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

by By Kim Newman

  “... blong Jesus Christ,” Jeperson added, emphatically.

  She wondered if, in addition to everything she’d been briefed on, the old man had Tourette’s Syndrome.

  Onions (“O-nye-ons,” he had insisted, understandably) looked up, as if jolting awake inside his expensive parka. Stacy noticed he always kept half an eye on Jeperson, like a bear sharing a cave with a languid adder. Onions adjusted his baffles, exposing an ear.

  She glanced around. None of the others were interested.

  Mr. Head munched a Lion bar, fixated on Petesuchis, a high-end crossword magazine. The little man, whose boiled egg baldpate and wide watery eyes suggested something without bones, did not fill in a puzzle, just solved all the clues mentally, left the grid virginal, and proceeded to the next, more challenging page. Onions had told her Petesuchis scorned newsstand distribution. The publishers set an entrance exam for the subscription list, charging on a sliding scale, lower price for higher grades. Adam Onions paid a thousand pounds a year for thirteen slim numbers; Sewell Head got his for free.

  Persephone Gill, the Droning of Skerra, wore tiny Walkman earclips under her baffles, nodding serenely to something bland. Once she got past the notations in “Percy” Gill’s file (“21 years old, inheritrice of the most unearned wealth in the United Kingdom, no educational qualifications”), Stacy was still venomously glad the girl had been voted out of the mansion at the first cull of Channel 4’s Posh Big Brother.

  Franklin Yoland, the tech guy, gripped his webbing, white-faced and praying for deliverance. He suffered from airsickness and flight terrors, perhaps not ideal qualities in an editor ofJane’s Book of Air-Launched Weapons.

  “I’d been trying to remember,” Jeperson explained to Stacy. “You know what it’s like when you have something in your head but can’t fish it out. The name of a tune you hear in a fresh arrangement. The new capital city of a country that’s changed its name. Whether Dante ranks virtuous pagans above or below Christian hypocrites in Hell. Pidgin English for ‘helicopter.’“

  Through a floor-set Plexiglass bubble that sealed a gunport, she saw the arrowheaded shadow of the Royal Navy Sea King Mk4 rushing across the Norwegian Sea at 100 knots. Crescents of sun-glint flashed on roof-slate grey waters. Lieutenant de Maltby, the pilot, flew almost at wave-level, under radar.

  “Bloodybuggerinmixmaster blong Jesus Christ.”

  Jeperson nodded to himself, happy that his pidgin vocabulary was filed away neatly. In London, Chief Inspector Regent had told her Richard Jeperson knew more arcane facts than anyone alive, but that whole years were missing from his memory banks. Stacy supposed that if she lost her primary school years or Thatcher’s second term, she’d be as concerned as Jeperson with accessing what was left in her skull. Still, he wasn’t someone she was comfortable around. She wondered again why she’d drawn this duty.

  “What’s that?” asked Onions, voice raised.

  “Nothing important,” said Jeperson, dismissing the inquiry with a flutter of long fingers. “Are we there yet?”

  Jeperson perfectly mimicked the stereotypical whine of a bored child on a long car journey. His prog rock moustache, coal-black but flashed white at the corners, twitched with amusement.

  It took Onions long seconds to tumble that he was being spoofed. He looked at the plastic-wrapped chart in his mittened paws before he got the joke, then made a sour face.

  “Very mature,” he commented.

  Jeperson gave Stacy a private eyebrow wiggle. She almost warmed to him.

  Onions detached himself from the webbing and, unsteady as an astronaut going EVA, hauled himself down the compartment to confer with (i.e., nag) Lieutenant de Maltby.

  “Cuppa char, sir?” asked Aircrewman Kydd, a cockney gnome. His duties obviously included keeping the passengers from distracting the driver while the bus was in motion.

  Kydd held out a Thermos, face arranged into a feral smile.

  Onions hung from handholds, unsure.

  “I’d care for some tea, if that’s all right,” said Jeperson. “And maybe the ladies ...”

  Kydd, who knew a proper gent when he saw one, delivered a real smile and a salute. He had different flasks for English breakfast, orange pekoe and lapsang souchong.

  “Best not bother the Viscount,” Jeperson told Onions. “He probably has a lot on his mind, what with avoiding diplomatic offence to our esteemed allies in Oslo or Reykjavik. Last thing we need is another Cod War.”

  Lieutenant de Maltby was Viscount Henry de Maltby, somewhere in the midthirties in line of succession to the throne. He had the House of Windsor habit of being unable to string together a sentence without saying uhhhm. It was not settled whether Debrett (or Dante) reckoned the Viscount more or less royal than the Droning of Skerra, but in this party of geniuses and idiots he was the one Stacy felt herself level with in the middling cleverness bracket. Shame his Hapsburg lip was so developed that it resembled a facial foreskin.

  With a wink, Kydd handed her a mug of English breakfast. It was a plastic beaker with a childproof top. She nodded thanks and drank.

  The tea hit the spot.

  “Perhaps you should look out your big orange suitcase,” Jeperson suggested to Onions. “Check if your anemometers are all in order.”

  After consideration, Onions got back to his seat. He was most particular about his kit, which indeed came in a big orange suitcase. Jeperson said it was full of ghost-hunting gear.

  They shared the troop compartment with an all-terrain vehicle, weighted down by neatly stowed supplies and equipment. The ATV occasionally shifted on its tethers. If it got loose, it would crush them all.

  The intercom crackled.

  “Skerra up ahead,” said de Maltby, sounding uncannily like his great-great-uncle abdicating from the throne. “We should be aground in ... uhhhm ... about ten minutes.”

  Yoland thanked the gods but had to gulp back his silent words. He waved away Kydd’s tea.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Jeperson said to her. “Venturing into unknown territory.”

  She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt.

  “Look, sir, you can see the island.”

  Kydd pointed out of a window. Jeperson casually turned to glance at Skerra. Onions lurched from his seat, again hanging apelike from strap-holds, and peered at the seascape, searching for their destination.

  “There,” said Jeperson. “Such a tiny scrap of rock.”

  The only thing this assignment had in common with regular police-work was that Stacy had the usual feeling of coming in late and having to pick up story threads before she could make any progress.

  If she was to cope with Skerra, she needed to catch up.

  * * * *

  2

  Two days earlier, DS Cotterill had learned she was to be despatched to the blue plaque jungle of London, SW3. In New Scotland Yard, CI Frederick Regent ran off a list of who else had lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

  “Isambard Kingdom Brunei, George Eliot, Turner, Mrs. Gaskell, Whistler (of’s Mother fame), Dante Gabriel Rosetti, a bunch of other pre-Raphs, Thomas Carnacki, Henry James. With Carlyle round the corner in Cheyne Row.”

  Stacy said she’d heard of them all, except Carnacki.

  “Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Cotterill,” her guv’nor said. “Secret history. Bone up on it.”

  Easier said than done.

  It struck her that the guv’nor either wished he was going out on this call himself or was profoundly grateful seniority kept him snug in his office. Or both at the same time. Regent was a funny specimen of top cop. Higher-ups didn’t often let him do telly interviews. Gossip at the Met was that he was the only senior officer ever to turn down a CBE, nearly get married to Diana Rigg and earn the honour of laying the wreath on Joey Grimaldi’s grave at the annual Clowns’ Service at Holy Trinity Church in Dalston.

  Stacy didn’t fully realise how out of the ordinary the errand was until Regent told her to take a chit to Sergeant Ellbee, who would scare her up a driver and car. Tha
t luxury was a first in her career.

  Ellbee recognised the address and laughed.

  “Haven’t seen that one in an age, Stace,” said the Sergeant, who had a London Welsh accent. “Surprised Jeperson is still alive, what with all he went through. Put the guv’nor through, too. How do you think Fred Regent lost his hair?”

  It wasn’t something she’d ever considered.

  “The famous Richard Jeperson,” clucked Ellbee. “Name from the seventies. Sixties, even. Fab crazy gear, man. Austin Powers era. Watch out he doesn’t try to shag you, baby.”

  “Was he a copper?”

  “Not with his haircut. Richard Jeperson was a private consultant. A spook. The spooks’ spook, in fact. Ever hear of the Diogenes Club?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Read your Sherlock Holmes, girl.”

  She had the feeling everyone knew more than she did. Regent had given her the bare bones and a large brown-paper parcel tied with pink string.

  “Diogenes wasn‘t a club, really,” continued Ellbee. “It was a Department of Dead Ends. Like our old, pre-PC Bureau of Queer Complaints. That was nothing to do with policing Gay Pride marches. Know why the CI’s thrown you this scrap? Fred’s had an eagle eye on you ever since the Maudsley murders.”

  Stacy didn’t think the case was her finest hour. It had seemed a simple, if gruesome triple homicide. A middle-aged man found in a fugue state in his own home, sitting amid the remains of three diced street kids. Evidence indicated that the vics, all well known to the courts, had entered the premises with unlawful intent and received something very like just desserts. A history of ill-will existed between the district’s druggies and the reclusive householder, Mantan “Misery” Maudsley.

  Before the likely perpetrator could be roused enough to understand formal charge, Maudsley perished in his cell. Not just died, perished. Autopsy suggested he’d been dead for three weeks at the time of arrest. When Stacy had met Maudsley, he wasn’t speaking much or smelling fresh but had been capable of walking about. The file was still open.

  “Some plods go through a whole career without anything like ‘Misery’ Maudsley,” said Ellbee. “Others clock Scooby-Doo cases every week but never tumble to the way the world really works. You took it in, Stace. Adjusted to accept it. When he was with Diogenes and Richard Jeperson, that was Fred Regent’s special knack. He thinks you’ve got something similar.”

  She remembered the sick, clear atmosphere after the Maudsley case, the way station-mates treated her differently, the eagerness of her shift commander to get her onto something else quickly. It wasn’t something she had enjoyed at all. She didn’t relish the prospect of anything more in that line.

  “Come off it, Ellbee,” she said. “I happened to be in the office with a clearish desk when the guv’nor wanted a parcel delivered to Chelsea. End of story.”

  “Mind how you tread in the dark, Stace.”

  Somebody else who had lived in Cheyne Walk was Bram Stoker. Stacy remembered the peasant pressing her crucifix on the young man on his way to Castle Dracula.

  This wasn’t how she usually thought of Sergeant Ellbee. She put his theory into practice and adjusted to accept it.

  In the car on the way to Chelsea, the driver didn’t speak to her.

  The only thing Maudsley had said as she was bringing him in was “a cavern, far north.” She had thought it random sparking in a broken brain, not even addressed to her.

  Now, she wondered if Misery had known about Skerra.

  * * * *

  3

  At first sighting, the island was a greenish thumbnail barely stuck out of the sea. Then, as the helicopter neared, Skerra looked more like a sinking aircraft carrier: an oblong wedge rising steeply, sloping deck sliding into the ocean, barnacled stern lifted clear of the water.

  They circled. Stacy got a good look at the place.

  Skerra was a British Isle, but only for cartographers’ convenience. Too far north to be a Shetland (let alone an Orkney), the outcrop lay alone and desolate in cold grey water between Iceland and the Norwegian coast. As much, or as little, Scandinavian as Scots, a case could be made for calling it the Easternmost Faroe. In the reign of Macbeth (yes, that one), Skerra had been gifted to Scotland among the dowry of the Princess of Denmark. An agreed reciprocal tribute went unpaid, so the transfer of sovereignty was moot. If either crown had regarded it as a possession rather than a dependency, Skerra might have become a mediaeval Schlesweig-Holstein Question. As it was, Dunsinane and Elsinore remained barely aware that such a place existed. The islanders looked to their own matrilineal monarchy.

  The title of Droning still existed, but the Skerrans didn’t.

  The hardy, vicious flocks of goats that supported the local economy and ecosystem (and fashion statements) declined over the centuries and were all but extinct by 1932, when the last remaining islanders were evacuated to unimaginable Southlands. This emergency measure led to the dumping of a knot of insular, Innsmouth-featured folk in a Glasgow slum. Their descendants were allegedly the city’s most violent criminal gang. One of the few surviving words of the Skerran tongue was “dreep,” underworld slang for an especially horrific form of murder-by-torture.

  Sir Piers Gill (ne Paddy Kill) had bought Skerra from another private owner when Persephone was six, so his daughter could legitimately call herself a Princess. This was the first time the Droning had come within five hundred miles of her island realm.

  Stacy saw where waves washed the incline. Rising seas had swallowed the harbour decades ago. Choppy waters swirled around the few stone skeletons that remained of Skerra Landsby, the abandoned village.

  “Look,” said Onions, “the A-Boat.”

  It was caught in among the shattered buildings, on its side, mostly underwater. If the hull hadn’t been rust-red, the boat would have passed for a reef.

  Onions whistled.

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Strange waters,” commented Richard Jeperson. “Look at the whirlpools.”

  There were three around the village end of Skerra, spinning like submarine Tasmanian Devils, and a far larger maelstrom to the North.

  “The Kjempestrupe,” said Jeperson. “It’s as if God pulled the plug.”

  For the first time, Mr. Head took an interest. He closed his Petesuchis and peered out the window.

  The Kjempestrupe was a funnel in the sea. It seemed bottomless, spiral walls of whirling water keeping open an impossible chasm.

  “Any man who wants to marry you is supposed to brave that in a coracle,” Jeperson told Persephone. “Otherwise he’s not fit to be consort to the Droning of Skerra.”

  Persephone looked as if she had heard the legend so many times it wasn’t even worth commenting on.

  Being a Princess evidently wore thin.

  “And any woman who wants to challenge for the iron crown has to face you in single combat,” Jeperson added.

  “They’re welcome to try.”

  The Sea King circled the whirlpool, clockwise to its anticlockwise. It was too much for Yoland, who finally spewed. Aircrewman Kydd tactfully provided a paper bag.

  “Does he have to?” asked Persephone, infinitely weary.

  “Yes, love, he does,” said Kydd.

  The Droning of Skerra didn’t care to be addressed as “love.” Kydd was too busy tidying up after Yoland to notice her moue of annoyance.

  “Better out than in, sir,” said Kydd, with cheery deference.

  Yoland nodded something like thanks.

  The helicopter passed over the Kjempestrupe and approached the island. Skerra was a volcanic extrusion, originally expelled through a hernia in the planet’s crust, bursting molten above the seas to solidify like an igneous loaf, then shaped and sculpted by unrelenting wind and water. When the satellite pictures came in, the first theory was that the volcano was active again. Met office wags nicknamed it “McKrakatoa.”

  The squared-off cliffside had been gouged out by millennia of brutally battering waves.
A torrent poured into the vast cave-mouth, and washed back out again as froth. The island was hollow, like a decayed tooth. It should eventually collapse on its caverns and become rocks strewn across the seabed, lamented by no one but map-maintainers and reduced-to-commoner female Gills.

  The ridge of the cliff whizzed below.

  There wasn’t a tree on the island, though its upper slopes were infested with long, thick grass. Survivalist goats had persisted after the people left, the toughest specimens emerging from some cave-shelters to reclaim the surface. Their savage descendants looked to the sky as the helicopter passed overhead, but did not abandon tussock-chewing to run for cover. DeMaltby and Kydd had been issued small arms, but Stacy fancied Skerran goats likely resistant to everything this side of depleted uranium shells. They were a prison population: faces smashed by head-butting horn fights, flanks ripped by scars like tattoos, each lifer the perpetrator of a multiple rapes and dreeps.