They made fresh, ragged footprints across the empty fields. They were the only moving things in sight. It was quiet too. Richard saw birds frozen in mid-tweet on boughs, trapped in globules of ice. No smoke rose from the chimneys of Sutton Mallet. Of course, what with the heat wave, even the canniest country folk might have put off getting in a store of fuel for next winter.
“Refresh my memory,” said Richard. “How many people are at your weather research station?”
“Five. The director, two junior meteorologists, one general dogsbody and a public relations-security consultant.”
Richard had gone over what little the Club could dig up on them. Oddly, a DLI press release provided details of only four of the staff.
“Who’s the director again?” he asked.
“We’ve kept that quiet, as you know,” said Leech. “It’s Professor Cleaver. Another Dick, which is to say a Richard.”
“Might have been useful to be told that,” said Richard, testily.
“I’m telling you now.”
Professor Richard Cleaver, a former time-server at the Meteorological Office, had authored The Coming Ice Age, an alarmist paperback propounding the terrifying theory of World Cooling. According to Cleaver, natural thickening of the ozone layer in the high atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to the expansion of the polar icecaps and a global climate much like the one currently obtaining in Sutton Mallet. Now, the man was in the middle of his own prediction, which was troubling. There were recorded cases of individuals who worried so much about things that they made them happen. The Professor could be such a Talent.
They huffed into Sutton Mallet, past the chapel, and went through a small copse. On the other side was the research station, a low-lying cinderblock building with temporary cabins attached. There were sentinels in the front yard.
“Are you in the habit of employing frivolous people, Mr Leech?”
“Only in my frivolous endeavours. I take the weather very seriously.”
“I thought as much. Then who made those snowmen?”
They emerged from the rhyne and stood on hard-packed ice over the gravel forecourt of the DLI weather research facility. Outside the main doors stood four classic snowmen: three spheres piled one upon another as legs, torso and head, with twigs for arms, carrots for noses and coals for eyes, buttons and mouths. They were individualized by scarves and headgear - top hat, tarn o’shanter, pith helmet and two toy bumblebees on springs attached to an Alice band.
Leech looked at the row. “Rime-men, surely?” he said, pointedly. “As a busybody, you appreciate accuracy.”
There were no footprints around the snowmen. No scraped bare patches or scooped-out drifts. As if they had been grown rather than made.
“A frosty welcoming committee?” suggested Leech.
Before anything happened, Richard knew. It was one of the annoyances of his sensitivity - premonitions that come just too late to do anything about.
Top Hat’s headball shifted: it spat out a coal, which cracked against Richard’s visor. He threw himself down, to avoid further missiles. Top Hat’s head was packed with coals, which it could sick up and aim with deadly force.
Leech was as frozen in one spot as the snowmen weren’t. This sort of thing happened to others, but not to him.
Pith Helmet, who had a cardboard handlebar moustache like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, rose on ice-column legs and stalked towards Leech, burly white arms sprouting to displace feeble sticks, wicked icicles extruding from powdery fists.
Tarn and Bee-Alice circled round, making as if to trap Richard and Leech in the line of fire.
Richard got up, grabbed Leech’s arm, and pulled him away from Pith Helmet. It was hard to run in polar gear, but they stumped past Tarn and Bee-Alice before the circle closed, and legged it around the main building.
Another snowman loomed up in front of them. In a postman’s cap, with a mailbag slung over its shoulder. It was a larger and looser thing than the others, more hastily made, with no face coals or carrot. They barrelled into the shape, which came apart, and sprawled in a tangle on the cold, cold ground - Richard felt the bite of black ice through his gauntlets as the heel of his hand jammed against grit. Under him was a dead but loose-limbed postman, grey-blue in the face, crackly frost in his hair. He had been inside the snowman.
The others were marching around the corner. Were there people inside them too? Somehow, they were frowning - perhaps it was in the angle of their headgear, as if brows were narrowed - and malice burned cold in their eye-coals.
* * * *
Leech was on his feet first, hauling Richard upright.
Snow crawled around the postman again, forming a thick carapace. The corpse stood like a puppet, dutifully taking up its bag and cap, insistent on retaining its identity.
They were trapped between the snowmen. The five walking, hat-topped heaps had them penned.
Richard was tense, expecting ice-daggers to rip through his furs and into his heart. Leech reached into his snowsuit as if searching for his wallet - in this situation, money wasn’t going to be a help. A proper Devil would have some hellfire about his person. Or at least a blowtorch. Leech - who had recorded a series of anti-smoking adverts - managed to produce a flip-top cigarette lighter. He made a flame, which didn’t seem to phase the snowmen, and wheeled around, looking for the one to negotiate with. Leech was big on making deals.
“Try Top Hat,” suggested Richard. “In cartoon terms, he’s obviously the leader.”
Leech held the flame near Top Hat’s face. Water trickled, but froze again, giving Top Hat a tear streaked, semi-transparent appearance. A slack face showed inside the ice.
“Who’s in there?” asked Leech. “Cleaver?”
Top Hat made no motion.
A door opened, and a small, elderly man leaned out of the research station. He wore a striped scarf and a blue knit cap.
“No, Mr Leech,” said Professor Richard Cleaver, “I’m in here. You lot, let them in, now. You’ve had your fun. For the moment.”
The snowmen stood back, leaving a path to the back door. Cleaver beckoned, impatient.
“Do come on,” he said. “It’s fweezing out.”
Richard looked at Leech and shrugged. The gesture was matched. They walked towards the back door.
The last snowman was Bee-Alice. As they passed, it reared up like a kid pretending to be a monster, and stuck out yard-long pseudo-pods of gleaming ice, barbed with jagged claws. Then it retracted its arms and silently chortled at the shivering humans.
“That one’s a comedian,” said Cleaver. “You have to watch out.”
Leech squeezed past the Professor, into the building. Richard looked at the five snowmen, now immobile and innocent-seeming.
“Come on, whoever you are,” urged Cleaver. “What are you waiting for? Chwistmas?”
Richard slipped off his sun-visor, then followed Leech.
* * * *
II
“You in the van, wakey wakey,” shouted someone, who was also hammering on the rear doors. “The world needs saving.”
“Again?” mumbled Jamie Chambers, waking up with another heat-headache and no idea of the time. Blackout shields on the windows kept out the daylight. Living in gloom was part of the Shade Legacy. He didn’t even need Dad’s night-vision goggles -which were around here somewhere - to see well enough in the dark.
He sorted through stiff black T-shirts for the freshest, then lay on his back and stuck his legs in the air to wriggle into skinny jeans. Getting dressed in the back of the van without doing himself an injury was a challenge. Sharp metal flanges underlay the carpet of sleeping bags, and any number of dangerous items were haphazardly hung on hooks or stuffed into cardboard boxes. When Bongo Foxe, the drummer in Transhumance, miraculously gained a girlfriend, he’d tactfully kicked Jamie out of the squat in Portobello Road. The keys and codes to Dad’s old lair inside Big Ben were around somewhere, but Jamie could never get used to the constant ticking. Mum hated that
too. Between addresses, the Black Van was his best option.
“Ground Control to Major Shade,” called the hammerer, insistent and bored at the same time. Must be a copper.
“Hang on a mo,” said Jamie, “I’m not decent.”
“Hear that, Ness?” said the hammerer to a (female?) colleague. “Shall I pop the lock and give you a cheap thrill?”
One of the few pluses of van living, supposedly, was that gits like this couldn’t find you. Jamie guessed he was being rousted by gits who could find anybody. For the second time this week. He’d already listened to Leech’s twist, Heather Wilding. This’d be the other shower, the Diogenes Club. One of the things Jamie agreed with his father about was that it made sense to stay out of either camp and make your own way in the night.
Even parked in eternal shadow under railway arches, the van was like a bread oven with central heating. The punishing summer continued. After seconds, his T-shirt was damp. Within minutes, it’d be soaked and dried. This last six weeks, he’d sweated off pounds. Vron was freaked by how much his skeleton was showing.
He ran fingers through his crispy shock of raven hair (natural), checked a shaving mirror for blackheads (absent), undid special locks the hammerer oughtn’t have been able to pop, and threw open the doors.
A warrant card was held in his face. Frederick Regent, New Scotland Yard (Detached). He was in plainclothes - blue jeans, red Fred Perry (with crimson sweat patches), short hair, surly look. He couldn’t have been more like a pig if he’d been oinking and had a curly tail. The girlfriend was a surprise - a red-haired bird with a Vogue face and a Men Only figure. She wore tennis gear - white plimsolls, knee-socks, shorts cut to look like a skirt, bikini top, Cardin cardigan - with matching floppy hat, milk-blank sunglasses (could she see through those?) and white lipstick.
“I’m Fred, this is Vanessa,” said the Detached man. “You are James Christopher Chambers?”
“Jamie,” he said.
Vanessa nodded, taking in his preference. She was the sympathetic one. Fred went for brusque. It was an approach, if tired.
“Jamie,” said Fred, “we understand you’ve come into a doctorate?”
“Don’t use it,” he said, shaking his head. “It was my old man’s game.”
“But you have the gear,” said Vanessa. She reached into the van and took Dad’s slouch hat off a hook. “This is a vintage ‘Dr Shade’ item.”
“Give that back,” said Jamie, annoyed.
Vanessa handed it over meekly. He stroked the hat as if it were a kitten, and hung it up again. There was family history in the old titfer.
“At his age, he can’t really be a doctor,” said Fred. “Has there ever been an Intern Shade?”
“I’m not a student,” he protested.
“No, you’re one of those dropouts. Had a place at Manchester University, but left after a term. Couldn’t hack the accents oop North?”
“The band was taking off. All our gigs are in London.”
“Don’t have to justify your life choices to us, mate. Except one.”
Fred wasn’t being quite so jokey.
“I think you should listen,” said Vanessa, close to his ear. “The world really does need saving.”
Jamie knew as much from Heather Wilding. She’d been more businesslike, drenched in Charlie, her cream suit almost-invisibly damp under the arms, two blouse buttons deliberately left unfastened to show an armoured white lace foundation garment.
“The other lot offered a retainer,” he said. “Enough for a new amp.”
“We heard you’d been approached,” said Vanessa. “And were reluctant. Very wise.”
* * * *
Wilding hinted Transhumance might be signed to a Derek Leech label. They didn’t only put out moaning hippie box sets and collected bubblegum hits.
“You won’t need an amp in the ice age,” said Fred. “They’ll be burning pop groups to keep going for a few more days.”
“Yeah, I’m already shivering,” said Jamie, unpicking wet cotton from his breastbone. “Chills up my spine.”
“All this heat is a sign of the cold, they say.”
“You what?”
Fred cracked a laugh. “Trust us, there could be a cold spell coming.”
“Roll on winter, mate.”
“Careful what you wish for, Jamie,” said Vanessa.
She found his Dad’s goggles in a box of eight-track tapes, and slipped them over his head. He saw clearly through the old, tinted glass.
“Saddle up and ride, cowboy,” she said. “We’re putting together a posse. Just for this round-up. No long-term contract involved.”
“Why do you need me?” he asked.
“We need everybody,” said Fred, laying a palm on the van and wincing - it was like touching a griddle. “Especially you, shadow-boy. You’ve got a licence to drive and your own transport. Besides standing on the front lines for democracy and decent grub, you can give some of your new comrades a lift to the front. And I don’t mean Brighton.”
Jamie didn’t like the sound of this. “What?” he protested.
“Congratulations, Junior Shade. You’ve got a new backing group. Are you ready to rock and - indeed - roll?”
Jamie felt that a trap had snapped around him. He was going into the family business after all.
He was going to be a doctor.
* * * *
III
Inside the research station, crystals crunched underfoot and granulated on every surface. White stalactites hung from doorframes and the ceiling. Windows were iced over and stunted pot-plants frostbitten solid. Even light bulbs had petals of ice.
Powdery banks of frost (indoor rime? snow, even?) drifted against cabinets of computers. Trudged pathways of clear, deep footprints ran close to the walls, and they kept to them - leaving most of the soft, white, glistening carpet untouched. Richard saw little trails had been blazed into the rooms, keeping mainly to the edges and corners with rare, nimbler tracks to desks or workbenches. The prints had been used over again, as if their maker (Professor Cleaver?) were leery of trampling virgin white and trod carefully on the paths he had made when the cold first set in.
The Professor led them through the cafeteria, where trestle tables and chairs were folded and stacked away to clear the greatest space possible. Here, someone had been playing - making snow-angels, by lying down on the thick frost and moving their arms to make wing-shapes. Richard admired the care that had been taken. The silhouettes - three of them, with different wings, as if writing something in semaphore - matched Cleaver’s tubby frame, but Richard couldn’t imagine why he had worked so hard on something so childish. Leech had said he didn’t employ frivolous people.
If anything, it was colder indoors than out. Richard felt sharp little chest-pains when he inhaled as if he were flash-freezing his alveoli. His exposed face was numb. He worried that if he were to touch his moustache, half would snap off.
They were admitted to the main laboratory. A coffee percolator was frosted up, its jug full of frothy brown solid. On a shelf stood a goldfish bowl, ice bulging over the rim. A startled fish was trapped in the miniature arctic. Richard wondered if it was still alive - like those dinosaurs they found in the 1950s. Here, the floor had been walked over many times, turned to orange slush and frozen again, giving it a rough moon-surface texture. Evidently, this was where the Professor lived.
Richard idly fumbled open a ringbinder that lay on a desk, and pressed his mitten to brittle blue paper.
“Paws off,” snapped Cleaver, snatching the file away and hugging it. “That’s tip-top secwet.”
“Not from me,” insisted Leech, holding out his hand. “I sign the cheques, remember. You work for me.”
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 36
