The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01]

by By Kim Newman

  “To an extent.”

  “Excellent. You are accountable, then. You will come to me tomorrow at teatime, and give a report of your progress.”

  Richard kissed June’s hand. “Of course.”

  “Alone,” she said, eyes swivelling to Barbara.

  He felt again the crackle he had experienced yesterday. This was a very powerful woman, perhaps a conduit for a higher, greedier power. He tried to let June’s hand go, but she pinched his fingers for a moment, hanging on, then released him when she decided to.

  “Now, I must rest. It’s fearfully exhausting, you know. Being Mavis.”

  June pushed off and skated away, independent of the Twins, making Squiers cringe. She did a circuit of the studio, whooshing through the shadowed areas away from the brightly lit lounge.

  Richard watched her brush past Emma’s cold, damp spot.

  There was a sound in his head like a bubble being popped and June sped back, puffed out a little like a cat with a mouthful of feathers. She zoomed across the set towards the door, which the Twins got open in time, and whizzed out onto the car park.

  Richard walked towards Emma’s spot.

  “What happened?” Barbara asked.

  Richard opened himself up, trying to find yesterday’s presence. Emma was gone, completely. Her psychic substance had been consumed.

  “That woman’s a sponge,” he told Barbara. “She just ate a ghost.”

  * * * *

  IX

  TheDaily Comet, Britain’s best-selling tabloid, led with the headline “TERROR STALKS BARSTOWS”—bumping England’s failure to qualify for the World Cup and another oil crisis to the inside pages. The popular press had been filling their middles with trivial showbiz stories since the days of Marie Lloyd sitting among the cabbages and peas and Lillie Langtry snaring the Prince of Wales, but now ephemera like this made page one. Richard sensed another trend in the making, another step downstairs. From now on, Coronation Street would get more newspaper coverage than coronations, Harold Steptoe would be more newsworthy than Harold Wilson, and the doings of Barstow and Company would be followed more intently than those of Barclay’s Bank. Eventually, there would only be television. More and more of it, expanding to fill the unused spaces in the general consciousness.

  The Barstows weren’t taping this afternoon, so before-cameras talent had time off. Squiers and the writing pack were conjuring up the next script. June was in her caravan with a nervous ghost writer, one of a string employed on her much-delayed autobiography; it seems she ate them up, just as she consumed real ghosts. Finn, suitably equipped with a dolly bird as “arm ornament,” was opening a supermarket in Bradford; “Victoria Plant” had turned down an offer of £15 to play the lucky girl, diminishing her chances of getting ahead in the business. Lionel was working on a futile press release to deny all these silly curse rumours.

  Richard and Barbara met Vanessa in the Grand Old Duke of North.

  Vanessa was perched on a barstool not designed with modern female fashions in mind. Unless she fixed her tangerine-and-lemon minidress firmly over her hips, it rode up and turned into a vest. She looked down, with an unjustly critical eye, at her officially lovely legs.

  Richard sipped Earl Grey from one of the silver thermos cups in today’s Fortnum’s hamper, and took a psychic temperature reading. Vanessa and Barbara had hit it off at once, which was a positive. Otherwise, the Grand Old Duke was a chill place.

  The pub, another Barstows standing set, was in the studio’s smallest stage. Here, many a “pint of Griddles” had been called for and swallowed by a Barstow who needed a drink before spitting out the latest news, usually some bombshell lobbed just before the adverts to keep viewers transfixed as they were mind-controlled to hire-purchase fridge-freezers, terrorised by the catastrophe of hard-to-shift understains, warned of things their best friends wouldn’t tell them and urged to buy the world a Coke. Here, Ben Barstow had enjoyed (or perhaps not) a liaison with Blodwyn, the Welsh barmaid who broke up his third marriage and then died in a plane crash two episodes before his fourth wedding. Here, for weeks and weeks, Da’s kidnapped urn had been hidden in plain sight, in the display case along with clog-dancing, whippet-racing and brass band trophies. There had been a nationwide contest to “spot the ashes,” with viewers writing in to suggest where they might be and newspapers running stories about urns seen in surprising real-life locales from the Crown Jewel case in the Tower of London to an Olde Junke Shoppe in Margate. Some even sent in ashes of their own, in homemade or shop-bought urns: most were just from the grates of open fires, but some contained authentic human bone fragments. It was no wonder the show wound up cursed.

  “I think the culprit is the Phantom Phoner,” said Vanessa, breaking into his prophetic gloom.

  “You think there’s a culprit?” asked Barbara.

  Vanessa deferred to Richard.

  “Sometimes, a curse—by which I mean an infestation of malign extranormal phenomena—is like weather or a bad cold. No one’s fault, but hard to do anything about except wait for it to blow over. This happens in more cases than you hear of. Sometimes, it really is a ghost or a spirit—a discarnate, spiteful entity, making mischief or bearing a grudge, acting on its own accord or directed by a houngan who has summoned or tapped into a power and is using it for his or her own ends.”

  “A houngan?” quizzed Barbara.

  “Voodoo sorcerer,” shuddered Vanessa. “Like Mama Cartouche, remember?”

  “It doesn’t have to be voodoo,” said Richard. “That’s an Afro-Caribbean tradition. Europe has more than enough witchery to go round. Australasia and the Americas too. Everywhere except Antarctica, and that’s only because the Sphinx of the Ice won’t allow it. In this case, however, I think we are dealing with something vaguely voodoo.”

  “So there is a culprit?”

  “I definitely suspect a suspect,” said Richard. “Someone is deliberately shaping events, channelling a force, and, as it happens, charging money for it. What we have here is a hit man, as Fred suggested, but one with an unusual m.o. Working with The Northern Barstows, through the psychic energy generated by the machinery of the show, and directing it, essentially, to kill people. To order, for cash. So, yes, there’s a culprit. One who either needs or wants money for their services. In my experience, that tends to rule out ghosts and demons. Some miserly spirits cling to the idea of worldly goods even when they’re beyond a plane in which they’d be any good to them. You’ve heard of the ghost who collects bright trinkets— coins and jewels—like a magpie. A nuisance, but not serious, especially since you usually get the pleasant surprise of finding the hoard of goodies at the end of the day. This isn’t like that. This is large sums transferred to Swiss bank accounts. This is organised crime.”

  Barbara, intent on what he was saying, put down her salmon sandwich.

  “But how is it done? How can something that happens on a television programme, which boils down to actorspretending, lead to something happening to real people out there in the real world? When Delia rode Jockie to death, what happened to make Delia do the same thing to Jamie? Or am I getting the order wrong?”

  “I have ideas about that. Vanessa, what was the most significant thing Delia told us about the case?”

  Vanessa shrugged.

  “Think ‘Penny for the Guy.’“

  “Old clothes,” said Vanessa, tumbling to it at once. “We were told that Jamie fired a groom who was supposed to have stolen some of their clothes. Jamie thought the actors’ costumes included items filched from him and Delia.”

  ‘“And not just clothes, but other things, personal things.’“

  Vanessa snapped her fingers. “It’s pins! Pins in dolls!”

  Barbara shook her head. She hadn’t caught up.

  “What do you think the personal things were?” Vanessa asked. “We can find out from Delia, but what do you think ...”

  “Anything, really. Combs, with hair. Makeup. Cigarette ends. Rings. Things impregnated with sweat
, skin, hair. Clothes should do it alone, but the rest would put the pink bow on it.”

  “Voodoo dolls,” said Barbara, catching on. “On the Barstows, Mama Cartouche made a doll of Brenda, with nail clippings and hair pressed in, and stuck pins through it. Brenda hadtwinges.”

  “Probably where our culprit got the idea,” said Richard.

  “You have to admit this is a new one,” said Vanessa. “Fashioning characters on a television programme into voodoo dolls, then torturing or killing them in front of fifteen million people ...”

  “... some of whom believe in the characters. June said the Barstows were more real to viewers than their own families. All that belief has to mean something, has to do something, has to go somewhere!”

  “God, there’s a paper in this,” said Barbara.

  Richard and Vanessa looked at her.

  “But there is,” she said. “This is what I’ve been saying all along. TV soaps matter. They shape reality. I’m not saying it’s a good thing; I’m saying it’s a thing thing.”

  Richard slipped an arm around the Professor and kissed her ear.

  “Hold off on publication for a while, Barbara. Let’s at least nab the killer first.”

  “I have a name,” said Fred.

  They looked at the stage door. Fred had come in, motorcycle helmet under his arm. Richard knew he had heard enough to be up to speed.

  “I went after the gambling syndicate, the ones who hired Jamie’s murder,” said Fred. “Price hauled in some minor faces, put the squeeze on ... and someone coughed up a name. Our hit man.”

  Fred let the pause run.

  “Do tell,” prompted Richard.

  “Stop faffing about, Regent,” said Vanessa. “This isn’t the end of an episode and we can pick up on Thursday.”

  ‘“Darius,”‘ said Fred. “That’s the name he uses. ‘Darius Barstow.’“

  Richard was sure he had turned to where the camera would be and frozen his face long enough for the credits to start rolling.

  He shivered as he heard theBarstows theme in his head.

  * * * *

  X

  Head of Wardrobe at O’Dell-Squiers was Madame Louise Ésperance d’Ailly-Guin (“Mama-Lou”), a tall, slender woman, graphite-black, with large, lively eyes and a bewitching islands accent. Her office ensemble ran to a red mushroom-shaped turban, white silk strapless evening dress with artfully ragged hems and matching PVC go-go boots. Behind her desk was an altar to Erzulie Freda and a framed snapshot of a younger Mama-Lou frozen in the middle of a snake-waving dance under a Haitian waterfall.

  Richard, inclined by instinct to look gift horses in the mouth, felt the same way about a gift houngan.

  Tara, the wardrobe assistant Richard had seen on set, was showing Mama-Lou a range of designs for Priscilla’s future dresses. Mama-Lou pencilled crosses on the rejects, flicking away hours of work.

  Richard did not insist on being attended to. It was more useful to observe.

  Last night, in the TV room at the guest house, Richard had for the first time watched The Northern Barstows as it went out to the nation, even though there was an interesting-sounding programme about cane toads on BBC2. Barbara, Vanessa and Fred helped him through it. He turned the sound down during the adverts and covered the screen with a sheet of grease-proof paper to shield his senses from mind-altering subliminals in the baked bean and gravy commercials. It was the episode he had followed from script to shooting, so there shouldn’t have been surprises. Vanessa thought they hadn’t used her best “takes” and detected the hand of June O’Dell in the editing suite. A few interesting bits and pieces were slipped in that hadn’t come up at the script meeting, which must have been shot when he wasn’t looking—a shadow stalking through the fogs of Bleeds, hobnail boots clumping on the cobbles; a mysterious wind blowing through the Grand Old Duke, giving Bev the new barmaid horrors; objects wobbling slowly (on visible strings) around the boardroom, indicating a poltergeist problem. The curse was being worked into the show, which set up Mavis’ speech about calling a ghost-hunter.

  “In trut’, nix to ahll these,” Mama-Lou said to Tara, returning the last design.

  The girl was exasperated, dreading the work of going back to the beginning.

  “They won’ be needed,” said the Head of Wardrobe. “Word come from on high.”

  Mama-Lou thumbed upwards, at the ceiling. The Wardrobe Department was a windowless bunker beneath the writers’ den. Multiples of costumes hung in cellophane shrouds, continuity notes pinned to them, indicating when they had last been worn on air. Shoes, hats, coats, gloves, scarfs and belts had their own racks. Principal characters had niches, where their two or three outfits were looked after. There was a separate room, temperature-controlled and with a combination lock, for June O’Dell’s wardrobe, which was twice the size of the rest of the cast’s put together.

  “We can’t keep Lovely Legs in that fruit punch frock,” said Tara. “It goes fuzzy in transmission and looks like she’s wearing a swarm of bees. Technical have sent several memos about it. Sound on vision. And the poor cow at least needs a new pair of tights.”

  Mama-Lou drew a finger across her throat.

  Tara was sobered. Mama-Lou put the finger up to her mouth.

  “Hush-hush, chile,” she said. “Don’t nobody know outside of you, me and the loas.”

  Mama-Lou’s eyes flashed at Richard.

  Whatever it was nobody knew, he didn’t know it either. Unless he did.

  “Now, run off and see to Dudley’s latest split trews, while I converse wit’ this gentlemahn.”

  Tara’s head bobbed and she withdrew.

  “Now, Mist’ Jeperson ...”

  “Richard.”

  “Reechar’.”

  Mama-Lou reached out and touched his chest, appreciatively feeling the nap of his velvet collar.

  “I like a mahn who knows how to dress.”

  She left his jacket alone.

  “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m interested in how you costume some of your characters. You can guess the ones I mean.”

  “Jockie and Delia. Prince Abu. Sir Josiah and Falmingworth. Lady Gulliver. Masterman and Dr. Laurinz. Mr. Gatling. Pieter Bierack.”

  She had obviously been waiting for someone to ask.

  “You have a few more on your list than I do.”

  “I’ve been workin’ here long-time, Reechar’. I’m firs’ to know who’s comin’ and who’s goin’. When word comes down from on-high, I have to dress the word, send it out decent to the studio floor. You dig?”

  “I think so.”

  “A costume is more than jus’ clothes. It’s the t’ings in the pockets, the pins under the lapels, the dirt in the soles of the shoes, weathering and ageing ...”

  She led him to the “Ben” rack, raised cellophane from a jacket, showed the fray of the sleeve-cuffs, a loose button, a stitched-over stab-mark. From the pocket, like a stage magician, she pulled out a stream of items: a bus ticket, a paper bag of lemon-drops, an item of female underwear, a tied fishing fly in the form of a water-boatman.

  She smiled, showing sharp, very white teeth.

  He laughed as she flourished an artificial flower.

  “I’m not so interested in Ben Barstow,” said Richard.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me if he be interested in you,” said Mama-Lou.

  Richard wondered if he was exuding psychic pheromones. Since he and Barbara had happened, people treated him differently. Mama-Lou was closer to him than decorum would advise. And she was right—Dudley Finn had been giving him glances. And so had June O’Dell.

  “Very flattering,” he said, “but not the field I wish to explore. Where are the racks for Jockie and Delia?”

  Mama-Lou made a fist, then opened it suddenly.

  “Gone. To the ‘cinerator. No room roun’ here. New come, so old gotta go. Policy directive.”

  She looked to the ceiling.

  “And all the others. Gone too?”

/>   She made an “up in smoke” gesture.

  “I’d have been interested to know how you costumed them?”

  “Carefully,” she said. “We go to great lengths to procure the ... suitable items, to give them the proper ... treatment.”