It might be that Mimsy was more than just missing.
She tried to read one of Mimsy’s poems. Without being in the least comprehensible, it gave her the shudders. She had the impression Mimsy was up to something.
*
“It’s not a family,” Neil said, without taking off his coat, “it’s a club.”
Sally looked up. Neil brought Jerome into the flat.
“We saw mummies!” her son said.
Neil flopped open a notebook.
“Ever heard of a journo named Katharine Reed? Irish, turn of the century, bit of a firebrand?”
Sally hadn’t.
“She left a memoir, and in that memoir she alludes in an off hand way to a Charles Beauregard who is almost certainly your Mr. ‘B’. The DNB has pages on him. Reading between lines, he was something between a spy and a spy-catcher.”
“I know the feeling.”
“He became something high up in the Secret Service, and his protegé was a Captain Edwin Winthrop.”
“Him I’ve heard of. He co-wrote a book about authentic hauntings in the West Country. Sometime in the ’20s.”
“That’s the one. And he is your Captain ‘W’, to be found in Hollywood in 1942.”
Sally considered hugging Neil. But the mention of the Secret Service was unsettling.
“Have you a name for the last one, ‘R.J.’?”
“Sadly, 1972 wasn’t long enough ago for any of the secret stuff to have been disclosed yet. And a lot of the files on the others, even Beauregard, are sealed until well into Jerome’s adult life. He’ll have to finish the puzzle.”
“I’m going to be a spy when I grow up,” Jerome announced.
“That’ll be useful,” she said. “What did you mean about a club?”
Neil grinned.
“You’ll love this. Remember Mycroft Holmes?”
“Who?”
“Brother of the more famous …?”
“Sherlock?”
“Give the girl a kiss,” he said, and did. “Yep, Mycroft, whom Conan Doyle informs us ‘sometimes was the British Government’, was, as it turns out, a real person. His private fiefdom was a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, the Diogenes. It was a cover for a special section of British Intelligence. When Mycroft retired or died, this Beauregard took over and played the hush-hush game even more seriously. For the best part of this century, the Diogenes Club was Britain’s own Department of Weird Shit. You know what I mean.”
“Only too well.”
“Aside from the wonderful Kate Reed, none of the people mixed up in this thought to write memoirs—though I’ve found references to a suppressed issue of Black Mask which supposedly ran a story that gave away too much—which means it’s all locked up in Whitehall somewhere. When you sort this out …”
“When!”
“When. I have confidence in you. Anyway, when you sort this out, there might be a book in the Diogenes Club. Britain’s X-Files. There’s a hook. And at this late date, the secrecy issue is long dead.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Come on, Sal-love. It’s great stuff. Look, mummy’s curses, Sherlock Holmes, Hooray for Hollywood, spies and ghosts, a fabulous lost treasure, Nazi Irishmen, hippie chicks with extremely large breasts, politics and black magic, terrorism, old dark houses, the plague.”
“Think it through, Neil. You say it’s all still secret.”
“Just bureaucracy. We can get in there.”
“When the War is over, the secrets come out. We know about that Scottish island Churchill dosed with anthrax. The Eastern Bloc refugees we handed over to Stalin for genocide. All that came out. Why not this stuff about the jewel?”
“Too trivial to be taken seriously. I mean, it’s absurd, right? Spooks.”
“When the War is over, the secrets come out. These secrets aren’t out. Because the War isn’t over.”
“You’re being a wet blanket, love.”
She backed off from an argument. Neil didn’t like being a dependant, but none of his outside projects ever quite came together. And he resisted being brought into the firm as a partner.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
*
While she was on the bus, her mobile bleeped. It was Maureen. Sally ran down the list of the people she’d talked with, and floated out some of the material Neil had gathered on the Diogenes Club. Surprisingly, a door opened. Then closed again.
“They’re out of business,” Maureen said. “Have been for a long time. Winthrop, I knew. At the end. That was the last War. This is something new.”
“Is it about Mimsy or the Seven Stars?”
Maureen hesitated.
The bus was stuck in Camden High Street.
“Sally, when you find Mimsy … you won’t hurt her, will you?”
She thought of the two coma men. Only one had got better.
“If she doesn’t want to come home, that’s fine by me. I just want to know if she’s all right.”
She had heard that on every missing child case. If Jerome wandered off, she wouldn’t be convinced he was all right until he was back home. But Jerome wasn’t twenty-seven.
“I think Mimsy can take care of herself,” she said, trying to reassure Maureen.
“The Jewel of Seven Stars isn’t important to me.”
After Maureen had rung off and the traffic started moving again, Sally thought to ask herself the question. So, who is the jewel important to? A morphing billboard outside the bus shifted from an ad for the new Dr. Shade movie to one for the Daily Comet to one for Cloud 9 satellite TV. All Derek Leech products.
The traffic thickened again, and Sally felt trapped.
*
Despite what she had told Neil and Maureen had told her, she had to go to Pall Mall. It wasn’t that she thought this Diogenes Club was germane to the investigation, but she wanted to look at it, to cut off that avenue before it took up too much time. Besides, she was curious.
It took several wanders up and down the Mall before she found the tiny brass plate on the big oak doors. All it said was MEMBERS ONLY. The building was shuttered and out of use. She hammered on the doors, to see if she could raise some member from a decades long sleep. No one came.
She stood away from the building.
The Mall was busy, with Easter Holiday tourists enjoying the country’s new climate in short-sleeved shirts and pastel dresses. There might be a drought on, but she could get used to this Californian London. Doom-merchants, however, said it was a sign of the end of the world.
A slim blonde girl in white wafted across very green grass, towards her. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses with lenses the size and colour of apples.
For a moment, she thought this was another ghost. It was something about the way the light hit the girl’s hair. She reminded Sally of Connor.
“Nobody home,” the girl said.
She was too young to be Mimsy, not yet out of her teens. She had the trace of an accent.
Sally shrugged.
“You’re looking for the jewel,” the girl said.
Through the green lenses, tiny red points shone. This pretty waif had enormously hungry eyes.
“I’m looking for the woman who has the jewel,” Sally said.
“Mimsy,” the girl said, head cocked. “Poor dear.”
“I’m Sally Rhodes. Who are you?”
“Geneviève Dieudonné. Call me Gené.”
“Are you Mimsy’s friend?”
Gené smiled, dazzling. Sally realised this girl had an archness and composure that didn’t quite fit with her initial estimate of her age.
“I’ve never met her. But I feel her. I share blood with her mother. That was a great sacrifice for Maureen. She was just pregnant. There’s a sliver of me in Maureen, left behind like a sting in a wound. And a tinier sliver in Mimsy. Along with all the other stuff. She was conceived around the Jewel of Seven Stars. That’s why it speaks to her.”
Gené wasn’t insane. But she was
talking about things beyond Sally’s experience.
“The bauble that causes the trouble, Sally,” Gené said. “I’ve danced with the stone, like the gentlemen who used to doze beyond those doors, like the Mountmain Line. Down the years we all revolve around the Seven Stars. Sometimes, years and years slip by and I don’t think of the thing, but always it’s there, the knowledge that I share the planet with the Jewel of Seven Stars, that it’ll be back.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it.”
“I’m an odd sort of person.”
“Are you one of Leech’s?”
“Good Heavens, no. I’ve been called a leech, though.”
When Gené smiled, she showed sharp little teeth, like hooks carved of white ice.
“What do you want from me?”
“A partnership. I help you find the girl, and you let me have the jewel.”
“What do you want with it?”
“What do people want with jewels? I wish I knew. Since you ask, I’ll tell you. If possible, I’ll get rid of it. It was buried for thousands of years without causing too much trouble. If I could securely bury it again, or stow it away on a deep-space probe, I’d do it. It fell out of the sky once. For years, I wondered about those seven flaws, the seven stars. Then, when we launched Voyager, I understood. On our rocket we engraved a star map, to show where it came from. The jewel is dangerous, and I want to damp the fire. Satisfied?”
“Not really.”
“I wouldn’t be either. You remind me of myself at your age. Seriously, Mimsy—whether she knows it or not, and I think she does and welcomes it—is in danger so long as she has that stone with her. Your job, I understand, is to find Mimsy and make sure she’s safe …”
How had this woman known that?
“… and I can help you.”
“If you can find Mimsy, why don’t you? Why do you need me?”
“I’m not a solo sort of person. Difficult in my position, but there you are. I work best with a stout-hearted comrade. Someone to keep me down to earth.”
“I like you, Gené. Why is that?”
“Good taste.”
Gené kissed Sally on the cheek, with an electric touch.
“Come on, Sal. Let’s get a cab. I think I know where to start.”
*
Sally was usually sparing with taxi travel. It was still most practical to get around London on the bus and tube, and she had to account for her expenses. But Gené had a handbag full of money, in several different currencies. She got them into a black cab and ordered the driver to take them to Docklands.
“You rattled a lot of webs when you went through Maureen Mountmain’s address book,” Gené explained. “Bells rang, and I hopped on a plane from Palermo. I’ve read up on you. You’re good. They’d have liked you at the Diogenes Club, though they were funny about women.”
It was evening, now. Not dark yet, but the light was thin and cold. They were venturing into Docklands just as most people were leaving. The ’80s moderne office buildings were unnaturally clean in their emptiness, life-sized toys fresh from their boxes.
The black glass pyramid caught the last of the sun.
“It’s coming back to Leech,” Sally said.
“Not really. But I think you’d have come here yourself soon.”
“If I can help it, I stay away.”
“Understood. But you’ve covered Mimsy’s human connections with no luck. You’re drawing back and looking at the whole picture. That’s what made you go to the Mall. What you have to do is think of yourself as part of the pattern, to see how you fit in, where you can be triangulated.”
Sally saw what Gené meant.
“I’m in the pattern because of Leech. He doesn’t do anything for no reason. This isn’t a favour to a friend. This is part of a plan.”
Gené clapped.
“I’m the last person Leech loves. He said—and he’s always annoyingly truthful—that only I could do this job. He wants me to find Mimsy.”
“And the Seven Stars.”
“There’s a link between Leech and Mimsy. It’s broken, or at least played out to its full length. Is he after the jewel?”
“Leech’s dominion is of this world,” Gené said. “He only wants what I want, to keep the Seven Stars out of circulation. I’m not happy to share a common cause with him, but there you are. This business scrambles all your allegiances.”
“I thought Leech might be Mimsy’s father.”
“Good guess, but no. That was Richard Jeperson, one of the Diogenes fellows. Mimsy is unpredictable precisely because she is the fruit of an opposition, the Mountmain Line and the Diogenes Club. And whatever I threw in didn’t help. Whatever havoc she wreaks, we can all take the blame.”
Gené had the cab stop a few streets away from the Pyramid.
When it had driven off, the road was empty. The last of the light was going. It was a cloudless night, but the blanket of sodium orange street-lighting kept the stars at bay.
“One of the reasons I like you, Sal, is that you believe me. Over the years, almost no one has. Not at first. But you’ve stepped into the dark enough times to know the truth when you hear it.”
They looked up at the Pyramid.
“The Jewel of Seven Stars is a tool for ending empires,” Gené said. “It ended the rule of a Pharaoh. Declan Mountmain wanted to use it on Britain. Bennett Mountmain thought he could win the War for Hitler. Edwin Winthrop turned it on Germany and Japan. It could be used on that Pyramid.”
Sally imagined Leech’s empire in ruins.
“But there’s a cost. The world is still living with the consequences of the way Edwin and the Diogenes Club wound up the last War. I think Leech is one of those consequences. If the times weren’t out of joint, he wouldn’t have taken hold and grown like a cancer.”
“Leech thinks Mimsy is a threat?”
She couldn’t believe it. But it made sense.
“A mad woman from a long line of mad people? Armed with a chunk of dubious crystal? Do you have any idea of just who Derek Leech is? Of how far beyond human reckoning he is?”
“Why you, Sal? Why did he pick you?”
“He said I was a saint.”
Gené spread her arms and opened her hands.
“I’m not a saint. I’m a single mum. I’m kissing forty. My life and business lurches from crisis to crisis.”
“Twice, you’ve stopped him, Sal. You’ve saved people from him.”
“In the end, that meant nothing. He had other plans.”
“No one else has ever stopped him. Not once.”
Sally saw what Gené meant.
“So I’m the only person he can think of who could stand between him and Mimsy.”
“Not just Mimsy.”
The night was all around. Gené took off her dark glasses. Her eyes were alive and ancient, points of red burning in their depths.
*
They had spent the night by the Pyramid. Nothing had happened. Her instinctive faith in Gené’s inside knowledge was fraying. It would have been much more convenient if Mimsy had turned up in Derek Leech’s lobby, brandishing the Jewel of Seven Stars like a Star Trek phaser.
Red light came up in the East, and Sally phoned for a minicab. She didn’t think the night wasted.
She and Gené—Geneviève—had talked.
Without saying what she was, Gené had revealed a lot. She filled in, apparently from personal knowledge, a lot of the gaps. If Neil ever wrote his book, she’d be a prime source. But she wasn’t scary, like Leech. She was proof that you could live with the weirdness and not be swallowed up by it. She had a real personality.
Gené had made mistakes. She said what she thought, without filtering it through a brain that framed everything as a series of crossword clues with hidden killer clauses.
In the cab, Gené was jittery.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I led you down the wrong path. Something happened last night. And we missed it. My fault. I thought the Seven Stars wou
ld revolve around Leech. Maybe they will, but not yet. Maybe there’s too much Mimsy in the brew …”
*
Her mobile jarred her out of the half-sleep she had fallen into. The minicab was caught in the morning influx of commuters into Docklands.
It was Neil.
“The police have been round,” he said. “It’s to do with your client. She’s been killed, Sal-love.”
She was shocked awake.
“Maureen?”
“Yes. You’ll have to check in and give a statement. The pigs know you were working for her.”
Cold inside, she asked the question.
“Was it Mimsy?”
“She wasn’t killed with a hammer. From what they let slip, I don’t think it could have been murder. She had an allergic reaction to insect bites.”
Sally hung up and redirected the cab driver to Wimpole Street. She told Gené what had happened.
“Bitten to death?” Gené mused.
*
There was a policeman at the door, but Sally got through by admitting she had been asked to give a statement. Gené looked at the man over her sunglasses and was waved in without comment.
“Neat trick.”
“You wouldn’t want to learn it.”
The hallway was changed. All the purple paint was gone and there was a thick, crunchy carpet. Sally realised she was standing on a layer of bloated, dead flies. The purple paint had been stripped by a million tiny mouths, which had etched into the surfaces of everything. A cloud must have filled the house. The curtains were eaten away completely, dried white smears scabbed the window-glass.
“She’s trying to use it,” Gené said.
“I have to see,” Sally said.
“I know.”
They went upstairs. Policemen stood around the landing, and a couple of forensic people were expressing appalled puzzlement. Photographs were being taken.
A detective inspector issued orders that none of this was to be released to the press. He looked a hundred years old, and was too tired to shout at anyone for letting Sally and Gené into the house.
Sally explained who she was and that the dead woman had hired her to find her missing daughter. She admitted she hadn’t managed to do so.
“If she’s missing the way her mum is, you might as well give the money back.”
Dark Detectives Page 43