The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02]

by By Kim Newman

  It couldn’t be...

  .. .but it was. Missing for over fifty years and returned exactly as she had been when taken.

  This was Rose Farrar.

  * * * *

  II: “beyond the veil”

  “There is one who would speak with you, Catriona Kaye,” intoned Mademoiselle Astarte. “One who has passed beyond the veil, one who cares for you very much.”

  Catriona nodded curtly. The medium’s lacquered fingers bit deeply into her hand. She could smell peppermint on the woman’s breath, and gin.

  Mademoiselle Astarte wore a black dress, shimmering with beaded fringes. A tiara of peacock feathers gave her the look of an Aztec priestess. A rope of pearls hung flat against her chest and dangled to her navel. As table-rappers went, she was the bee’s roller-skates.

  She shook her head slightly, eyes shut in concentration. Catriona’s hand really hurt now.

  “A soldier,” the medium breathed.

  The Great War had been done with for seven years. It was a fair bet that anyone of Catriona’s age—she was a century baby, born 1900—consulting a woman in Mademoiselle Astarte’s profession would be interested in a soldier. Almost everyone had lost a soldier—a sweetheart, a brother, even a father.

  She nodded, noncommittally.

  “Yes, a soldier,” the medium confirmed. A lone tear ran neatly through her mascara.

  There were others in the room. Mademoiselle didn’t have her clients sit about a table. She arranged them on stiff-backed chairs in a rough semicircle and wandered theatrically among them, seizing with both hands the person to whom the spirit or spirits who spoke through her wished to address themselves.

  Everyone was attentive. The medium put on a good show.

  Mademoiselle Astarte’s mother, a barrel-shaped lady draped in what might once have been a peculiarly ugly set of mid-Victorian curtains, let her fingers play over the keys of an upright piano, tinkling notes at random. It was supposed to suggest the music of the spheres, and put the spirits at ease. Catriona was sure the woman was playing “Knocked ‘Em in the Old Kent Road” very slowly.

  Smoke filtered into the room. Not scented like incense, but pleasantly woody. It seemed to come from nowhere. The electric lamps were dimmed with Chinese scarves. A grey haze gathered over the carpet, rising like a tide.

  “His passing was sudden,” the medium continued. “But not painful. A shock. He hardly knew what had happened to him, was unaware of his condition.”

  Also calculated: no upsetting details—choking on gas while gutted on barbed wire, mind smashed by months of bombardment and shot as a coward—and a subtle explanation for why it had taken years for the spirit to come through.

  There was a fresh light. It seemed sourceless, but the smoke glowed from within as it gathered into a spiral. A prominent china manufacturer gasped, while his wife’s face was wrung with a mix of envy and joy—they had lost a son at Passchendaele.

  A figure was forming. A man in uniform, olive drab bleached grey. The cap was distinct, but the face was a blur. Any rank insignia were unreadable.

  Catriona’s hands were almost bloodless. She had to steel herself to keep from yelping. Mademoiselle Astarte yanked her out of her chair and held tight.

  The figure wavered in the smoke.

  “He wants you to know...”

  “.. .that he cares for me very much?”

  “Yes. Indeed. It is so.”

  Mademoiselle Astarte’s rates were fixed. Five pounds for a session. Those whose loved ones “made contact” were invariably stirred enough to double or triple the fee. The departed never seemed overly keen on communicating with those left behind who happened to be short of money.

  Catriona peered at the wavering smoke soldier.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Yes, child...”

  Mademoiselle Astarte could only be a year or two older than her.

  “My soldier. Edwin.”

  “Yes. Edwin. That is the name. I hear it clearly.”

  A smile twitched on Catriona’s lips.

  “Edwin... isn’t... actuallydead.”

  The medium froze. Her nails dug into Catriona’s bare arms. Her face was a study in silent fury. Catriona detached Mademoiselle Astarte’s hands from her person and stood back.

  “The music is to cover the noise of the projection equipment, isn’t it?”

  Mademoiselle’s mother banged the keyboard without interruption. Catriona looked up at the ceiling. The chandelier was an arrangement of mirror pendants clustered around a pinhole aperture.

  “There’s another one of you in the room upstairs. Cranking the projector. Your father, I would guess. It’s remarkable how much more reliable your connection with the spirit world has become since his release from Pentonville.”

  She poked her hand into the smoke and wiggled her fingers. Greatcoat buttons were projected onto her hand. The sepia tint was a nice touch.

  “You bitch,” Mademoiselle Astarte spat, like a fishwife.

  The others in the circle were shocked.

  “I really must protest,” began the china manufacturer. His bewildered wife shook her head, still desperate to believe.

  “I’m afraid this woman has been rooking you,” Catriona announced. “She is a clever theatrical performer, and a rather nasty specimen of that unlovely species, the confidence trickster.”

  The medium’s hands leaped like hawks. Catriona caught her wrists and held the dagger-nails away from her face. Her fringes writhed like the fronds of an angry jellyfish.

  “You are a disgrace, Mademoiselle,” she said, coldly. “And your sham is blown. You would do well to return to the music-halls, where your prestidigitation does no harm.”

  She withdrew tactfully from the room. A commotion erupted within, as sitters clamoured for their money back, and Mademoiselle and her mother tried in vain to calm them. The china manufacturer, extremely irate, mentioned the name of a famous firm of solicitors.

  In the hallway, Catriona found her good cloth coat and slipped it on over a moderately fringed white dress. It was daringly cut just above the knee, barely covering the rolled tops of her silk stockings. She fixed a cloche hat over her bobbed brown hair, catching sight of her slightly too satisfied little face in the hall mirror. She still had freckles, which made the carefully placed beauty mark a superfluous black dot. Her mouth was nice, though, just the shape for a rich red Cupid’s bow. She blew a triumphant kiss at herself, and stepped out onto Phene Street.

  Her cold anger was subsiding. Charlatanry always infuriated her, especially when combined with cupidity. The field of psychical research would never be taken seriously while the flim-flam merchants were in business, fleecing the grieving and the gullible.

  Edwin Winthrop awaited her outside, the Bentley idling at the kerb like a green and brass land-yacht. He sat at the wheel, white scarf flung over his shoulder, a large check cap over his patent-leather hair, warmed not by a voluminous car coat but by a leather flying jacket. The ends of his moustache were almost unnoticeably waxed, and he grinned to see her, satisfied that she had done well at the séance. Her soldier was seven years out of uniform, but still obscurely in the service of his country.

  “Hop in, Catty-Kit,” he said. “You’ll want to make a swift get-away, I suspect. Doubtless, the doers of dastardly deeds will have their fur standing on end by now, and be looking to exact a cowardly revenge upon your pretty little person.”

  A heavy plant-pot fell from the skies and exploded on the pavement a foot away from her white pumps. It spread shrapnel of well-watered dirt and waxy aspidistra leaves. She glanced up at the town house, noticing the irate old man in an open window, and vaulted into the passenger seat.

  “Very neatly done, Cat,” Edwin complimented her.

  The car swept away, roaring like a jungle beast. Fearful curses followed. She blushed to hear such language. Edwin sounded the bulb-horn in reply.

  She leaned close and kissed his chilled chee
k.

  “How’s the spirit world, my angel?” she asked.

  “How would I know?” he shrugged.

  “I have it on very good authority that you’ve taken up residence there.”

  “Not yet, old thing. The Hun couldn’t get shot of me on the ground or in the air during the late unpleasantness, and seven stripes of foul fellow have missed their chance since the cessation. Edwin Winthrop, Esquire, of Somerset and Bloomsbury, is pretty much determined to stick about on this physical plane for the foreseeable. After all, it’s so deuced interesting a sphere. With you about, one wouldn’t wish to say farewell to the corporeal just yet.”

  They drove through Chelsea, towards St. James’s Park. It was a bright English autumn day, with red leaves in the street and a cleansing nip in the air.

  “What do you make of this?”

  One hand on the wheel, he produced a paper from inside his jacket. It was a telegram.

  “It’s from the Old Man,” he explained.

  The message was terse, three words. Angel Down Sussex.

  “Is it an event or a place?” she asked.

  Edwin laughed, even teeth shining.

  “A bit of both, Catty-Kit. A bit of both.”

  * * * *

  III: “in the Strangers Room”

  Strictly speaking, the gentle sex were not permitted within the portals of the Diogenes Club. When this was first brought to Winthrop’s attention, he had declared his beloved associate to be not a woman but a minx and therefore not subject to the regulation. The Old Man, never unduly deferential to hoary tradition, accepted this and Catriona Kaye was now admitted without question to the Strangers Room. As she breezed into the discreet building in Pall Mall and sat herself daintily down like a deceptively well-behaved schoolgirl, Winthrop derived petty satisfaction from the contained explosions of fury that emanated from behind several raised numbers of The Times. He realised that the Old Man shared this tiny pleasure.

  Though he had served with the Somerset Light Infantry and the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War, Edwin Winthrop had always been primarily responsible to the Diogenes Club, least known and most eccentric instrument of the British Government. If anything, peace had meant an increase in his activities on their behalf. The Old Man—Charles Beauregard, Chairman of the Club’s Ruling Cabal—had formed a section to look into certain matters no other official body could be seen to take seriously. Winthrop was the leading agent of that special section, and Catriona Kaye, highly unofficially, his most useful aide. Her interest in psychical research, a subject upon which she had written several books, dovetailed usefully with the section’s remit, to deal with the apparently inexplicable.

  The Old Man joined them in the Strangers Room, signalled an attendant to bring brandy, and sat himself down on an upholstered sofa. At seventy-two, his luxurious hair and clipped moustache were snow white but his face was marvellously unlined and his eyes still bright. Beauregard had served with the Diogenes Club for over forty years, since the days when the much-missed Mycroft Holmes chaired the Cabal and the Empire was ceaselessly harried by foreign agents after naval plans.

  Beauregard complimented Catriona on her complexion; she smiled and showed her dimple. There was a satirical undercurrent to this exchange, as if all present had to pretend always to be considerably less clever than they were, but were also compelled to communicate on a higher level their genuine acuities. This meant sometimes seeming to take the roles of windy old uncle and winsome young flirt.

  “You’re our authority on the supernatural, Catriona,” said the Old Man, enunciating all four syllables of the name. “Does Angel Down mean anything to you?”

  “I know of the story,” she replied. “It was a nine-day wonder, like the Mary Celeste or the Angel of Mons. There’s a quite bad Victorian book on the affair, Mrs. Twemlow’sThe Girl Who Went With the Angels.”

  “Yes, our little vanished Rosie Farrar.”

  Until today, Winthrop had never heard of Angel Down, Sussex.

  “There was a wave of ‘angelic visitations’ in the vicinity of Angel Down in the 1870s,” Catriona continued, showing off rather fetchingly. “Flying chariots made of stars harnessed together, whooshing through the treetops, leaving burned circles in fields where they touched ground. Dr. Martin Hesselius, the distinguished specialist in supernatural affairs, was consulted by the Farrar family and put the business down to a plague of fire elementals. More recently, in an article, Dr. Silence, another important researcher in the field, has invoked the Canadian wendigo or wind-walker as an explanation. But in the popular imagination, the visitors have always been angels, though not perhaps the breed we are familiar with from the Bible and Mr. Milton. The place name suggests that this rash of events was not unprecedented in the area. Mrs. Twemlow unearthed medieval references to miraculous sightings. The visitations revolved around a neolithic circle.”

  “And what about the little girl?” Winthrop asked.

  “This Rosie Farrar, daughter of a farmer, claimed to have talked with the occupants of these chariots of fire. They were cherubs, she said, about her height, clad in silvery-grey raiment, with large black eyes and no noses to speak of. She was quite a prodigy. One day, she went into Angel Field, where the stones stood, and was transported up into the sky, in the presence of witnesses, and spirited away in a fiery wheel.”

  “Never to be seen again?” Winthrop ventured.

  “Until yesterday,” the Old Man answered. “Rose has come back. Or, rather, a child looking exactly as Rose did fifty years ago has come back. In Angel Field.”

  “She’d be an old woman by now,” Winthrop said.

  “Providing time passes as we understand it in the Realm of the Angels,” said Catriona.

  “And where exactly might that be, Cat?”

  She poked her tongue out at him, just as the attendant, a fierce-looking ghurka, returned with their brandy. He betrayed no opinion, but she was slightly cowed. Serve her right.

  “The local rector made the report. One Bartholomew Haskins. He called the Lord Lieutenant, and the matter was passed on to the Diogenes Club. Now, I’m entrusting it to you.”

  “What does this girl have to say for herself?” Catriona asked. “Does she actually claim to be Rosie Farrar?”

  “She hasn’t said anything yet. Photographs exist of the real Rose, and our girl is said to resemble them uncannily.”

  “Uncannily, eh?” said Winthrop.

  “Just so.”

  “I should think this’ll make for a jolly weekend away from town,” Winthrop told the Old Man. “Angel Down is near enough to Falmer Field for me to combine an investigation with a couple of sorties in Katie.”

  Winthrop had kept up his flying since the War, maintaining his own aeroplane, a modified Camel fighter namedKatie. She was getting to be a bit of an antique paraded next to the latest line in gleaming metal monoplanes, but he trusted her as much as he did Catriona or the Bentley. He knew the kite’s moods and foibles, and could depend on her in a pinch. If she could come through the best efforts of the late Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus, she could survive any peace-time scrape. If he were to tangle with “chariots of stars,” he might have need of the faithfulKatie.

  Catriona was thoughtful. As ever, she saw this less as a jaunt than he did. He needed her to balance him. She had a strong sense of what was significant, and kept him from haring off on wild streaks when he needed to be exercising the old brain-box.

  “Has this miraculous reappearance been made public?”

  The Old Man’s brows knit. “I’m afraid so. The Brighton Argus carried the story this morning, and the afternoon editions of all the dailies have it, in various lights. Haskins knows enough to keep the child away from the press for the moment. But all manner of people are likely to take an interest. You know who I mean. It would be highly convenient if you could come up with some unsensational explanation that will settle the matter before it goes any further.”

  Winthrop understood. It was almost ce
rtain this business was a misunderstanding or a hoax. If so, it was best it were blown up at once. And, if not, it was sadly best that it be thought so.

  “I’ll see what I can do, Beauregard.”

  “Good man. Now, you children run off and play. And don’t come back until you know what little Rosie is up to.”

  * * * *

  IV: “a demure little thing”

  With Sam Farrar queerly reluctant to take his miraculously returned aunt into his house, Haskins had to put the little girl up at the rectory. He wondered, chiding himself for a lack of charity, whether Sam’s hesitation was down to the question of the stake in Farrar Farm, if any, to which Rose might be entitled. It was also true that for Sam and Ellen to be presented in late middle age with a child they might be expected to raise as their own would be an upheaval in their settled lives.