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

by By Kim Newman

  Mrs. Nickles had followed Arnold. She clung to the handrail.

  “It’s Donald,” she shouted. “Donald McRidley. I didn’t recognise the blighter without ‘is ‘air. ‘E were a ruddy woman about his blessed beautiful ‘air when ‘e were the Shaggin’ Scot, an’ now ‘e’s a bald-bonced old git.”

  Arnold’s—Donald’s!—eyes fluttered open.

  So, he wasn’t a navvy. Or not anymore. He was back on his train. Unable to get away, Richard supposed. No wonder.

  “Driver,” he shouted. “Bring in the Streak!”

  “Passengers aren’t allowed in this part of the train, sir,” he mumbled. “It’s against regulations. The company can’t be held responsible for accidents.”

  Richard saw the red glint, the Gecko creeping back. He slapped McRidley, hard. The eyes were clear for a moment.

  “Time to stop the train,” he told the man. “Do your duty, at last. Redeem your name.”

  “Do it for Else, ducks,” said Mrs. Nickles, cooing in McRidley’s ear. “Do it for poor Nick. For the LSI-bloody-R.”

  McRidley broke free of the pair of them.

  As if sleepwalking in a hurry, mind somewhere else, he pulled levers, rolled wheels, tapped gauges.

  The station was dead ahead, sunlight flashing on its glass roof.

  Wheels screamed on rails. Vanessa tooted the whistle, happily.

  Harry was with them now, arm in a makeshift sling, hair awry. Every boy wanted to be in the cabin of a steam train.

  They all had to hang onto something as McRidley braced himself.

  Sparks showered the platform, startling an early-morning porter. The buffers loomed.

  They did not crash. But there was a heavy jolt.

  * * * *

  IX

  Donald McRidley, Arnold the Conductor, was dead. When the train stopped, so did he—like grandfather and the clock in the song.

  3473-S was decoupled now and shunted into a siding. The Gecko was still nestled in there, but its conduit to the train, to the passengers, was cut. Richard thought it might have been the communication cord, which had to be unhooked—but the monster had also been tied to the lifeline of the once-disgraced, now-redeemed driver.

  “‘E were a handsome devil,” commented Mrs. Nickles, putting her teeth back in. “Loved ‘is train more than any girl, though.”

  Harry was on the telephone to Edwin Winthrop. He said the entity was in captivity, but Richard knew the Gecko was dying. As the fire went out in 3473’s belly, the monster gasped its last. A bad beast, Danny had called it. The iron shell would just be a trophy. They should hang the cowcatcher in the Diogenes Club.

  The decoy couriers were gone, off to the nato base. Mrs. Sweet was marching down to the baggage car, where a surprise awaited. The terrifying vicar looked even more ghastly in the light of day. Richard had brushed past the man several times, mind open for any ill omen, to convince himself the Gecko wasn’t sneaking off in this vessel to work its evil anew.

  Police and ambulances were on their way. Edwin would have words in ears, to account for Danny, Annette and the crewmen, not to mention general damage. Richard found Annette rolled under a table, and carried her to her compartment, where he laid her out on her bed, over her nightgown, eyes closed.

  A straight-backed American civilian, with teeth like Burt Lancaster and a chin-dent like Kirk Douglas, scouted along the platform.

  “Buddy, have you seen a parcel?” he said. “For Coates?”

  Richard tried to answer, but no words came.

  The American looked further, walking past Vanessa.

  * * * *

  PORTNACREIRANN

  The train finally came, as Richard finished telling the story.

  They had been up all night. Cold Saturday dawn had broken.

  Now, they sat in a carriage, not a compartment. Fred settled in, but Richard was restless.

  “I used to love trains,” he said. “Even after my Ghost Train ride. It was a nice way to travel. You had time and ease, to read or talk or look out the window. Now, it’s all strikes and delays. This might as well be a motor coach. She hates trains, you know. Mrs. Thatcher. To her, anyone who travels on public transport is a failure, beneath contempt. She’s going to bleed the railways. It’ll be horrid. Like so much else.”

  Fred still had questions.

  “So, guv, who is Vanessa?”

  Richard shrugged. “Vanessa is Vanessa, Fred. Like me, she’s no real memory of who she was, if she was anyone. In my case, there was a war, a decade of chaos. It was easy to get misplaced, left out of the records. With her ... well, it shouldn’t have been possible. Someone dropped her off at Euston with a label round her neck. A woman, she thought, but not her mother. Surely, she couldn’t be a stray, she must belong to someone?”

  “What about that Coates bloke? The Yank at Portnacreirann.”

  “That wasn’t ‘Lieutenant Commander Alexander Coates, R.N.’ That was a Colonel Christopher Conner, S.A.C. ‘Coates’ wasn’t an alias or a code—just a name on a label. Winthrop made enquiries. The only ‘Alexander Coates’ even remotely in the navy was a fourteen-year-old sea-scout. We looked into the system of couriering the Go-Codes. The Americans had only given us the cover story even when they’d wanted help, so we threw a bit of a sulk. They eventually admitted—and this is how strange defence policy is—that they had, as they said, ‘contracted out.’ Hired a private firm to make delivery, not telling them what was being carried. The firm turned out to be a phone in an empty room with six weeks’ rent in arrears. Maybe some semicrook was hauling kids out of orphanages and bundling them up to Scotland under official cover, then selling them on or disposing of them. We’ll never know and, in the end, it was beside the point.”

  “You adopted Vanessa?”

  “No. No one adopted her, unless you count the Diogenes Club.”

  “Does she have a surname?”

  “Not really. Where it’s absolutely necessary, it’s ‘Kaye.’ Catriona took an interest, as she did in me. Without her, we’d be complete freaks.”

  Fred kept quiet on that one.

  “What about the Gecko? Harry Cutley?”

  “The Gecko died, if it could be said to have lived. When 3473-S turned into cold scrap iron, it was gone. Puff. Harry poked around with his instruments before giving up. For a year or two, another old steamer pulled the Scotch Streak. Then it went diesel. Harry dropped out in 1967. Went to Nepal. And I became the Most Valued Member. There’s a ceremony. Very arcane. Like the Masons. You know most of what’s happened since.”

  Fred thought it through.

  He did know most of the stories, but not all. Despite ten years’ involvement with the Diogenes Club, with Richard and Vanessa, there were mysteries. They could both still surprise him. Once, in a close, tense, unexpected moment, before Fred met Zarana, he and Vanessa had kissed, deeply and urgently. She said, “You do know I’m a man,” and, for dizzying seconds, he had believed her. Then she giggled, they were back in danger, and anything further between them cut off.

  After a decade, he still didn’t know if Richard and Vanessa had ever been a couple. Everyone else assumed, but he didn’t. Now, knowing about the Ghost Train, he saw how complex their entanglement was: a kinship of siblings, raised under the aegis of a unique institution, but also guardianship, as Richard brought Vanessa into the circle the way his adoptive father had brought him. The only thing he really knew now that had been mystifying before was how Vanessa had got her eyebrow scar. Richard had given it to her.

  Lately, Vanessa had been absent a great deal. So had Fred, of course— with Zarana, or at the Yard. But Vanessa had been on missions, cases, sealed-knot and under-the-rose business. A change was coming in the Club—when Richard took a seat on the Cabal, as seemed inevitable, was Vanessa in line to become Most Valued Member? There was a woman Prime Minister, so no reason why a woman couldn’t hold that title. If she wanted it—which, Fred realised, he didn’t know she did.

  For three months, there’d bee
n no word. While Richard and Fred were tracking cornflakes cultists, she was somewhere else, unavailable. Fred could tell Richard was concerned, though confident in the woman. She’d survived a lot since throwing off the Gecko. Now, this summons.

  ... to Portnacreirann.

  “It’s not over, is it?” said Fred. “It can’t be coincidence that it’s the same place.”

  Richard gave a noncommittal pfui.

  “We’re at Inverdeith,” he said. “And that’s a Portnacreirann train on the other side of the platform.”

  They were off one train before it had completely stopped and on another already moving out.

  And then Inverdeith Bridge. Sun glinted on the surface of Loch Gaer.

  “This is where the Gecko was born,” said Richard. “Between Nick Bowler and Donald McRidley and 3473-S. And that ‘stoon o’ fire spat out frae hell,’ if I’m any judge—which I am. The stoon was an egg, waiting for the right circumstances to hatch. All the other bloody business around the loch was influenced by the unborn thing. Maybe it was an alien, not a demon. The stoon was what we’d now call a meteorite, after all. From outer space. Witch drownings and human haggis kept the embryo on a drip-feed for centuries, but it awaited a vehicle—literally. The shell-shards might still be down there. Maybe it was a clutch of eggs.”

  Fred looked at untroubled waters. This local train proceeded slowly over the bridge. He saw rust on the girders where paint had flaked away, missing rivets, spray-can “Independent Scotland” graffiti, scratched swearwords.

  “In-for-Death,” he said.

  “Think calm thoughts, Frederick. And we’ll be safe.”

  This was where it had happened. With that thought, Fred had a chill. He didn’t only mean that this was where the Gecko had been born and defeated, but this was where Richard and Vanessa had started. When Richard got on the Ghost Train, he’d been a kid himself. When he got off...

  Past the bridge, with Portnacreirann in sight and passengers taking luggage down from overhead racks, Fred’s insides went tight. They had been delayed. What if they were too late? What was so urgent anyway? He had learned to be ready for anything. But what kind of anything was there at Portnacreirann?

  “Did you bring your elephant gun, guv?”

  Richard snorted at that.

  They got off the train, carrying their bags.

  They walked along the platform and into the station. It was busier than Culler’s Halt, but emptied quickly.

  A centrepiece of the station was an old steam engine, restored and polished, with a plaque and a little fence around it.

  Richard froze. It was 3473-S, the locomotive that had pulled the Scotch Streak, the Ghost Train, the favoured physical form of the Gecko. Now, it was just a relic. No danger at all. A youth in naval dress uniform admired it. He turned and saw them.

  “Mr. Jeperson, Mr. Regent,” he said. “Glad you made it in time. Cutting it close, but we’ll get you to the base by breaking petty road safety laws. Come on.”

  The officer trotted out of the station. Fred and Richard followed, without further thought for 3473-S.

  A jeep and driver waited on the forecourt. The officer helped them up. Fred had a pang at being treated as if he were elderly when he was only just used to thinking of himself as “early middle aged.” It happened more and more lately.

  “I’m Jim,” said the boy in uniform. “Al’s cousin. We’re a navy family. Put down for ships at birth like some brats are for schools. In the sea-scouts as soon as we’re teething. I hope your lady knows what she’s getting into.”

  Fred and Richard looked at each other, not saying anything.

  “We all think she’s rather super, you know. For her age.”

  “We admire her qualities, too,” said Richard.

  Fred had a brief fantasy of tossing Jim out of the jeep to watch him bounce on the road.

  They travelled at speed down a winding lane. Three cyclists with beards and cagoules pedalling the other way wound up tangled in the verge, shaking fists as Jim blithely shouted out “sorry” at them. “Naval emergency,” he explained, though they couldn’t hear.

  Whatever trouble Vanessa was in, Fred was ready to fight.

  The jeep roared through a checkpoint. The ratings on duty barely lifted the barrier in time. Jim waved a pass at them, redundantly.

  They were on the base.

  It had been a fishing village once, Fred saw—the rows of stone cottages were old and distinctive. Prefab services buildings fit in around the original community. The submarine-launched “independent deterrent” was a Royal Navy show now. nato—i.e., the Yanks—preferred intercontinental ballistic missiles they could lob at the Soviets from their own backyards in Kansas, or bombs dropped from the planes that could be scrambled from the protestor-fringed base at Greenham Common. There would still be Go-Codes, though.

  The base was on alert. Sailors with guns rushed about. There were rumours of trouble in the South Atlantic. Naval budget cuts had withdrawn forces from the region so suddenly that a South American country, say Argentina, could easily get the wrong idea. It might be time to send a gunboat to remind potential invaders that the Falklands remained British. If there were any gunboats left.

  The jeep did a tight turn to a halt, scattering gravel in front of a small building. Once the village church, it was now the base chapel.

  “Just in time,” said Jim, jumping down.

  He opened the big door tactfully, so as not to disturb a service inside, and signalled for Fred and Richard to yomp in after him.

  Fred remembered Richard leading him into a deconsecrated church at dead of midnight to stop a then-cabinet minister intent on slitting the throat of a virgin choirboy in a ritual supposed to revive the British moulded plastics industry. The Minister was resigned through ill-health and packed off to the House of Lords to do no further harm. The choirboy was now in the pop charts dressed as a pirate, singing as if his throat really had been cut. This wasn’t like that, but a ritual was in progress.

  No one in the congregation gave the newcomers a glance. Jim led Fred and Richard to places in a pew on the bride’s side of the church. They found themselves sat next to Catriona Kaye, and her nurse. All the others from her day—Edwin, Sir Giles—were gone. Barbara Corri was here too, in a cloud of ylang-ylang with her hair done like Lady Diana Spencer’s. Even Inspector Price of the Yard, sporting a smart new mac. Fred looked around, knowing the other shoe would drop. Yes, Zarana, in some incredible dress, was at the front, clicking away with a spy camera lifted from Fred’s stash of surveillance equipment.

  “We got telegrams,” whispered Professor Corri, fingers around Richard’s arm.

  Vanessa stood at the altar, red hair pinned up under the veil, in a white dress with a train. Beside her stood a navy officer Fred had never seen before. He couldn’t focus on the groom’s face for the glare of his uniform. He even had the dress sword on his belt and plumed helmet under his arm.

  “How did this happen?” Fred asked, no one in particular.

  “A loose end, long neglected,” whispered Catriona. “Not that it explains anything....”

  She dabbed a hankie to the corner of her eye.

  Fred looked at Richard. The man was crying, and Fred had absolutely no idea what he was feeling.

  Fred looked at the altar, at the naval chaplain.

  “...do you, Alexander Selkirk Coates, take this woman, Vanessa, ah, No Surname Given, to be your lawfully wedded wife ...”

  Fred looked up at the vaulted ceiling, gobsmacked.

  <>

  * * * *

  SWELLHEAD

  ACT I: “ARNE SAKNUSSEMM, HIS SIGN”

  1

  “Bloodybuggerinmixmaster ...,” said Richard Jeperson.

  Detective Sergeant Stacy Cotterill looked across the troop compartment at the Man from the Diogenes Club. Since takeoff from the Air-Sea Rescue helipad, he’d been sitting quietly, secured by webbing that reminded her of a straitjacket. He wore a Day-Glo orange oilskin ponch
o with reflective road safety trim, folded newspaper hat that was actually a PVC sou’wester with a novelty design, padded plaid jumpsuit with multiple pockets and pouches, and lemon-yellow moon boots with chemical lights in the heels.

  For his first enigmatic pronouncement in hours, Jeperson didn’t seem to need to raise his voice. Stacy heard him clearly over the chopping whirr of rotors, through the big blue baffles everyone wore to protect their ears.