The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01]

by By Kim Newman

  Richard shrugged.

  “I like her,” said Fred. “Can we keep her?”

  “Entirely her decision,” said Richard. “After much more of this, she may not want to keep us.”

  Barbara sipped coffee, enigmatic but adorable.

  “I put Garrison to one side and came back at the others. The Thing is ... whisper has it that they were hit too.”

  This was not what Richard expected.

  “Jamie Hepplethwaites was in hot water with almost everyone he ever met,” said Fred. “He was under investigation for race-fixing, and rumour was that he was on the point of telling all. Which would have been inconvenient for certain followers of the turf. The sort of enthusiasts who’d have no scruple about laying out cold cash to put Jamie in a morgue drawer.”

  “Delia Devyne is not a ‘tarpaulin,’“ said Richard.

  “A torpedo, guv. No, I’m not saying she is. I’m just saying some big crims are puffing cigars and bragging that they did for Jamie. Ditto Prince Ali, Queenie and Sir Joe. The Prince can’t talk anymore with his vocal cords slashed, which is dead convenient for his uncle the King, who was not a big fan of Ali’s international playboy act. Queenie’s Mancunian empire is being carved up by her old competition, which mostly consists of her daughters.”

  “How Lear.”

  “Manchester CID say they hope the war of succession thins out the herd a bit. Unofficially.”

  “What about Keats? He’s the only one of the victims who had any prior connection with the people who make the show. He was on the board of Amalgamated Rediffusion.”

  “The more that comes up, the more the show looks like a complete blind alley. It’s not just Sir Joe who went missing but his secretary. Between them, they had ten months’ worth of work on the Factories Regulation Bill in their heads that is all out the window and back to the drawing board now. That means very happy proprietors of Unregulated Factories. Guess what’s being said about them?”

  “That they paid to get the job done?”

  Fred snapped his fingers. “Got it in one.”

  Richard whistled and sat back to think.

  “I reckon it’s a smokescreen,” said Fred. “Our Mystery Murder-to-Order Limited is twisting the Barstows to put a spin on their business, keeping the fuzz off their case while advertising a service to potential clients. Jobs like Prince Ali, Queenie and Sir Joe do not come cheap. This is not an envelope full of fivers to a couple of washed-up boxers to do over a builder who put the bathroom taps in the wrong way. This is serious money for a serious business.”

  Richard waved his friend quiet.

  “It won’t do,” he said. “It’s still too ... weird.”

  “You don’t want to let it go, guv. But if it’s just killers with a gimmick, then this goes back to Inspector Price. We’re surplus to requirements.”

  “I mean weird in the strictest sense, Fred. Not merely bizarre and freakish, but occult—concealed and supernatural. I’m tingling with an awareness of it.”

  “Don’t you reckon the Professor might have something to do with that?”

  “Cheek,” said Barbara, smiling and sloshing Fred with a napkin.

  “Very well,” said Richard. “Fred, hie thee back to town and share this with Euan Price. Start the Yard moving on this from the other end. Go after the putative clients of your phantom assassination bureau. See if the urge to boast about getting away with it leads to indiscretion.”

  “What about you two? You’ll continue the canoodling holiday?”

  “We’ll stay here, with the Barstows. There’s something or someone we’ve not seen yet. Some big piece which will fill in the jigsaw.”

  Richard’s tea was cold.

  * * * *

  VIII

  June O’Dell knew how to make an entrance.

  The company made an early start. Dudley Finn was pressed up against a wallpapered backdrop by a single camera. He held a phone to his ear, though the dangling cord didn’t attach to anything. Jeanne Treece hoisted a large sheet of card (“an idiot board”) on which one side of a phone conversation was written in magic marker. Ben Barstow was getting news about Delia Delyght.

  “We’re tying off plot ends,” Lionel whispered to Richard as Finn took one of many breaks—the actor wasn’t as good at reading off the card as he had been yesterday at instantly memorising his lines. “Viewers have written in asking what happened after the murder, so Mucus whipped up this bit overnight to reveal all. It’s how this show always goes. Big buildup, over months and months, nation on the edges of their three-piece suites, a shattering sensational climax ... then we drop the whole thing and move on. Once your plot is over, there’s no hanging around. No trial scene with an expensive courtroom set and guest actors in those ducky wigs, no twelve extras on the jury. Just one side of a call. ‘So, she’s copped an insanity plea, eh ... fancy that ... well, never mind ... you’re telling me she’s going to be locked up in a looney bin for t’ rest of her natural life? Fancy that. We’ll remember Delia Delyght for a long time in Bleeds.’ Like fork, we will. That’s all over, and we’re onto something else. Makes your head spin.”

  Finally, Finn got the speech down. As Lionel indicated, the actor had to repeat what had supposedly been said to him by the non-person on the line, with interjected expressions of astonishment.

  “It’s the famous Phantom Phoner,” said Barbara.

  Richard knew the show had a habit of cutting into the middle of telephone conversations, without identifying the unseen party, to get over plot developments while avoiding potentially costly scenes (“Morrie’s Boom-Boom Room Hot Spot has burned down to t’ ground? In a mysterious fire t’ police say might well be arson? Eeh, I’m right astonished!”) or repeat the last week’s bombshell for viewers who might have missed an episode (“Brenda’s up t’ duff? By that coloured bloke who plays t’ drums? Well, I’ll be blowed!”). At the end of the call, Finn had to hang the phone up out of frame. Since there was no cradle for the receiver, a stagehand stood by with a weird little gadget that made the click sound (and was surely more expensive and harder to come by than an actual phone).

  Gerard Loss insisted Finn hasten over pauses where, logically, the Phantom Phoner should be speaking. Finn had an actory spat about believability, but was reminded which show this was and agreed just to read the board. His last line, crammed close to the bottom of the card, was a cipher scrawl, “t’ll be H to P w/ M h a’t t—BH!” Richard was worried that he knew instantly what that was about. Every Phantom Phoner scene in the episodes he had watched concluded with Ben Barstow looking straight into the camera, shaking his head and musing “there’ll be hell to pay when Mavis hears about this! Bloody hell!”

  Loss called for quiet. Finn took a deep breath, and began.

  Three sentences in, the big studio door slid noisily open, admitting blinding light and a cloud of Lalique.

  Outside the stage building was a red box that lit up the word recording. June O’Dell must have waited for it to go on before commanding her entourage to open the door and make way for the Queen of Northshire.

  Finn grimly carried on with the “take.” Loss chewed his moustache. Jeanne Treece hit herself over the head with the idiot board.

  Marcus Squiers hopped to and danced attendance on his ex-wife. He had to negotiate a way past two tall young men who flanked the star. They had mullet haircuts, sideburns like flat-ironed hedgehogs, and had overdone their daily splash of Früt aftershave. Their knitted rainbow tank tops showed off muscular arms.

  In person, June O ‘Dell was tiny—though enormous hair took her height a little over five feet. She had hard, sharp, glittering eyes, and her skin was shinily tight across the cheekbones and under her chin. Richard had heard her described as “a cross between Miss Piggy and Charles Manson,” but she was more frail than he had expected. The Tank-Top Twins might well be there to rush in and prop her up if a stiff wind blew.

  Ignored by everyone, including a dead camera, Dudley Finn finished his scene. Without th
e board, he was word-perfect.

  “There’ll be hell to pay when Mavis hears about this,” he said, flatly. “Bloody hell.”

  Jeanne Treece whipped the crew into shifting the cameras to the lounge set and getting it lit properly.

  “Madame Moo is prepared to work today,” said Lionel. “Lesser morts have to strike while the icon is hot.”

  “What about the Phantom Phoner?” asked Barbara.

  Lionel shrugged. “Scene’s scrubberood. Not that many people wrote in. Delia Delyght is in TV limbo now. Make up your own ending, luv.”

  “Delia escapes from Broadmoor and comes back chained to an axe-murderer? Then they chop up as many Barstows as they can get to?”

  “Pitch it to Mucus, luv. In a year or two, he’ll do it. Folk are always coming back to Northshire to get their own back. I shouldn’t be surprised if British Rail do a Revenge Special Awayday fare to Bleeds.”

  One of the Twins handed Squiers a thin script, heavily scrawled on in what looked like pink neon. June pointed a long fingernail at a particular passage and tapped the paper.

  “I see the star writes her own lines?” observed Richard.

  “Never touches ‘em. The pack know how to write Mavis the way Junie likes her. No, she always scribbles overeveryone else’s sides. Loves to give the supporting artistes a hard time. She’d force them to run their lines backwards and on their heads if she could. Eventually she will. Knows all the tricks, that one. How to cut the heart out of someone else’s scene. How to take it all away with a single nasty look. What to wear to blind the other actors. Of course, Mavis on the show is an evil domineering cow, so Junie’s approach might be method acting.”

  Squiers looked over June’s suggested changes, agreeing with every one out of his mouth, appalled fury spitting out of his eyes.

  Loss had to chivvy Finn onto the lounge set, while jamming June’s line changes into him. The actor didn’t complain. Squiers, who literally took off his producer’s hat when talking with June, diplomatically made a few suggestions.

  The lights came up on Mavis Barstow’s lounge, the most-used Barstows set. Its two walls had shaggy purple paper that matched the carpet. At least once an episode, the camera would overshoot while panning to follow the action and afford glimpses of studio blackness and the odd crew member where the other walls ought to be. Inflatable plastic chairs leaked slowly around a glass-and-chrome coffee table loaded with mocked-up fictional glossy magazines. A drinks trolley held rattling bottles of cold tea and dyed water. On The Northern Barstows, no actual products were shown (that was saved for the commercial breaks); everyone drank “Funzino,” “Bopsi-Coolah” and “Griddles Ale.” Mavis’ mother’s old mangle stood in a corner like an industrial art piece, to remind her where she came from: she would often tell relatives at length about the way her Mam flattened her hands in a washing accident that threw the whole family into the poorhouse when she were a lass.

  An idealised portrait of the very late Da Barstow, in Day-Glo on velvet, cap on his head and miner’s pick over his shoulder, had pride of place above a shaped fibreglass marble mantelpiece where his ashes supposedly sat in a silver urn to which many of Mavis’ most vehement or nostalgic speeches were addressed. The cremains had once been “kidnapped” by Cousin Dodgy Morrie and held to ransom. Since their return, Mavis often got close to the polished urn to talk to the departed, usually after one too many Funzinos, and the camera had to focus on her distorted, wobbly reflection as she reminisced about how much happier everyone was when they were dirt poor. Jeanne Treece stalked the set, putting odd little folded cards like place-markers in ashtrays, on the magazines, hanging out of Finn’s blazer pocket, around the mantel and under light fittings.

  When the floor-manager had finished distributing the cards, she gave Dudley Finn a once-over as if checking for dandruff and nodded to Squiers, who signalled to Loss, who made a gun-gesture at the Twins, who lifted June O’Dell up by her arms as if she were part of their circus acrobatic act. The actress was propped on two eight-inch blocks with wheels. One Twin steadied her while the other knelt and fixed clamps from the blocks to her calves.

  “The Mavis Glide,” exclaimed Barbara. “That’s how she does it. Platform roller skates.”

  While her undercarriage was checked and fiddled with, a makeup girl made last-minute adjustments to June’s white mask. Then, June’s pit crew stood back. Suddenly, with a girlish giggle, she set off at a wheeled stride and did a figure eight around the set, skirts billowing. Applause was mandatory, but Richard conceded that it was a good act. She lifted one heavy skate off the floor and rolled on elegantly, leg out like a ballerina, then twirled and came to a dead stop.

  She was next to Dudley Finn. Thanks to the platforms, June O’Dell was now taller than him.

  “If a word of the risers leaks out, you’ll be killed,” Lionel told them. “No question about it.”

  The recording light went on again, and June and Finn—Mavis and Ben—went through a scene that had evolved from yesterday’s script meeting. June floated about the set as she spoke, picking up phrases or single-word cues from the tiny cards Jeanne Treece had distributed, skating through speeches with the aid of these prompts. The scene built up to the revelation that Mavis had known all along that Priscilla was the Bogus Brenda returned. Richard accepted the sad inevitability that he was now a follower of The Northern Barstows, like everybody else in the country. He knew who all these people were and how they related to each other, and suffered a nagging itchy need to know what they would get up to next. This must be what it was like to be a newly body-snatched vegetable duplicate and click in sync with the collective consciousness of the pod people.

  “She’s an old ghost, Ben,” said June, in a line Richard hadn’t heard yesterday. “There’ve bin too manybloody old ghosts round hereabouts lately. Spectre horses, headless spooks, all manner o’ witchcraft and bogeyness. I’m beginning to think this family’sbloody haunted. An’ somethin’ should be done about it or my name’s not Mavis Barstow.”

  Ben weakly put in a line about what was to be done.

  “Get me a bloody ghost-hunter,” said Mavis. “Someone to put a stop to t’ haunting. Or else someone t’ haunting will put a stop to.”

  June’s face froze. Richard had assumed the effect was a camera trick, but she really did just stop still and stare at the lens for long seconds.

  Loss called “cut” and June was applauded again.

  “What was that about?” Barbara asked Richard. “The ghost-hunter bit?”

  “I wouldn’t say it came out of nowhere,” he replied. “I’m rather afraid we’ve been noticed.”

  June, who had perspired through her pancake, was wheeled off the set by the Tank-Top Twins and repaired by the makeup girl, who applied what looked like Number Two gloss from a bucket with a brush. Then, June was trundled towards Richard and Barbara, with Squiers hopping along in her wake. From her artificial height, June O’Dell looked Richard in the eye.

  “So, you’ve come about the mystery?”

  Her natural voice would have suited her to play Lady Bracknell if she could ever be persuaded to admit she was old enough. It was nasal, aristocratic, reedy with that Anglo-Irish affectation known as “West Brit.” Richard wondered if she had ever met Lady Damaris Gideon. If so, Lady Dee would probably have come second in a “peering down the nose with disdain” contest. Richard had previously reckoned the MP a likely British champion in the event.

  “The haunting?” he prompted. “Very topical.”

  June tittered, a tiny hand over her mouth. She fluttered long, feathery eyelashes.

  “Must remain abreast of current events. It’s part of the format. Keeps us all on our toes. Or, in my case, wheels.”

  “Am I to have a writer tagging along as I work? Taking notes on my ghost-hunting activities?”

  “Not one of our writers, I trust. You wouldn’t want any of those oiks about. I don’t understand why we have to have them. Some of us are quite capable of making it up a
s we go along.”

  “June has the utmost respect for our writing staff,” put in Squiers. “She is being amusing. The poltergeist plot has been thoroughly worked out by trained professionals.”

  June flicked a glance at her ex-husband and he withered. Then, she noticed Barbara.

  “Professor Corri, how nice to see you again. Peachy.”

  Barbara had not mentioned that she’d met June O’Dell. She nodded in acknowledgement of peachiness, but did not attempt a curtsey.

  “This curse has become infinitely tiresome and makes our blessed calling far more difficult than it need be. We have a duty to our viewers. They depend on us to take them out of their drab, wretched lives for two brief half-hours a week. Half-hours of entertainment, of education, of magic. It’s a terrible responsibility. Many say that the Northern Barstows are more real to them than their wives, husbands and children. And for some who live alone, the elderly and the loveless, we are the only family they have. It’s for them that we do this, undertake the endless struggle of the business we call show. I trust you will bring your investigation to a swift and happy conclusion. Rid us of all ghosts, ghoulies and ghastliness. You are, I understand, supported by taxpayers’ money.”