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

by By Kim Newman

  “I wonder if he hit on this by accident,” Barbara said, on Monday morning, as they sat on the studio lawn. They watched Leslie and Gaye, who had grown close over the last fortnight, console each other before the taping of the worst-concealed surprise twist inBarstows history—their deaths. “I keep thinking of Brenda’s black baby. The way apparently the whole audience changed opinion when Mavis did. That might have been when it started.”

  “There was Karen Finch,” said Richard.

  “She must have been the first victim. The Bogus Brenda was her doll. What happened to BB on the programme happened to her in life. Not killed, but certainly her options were limited.”

  “Barbara?” He held her hand.

  “Yes?”

  “I won’t let him murder us. What we did this weekend will work. In the end, Squiers is an amateur and I am a professional.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Leslie and Gaye embracing, in tears.

  He kissed Barbara and thought, for a moment, he knew how she felt.

  Then it was gone again, and he found himself looking at her face and wondering.

  “You know,” she said. “I cannever tell what you’re thinking.”

  “Good. I’d hate to spoil any more surprises.”

  She laughed, like the sun coming out.

  “So, do you want to watch our heads getting chopped off?”

  “Why not?”

  He took her arm and they walked across the lawn, towards the stage. As they passed, Leslie and Gaye were brushing grass-strands off their costumes and getting it together to undergo their career-ending ordeal.

  “Cheer up,” Richard told them. “It might never happen.”

  “Easy for you to say,” snarled Leslie Veneer, with more feeling than any of his line-readings. “You’re not the Bloody God of Bleeds.”

  They arrived on the stage before Leslie and Gaye, and—as had become tediously predictable—an assistant director was hustling them onto the set when the real actors arrived. Everyone’s identities got sorted out.

  Gerard Loss was nowhere to be seen. Marcus Squiers was directing this scene himself, wearing his rarely seendirector’s hat—a baseball cap. He sat on a high chair like a tennis umpire and wielded the sort of megaphone Cecil B. DeMille had been fond of until talking pictures came in.

  Squiers was surprised to see Richard and Barbara, but nodded at them with the kind of magnanimous admiration only someone who thought he’d long since won could show for an already mortally wounded foe he was about to decapitate. Richard waved cheerily back.

  Almost all the episode had been taped on Friday. Roget and Canberra were shown up as yet more confidence tricksters (a habitual Barstows plot tic). It turned out they were in with Ben Barstow and had been faking the haunting in order to extort a fortune from Mavis—but this had raised the real angry spirit of Da Barstow, who was about to get his revenge.

  Clarence “Gore” Gurney, a special effects man who usually worked on cinema films about Satanic accidents, was hired in at great expense—and with resentful grumbling from the O’D-S makeup people—to supervise the Decapitation of Roget Masterman and, to vary things, the Exploding Head of Canberra Laurinz. Realistic dummies, faces contorted in frozen screams, were held in waiting, tubes and wires fed into slit holes in the backs of their clothes. Richard assumed the dummies now wore the clothes filched from his and Barbara’s closets. At last, here were proper voodoo dolls, with hairs stolen from brushes applied to the heads. Tara, exceeding her wardrobe job, was helping Gurney set up the effects.

  Barbara kept looking at the dummies, struck by the terror on her own faked face.

  Leslie and Gaye only had to flounder screaming around the set, while Dudley-as-Ben begged Da for forgiveness and fire spurted out of the portrait’s eyes. Then, the actors were hauled off—and essentially kicked out the studio door, final pay packets exchanged for entry lozenges—and the dummies were set up. This took an age.

  Lionel dropped by to say hello.

  “They’ll never get away with this, luv,” he said. “Mucus is mental. Grannies in Hartlepool will have heart attacks. Folk tune in to the Barstards to see Mavis being a cow and Northshire idiots whining about the old days over pints of Griddles, not blood and guts all over the shop. It’s like the worst bits of James Herbert spewed into front parlours and the audience won’t like it. The duty officer will log a record number of complaints when this airs. Once it’s out, ART will come down like a ton of angry bricks. Mark my words.”

  “We only have one shot at this,” announced Squiers through his megaphone. “All three cameras ... make sure you can’t see each other or the edge of the set.”

  Three cameramen gave thumbs-up.

  “‘Gore’?”

  Gurney crouched over a wooden control-box studded with lights and switches, and plungers like the ones used to detonate cartoon dynamite. He checked all the leads and saluted Squiers.

  “Supernatural smoke, please.”

  Odorous clouds were puffed onto the set by stagehands wielding gadgets like industrial vacuum cleaners on reverse. Finn coughed, and the smoke settled like a grey ground-mist.

  “Light the picture.”

  Da’s eyes shone. It struck Richard that Marcus Squiers had posed for the portrait.

  “Dudley?”

  Finn went down on his knees, warily ready.

  “... and action!”

  Gurney flicked switches, and the dummies flailed with alarming realism. Finn, nervous to be on set with so much explosive, picked up his ranted lines.

  “Dr. Laurinz!” shouted Squiers.

  Gurney depressed a plunger. The Canberra dummy’s head burst, flinging watermelon bits and cottage cheese across the set. Barbara pressed her face against Richard’s collar, unable to watch.

  Richard did not miss Squiers’ nasty little smile.

  The last splatters of the head’s contents rained down. Red syrup spurted from the neck as if it were a sugary drinking fountain. The headless dummy toppled over, mechanics inside sparking dangerously.

  “... and Masterman!”

  Gurney depressed the other plunger.

  A rubber axe flew across the set. Richard watched his own head come off, tumble through the air and fall, still blinking, at the feet of a screaming Ben Barstow.

  “Cut! Thank you all very much. You’ve made TV history.”

  There was a smattering of applause, mostly from the writing pack who had been let off school especially to watch the deaths.

  “The Ti-bloody-tanic made history,” said Lionel, who was annoyed to get gluey red corn starch on his Clark’s tracker shoes.

  “What do you think, Mr. Jeperson?” asked Squiers through his megaphone. “How did it look from down there?”

  Richard made an equivocal gesture.

  “I’ll have to see it go out to be sure.”

  “Indeed you will. Would you and Professor Corri care to be my guests tomorrow? Because it’s a ‘special’ episode, we’re having a select celebration here at the studio. We can watch you die and then have canapés and wine. It’ll be a treat. Are you up for it?”

  Barbara was white-lipped with fury and terror, but rigidly self-possessed, refusing to let Squiers see. Richard’s blood was up too, but he was calm. He’d seen the worst and it wasn’t so bad.

  “We wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.

  * * * *

  XV

  “You’re early,” said Squiers.

  “I thought we might not get the chance to chat later.”

  Squiers was surprised, calculated a moment, then chose to laugh.

  Coolly, Richard sauntered down the aisle of the small, luxurious screening room, fingers brushing the leatherette of the upholstered seats. Squiers stood in front of a wall of colour television sets, turned on and tuned to ITV but with the sound off, images repeated as if through insect eyes. A quiz programme was on, the grinning host in a silver tuxedo dropping contestants into vats of gunk when they failed to answer correctly,
showgirls in spangly tights posed by washer-dryers and Triumph TR-7s, mutant puppets popping up between the rounds to do silent slapstick. No wonder Richard preferred reading.

  Squiers wore a different hat tonight, a large purple Stetson, with bootlace tie, orange ruffle shirt, faux-buckskin tuxedo and rawhide cowboy boots with stack heels and spurs. Richard intuited that the ten-gallon titfer was the writer-producer’s “party hat.” Marcus Squiers saw himself as a gunslinger.

  “Nice threads, Squiers.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Masterman.”

  “Jeperson. Masterman is your fellow. The one on TV.”

  “I was forgetting. It’s easy to get mixed up.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  Richard was not what Squiers expected. In the producer’s mind, Richard (and Barbara) ought to be getting sweaty, nervous, close to panic, sensing the trap closing, feeling a frightful fiend’s breath warming their backs. They should be jitterily trying to evade the inescapable, pass mrjamesian runes on to some other mug, get out of the way of safes and grand pianos fated to fall from the skies.

  Disappointment roiled off Squiers, who—as ever—was the sweaty one.

  For him, this should have been a new pleasure. All his previous marks had been unaware of the gunsights fixed on their foreheads. Richard knew what was happening and was powerless to dodge the bullet. This was the first time Squiers could afford to let anyone know how clever he had been.

  “It was Junie’s fault,” said Squiers. “That first serial, just six weeks of it, was damn good telly. Damn good writing. Better than your Dennis Potter or Alan Plater any night of the week. Junie was good in it. She’s always been able to play Mavis. She was the one who pushed for the series. I wanted to go on to other things. Plays, films, novels. I could have, you know. I had ideas, ready to go. But Junie tied me to the Barstards. The things she did. You wouldn’t believe. The first few years, I kept trying to quit and she’d wrestle me back. There was never much money. Muggins here got stuck with his nineteen sixty-flaming-four salary, while the Moo’s fees climbed to the sky. Read the bloody small print—first rule of showbiz. There were other ways to keep me on the hook. Even when we weren’t married any more, she’d find means. ‘No one else can produce the show,’ she says. ‘No one.’ Who would want to? I mean, have you watched it?”

  Richard nodded.

  “I have to live with it. So there might as well be some use in it.”

  “Your discovery?”

  “Yes.” The bitterness turned sly. A petulant smile crept in, barely covering his teeth. “That’s a good way of putting it. The discovery.”

  “It must be galling to waste shots on Roget and Canberra. I mean, who’s to pay for us?”

  Squiers chuckled.

  “Oh, there’s a purpose to you. Nothing goes to waste in television. I have a select company joining us for this party. But you and Professor Corri are my guests of honour. Where is she, by the way?”

  “Present,” said Barbara.

  She wore a bias-cut tangerine evening gown, with matching blooms in her hair and on her shoulder. She stood a moment in the doorway, then glided down. Squiers applauded. Richard kissed her.

  “You make a lovely couple,” said Squiers. “But you’ll be lovelier without heads.”

  Richard felt an itch around the neck. It was becoming quite persistent.

  Barbara was wound tight. Her arm around his waist was nearly rigid with suppressed terror.

  “If you haven’t learned something by the end of the evening,” said Squiers. “I’ll eat my hat.”

  “And what a fine hat it is,” said Richard.

  The room filled up. The theatre seats took up barely a quarter of the screening room, which was otherwise available for general milling and swilling. Minions in black and white livery weaved among the guests with trays of food: little cubes of cheese and pineapple on sticks; champagne glasses stuffed with prawns, lettuce and pink mayonnaise; quartered individual pork pies, with dollops of Branston’s pickle; fans of “After Eight” mints; ashtrays of foil-wrapped Rose’s chocolates. A barman served wine (Mateus Rose, Blue Nun, Black Tower) and beer (Watney’s Red Barrel, Whitbread Trophy Bitter, Double Diamond). There had been an attempt to market a real Griddles Ale, but it was not successful—beer connoisseurs reckoned the cold tea they drank on telly had a better flavour.

  Not everyone from O’D-S was here. Richard and Barbara kept score. Anyone on this guest list was almost certainly in it with Squiers; the rest were on the outside and innocent. So far, the guilties ran to Tara (no surprise), Dudley Finn (but not his boyfriend), Jeanne Treece and a good three-quarters of the writing pack. Lionel was evidently guiltless, and so was Gerard Loss. Some people surprised you.

  Squiers whizzed about, ten-gallon hat bobbing among a sea of heads, pressing the flesh, meeting and greeting. Richard saw three people come in who were his own invitees. Squiers had pause when he recognised Vanessa, but clearly had no idea who Fred was and was puzzled to see the third added guest, whom he must be dimly aware of but couldn’t put a name to. That was another black mark against Evil on the scoreboard.

  Richard was about to make introductions when a fresh knot of outside guests appeared and Squiers barged through the crowd to welcome them, sweatily unctuous and eager.

  Now Richard understood Squiers’ crack about nothing going to waste in television.

  “Good grief,” he said, “we’re starring in a sales pitch!”

  Squiers led his VIP guests down the aisle, towards Richard and company. Richard sensed Vanessa and Fred, dapper bookends in white matador-cut tuxedos, taking flanking defensive positions. Good move.

  As Squiers grinned and got closer, Richard saw Mama-Lou and June O’Dell—as near to disguised as they could manage—slip in, and take seats hunched down in the back row, huge hat brims over their faces.

  “Mr. Jeperson, Professor Corri,” said Squiers. “I’d like you to meet some people. Prospective sponsors. This is Adam Onions.”

  “O-nye-ons,” corrected a youngish man in a blazer and polo-neck. “Not like the vegetable.”

  He stuck out a hand, which Richard opted not to shake.

  “Hello, Barb,” said Onions, shyly fluttering his fingers.

  The Professor was furious at Onions’ presence, which she took as a personal betrayal.

  Richard guessed how Onions fit in. He was from the Brighton University Department of Parapsychology. Barbara had talked to him before getting involved with the Diogenes Club. His ambition must have been piqued, along with his curiosity. He had made connections and ridden the hobbyhorse.

  “I’m with a government think tank now,” he said. “The Institute of Psi Technology. Pronounced ‘Eyesight.’ We’re getting in a position to be competitive, Mr. Jeperson. Your gentlemen’s club has had the field to itself for too long. Your record is astounding, but your horizons have been limited. Effort has been wasted smashing what should be measured. There are applications. Profitable, socially valuable, cutting edge.”

  Richard could guess what Onions’ political masters would want to cut with their edge.

  “Heather Wilding,” continued Squiers, indicating a woman with a ring-of-confidence smile, slightly ovoid pupils like cat’s eyes, feathery waves of honey-blond Farrah hair and a tailored red velour suit with maxiskirt and shoulderpads. “She represents ...”

  “I know what Miss Wilding represents.”

  “Ms.,” said the woman, who was American.

  “Private enterprise,” commented Richard. “Very enterprising enterprise.”

  Heather Wilding was a name Richard had come across before. She fronted for Derek Leech, the newspaper proprietor (of the Comet, among other organs) who sat at the top of a pyramid of interlinked corporations and was just becoming a major dark presence in the world. Leech was taking an ever-greater interest in television, so his representation here should not be a surprise. This woman sat on the Devil’s left hand and fed him fondue.

  “And this is General Skinner. H
e’s with nato.”

  The General was in uniform, with a chest-spread of medal-ribbons and a pearl-handled sidearm. Over classically handsome bone structure was stretched the skin of a white lizard, making his whole face an expressionless, long-healed scar. He was the single most terrifying individual Richard had ever met. How long had this man-shaped creature walked among humanity? Some of his medals were from wars not fought in this century. Not a lot of people must notice that.

  “Mr. Jeperson,” said Skinner. “You. Have. Been. Noticed.”