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

by By Kim Newman

  Beyond the railbed 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 seem 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 “holdover 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 andfeeling. 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?”

  “nato. Defence considerations kept the Scotch Streak running long after its natural lifetime. Then they didn’t. March of bloody progress.”

  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 refugee camp by Major Jeperson, a British officer who saw his sensitivity. Richard had been raised as much by the Diogenes Club as by 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 recordkeeping, 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 cleanup operation, scathed but alive. Major Geoffrey Jeperson named him Richard, after Richard Riddle—a boy detective who was his own childhood hero.

  Of Richard’s doings between the war and the Seamouth Case, Fred knew not much. After Geoffrey’s death in 1954, Richard’s sponsors at the Club had been Edwin Winthrop, now dead but well remembered, and Sir Giles Gallant, now retired and semidisgraced. Vanessa had come into the picture well before the Seamouth Case. She had Richard’s habit of being evasive without making a fuss about it. All Fred knew was that her first meeting with their patron was another horror story. Whenever it came up, she’d touch the almost-invisible scar through her eyebrow and change the subject with a shudder.

  “Now we’re near the end of the line,” said Richard, “perhaps you should hear the tale.”

  They were here for the night. Time enough for a ghost story.

  “Frederick,” said Richard, “it was 195—, and I was down from Oxford

  * * * *

  ACT ONE: LONDON EUSTON

  I

  It was 195— and Richard Jeperson was down from Oxford. And the LSE. And Cambridge. And Manchester Poly. And RADA. And Harrow School of Art. And ... well, suffice to say, many fine institutions, none of which felt obliged to award him any formal qualification.

  Geoffrey Jeperson had sent him to St. Cuthbert’s, his old school. Richard hadn’t lasted at “St. Custard’s,” setting an unhappy precedent insofar as not lasting at schools went. After the Major’s death, Edwin Winthrop took over in loco parentis. He encouraged Richard to regard schooling as a cold buffet, picking at whatever took his fancy. Winthrop called himself a graduate of Flanders and the Somme, though as it happened he had a Double First in Classics and Natural Philosophy from All Souls. Since Richard was known for his instincts—his sensitivities, everyone said—he was allowed to follow his nose. He became a “New Elizabethan renaissance man,” though teachers tended to tut-tut as he acquired unsystematic tranches of unrelated expertise then got on with something else before he was properly finished.

  Though the Diogenes Club supported him with a generous allowance, he took on jobs of work. He assisted with digs and explorations. He sleuthed through Europe in search of his past, and drew suspicious blanks—which persuaded him to pay more attention to his present. He spent a summer in a biscuit factory in Barnsley, making tea and enduring harassment from the female staff. He was a film extra in Italy, climbing out of the horse in Helen of Troy. He couriered documents between British embassies in South America. He studied magic—stage magic, not yet the other stuff—with a veteran illusionist in Baltimore. H
e dug ditches, modelled for catalogues, worked fishing boats, wrote articles for manly magazines, and the like.

  Between education and honest toil, he did his National Service. He was in the RAF but never saw an aeroplane. The Club placed him in a system of bunkers under the New Forest. He fetched and carried for boffins working on an oscillating wave device. After eighteen months, a coded message instructed him to sabotage an apparently routine experiment. Though he liked the backroom boys and had worked up enthusiasm for the project, he followed orders. The procedure failed and—he was later given to understand—an invasion of our plane of existence by malign extradimensional entities was prevented. That was how the Club worked under Edwin Winthrop: preemptive, unilateral, cutting out weeds before they sprouted, habitually secretive, pragmatically ruthless. A lid was kept on, though who knew whether the pot really had been boiling over?

  After the RAF, Richard spear-carried for a season at the Old Vic, and played saxophone with The Frigidaires. The doo-wop group had been on the point of signing with promoter Larry Parnes—of “parnes, shillings and pence” fame—when the girl singer married a quantity surveyor for the security. Though her rendition of “Lipstick on Your Collar,” lately a hit for Connie Francis, was acceptable, Richard couldn’t really argue with her. Frankly, The Frigidaires were never very good.

  Richard only knew within a year or so how old he actually was, but must be out of his teens. Edwin felt it was time the boy knuckled down and got on with the work for which he had been prepared. Richard moved into a Georgian house in Chelsea which was in the gift of the Club, occasionally looked after by an Irish housekeeper who kept going home to have more children. He meditated, never missed Hancock’s Half Hour on the wireless and read William Morris and Hank Jansen. Edwin told him to wait for a summons to action.

  Richard dressed in the “Edwardian” or “teddy boy” manner: scarlet velvet frock coat with midnight black lapels (straight-razor slipped into a special compartment in the sleeve), crepe-soled suede zip-up boots with winkle-picker toe-points, a conjurer’s waistcoat with seventeen secret pockets, his father’s watch and chain, bootlace tie with silver tips, navy-blue drainpipe jeans tighter than paint on his skinny legs. His thin moustache was only just established enough not to need augmentation with eyebrow pencil. A Brylcreem pompadour rose above his pale forehead like a constructivist sculpture in black candyfloss.

  If he took his life to have begun when his memory did, his experience was limited. He had never seen a woman naked, except in Health & Efficiency magazine. He could not drive a car, though he intended to take lessons. He had never killed anything important. He had never had a broken bone. He had never eaten an avocado.

  Within a year, all that would change.

  One morning, a special messenger arrived on a motorbike, with instructions that he give himself over to a sidecar and be conveyed to the Diogenes Club. This, he knew, was to be his debut.

  The retired Royal Marine Sergeant who kept door in the Mall went beet-coloured as Richard waltzed past his post. Outlandish folk must come and go from the Diogenes Club, but Richard’s clothes and hair were red rag to a bull for anyone over twenty-five—especially a uniformed middle-aged man with a short back and sides and medal ribbons. There was talk about playwrights and poets who were “angry young men,” but the older generation would not easily yield a monopoly on sputtering indignation.

  He rather admired himself in the polished black marble of the hallway pillars. The whole look took hours to achieve. His face no longer erupted as it had done a few years earlier, but the odd plague-rose blemish surfaced, requiring attention.

  Escorted by a silk-jacketed servant beyond the famously noiseless public rooms of the Club, he puffed with pride. Ordinary Members mimed harrumphs, seconding the doorman’s opinion of him. The servant opened an inner door, and stood aside to let Richard pass. He had not been this deep into the building since childhood. Then, he had almost been a possession, shown off by his father. Now, he was entitled to pass on his own merit. He could walk the corridors, consult the archives, visit the private collections, accept commissions. He was not merely a Life Member, inheriting that status from Major Jeperson, but an Asset, whose Talent suited him to act for the Club in Certain Circumstances.

  He was treading in the footsteps of giants. Mycroft Holmes, the mid-Victorian civil servant who was instrumental in founding what was ostensibly a “club for the unclubbable” but actually an auxiliary extraordinary to British intelligence and the police. Charles Beauregard, the first Most Valued Member—the great puzzle-chaser of the 1880s and ‘90s and visionary chairman of the Ruling Cabal through the middle-years of the current century. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Several terrifying individuals who operated covertly under the goggles of “Doctor Shade.” Adam Llewellyn de Vere Adamant, the adventurer whose disappearance in 1903 remained listed on the books as an active, unsolved case. Catriona Kaye, Winthrop’s lifelong companion, the first woman to accept full membership in the Club. Flaxman Low. Sir Henry Merrivale. Robert Baldick. Cursitor Doom.

  He was ushered upstairs. In an underlit anteroom, his coat was taken by a turbaned orderly. He had a moment before a two-way mirror to be awed by the great tradition, the honour to which he would ascend in the presence of the Ruling Cabal. He patted his pockets, checked his fly and adjusted his tie. The weight of the razor was gone from his sleeve. Somewhere between the street and the anteroom, he had been frisked and defanged.

  A baize door opened, and a tiny shove from the silent Sikh was necessary to propel him along a short dark corridor. One door shut behind him and another opened in front. Richard stepped into the windowless Star Chamber of the Ruling Cabal.

  “Good Gravy, Edwin,” said someone sour, “is this what it’s come to? A bloody teddy boy!”

  Some of Richard’s puff leaked out.

  “I think he’s sweeet,” purred a woman with a whisky-and-cigarettes voice, like Joan Greenwood or Fenella Fielding. “Winner of the Fourth Form fancy dress.”

  The last of his self-esteem pooled on the floor.

  “Cool, man,” said another commentator, snapping his fingers. “Straight from the fridge.”

  He didn’t feel any better.

  Edwin Winthrop sat at the big table that had been Mycroft’s desk, occupying one of three places. He had slightly hooded eyes and an iron-grey moustache. Even if Richard weren’t attuned to “vibrations,” he’d have had no doubt who was in charge. Next to him was Catriona Kaye, a compact, pretty woman as old as the century. She wore a dove-grey dress and pearls. The only one of the Inner Circle who had treated him as a little boy, she was now the only one who treated him as a grownup. She was the heart and conscience of the Diogenes Club. Edwin recognised his own tendency to high-handedness, and kept Catriona close—she was the reason why he wasn’t a monster. To Edwin’s right was an empty chair. Sir Giles Gallant, make-weight on the Ruling Cabal, was absent.

  “If we’ve finished twitting the new boy,” said Edwin impatiently, “perhaps we can get on. Richard, welcome and all that. This is the group Edwin introduced everyone. Richard put faces to names and resumes he already knew.

  Dr. Harry Cutley, the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed scowler, held a chair of physics at a provincial redbrick university. He had unexpectedly come under the Club’s remit, as quantum mechanics led him to parapsychology. When Edwin vacated the post of Most Valued Member to run the Ruling Cabal, Sir Giles recruited Cutley to fill his roomy shoes. The academic finally had funds and resources to mount the research programme of his dreams, but was sworn not to share findings with his peers, turning his papers over instead to the Cabal. They then had to root out others capable of understanding Cutley’s work and determining what should leak onto the intellectual open market and what the world was not yet ready to know. In practice, Cutley had exchanged one set of grumbling resentments for another. He knew things no one else on the planet did, but colleagues in the real world wrote him off as a dead-ended time-server whose students didn’t like him
and whose ex-wife slept with other faculty members. Cutley had a boozer’s red-veined eyes, hair at all angles and a pulsing, hostile aura—the plainest Richard had ever sensed, as if inner thoughts were written on comic strip bubbles.

  The husky-voiced blonde in the black leotard and pink chiffon scarf was Annette Amboise, of Fitzrovia and the Left Bank. She wore no lipstick but a lot of eye makeup and had hair cropped like Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc. She smoked Gauloises in a long, enamel holder. Of Anglo-French parentage, she’d spent her mid-teens in Vichy France, running messages for the Resistance and Allied Intelligence. She had come to the Club’s notice after an unprecedented run of good fortune, which is to say she outlived all other agents in her district several times over. Catriona diagnosed an inbuilt ability to intuit random factors and predict immediate danger. Annette thought in knight moves—two hops forward, then a kink to the side. Since the war, she’d been doing other things. A retired interpretive dancer, past thirty with too many pulled muscles, she was authoress of a slim volume, Ectoplasm and Existentialism. Knowing what would probably happen next gave her a peculiarly cheerful fatalism. She had no accent, but showed an extremely French side in occasional “fa va” shrugs.