The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 23

  ‘You know what these Jesus freaks are like, guv’nor.’

  ‘Those white symbols on his suit and car have nothing to do with Christianity, Frederick. Which is interesting, don’t you think? Lord Leaves is a man of great faith, evidently. An inspiration to followers. A black beacon of morality in an age he might deem is going to the dogs. Yet his faith isn’t one hitherto associated with morality in the limited sense expressed here. The only thing I’ve seen in Soho that really goes with those symbols was your dead policeman. Lord Leaves is a great one for smiting and the late DI Booth was certainly smitten.’

  Fred looked again at Lord Leaves exulting as liquid filth poured down upon harlots and whoremongers. He considered the blue-eyed priestess, the blindfolded minstrel, the well-drilled troops. The Nazis had been against decadence, too.

  ‘That, my dears,’ said Richard, pointing at Lord Leaves of Leng, ‘is a Suspect.’

  VI. REPEAT OFFENDER

  By nightfall, the street looked as if the Luftwaffe were blitzing again. Lights came on by fits and starts, many broken or sparking. The pavement was shiny, as black goo congealed into plasticky, pungent shellac.

  Fred tried to avoid getting any on his Docs.

  The march turned into a torchlight rally in Soho Square. Lord Leaves sang more songs – ‘Cast the First Stone’ was surprisingly catchy – between other ‘turns’. ‘Concerned parents’ made halting speeches, and ‘fallen souls’ recanted previous harlotry at great length and in explicit detail.

  Zarana had popped back to ‘Skindy’s’, to see if she needed to go on again. The management might dim the lights this evening, if not in tribute to the late DI Booth then to avoid attracting an angry mob of torch-wielding zealots. She had invited Fred to come watch her Queen of the Nile routine some time when all hell wasn’t breaking loose. A snake was involved, apparently.

  Richard pottered around ruins, trying to pick up ‘impressions’. Fred gathered it wasn’t easy. At the calmest of times, Soho was awash with emotional discharge. Now, it was a maelstrom of mixed feelings. If all this energy could be piped to power stations, the United Kingdom wouldn’t need North Sea oil.

  Fred showed his warrant card to a stray constable and asked for a report. The copper had a splurge of black across his uniform and was looking for his lost helmet. He was in a state of high pissed-offness.

  ‘If this had been a student demo at the Yank Embassy,’ complained the constable, ‘the Special Patrol Group would be out in body-armour, with CS gas and riot-shields. A hundred arrests before supper-time, commendations all round. Because it’s bloody prudes, it was just me and poor old Baxter trying “move along nicely now” on an army of roaring dervishes. Bastards said they’d march tomorrow, then switched schedules. That Lord Leaves is a menace. I’d rather have Hell’s Angels any day.’

  Fred remembered he still hadn’t called New Scotland Yard to share the sad news about DI Booth. At this rate, they would read about it in the morning papers. Richard said a forensics team would only get in the way. It was nice having such pull in high places that he could conduct his own private murder investigation.

  Among those who came out to peep at the mess was Mickey Gates.

  Through the rolled-down window of an I’ve-got-money Rolls-Royce, Gates watched, a hard-faced dolly bird in each armpit, foot-long cigar in his gob. Eric and Colin, his monkeys, supervised damage control at a couple of Gates enterprises – a private cinema club and a ‘sex arcade’. They chased off scavengers.

  ‘Mr Gates is having a bad day,’ said Fred.

  The PC cheered up a bit.

  ‘Isn’t his Roller illegally parked?’ said Fred. ‘See if you can rustle up a traffic warden. Get him ticketed.’

  The constable laughed. ‘Wouldn’t I like to see that.’

  Gates caught sight of Richard and frowned, even more furiously. He was on the point of shouting something.

  Suddenly, with an almighty whump!, a giant invisible boot came down on the Rolls. The roof caved and windows burst. Side-doors buckled, ejecting the matched set of dollies. They crab-walked away, awkward in hot-pants and fishnets, scraping knees and elbows, hairdos loose. At least they were well out of it.

  Fred saw Mickey bite off a chunk of cigar and swallow it.

  Then metal folded around him. The car lifted off the street, and bent. Metal crumpled with dinosaur screams. Dents appeared in the bodywork. The car’s boot ruptured, vomiting a stream of bright, shiny paper – torn girlie magazines.

  Richard was nearer than Fred. He considered the sight with cool interest. Sometimes, the guv’nor just plain forgot to be sensibly scared – that was one of the talents Fred brought to the team.

  Eric and Colin just stood and gaped, like dozens of others. None of them tried to get too close.

  Whatever was crushing the Roller wasn’t quite invisible after all.

  Greyish stuff swirled up, from the street and the rubble, lacing out of thin air, forming a giant, squat man-shape. Mr Sludge had a domed lump of head but no neck. The bubble body, thick and smeary, distorted light. Power flexed in trunk-like limbs.

  Red dripped from the car, which buckled and compacted as if in a press at a wrecking yard. As the Rolls was abused, the giant became more solid. Fred had no doubt this was the phantasm, golem or afrit that had killed Booth. The MO was unmistakable. Mr Sludge glistened, glowing, almost. Blood-squirts shot into its body, lighting up a nerve-network of red traces. Girlie pictures clung to its torso, plastered like papiermâché layers, smoothing over an enormous musculature. Bright smiles and air-brushed curves, pink tits and bums, faded to grey leatheriness. Dozens of nipples stood out like scabs for a few seconds, then healed.

  Like a Herculean weight-lifter, Mr Sludge hoisted high a rough cube that had been a car and its occupant.

  Richard tried gestures and incantations, which got the thing’s attention but little else.

  The grey giant looked down at the man from the Diogenes Club.

  Fred remembered what Busy Boddey had said about its mouthless smile. Here it was again. Eyelights shone.

  The car-lump was bowled at Richard.

  Fred ran and jumped, shoving his guv’nor out of the way. They sprawled on the pavement as the heavy cube tore into the road. The Spirit of Ecstasy bonnet-ornament stuck up from the mess, undamaged, wings shining. Solid workmanship, that. Gates had known enough to buy British.

  Mr Sludge bellowed triumph, an unearthly sound produced by leather lungs and Aeolian-harp vocal cords. The roar rose into the skies. Fred’s eardrums hurt, and the noise invaded his skull, sprouting pain-blossoms behind his eyes. The giant’s substance flowed into sound, and departed with the dying echo. The killer flew up, up and away, passing from this plane of existence. Detritus showered from the space it had occupied. Stiff, faded fold-outs fell like autumn leaves.

  Richard sat up, fastidiously flicking bits of filth from his clothes.

  ‘So, it’s a repeat offender,’ he said. ‘Naughty, naughty.’

  VII. GO-GO GOLEM

  ‘What was that?’ Fred asked.

  ‘As I said, a phantasm, golem, afrit, revenant, whatever. An energy presence.’

  ‘It came out of nothing.’

  Richard raised a finger. ‘No, Frederick, not nothing. It accumulated matter, stuff. It displaced air. It had a physical effect on this world.’

  Fred looked at the metal lump in the road. Workmen with acetylene-torches were trying to crack it open.

  ‘I’ll say it was physical.’

  An ambulance was on the scene. No one had hopes for the ‘patient’. Ordinary police took witness statements, then quietly tore pages from their note-books. Reports of the day’s business had been made to Euan Price, Fred’s guv’nor at New Scotland Yard, and the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, Richard’s notional superiors. Assistance had been grudgingly offered, but there was a sense that since Fred and Richard had got into the case by themselves – thank you very much, Busy Boddey! – it would be as well if they did the heavy lifti
ng and got it tidied away as quietly as possible.

  ‘It came from nothing, though,’ said Fred. ‘Empty air.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as nothing,’ said Richard. ‘All sort of stuff washes about. And it can change form, just as water solidifies into ice. Our Mr Sludge gets punching weight from what comes to hand. Very neat and efficient. It’s probably tethered to the district. You heard Lord Leaves: “Sin and sodomy, lust and lechery.” Potent stuff, that. Especially if you stir in the frustration. Tantalising come-ons whip up the imagination. Then, there’s the let-down of finding out that what’s on offer can’t match what was hoped for. That’s what’s really wrong with porn, by the way – not that it’s against morality, but that it always delivers short measure.’

  Fred wasn’t so sure. Richard had never seen Pony-Tail.

  He thought of Zarana’s snake dance – and had an inkling that her reality might live up to what he could imagine. At least he had something to look forward to.

  ‘There’s so much surplus emotion around here,’ said Richard, ‘strewn like used paper tissues. It’s a wonder these things don’t spontaneously generate all the time.’

  The cube cracked. Someone swore.

  ‘It’ll be closed casket,’ said Fred.

  Dark, silent figures joined the crowds, members of the Festival. They watched the cutting-crew extricate the former meat-man from his car. The rally in Soho Square was over. To the faithful, it must seem as if Lord Leaves’s prayers produced impressive instant results.

  A banner unfurled, proclaiming the wages of sin as death.

  ‘The most interesting thing about our go-go golem,’ said Richard, ‘is that there’s someone inside.’

  ‘A dog-handler, setting the beast on its prey?’

  ‘There is such a person, undoubtedly. A summoner. We’ll get to him or her later. But what interests me just now is that some personality persists inside our Mr Sludge. An earthbound spirit, doing the summoner’s bidding. It’s not easy to get a ghost to follow orders. There has to be some sort of shared purpose. You can’t just invoke, say, Henry V, dress him in ectoplasmic armour, and send him out to murder the Bay City Rollers for offences against humanity.’

  ‘But you could get him to fight the French?’

  ‘Precisely. You’re learning.’

  ‘It rubs off after a while. So, you’ve got His Bloody Lordship, who hates the porn barons…’

  ‘And dresses like a high initiate in the sort of religion with a solid track record in revenant-raising.’

  Fred remembered Lord Leaves’s stern, aged features as he sang or hosed. And his wife’s ecstatic excitement. These people loved smiting more than they hated sin.

  ‘So who’s he raised up? Some old-time Puritan book-burner?’

  ‘That’s a thought. Mrs Grundy or Dr Bowdler? I think not, though. No point going to all the trouble of ensouling an amorphous mass of power if all it’s going to do is sing hymns or write complaining letters.’

  Fred thought about the crimes. He set aside the method – the weird stuff – and tried to concentrate on the motive. Maybe thinking of the golem as a plain old crim would help.

  ‘What about a nutter? Someone “down on whores” like that nutcase who threw ammonia in porn cinemas. He hated it that the films turned him on, but couldn’t stop himself being in the front row every night. He was looking to blame someone else for his own “urges”.’

  They were outside the Dog and Duck pub now. There was a buzz about an ‘accident’ in Greek Street earlier, and a grumbling persisted regarding the Festival’s hosepipe habits. But things were getting back to Soho normal – shrill laughs, loud music (Mott the Hoople’s ‘All the Way From Memphis’ from the Dog versus Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’ from the Crown and Two Chairmen up the road), busy fillies getting close to sozzled blokes, shills from the strip-joints inviting passers-by, plods looking the other way.

  Richard considered Fred’s Ripper theory and decided it wouldn’t do. ‘Our victims have both been men. The higher-ups. The inadequates you’re talking about go after women – strippers, models, prostitutes, usherettes. Our killer has been precise about who gets hurt. The girls in Gates’s car got away with damage only to their dignity.’

  ‘So, we’re scouting the afterlife for someone who hates bent coppers and cockney ponces?’

  Richard spread his hands.

  ‘Neither of the dead men had fan clubs, mate,’ said Fred.

  ‘I can think of two Soho disappearees who might have motive for doing away with Mickey Gates. We can rule out Pony-Tail, the patron saint of strip-tease. Our golem is definitely a feller. Shaped like a former wrestler, bouncer and strong-arm man. “One of those man-mountain types”, you said. Droppeth the penny?’

  ‘Grek Cohen?’

  Richard snapped his fingers.

  ‘Of course, it would be peachier if Cohen had some grudge against Booth.’

  Fred bit his lip.

  ‘Very sharp,’ he said. ‘In ’63, Booth was a rising DC, already knee-deep in Soho rackets. They say he brokered the deal between Schluderpacheru and Gates. It’s what set him up for… well, for life. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one who snatched the girl, to lure Grek. Then, afterwards, he… thwick!’

  He cut his throat with a thumb.

  Richard’s brows narrowed. ‘It occurs to me that Mr Schluderpacheru might, at present, be a worried man.’

  ‘Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.’

  ‘Come, come, now, now. We frown on killing people with the dark arts, no matter their character defects. There are often unhappy consequences. It’s proverbially difficult to get the genie back in the bottle.’

  That was not a comforting thought.

  VIII. LORD SOHO

  Back at Skinderella’s, Fred learned Zarana had done her snake dance to an audience of precisely two paying punters, plus malingerers from a clean-up crew the Yard sent round to remove Booth’s body and seal his files. The ghost at the feast was Inspector Roger ‘No Mates’ Macendale, who had annoyed someone once and been cursed with the job of investigating police corruption cases. Macendale had avoided the OPS mess for years; now, in Booth’s office, he was literally treading in it.

  Boddey was trying to make himself helpful, hopping from one foot to the other like a playground semi-outcast trying to get in cosy with bullies by directing their attention to even more marginalised kids. Busy hoped to cast himself as a heroic whistle-blower, soldiering on in an impossible job, never taking so much as a penny from the Vice Lords who’d suborned his guv’nor. It was going to be hard to explain away the Jaguar in the garage of his family villa in Surbiton, and the equally high-maintenance, luxury model girlfriends in rented flats from Belgravia to Hampstead.

  With the corpse removed from the premises, Richard had commandeered the phone and was making calls. The Ruling Cabal had pull from the House of Lords to the councils of gangland. Richard used it to solicit backstory on the Festival of Morality, the Big Soho Carve-Up of 1963, the box-office records of Imperial Anglo-British/John Bull Films, Ltd (Graf Konstantin Hermann Rezetsky Bolakov ze Schluderpacheru, prop.), golem-raising rituals, the presumably late Immanuel Cohen (‘Grek’ was from his wrestling style, ‘Graeco-Roman’) and the legal tangle of the Obscene Publications Act.

  Fred sat in the bar, skim-reading Confessions of a Psychic Investigator. He had slipped the book into his pocket earlier and, what with the excitement, forgotten it until now. Chapter One, ‘The Ghost Gets Laid’, introduced medallion-wearing open-frilly-shirt magician ‘Robert Jasperson’ and his cheeky cockney wide-boy sidekick ‘Bert Royale’, who ran a cleaning service to get rid of unwanted spooks. Their first big case was a summons to a posh school where a succubus was molesting older girls and younger teachers with ‘midnight gropings and tonguings’. Fred was miffed to discover that the gormless Bert spent all his time peeping through keyholes, getting ‘hot and bothered’ as the apparently irresistible Jasperson enjoyed ‘rampaging rumpypumpy’ with the Frenc
h and Biology mistresses, the girls’ netball team, his ‘tantric sex magickian’ assistant Clitoria, and a passing district nurse. At the climax, the randy git solved the case by converting the ‘heavily knockered’ ghost girlie (a nun walled up centuries earlier for instructing the novitiates in ‘Mysteries of the Orgasm’) to ‘proper hetero shaggery’ with vigorous application of his ‘mighty shaft’. Lesley Behan (which Fred suspected wasn’t her birth name) made Jasperson out to be the sort of psychic detective who couldn’t so much as take out an anemometer to read a cold spot in a haunted house without being pounced upon by suburban housewives, high society nymphomaniacs, teenage virgins, Dutch au pair girls, or two-way bike chicks.

  ‘Losin’ yourself in a good book?’

  Fred looked up from a scene involving an ‘Orgy of Bubastis’ and saw Zarana, in her civvies.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said, folding the book and hiding it in his back pocket. ‘You heard about Gates?’

  Zarana cringed. ‘Some of the girls from Dirty Gertie’s were in after it happened. We’re all worried about bein’ out of jobs. A lot of us are considerin’ other lines of work. Actin’, mostly.’

  ‘Including you?’

  She looked glum. ‘John Bull Films has a company to compete with Hammer, Gruesome Pictures. I’ve done three-day bits for them – wenches chewed by werewolves, maids bitten on the nipple by vampire queens, dollymops gutted by Reg the Ripper. They couldn’t afford Jack, apparently. I don’t much fancy gettin’ killed over and over again. And those are Popeye’s “respectable” pictures. He also makes the Sexploits films… you know, Sexploits of a Long-Distance Lorry Driver, Sexploits of a Merseyside Meter Maid, Sexploits of a Quantity Surveyor. You don’t get in those unless you turn up at his palace for bun-fights they call “trade shows” and go upstairs with fat, baldin’ men who own provincial cinemas and stink of stale Kia-Ora. I’d rather work in a biscuit factory in Barnet.’

  ‘There are other film companies.’

  ‘Not if you’ve got a John Bull brand on your bum. Popeye can get you blacklisted. So I ain’t goin’ to be a Bond girl or a wife of Henry VIII. It’ll be back to modellin’.’