It was late and Malcolm Stuart had a full schedule for the following day. The property market had picked up to the point where the office veterans had stopped talking lyrically about the mini-boom at the beginning of the millennium. They’d even stopped waxing nostalgic about the boom proper at the start of the 1990s. The good times were emphatically back. He knew that the sensible thing to do would be to get some sound sleep before a hectic Monday.
He couldn’t, though. He didn’t know when he’d met a more attractive woman less aware of her own impact than Ruthie Gillespie had proven to be over a couple of enigmatic hours. There was a melancholy about her she carried like a weight and he was intrigued about where that burden had come from. She was slightly careworn and utterly stunning. He’d spent most of the late afternoon and evening wondering how he could overcome the obstacle of being a decade or so younger than she was.
And it was an obstacle. She had seemed to be single and straight, which meant that she was theoretically available. He had managed to establish that much about her during their conversation. But she didn’t take him seriously as a suitor, or wouldn’t, because she was in her mid-thirties and he had not long graduated from university. Calling her would be pointless. She’d be tactful, because she was courteous on top of all her other attributes. She’d be firm, though, because she knew her mind and the age difference would prevent him from being a credible romantic option.
He thought that he knew a way to impress her, despite this. He could help with at least one aspect of her research into Martin Mear. He’d done some oral-history recordings with a few of the old dock hands from Wapping and Shadwell. The recording themselves would not help, they were general reminiscences, the subjects of Martens and Degrue and their one-time clerk Max Askew had never come up. Why should they have?
He was thinking about one particular witness to the great days of the docks, however, and hoping that the man was still alive and that he had not succumbed to Alzheimer’s or to a stroke or just the memory loss associated with old age. He’d interviewed this character at a sheltered housing block, in the pristine flat he occupied there, in Bethnal Green at the time he was researching his thesis.
And Ginger McCabe was a character. In his early eighties, ramrod-straight, the habitual wearer of a smart three-piece suit even indoors, even in his own home. In the 1960s he’d been a bare-knuckle boxing champion. He’d been an extra in a couple of British feature films, the kitchen-sink dramas shot in real locations in the days when the big stars had been Tom Courtney and Lawrence Harvey and Albert Finney. He’d had a small speaking part in the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon. He’d been on drinking terms with Oliver Reed and Anthony Newley.
Ginger had been a union activist, an organizer of strikes and a formidable human barricade against scab workers on any picket line back when the dockers were, with the miners, the most militant workers in the country when it came to protecting their hard-won rights. Malcolm thought that Ginger, with his perfect recall and his cockney rasp, would remember both Max Askew and the firm that had employed him until his retirement. He’d know all about the mysterious Martens and Degrue.
Malcolm still had Ginger McCabe’s contact details. What he didn’t have was a legitimate reason for questioning the old man about stuff that might provoke unpleasant memories. As Ruthie Gillespie had pointed out, an exorcism was an extreme measure at the time two had been performed in a Shadwell dockside warehouse all those years ago. Ginger would have been in his late thirties back then, wouldn’t he, a big-shot on the quays, a union rep with keen eyes and his ear to the ground.
Things didn’t generally go bump in Malcolm Stuart’s night. He had never entertained the idea of the paranormal before taking his estate agent job. But since he’d taken the job, he’d encountered 77 Proctor Court and developed a perspective slightly different from the one he’d had before. This new outlook was somewhat less carefree and more cautious. It was less inclined to the bombastic certainties he’d held to back in his student days.
He’d gone back there, after saying goodbye to Ruthie outside the door of the pub. She’d raised the collar of her coat and smiled slightly wistfully and turned away from him and headed towards the tube. He’d had to leave his car where he’d parked it because the two pints of lager he’d drunk put him slightly over the limit if he got stopped and breath-tested. He’d parked where there were no restrictions on a Sunday so that aspect of things was OK.
He thought the two pints were probably the reason he went back. It was sufficient Dutch courage to get him over the Proctor Court threshold in daylight. Ruthie had been vague about whatever her experience had been once past Max Askew’s old front door. It had been out of kilter in some subtle, disturbing way, but she hadn’t heard a banshee wail or encountered a screaming demon. She would have said so, if she had.
Malcolm was wrong, though. The rain had strengthened while they chatted in the Prospect and he got to Proctor Court cold and damp-shouldered wearing the weight of his sodden raincoat like some sartorial defeat. His feet felt wet inside his shoes. They were almost wet enough to squelch. The stairwell echoed as he climbed the rain-slicked steps and when he reached the door and fumbled for the key a shiver wracked him more akin to dread than just a chill.
He stared at the Green Man door knocker and it stared back at him, gnarled and dripping, grinning and secretive, sly-eyed and antic and not welcoming at all. And through the frosted array of small glass panes above the knocker, he thought he saw a flicker of movement disturb the gloom within.
In Malcolm Stuart’s stomach, dismay lurched into dread. He swallowed. The key was shaking in his fist. ‘Sod it,’ he whispered, turning away.
Now, he yawned and looked at his wristwatch. Home was a Hoxton studio flat he’d got on a two-year lease at a cut-rate rent care of a former colleague. It was small and secure and comfortable. It was warm and well-lit and he was sprawled on the sofa with Ellie Goulding turned down so low it was like she was whispering the songs personally to him. He would wait for lunchtime tomorrow and then give Ginger McCabe a call. He might even call him in the morning before work, aware of the habit the elderly had of rising earlier than they needed to.
It still bothered him that he had no legitimate reason to question the old man in this way, beyond trying to access information that would aid his bid to be taken seriously as a romantic proposition by Ruthie Gillespie. Against that, though, was the fact that Ginger liked to reminisce. He was proud of his own fairly flamboyant history as one of the district’s faces.
‘It was my manor,’ he would say with an indignant flush, slapping a big fist into a still meaty palm for emphasis.
Malcolm would take him for a drink. It wasn’t a dry academic exercise, this. He’d buy him a few beers and make a social event of it. And if it looked like trying to recall Max Askew and Martens and Degrue was distressing him in any way, he’d simply change the subject, move on to something else, like the time Ginger drank Richard Harris under the table on a film set; or the time he fought the Irish King of the Gypsies to a bloodied standstill in an Epsom meadow on Derby Day.
He looked at his watch again. It was almost eleven o’clock. He was pleased now he had a plan of sorts in place. More of a scheme than a plan, but he felt he had to do something. He couldn’t just let Ms Gillespie slip out of his life carelessly, without some attempt to influence matters to the contrary.
He met a lot of women. It was inevitable in his line of work. They tended to be ambitious and forceful, of a type, on the up, acquisitive and slightly flashy and a bit vacuous and almost inevitably blonde. Ruthie was raven-haired and clever and serious and though she’d turned practically every male head in the pub on their arrival at the Prospect, she’d been completely unaware of the fact. She was probably out of his league, but he had to try, didn’t he?
He thought about his sister. He knew that Ursula would still be up. She’d been christened Bernadette, but had become Ursula at art school when, in common with most of her friends, she’d been more creative working on herself than on her courses. She’d still be up because Goths were essentially nocturnal creatures.
She wasn’t quite a Goth. She wasn’t quite a hippie, either, which is how he’d described her in the pub to Ruthie. She was somewhere between the two. She didn’t drink cider in cemeteries or make Whitby Bay pilgrimages but she mostly wore black and a great deal of mascara and her lipstick was always red. She read a huge amount of horror fiction and of course she listened to Martin Mears’ old band and banged on about him never having actually died to anyone who’d listen.
He called her. She answered at the tenth ring. He said, ‘Tell me about Ghost Legion.’
She said, ‘It’s a pretty huge subject, Mal. Heavy, too, for a Sunday night.’
‘I’m a captive audience,’ he said.
On the Portuguese coast, it was very late and Frederica Daunt was either on the cusp of drunkenness or the cusp of sobriety, depending upon a person’s outlook. Her father was seated in the armchair opposite hers on the other side of the wood-burner. There was a slight smell of salt and tar from the driftwood she gathered from the shore to fuel her fires and to her this mingled scent had a nostalgic quality. Or that could just have been her father’s company, she thought, slightly dozily. She hadn’t enjoyed that for a long time and his presence was largely something she associated with her childhood.
Now, she looked at her dad and something in his expression made her say, ‘What?’
‘I think you might have imagined the figure in the garden. I think it might have been only a projection. I suspect you saw it because you expected to.’
Frederica thought about this. She said, ‘I wouldn’t have expected to see his fingernails as grotesquely long as they were. As though they’d grown in his coffin after his death. That was a detail too far.’
Sebastian Daunt raised an eyebrow. There was a beer bottle beaded with moisture in his right fist. In the firelight, the bottle looked bejewelled. He took a sip and said, ‘That happens in life. It’s a detail your subconscious provided. You’d been dwelling on the subject of Martin. Flight was already on your mind. You needed a tipping point and your imagination cooperated in providing one. You need him to look scary and so he did.’
‘It’s a seductive theory,’ Frederica said.
‘Really?’
‘Of course. It would be reassuring to think that’s what happened. It’s less disturbing than the alternative.’
‘So give it some consideration.’
‘It doesn’t explain what happened at the séance. There was a witness to that. Or maybe more accurately a participant.’ Frederica realized she was still fairly sober. ‘Participant’ was a minefield of a word to someone pissed.
Sebastian reached for the rattan table in front of him and his daughter’s phone. He’d earlier in the evening used it to source a picture of Ruthie Gillespie. It was a press-shot taken at some reception or launch of something and used as publicity material by her publisher. She looked happy, clutching a champagne flute. She looked exotic in an evening dress with her precise black fringe and crimson smile and elaborately inked arms.
Sebastian studied the image, suppressing a slight smile. He said, ‘An author of stories about elves and curses written for children.’
‘She’s a respected researcher.’
‘One with a florid imagination.’
‘I saw what I saw.’
‘I wouldn’t call Ruthie Gillespie to the stand with anything approaching confidence.’
‘That’s unfair. Yes, she’s on the picturesque side.’
‘Picturesque is one word for it.’
‘She’s also intelligent and shrewd. And when I was shaken and bleeding she was kind to me. She was cool-headed. She took control.’
Her father merely shrugged.
‘I saw what I saw, Dad.’ There was an edge to Frederica’s voice, suddenly. A touch of steel: ‘I heard what I heard. We both did. It was him. One way or another, Clamouring or no Clamouring, he’s back. Maybe I did imagine what I thought I saw in the garden the following evening. I was alone and frightened and pretty suggestible, I suppose. But Martin Mear is back and I don’t find that thought terribly relaxing.’
‘You should turn in, love. We both should.’
‘I’m reluctant to sleep.’
‘That’s just silly.’
‘I’m frightened of what I might dream about.’
Sebastian sipped more beer and turned his gaze to the fire. It was fading now, diminishing; the feeble orange of a small sun extinguishing the world it had faithfully enabled. Carefully, he said, ‘Martin was a keeper of secrets. I wouldn’t pretend to have known the half of what he thought or much at all about any dark stuff he got up to privately after the Legion went global. But if anyone could cheat death, he’d be my candidate.’
‘I’m not seeing your point here.’
‘Assume he’s done this by some occult means. The preparation would be elaborate and the effort enormous. He wouldn’t do it just to put the wind up a medium, not even one as high-profile as you’ve been over the last few years. He’d have an agenda. It would be serious and ambitious and he wouldn’t be sidetracked or distracted.’
‘You’re just telling me what you think I want to hear.’
Sebastian frowned. He said, ‘What I’m doing is applying logic to a supposition that beggars sane belief. But if Martin’s really back, he’s got bigger fish to fry than you, Freddie.’
Frederica peered through the wood-burner’s soot-smeared door. She said, ‘Our fire’s gone out.’
Gently, her father said, ‘A good moment for us both to admit that we’re tired and need some rest. Is the bed in the spare room made up?’
‘Of course it is, Dad. I don’t see much of you. Doesn’t mean I don’t always live in hope.’
Malcolm Stuart called Ginger McCabe at a quarter to nine on Monday morning, forty-five minutes before he was due to be at his desk, making the call on his mobile from a Costa coffee boutique not far from Shadwell underground station. The street outside was cobbled and slick with rain and rain streaked the window through which he watched the wet stones reflect the headlamps of cars passing streakily by. Ginger answered on the third ring.
‘Mr McCabe?’
‘Who wants him?’
‘It’s Malcolm.’
There was a pause. ‘Remind me.’
‘Malcolm the student?’
‘Don’t do that upspeak thing, Malcolm the student. Drives me potty the way all you young people do that. Anyway, I’ve got you now. Social history. What can I do for you that I haven’t already done?’
‘There’s a company I want to talk to you about. Bloke worked for them I’m hoping you might remember.’
There was another pause. Then, ‘This pan have a handle?’
‘Max Askew. He lived in Shadwell, at an address at Proctor Court.’
‘He did indeed, Malcolm the Student.’
‘And he worked for—’
‘I know very well who he worked for and if I were you I’d avoid mention of the name on an open phone line.’
‘Isn’t that being a bit you know, paranoid?’
‘It might be. And it might only be taking a sensible precaution. Come and see me tonight. Don’t come alone.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You’ll be accompanied, Malcolm the student. Mr Chivas and Mr Regal are coming with you. Seven o’clock.’