Mask of the Verdoy

by Lecomber, Phil

  Turning a deeper shade of purple, Warren turned to Webbe and barked into his face: ‘Well, Webbe—what are you waiting for? You heard the Home Secretary! Get out there and bring Harley in for questioning—immediately! And take at least two cars with you—my guess is the fellow will be a bit of a handful.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘On second thoughts, Sergeant, put a call in to the Flying Squad—tell them we need some back-up on this.’

  ‘The Flying Squad, sir? Really?’

  ‘Yes, really, Sergeant! Now get on with it, man!’

  ‘Very good, sir!’ said Webbe rushing out of the office.

  ‘Much better, Mr. Warren,’ said Box-Hartnell, heading for the door followed by the civil servants who were now weighed down with Quigg’s paperwork. ‘Make sure that you contact my office the moment you have him in custody. And take care, Chief Inspector, the man’s a subversive. As I say, this is a matter of state security—you won’t allow him to slip through your fingers now, will you?’

  ‘Of course not, sir. Rest assured, you can depend on the Metropolitan Police, Home Secretary.’

  Box-Hartnell raised one eyebrow at this comment and then strode out of the room, leaving Warren to slump down in the chair and survey the ransacked office.

  ***

  Harley awoke with his head on the bureau, the image of the Green Man crumpled in his hand. The pale sepia of a London morning was pushing its way through the crack in the curtains and the city birdsong, along with the fading clip-clopping of the milkman’s horse on the cobbled street below, heralded the start of a new day.

  He sat up and rubbed a hand across his eyes. He was painfully hung-over, his face slick with a cold, greasy sweat.

  Straightening out the crumpled paper he peered through bleary eyes to read back the results of his experiment with the hallucinogenic dreambugs.

  ‘Pamphlet from C, filed under E …’

  Harley now started at a loud scratching sound coming from the direction of the door … but was relieved to see it was just Moloch—thankfully transformed back to his old feline self—pawing to be let out.

  ‘Sorry, mate!’ said the private detective, getting up and opening the door to allow the tattered old tom cat to slip out onto the landing and down the stairs. ‘Off you go, then! And say hello to that little molly of yours for me, won’t yer? You dirty old cove!’

  Harley smiled, then immediately frowned at the stabbing pain this produced at the base of his skull.

  ‘Jesus—my ’ead!’

  He followed Moloch downstairs and searched out a packet of aspirin in the bathroom cabinet, made himself a cup of strong, sweet tea and retrieved the fresh pack of Gold Flake from his overcoat.

  Back in the library, having drunk most of the tea and already halfway through his second smoke, Harley felt suitably recovered to scrutinize in detail the notes he’d made from the previous night.

  ‘Filed under ‘E’ …’ he said, drumming his fingers on the desk. ‘Alright then, here we go.’

  Although still a little shaky from the come-down, he managed to negotiate the rickety library steps to scan the box files on the relevant shelf, hoping that the sight of the title might jog his memory enough to avoid having to go through every clipping and article that he’d archived under ‘E’.

  ‘Entomology … Entozoology … Epidemiology … Éprouvette testing … Eugenics—of course! Eugenics!’

  The memory of that afternoon now came flooding back—Cynthia’s anger at the proposals she’d heard being made at the meeting she’d attended with her orchestra’s conductor, of the sterilization of the deaf and the blind, promiscuous women and homosexuals. Harley also recalled his own jealousy at the oily Cecil Whatley’s interest in his fiancée, and how he’d argued with Cynthia, each of them sulking for the remainder of the day. He allowed the memory to taunt him for a moment, then pulled out the box file and climbed down the steps.

  He flicked through the assortment of newspaper clippings and copied extracts from text books. There it was—the small pamphlet from the Eugenics Society that Cynthia had returned with that day.

  ‘Bingo!’ he said, returning to the desk to study his find.

  The image on the cover showed a large sprawling tree, named as “The Tree of Human Evolution”, whose meandering roots were emblazoned with labels such as “Genealogy”, “Anthropology”, “Mental Testing” and “Statistics”. But it was the tree’s branches that had immediately caught Harley’s attention. Each leaf-covered bough was heavy with what was labelled as “The Fruits of Humanity”—a crop of Green Man masks, identical in design to the one stolen from Viscount Chantry, bearing titles such as “Music”, “Politics”, “Scientific Discovery”, “Sport” and “Society”.

  ‘Christ! I knew I’d seen these before. So the Verdoy are mixed up with this Eugenics bollocks, are they? Well, no surprise there, I guess—what with Saint Clair always banging on about the watering down of the Nation’s Blood … Alright—we’ll come back to that later.’

  Now Harley looked to the second note to himself that he’d made. This time the frantic scribbling under the words “Rye Wolf” took a little more time to decipher.

  ‘Ah … Pembroke’s old man!’

  He returned to the bookshelves and hunted through the personnel files under “P”—but the only notes he had in his archive were the ones he’d made recently on the Reverend Giles Pembroke himself. But his old man was also a vicar, wasn’t he … he thought. He extracted some of the notes on Giles Pembroke, replaced the box file and moved to a lower shelf to hunt out an old edition of “Crockford’s Clerical Directory”.

  ‘Here he is: Arthur Reginald Pembroke … born eighteen-forty-seven … Don’t know what all those poxy abbreviations are, but then … Oxford … Chantry Hall … Grubberton … died nineteen-twenty …’

  Harley slammed the book closed, producing a little puff of dust.

  ‘Nothing obvious there.’

  He came down from the steps and thought for a moment, drawing his fingers through his dishevelled hair.

  ‘Come on, George—think!’

  His eyes wandered along the shelves, coming to rest on the section labelled “Religion & Mythology”. He pulled out a series of large text books, thumbing through each to find the index and list of contributors; but nowhere could he discover any reference to the Reverend Arthur Reginald Pembroke.

  Harley now changed tack, leaving the reference section and moving to the wall opposite, which housed a selection of fiction—mostly collected by his Uncle Blake, although with a few esoteric additions that he’d picked up himself over the years. The theme of the majority of these novels was the occult and the supernatural; a subject which—contrary to his scientific leanings—Harley had had a fascination with since childhood.

  But a trawl through the various authors’ names on the spines of the novels failed to turn up any anything new.

  Feeling enervated and dejected from the after effects of the previous night’s ordeal, Harley slumped back down at the bureau and finished off the last dregs of the cold, sweet tea. He sparked up another cigarette and stared at the book shelves, hoping for a flash of inspiration.

  He picked up the notes on Giles Pembroke and read through them again.

  ‘Chaplain at Chantry Hall … childhood friend … keen amateur historian—hold on! Didn’t Effie say the old man was a historian as well? I wonder …’

  Returning to the reference shelves he now studied the spines of the volumes in the History section.

  ‘Here we go! “Saint Anthony’s Fire—Being an Account of the Outbreak of Ergotism in a Somerset Village in 1340”, by A. R. Pembroke. Got you, you bugger! Jesus! I don’t even remember ever seeing this thing before, let alone reading it—Moloch, you’re a pal!’

  He pulled out the thin volume and sat down in the wing chair to pore through its contents, underlining the sections of text that he felt were relevant:

  “Ergotism, an epidemic malady linked to bad harvests … mixture of p
oisoned grains in rye or other corn … after a wet sowing or a wet season of growth some of the rye heads become infected with the fungal parasite Claviceps purpurea, bearing long brown or purple corns … rye-bread infected with ergot may be blacker in appearance, but has no discernable difference in taste … although rye was scantily cultivated in England during the medieval period, it continued to be an occasional crop on the Chantry Hall estate … particularly wet summer in 1340 … outbreak affected a large percentage of the peasantry in the local village of Grubberton.”

  He now came to the description of the symptoms of the disease, and as he read on his heart began to quicken with anticipation.

  “The attacks began with intense pain in the extremities, causing the victims to writhe and scream. They experienced intense itching followed by the onslaught of a fire that seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, such was the ignis sacer (sacred fire), or ignis S. Antonii (St Anthony’s fire) … sloughing of the extremities … gangrene … convulsions … mimicking the sounds of a dog … snarling, barking and at the last howling like a hound.”

  ‘Christ! Itching, convulsions, barking like a dog—that’s Miss Perkins. Girardi must have used some kind of ergot extract.’

  He continued on. ‘Here we go—the Rye Wolf!’

  “… some historians believe that the Roggenwolf (‘rye-wolf’) of German folklore—a lycanthropic evil spirit who hides amongst the fields of rye, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting peasant and strangle him to death—is linked to the rural term Wolfszahn (“Wolf-tooth”), a description of the distorted appearance given to the rye grain by an infestation of the ergot fungus. One of the recorded symptoms of ergot poisoning is the contraction of “wry-neck”, and fatal victims of the disease often appear to be dying through strangulation.

  In his celebrated study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer recounts that in European peasantry it was common for the wave-like motion of the wind gusting through the corn to be explained as “the Rye-wolf is rushing through the corn”, and children were warned not to go wandering alone into the corn-fields for “the Rye-wolf will carry you off”.’

  There is strong evidence to suggest that the psychoactive properties of Claviceps purpurea were employed as an entheogen in various religious ceremonies of antiquity; from the drinking of the kykeon in the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece, to the consummation of the sacred barley mead in the sacrificial ceremonies of the Ancient Britons … furthermore, the most commonly accepted interpretation of the hero’s name from the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, is “Barley-wolf”; some believe that this alludes to use of a trance-inducing ergot-based drink in the religions of our ancient ancestors.”

  Harley closed the book on his lap.

  ‘Ancient Briton, mystic ceremonies—this has got the sodding Verdoy written all over it. And with Girardi using some kind of powdered ergot extract … so then, Pembroke has got to be the Rye Wolf, right?’

  He got up and walked over to the blackboards.

  ‘So why is the Rye Wolf “K” on the list; a middle name, maybe? After all, there’s the Austin 7 seen leaving Effie’s apartment after the delivery of the dynamite … and he was there at Spitalfields, leaving the scene of the crime just before the explosion. He’s gotta be our boy.’

  Harley walked back to the bureau and picked up the Eugenics Society pamphlet. He studied the Green Man masks on the front cover.

  ‘Then we’ve got these bastards, ready to perform their animal husbandry on the nation to breed out the elements they don’t like—which, as well as the mentally feeble and the disabled, will no doubt include unmarried mothers, socialists, anyone with a criminal record, those of a lower IQ than the average Eton scholar, and basically anyone else who doesn’t comply to their Fascist ideal of the perfect British subject.’

  He turned the page and was presented with a list of guest speakers that had featured at the meeting that Cynthia had attended.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, dropping the pamphlet. ‘Shit!’

  Harley began to pace the room frantically, his mind racing with the information that he’d just taken in.

  He walked back to the bureau and checked the list of names, just to make sure—but there could be no doubt about it.

  Now, as he closed the pamphlet, he began to feel a wave of nausea … the cluster of Green Man masks on the cover seemed to turn and taunt him, jangling on the leafy boughs as they opened their mouths to silently laugh.

  The room began to spin as he groped for the small jade bottle containing the antidote. He chewed on one of the dried flower heads, working his jaw frantically to fill his mouth with the bitter purple juice. He swallowed the mush and slumped back into the chair.

  Within a minute or two Harley was suitably recovered to think coherently enough to plan his next move. He checked his watch, and then hurried downstairs, grabbing his hat and coat before rushing out and jogging the few hundred yards around the corner to the public telephone box in Warren Street.

  He noticed his hand was shaking as he pushed the coin into the slot. Come on, George! He thought. Pull yourself together!

  ‘DC Pearson, please,’ he said, as the call was answered at the other end. ‘Tell him it’s Mack calling.’

  It was then that he remembered Vi’s news—Quigg was dead, shot in the head by Charlie Highstead; so maybe there was no need for the subterfuge anymore. Then again, he couldn’t take any chances; after all, he was sure that Quigg had been working for the Verdoy—and half the British establishment to boot.

  ‘Albert? Yeah, it’s George. Listen, I think I’m on to something, but I’ve got to make sure. I need to find the vicar, Pembroke. You were gonna check to see if he’d gone back done to Chantry Hall … Well—go and get it! I need to know right now!’

  Whilst he waited for Pearson to consult his notes Harley felt in his pocket for his smokes, cursing when he realized that he’d left them back in the library. He rubbed the condensation from one of the small panes of glass and watched the city coming to life: the office workers streaming in from the underground and the buses, the street traders on their way to set up their pitches for the day, people buying papers and frequenting the cafés for their breakfast—all of them going about their regular business, oblivious to the fact that in a few hours the machinations of a handful of powerful individuals might turn British life on its head. He shivered and buttoned his coat up.

  ‘Albert? Yeah … yeah, I know where it is—I looked it up the other day. And you’re sure he’s gone back down there? … Well, I know, but I’ll have to take that chance … No, no—you stay here. FW is going to need all the help he can get. It’s the fifteenth, remember—if we’re right about this Correction thing, this is the day it all kicks off. As soon as I hang up I want you to check in with FW, see whether he’s had any success with getting the PM to cancel his official engagements for the day. Then I want you to get hold of Solly Rosen, CID should have a file on him—a thick one, probably. All the addresses you might find him at should be in there. Tell Sol to be on standby, that George says we need a favour. I’m sure Fellows has it covered but Solly’s unbeatable in a tight spot … yeah, Quigg … I heard—Charlie Highstead, right? See what you can find out about it, won’t yer? Listen—I’d better be going. Hopefully I’ll be back some time this afternoon. Oh, and make sure that FW has someone manning that phone number at all times—with a bit of luck I’ll be calling later with a few answers. And Albert? Make sure you’re packing that shooter of yours—I’ve got a funny feeling you’ll be needing it before the day’s out.’

  Back home at Bell Street Harley returned to the reference section in the library and pulled out an Ordinance Survey map of Somerset, spreading it out on the floor and ringing the village of Grubberton and the estate of Chantry Hall with a red pencil. He calculated the distance and decided that if he took his trusty Norton CS1 and sidecar he could be there by noon; which left him just enough time to make a few necessary preparations.

  Following a quic
k sluice and a change of clothes he prepared himself an emergency dose of the purple flower antidote and decanted it into a hip-flask. He used the remainder of the boiled water to make a thermos of sweet tea, then dished out some breakfast for Moloch. Moving back upstairs he secured the jade bottles back in their hiding place, grabbed the OS map and his bike gear, and searched out his brass knuckles.

  He stood weighing the knuckleduster thoughtfully; then moved up to his bedroom and fished about under the bed for an old biscuit tin containing a collection of souvenirs from the war. He prized off the lid and uncovered the largest of the mementoes from its German Imperial war flag wrapping—a Luger P08 semi-automatic pistol. He gave the firearm a quick once-over and then fitted the magazine.

  There’s gotta be an easier way to make a living! he thought, before gathering everything together and heading off towards the lock-up where he kept Mabel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Having made such an early start the journey into the West End from the South London suburbs had taken no time at all, and it was still a few minutes before eight-o’clock as Valentine Medini turned his new Hillman 14 into Great Marlborough Street.

  He pulled up sharply at a pedestrian crossing just outside of Liberty’s to allow a uniformed bobby to cross the road. As he did so he glanced nervously across at his fellow traveller in the passenger seat, but Ludovico Girardi held his charming smile, even acknowledging the policeman with a calm nod. Now Medini risked a glimpse in the rear-view mirror, which reflected a scene that made his heart flutter: his wife Gladys squashed up against the vast bulk of the henchman Billy Boyd, whose billycock hat sat on his lap—covering a loaded revolver.

  ‘Please, Signor Chadwick,’ said Girardi, without taking his eye off the policeman. ‘We are almost at our destination. We do not want any of your tricks now. After all, it would be a shame to see your wife’s beautiful fur coat stained with her husband’s blood.’