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

by By Kim Newman

  As the Sea King descended, propwash whipped grass into crop circles. De Maltby searched for a likely landing spot.

  Onions waved downwards, indicating to the pilot the urgency of making ground.

  Even as they hovered, the island slipped out from under the Sea King. De Maltby had to fight strong winds to avoid dipping in the drink. An intermittent stone wall rimmed what had once been a field. De Maltby put the Sea King down by it. After the rotors stopped, there was still whirring—the wind, trying to wipe the island into the sea.

  “I own this carbuncle,” said Persephone Gill. “Any offers? I’d have to abdicate, but I think I could be persuaded by any convincing bid. A bean and a button?”

  Stacy wasn’t tempted. Even if owning Skerra meant being able to call herself a Princess.

  “Let’s get out and find camp,” said Onions. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  It wasn’t quite lunchtime, and night was about to fall.

  No wonder Princess Percy wasn’t surprised by the lack of potential buyers.

  * * * *

  4

  In Chelsea, Stacy told her driver to wait in the car and searched for the address she’d been given. She had the brown-paper parcel under her arm.

  The house didn’t show a street number. Inset in the front door, where neighbours had number plates, was an art nouveau stained-glass panel with an Ancient Egyptian eye motif.

  When Stacy thumbed the button, a bell jangled inside the house. Shadows shifted.

  She noticed the milk—eight bottles—hadn’t been taken in. A rain-eaten roll of free newspaper was rammed into the letter-slit, drooping like a fag from the mouth of a charlady in a 1970s ITV sitcom. Freesheets were the burglars’ friend—you couldn’t stop them when you went on holiday. From the looks of this place, the home-owner never went on holiday. She wondered why CI Regent thought he’d stir himself now.

  The clear glass pupil of the Egyptian eye darkened. A real eye looked out at her: startling silver-flecked blue-grey iris trapped in veinous cobweb.

  She held up her warrant card.

  “Come on in,” boomed a voice. “S’not locked.”

  She took the handle and pushed the door, which resisted. A small avalanche of newspapers, pizza menus, minicab cards, AOL start-up discs, estate agent’s brochures and letters from the council shifted, was ground under, then stopped the door dead at half-open.

  Stacy turned sideways and slipped into the house.

  She smelled incense, sweet and heavy. The long, narrow, crowded foyer rose three storeys to a murky glass roof. Potted plants exploded from tubs and grew up banisters, reaching tendrils toward the distant sun. Odd objects were piled at random: books of all formats and thicknesses, primitive masks, fancy dress finery, dissected animals under glass domes, unsleeved vinyl records, unnameable musical instruments, ancient valve wirelesses in various states of dismantlement, obscure statuary. And multiple cats—which explained the milk. They roamed free, clambering and searching.

  “You must be from Fred.”

  Richard Jeperson stood before her: tall, thin and gaunt. He could have been any age, but working it out from the backstory—child in the war, career in the 1970s—Stacy knew he must be in his midsixties. When younger, he’d looked older; now, he just looked himself. Dramatic streaks ran through the Zapata moustache, but the long fall of tight curls was glossily black. He had the pale skin of someone who’s stayed indoors for decades, deep-etched around those silver-flashing eyes but unslack under the chin, unspotted on the backs of his hands.

  A Persian kitten peeped out of a pocket, and a Siamese cat perched on his shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot. He wore suede winkle-picker shoes, pinstripe city gent trousers, a turquoise kaftan tunic belted with a sash, and, as if to offset the Siamese, a gold-frogged green velvet greatcoat over his other shoulder, pocket unflapped so the kitten could breathe.

  “You expected Howard Hughes fingernails and a Ben Gunn beard?”

  He spoke like a theatrical knight, but his eyes were lively. She could imagine him headlining the Glastonbury Festival in 1972 or playing Don Quixote in a silent movie.

  She introduced herself as DS Cotterill.

  “Stacy,” he said, surprising her. “Interesting career.”

  She was surprised he kept up with New Scotland Yard.

  “Teenage model, then policewoman. Why the change?”

  Almost no one mentioned it anymore. At Hendon Police College, she had done extreme things to blokes who thought it funny to go on about her after-school job. Jeperson had wrong-footed her, though he seemed genuinely interested rather than attempting a put-down.

  “It’s no life for a grown woman without an eating disorder,” she said, uncomfortable. “And the agency dropped me when I refused to have my back teeth pulled. It was supposed to make my face look thinner.”

  He cocked his head to one side, then the other, considering her face.

  “I bet they wanted to keep the teeth.”

  “As a matter of fact they did. All the girls’ teeth. In jam jars in a cupboard, individually labelled. In solutions of brine.”

  “Better than a contract. You’re well out of that.”

  Jeperson looked at her face first and last. Which made him different from 95% of men. That shouldn’t be a surprise; everything about him was different. She found herself almost disarmed, then remembered he was mad.

  “Come through to the study,” he said, dislodging the Siamese, who streaked squirrel-fast up branches to the second-floor landing. The plant was a spreading green apocalypse, a tree that became a vine when it suited. It was stapled to the wall in several crucial places.

  “Would you believe this began as a cutting? From yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree. A gift to the Diogenes Club from William Morris in the days of gaslight and pea-soup fogs. When Mycroft Holmes sat on the Ruling Cabal. Brother of the more famous. Charles Beauregard lived in this house then. You wouldn’t have heard of him, though some scholar has been struggling to research a biography for years. I met Beauregard once, when I was a little lad. Nearly a hundred, but kept au fait with the comings and goings. A very interesting Englishman. Unlike me. I’m foreign, you know. Nonspecific, but foreign.”

  He slipped back the cuff of his kaftan, to show a blue tattooed number.

  “Adopted by an Englishman, adopted by the Club. Raised for the position, as it were. I’m a foundling of war. I must have had a name and a nationality before 1945, but the cylinders don’t fire up here.”

  He tapped his temple.

  “Nothing before the Liberation. A few other gaps, sadly. It’s been a crowded life, so I have had to forget things to make room. Wish I could have planned better. I remember a great many things it would make sense to forget. But not...”

  He let the thought dangle and opened a door.

  The white study was strip-lit. Windowpanes were whitewashed to match the walls, ceiling and carpet. A large picture hung opposite, canvas as blankly white as the frame. A milk-white shelving unit contained books with white, featureless spines. Soft white plastic cubes formed a settee along one wall and chairs around the room. Hard white plastic boxes made a desk and tables. A perfect-bound magazine for the blind, glossy pages stamped with Braille, lay open on a low table. A towering sound system, white as a fridge, played “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” The almost-invisible CD jewel case on the floor reminded her the song was fromThe White Album.

  “This is a visually sterile environment,” Jeperson explained. “I need it sometimes. There is too much information out there to process comfortably. I have an open mind. That’s my gift and curse.”

  Jeperson sat, arms laid along the back of the settee, shrugging out of his coat, long legs crossed. He motioned her to do make herself comfortable. She put her parcel on the low table, a violent intrusion of brown, and sat on a stool.

  “Is that a present? For me?”

  “CI Regent asked me to bring it to you.”

  “Ah-ha. It’s evidence, isn’t it? This is
a case. You know I’m retired? I don’t consult or sleuth or intuit or adventure. Not my decision. Things changed. Certain elements among our rulers made judgements. The Diogenes Club closed its doors. I am given to understand that some quango took over our duties. You can probably reach them in a unit on an industrial estate in Wolverhampton. Whatever threatens the fabric of our reality will prove a nice change from playing solitaire with Rhine cards or theorising undetectable assassinations or whatever Adam Onions’ little helpers do to justify their expenses claims.”

  She waved him to a halt.

  “This is too much for me, Mr. Jeperson....”

  “Richard, please.”

  “This is too much for me,Richard. Until this morning, I’d never heard of you or the Diogenes Club and I’m really not up to speed. CI Regent—

  “Fred...”

  “CI Regent has requested that I work with you.”

  “Very clever. Chuck the old dog a dolly-mixture and creep up with the muzzle.”

  Hot-cheeked, she stood up.

  “You resent that,” he said.

  “They told me you were perceptive.”

  He was up too, close to her, hands around hers, radiating sincerity.

  “I apologise. I forget myself. As I mentioned.”

  She damped her momentary anger. But she wasn’t ready to trust this dinosaur.

  “Fred Regent wouldn’t have sent you round if you were only blonde. You collared ‘Misery’ Maudsley, did you not? Fred must have fought hard to keep that little brouhaha out of Onions’ remit. Tell me, it wasn’t in any of the papers, but ... when you slapped the cuffs on him, was Maudsley doing something with his eyes, something more than looking at you?”

  She remembered. A squirming. Like REM dream twitches, but with the eyes wide open.

  “I thought so,” said Richard, wheeling across the room. “Maggots. Little tiny maggots, hatched and hungry. An inconvenience, at the least.mAlways the problem with reanimation by force of will. Any qualified houngan cures the corpse before raising thezombi. Still, Maudsley got his job done. What happened to his books? Mislaid in the evidence room as usual?”

  “Everything from the house went. There was no court case pending, so the coroner brought in an open verdict. Maudsley’s stuff got tossed into a skip.”

  Jeperson shook his head.

  “So anyone could breeze along and filch the tomes? That’s like tossing a sackful of loaded revolvers into a playgroup. Never have happened in my day.”

  He was enthused for a moment. Then he stopped.

  “But I’m out of it. As you’ll have gathered.”

  She said nothing. Jeperson wandered around his white room, touching things, looking away from her.

  “It’s all parapsychology now,” he said. “Target figures and year-end reports and jolly-promising-results-minister. We had mysteries, Stacy. Riddles of the sphinx, conundrums of the incalculable. Not parapsychology, but parapsychedelia. Not phenomena, not anomalies, not quantum metaphysics, but magic ... enchantment... deviltry!”

  He stood by the table, fingers drumming on brown paper.

  He looked at her, eyes piercing, looked at the package, bit the end of his moustache, looked at her again.

  “What’s in the parcel?”

  “I thought you said you were out of it.”

  “Minx! What’s in the parcel?

  “You of all people should know what they say about cats and curiosity.”

  Jeperson picked up the parcel, like a six-year-old with a present on Christmas Eve. He shook it, and held it to his ear.

  “Very light for its size. Not a case of wine or an occasional table, then.”

  He squeezed and crackled.

  “Feels fabricky. Like a blanket. Or a party frock.”

  He tweaked something through the paper.

  “Brass buttons. It’s a coat. I’ve guessed. I’m right, aren’t I? A coat, found in evidence. Bullet holes and bloodstains.”

  His mood switched, from playful to serious. She felt a chill.

  “I’m right about that, too,” he said, sober.

  “Open it,” she urged.

  “Very well,” he decided. “For you. Because you told me about Maudsley’s eyes. But no commitment. This is not going to be Richard Jeperson Rides Again.”

  He slipped a tiny blade out of his sleeve and snipped the string. The paper fell away and he held a stiff, greyish green coat. There were bullet holes in the left sleeve and the hip pocket. And old blood.

  The sound system was playing “Rocky Raccoon.”

  Jeperson looked at the makers’ label. He held the coat against himself, mouth open in astonishment.

  “This is ...”

  “Yours. We traced it through your tailor. They had the record on a handwritten card in a box in the basement. You bought it in 1968, about the time this album came out.”

  Jeperson shook his head. He was trembling, garment shaking in his grip. She thought he might have the beginnings of a seizure.

  “It’s the same cut as that one there,” she added, nodding at the settee.

  The kitten had escaped from its pocket and was trying claws out on the silk lining.

  “I don’t own two of anything. This is that coat over there. Where was this found?”

  “You’d better come with me to the Yard.”

  Jeperson laid the coat down next to its identical twin.

  “To help you with your enquiries,” he said, frowning hard. “I think I better had. This, Stacy, is serious. This makes ‘Misery’ Maudsley look like a purse-snatching in Safeway’s car park. There isn’t room in the world for two of this.”

  “I have a car waiting,” she said.

  He picked up his coat, the one she hadn’t brought, dislodging the kitten. It nosed the doppelgarment, thought better of it, and dashed from the room. Jeperson slipped an arm into one sleeve, but needed her help with the other. His shoulder shook, almost spasming.

  For a moment, he did look his age.

  “You’d better bring that” he said, finger aimed at the surplus coat. “Wrap it up again. It should be sealed in lead, but sturdy brown paper will have to do.”

  She knew she was not suggestible. But she no more wanted to touch the coat than the kitten had, or Jeperson did.

  Still, she picked up the paper, using it like an oven-glove, and took hold of the coat, wrapping it tight against the possibility that its arms might come to life and throttle her.

  At the doorstep, Jeperson hesitated.

  “It’s been a very long time,” he said weakly. “I don’t know if I can...”

  He seemed to flinch from daylight, from the outside world. Then he looked at her parcel.

  “No choice,” he said, striding through the doorway.

  They left the house. Jeperson did not lock up behind them.

  * * * *

  5

  “It’s your island, Miss Gill,” Jeperson said to Persephone. “You be Neil Armstrong.”

  Stacy noted Onions sulking whenever Jeperson acted as if he were in charge. The Man From I-Psi-T needed to feel he was tour operator for this jaunt.

  At Jeperson’s nod, Kydd hauled the handle and swung open the door. The temperature in the back of the Sea King plunged.

  “Best not,” said Onions.

  Persephone had unstrapped herself. Ignoring Onions, she slid across the floor and out of the helicopter.

  “Mind the goats,” Stacy advised.

  Through the door, Stacy watched the Droning of Skerra stamp around, doing the hunting set version of t’ai chi—thumping the heels of her green Wellies against grassy sod, flexing her back and thighs as if she were on horseback, and struggling against the wind to tie a Hermes scarf around her hair. She lost the scarf, which was sucked upwards by an invisible Kjempestrupe.

  Nothing killed Persephone, so Stacy assumed it was all right to get out of the transport. She took off her ear-baffles and undid all the straps.

  Jeperson made a “ladies first” bow. Stacy dangled he
r legs out of the helicopter, then took the jump. She realised how stiff she’d become and uncrooked her back.