The Man From the Diogenes Club Read online

  The Twins faded into the shadows.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you suggested to me the other day about Marcus’s sideline, Mr Jeperson,’ said June. ‘It was hard to believe.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘It answers so many questions. I knew Marcus was up to something sneaky. I just didn’t imagine it could be so unusual. Such a betrayal of the sacred trust between creative artist and the audience.’

  ‘It’s dangerous to use the Saturday Man,’ said Mama-Lou. ‘Betimes, the Saturday Man wind up usin’ you.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for the wretched clot, Louise. He was always a worm!’

  Richard took off the cap Mama-Lou had given him.

  ‘Ugh. Ghastly thing,’ said June.

  Mama-Lou took the cap back, reverentially. It had become a sacred object.

  Richard went to the mantelpiece. All the framed photographs and trinkets had been distributed across the set by the poltergeist, save for Da Barstow’s urn – which issued green smoke when it became obvious who the Bogey was. The eyes of the portrait had burned like hot coals. Richard saw where red bulbs had been set into the picture.

  He took the urn and twisted off the top.

  Screwed up inside were dozens of used cue cards.

  ‘Marcus’s words,’ said June. ‘This is where he gets to choke on them.’

  The Twins came back, stepping cautiously. They had fetched a rusty barbeque from the props vault. It usually sat on the obviously indoor set of Ben Barstow’s back garden.

  Richard lifted the grille and poured the cue cards into the pan.

  ‘You bring what I tol’ you,’ Mama-Lou said to June.

  June snapped her fingers and a Twin handed over a brown paper bag.

  Mama-Lou looked inside and smiled.

  She emptied the bag onto the crumpled cards. Nail-clippings, a still-damp handkerchief, bristles shaved off a toothbrush, blood-dotted Kleenex.

  ‘Obviously, you can’t get hair from a bald man,’ said June. ‘But Marcus never learned to shave. I think his mummy did it until he married me, and he expected I would take over. No wonder it didn’t last. Blood is better than hair, you said?’

  ‘Blood is good, Miss June,’ said Mama-Lou.

  ‘Will you do the honours, Mama-Lou?’ said Richard, bowing.

  ‘Indeed I will. This is my religion, an’ I despise what’s been done wit’ it.’

  She had a box of Swan Vesta matches caught between her thigh and the tie of her bikini-bottom. She took the box and rattled the matches.

  ‘Erzulie Freda, we call you to the flame,’ she said, looking up.

  Mama-Lou was dancing to unheard music. Her necklaces – which were strung with beads, feathers, items of power, bones and tiny carvings – rattled and bounced against her dark, lithe torso.

  The set lights went down – it wasn’t magic, one of the Twins was at the dimmer switch. June snapped her fingers, banishing her familiars – who had orders to stand guard outside. In the darkness, Mama-Lou struck a match. The single flame grew, swelling around the matchhead, burning down the matchstick, almost to her enamelled nails. She dropped the match onto the pile of combustibles, humming to herself. The flame caught.

  ‘Hocus pocus mucus Marcus,’ improvised June.

  Mama-Lou slapped her shoulders, breasts, hips and thighs, with gestures Richard had seen performed by warlocks, witches and morris dancers. She added certain herbs to the fire, filling the studio with a rich, pungent, not-unpleasant musk. Mama-Lou shook herself into a trance, channelling her patron, Erzulie Freda. She invoked others of her island pantheon, reciting the ‘Litanie des Saints’. Damballah Wedo, Lord Shango, Papa Legba.

  And Baron Samedi. The Saturday Man.

  When the barbeque was fully alight, Richard laid the producer’s hat into the bed of flames.

  They watched until everything was burned down to ashes.

  Then they filled the urn.

  Richard fastened the lid.

  ‘Now, the seal of Erzulie Freda,’ announced Mama-Lou. She surprised June O’Dell with a deep, open-mouthed kiss and then applied herself to Richard with nips and an agile tongue. The wardrobe mistress’s personal loa was the Haitian goddess of love and sensuality. He would have to admit he knew how ceremonies performed under the patronage of Erzulie Freda were traditionally concluded.

  Mama-Lou pulled him and June towards Mavis Barstow’s enormous Friesian cowhide three-piece suite, elbows crooked around their necks, lips active against their faces. She had a lot of strength in her arms. This development came as something of a shock to June, but Mama-Lou whispered something to her in French which made reservations evaporate. The actress became as light on her feet as she was on her platform-skates and slipped busy fingers inside Richard’s shirt.

  He remembered the star’s hunger, and the consequences for unwary ghosts. He must be careful not to let her leech away too much of him. She had used up the best part of her husband, literally. But Mama-Lou was strong too, with a different kind of hunger, a different kind of need.

  Two bodies, one very pale, one very black, wound around him and each other. And two spirits, burning inside the bodies, pulled at him.

  When he told Barbara about the evening, he would tactfully omit this next stage of the ritual.

  He checked the cameras with quick glances. They were hooded. The red recording lights were off.

  Which was a mercy.

  June and Mama-Lou impatiently helped him off with his trousers. Richard thought of England, then remembered he wasn’t actually English.

  XV.

  Vanessa, of course, saw what had happened in an instant, and held it over him all week, exacting numerous favours. She obviously told Fred, and he went around looking at his ‘guv’nor’ with envious awe. Richard was not entirely comfortable with his own behaviour, and took care to be exceptionally solicitous to Barbara, which – later on the night in question – involved a fairly heroic effort in their shared bedroom. He put his evident success down to the lingering effect of Mama-Lou’s voodoo herbs rather than the strength of his own amative constitution. Now he was glad, not only that he had not been found out by the Professor, but that a night spent with her had followed his hour or so under the spell of Erzulie Freda.

  Being open to the feelings of others often led him into choppy waters, and he was not about to excuse himself on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He accepted the less admirable, very male, elements of his make-up, and determined to rein them in more effectively. The Swinging Sixties were over, and this ought to be the Sensible (or at least, the Sober) Seventies. Besides, he could self-diagnose the symptoms and knew he was falling in love with Barbara Corri.

  It was his gift to know how other people felt. All the time. Without fail. But with one exception. He could tell when a woman was attracted to him. He could tell when she was infuriated with him and performing a supernatural feat by concealing it from the world. But he could not tell if a woman he loved even liked him. If Barbara were in love with him, she’d have to come straight out and say so. Even then, he was no more able to tell if she meant it than anyone else in the world could. It struck him that this blind spot was probably the one thing, along with his unique upbringing under the aegis of the Diogenes Club, that prevented him from becoming a monster.

  Too many people with talents went bad.

  Look at Marcus Squiers. Obviously, the fellow had some raw abilities, or he’d never have been able to co-opt the arcana to a criminal venture. He could have used the influence of The Northern Barstows over the viewing public for good. Or he could have left well enough alone and concentrated on making better TV programmes.

  ‘I wonder if he hit on this by accident,’ Barbara said, on Monday morning, as they sat on the studio lawn. They watched Leslie and Gaye, who had grown close over the last fortnight, console each other before the taping of the worst-concealed surprise twist in Barstows history – their deaths. ‘I keep thinking of Brenda’s black baby. The way apparently the who
le audience changed opinion when Mavis did. That might have been when it started.’

  ‘There was Karen Finch,’ said Richard.

  ‘She must have been the first victim. The Bogus Brenda was her doll. What happened to BB on the programme happened to her in life. Not killed, but certainly her options were limited.’

  ‘Barbara?’ he held her hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I won’t let him murder us. What we did this weekend will work. In the end, Squiers is an amateur and I am a professional.’

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Leslie and Gaye embracing, in tears.

  He kissed Barbara and thought, for a moment, he knew how she felt.

  Then it was gone again, and he found himself looking at her face and wondering.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I can never tell what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Good. I’d hate to spoil any more surprises.’

  She laughed, like the sun coming out.

  ‘So, do you want to watch our heads getting chopped off?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He took her arm and they walked across the lawn, towards the stage. As they passed, Leslie and Gaye were brushing grass-strands off their costumes and getting it together to undergo their career-ending ordeal.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Richard told them, ‘it might never happen.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ snarled Leslie Veneer, with more feeling than any of his line-readings. ‘You’re not the bloody God of Bleeds.’

  They arrived on the stage before Leslie and Gaye, and – as had become tediously predictable – an assistant director was hustling them onto the set when the real actors arrived. Everyone’s identities got sorted out.

  Gerard Loss was nowhere to be seen. Marcus Squiers was directing this scene himself, wearing his rarely seen director’s hat – a baseball cap. He sat on a high-chair like a tennis umpire and wielded the sort of megaphone Cecil B. DeMille had been fond of until talking pictures came in.

  Squiers was surprised to see Richard and Barbara, but nodded at them with the kind of magnanimous admiration only someone who thought he’d long since won could show for an already mortally wounded foe he was about to decapitate. Richard waved cheerily back.

  Almost all of the episode had been taped on Friday. Roget and Canberra were shown up as yet more confidence tricksters (a habitual Barstows plot tic). It turned out they were in with Ben Barstow and had been faking the haunting in order to extort a fortune from Mavis – but this had raised the real angry spirit of Da Barstow, who was about to get his revenge.

  Clarence ‘Gore’ Gurney, a special effects man who usually worked on cinema films about Satanic accidents, was hired in at great expense – and with resentful grumbling from the O’D-S make-up people – to supervise the Decapitation of Roget Masterman and, to vary things, the Exploding Head of Canberra Laurinz. Realistic dummies, faces contorted in frozen screams, were held in waiting, tubes and wires fed into slit holes in the backs of their clothes. Richard assumed the dummies now wore the clothes filched from his and Barbara’s closets. At last, here were proper voodoo dolls, with hairs stolen from brushes applied to the heads. Tara, exceeding her wardrobe job, was helping Gurney set up the effects.

  Barbara kept looking at the dummies, struck by the terror on her own faked face.

  Leslie and Gaye only had to flounder screaming around the set, while Dudley-as-Ben begged Da for forgiveness and fire spurted out of the portrait’s eyes. Then the actors were hauled off – and essentially kicked out the studio door, final pay packets exchanged for entry lozenges – and the dummies were set up. This took an age.

  Lionel dropped by to say hello.

  ‘They’ll never get away with this, luv,’ he said. ‘Mucus is mental. Grannies in Hartlepool will have heart attacks. Folk tune in to the Barstards to see Mavis being a cow and Northshire idiots whining about the old days over pints of Griddles, not blood and guts all over the shop. It’s like the worst bits of James Herbert spewed into front parlours and the audience won’t like it. The duty officer will log a record number of complaints when this airs. Once it’s out, ART will come down like a ton of angry bricks. Mark my words.’

  ‘We only have one shot at this,’ announced Squiers through his megaphone. ‘All three cameras, make sure you can’t see each other or the edge of the set.’

  Three cameramen gave thumbs-up.

  ‘Gore?’

  Gurney crouched over a wooden control-box studded with lights and switches, and plungers like the ones used to detonate cartoon dynamite. He checked all the leads and saluted Squiers.

  ‘Supernatural smoke, please.’

  Odorous clouds were puffed onto the set by stagehands wielding gadgets like industrial vacuum cleaners on reverse. Finn coughed and the smoke settled like a grey ground-mist.

  ‘Light the picture.’

  Da’s eyes shone. It struck Richard that Marcus Squiers must have posed for the portrait.

  ‘Dudley?’

  Finn went down on his knees, warily ready.

  ‘And action!’

  Gurney flicked switches and the dummies flailed with alarming realism. Finn, nervous to be on set with so much explosive, picked up his ranted lines.

  ‘Dr Laurinz!’ shouted Squiers.

  Gurney depressed a plunger. The Canberra dummy’s head burst, flinging watermelon-bits and cottage cheese across the set. Barbara pressed her face against Richard’s collar, unable to watch.

  Richard did not miss Squiers’s nasty little smile.

  The last splatters of the head’s contents rained down. Red syrup spurted from the neck as if it were a sugary drinking fountain. The headless dummy toppled over, mechanics inside sparking dangerously.

  ‘And Masterman!’

  Gurney depressed the other plunger.

  A rubber axe flew across the set. Richard watched his own head come off, tumble through the air and fall, still-blinking, at the feet of a screaming Ben Barstow.

  ‘Cut! Thank you all very much. You’ve made TV history.’

  There was a smattering of applause, mostly from the writing pack who had been let off school especially to watch the deaths.

  ‘The Ti-bloody-tanic made history,’ said Lionel, who was annoyed to get gluey red cornstarch on his Clarks tracker shoes.

  ‘What do you think, Mr Jeperson?’ asked Squiers through his megaphone. ‘How did it look from down there?’

  Richard made an equivocal gesture.

  ‘I’ll have to see it go out to be sure.’

  ‘Indeed you will. Would you and Professor Corri care to be my guests tomorrow? Because it’s a “special” episode, we’re having a select celebration here at the studio. We can watch you die and then have canapés and wine. It’ll be a treat. Are you up for it?’

  Barbara was white-lipped with fury and terror, but rigidly self-possessed, refusing to let Squiers see. Richard’s blood was up too, but he was calm. He’d seen the worst and it wasn’t so bad.

  ‘We wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ he said.

  XVI.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Squiers.

  ‘I thought we might not get the chance to chat later.’

  Squiers was surprised, calculated a moment, then chose to laugh.

  Coolly, Richard sauntered down the aisle of the small, luxurious screening room, fingers brushing the leatherette of the upholstered seats. Squiers stood in front of a wall of colour television sets, turned on and tuned to ITV but with the sound off, images repeated as if through insect-eyes. A quiz programme was on, the grinning host in a silver tuxedo dropping contestants into vats of gunk when they failed to answer correctly, showgirls in spangly tights posed by washer-dryers and Triumph TR7s, mutant puppets popping up between the rounds to do silent slapstick. No wonder Richard preferred reading.

  Squiers wore a different hat tonight, a large purple Stetson, with bootlace tie, orange ruffle shirt, faux-buckskin tuxedo and rawhide cowboy boots with stack heels and spurs. Richard intuited that the ten-gallon t
itfer was the writer-producer’s ‘party hat’. Marcus Squiers saw himself as a gunslinger.

  ‘Nice threads, Squiers.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Masterman.’

  ‘Jeperson. Masterman is your fellow. The one on TV.’

  ‘I was forgetting. It’s easy to get mixed up.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  Richard was not what Squiers expected. In the producer’s mind, Richard (and Barbara) ought to be getting sweaty, nervous, close to panic, sensing the trap closing, feeling a frightful fiend’s breath warming their backs. They should be jitterishly trying to evade the inescapable, pass mrjamesian runes on to some other mug, get out of the way of safes and grand pianos fated to fall from the skies.

  Disappointment roiled off Squiers, who – as ever – was the sweaty one.

  For him, this should have been a new pleasure. All his previous marks had been unaware of the gunsights fixed on their foreheads. Richard knew what was happening and was powerless to dodge the bullet. This was the first time Squiers could afford to let anyone know how clever he had been.

  ‘It was Junie’s fault,’ said Squiers. ‘That first serial, just six weeks of it, was damn good telly. Damn good writing. Better than your Dennis Potter or Alan Plater any night of the week. Junie was good in it. She’s always been able to play Mavis. She was the one who pushed for the series. I wanted to go on to other things. Plays, films, novels. I could have, you know. I had ideas, ready to go. But Junie tied me to the Barstards. The things she did. You wouldn’t believe. The first few years, I kept trying to quit and she’d wrestle me back. There was never much money. Muggins here got stuck with his nineteen-sixty-flaming-four salary, while the Moo’s fees climbed to the sky. Read the bloody small print – first rule of showbiz. There were other ways to keep me on the hook. Even when we weren’t married any more, she’d find means. “No one else can produce the show,” she says. “No one.” Who would want to? I mean, have you watched it?’

  Richard nodded.

  ‘I have to live with it. So there might as well be some use in it.’