The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 13

  She looked at a glossy prospectus that was in with all the case files. A Regency mansion set among rolling downs. Dr Ballance smiling with his caring staff, all beautiful young women. Testimonials from leaders of industry and government figures. A table of fees, starting at £500 a week.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Fred. ‘Sane people go in…’

  ‘And mad people come out,’ Richard announced.

  Vanessa felt a little chill. There was something cracked in Dr Ballance’s half-smile. And his staff couldn’t quite not look like the dolly bird wing of the SS.

  ‘The question which now presents itself, of course, is which of us would most benefit from a week or two under the care of the good Dr Ballance.’

  Richard looked from Fred to Vanessa. Fred just looked at her.

  ‘You’re the sanest person I know, Ness,’ Fred said.

  ‘That’s not saying much,’ she countered.

  Richard was about to give a speech about knowing how dangerous the assignment would be and not wanting her to take it unless she was absolutely sure. She cut him off. After all, she owed him too much – her sanity, at least, probably her life – to protest.

  ‘Just tell me who I am,’ she said.

  Richard smiled like a shark and produced a folder.

  * * *

  In the garage of the Chelsea house, her white Lotus Elan looked like a Dinky Toy parked next to Richard’s Rolls-Royce ShadowShark, but it could almost match the great beast for speed and had the edge for manoeuvrability. She should get down to Sussex inside an hour.

  Fred was already in Whipplewell. If asked, he was a bird-watcher out after a look-see at some unprecedented avocets. Richard had given him an I-Spy Book of Birds to memorise. He would watch over her.

  Richard had turned out to see her off. He wore an orange frock coat with matching boots and top hat, over a psychedelic waistcoat and a lime-green shirt with collar-points wider than his shoulders. He fixed her with his deep, dark eyes.

  ‘My love, remember who you are.’

  When they had met, she’d been a different person, not in command of herself. Something it was easiest to call a demon had her in a thrall it was easiest to call possession. He’d been able to reach her because he understood.

  ‘We have less memory than most. That’s why what we have, what we are, is so precious.’

  Richard was an amnesiac, a foundling of the War. He had proved to her that it was possible to live without a past that could be proved with memory. Once, since the first time, she had come under the influence of another entity – she shuddered at the memory of a pier on the South Coast – but had been able to throw off the cloak dropped over her mind.

  ‘You’ll be pretending to be a new person, Vanessa Vail. That’s a snakeskin you can shed at any time. While the act must be perfect, you must not give yourself up to it completely. They can do a great deal to “Vanessa Vail” without touching Vanessa the Real. You must have a core that is you alone.’

  She thought she understood.

  ‘Vanessa,’ he repeated, kissing her. ‘Vanessa.’

  She vaulted into the driving seat of the Lotus.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  She told him, and drove off.

  * * *

  ‘You are an army officer?’ Dr Ballance asked, looking up from the folder. He had a hard Scots accent.

  Vanessa nodded. She was supposed to be a paratrooper. Looking at her long legs and big eyes, people thought she must be a fashion model, but she had the height to be a convincing warrior woman. And she could look after herself in hand-to-hand combat. It wasn’t a great snakeskin but it was wearable.

  ‘Things have changed since my day, Lieutenant Vail.’

  She hated her new name. The double V sounded so cartoonish. But you couldn’t be in the army without a surname.

  ‘Were you in the services, Dr Ballance?’

  He nodded and one side of his mouth smiled. The left half of his face was frozen.

  She imagined him in uniform, tunic tight on his barrel chest, cap perched on his butter-coloured cloud of hair, tiger stripes on his blandly bespectacled face. She wondered which side he had been on in whichever war he had fought.

  ‘You will be Lieutenant Veevee,’ he said. ‘For “vivacious”. We rename all our guests. The world outside does not trouble us here in Pleasant Green. We are interested only in the world inside.’

  She crossed her legs and rearranged her khaki miniskirt for decency’s sake. Dr Ballance’s one mobile eye followed the line of her leg down to her polished brogue. She was wearing a regimental tie tucked into a fatigue blouse, and a blazer with the proper pocket badge. Richard had suggested medal ribbons, but she thought that would be over-egging the pud.

  ‘I’ll have Miss Dove show you to your quarters,’ said Dr Ballance. ‘You will join us for the evening meal, and I shall work up a programme of tests and exercises for you. Nothing too strenuous at first.’

  ‘I’ve passed commando training,’ she said.

  It was true. Yesterday, getting into character, she had humped herself through mud with an incredulous platoon of real paratroopers. At first, they gallantly tried to help her. Then, when it looked like she’d score the highest marks on the course, they did their best to drag her back and keep her down. She gave a few combat-ready squaddies some nasty surprises and came in third. The sergeant offered to have her back to keep his lads in line.

  ‘Your body is in fine shape, Lieutenant Veevee,’ said Dr Ballance, eye running back up her leg, pausing at chest-level, then twitching up to her face. ‘Now we shall see what we can do about tailoring your mind to fit it.’

  Dr Ballance pressed a buzzer switch. A young woman appeared in the office. She wore a thigh-length flared doctor’s coat over white PVC knee-boots, a too-small T-shirt and hot-pants. Her blond hair was kept back by an Alice band.

  ‘Miss Dove, show Lieutenant Veevee where we’re putting her.’

  The attendant smiled, making dimples.

  Vanessa stood and was led out of the office.

  * * *

  Pleasant Green manor house had been gutted, and the interior remodelled in steel and glass. Vanessa took note of various gym facilities and therapy centres. All were in use, with ‘guests’ exercising or playing mind games under the supervision of attendants dressed exactly like Miss Dove. They looked like Pan’s People rehearsing a hospital-themed dance number. Some processes were obvious, but others involved peculiar machines and dentist’s chairs with straps and restraints.

  She was shown her room, which contained a four-poster bed and other genuine antique furniture. A large window looked out over the grounds. Among rolling lawns were an arrangement of pre-fab buildings and some concrete-block bunkers. Beyond the window was a discreet steel grille, ‘for protection’.

  ‘We don’t get many gels at Pleasant Green, Lieutenant Veevee,’ said Miss Dove. ‘It’s mostly fellows. High-powered executives and the like.’

  ‘Women are more and more represented in all the professions.’

  ‘We’ve one other gel here. Mrs Empty. Dr Ballance thinks she’s promising. You’ll have competition. I hope you’ll be chums.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘I think you’re going to fit in perfectly, Lieutenant.’

  Miss Dove hugged her.

  Vanessa tensed, as if attacked. She barely restrained herself from popping the woman one on the chin. Miss Dove air-kissed her on both cheeks and let her go. Vanessa realised she had been very subtly frisked during the spontaneous embrace. She had chosen not to bring any obvious weapons or burglar tools.

  ‘See you at din-din,’ Miss Dove said, and skipped out.

  Vanessa allowed herself a long breath. She assumed the wall-size mirror was a front for a camera. She had noticed a lot of extra wiring and guessed Dr Ballance would have a closed-circuit TV set-up. She put her face close to the mirror, searching for an imaginary blackhead, and thought she heard the whirring of a lens adjustment.
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br />   There was no telephone on the bedside table.

  Her bags were open, her clothes put in the wardrobe. She hoped they had taken the trouble to examine her marvellously genuine army credentials. It had taken a lot of work to get them up to scratch, and she wanted the effort appreciated.

  She looked out of the window. At the far end of the lawns was a wooded area and beyond that the Sussex Downs. Fred ought to be out there somewhere with a flat cap, a thermos of tea and a pair of binoculars. He was putting up in the Coach and Horses at Whipplewell, where there were no bars on the windows and you could undress in front of the mirror without giving some crackpot a free show.

  Where was Richard all this time? He must be pulling strings somehow. He was supposed to be following up on the graduates of Pleasant Green.

  She felt sleepy. It was late afternoon, the gold of the sun dappling the lawn. She shouldn’t be exhausted. There was a faint hissing. She darted around, scanning for ventilation grilles, holding her breath. She couldn’t keep it up, and if she made an attempt the watchers would know she was a fake. She decided to go with it. Climbing onto the soft bed, she felt eiderdowns rise to embrace her. She let the tasteless, odourless gas into her lungs, and tried to arrange herself on the bed with some decorum.

  She nodded off.

  * * *

  Something snapped in front of her face and stung her nostrils. Her head cleared. Everything was suddenly sharp, hyper-real.

  She was sitting at a long dinner table, in mixed company, wearing a yellow-and-lime-striped cocktail dress. Her hair was done up in a towering beehive. A thick layer of make-up – which she rarely used – was lacquered over her face. Even her nails were done, in stripes to match her dress. Overhead fluorescents cruelly illuminated the table and guests, but the walls were in darkness and an incalculable distance away from the long island of light. The echoey room was noisy with conversation, the clatter of cutlery and The Move’s ‘Fire Brigade’. She had a mouthful of food and had to chew to save herself from choking.

  ‘You are enjoying your eyeball, Lieutenant?’

  The questioner was a slight Eurasian woman in a man’s tuxedo. Her hair was marcelled into a Hokusai wave. A nametag identified her as ‘Miss Lark’.

  Eyeball?

  Chewing on jellying meat, she glanced down at her plate. A cooked pig’s face looked back up at her, one eye glazed in its socket, the other a juicy red gouge. She didn’t know whether to choke, swallow or spit.

  The pig’s stiff snout creaked into a porcine smile.

  Vanessa expectorated most of the pulpy eye back at its owner.

  Conversation and consumption stopped. Miss Lark tutted. Dr Ballance, a tartan sash over his red jacket, stared a wordless rebuke.

  The pig snarled now, baring sharp teeth at her.

  A fog ocean washed around Vanessa’s brain. This time, she struggled. Flares of light that weren’t there made her blink. Her own eyeballs might have been vasilined over. The room rippled and faces stretched. The guests were all one-eyed pigs.

  Some eye slipped down her throat. She went away.

  * * *

  This time, the smell of cooking brought her to. She was in an underground kitchen or workshop. Sizzling and screeching was in the air. Infernal red lighting gave an impression of a low ceiling, smoky red bricks arched like an old-fashioned bread-oven.

  In her hands were a pair of devices which fitted like gloves. Black leather straps kept her hands around contoured grips like the handles of a skipping rope, and her thumbs were pressed down on studs inset into the apparatus. Wires led from the grips into a junction box at her feet.

  She was wearing black high-heeled boots, goggles that covered half her face and a rubber fetish bikini. Oil and sweat trickled on her tight stomach, and down her smoke-rouged arms and calves. Her hair was pulled back and fanned stickily on her shoulders.

  Her thumbs were jamming down the studs.

  Jethro Tull was performing ‘Living in the Past’.

  And someone was screaming. There was an electric discharge in the air. In the gloom of the near distance, a white shape writhed. The goggles were clouded, making it impossible to get more than a vague sense of what she was looking at.

  She relaxed her thumbs, instantly. The writhing and screaming halted. Cold guilt chilled her mind. She fought the fuzziness.

  Someone panted and sobbed.

  ‘I think you’ve shown us just what you think of the cook, Lieutenant Veevee,’ said Dr Ballance.

  He stood nearby, in a kilt and a black leather Gestapo cap. A pink feather boa entwined his broad, naked chest like a real snake.

  ‘Have you expressed yourself fully?’ he asked.

  She could still taste the eyeball. Still see the damned pig-face making a grin.

  Red anger sparked. She jammed her thumbs down.

  A full-blooded scream ripped through the room, hammering against the bricks and her ears. A blue arc of electricity lit up one wall. The white shape convulsed and she kept her thumbs down, pouring her rage into the faceless victim.

  No. That was what they wanted.

  She flipped her thumbs erect, letting go of the studs.

  The arc stopped, the shape slumped.

  Half Dr Ballance’s face expressed disappointment.

  ‘Forgiveness and mercy, eh, Lieutenant? We shall have to do something about that.’

  Attendants took down the shape – was it a man? a woman? an animal? – she had been shocking.

  Vanessa felt a certain triumph. They hadn’t turned her into a torturer.

  ‘Now cook has the switch,’ said Dr Ballance.

  She looked into the darkness, following the wires.

  Shock hit her in the hands and ran up her arms, a rising ratchet of voltage. It was like being lashed with pain.

  Her mind was whipped out.

  * * *

  She was doing push-ups. Her arms and stomach told her she had been doing push-ups for some time. A voice counted in the mid-hundreds.

  Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ was playing.

  She concentrated on shoving ground away from her, lifting her whole body, breathing properly, getting past pain. Her back and legs were rigid.

  Glancing to one side, she saw a polished pair of boots.

  Numbers were shouted at her. She upped the rate, smiling tightly. This, she could take. She was trained in dance (ballroom, modern and ballet) and oriental boxing (judo, karate and jeet kune do), her body tuned well beyond the standards of the commandos. She reached her thousand. Inside five seconds, she gave ten more for luck.

  ‘On your feet, soldier,’ she was ordered.

  She sprung upright, to attention. She was wearing fatigues and combat boots.

  A black woman inspected her. She had a shaved head, three parallel weals on each cheek, and ‘Sergeant-Mistress Finch’ stencilled on her top pocket.

  Her tight fist jammed into Vanessa’s stomach.

  She clenched her tummy muscles a split second before hard knuckles landed. Agony still exploded in her gut, but she didn’t go down like a broken doll.

  Sergeant-Mistress Finch wrung out her fist.

  ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘Give Lieutenant Veevee a lollipop.’

  Miss Dove, who was dressed as a soldier, produced a lollipop the size of a stop sign, with a hypnotic red and white swirl pattern. She handed it to Vanessa.

  ‘By the numbers,’ Sergeant-Mistress Finch ordered, ‘lick!’

  Vanessa had a taste-flash of the pig’s eyeball, but overcame remembered disgust. She stuck her tongue to the surface of the lollipop and licked. A sugar rush hit her brain.

  ‘Punishments and rewards,’ commented a Scots voice.

  * * *

  She woke with the taste of sugar in her mouth and a gun in her hand. She was wearing a kilt, a tight cut-away jacket over a massively ruffled shirt, and a feathered cap. Black tartan tags stuck out of her thick grey socks and from her gilt epaulettes.

  Sergeant-Mistr
ess Finch knelt in front of her, hands clasped behind her neck, forehead resting against the barrel of Vanessa’s pistol.

  ‘Sergeant-Mistress Finch is a traitor to the unit,’ said Dr Ballance. Vanessa swivelled to look at him. He wore the full dress uniform of the Black Watch.

  They were out in the woods somewhere, after dark. A bonfire burned nearby. Soldiers (all girls) stood around. There was a woodsy tang in the air and a night chill settling in. A lone bagpiper mournfully played ‘Knock Knock, Who’s There?’, a recent chart hit for Mary Hopkin.

  ‘Do your duty, Lieutenant Veevee.’

  Vanessa’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  This was some test. But would she pass if she shot or refused to shoot? Surely, Dr Ballance wouldn’t let her really kill one of the attendants. If he ran Pleasant Green like that, he would run out of staff.

  The gun must not be loaded.

  She shifted the pistol four inches to the left, aiming past the Sergeant-Mistress’s head, and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion out of all proportion with the size of the gun. A crescent of red ripped out of Finch’s left ear. The Sergeant-Mistress clapped a hand over her spurting wound and fell sideways.

  Vanessa’s head rang with the impossibly loud sound.

  * * *

  She looked out through white bars. She was in a big crib, a pen floored with cushioning and surrounded by a fence of wooden bars taller than she was. She wore an outsized pinafore and inch-thick woollen knee-socks. Her head felt huge, as if jabbed all over with dental anaesthetic. When she tried to stand, the floor wobbled and she had to grab the bars for support. She was not steady on her feet at all. She had not yet learned to walk.

  Veevee crawled. A rattle lay in the folds of the floor, almost too big for her grasp. She focused on her hand. It was slim, long-fingered. She could make a fist. She was a grown-up, not a baby.

  A tannoy was softly broadcasting ‘Jake the Peg (With the Extra Leg)’ by Rolf Harris.

  She picked up the rattle.

  The bars sank into the floor and she crawled over the row of holes where they had been. She was in a playroom. Huge alphabet blocks were strewn around in Stonehenge arrangements, spelling words she couldn’t yet pronounce. Two wooden soldiers, taller than she was, stood guard, circles of red on their cheeks, stiff Zebedee moustaches on their round faces, shakoes on their heads, bayonet-tipped rifles in their spherical hands.