The Man From the Diogenes Club
Page 43
On the plus side, the Club had tentative gains. Susan Rodway and Jamie Chambers – the new Dr Shade! – were hardly clubbable in the old-fashioned sense, but Mycroft Holmes had founded the Diogenes Club as a club for the unclubbable. Even Keith Marion, in a reasonable percentage of his might-have-been selves, was inclined to the good – though finding a place for him was even more of a challenge. Geneviève reported that the Chambers boy showed his father’s dark spark, tempered with a little more sympathy than habitually displayed by Jonathan Chambers. Derek Leech must want to sign up Dr Shade. The Shades wavered, leaning towards one side or the other according to circumstance or their various personalities. The boy could not be forced or wooed too strongly, for fear of driving him to the bad. Leech would not give up on such a potent Talent. There might even be a percentage in letting Jamie get close to Leech, putting the lad in the other camp for a while. Susan was reluctant to become a laboratory rat for David Cross or Myra Lark, but was too prodigious to let slip. Without her warm hands, Richard would not have lived through this cold spell. Susan needed help coping with her Talent, and had taken Catriona’s card. If Jamie could be a counter for Leech, Susan was possibly their best hope of matching Jago. It chilled Catriona that she could even consider sending a girl barely in her twenties up against an Effective Talent like Anthony Jago, but no one else was left to make the decisions.
She was thinking like Edwin now, or even Mycroft. The Diogenes Club, or whatever stood in its stead, had to play a long game. She had been a girl younger than Susan or Jamie when this started for her. The rector’s daughter, not the lady of the manor. At eighteen, with Edwin away at the front, she had been escorted by Charles to Mycroft’s funeral. That had been a changing of the guard. Some of the famous names and faces of generations before her own seemed like dinosaurs and relics in her eyes. Even Mycroft’s famous brother was a bright-eyed old gaffer with a beaky nose, fingers bandaged from bee-stings and yellow teeth from decades of three-pipe problems. Richard Riddle had been there, with his uncle and aunt. In his RFC uniform and jaunty eyepatch, the former boy detective was impossibly glamorous to her. She had a better idea than most where he had flown to in 1934, and still expected him to turn up again, with his chums Vi and Ernie.
Charles had pointed out Inspector Henry Mist, Thomas Carnacki, Sir Henry Merrivale, Winston Churchill, General Hector Tarr, John Silence, Sir Michael Calme, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, Margery Device, the Keeper of the Ravens, and others. Now, Catriona knew Geneviève had been there too, spying through blue lenses from the edge of the crowd – Mycroft’s most secret secret agent and, contrary to the public record, the first Lady Member of the Diogenes Club. After all the fuss, Catriona turned out not to be the first of her sex to be admitted to the Inner Rooms – though she was the first woman to chair the Ruling Cabal.
It had been a busy sixty years. Angel Down, Irene Dobson, the Murder Mandarin, the Seven Stars, the last flight of the Demon Ace, Spring-Heel’d Jack, Dien Ch’ing, the Splendid Six, Weezie’s Hauntings, the Rat Among the Ravens, the Crazy Gang, Parsifal le Gallois, the Water War, Adolf Hitler, Swastika Girl, the Malvern Mystery, the Scotch Streak, the Trouble with Titan, Castle De’ath, the Drache Development, Paulette’s dream, the Soho Golem, the Ghoul Crisis, the Missing Mythwrhn, and so many others. And now the Cold. There was more to come, she knew. Richard Jeperson’s work wasn’t done. Her work wasn’t done. The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club remained open.
She felt a whisper against her cheek.
XV.
The garden was Disneyfied: white pools of melting ice, night-birds singing. Light spilled onto the lawns from the upstairs windows of the manor house. Glints reflected in dwindling icicles. Jamie saw activity streaks in the shadows. With the Cold drawn in, the land was healing.
No one had to worry about World Cooling any more.
Richard Jeperson, the man from the Diogenes Club, tried to explain what he had done. It boiled down to getting the attention of a vast, unknowable creature and asking it very nicely not to wipe out all life-forms which needed a temperature above freezing to survive. Jamie realised how lucky they had been. Only someone who could ask very politely and tactfully would have gotten a result. A few bumps the other way, along one of Keith’s paths, and it could have been Derek Leech under the snow…
Leech had left Jamie his card, and he hadn’t thrown it away.
Many of the people drawn to the Winter War had melted away like the ice. Some were sleeping over in the house. Jamie’s van was parked next to Richard’s ShadowShark in the drive.
He sat on a white filigree lawn-chair, drinking black coffee served from an electric pot. The hostess, an elderly lady who had not joined them outside, provided a pretty fair scratch supper for the survivors and their hangers-on. Now, there were wafer-thin mints. Gené was in a lawn-swing, drinking something red and steaming which wasn’t tomato soup. Richard, still glowing with whatever Susan had fed into him, smoked a fat, hand-rolled cigarette that wasn’t a joint but wasn’t tobacco either. Considering what he’d done, Jamie reckoned he could demand that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister hand-deliver an ounce of Jamaican, the Crown Jewels and Princess Margaret dressed up in a St Trinian’s uniform to his room within the next half-hour and expect an answer of ‘right away, sir’.
‘How was your first day on the job?’ Gené asked him.
‘Job?’
‘Your dad called it a practice. Being Dr Shade.’
‘Not sure about the handle. I thought I’d just go with “Shade” for a bit. “Jamie Shade”, maybe? I’d use it for the band, but it sounds too much like Slade.’
‘I quite like Slade,’ said Richard.
‘You would,’ said Jamie. ‘What a year, eh?’
‘It has had its meteorological anomalies.’
‘No, I mean the charts. Telly Savalas, Real Thing, the Brotherhood of Man, Abba, the Wurzels, J. J. Barrie, Demis Roussos… “Brand New Combine Harvester”, “Save Your Kisses for Me”, bloody “No Charge”… It has to be the low-point in music since for ever. It’s like some great evil entity was sucking the guts out of our sounds. Some other great evil entity. You can’t blame Leech for all of it. Even he wouldn’t touch the Wurzels. Something’s got to change. Maybe I’ll stick with the band, leave monsters and magic to other folk. Kids are fed up, you know. They want to hear something new. And you lot are getting on.’
‘Do you feel “long in the tooth?”, Geneviève?’ Richard asked.
Gené bared teeth which Jamie could have sworn were longer than they had been earlier.
‘It’s not about how old you are,’ said Susan, who had been quietly sipping a drink with fruit in it. ‘It’s about what you do.’
‘Here’s to that,’ said Richard, clinking his glass to hers.
Keith was sitting quietly, not letting on which of his selves was home. The primary Keith had reluctantly given Jamie back the Great Edmondo’s cloak and its hidden tricks. He had asked if Dr Shade needed an assistant, and started shuttling through selves when Jamie told him he really needed a new drummer. Now, despite what he’d said, he wasn’t sure. Being Dr Shade meant something, and came with a lot of baggage. He half-thought Vron was only with him because of who his dad was. These people kept calling him ‘Junior Shade’, ‘Young Dr Shade’ or ‘the New Dr Shade’. Perhaps he should take them seriously. He was already a veteran of the Winter War, if something over inside two days counted as a war.
Like Dad, he wasn’t much of a joiner. He couldn’t see himself putting a tie on to get into some fusty old club. But he played well with others. How randomly had his vanload of raw recruits been assembled? Even Sewell Head, now lost to Leech, had come in handy. Maybe, he’d found his new band. Susan, Gené and Keith all had Talents. Perhaps the old hippie with the ringlets and the tash could take the odd guest guitar solo. One thing was for certain, they wouldn’t sign with a Derek Leech label.
In the house, the lights went off, and the garden was dark. Jamie didn’t mind the dark. F
rom now on, he owned it.
‘Catriona’s gone to bed,’ said Richard.
Gené, another night person, stretched out on the grass, as if sunning herself in shadows.
‘Some of us never sleep,’ she said. ‘Someone has to watch out for the world. Or we might lose it.’
‘We’re not going to let that happen,’ said Richard.
THE MAN WHO GOT OFF THE GHOST TRAIN
PROLOGUE: CULLER’S HALT
‘Ten hours, guv’nor,’ said Fred Regent. ‘That’s what the timetable says. Way this half-holiday is going, next train mightn’t come for ten months.’
Richard Jeperson shrugged. A cheek-muscle twitched.
Pink-and-grey-streaked autumn skies hung over wet fields. Fred had scouted around. No one home. Typical British Rail. He only knew Culler’s Halt was in use because of the uncollected rubbish. Lumpy plastic sacks were piled on the station forecourt like wartime sandbags. The bin-men’s strike was long-since settled, but maybe word hadn’t reached these parts. A signpost claimed ‘Culler 3m’. If there were a village at the end of the lane, it showed no lamps at the fag-end of this drab afternoon.
Fred wasn’t even sure which country Culler was in.
On the platform, Richard stood by their luggage, peering at the dying sunlight through green-tinted granny glasses. He wore a floor-length mauve travel coat with brocade frogging, shiny PVC bondage trousers (a concession to the new decade) and a curly brimmed purple top hat.
Fred knew the man from the Diogenes Club was worried about Vanessa. When a sensitive worried about someone who could famously take care of herself, it was probably time to panic.
At dawn, they’d been far south, after a nasty night’s work in Cornwall. They had been saddled with Alastair Garnett, a civil servant carrying out a time-and-motion study. In a funk, the man from the ministry had the bad habit of giving orders. If the local cops had listened to Richard rather than the ‘advisor’, there’d have been fewer deaths. The hacked-off body parts found inside a stone circle had to be sorted into two piles – goats and teenagers. An isolated family, twisted by decades of servitude to breakfast food corporations, had invented their own dark religion. Ceremonially masked in cornflakes packets with cut-out eyeholes, the Penrithwick Clan made hideous sacrifice to the goblins Snap, Crackle and Pop. Bloody wastage like that put Richard in one of his moods, and no wonder. Fred would happily have booted Garnett up his pin-striped arse, but saw the way things were going in the eighties.
Trudging back to seaside lodgings in Mevagissey, hardly up for cooked breakfast and sworn off cereal for life, they were met by the landlady and handed Vanessa’s telegram, an urgent summons to Scotland.
Abandoning the Penrithwick shambles to Garnett, Richard and Fred took a fast train to Paddington. They crossed London by taxi without even stopping off at their respective homes in Chelsea and Soho for a change of clothes or a hello to the girlfriends – who would, of course, be ticked off by that familiar development – and rattled out of Euston in a slam-door diesel.
The train stank of decades’ worth of Benson & Hedges. Since giving up, Fred couldn’t be in a fuggy train or pub without feeling queasily envious. At first, they shared their first-class compartment with a clear-complexioned girl whose T-shirt (sporting the word ‘GASH’, with an Anarchy symbol for the A) was safety-pinned together like a disassembled torso stitched up after autopsy. She quietly leafed through Bunty and The Lady, chain-smoking with a casual pleasure that made Fred wish a cartoon anvil would fall from the luggage rack onto her pink punk hairdo. At Peterborough, she was collected by a middle-aged gent with a Range Rover. Fred and Richard had the compartment to themselves.
Outside Lincoln, something mechanical got thrown. The train slowed to a snail’s pace, overtaken by ancient cyclists, jeered at by small boys (‘get off and milk it!’), inching through miles-long tunnels. This went on for agonising hours. Scheduled connections were missed. The only alternative route the conductor could offer involved getting off at York, a stopping train to Culler’s Halt, then a service to Inverdeith, changing there for Portnacreirann. In theory, it was doable. In practice, they were marooned. The conductor had been working from a timetable good only until 1 September of last year. No one else had got off at Culler’s Halt.
Beyond the rail-bed was a panoramic advertising hoarding. A once-glossy, now-weatherworn poster showed a lengthy dole queue and the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working – Vote Conservative’. Over this was daubed ‘No Future’. A mimeographed sheet, wrinkled in the fly-posting, showed the Queen with a pin through her nose.
‘There’s something wrong, Frederick,’ said Richard.
‘The country’s going down the drain, and everyone’s pulling the flush.’
‘Not just that. Think about it: “God Save the Queen” came out for the Silver Jubilee, two years before the election. So why are ads for the single pasted over the Tory poster?’
‘This is the wilds, guv. Can’t expect them to be up with pop charts.’
Richard shrugged again. The mystery wasn’t significant enough to be worth considered thought.
They had more pressing troubles. Chiefly, Vanessa.
Their friend and colleague wasn’t a panicky soul. She wouldn’t have sent the telegram unless things were serious. A night’s delay, and they might be too late.
‘I’m not happy with this, Frederick,’ said Richard.
‘Me neither, guv.’
Richard chewed his moustache and looked at the timetable Fred had already checked. Always gaunt, he was starting to look haggard. Deep shadow gathered in the seams under his eyes.
‘As you say, ten hours,’ said Richard. ‘If the train’s on time.’
‘Might as well kip in the waiting room,’ suggested Fred. ‘Take shifts.’
There were hard benches and a couple of chairs chained to pipes. A table was piled with magazines and comics from years ago: Patrick Mower grinned on the cover of Tit-Bits; Robot Archie was in the jungle in Lion. A tiny bookshelf was stocked with paperbacks: Jaws, Mandingo, Sexploits of a Milk Monitor, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit. Richard toggled a light-switch and nothing happened. Fred found a two-bar electric fire in working order and turned it on, raising the whiff of singed dust. As night set in, the contraption provided an orange glow but no appreciable heat.
Fred huddled in his pea-coat and scarf. Richard stretched out on a bench like a fakir on a bed of nails.
The new government wasn’t mad keen on the Diogenes Club. Commissions of Inquiry empowered the likes of Alastair Garnett to take a watching brief. Number Ten was asking for ‘blue skies suggestions’ as to what, if anything, might replace this ‘hold-over from an era when British intelligence was run by enthusiastic amateurs’. Richard said the 1980s ‘would not be a comfortable decade for a feeling person’. His chief asset was sensitivity, but when his nerves frayed he looked like a cuckoo with peacock feathers. Called up before a Select Committee, he made a bad impression.
Fred knew Richard was right to be paranoid. Wheels were grinding and the team was being broken up. He had been strongly advised to report back to New Scotland Yard, take a promotion to detective inspector and get on with ‘real police work’. Rioters, terrorists and scroungers needed clouting. Task Forces and Patrol Groups were up and running. If he played along with the boot boys, he could have his own command, be a Professional. The decision couldn’t be put off much longer.
He’d assumed Vanessa would stay with the Club, though. Richard could chair the Ruling Cabal, planning and feeling. She would handle fieldwork, training up new folk to tackle whatever crept from the lengthening shadows.
Now, he wasn’t sure. If they didn’t get to Vanessa in time…
‘There used to be a through train to Portnacreirann,’ mused Richard. ‘The Scotch Streak. A sleeper. Steam until 1962, then diesel, then… well, helicopters took over.’
‘Helicopter?’ queried Fred, distracted. ‘Who commutes by helicopter?’
Richard sat up. He took off and folded his glasses, then tucked them in his top pocket behind an emerald explosion of display handkerchief.
‘It’s where I started, Frederick,’ he said. ‘On the Scotch Streak. Everyone has a first time…’
‘Not ’arf,’ Fred smiled.
Richard smiled too, perhaps ruefully. ‘As you so eloquently put it, “not ’arf ”. For you, it was that bad business at the end of the pier, in Seamouth. For your lovely Zarana, it was the Soho Golem. For Professor Corri it was the Curse of The Northern Barstows. For me, it was the Scotch Streak… the Ghost Train.’
Fred’s interest pricked. He’d worked with Richard Jeperson for more than ten years, but knew only scattered pieces about the man’s earlier years. Richard himself didn’t know about a swathe of his childhood. A foundling of war, he’d been pulled out of a death camp by Captain Jeperson, a British officer who saw his sensitivity. Richard had been raised as much by the Diogenes Club as his adoptive father. He had no memory of any life before the camps. Even the tattoo on his arm was a mystery. The Nazis were appallingly meticulous about record-keeping, but Richard’s serial number didn’t match any name on lists of the interned or to-be-exterminated. The numbers weren’t even in a configuration like those of other holocaust survivors or known victims. Suspicion was that the Germans had seen the boy’s qualities too and tried to make use of him in a facility destroyed, along with its records and presumably other inmates, before it could fall into Allied hands. The lad had slipped through the clean-up operation, scathed but alive. Geoffrey Jeperson named him Richard, after Richard Riddle – a boy detective who was his own childhood hero.