by Kim Newman
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, RN”. That was a Colonel Christopher Conner, SAC. “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 semi-crook 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 been 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 non-committal 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 swear-words.
‘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 this was where the Gecko was 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 was admiring 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 fitted 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 gun-boat to remind potential invaders that the Falklands remained British. If there were any gun-boats 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 sitting next to Catriona Kaye, and her nurse. All the others from her day – Edwin, Sir Giles – were gone. Barbara Corri was there 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, gob-smacked.
SWELLHEAD
ACT I: ‘ARNE SAKNUSSEMM, HIS SIGN’
I.
‘Bloodybuggerinmixmaster…’ said Richard Jeperson.
Detective Sergeant Stacy Cotterill looked across the troop compartment at the man from the Diogenes Club. Since take-off from the Air-Sea Rescue helipad, he’d been sitting quietly, secured by webbing which reminded her of a strait-jacket. He wore a dayglo orange oilskin poncho 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.
‘…blong Jesus Christ,’ Jeperson added, emphatically.
She wondered if, in addition to everything she’d been briefed on, the old man had Tourette’s syndrome.
Onions (‘O-nye-ons,’ he had insisted, understandably) looked up, as if jolting awake inside his expensive parka. Stacy noticed he always kept half an eye on Jeperson, like a bear sharing a cave with a languid adder. Onions adjusted his baffles, exposing an ear.
She glanced around. None of the others were interested.
Mr Head munched a Lion bar, fixated on Petesuchis, a high-end crossword magazine. The little man, whose boiled-egg baldpate and wide watery eyes suggested something without bones, did not fill in a puzzle, just solved all the clues mentally, left the grid virginal, and proceeded to the next, more challenging page. Onions had told her Petesuchis scorned newsstand distribution. The publishers set an entrance exam for the subscription list, charging on a sliding scale, lower price for higher grades. Adam Onions paid a thousand pounds a year for thirteen slim numbers; Sewell Head got his for free.
Persephone Gill, the Droning of Skerra, wore tiny walkman earclips under her baffles, nodding serenely to something bland. Once she got past the notations in ‘Percy’ Gill’s file (‘twenty-one years old, inheritrice of the most unearned wealth in the United Kingdom, no educational qualifications’), Stacy was still venomously glad the girl had been voted out of the mansion at the first cull of Channel 4’s Posh Big Brother.
Franklin Yoland, the tech guy, gripped his webbing, white-faced and praying for deliverance. He suffered from airsickness and flight terrors, perhaps not ideal qualities in an editor of Jane’s Book of Air-Launched Weapons.
‘I’d been trying to remember,’ Jeperson explained to Stacy. ‘You know what it’s like when you have something in your head but can’t fish it out. The name of a tune you hear in a fresh arrangement. The new capital city of a country that’s changed its name. Whether Dante ranks virtuous pagans above or below Christian hypocrites in Hell. Pidgin English for “helicopter”.’
Through a floor-set Plexiglas bubble that sealed a gunport, she saw the arrowheaded shadow of the Royal Navy Sea King Mk4 rushing across the Norwegian Sea at 100 knots. Crescents of sunglint flashed on roofslate-grey waters. Lieutenant de Maltby, the pilot, was flying them almost at wave-level, under radar.
‘Bloodybuggerinmixmaster blong Jesus Christ.’
Jeperson nodded to himself, happy that his pidgin vocabulary was filed away neatly. In London, Chief Inspector Regent had told her Richard Jeperson knew more arcane facts than anyone alive, but that whole years were missing from his memory banks. Stacy supposed that if she lost her primary-school years or Thatcher’s second term, she’d be as concerned as Jeperson with accessing what was left in her skull. Still, he wasn’t someone she was comfortable around. She wondered again why she’d drawn this duty.
‘What’s that?’ asked Onions, voice raised.
‘Nothing important,’ said Jeperson, dismissing the enquiry with a flutter of long fingers. ‘Are we there yet?’
Jeperson perfectly mimicked the stereotypical whine of a bored child on a long car journey. His prog-rock moustache, coal-black but flashed white at the corners, twitched with amusement.
It took Onions long seconds to tumble that he was being spoofed. He looked at the plastic-wrapped chart in his mittened paws before he got the joke, then made a sour face.
‘Very mature,’ he commented.
Jeperson gave Stacy a private eyebrow-wiggle. She almost warmed to him.
Onions detached himself from the webbing and, unsteady as an astronaut going EVA, hauled himself down the compartment to confer with (i.e. nag) Lieutenant de Maltby.
‘Cuppa char, sir?’ asked Aircrewman Kydd, a cockney gnome. His duties obviously included keeping the passengers from distracting the driver while the bus was in motion.
Kydd held out a
Thermos, face arranged into a feral smile.
Onions hung from hand-holds, unsure.
‘I’d care for some tea, if that’s all right,’ said Jeperson. ‘And maybe the ladies…’
Kydd, who knew a proper gent when he saw one, delivered a real smile and a salute. He had different flasks for English breakfast, orange pekoe and lapsang souchong.
‘Best not bother the Viscount,’ Jeperson told Onions. ‘He probably has a lot on his mind, what with avoiding diplomatic offence to our esteemed allies in Oslo or Reykjavik. Last thing we need is another Cod War.’
Lieutenant de Maltby was Viscount Henry de Maltby, somewhere in the mid-thirties in line of succession to the throne. He had the House of Windsor habit of being unable to string together a sentence without saying ‘uhhhm’. It was not settled whether Debrett (or Dante) reckoned the Viscount more or less royal than the Droning of Skerra, but in this party of geniuses and idiots he was the one Stacy felt herself level with in the middling-cleverness bracket. Shame his Hapsburg lip was so developed that it resembled a facial foreskin.
With a wink, Kydd handed her a mug of English breakfast tea. It was a plastic beaker with a childproof top. She nodded thanks and drank.
The tea hit the spot.
‘Perhaps you should look out your big orange suitcase,’ Jeperson suggested to Onions. ‘Check if your anemometers are all in order.’
After consideration, Onions got back to his seat. He was most particular about his kit, which indeed came in a big orange suitcase. Jeperson said it was full of ghost-hunting gear.
They shared the troop compartment with an all-terrain vehicle, weighted down by neatly stowed supplies and equipment. The ATV occasionally shifted on its tethers. If it got loose, it would crush them all.
The intercom crackled.