The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 35

  The chubby writer checked his colleagues’ faces and nodded vigorously. The rest agreed with him. June O’Dell was in charge.

  ‘Professor Corri,’ she said, ‘we’ve had our differences, but I’d like to offer you a job as head writer. This is yours for the taking.’

  She snatched the school cap from one of the writers’ pockets and offered it to Barbara.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said the Professor.

  Beside June, Mama-Lou smiled, eyes glittering.

  The Moo and Mistress Voodoo exerted a tug on Barbara, which Richard knew would have an effect. He was more worried about how the Professor would fare in the television jungle than he had been when she was only under a deadly curse. But she could take care of herself.

  Richard acknowledged these women of power, trusting – against prior experience – they would wield it only for good. He might have to keep watching the blasted programme to make sure they avoided the shadow of the Saturday Man.

  He helped the Professor, now steady on her feet, out of the room.

  The Rolls awaited.

  He turned to look into Barbara’s eyes, and kissed her. Her terror had passed, and new, exciting feelings were creeping in.

  ‘Did we win?’ she asked.

  ‘Handsomely,’ said Richard.

  COLD SNAP

  I.

  ‘Nice motor,’ said Richard Jeperson, casting an appreciative eye over Derek Leech’s Rolls-Royce ShadowShark.

  ‘I could say the same of yours,’ responded Leech, gloved fingertips lightly polishing his red-eyed Spirit of Ecstasy. Richard’s car was almost identical, though his bonnet ornament didn’t have the inset rubies.

  ‘I’ve kept the old girl in good nick,’ said Richard.

  ‘Mine has a horn which plays the theme from Jaws,’ said Leech.

  ‘Mine, I’m glad to say, doesn’t.’

  That was the pleasantries over.

  It was the longest, hottest, driest summer of the 1970s. Thanks to a strict hosepipe ban, lawns had turned to desert. Neighbours informed on each other over suspiciously verdant patches. Bored regional television crews shot filler about eggs frying on dustbin lids and sunburn specialists earning consultancy fees in naturist colonies. If they’d been allowed anywhere near it, a considerably more unusual summer weather story was to be had. A news blackout was in effect, and discreet roadblocks limited traffic onto this stretch of the Somerset Levels.

  The near-twin cars were parked in a lay-by equidistant from the seemingly Mediterranean beaches of Burnham-on-Sea and Lyme Regis. While the nation sweltered in bermuda shorts and flip-flops, Richard and Leech shivered in arctic survival gear. Richard wore layers of bearskin, furry knee-length boots with claw-toes, and a lime-green balaclava surmounted by a scarlet Andean bobble hat with chinchilla earmuffs – plus the wraparound anti-glare visor recommended by Jean-Claude Killy. Leech wore a snow-white, fur-hooded parka and baggy leggings, ready to lead an Alpine covert assault troop. If not for his black Foster Grants, he could stand against a whitewashed wall and impersonate the Invisible Man.

  Around them was a landscape from a malicious Christmas card. They stood in a Cold Spot. Technically, a patch of permafrost, four miles across. From the air, it looked like a rough circle of white stitched onto a brown quilt. Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone… snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow. The epicentre was Sutton Mallet, a hamlet consisting of a few farmhouses, New Chapel (which replaced the old one in 1829) and Derek Leech International’s weather research facility.

  Leech professed innocence, but this was his fault. Most bad things were.

  Bernard Levin said on Late Night Line-Up that Leech papers had turned Fleet Street into a Circle of Hell by boasting fewer words and more semi-naked girls than anything else on the newsstands. Charles Shaar Murray insisted in IT that the multi-media tycoon was revealed as the Devil incarnate when he invented the ‘folk-rock cantata’ triple LP. The Diogenes Club had seen Derek Leech coming for a long time, and Richard knew exactly what he was dealing with.

  Their wonderful cars could go no further, so they had to walk.

  After several inconclusive, remote engagements, this was their first face-to-face (or visor-to-sunglasses) meeting. The Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club and the Great Enchanter were expected to be the antagonists of the age, but the titles meant less than they had in the days of Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop or Leo Dare, Isidore Persano and Colonel Zenf. Lately, both camps had other things to worry about.

  From two official world wars, great nations had learned to conduct their vast duels without all-out armed conflict. Similarly, the Weird Wars of 1903 and 1932 had changed the shadow strategies of the Diogenes Club and its opponents. In the Worm War, there had almost been battle-lines. It had only been won when a significant number of Persano’s allies and acolytes switched sides, appalled at the scope of the crime (‘the murder of time and space’) planned by the wriggling mastermind (‘a worm unknown to science’) the Great Enchanter kept in a match-box in his waistcoat pocket. The Wizard War, when Beauregard faced Zenf, was a more traditional game of good and evil, though nipped in the bud by stealth, leaving the Club to cope with the ab-human threat of the Deep Ones (‘the Water War’) and the mundane business of ‘licking Hitler’. Now, in what secret historians were already calling the Winter War, no one knew who to fight.

  So, strangely, this was a truce.

  As a sensitive – a Talent, as the parapsychology bods had it – Richard was used to trusting his impressions of people and places. He knew in his water when things or folks were out of true. If he squinted, he saw their real faces. If he cocked an ear, he heard what they were thinking. Derek Leech seemed perfectly sincere, and elaborately blameless. No matter how furiously Richard blinked behind his visor, he saw no red horns, no forked beard, no extra mouths. Only a tightness in the man’s jaw gave away the effort it took to present himself like this. Leech had to be mindful of a tendency to grind his teeth.

  They had driven west – windows rolled down in the futile hope of a cool breeze – through parched, sunbaked countryside. Now, despite thermals and furs, they shivered. Richard saw Leech’s breath frosting.

  ‘Snow in July,’ said Leech. ‘Worse. Snow in this July.’

  ‘It’s not snow, it’s rime. Snow is frozen rain. Precipitation. Rime is frozen dew. The moisture in the air, in the ground.’

  ‘Don’t be such an arse, Jeperson.’

  ‘As a newspaperman, you appreciate accuracy.’

  ‘As a newspaper publisher, I know elitist vocabulary alienates readers. If it looks like snow, tastes like snow and gives you a white Christmas, then…’

  Leech had devised So What Do You Know?, an ITV quiz show where prizes were awarded not for correct answers, but for matching whatever was decided – right or wrong – by the majority vote of a ‘randomly selected panel of ordinary Britons’. Contestants had taken home fridge-freezers and fondue sets by identifying Sydney as the capital of Australia or categorising whales as fish. Richard could imagine what Bernard Levin and Charles Shaar Murray thought of that.

  Richard opened the boot of his Rolls and hefted out a hold-all which contained stout wicker snowshoes, extensible aluminium ski-poles and packs of survival rations. Leech had similar equipment, though his boot-attachments were spiked black metal and his rucksack could have contained a jet propulsion unit.

  ‘I’d have thought DLI could supply a Sno-Cat.’

  ‘Have you any idea how hard it is to come by one in July?’

  ‘As it happens, yes.’

  They both laughed, bitterly. Fred Regent, one of the Club’s best men, had spent most of yesterday learning that the few places in Great Britain which leased or sold snow-ploughs, caterpillar tractor bikes or jet-skis had either sent their equipment out to be serviced, shut up shop for the summer or gone out of business in despair at unending sunshine. Heather Wilding, Leech’s executive assistant, had been on the same fruitless missio
n – she and Fred kept running into each other outside lock-ups with ‘come back in November’ posted on them.

  Beyond this point, the road to Sutton Mallet – a tricky proposition at the best of times – was impassable. The hamlet was just visible a mile off, black roofs stuck out of white drifts. The fields were usually low-lying, marshy and divided by shallow ditches called rhynes. In the last months, the marsh had set like concrete. The rhynes had turned into stinking runnels, with the barest threads of mud where water usually ran. Now, almost overnight, everything was deep-frozen and heavily frosted. The sun still shone, making a thousand glints, twinkles and refractions. But there was no heat.

  Trees, already dead from Dutch elm disease or roots loosened from the dry dirt, had fallen under the weight of what only Richard wasn’t calling snow, and lay like giant blackened corpses on field-sized shrouds. Telephone poles were down too. No word had been heard from Sutton Mallet in two days. A hardy postman had tried to get through on his bicycle, but had not come back. A farmer who had set off to milk his cows had also been swallowed in the whiteness. A helicopter had flown over, but the rotor blades slowed as heavy ice-sheaths grew on them. The pilot had barely made it back to Yeovilton Airfield.

  Word had spread through ‘channels’. Unnatural phenomena were Diogenes Club business, but Leech had to take an interest too – if only to prove that he wasn’t behind the cold snap. Heather Wilding had made a call to Pall Mall, and officially requested the Club’s assistance. That didn’t happen often or – come to think of it – ever.

  Leech looked across the white fields towards Sutton Mallet.

  ‘So we walk,’ he said.

  ‘It’s safest to follow the ditches,’ advised Richard.

  Neither bothered to lock their cars.

  They clambered – as bulky and awkward as astronauts going EVA – over a stile to get into the field. The white carpet was virginal. As they tramped on, in the slight trough that marked the rime-filled rhyne, Richard kept looking sidewise at Leech. The man was breathing heavily inside his polar gear. Being incarnate involved certain frailties. But it would not do to underestimate a Great Enchanter.

  Derek Leech had popped up apparently out of nowhere in 1961. A day after Colonel Zenf finally died in custody, he first appeared on the radar, making a freak run of successful long-shot bets at a dog track. Since then, he had made several interlocking empires. He was a close friend of Harold Wilson, Brian Epstein, Lord Leaves of Leng, Enoch Powell, Roman Polanski, Mary Millington and Jimmy Saville. He was into everything – newspapers (the downmarket tabloid Daily Comet and the reactionary broadsheet Sunday Facet), pop records, telly, a film studio, book-publishing, frozen foods, football, road-building, anti-depressants, famine relief, contraception, cross-channel hovercraft, draught lager, touring opera productions, market research, low-cost fashions, educational playthings. He had poked his head out of a trapdoor on Batman and expected to be recognised by Adam West – ‘It’s not the Clock King, Robin, it’s the English Pop King, Derek Leech.’ He appeared in his own adverts, varying his catch-phrase – ‘If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t…’ eat it, drink it, watch it, groove it, use it, wear it, bare it, shop it, stop it, make it, take it, kiss it, miss it, phone it, own it. He employed ‘radical visionary architect’ Constant Drache to create ‘ultra-moderne work-place environments’ for DLI premises and the ranks upon ranks of ‘affordable homes for hard-working families’ cropping up at the edges of conurbations throughout the land. It was whispered there were private graveyards under many a ‘Derek Leech Close’ or ‘Derek Leech Drive’. Few had tangled with Derek Leech and managed better than a draw. Richard counted himself among the few, but also suspected their occasional path-crossings hadn’t been serious.

  They made fresh, ragged footprints across the empty fields. They were the only moving things in sight. It was quiet, too. Richard saw birds frozen mid-tweet on boughs, trapped in globules of ice. No smoke rose from the chimneys of Sutton Mallet. Of course, what with the heat wave, even the canniest country folk might have put off getting in a store of fuel for next winter.

  ‘Refresh my memory,’ said Richard. ‘How many people are at your weather research station?’

  ‘Five. The director, two junior meteorologists, one general dogsbody and a public relations-security consultant.’

  Richard had gone over what little the Club could dig up on them. Oddly, a DLI press release provided details of only four of the staff.

  ‘Who’s the director again?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve kept that quiet, as you know,’ said Leech. ‘It’s Professor Cleaver. Another Dick, which is to say a Richard.’

  ‘Might have been useful to be told that,’ said Richard, testily.

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  Professor Richard Cleaver, a former time-server at the Meteorological Office, had authored The Coming Ice Age, an alarmist paperback propounding the terrifying theory of World Cooling. According to Cleaver, natural thickening of the ozone layer in the high atmosphere would, if unchecked, lead to the expansion of the polar icecaps and a global climate much like the one currently obtaining in Sutton Mallet. Now, the man was in the middle of his own prediction, which was troubling. There were recorded cases of individuals who worried so much about things that they made them happen. The Professor could be such a Talent.

  They huffed into Sutton Mallet, past the chapel, and went through a small copse. On the other side was the research station, a low-lying cinderblock building with temporary cabins attached. There were sentinels in the front yard.

  ‘Are you in the habit of employing frivolous people, Mr Leech?’

  ‘Only in my frivolous endeavours. I take the weather very seriously.’

  ‘I thought as much. Then who made those snowmen?’

  They emerged from the rhyne and stood on hard-packed ice over the gravel forecourt of the DLI weather research facility. Outside the main doors stood four classic snowmen: three spheres piled one upon another as legs, torso and head, with twigs for arms, carrots for noses and coals for eyes, buttons and mouths. They were individualised by scarves and headgear – top hat, tam-o’-shanter, pith helmet and two toy bumblebees on springs attached to an Alice band.

  Leech looked at the row. ‘Rime-men, surely?’ he said, pointedly. ‘As a busybody, you appreciate accuracy.’

  There were no footprints around the snowmen. No scraped-bare patches or scooped-out drifts. As if they had been grown rather than made.

  ‘A frosty welcoming committee?’ suggested Leech.

  Before anything happened, Richard knew. It was one of the annoyances of his sensitivity – premonitions which come just too late to do anything about.

  Top Hat’s headball shifted: it spat out a coal, which cracked against Richard’s visor. He threw himself down, to avoid further missiles. Top Hat’s head was packed with coals, which it could sick up and aim with deadly force.

  Leech was as frozen in one spot as the snowmen weren’t. This sort of thing happened to others, but not to him.

  Pith Helmet, who had a cardboard handlebar moustache like Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout, rose on ice-column legs and stalked towards Leech, burly white arms sprouting to displace feeble sticks, wicked icicles extruding from powdery fists.

  Tam and Bee-Alice circled round, making as if to trap Richard and Leech in the line of fire.

  Richard got up, grabbed Leech’s arm, and pulled him away from Pith Helmet. It was hard to run in polar gear, but they stumped past Tam and Bee-Alice before the circle closed, and legged it around the main building.

  Another snowman loomed up in front of them. In a postman’s cap, with a mail-bag slung over its shoulder. It was larger and looser thing than the others, more hastily made, with no face coals or carrot. They barrelled into the shape, which came apart, and sprawled in a tangle on the cold, cold ground – Richard felt the bite of black ice through his gauntlets as the heel of his hand jammed against grit. Under him was a dead but loose-limbed postman, grey-blue in th
e face, crackly frost in his hair. He had been inside the snowman.

  The others were marching around the corner. Were there people inside them too? Somehow, they were frowning – perhaps it was in the angle of their headgear, as if brows were narrowed – and malice burned cold in their eye-coals.

  Leech was on his feet first, hauling Richard upright.

  Snow crawled around the postman again, forming a thick carapace. The corpse stood like a puppet, dutifully taking up its bag and cap, insistent on retaining its identity.

  They were trapped between the snowmen. The five walking, hat-topped heaps had them penned.

  Richard was tense, expecting ice-daggers to rip through his furs and into his heart. Leech reached into his snowsuit as if searching for his wallet – in this situation, money wasn’t going to be a help. A proper devil would have some hellfire about his person. Or at least a blowtorch. Leech – who had recorded a series of anti-smoking adverts – managed to produce a flip-top cigarette lighter. He made a flame, which didn’t seem to faze the snowmen, and wheeled around, looking for the one to negotiate with. Leech was big on making deals.

  ‘Try Top Hat,’ suggested Richard. ‘In cartoon terms, he’s obviously the leader.’

  Leech held the flame near Top Hat’s face. Water trickled, but froze again, giving Top Hat a tear-streaked, semi-transparent appearance. A slack face showed inside the ice.

  ‘Who’s in there?’ asked Leech. ‘Cleaver?’

  Top Hat made no motion.

  A door opened, and a small, elderly man leaned out of the research station. He wore a striped scarf and a blue knit cap.

  ‘No, Mr Leech,’ said Professor Richard Cleaver, ‘I’m in here. You lot, let them in, now. You’ve had your fun. For the moment.’

  The snowmen stood back, leaving a path to the back door. Cleaver beckoned, impatient.

  ‘Do come on,’ he said. ‘It’s fweezing out.’

  Richard looked at Leech and shrugged. The gesture was matched. They walked towards the back door.