The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 20

  * * *

  Fred didn’t care to set foot inside the Horus Tower. Just thinking about what had been done in the building made him sick to his stomach. He was on the forecourt as the coughing, shrunken, handcuffed George Rameses Bunning was led out by Inspector Euan Price. Jeperson had accompanied the police up to the pyramid on top of the tower, to be there at the arrest.

  Employees gathered at their windows, looking down as the boss was hauled off to pokey. Rumours of what he had intended for them – for two hundred and thirty-eight men and women, from senior editors to junior copy-boys – would already be circulating, though Fred guessed many wouldn’t believe them. Derek Leech’s paper would carry the story, but few people put any credence in those loony crime stories in the Comet.

  ‘He’ll be dead before he comes to trial,’ said Jeperson. ‘Unless they find a cure.’

  ‘I hope they do, Richard,’ said Fred. ‘And he spends a good few years buried alive himself, in a concrete cell.’

  ‘His Board of Directors were wondering why, with the company on the verge of liquidation, Bunning had authorised such extensive remodelling of his corporate HQ. It was done, you know. He could have thrown the switch tomorrow, or next week. Whenever all was lost.’

  Now Fred shivered. Cemeteries didn’t bother him, but places like this – concrete, glass and steel traps for the enslavement and destruction of living human beings – did.

  ‘What did he tell what’s-his-name, the architect? Drache?’

  ‘It was supposed to be about security, locking down the Tower against armed insurrection. Rioting investors wanting their dividends, perhaps. The spray nozzles that were to flood the building with nerve-gas were a new kind of fire-prevention system.’

  ‘And Drache believed him?’

  ‘He believed the money.’

  ‘Another bastard, then.’

  ‘Culpable, but not indictable.’

  The Horus Tower was equipped with shutters that would seal every window, door and ventilation duct. When the master-switch was thrown, they would all come down and lock tight. Then deadly gas would fill every office space, instantly preserving in death the entire workforce. Had George Rameses Bunning intended to keep publishing magazines in the afterlife? Did he really think his personal tomb would be left inviolate in perpetuity with all the corpses at their desks, a monument to himself for all eternity? Of course, George Oldrid Bunning had got away with it for a century.

  ‘George Rameses knew?’

  ‘About George Oldrid’s funerary arrangements? Yes.’

  ‘Bastard bastard.’

  ‘Quite.’

  People began to file out of the skyscraper. The work-day was over early.

  There was a commotion.

  A policeman was on the concrete, writhing around his kneed groin. Still handcuffed, George Rameses sprinted back towards his tower, shouldering through his employees.

  Jeperson shouted to Price. ‘Get everyone out, now!’

  Fred’s old boss understood at once. He got a bullhorn and ordered everyone away from the building.

  ‘He’ll take the stairs,’ said Jeperson. ‘He won’t chance us stopping the lifts. That’ll give everyone time to make it out.’

  Alarm-bells sounded. The flood of people leaving the Horus Tower grew to exodus proportions.

  ‘Should I send someone in to catch him?’ asked Price. ‘It should be easy to snag him on the stairs. He’ll be out of puff by the fifth floor, let alone the thirtieth.’

  Jeperson shook his head.

  ‘Too much of a risk, Inspector. Just make sure everyone else is out. This should be interesting.’

  ‘Interesting?’ spat Fred.

  ‘Come on. Don’t you want to see if it works? The big clockwork trap. The plans I saw were ingenious. A real economy of construction. No electricals. Just levers, sand and water. Drache kept to Egyptian technology. Modern materials, though.’

  ‘And nerve gas?’ said Fred.

  ‘Yes, there is that.’

  ‘You’d better hope Drache’s shutters are damn good, or half London is going to drop dead.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  Vanessa crossed the forecourt. She was with the still-bewildered Lillywhite.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

  ‘George Rameses is back inside, racing towards his master-switch.’

  ‘Good grief.’

  ‘Never fear, Vanessa. Inspector, it might be an idea to find some managerial bods in the crowd. Read the class register, as it were. Just make sure everyone’s out of the tower.’

  ‘Good idea, Jeperson.’

  The policeman hurried off.

  Jeperson looked up at the building. The afternoon sun was reflected in black.

  Then the reflection was gone.

  Matt shutters closed like eyelids over every window. Black grilles came down behind the glass walls of the lobby, jaws meshing around floor-holes. The pyramid atop the tower twisted on a stem and lowered, locking into place. It was all done before the noise registered, a great mechanical wheezing and clanking. Torrents of water gushed from drains around the building, squirting up fifty feet in the air from the ornamental fountain.

  ‘He’s escaped,’ said Fred. ‘A quick, easy death from the gas and it’ll take twenty years to break through all that engineering.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Jeperson. ‘Fifteen at the most. Modern methods, you know.’

  ‘The ghosts won’t rest,’ said Lillywhite. ‘Not without revenge or restitution.’

  ‘I think they might,’ said Jeperson. ‘You see, George Rameses is still alive in his tomb. Alone, ill and, after his struggle up all those stairs, severely out of breath. Though I left the bulk of his self-burial mechanism alone, I took the precaution of disabling the nerve gas.’

  ‘Is that a scream I hear?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Jeperson. ‘If nothing else, George Rameses has just sound-proofed his tomb.’

  SOHO GOLEM

  Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London, Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit… Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.

  John Galsworthy

  I. SPOILING THE BARREL

  On a fine May day in 197—, Fred Regent and Richard Jeperson stood in Old Compton Street, London W1. The pavement underfoot was warm and slightly tacky, as if it might retain the prints of Fred’s scruffy but sturdy Doc Martens and Richard’s elastic-sided claret-coloured thigh-high boots.

  Slightly to the north of but parallel to the theatrical parade of Shaftesbury Avenue, Old Compton Street was among Soho’s main thoroughfares. Blitzed in the War, the square-mile patch had regenerated patchwork fashion to satisfy or exploit the desires of a constant flux of passers-through. People came here for every kind of ‘lift’. Italian coffee-houses had opened on this street a century ago; now, you could buy a thousand varieties of frothy heart-attack in a cup. This was where waves of ‘dangerous’ music broke, from bebop to glitter rock. Within sight, careers had begun and ended: Tommy Steele strumming in an espresso skiffle trio, Jimi Hendrix choking in an alley beside the Intrepid Fox.

  Also, famously and blatantly, Soho was a red-light district, home to the city’s vice rackets for two hundred years. Above window displays were neon and plastic come-ons: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS – LIVE NUDE BED REVUE – GOLDILOXXX AND THE THREE BARES. Above door-bells were hand-printed cards: ‘French Model One Flight Up’, ‘Busty Brunette, Bell Two’, ‘House of Thwacks: Discipline Enforced’.

  Fred checked the address against his scribbled note.

  ‘The scene of the crime,’ he told Richard.

  Richard took off and folded his slim, side-panelled sunglasses. They slid into a tube that clipped to his top pocket like a thick fountain-pen.

  ‘Just the one crime?’ he said.

 
‘Couldn’t say, guv,’ replied Fred. ‘One big one, so far this week.’

  Richard shrugged – which, in today’s peacock-pattern watered silk safari jacket, was dangerously close to flouncing. Even in the cosmopolitan freak show of Soho, Richard’s Carnabetian ensemble attracted attention from all sexes. Currently, he wore scarlet buccaneer britches fitted tighter than a surgical glove, a black-and-white spiral-pattern beret pinned to his frizzy length of coal-black hair, a frill-fronted mauve shirt with a collar-points wider than his shoulders, and a filmy ascot whose colours shifted with the light.

  ‘I certainly feel a measure of recent turmoil,’ said Richard, who called himself ‘sensitive’ rather than ‘spooky’. He flexed long fingers, as if taking a Braille reading from the air. ‘It certainly could be a death unnatural and occult. Still, in this parish, it’d be unusual not to find a soupçon of eldritch atmos, eh? This is east of Piccadilly, mon ami. Vibes swirl like a walnut whip. If London has a psychic storm centre, it’s on this page of the A to Z. Look about, pal – most punters here are dowsing with their dickybirds. It’s not hard to find water.’

  A skinny blonde in hot-pants, platforms and a paisley halter-top sidled out of Crawford Street. She cast a lazy look at them, eyes hoisting pennyweights of pancake and false lash. Richard bowed to her with a cavalier flourish, smile lifting his Fu Manchu. The girl’s own psychic powers cut in.

  ‘Fuzz,’ she sniffed, and scarpered.

  ‘Everyone’s a detective,’ Richard observed, straightening.

  ‘Or a tart,’ said Fred.

  The girl fled. Heart-shaped windows cut out of the seat of her shorts showed pale skin and a sliver of Marks and Sparks knicker. Four-inch stack-soles made for a tottering, Thunderbirds-puppet gait which was funny rather than sexy.

  ‘That said, shouldn’t this place be veritably swarming with the filth?’ commented Richard. ‘One of their own down, and all that. Uniforms, sirens, yellow tape across the door, Black Marias hauling in the usual susses, grasses shaken down? All holidays cancelled, whole shift working overtime to nick the toerag who snuffed a copper while he was about his duty? And where’s the wreath? There should be one on the street, with some junior Hawkshaw posted in that alcove there, in case the crim revisits the scene to gloat and lingers long enough to get nabbed.’

  Richard had put his finger on something which had bothered Fred. One of the man’s talents was noticing things unusual by their absence. The proverbial dog that didn’t bark in the night.

  ‘This isn’t Dock Green, Richard. And DI Brian “Boot Boy” Booth isn’t – wasn’t – George Dixon.’

  Now he thought about it, Fred wondered if Busy had even told the Yard about Booth. He might have thought giving Fred the shout was all duty, and a sense of self-preservation, required. In which case, there would be a load of forms to fill in before bedtime.

  Usually, Fred got involved in cases thanks to Richard. They were both assets of the Diogenes Club, an institution which quietly existed to cope with matters beyond the purview of regular police and intelligence services. Last month, it had been flower children plucked from Glastonbury Tor by ‘bright lights in the sky’ which the boffins reckoned were extra-dimensional rather than extraterrestrial; before that, a Brixton papaloi whose racket was giving out tetrodotoxin-cut ganja at a street festival and enslaving a cadre of zombies through the voodoo beat of a reggae number Fred still couldn’t get out of his head.

  This time, the call came directly to Fred from Harry ‘Busy’ Boddey. Fred’s secondment to work with Richard had been extended so long he sometimes forgot he was still a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, with space in the boot-rack at New Scotland Yard. He hadn’t seen Busy since Hendon College, which was deliberate. DC Boddey was a trimmer, a taker-of-shortcuts; the cheery cheeky chappie chatter and carved-into-his-cheeks smirk didn’t distract from ice-chips in his eyes. Through rozzer gossip, Fred heard Busy had landed his dream job.

  On the phone, Busy hadn’t sounded as if he were still smirking.

  ‘It’s my guv’nor, Freddo,’ he had explained. ‘DI Booth is dead. Killed. It’s one of yours, pal. One of the weird ones, y’know. Off the books. So far off the books it’s not even on the bloody shelf. The horror shows that bring out that long-haired pouf with the tash and the clothes. Booth was smashed. While sittin’ in his office. Looks like he was hit by a bleedin’ express train. Five blokes with sledge-hammers couldn’t do that much damage.’

  Fred’s first reaction was to assume five blokes with sledgehammers had outdone themselves and the regular plods could track them easily by the blood-drip trail. Gruesome, admittedly, but hardly in the same docket as time-warping Nazi demons, extra-dimensional hippie harvesting, spirits of ancient Egypt, dreadlocked Rasta zombies or brainbending seminars in Sussex. Still, the Diogenes Club had nothing on at the moment and it was sunny out. No point lazing around the flat on an inflatable chair with a slow leak, with the snooker commentator on the BBC continually rubbing it in that he hadn’t sprung for a colour telly (‘for those of you watching in black and white, Reardon’s coming up on the pink’). Once Busy was off the line, Fred had given Richard a bell and arranged to meet him here, outside Booth’s Soho HQ.

  Richard arched an elegant eyebrow. ‘“Skinderella’s”?’

  The name was up in glittery purple letters, surrounded by silver-paper suns whose points curled like two-days-dead starfish. The light of this constellation was reaching Earth well after the stars had burned out. In the star-hearts were photographs of female faces, with hairstyles and smiles from ten years before. Once colour, the snaps were bleached to a peculiar aquamarine that made the girls look drowned. The door was wedged open, but glittery streamers curtained the way in.

  Somewhere, tinny music played through maladjusted speakers. It could have been Melanie’s ‘Brand New Key’ or John Fred and His Playboy Band’s ‘Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)’ or anything with that rinky-dink, teeth-scraping rhythm.

  Fred checked his note again. He guessed why Busy had given him a street address rather than just named the place.

  A board propped on an easel on the street promised ‘Tonite’s tasties – Helena Trois, the Mysterious Zarana and Freak-Out Frankie’. Black-and-white head-shots were pinned around the names, all of women looking back over naked shoulders. In the window stood life-size cardboard cut-outs of girls who wore only sparkly G-strings and high-heels, leaning in unnatural and/or uncomfortable positions. As a token of respect to passers-by, coloured paper circles were stuck like grocer’s price-tags over nipples. One or two had fallen off, leaving the girls stuck with blobby glue-pasties.

  A book rack, just like the ones in a newsagent’s or bus station, was chained to a Victorian boot-scraper to prevent theft. Paperback shapes in the wire-slots were wrapped in brown paper like a surrealist installation. The wrapping was partially torn off one, disclosing a title which caught Fred’s eye, Confessions of a Psychic Investigator. He plucked out the book, skinned it and looked at the cover. A thirtyish blonde in a school-cap and navy-blue knickers, braids conveniently arranged over her breasts, did a shocked comedy double-take as a ‘ghost’ in a long sheet ripped off her gymslip with warty rubber horror-hands. The author was a Lesley Behan.

  ‘Nice to see the field getting serious attention,’ drawled Richard. ‘You should buy that. I’m not aware of Miss Behan’s contribution to the literature of the occult.’

  Also on offer were ‘films – continuous’, at a ticket price well above that charged by self-respecting Odeons or Classics; this afternoon’s ‘XXX’ triple-bill was Sixth Form Girls in Chains, Chocolate Sandwich and Sexier Than Sex.

  ‘Now, that’s just ridiculous,’ exclaimed Fred. ‘How can anything be, well, sexier than sex? It’s like saying wetter than water.’

  ‘Perhaps a philosophical point is intended. After all, is not reality sometimes a disappointment, set against its imagined or anticipated version?’

  ‘One thing I guarantee is that what won’t be sexier than sex will
be these films.’

  ‘You sound like a connoisseur.’

  ‘I once spent two weeks in the back row of one of these pokey little cinemas on an undercover job. We were after some nutter who liked to throw ammonia in the faces of the usherettes. In the end, they nabbed him somewhere else. All I got out of it was eyestrain. I didn’t even want to think about chatting up a bird for six months. I’ve actually seen Chocolate Sandwich. It’s about this West Indian bloke, a plumber, and these housewives…’

  Richard made a face, indicating he didn’t want to know any more.

  Locating a panel of buttons by the streamers, Richard pressed one. A buzzer sounded inside.

  ‘Frederick,’ Richard began, ‘this might seem naïve to someone au fait with the ins and outs of policing the capital, but isn’t it something of a conflict of interests that the policeman in charge of the Obscene Publications Squad should work above – not to put too fine a point on it – a strip club?’

  Fred coughed a little. The OPS was one of those embarrassments the average copper tried not to bring up if he had any intention of becoming an above-average copper.

  ‘Don’t hem and haw, man,’ snapped Richard.

  ‘Have you ever heard the expression “one bad apple”?’

  ‘“Spoils the barrel”? Indeed.’

  Fred found himself whispering. ‘You know we don’t have police corruption in this country?’

  ‘That’s the impression given by the patriotic press.’

  ‘Well, it might not be one hundred per cent true.’

  Before he could further disenchant Richard, the streamers parted. White, beringed hands reached out and fastened on Fred’s shoulders. He was pulled into warm, fragrant darkness.

  II. QUEEN OF THE NILE

  When his eyes got used to the gloom, Fred found he was being held close by a tiny woman in a Cleopatra outfit. She had Egyptian eye make-up and a sprinkling of glitter on her bare shoulders. A rearing tin cobra stuck to the front of her stiff black wig prodded his chin.