by F. G. Cottam
‘They’re not coming.’
‘I know them, Ruthie. I was born to this shit, remember? So, I know that they are. They got you, because you were the kind of person Paula and my girl would open up to. They thought you’d be given the clues. How did they?’
‘I’ve got previous with them,’ Ruthie said. ‘Two past encounters.’
‘Terry sussed it straight away, that you were the lure.’
Ruthie didn’t say anything.
‘Shit, Ruthie. I should have died when I was fourteen. Everything since that day has been a weird kind of encore. You’re young, with a lifetime in front of you, and you might still be able to get away. I’m begging you, if that’s what it takes.’
‘They’re not coming,’ Ruthie said again. ‘Make me a mug of coffee, Martin, and I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve done to stop them.’
Ruthie had done it only the previous morning, at her scheduled meeting with Carter Melville. She’d done it heartily sick of being played, aware that a reversal of roles in their relationship felt more than overdue to her.
‘Baby,’ he said. ‘You called this one. I’ve had to shuffle my schedule. Make it worth my while.’
She sensed that for the first time there was a hint of vulnerability about him. He didn’t know what she wanted there and wasn’t a man who welcomed surprises. He looked more marooned than moored behind his aircraft-carrier flight-deck of a desk. She looked at the trophies lined up on the shelves at his back, at the industry plaudits framed on his walls. And she thought that in the uncompromising autumnal light through his room-length window, they looked a bit tawdry and cheap.
‘I think I know why you sent me firstly in the direction of Frederica Daunt in Chiswick on that rainy Friday night about a hundred years ago,’ she said.
‘Go on.’
‘It was a test. You wanted to know if I was easily scared. I passed the test. It’s more a sort of stubbornness than actual courage, but the fact is that I’m not easily frightened. I wouldn’t be here now, if I was.’
‘You’re speaking in riddles, Ruthie.’
‘Then I’ll make it very plain. I think you killed Malcolm Stuart. I don’t think you planned to, but it became necessary. It was bad timing. He went back to Proctor Court half-cut after sharing a bottle of whisky with Ginger McCabe and you were there planting the postcards Martin Mear sent to taunt Max Askew. You were doing that for me to find them.’
‘You’ve a lurid imagination, Ruthie. How would I come into possession of Max Askew’s postcards?’
‘Because the cult you belong to is dynastic and hierarchical. Max Askew was a foot-soldier. He’d have felt obliged to hand over the postcards, if not to you back then, I suspect to your father.’
‘I don’t belong to any cult.’
‘Of course I can’t prove you killed Malcolm.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘You’re not entitled to sarcasm.’
Melville glanced at his wristwatch. ‘This conversation’s going nowhere,’ he said.
‘On the contrary, Carter, it’s going to Shadwell, where I can prove you killed Ginger McCabe.’
Under the nicotine gloss of his sunbed tan, Carter Melville turned pale. ‘How can you do that, Ruthie?’
‘The event was filmed. I’ve got the footage.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘The whole area’s crawling with CCTV cameras and they’ve all got motion sensors.’
‘You’re still bluffing.’
‘How do I know the exact location? How do I know he went into the water at precisely 7.16 pm? It’s because there’s a time-code on the video, you fucking murdering jerk.’
‘You’re quite fuckable yourself, Ruthie, in a low-rent, shop-soiled sort of way. Is that how you got the video? Or was it just a blow-job?’
‘I got lucky, Carter. A luxury apartment building, a concierge with a little sister who reads my books. He swapped the video from that night for a couple of signed hardbacks. They hadn’t even looked at it. No crime had been committed that night, after all. Ginger McCabe’s death was an accident.’
‘I still don’t get how you knew where to look.’
‘Malcolm Stuart had reminded Ginger of Max Askew and Martens and Degrue. He saw something sacrilegious there, decades ago. He went back to the scene of the crime. It’s what people do.’
Carter Melville sat silently, sucking his teeth.
Ruthie said, ‘Why did you kill him?’
‘Are you wearing a wire, Ruthie?’
‘I don’t need to wear a wire, hon. Not when I’ve got the video.’
‘I was at Martens and Degrue all those years ago when he visited. I was working there in the Easter vacation from university at Oxford. I was the flunky there served him his coffee that day. In a few weeks, my name and picture are going to be everywhere when we launch the box set. Archive shots of me back then with Martin. I didn’t want the old guy remembering something I’d rather keep confidential.’
‘I think you enjoyed it,’ Ruthie said, kicking at the hide rug with its bullet holes, splayed across his office floor. ‘You stalked an old man like prey.’
‘And you’re giving the video to the police?’
Ruthie shook her head. ‘Won’t bring Ginger back, will it? No, Mr Melville. It’s my belief you’re very high up in this cult to which you say you don’t belong. Maybe right at the top of the food chain. Anything unfortunate happens to me, the video goes straight to a senior Met Police detective. Check him out, he’s Commander Patrick Lassiter. He’s very much the real deal. And shop-soiled or otherwise, Patsy’s quite fond of me.’
‘That’s all you want?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s the least of it, hon. You let bygones be bygones with Martin Mear. I very much doubt he has any interest any longer in performing, or even very much in being Martin Mear again, frankly. But when I find him, he’ll probably want rather badly to see April and Paula. You and your people will leave him and them alone.’
‘I don’t like blackmail,’ Carter Melville said.
‘I put Patsy Lassiter on your case, Carter, and you’ll die in a high-security prison cell. And where I’m concerned, Patsy’s never further than a phone call away. So, my advice to you, is suck it up.’
THIRTY-TWO
The smile on Martin Mear’s face when Ruthie finished her account was much more open and less conflicted than the one he’d worn earlier. He said, ‘Where’s the video now, Ruthie?’
‘There is no video,’ she said. ‘I mean, there might be. I got the exact time and location of Ginger McCabe’s murder by less conventional means than CCTV. But Carter thinks it exists and that’s all that matters.’
He laughed. ‘You’re a piece of work.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘This big guy from the Met another of your bluffs?’
‘He’s my ex-boyfriend’s best mate. We were on an expedition together. Something happened that caused him to come apart quite badly. I got to him first, helped put him back together.’
‘Strong at the broken places,’ Martin said.
‘That’s Hemingway, isn’t it? April said you were a big reader.’
‘More poetry than prose. Is he, your police chief? Strong at the broken places?’
‘Yes, he is. But it isn’t that, really. Sometimes you just like people and they like you back. There’s a rapport, it’s human nature. It’s chemistry.’
There were tears in Martin’s eyes, tears tracking the contours of his cheeks, disappearing into the unruly salt and pepper of his beard. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. How to thank you,’ he said. ‘There are no adequate words.’
‘If they’d got you, would the Clamouring have brought you back?’
He sniffed. He said, ‘The Clamouring was always a crock.’
‘Did you really levitate in Montreal?’
‘The evidence is inconclusive.’
‘That’s a politician’s answer.’
‘The honest answer is that I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I believed I could, but I was pretty drugged up that night in Montreal. They were weird times. I made some very uncool decisions. What these days you term judgement calls.’
‘You’ve paid a hefty price.’
‘Just paying my dues. Nothing to the price Paula and April have paid. And they did nothing wrong.’
Ruthie nodded towards the gun. ‘Would you have shot me?’
‘People change, Ruthie. They mellow out. At one time I was wild. But I can’t remember a version of me would ever have pointed a gun at you and pulled the trigger.’
She thought that a more honest answer than the one he’d given about Montreal. She said, ‘Carter Melville?’
‘Carter finished the job at Oxford my uncle began on me as a kid.’
‘And at Klaus Fischer’s mansion in Brightstone Forest, you heard your Master’s voice?’
Martin Mear nodded slowly. ‘Man, did I ever. It took Paula to teach a corrupted soul how to know right from wrong.’
‘I think you knew it already,’ Ruthie said. ‘Your daughter’s the living proof.’
Martin Mear didn’t react to that. Ruthie asked, ‘Why is King Lud about London?’
‘I think because that’s where the seed was sown by my Uncle Max. He worked on the river at Shadwell. But that recording was heavily influenced. Crazy, spellbound, not much to do with me. Not with the conscious part.’
‘It set the Legion template.’
‘And probably cost me any hope I had of salvation. Is Sebastian Daunt still breathing?’
‘Frail,’ Ruthie said, ‘dying. His daughter’s a medium, held a séance a fortnight ago, thought she’d summoned you. I was there. Didn’t feel like smoke and mirrors. I think it might actually have been James Prentice.’
‘James could be very bad news,’ Martin said, ‘could be one angry motherfucker. He was the cat that mostly trashed the hotel rooms. Pissed Terry off big-time.’
‘I’ve heard he died angry with you.’
Martin shook his head. ‘Not true,’ he said, ‘we never had a beef. His family’s stories are a courtroom con. Terry kept me briefed on the cases. James was a hot arranger, but I did all the writing. And we had this groove together, musically. And a shared interest in the occult. Though mine came from bloodline and his was just personal enthusiasm. We were always going in opposite directions with that.’
‘Could James perform sleight of hand?’
Martin nodded. ‘Saw him do things a couple of times. Wouldn’t really call it conjuring, though. Esoterically, James was extremely creative.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘He was the one always thought the Clamouring could work. So, if I’m wrong and it ever does, he’s the one “Cease All Mourning” will be bringing back. Maybe not in the best of shape.’
‘I had a bit of trouble getting here,’ Ruthie said.
Martin Mear laughed, ‘Natural deterrents?’
‘They didn’t seem very natural.’
‘And they didn’t deter you.’
‘That your doing?’
‘Simple stuff,’ he said. ‘Tricks.’
She remembered then what he’d done on a film set, when poor dead Ginger McCabe had found himself wearing the director’s Rolex. Martin Mear’s definition of trickery differed from most people’s in the crucial regard that it wasn’t trickery at all.
He said, ‘What happens next?’
‘Do you have a vehicle?’
‘Old Defender,’ he said. ‘Hidden, camouflaged, a mile from here. Looks like shit but they go on trucking for ever.’
‘I’d like a lift back to my car,’ Ruthie said. ‘But if that’s a general question, I’d say what happens next is up to you. How big a wheel is Carter Melville?’
‘Very,’ Martin said. ‘His grand-daddy founded the Society’s Maine Chapter after fleeing Europe in 1927 and changing his name legally from Fischer. Carter’s the main event, the headline act, destined for it from birth. A divine right to misrule.’
‘And if he values his freedom, he’ll leave you alone. It might take a while for that penny to drop, but what happens from now on is your choice. How does that make you feel?’
Martin Mear sniffed and wiped tears from his eyes with shaking fingers. His voice shook too when he answered her, saying, ‘Honestly? Like I’ve been born again.’
There was a silence between them. Ruthie broke it by saying, ‘Tell me about the Jericho Society.’
‘You’re better off not knowing,’ he said.
‘That was certainly true before yesterday morning,’ Ruthie said. ‘I don’t think it is any longer.’
‘When I was seven years old, I learned that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Got the glad tidings from an older boy at school. I was pretty cut up and then in the Christmas holidays went to stay with my Uncle Max. And he told me that there was someone much better than Santa, someone who didn’t confine his generosity to just the one day a year. But that it was give and take, a two-way street. That was the start of it for me.’
‘Except that Santa is a fairy tale and not a cult.’
Martin said, ‘What do you know about Deism? About Theism?’
‘I took my degree in history, Martin. I don’t know much at all about theology.’
He said, ‘The Societé Jericho was founded in the French Revolutionary Terror. Deism is believing that God made the world and then washed his hands of it. Theism is a belief in an interventionist Creator. That short-fused, bearded guy from the Old Testament who flooded the world in a sulk and only saved Mr and Mrs Noah and their kids and their boatload of assorted beasts.’
‘Among other incidences of plague and pestilence,’ Ruthie said, ‘and the burning of whole cities he’d taken exception to with pillars of fire.’
‘Scorched earth, more than just burning,’ Martin said. ‘When the old guy pulled that move, everything breathing perished.’
‘So basically, you weren’t Satanists? You just believe in the vengeful God of the Old Testament?’
‘It isn’t that simple or innocent,’ Martin said.
‘Tell me.’
‘The Societé Jericho was no more than a flag of convenience. It was a bid for legitimacy at a time and in a place when pretty much any tin-pot creed was tolerated just so long as it wasn’t Catholicism. The French revolutionaries held a pagan Festival of the Supreme Being back then, just to piss off the Church.’
‘I know about that,’ Ruthie said. ‘It was organized by the Jacobin Joseph Fouché, the Executioner of Lyons, the man who became head of Bonaparte’s secret police.’
Martin nodded. He said, ‘Not a cool dude. And the main man in forcing the society to flee France eventually for America. But that’s not the issue. The reality is that the cult into which I was born predates Christianity by millennia.’
‘Jesus.’
Martin shook his head. ‘Jesus hadn’t even been thought of. This stuff goes way back.’
‘How far?’
‘To the time when the most seriously enchanted place in the Western world was a large and intricate stone construction in the west of England, in Wiltshire. There’s still a bit of it left.’
‘Stonehenge is four thousand years old.’
‘More like five,’ Martin said.
‘You’re saying this goes all the way back to the druids. It’s why King Lud plays out the way it does thematically. That song where the Roman invaders die in their sleep? It’s a tribute, isn’t it?’
‘It’s an act of fealty,’ Martin said.
‘So you’re a slave to this cult?’
‘Was. You’re basically a believer in a merciless god.’
‘But one that can be bribed?’
‘Humoured,’ Martin said. ‘Flattered. Cajoled.’
‘Antic and cruel. Mischievous and sybaritic.’
Martin laughed. He said, ‘You’ve just described Mick and Keith.’
‘I’ve just described the Green Man,’ Ruthie said, �
�for whom your uncle had a soft spot.’
‘Yeah, he was a big fan of that guy too.’
Ruthie pondered. She was thinking about the druids and standing water, about the amphibious reptile she’d seen emerge from that tarn. It hadn’t been real. She’d seen the thing she’d most feared seeing. She said, ‘The druids went in for human sacrifice. Have you—’
‘No,’ Martin said. ‘Though I believe it was done one time at the Fischer House. Very bad karma in the cellar there. Strange stain on a snooker table. Kind of a weird aftermath thing too, like a premonition in reverse.’
‘Paula told me.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘I guess that makes you one of those women other women trust.’
‘Are Carter Melville’s hands stained with sacrificial blood?’
‘The honest answer is I don’t know, Ruthie. All I do know is I never would have vouched for Carter, even before I extricated myself from all that ominous, poisonous shit.’ He looked at her, levelly. And he said, ‘Given how high up Carter is in the hierarchy, you’d be pretty dumb to bet against it.’
‘Do you remember a man named Ginger McCabe? You once played a conjuring trick on him.’
‘I do, and I did, but it wasn’t really conjuring.’
‘He told me you had no fear.’
‘Then he got me very wrong.’
‘He once saw a blasphemous painting at Martens and Degrue. The signature was Arthur Sedley-Barrett’s.’
Martin raised an eyebrow. He said, ‘It could have been Bacon’s signature or Lucien Freud’s. Go back a few centuries and Fuseli could have painted what he saw. Or Caravaggio. They have deep pockets and persuasive ways.’
‘How influential are they,’ Ruthie said, ‘how powerful?’
‘You want personal or political?’
‘How about both?’
‘I don’t know whether they’ve thrived, or they’ve declined. I’ve been what’s nowadays called off-message for a long time. My instinct is that they’re doing OK. There’ll always be greed and people with an appetite for badness. It didn’t take all that long back in the day for Woodstock to turn into Altamont.’