more concerned about.
‘If everything goes tits up, there’s a one-man tent in my rucksack,’ she said aloud to the rocks, the heather, the strengthening rain descending from flurries of lead-coloured cloud. Which bit of defiant rhetoric didn’t comfort her in the slightest.
She heard a wolf-howl then, a feral, barren echo of a sound that scraped out her stomach and made her teeth clench with foreboding and wish she was at the wheel of Eddie Coyle’s Land Rover Defender with the sturdy doors locked and the heater warming her as she rattled effortlessly over the ground.
There are bound to be safeguards, Ruthie, she told herself. There are deterrents, the closer you approach. He’ll have taken precautions. He hasn’t gone undiscovered this long by accident.
There were no wolves in Scotland. Maybe there were at a zoo somewhere, but there were none in the wild. No wolves and no bears. Her surrounding might appear desolate, but this was still the UK, not the Australian Outback or the Rocky Mountains in bloody Colorado.
What if the howl had come from wild dogs? Unwanted pets dumped in the wilderness. Dobermans and Rottweilers and Alsatians and pit bulls reverted to nature and hunting in a pack? Would that be any easier to confront than a wolf? It was, she knew, what she was supposed to think. They were the commonsensical fears that would turn someone back or make them veer off out hiking in a less hazardous direction. But Ruthie didn’t have the luxury of that option. She had a precise destination in mind. And she didn’t know when she had felt more alone in her life.
She became aware of the smell of decay about half a mile further on. It was strong and strengthening with every step. It was a corrupt stench making her eyes water and her nostrils smart when she came upon its cause. It was a dead sheep, its belly erupted now, burst with the gasses of decomposition, its innards purplish and black with decay and the carcass seeming to tremble and shift with movement the closer she got. It was maggots, she realized, thousands of them, palely squirming and feasting in an infestation that made the wool of the animal’s coat writhe. Ruthie was a foot away from this obscenity when a large rat, its coat slick with the slime of rot, burst out of the sheep’s exposed stomach, tugging at some intestinal morsel with its teeth.
Ruthie screamed. It was a sound that withered swiftly in the surrounding silence, the stone and heather vacancy of the empty landscape, the vast indifferent sky above her. She felt small, solitary, cruelly exposed. She felt honestly lost. But she pressed on. She knew that she would not be deterred. She walked on from the stinking thing now at her back. She swallowed bile. She heard a single keening bark of sardonic laughter. She didn’t imagine it. She thought she knew from whom it had come. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t hurt her. If he could, he’d have done it at
his leisure in his not quite derelict home.
She passed a tarn, or pond, its surface pewter, reflecting the grey, wind-harried sky. Its surface rippled, she thought with the gusting breeze, but then it bubbled, and she knew something substantial would imminently breach from its depths.
It was an eel, she thought, confronted by its wide slit of a mouth and dead-eyed stare when they emerged. But then it slithered onto the shore and she reasoned that despite its smooth, scale-less skin, it was a snake, bigger than any she thought native to the British Isles and moving quite rapidly towards her.
Ruthie didn’t change direction. She ran past the reptile, moving faster, much faster than she’d ever have imagined she could shift, fuelled by a high-octane cocktail of determination and terror. And she saw the snake rear up as she passed it, maybe surprised by her movement, because it didn’t strike. But she didn’t slow. She ran on until her lungs felt confined in her chest by a hoop of iron, steadily tightening. She ran until exhaustion forced her to stop. And when she could run no further she did stop and turned, gasping, her head bowed and her hands on her knees. And she saw that nothing visible had followed her.
Her ordeal wasn’t quite over. She had to negotiate a patch of gorse between two high rock outcrops. Through seemed easier and more practical than around. Then her right foot got stuck and when she tried to pull it free and it wouldn’t come she looked down and saw that the gnarled fingers of a human hand had snagged her ankle, pushing up the hem of her jeans, barking her shin and trapping her. It took a panicky moment for the reality to make itself plain in a rough lattice of small, sinewy branches into which her own weight had thrust her. And she was able then to disentangle herself without further damage to her leg or her dignity.
The land flattened out after that. Eventually, she came to a loch. She’d been wrong in her island theory. Sir Terence Maloney’s pontooned plane wasn’t thus equipped for a landing at sea. It was for putting down here. And on the far bank of the loch, Ruthie saw the house to which April Mear’s father had taken her as a child. Not a bothy, nothing so public for so private a man. Not somewhere he might be obliged to share with some random stranger. Not a refuge marked on Ordnance Survey maps for the use of grateful travellers but somewhere he owned, bought probably from the descendants of the crofter who built it, paid for in cash and acquired through his old roadie intermediary so no one could put a name to its owner’s face.
Just a theory. But the evidence was stacking up. And there was more of it in the thin column of peat smoke rising from the chimney into a rainy sky.
Ruthie thought suddenly about all the varied elements that had delivered her to this moment. She thought of Phil Fortescue’s obstinate grief and Veronica Slade’s endlessly tactful kindness; of Frederica Daunt’s impulsive warmth and coldly uncertain gift. She thought of Max Askew’s shabby, vapid ghost and the courteous dreamer she’d briefly known in Malcolm Stuart. She thought of Ginger McCabe’s dapper pride and Paula Tort’s less than icy hauteur and the abiding gentle sadness of April Mear and the malign hints Klaus Fischer’s angry spirit still insinuated into the world. Eddie Coyle’s epic sleight-of-hand. Carter Fucking Melville’s dark agenda. She thought of Michael Aldridge and the enduring love she still didn’t really believe she deserved to receive from him.
A long and complex litany of names and places, people and events and contrasting motivations would be pulled together into clear focus in the person she believed she was about to confront. Everything had rippled out from the splash Martin Mear had made in life and then allegedly in death. Ruthie felt a slight weariness, but she also felt quite calm. This moment she had reached was, after all, much more about him, at its conclusion, than it was about her.
It was a simple place when she got there, granite, slate-roofed, whitewashed. But the twin windows to either side of the door were shuttered. The building was blind, unless there was a peephole in the door. It was blind to her, though, from the outside. And so she stood there feeling suddenly naked for a charged instant until she heard the rasp of bolts being drawn back and the door opened inward on a gaunt man with a shotgun broken over his right forearm. The weapon had two barrels.
Ruthie expected him to snap the barrels shut, to ready the gun for firing. But he didn’t do that. Instead he smiled at her and in the low murmur of a voice that sounded not much used, said, ‘The polite thing to do would be to knock.’
THIRTY-ONE
It was warm in the shelter of the cottage. The place was spartanly furnished, lit by gas lanterns he turned off after opening the shutters. He wore a full beard and had shaved his head, so he didn’t look very much at first glance like the leonine Martin Mear of the early 1970s. He was limber when he moved, had the sinewy build of a fell runner and eyes the flecked green of the sea in a storm. His eyes held hers with fierce directness. But the extraordinary thing about him was his presence. The sheer physicality of the man radiated off him. He charged the air in a way that made her expect it to crackle with energy. Ruthie didn’t think charisma anywhere near an adequate word.
She had to drag her gaze away from him to study the cottage interior. It required an actual effort of will. The space she was in was contradictory, ordered and precise, but busy with the accoutrements of a remote, rural life.
Some of it was the stuff of sustenance. A fishing rod rested in a corner above a woven basket filled with lures and hooks and coils of line. There was a serious looking archery bow and beside it, a quiver full of arrows. There was a large bone-handled bowie knife in a leather sheath. To the right of an old enamel cooker, game had been hung. There was a red grouse and a mountain hare, still with their feathers and fur.
Some of it, though, was recreational. A coil of rope and climbing boots and a helmet hung from hooks, along with a powerful-looking pair of binoculars and a belt full of carabiners. He had snow shoes and a pair of ice-skates. There was a folded kite, poignant because she thought of them essentially as children’s toys, not the plaything of a mature exile from his rightful life. It would go high, she thought, plied on the Highland winds.
A floor-to-ceiling bookcase dominated the rear wall, its shelves crammed, almost overflowing. Pinned to the walls there were frameless charcoal sketches she thought he’d probably done himself. Wildlife was the theme; a sea-eagle, a kingfisher, a falcon, an otter, a salmon depicted mid-leap. Ruthie thought these studies probably what the binoculars were for.
‘All mod cons,’ she said, ‘sort of. Bankrolled by Sir Terence?’
‘I died a wealthy man, but live on in a kind of penury.’
‘Sounds like a line from Eliot.’
‘Nope. I’d know, if it was.’
Ruthie hesitated and then took off her jacket and he appraised her. Neither of them had sat down. The light through the un-shuttered windows had a pale uncertainty that bled the room of shadows. Her eyes were lured back to him, her focus strongly pulled, dragged, like magnetism tuned to work on an aesthetic level. He was a sensory assault, making her feel slightly giddy. She thought that in sunlight he would look like an ageing god.
‘I never imagined my death sentence would come quite so exotically wrapped,’ he said.
‘I’m not your death sentence, Mr Mear.’
‘Martin, please. And you’ll be Ruthie Gillespie.’
‘You heard about me from Sir Terence?’
‘He figured you were looking in the wrong places. Didn’t stop him warning me.’
‘April led me to you,’ Ruthie said.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Those lines from Shelley. All waste and solitary places.’
He looked out of the window, out of both windows, at a vista he no longer thought of as innocent. ‘Not solitary for much longer, Ruthie. They’ll have followed you.’
‘The Jericho Society?’
He shook his head. His smile then was heartbreaking, she thought. He said, ‘There’s always a price to pay. They never write off a debt. They never forget. There’s no forgiveness.’
‘T
hey’re not coming,’ Ruthie said.
‘I’m intrigued to know why you think that. You can tell me, if there’s time.’ He glanced over at the table on which his gun now lay, inert and lethal. He went over to a cupboard and took a leather bandolier of cartridges out of it and put that next to the gun. He thought he was going down, but wasn’t resigned to going quietly. He had the determination to fight. It was there in the detachment of his glance and the set of his jaw. He sniffed the air, as if he could scent impending intrusion. There was no loudening rumble of off-roader engine, no drone of an outboard amplifying with the approach of a boat on the loch, no closing tread of a party of professional killers on foot. And to Ruthie, the man in front of her looked far more predator than prey.
‘Do you have any coffee, Martin?’
He smiled at her, a bit distractedly. ‘A last request? You’re not one of them. They’ll kill you too, for which I’m sorrier than I can say. I’ll take as many of them down as I can, and I can shoot, Ruthie. And have no compunction where they’re concerned, but I’m a single gun.’
‘They’re not coming,’ Ruthie said. Then she said, ‘Hope that coffee’s not instant.’
‘Blue Mountain Jamaican, care of Sir Terry. One of the hermit’s little luxuries,’ Martin said. His speaking voice was deliberately quiet. It was a melodic voice, but he had no interest himself in hearing it. He was very alert now, to noise, to intrusion. She observed how his hands flexed convulsively at what he still believed was to come. He was ready for the confrontation, resigned to conflict. He was brave and absolutely determined to sell his life as dearly as possible.
‘You loathe them, don’t you?’
‘Loathing and shame in equal measure, Ruthie. Most of a lifetime of both.’
‘You need to let go of the shame.’
‘I made even Sebastian Daunt afraid of me.’
‘Not at the end. At the end, he loved you.’
Martin Mear scanned the view through his windows; the wilderness under its gunmetal-grey sky, the smudged horizon. Ruthie looked and swallowed at the vastness of it, at the way she’d come, approaching this place. And behind his home, the emptiness rose and loomed, on an epic, inhuman scale. Then he turned to her. ‘There’s a rear door. Stay out of their sightline and you might have chance if I can pin them down, hold them off for long enough.’