Walther shrugged as if to say that Mr Vanderfell’s patronage was of no interest to him. “I don’t imagine I was high on your list, Mr Vanderfell,” he said easily. “So if we’re here talking you must be feeling quite needy. What can I do for you?”
Vanderfell narrowed his eyes but I could tell that Walther was having none of it. After a moment when I thought we would get thrown out, the American sighed.
“I need you to find someone,” he said.
“Not quite my line of work,” said Walther lightly. Vanderfell scowled at him.
“Like you said, I’m out of options. I’ve tried the police and I’ve tried P.I.s and I’ve worked my way down the ladder until it was you or The Amazing Boffo. You come marginally more highly recommended. I want you to find my son.”
Walther took a moment before replying, and he was more serious when he did. “How long has he been missing?”
“Four months,” said Vanderfell. “That’s how long it took for your police to write it off, and for every other guy I put on the case to decide they didn’t want it. My son, James Vanderfell Junior, has vanished, Mr Cohen, and everyone’s telling me that he’s just run off around Europe or eloped with a girl, but it isn’t so, Mr Cohen. Something has happened to my son, and I’m not being told what.” Whatever his faults as a moneyman you could tell he really cared about his boy.
“Still not my line of work,” Walther said, sounding slightly irritated.
“I’ve had a file made up for you,” Vanderfell said, as if Walther hadn’t spoken. “Everything I’ve found out. Everything the investigators sent me before they decided to go quiet.” He pushed a thick buff folder across the desk. It was unlabelled.
Walther looked at his hat for a bit, as though he expected it to do something. His hands had opened the file, were leafing through the papers inside. “I don’t do missing persons, not without more. I’m sorry, Mr Vanderfell.”
“You’ve seen how much I’m offering, for any proof,” the American said hoarsely. I think before his son disappeared he would have shouted at us and thrown us out, but he had been discovering that even his money and power had limits.
Walther shook his head and opened his mouth to turn down all that money we could have used, and then his hands stopped.
“I’ll do it,” said Walther quietly. A shiver went through him as he said it and I knew he’d hit on something. When he stood up he looked pale, even wearing white.
*
We’re not private investigators. Walther’s business is the abnormal and mine is keeping his skin whole while he’s looking into it. We don’t do missing persons, messy divorces, all that. Not without more, as the man said. Walther wouldn’t say, though, what had changed his mind about the case. We went over the old, cold leads from the file pretty quickly. Whoever had been ahead of us had been thorough, but drawn a blank real fast. “Which is odd,” I said. “For Vanderfell’s money, people pad things out. This case is three years’ easy living to any private eye.” Walther wasn’t telling me what had hooked him, and because of that I wasn’t asking. I’m stubborn like that. We were at my place, the room I had this week, near where my work was. It was about what you imagine, for a rented room in London. I hadn’t really unpacked and the landlord hadn’t really had it cleaned.
Walther nodded, leafing through newspaper reports. The missing son had made the papers once or twice, then sunk without a trace like everything else. If it wasn’t a millionaire businessman being thwarted you’d think it was a cover up, but Vanderfell’s type are usually on the other end of the business when cover ups are handed out.
There was a lot of background information on file. Most of it was just groundwork, irrelevant stuff, put in to make it look like work was being done. Foreign trips in the last year (many), schools (prestigious), work (high paying, low skilled and obviously got through family connections). Eventually even stubborn wears thin. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“The PI talked to some of Junior’s old chums,” Walther said. I found the relevant pages, saw the school.
“Isn’t that your posh place?”
“That’s not it, but yes,” Walther agreed. “Harrow, dontcherknow.” Walther never has much money, but his family used to, is how I reckoned. Certainly he came down through the right schools to be a social someone. As for me, I always said my best school was prison. Before that I didn’t have much grasp on education.
“But that’s not why you’re interested?” The stuff from the old chums was thin, odd recollections, nothing the PI had found useful.
“Because we share an old school? Certainly not.” Walther poured himself a glass of wine and visibly considered not pouring me one. “You know me better than that, Michael.”
I didn’t, to be honest. I liked Walther but he was private. He’d never really let me in on his past. I just shrugged and read every damn line of those reports until I drew all the blanks there were. “So what?” I asked.
“Interview with Robin McCalfrey, second page, fourth paragraph.” He didn’t even pause to remember it, which told me he’d memorised it before to show off.
I read:
“Recalled plenty of women dated JV, no serious, no longer than three months, no pregnancies/scandal. I asked members of societies/clubs? Went through list of usual (as per KP interview). Something else. Prompted mentioned 2yrs ago JV accepted into “Dissipation Club” must check. No other mention. JV drunk when saying and celebrating. Never said when sober.”
“So what?” I asked again. I realised as I looked up that Walther had been watching me like a madman.
“I was wondering,” he said carefully, “Whether you might recognise it? Not familiar? Not at all?”
I shrugged. “Not to me. But it is to you?”
He nodded. Walther usually looks bright, on edge, kind of like a drug addict in an odd way. Now he looked tired. “Look it up on the Woo-wa,” he instructed. Meaning the internet, which Walther doesn’t have any truck with. Computers are one of the things I learned inside. I fired up my laptop and googled it right in there, with apostrophes.
“Not much,” was the charitable way of putting it. No news articles. A few red flags on the conspiracists’ websites, which is less than most multinationals get. There was some place in inner London, the posh end, called the Dissipation Club, was about the limit of it.
“What do the conspiracists say?” Walther wanted to know. There was an odd tone to his voice. He knew it all, already, but he wanted to see what other people knew, or thought they knew.
“One site is saying that it’s all to do with companies that want to ruin the environment – mind you, not just ones that happen to ruin it, but actively want to ruin it. There’s another here – says they’re a branch of the Freemasons, or it’s a Mason club, or something. But then it reckons that the Freemasons are running the world for the benefit of the Jews,” I explained. “They list a whole load of places.”
“For the Jews, is it?” Walther mused. “Well nobody told me. I wonder how I claim my share.”
“There’s planning permission,” I said, scrolling. “Someone wanting to build... objection from the Dissipation Club... permission denied. Well, posh London, hardly surprising.”
I carried on ogling google, paging down links that were less and less to do with anything. “Well, they’ve been where they’ve been for a long time.” I found notes to do with repairs to the building during the Blitz, and then some note regarding the order of repairs after the fire of London, where the Dissipation Club also seemed to jump the queue. “There’s a photo of some MP here.” I showed him. It was ten years ago, some secretarial scandal, the harassed-looking man snapped on the steps of a smart but discrete-looking place. The words “The Dispation Society” were cut in deep, neat capitals above him. I saw Walther shiver when he saw the photo.
“Dispation... Does that mean anything to you, Michael?”
“Still no.”
He nodded, and then, without precursor: “Can they know what
you’re searching for, on the Woo-wa? That you’re looking for them?”
I didn’t know, to be honest. “If they were someone like Vanderfell, with his money, maybe they could,” I said. “You think we might get visited? I can move out of here, no problems.” I live near where my day work takes me, around London. I don’t own much. I slapped in a search on “Dispation Society” too, just for kicks. “Hey, Jack Dee’s a member.”
“Who’s Jack Dee?”
“The comedian,” I told him. “The miserable one. Oh wait, this is John Dee. Never mind.”
Walther had that face on that suggested I was being stupid, and so I pulled up the article, which turned out to be some student thesis on Elizabethan history. Some crank called John Dee was being accused of witchcraft. Some of the people who stood up for him were his fellow members of the Dispation Society, or so the writer had got from some letter of the time. Their evidence had seemed to clinch the deal for Dee, anyway.
“Fifteen ninety-nine,” Walther said. “That’s a long time for a gentleman’s club to be going. Sufficiently long ago that nobody had heard of mass media, and so people didn’t worry about... leaving references lying about.”
“Walther, are you going to tell me what’s going on, or what?”
“What,” he said.
“Walther –” I stood up, nearly knocking the laptop over. “Tell me –”
He stopped me with a single gesture. He was looking far more serious than usual. The quirkiness, the easy humour he puts up against the world most of the time had slipped a cog.
“Michael, this is serious,” he said. “Really serious. It’s an old case, to me. It’s not something you’re involved in yet. Depending on how the Woo-wa works you may never be, if you walk away now. Vanderfell’s put me on an old scent again. It’s a sign, to me, not to leave things unfinished. But you don’t have to come with me.”
I left a decent-sized gap before answering. You have to, when people say that sort of thing to you. The answer was no surprise to him, surely. “Go for it. I’m in,” I said. “So spill.”
“Not yet. I want you to hear another angle first, before you make your mind up,” Walther told me. “Call the authorities.”
“Meaning Hawker?”
“Meaning Hawker.”
Detective Sergeant Hawker goes back a long way with Walther. I got to know her just after Walther and I got out. It was GBH for me, breaking and entering for him. Hawker passes us jobs, sometimes, when something nasty turns up on her patch. She helps us out, when we need a little digging in the police files. She’s been on the force about twelve years and she’s pissed off at being passed over, basically, and she doesn’t care much about the rest. I put in a call to her from a call box, which is how it works, and we arranged to meet in a week’s time.
*
What happened in between was we had an unaccountable run of bad luck. It was not what you might expect from the films or the novels. Nobody cut my brakes or poisoned my coffee. Walther didn’t get run over by a mysterious vanishing car. All the things that conspiracy theorists love to spout nonsense about, none of that happened. My current employers told me not to turn up the next day because they didn’t like my attitude, but then I had been a bit surly, to be honest. Walther got picked up by the police and held for about three hours, and then put in a line-up with four large men who looked nothing like him, and then let go without charge, even with an apology. I had some court proceedings come through for some rent I hadn’t paid a year before, and I got stop-searched by some policemen. Someone threw a brick through Walther’s window and spray-painted “poff” on his door, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Little things.
Nobody mentioned the Dissipation Club to us at all. There were no threats, no warnings to leave well alone. The librarians at the British Museum wouldn’t release some special old books for Walther to see, but then his record was hardly spotless there. Just little things. Things that made our lives complicated, that tied up our time in various ways. For anyone other than Walther it might have gone unnoticed. Walther has intuition, though, like I said. He knows when someone’s messing with him.
We were meeting Hawker at a pub we all knew, and Walther and I turned up first. After exchanging stories I asked right out, “If we start prying, is this going to get serious?” I asked.
“I’d move out,” Walther confirmed. “Don’t leave a forwarding address.”
“And you?”
He gave a grin that was humourless. “They know where I live already.”
“Walther, is this... supernatural? Have we been jinxed or cursed or something?”
He shook his head. “This is just someone being very, very subtle in telling us to bugger orff.”
Hawker arrived then. She’s a solid-built Irishwoman who looks like she wouldn’t hesitate to break your arm, given any excuse. When Walther mentioned the Club she scowled.
“This again.”
“This again,” Walther confirmed. “But I’m bringing Michael into it now. So I want you to tell him your take on it.”
“My take?” she snorted. “My take’s that they’re a pack of cheating bastards who keep people like me down. It’s a rich man’s thing, this club of theirs.”
“Freemasons,” I said.
“Freemasons be damned,” she said, and added some fairly serious language about freemasonry. “Freemasons aren’t the half of it,” she said. “This lot at the Dissipation Club are like freemasons for the freemasons. It’s all posh lads like your man here, and rich lads, and family lads with places in the country, like Burke’s f’ing peerage under one roof. And if you’re not in with them, or if one of them doesn’t like you, then you’re buggered back and sideways, because you’ll never get anywhere in life. Look at me. Am I where I should be, for my capabilities? For my experience? No, ‘cos I’m Irish and I’m a woman and I’m not a member of the f’ing Club.”
She went on like that in the same vein for about an hour, and we bought her drinks. She knew that a lot of her superiors, and more of their superiors, were either in this club or in the pocket of someone who was. It was just more freemasons to me. I was born at the bottom of the barrel. It didn’t seem to make much difference to me whether it was a top club or a real tip-top club, if even middle-ranker clubs wouldn’t take me in, save to stand at their doors and keep people out.
“Sod them,” I said. “I’m still in.”
After Hawker had left we went to a ratty little room Walther had rented, with cash and without questions. I sat like a lump until Walther smiled and said, “All right. I’ve been investigating the Dissipation Club for some time. I made one serious sortie, years before we met. I was quite young. I got burned.”
“So where did you hear about them?”
“This was when I was at school, last year there. Someone I knew, his father died. All very stiff upper lip stuff, you know. Except that a week later the two of us got out and got blind drunk on White Lightning, and he said all sorts of stuff about his old dad. He went on about how his dad had reckoned everything was on the up, on the brink of some great success. What a terrible shame it had happened just after getting into the club. What club? said I. He said he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. That his dad hadn’t been supposed to tell him. It was a secret club, you see.”
“The Dissipation Club.”
“I got it out of him,” Walther cpnfirmed. “Quite possibly he didn’t even remember telling me. However, a week later he was gone from the old Alma Mater and I never saw or heard from him again. But I remembered. I wanted to find out.”
“What happened?”
“I asked a lot of questions. I splashed a lot of money around. I visited their clubhouse in London. I stood right where that MP had been standing. I talked to the staff, pretending I wanted to join. I found stuff out. It was one of the first investigations I did. I was as thorough as I could be, with what little they’d left me.”
“And?”
“Historically? The Dissipation Club, previously
known as the Dispation Society, has been around for a long old time, Michael. There are references in documents from the reign of Elizabeth One, as you found, but they don’t say it was new then. In fact some of them, some of the records I pirated from the British Museum way back, say that it was reckoned extremely old.”
“So?”
“More recently… If you dig, really dig, in old newspapers, in the paper records, you find things. Not the Woo-waa, I’m sure. That’s changing all the time, and I know damn well that the people we’re dealing with can make all the changes they want. But if you dig and you dig, you come across missing people, Michael.”
“There are always missing people.”
“Oh yes, but missing poor people aren’t news. These are rich people. People with titles. People of family. People with money by the bucket. People like my friend. Like Vanderfell Junior. There’s a stir, just a little, when they vanish without a trace.” Seeing my face he was quick to stop me interrupting. “And yes, that happens too. They commit suicide or run off to Brazil, but I did my research and I talked to a lot of people. I was the regular sleuth on a trail of clues. I found three names who were definitely linked to the Dissipation Club, and who had vanished, years apart, going back to the twenties. In fact since then I’ve found five more.”
“And?”
“And what do you think I did, so full of youthful enthusiasm?”
“I think you went to the club and wanted answers.”
“Full marks,” Walther admitted. His face creased, showing old pain. “They were very polite, and very uninformative and, although I saw a few odd things, I didn’t get the chance to explore. They put me back on the pavement, and that’s when things went wrong.”
“Things?”
Walther smiled. “Why, everything, Michael. Absolutely everything. The family home repossessed, old debts surfacing, shares falling through the floor, friends not wanting to know me, getting thrown out of university. Everything, Michael. You must have wondered what happened to take me from Harrow to that place I live in now.”
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