Catriona realised the Aviatrix was looking through the crowds, checking each upturned face. She was searching for someone. Since doing so well with the jail-breaker, she had specialised in tracking down escaped or wanted felons, like a Wild West bounty hunter—though no d’Aulney would ever stoop to seeking payment for doing his or her duty. Her late brother Aulney Tregellis-d’Aulney, vanquished over No Man’s Land by Hans von Hellhund (the so-called “Demon Ace”), had never claimed a penny of his RFC pay.
The outfit showed little of the woman inside—bee-stung red lips and a blot of artificial beauty mark. It struck Catriona that Lady Lucinda painted her face like an actress, so as to give the best effect from a distance. Up close, her mouth would be an exaggerated scarlet bow.
Now the wings hung like a kite, and the Aviatrix held out her arms for balance, gliding on an air current. She seemed to walk on a glass promenade above the general run of humanity, considering then rejecting each.
Catriona recalled that Lady Lucinda had announced that she would hunt down and bring in an international revolutionary known as the Crocodile. The anarchist was behind a series of dynamite outrages on the Continent and reportedly intent upon bringing his stripe of violent upheaval to England.
A chill crept through her. A bomb on the sea-front, timed to go off at the height of a Bank Holiday, would be devastating, resulting in enormous loss of life. With the War so fresh in mind, it was scarcely conceivable that such horrors should resume, and on the mainland. And yet she knew better. Humanity’s capacity for beastliness was undimmed even after the mass slaughter of the trenches.
The Aviatrix passed overhead. Catriona had the illusion she could reach up and touch the heels of her boots, though the woman was a good ten feet beyond her grasp. Captain Duell rose from his chair, back creaking, uniform wrinkled around his waist from so long in a sitting position. He was still trying to speak. Floss was back, an arm around the patient, cooing to him, supporting him.
Everyone else—Catriona included—looked to the Aviatrix. At last, Lady Lucinda stopped, as if a gem had caught her eye in a tray of coals. She stood still, above the entrance to the West pier, and looked down at the Punch and Judy theatre. Her scarf streamed like a banner. She slipped her goggles up onto her forehead, disclosing long-lashed blue-grey eyes.
The puppet play continued, but the young audience was hushed, staring at the new arrival, who put a finger to her lips, entreating them to keep the secret a moment longer. The policeman puppet seemed to turn to look up too, truncheon in its arms. A slit opened in the front of the theatre, the puppeteer’s eyes shining through.
The Aviatrix smiled and made fists against her chest, crossing her wrists in a pose of concentration, then beat her wings. A hummingbird gust bore down and ripped away the striped fabric of the theatre, revealing a bearded fellow holding up the policeman and covering his face with the crocodile. The stall fell, struts twisting around the puppeteer’s legs. Hung inside the stall were the familiar figures of Punch and Judy, their dog and baby. A string of sausages turned out, upon examination, to be linked sticks of dynamite.
The Crocodile waved his crocodile hand, as if warding off the harpy who fell viciously upon him.
Claw-tipped gloves slashed across the anarchist’s arm, tearing the puppet off his hand, and hooked into his face, digging deep. A slapstick blood spray spattered the audience.
“You are Mr. Lobby Ludd,” said the Aviatrix. “And I claim my five pounds.”
Catriona felt more than she could cope with - awe, terror, love, disgust. She fainted, unnoticed. When Floss revived her with smelling salts, the show was over, the Crocodile in police custody, the heroine fluttered away. Relieved holidaymakers, only now sensing the peril averted, redoubled their efforts to enjoy their day away from normal life.
In the melee, someone had stolen her purse.
* * * *
Eight years and many singular experiences later, Catriona Kaye had learned to accept that she shared a world with women who flew. Indeed, by comparison, the Aviatrix was almost a routine marvel. After all, Lady Lucinda was a public figure, while her own adventuring usually involved matters which tended to be kept from the newspapers or recorded only as buried, inconclusive items at the foot of the column on an obscure inside page.
In the Bloomsbury flat she shared with Edwin, she sat up in bed, swathed in a sumo-size kimono, fiddling with a Chinese puzzle box. Souvenir of a gruesome bit of business she thought of as The Malign Magics of the Murder Mandarin of Mayfair, the box had defeated her fingers for fourteen months. It held the preserved forefinger of a centuries-dead courtesan-sorceress whose sharpened nail-talon had several times altered the course of history. Or maybe the rattling, lightweight treasure inside the box was a very old twig.
Catriona was no longer primarily a journalist, an observer—though she had published books about bogus spiritualists and genuine hauntings. Through her complicated association with Edwin Winthrop of the Diogenes Club, she was a participant in a secret life conducted busily just beyond the perceptions of the man or woman in the street. She was still alive and sane; if she thought about it, she was rather pleased with herself for that— such a happy, if provisional, outcome seemed so unlikely for a person in her line.
She slid lacquered panels back and forth, rattling the box, discovering new configurations with each click. The fiddling was at least educational, expanding her knowledge of Chinese characters.
“Still no joy?”
Edwin came into the small bedroom, with a tray of tea, toast, and Catriona’s mother’s marmalade. He wore a cardinal-scarlet, floor-length dressing gown that might have done for a ball-gown, over last night’s dress shirt with the collar popped and the tie undone. There had been talk of disowning and a cessation of parental relations when she elected to share accommodation with a man to whom she was not married, but it hadn’t lasted.
This was a decade of change.
“It’s always three moves away.”
Edwin kissed her cheek, took away the puzzle box and poured her a cup of tea, ritually tipping in just the splash of milk she liked.
This morning, he was being especially considerate. He had been out at his club—always the Club—last night. She gathered he had not slept.
“You’re going to ask me to do something?”
“A brilliant deduction, Catty-Kit,” he said, sitting on the bed, legs stretched over the coverlet, pillows propped behind his back. His hair smelled of tobacco; the inner rooms of the Diogenes Club were a perpetual fug, thicker even than the pea-soupers which still afflicted London.
“And it’s going to be wretched?”
Edwin rattled the puzzle box next to his ear. He subscribed to the old twig theory. He had also suggested solving the puzzle with an Alexandrine sword-stroke, but she knew he was only teasing.
“It’s just a tiny little murder,” he admitted.
“That’s extreme,” she said, nibbling a corner of toast. “Couldn’t you just have whoever it is crippled?”
“Not murder as in committing, murder as in investigating.
“You may not have heard, ducks, but there’s an excellent service for that. Those fellows in the bell-shaped helmets, the ones who always know the time and have those dear little whistles. They don’t take kindly to lady journalists getting under their size-eleven boots, or so I’ve read in the Police Gazette.”
Edwin shrugged, noncommittally.
“Good fellows the ‘peelers,’ even out in the trackless terra incognita that is Heathrow, Surrey. A fine yeoman constabulary excellently qualified for locating missing bicycles, rescuing cats from trees, and cuffing apple-scrumpers around the earhole. Maybe just a bit baffled by Murder Most Foul, though. The penetrating intellect and discreet tact of Miss Catriona Kaye would be much appreciated in certain circles.”
He marmaladed more toast and chewed it over.
“If Mr. Charles Beauregard of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club wants me to do something,” she said, “he coul
d always ask me himself.”
Edwin paused midmouthful. He always looked naughty boyish when his superior and mentor was involved.
“Better yet, Charles could nominate me for membership, you could second me, and we wouldn’t have to go round the houses every time the least-publically-acknowledged of the Kingdom’s intelligence and investigative agencies has a task uniquely suited to my abilities.”
Edwin scoffed.
“That would be murder. A woman member of the Diogenes Club! The ravens would flee the Tower of London. Sir Henry Merrivale would bust a corset. Anarchy in the streets. England would fall.”
“Serve it right. This is 1927. We’ve got the vote. And the Married Women’s Property Act.”
This was an old scab, picked at whenever they got bored. The last thing she wanted was to be a member of Edwin’s club, but it was still an annoyance that she put herself so frequently at the disposal of an institution that would only allow her into a select few rooms of their cavernous premises in Pall Mall, refusing her admittance to the rest of the place on the spurious grounds of her sex. As it happens, she had seen everything anyway—with the connivance of Charles and Edwin, and disguised as a post-boy, while thwarting the efforts of Ivan Dragomiloff, the soi-disant “ethical assassin,” and saving the somewhat over-capacious hide of that bloody-minded old reactionary Sir Henry.
“‘Sides, independence is what makes you an asset,” said Edwin, touching her nose. “We trust your objectivity. Diogenes isn’t entirely free from the compromises, rivalries, and politickings that shackle all servants of the crown. Sometimes, only a free agent will do.”
“You aren’t making this trip to the country any more attractive.”
Edwin smiled, a line of white beneath his clipped moustache. He made adorably sad eyes, like Buster Keaton.
“And that’s not going to work either, beast.”
He was tickling. Which wasn’t fair.
“The problem has features of uncommon interest.”
He shifted a facet of the box. It would be just like him to solve the thing without even trying, after she’d spent months on it.
“You mean, it’s embarrassingand dangerous.”
“Not at all. It’s probably very ordinary, run of the mill, and even, as murders go, tedious. But there’s anaspect that stands out. Almost certainly an irrelevance, but it needs mulling over. It’s something with which the locals have not a hope in Hades of coping. Only you, Catty-Kit, can bring to bear the tact and cunning needed. Hark, what’s that? Britannia, calling the finest of her daughters to do her duty...”
She swallowed the last of the toast.
“Aren’t you curious?”
He was maddeningly right.
“So, is it a dagger of ice, melted away in an open wound? A beheaded corpse in a room locked from the inside, with the head missing? The venomous bite of a worm unknown to science?”
“None of the above, old thing. Plain blunt instrument, applied to the back of the noggin with undue force. Probably a length of lead pipe. Or a fireplace poker. Mr. Peeter Blame, our luckless householder, apparently surprises a burglar in the course of felonious filching, gets badly bashed on the bonce, then left to die on the kitchen floor. Usual portable valuables missing. Cash, watch, minor jewelry. String of housebreakings in the vicinity. Official description of the fellow sought to help the police with their enquiries almost certainly runs to a striped jersey, crepe-soled shoes, a black domino mask, a beret, and a big black bag marked ‘SWAG.’“
She was being led by the nose. He was daring her to spot what was wrong with this picture.
“Peter Blame?”
“Peeter. Pee, double-e, ter. If you ask me, that’s an invitation to unlawful killing by itself. The late, lamented had an endearing habit of bringing suit against newspapers who misspelled his name.”
“Was he mentioned much in the ‘papers?”
“In the legal notices, which contributed to the problem, really. He had the habit of bringing suit against people for all sorts of things. A stickler for the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law.”
She knew what he meant.
“So, Mr. Peeter Blame, of the Extraneous E, was one of those busybodies who enjoys dragging all and sundry into court?” she deduced. “Thus scattering motives for murder throughout the countryside in which he lived. Heathrow, you said. I assume he’s also been known to, ah, strongly criticise the constabulary currently charged with investigating his demise?”
Edwin barked a laugh.
“They didn’t hold an inquest, Catty-Kit. They threw a party. With streamers and funny hats. I’m making that up, but you get my drift. An area of the law in which Mr. Battered Blame took especial interest was the licensing of establishments that serve alcoholic beverages.”
“Ouch.”
“Indeed. Last January, he was successful in ensuring the dismissal of several policemen and the disbarring of a Justice of the Peace on the grounds that they not only allowed the Coat and Dividers, the local pub, to stay open after regular hours but were photographed drinking there.”
“Photographed?”
“Another of Blame’s hobbies. Flash photography. Neat bit of trickery, done through a mullioned window. All the faces clear and the clock over the bar in perfect focus. Pints in mid-pull, merry coppers in mid-draught, JP rendering the ‘sober as a judge’ saying inapplicable. Twenty minutes past midnight. On January the first.”
“New Year’s Eve? Are you sure killing Mr. Blame was strictly against the law?”
“‘Fraid so. Even the smallest, and smallest-minded, of His Majesty’s subjects deserves full restitution when knocked off by skull-cracking crooks.”
Catriona pulled her kimono tighter. She saw the trap closing.
“I’ll concede being a killjoy and a bounder isn’t grounds for justifiable homicide,” she said. “But there’s an elephant in the room, something colossal you’ve omitted mention of. The Diogenes Club doesn’t concern itself with page seven stuff, no matter how flagrant the misapplication of local justice. Charles is only concerned with matters momentous. It takes a serious threat to the nation to get him out of his armchair. Even then, he’s only excited by a serious threat to our plane of existence. So? Perfidious foreigners or supernatural spookery?”
“Maybe both, maybe neither.”
She was close to teasing it out of him.
“I give up. What’s the feature of uncommon interest?”
Edwin’s eyes shone.
“The address. The Hollyhocks, Heathrow, Surrey. Mr. Blame has... had... unusual neighbours. His property abutted the Drome.”
“Ah.” Catriona saw it. “The Splendid Six.”
“Those are the fellows. And lady. Mustn’t forget the lovely Lalla Tregellis-d’Aulney.”
Catriona considered the situation.
“When an ordinary everyday unsolved murder is committed right next-door to the greatest sleuths and saviours in the land, it’s a tad awkward.”
“Rather.”
“So it had better get itself jolly well solved.”
“Indeed.”
“Quickly and quietly.”
“On the nose, admirable girl.”
She thought about it.
“But you want me to look into it? You’re staying out yourself, along with the whole Club?”
“Matter of jurisdiction. Diogenes prefers the shadows, you know. And the Splendid Six... well, they’re great ones for the spotlight. We’ve got by so far on staying out of each other’s way. Best all round, really. But Captain Rattray put in a personal telephone call to Charles, on his private line...”
“Captain Dennis Rattray. Blackfist?”
“Yes, Blackfist. He asked our opinion. Not something he does often. Rather, not something he’s done ever before. The thing is that the Splendid Six are all very well when you want the Eastern Empire saved from a Diabolical Mastermind or need a Royal Princess rescued from the inbred descendants of a lost legion of Roman soldiers maintainin
g a fiefdom in a hidden Welsh valley, but they aren’t who you want to turn loose on a mundane robbery-murder. It’d be like using a team of Derby winners to pull the milk-cart.”
“But I’m a suitable dray-horse? Very flattering.”
“You have to appreciate our quandary. We can’t go charging in mob-handed and take over from the police.”
“What you mean is that Charles doesn’t like the Club being called in like a tradesman to tidy up a mess on the doorstep of a crew of glory-hogs who won’t sully themselves with it. Blacklist didn’t ask for your help, he told you to take out the rubbish and lock the gate behind you. So, to get out of the who-can-spit-further contest, you’re palming this off on me—because I’m ‘independent.’ Well, I’m not really allowed to poke into murders. I know there’s this craze for amateur detectives, but they’re usually so well-connected that the police bite their lips and pretend to appreciate the ‘help.’ I don’t have an ancient title, a chair in advanced cleverness at an Oxbridge college, or an obliging nephew in Scotland Yard. I don’t think my press card will get much respect. I’m not even eccentric.”
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 22
