The Man From the Diogenes Club

by Kim Newman

  As far as he was concerned, Zarana was the real Queen of the Nile.

  A warm, dry, intimate touch slid across his belly.

  ‘Luv, I’m not sure I could manage again…’

  She pressed her fingers to his face and he realised he had spoken too soon. She planted a tongue-twisting kiss on him. He pulled her closer, as they negotiated the tangle of sheets.

  The sliding touch across his stomach was still there.

  Zarana broke the kiss and stroked his chest, fingertips moving towards the slithering touch.

  ‘Freddy, meet Ramsbottom.’

  He was fully awake now, and – as Lesley Behan might have it – ‘raring for rumpy-pumpy’. But there was a new player in the game.

  ‘Ramsbottom?’ he demanded.

  ‘The other bloke in my life,’ said Zarana.

  In the pre-dawn light, Fred discovered he and Zarana were wound together in the coils of a contented snake.

  ‘Love me, love my python,’ said Zarana.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Fred.

  THE SERIAL MURDERS

  I.

  ‘Surely, this is common-or-garden crime,’ said Richard Jeperson, knuckle-tapping one-way glass, getting no reaction from the woman in the interrogation room. ‘The Diogenes Club doesn’t do ordinary murders.’

  ‘Don’t watch ordinary television either, do you?’

  Inspector Euan Price had a strong Welsh accent: ‘you’ came out with extra vowels, ‘yiouew’.

  ‘The odd nature documentary on BBC Two,’ he admitted, wondering what the goggle-box had to do with the price of tea in China.

  ‘And Doctor Who, sir,’ put in Fred Regent, Richard’s liaison with Scotland Yard.

  ‘Professional interest,’ explained Richard. ‘If you had Daleks, we’d do Daleks. Or Autons. That would be Diogenes Club material. We are the boys – and occasional girl – who cope with the extra-normal. This is so… so News of the World.’

  ‘“Jockey Ridden to Death by Top Model”,’ said Vanessa, the ‘occasional girl’ Richard had thought of. ‘Sport, crime, smut… just needs a randy vicar to tinkle all the bells.’

  Richard looked again at the murderess beyond the mirror. She wore jodhpurs and a scarlet huntswoman’s jacket. Her hard riding hat was on the table, but her blond hair was still bunned up. He might assume the only creature Della Devyne wanted to see killed had a brushy tail, pointed ears and a folkloric reputation for cunning. This was not a description of the corpse in the case. Della had calmed down and was waiting patiently for what came next – whether another cup of Ealing Police Station tea or a twenty-five-year stretch in Holloway.

  Though the mirroring was on the other side of the glass, Richard saw the tinted ghost of his reflection superimposed over Della. He looked like a crash-dieting Charles II. His moustache alone required more barbering than a glam-rock pop star’s hair. Today, he wore a tight white-and-pink striped-waistcoat over a loose scarlet ruffle shirt, black matador britches tucked into oxblood buckle-boots, and a crimson cravat noosed through a scrimshaw ring representing the Worm Ourobouros. He did not match the olive-and-tobacco institutional décor.

  Keenly attuned to unvoiced feelings, he could sense mental turmoil whenever a policeman saw him. Your basic bluebottle constantly had to fight a primal urge to yell ‘Get yer hair cut!’ at him. When a policeman saw Richard Jeperson, it was usually because his particular, peculiar services were urgently needed. A measure of tact – not to say begging and pleading – was required to secure his assistance.

  ‘Which of you is going to tell him?’ said Price, to Fred and/or Vanessa.

  Tact – indeed, begging and pleading – seemed not to be on offer today.

  Richard had the unfamiliar impression that everyone else in the room knew more than he did. He was supposed to be the sensitive, who told people things they hadn’t picked up on, then basked – just a little – in the glow of admiration.

  Fred and Vanessa looked at each other, furtively. His sensitivities prickled again. Neither wanted to own up… but to what? They had alibis, and this wasn’t even a whodunit. Price had evidence and a confession. He should be turning Miss Guilty over to briefs, quacks and the Old Bailey.

  ‘Where have you heard this before?’ began Price. ‘Discovering that her famous, Grand National-winning jockey boyfriend secretly hates horses and takes every chance to maim, injure or abuse one of the blessed beasts, our lovely lass feels compelled – by a gold-maned nag which speaks to her in dreams – to saddle him up and gallop him around the practice track, with liberal applications of the whip and spurs, until he drops frothing dead?’

  ‘Unique in the annals of crime and lunacy, I’ll be bound,’ said Richard. ‘But still not a matter for us. Miss Della Devyne—’

  ‘Née Gladys Gooch,’ put in Vanessa.

  ‘…the former Miss Gladys Gooch is out of her tree, Inspector. That’s why she rode Jamie Hepplethwaites to death. And don’t try to say the dream horse nonsense makes this a paraphenomenon. Pack her off to Broadmoor and get on with your proper mysteries, like the Ministerial Disappearances or the City Throat-Cuttings.’

  ‘Unique, you say?’

  ‘In my experience, which – as you know – is extensive, yes.’

  ‘It’s not unique, though, look you. DS Regent, tell him.’

  Richard arched an eyebrow at Fred, who looked distinctly sheepish. Vanessa found something absorbing to examine in her paper cup, which couldn’t be tea-leaves.

  ‘Zarana, my girlfriend,’ began Fred, ‘she follows it, and… you know… you watch a couple, and you need to keep on watching, just to find out what happens next. It’s rubbish, of course. Real rubbish. But…’

  He fell silent, as if he’d just delivered a speech which began, ‘My name is Frederick and I’m an alcoholic,’ to a circle of inadequates on primary-school chairs.

  ‘Miss Vanessa,’ prompted Price. ‘Could you enlighten our Mr Jeperson?’

  Vanessa crushed the cup and dropped it in a bin.

  ‘We’re talking about The Northern Barstows, Richard,’ she said. ‘A television programme. A soap opera.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s on the channel with adverts.’

  ‘Ah.’ Richard made a point of limiting his select viewing to the BBC. So far as he knew, the channel-changer on the front of his set only went up to ‘2’.

  ‘Richard believes commercial television was invented by Satan,’ Vanessa explained to Price.

  Actually, Richard didn’t believe that – he knew it for a fact.

  ‘What about this “soap opera”?’ he asked.

  ‘Last night, on the Barstows,’ said Vanessa, ‘“Delia Delyght” killed “Jockie Gigglewhites” with exactly the same MO. Whips, spurs, saddle, the lot. I didn’t see that coming, and the storyline’s been running for months.’

  Yesterday evening, Vanessa had cried off a visit to a reputedly haunted Tube station, disused since the Blitz and blighted by spectral ARP wardens. Her story was that an unexpected old school friend was in town and needed looking after. It seemed improbable to Richard that he hadn’t sensed the dissembling, but Vanessa was too close. He didn’t suspect his associates of leading secret, shameful lives. The ‘haunting’ turned out to be down to rumbling drains and a rack of forgotten gas-masks.

  ‘Highest viewing figures since that documentary about the Queen eating cornflakes,’ said Fred. ‘Pubs empty when the show is on. People everywhere rabbitting nine to the dozen about Delia and Jockie. And you didn’t notice.’

  ‘I imagine I was too busy re-reading Proust in the original,’ said Richard.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, guv,’ said Fred. Richard picked up his glum resentment. Now the secret was out, Fred would be in for some ribbing. Except ribbing usually came from Vanessa’s direction, and she evidently shared his shameful addiction.

  Richard raised an eyebrow at Price, who was lighting his pipe.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘me too. Never miss the Barstows. At t
he Yard, see, the lads have a portable set. If you want to rob the Bank of England, do it on Tuesday or Thursday between eight and eight-thirty. No one will show up to nick you till you’re well away from Threadneedle Street with the loot and Max Bygraves is on.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was possible to learn anything new at my age,’ said Richard, ‘but you’ve all surprised me. Congratulations.’

  Clearly, he was the only one whose brain wasn’t fogged with “soap”. He needed to deliver an incisive explanation, then go back to Albertine disparue. The rest of the populace could happily gorge their minds on rubbish twice a week without bothering him.

  ‘This woman is another sad addict,’ he declared, pointing at Della-née-Gladys, ‘and has become a “copycat”. Struck by the coincidences of names and professions in the fiction, she felt compelled to enact the television story in real life. An argument for severe regulation of such programming, no doubt. The answer to crimes like these is more nature documentaries. But this is a psychological curiosity, not a supernatural event.’

  ‘It’s not so simple, Jeperson,’ said Price. ‘The Northern Barstows guard their future scripts better than MI5 guard our military secrets.’

  ‘Lots better,’ said Vanessa, from bitter experience.

  ‘The point is to be surprising, see. The whole country had to wait to find out what Golden told Delia to do to Jockie. But last night, this woman, Della, did exactly the same thing to the real-life Jamie, at the same time as the programme was going out.’

  Richard thought about this.

  ‘It’s happened before, Jeperson. This case is the Ministerial Disappearances.’

  ‘On the Barstows, “Sir Josiah Shelley” and “Falmingworth” vanished from a locked cabinet room,’ said Vanessa. ‘Just as, in real life, Sir Joseph Keats and his secretary Farringwell disappeared, scuppering passage of the Factories Regulation Bill.’

  ‘And the City Throat-Cuttings,’ said Fred. ‘Prince Ali Hassan was assaulted by that fanatic on the floor of the Stock Exchange just when the same thing happened on telly to “Prince Abu Khazzim”.’

  Despite himself, Richard became interested.

  II.

  ‘The horse told me to do it,’ said Della Devyne.

  ‘In your dreams?’ prompted Richard.

  ‘No, that was the horse on the telly. It wasn’t exactly like that. Nothing was exactly the same. They changed it just enough to be different. “Just enough not to be sued,” Jamie always says. Used to say. Oh dear, I’m sorry. That programme used to drive him mad.’

  ‘The Northern Barstows?’

  Della nodded. She was being cooperative, going over the whole thing with Richard. He’d interviewed murderers before and knew the types. The professionals didn’t talk at all, just shut up and took their medicine. The enthusiastic amateurs liked to brag, and wanted to see their pictures in the papers. Della fell into a third category, the escapists. Before the big event, they’d been nagged and nagged about something, either by other people (not infrequently their victims-to-be), brute circumstances or a persuasive inner voice. Ultimately, the only way to make the irritation go away was to reach for a blunt instrument or a bottle of pills. Such cases were as likely to kill themselves as anyone else: self-murder was an escape, too.

  Della was in a kind of did-I-really-do-that-oh-I-suppose-I-must-have daze. To Richard’s certain knowledge, inner voices did occasionally turn out to be external entities, human or otherwise.

  ‘You also watch this television series?’

  Della shook her head. ‘Lately, Jamie stopped me, said it would upset me to see what they’d made us out to be. I always used to follow it, though, used to love it, but when they brought in those characters… “Jockie” and “Delia”? Well, anyone could tell they were supposed to be us.’

  ‘You think the characters were based on you and Jamie?’

  ‘No doubt, is there? They say “any resemblance with persons, living or dead is unintentional” but they have to, don’t they? By law. Jamie looked into having them up for libel… or is it slander? Slander’s when it’s said out loud and libel’s written down.’

  ‘A tricky point,’ Richard conceded. ‘It would be written down in the script but said out loud by the cast. Who to sue, the writer or the actors?’

  ‘It also has to be not true.’

  Della stopped. She had owned up to killing, but now wanted to hold back.

  Richard took her hands and squeezed. He had the sense that in some way this woman was innocent and he needed to help her.

  Price’s instincts were good. This was a Diogenes Club case.

  ‘Was it true?’ he asked gently, fixing his gaze on her.

  ‘You have lovely eyes,’ she said, which was nice but not really where he wanted this interview to go. He faintly heard Fred stifling laughter beyond the mirror.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘it was all true. So far as I could make out, from what Jamie said and the questions people kept asking me. As I said, I haven’t seen the Barstows in three months. With Jamie gone, I suppose I can watch again. That’s something. They have telly in prison, now, don’t they? Anyway, when Jockie and Delia came on, Jamie shut me out of the front room and watched on his own. He always came out furious. If you ask me, he was angrier after episodes when Jockie and Delia weren’t in the story than when they were.’

  ‘Did he take any action? Against the programme?’

  ‘He sacked a couple of grooms, some secretaries and his manager. Swore up and down that someone must be talking. “Leaking” he called it, like secrets. It was Watergate to him, you see. They were getting inside his circle, ferreting things out, then putting them on telly. One of the grooms was supposed to have sold some of our old clothes to the people who make the show, for the actors to wear. And not just clothes, but other things, personal things. Jamie kept being asked if he hated horses like Jockie. Every time he denied it, it seemed more like the truth. I know it didn’t used to be true, but somehow it came true. I don’t know how they did it. There were things only he knew about – things I didn’t know – which went out on telly.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Do you remember Bright Boy, the horse that threw Jamie at Goodwood, that was kidnapped and never found? On the programme, a horse called “Lively Lad” injured Jamie… I mean, Jockie. They showed him beating it to death with a cricket bat, then faking the kidnapping. Jamie would never come out and say so, but I think the telly had it right and his story to the papers was a lie. He showed me the ransom note, and the ears and tail the kidnappers were supposed to have posted to him. The police took it seriously. They never caught the crooks, though. Jamie got rid of his golf clubs about the same time. Not in the rubbish – in the furnace. You don’t burn your clubs if you give up golf, do you? And he didn’t give up. He bought a new set. No, Jamie killed Bright Boy, just like Jockie killed Lively Lad. They knew, those clever telly people, they knew.’

  ‘Just like they knew about you? About what you did?’

  Della’s brow creased. Now, she was gripping his hand. He felt strength in her – as well as modelling, she was a show-jumper. She knew how to hold the reins, apply the whip. The spurs were excessive, but they had come from Jamie’s private tack-room.

  ‘I can remember it,’ she said. ‘I remember having the idea. I’m not mad. I know a horse doesn’t speak inside my head. I know that I’m the horse really. It’s just… it really does seem like someone else was there. Someone who’s not here any more. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Almost nothing makes sense, Della.’

  He leaned in close and whispered, so Price couldn’t overhear. ‘Say that Jamie forced you to ride him, begged you not to stop. It was a sexy game that went too far.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly like that, I know. But it was something like that, and you should not suffer for this. Understand?’

  There was a rattle at the door. Price coming in. Richard let Della’s hands go, and sat back.

 
‘Inspector Price, how nice to see you. We’ve got to the bottom of this, I think. Has Miss Devyne been charged?’

  Price’s face fell. He saw his closed case opening like a parachute.

  ‘The inquest will rule misadventure in embarrassing circumstances. We should let this young lady go. She’s had a gruelling experience and needs to be with her friends and family.’

  Vanessa slipped in, past the Inspector.

  ‘Come along with me, Della,’ she said. ‘We’ll get you out the back. There are reporters out front.’

  ‘No,’ said Della. ‘I’d like to see reporters. I have to some time. And I have something to say they’ll want to hear. Before I go, I want to fix my face. May I?’

  ‘Of course,’ purred Richard.

  Price glared at him in a you’ve-created-a-monster manner.

  Vanessa led Della away, to be presented to her public.

  ‘She bloody did it, Jeperson,’ said Price, when Della was out of earshot. ‘You know she bloody did it!’

  ‘Yes, but she didn’t bloody mean it.’

  ‘What about the throat-cutter? Do we let him go too? He killed five people to get at the Prince.’

  ‘Leave him be, for now.’

  ‘For now?’

  Price would have to do a deal of fancy footwork to explain the handling of this case. In the end, it would be all right. If viewers felt the martyred Delia was more than justified in treating the odious Jockie the way she did, they would feel the same about Della. Besides, The Northern Barstows was officially fiction. If it couldn’t be proved that what they showed on television had happened in real life, then Della was off the hook.

  ‘Look at it this way, Price – what with the TV tie-in, you’d never be able to get an unprejudiced jury. It’d be a show trial, run longer than the series, and we’d all end up looking like right plonkers. This way, she gets her own spin-off, and we can go after the real source of the problem.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The Northern Barstows. I want to know more about how the programme is made and the people who make it. Don’t worry, I’ve not forgotten your ordinary murder. It’s just something extraordinary is mixed in.’