The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 55

  ‘Skerra up ahead,’ said de Maltby, sounding uncannily like his great-great uncle abdicating from the throne. ‘We should be aground in… uhhhm… about ten minutes.’

  Yoland thanked the gods but had to gulp back his silent words. He waved away Kydd’s tea.

  ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ Jeperson said to her. ‘Venturing into unknown territory.’

  She wasn’t exactly sure how she felt.

  ‘Look, sir, you can see the island.’

  Kydd pointed out of a window. Jeperson casually turned to glance at Skerra. Onions lurched from his seat, again hanging apelike from strapholds, and peered at the seascape, searching for their destination.

  ‘There,’ said Jeperson. ‘Such a tiny scrap of rock.’

  The only thing this assignment had in common with regular police work was that Stacy had the usual feeling of coming in late and having to pick up story threads before she could make any progress.

  If she was to cope with Skerra, she needed to catch up.

  II.

  Two days earlier, DS Cotterill learned she was to be despatched to the blue plaque jungle of London, SW3. In New Scotland Yard, DCI Frederick Regent ran off a list of who else had lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

  ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel, George Eliot, Turner, Mrs Gaskell, Whistler (of ’s Mother fame), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a bunch of other Pre-Raphs, Thomas Carnacki, Henry James. With Carlyle round the corner in Cheyne Row.’

  Stacy said she’d heard of them all, except Carnacki.

  ‘Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Cotterill,’ her guv’nor said. ‘Secret history. Bone up on it.’

  Easier said than done.

  It struck her that the guv’nor either wished he was going out on this call himself or was profoundly grateful seniority kept him snug in his office. Or both at the same time. Regent was a funny specimen of top cop. Higher-ups didn’t often let him do telly interviews. Gossip at the Met was that he was the only senior officer ever to turn down a CBE, nearly get married to Diana Rigg and earn the honour of laying the wreath on Joey Grimaldi’s grave at the annual Clowns’ Service at Holy Trinity Church in Dalston.

  Stacy didn’t fully realise how out of the ordinary the errand was until Regent told her to take a chit to Sergeant Ellbee, who would scare her up a driver and car. That luxury was a first in her career.

  Ellbee recognised the address and laughed.

  ‘Haven’t seen that one in an age, Stace,’ said the sergeant, who had a London Welsh accent. ‘Surprised Jeperson is still alive, what with all he went through. Put the guv’nor through, too. How do you think Fred Regent lost his hair?’

  It wasn’t something she’d ever considered.

  ‘The famous Richard Jeperson,’ clucked Ellbee. ‘Name from the seventies. Sixties, even. Fab crazy gear, man. Austin Powers era. Watch out he doesn’t try to shag you, baby.’

  ‘Was he a copper?’

  ‘Not with his haircut. Richard Jeperson was a private consultant. A spook. The spooks’ spook, in fact. Ever hear of the Diogenes Club?’

  She hadn’t.

  ‘Read your Sherlock Holmes, girl.’

  She had the feeling everyone knew more than she did. Regent had given her the bare bones and a large brown-paper parcel tied with pink string.

  ‘Diogenes wasn’t a club, really,’ continued Ellbee. ‘It was a Department of Dead Ends. Like our old, pre-PC Bureau of Queer Complaints. That was nothing to do with policing Gay Pride marches. Know why the CI’s thrown you this scrap? Fred’s had an eagle eye on you ever since the Maudsley murders.’

  Stacy didn’t think the case was her finest hour. It had seemed a simple, if gruesome triple homicide. A middle-aged man found in a fugue state in his own home, sitting amid the remains of three diced street kids. Evidence indicated that the vics, all well-known to the courts, had entered the premises with unlawful intent and received something very like just desserts. A history of ill-will existed between the district’s druggies and the reclusive householder, Mantan ‘Misery’ Maudsley.

  Before the likely perpetrator could be roused enough to understand the formal charge, Maudsley perished in his cell. Not just died, perished. Autopsy suggested he’d been dead for three weeks at the time of arrest. When Stacy had met Maudsley, he wasn’t speaking much or smelling fresh but had been capable of walking about. The file was still open.

  ‘Some plods go through a whole career without anything like Misery Maudsley,’ said Ellbee. ‘Others clock Scooby-Doo cases every week but never tumble to the way the world really works. You took it in, Stace. Adjusted to accept it. When he was with Diogenes and Richard Jeperson, that was Fred Regent’s special knack. He thinks you’ve got something similar.’

  She remembered the sick, clear atmosphere after the Maudsley case, the way station-mates treated her differently, the eagerness of her shift commander to get her onto something else quickly. It wasn’t something she had enjoyed at all. She didn’t relish the prospect of anything more in that line.

  ‘Come off it, Ellbee,’ she said. ‘I happened to be in the office with a clearish desk when the guv’nor wanted a parcel delivered to Chelsea. End of story.’

  ‘Mind how you tread in the dark, Stace.’

  Somebody else who had lived in Cheyne Walk was Bram Stoker. Stacy remembered the peasant pressing her crucifix on the young man on his way to Castle Dracula.

  This wasn’t how she usually thought of Sergeant Ellbee. She put his theory into practice and adjusted to accept it.

  In the car on the way to Chelsea, the driver didn’t speak to her.

  The only thing Maudsley had said as she was bringing him in was, ‘A cavern, far north.’ She had thought it random sparking in a broken brain, not even addressed to her.

  Now, she wondered if Misery had known about Skerra.

  III.

  At first sighting, the island was a greenish thumbnail barely sticking out of the sea. Then, as the helicopter neared, Skerra looked more like a sinking aircraft carrier: an oblong wedge rising steeply, sloping deck sliding into the ocean, barnacled stern lifted clear of the water.

  They circled. Stacy got a good look at the place.

  Skerra was a British Isle, but only for cartographers’ convenience. Too far North to be a Shetland (let alone an Orkney), the outcrop lay alone and desolate in cold grey water between Iceland and the Norwegian coast. As much, or as little, Scandinavian as Scots, a case could be made for calling it the easternmost Faroe. In the reign of Macbeth (yes, that one), Skerra had been gifted to Scotland among the dowry of the Princess of Denmark. An agreed reciprocal tribute went unpaid, so the transfer of sovereignty was moot. If either crown had regarded it as a possession rather than a dependency, Skerra might have become a medieval Schleswig-Holstein Question. As it was, Dunsinane and Elsinore remained barely aware that such a place existed. The islanders looked to their own matrilineal monarchy.

  The title of Droning still existed, but the Skerrans didn’t.

  The hardy, vicious flocks of goats that supported the local economy and ecosystem (and fashion statements) declined over the centuries and were all but extinct by 1932, when the last remaining islanders were evacuated to unimaginable Southlands. This emergency measure led to the dumping of a knot of insular, Innsmouth-featured folk in a Glasgow slum. Their descendants were allegedly the city’s most violent criminal gang. One of the few surviving words of the Skerran tongue was dreep, underworld slang for an especially horrific form of murder-by-torture.

  Sir Piers Gill (né Paddy Kill) had bought Skerra from another private owner when Persephone was six, so his daughter could legitimately call herself a princess. This was the first time the Droning had come within five hundred miles of her island realm.

  Stacy saw where waves washed the incline. Rising seas had swallowed the harbour decades ago. Choppy waters swirled around the few stone skeletons that remained of Skerra Landsby, the abandoned village.

  ‘Look,’ said Onions, ‘the A-Boat.’

  It was caught in among
the shattered buildings, on its side, mostly underwater. If the hull hadn’t been rust-red, the boat would have passed for a reef.

  Onions whistled.

  ‘How the hell did that happen?’

  ‘Strange waters,’ commented Richard Jeperson. ‘Look at the whirlpools.’

  There were three around the village end of Skerra, spinning like submarine Tasmanian devils, and a far larger maelstrom to the north.

  ‘The Kjempestrupe,’ said Jeperson. ‘It’s as if God pulled the plug.’

  For the first time, Mr Head took an interest. He closed his Petesuchis and peered out the window.

  The Kjempestrupe was a funnel in the sea. It seemed bottomless, spiral walls of whirling water keeping open an impossible chasm.

  ‘Any man who wants to marry you is supposed to brave that in a coracle,’ Jeperson told Persephone. ‘Otherwise he’s not fit to be consort to the Droning of Skerra.’

  Persephone looked as if she had heard the legend so many times it wasn’t even worth commenting on.

  Being a princess evidently wore thin.

  ‘And any woman who wants to challenge for the iron crown has to face you in single combat,’ Jeperson added.

  ‘They’re welcome to try.’

  The Sea King circled the whirlpool, clockwise to its anticlockwise. It was too much for Yoland, who finally spewed. Aircrewman Kydd tactfully provided a paper bag.

  ‘Does he have to?’ asked Persephone, infinitely weary.

  ‘Yes, love, he does,’ said Kydd.

  The Droning of Skerra didn’t care to be addressed as ‘love’. Kydd was too busy tidying up after Yoland to notice her moué of annoyance.

  ‘Better out than in, sir,’ said Kydd, with cheery deference.

  Yoland nodded something like thanks.

  The helicopter passed over the Kjempestrupe and approached the island. Skerra was a volcanic extrusion, originally expelled through a hernia in the planet’s crust, bursting molten above the seas to solidify like an igneous loaf, then shaped and sculpted by unrelenting wind and water. When the satellite pictures had come in, the first theory was that the volcano was active again. Met Office wags nicknamed it ‘McKrakatoa’.

  The squared-off cliffside had been gouged out by millennia of brutally battering waves. A torrent poured into the vast cavemouth, and washed back out again as froth. The island was hollow, like a decayed tooth. It should eventually collapse on its caverns and become rocks strewn across the seabed, lamented by no one but map-maintainers and reduced-to-commoner female Gills.

  The ridge of the cliff whizzed below.

  There wasn’t a tree on the island, though its upper slopes were infested with long, thick grass. Survivalist goats had persisted after the people left, the toughest specimens emerging from some cave-shelters to reclaim the surface. Their savage descendants looked to the sky as the helicopter passed overhead, but did not abandon tussock-chewing to run for cover. De Maltby and Kydd had been issued small arms, but Stacy fancied Skerran goats likely resistant to everything this side of depleted uranium shells. They were a prison population: faces smashed by head-butting horn-fights, flanks ripped by scars like tattoos, each lifer the perpetrator of a multiple rapes and dreeps.

  As the Sea King descended, propwash whipped grass into crop circles. De Maltby searched for a likely landing spot.

  Onions waved downwards, indicating to the pilot the urgency of making ground.

  Even as they hovered, the island slipped out from under the Sea King. De Maltby had to fight strong winds to avoid dipping in the drink. An intermittent stone wall rimmed what had once been a field. De Maltby put the Sea King down by it. After the rotors stopped, there was still whirring – the wind, trying to wipe the island into the sea.

  ‘I own this carbuncle,’ said Persephone Gill. ‘Any offers? I’d have to abdicate, but I think I could be persuaded by any convincing bid. A bean and a button?’

  Stacy wasn’t tempted. Even if owning Skerra meant being able to call herself a princess.

  ‘Let’s get out and make camp,’ said Onions. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’

  It wasn’t quite lunch-time and night was about to fall.

  No wonder Princess Percy wasn’t surprised by the lack of potential buyers.

  IV.

  In Chelsea, Stacy had told her driver to wait in the car and searched for the address she’d been given. She had the brown-paper parcel under her arm.

  The house didn’t show a street-number. Inset in the front door, where neighbours had number-plates, was an art nouveau stained-glass panel with an Ancient Egyptian eye motif.

  When Stacy thumbed the button, a bell jangled inside the house. Shadows shifted.

  She noticed the milk – eight bottles – hadn’t been taken in. A rain-eaten roll of free newspaper was rammed into the letter-slit, drooping like a fag from the mouth of a charlady in a 1970s ITV sitcom. Freesheets were the burglars’ friend – you couldn’t stop them when you went on holiday. From the looks of this place, the home-owner was never home. She wondered why DCI Regent thought she’d find him in.

  The clear glass pupil of the Egyptian eye darkened. A real eye looked out at her: startling silver-flecked blue-grey iris trapped in veinous cobweb.

  She held up her warrant card.

  ‘Come on in,’ boomed a voice. ‘’S’not locked.’

  She took the handle and pushed the door, which resisted. A small avalanche of newspapers, pizza menus, minicab cards, AOL start-up discs, estate agent’s brochures and letters from the council shifted, was ground under, then stopped the door dead at half-open.

  Stacy turned sideways and slipped into the house.

  She smelled incense, sweet and heavy. The long, narrow, crowded foyer rose three storeys to a murky glass roof. Potted plants exploded from tubs and grew up banisters, reaching tendrils toward the distant sun. Odd objects were piled at random: books of all formats and thicknesses, primitive masks, fancy-dress finery, dissected animals under glass domes, unsleeved vinyl records, unnameable musical instruments, ancient valve wirelesses in various states of dismantlement, obscure statuary. And multiple cats – which explained the milk. They roamed free, clambering and searching.

  ‘You must be from Fred.’

  Richard Jeperson stood before her: tall, thin and gaunt. He could have been any age, but working it out from the backstory – child in the War, career in the 1970s – Stacy knew he must be in his mid-sixties. When younger, he’d looked older; now, he just looked himself. Dramatic streaks ran through the Zapata moustache, but the long fall of tight curls was glossily black. He had the pale skin of someone who’s stayed indoors for decades, deep-etched around those silver-flashing eyes but unslack under the chin, unspotted on the backs of his hands.

  A Persian kitten peeped out of a pocket and a Siamese cat perched on his shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot. He wore suede winkle-picker shoes, pinstripe city-gent trousers, a turquoise kaftan tunic belted with a sash, and, as if to offset the Siamese, a gold-frogged green velvet greatcoat over his other shoulder, pocket unflapped so the kitten could breathe.

  ‘You expected Howard Hughes fingernails and a Ben Gunn beard?’

  He spoke like a theatrical knight, but his eyes were lively. She could imagine him headlining the Glastonbury Festival in 1972 or playing Don Quixote in a silent movie.

  She introduced herself as DS Cotterill.

  ‘Stacy,’ he said, surprising her. ‘Interesting career.’

  She wouldn’t have guessed that he kept up with New Scotland Yard.

  ‘Teenage model, then policewoman. Why the change?’

  Almost no one mentioned it any more. At Hendon Police College, she had done extreme things to blokes who thought it funny to go on about her after-school job. Jeperson had wrong-footed her, though he seemed genuinely interested rather than attempting a put-down.

  ‘It’s no life for a grown woman without an eating disorder,’ she said, uncomfortable. ‘And the agency dropped me when I refused to have my back-teeth
pulled. It was supposed to make my face look thinner.’

  He cocked his head to one side, then the other, considering her face.

  ‘I bet they wanted to keep the teeth.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, they did. All the girls’ teeth. In jam-jars in a cupboard, individually labelled. In solutions of brine.’

  ‘Better than a contract. You’re well out of that.’

  Jeperson looked at her face first and last. Which made him different from ninety-five per cent of men. That shouldn’t be a surprise; everything about him was different. She found herself almost disarmed, then remembered he was mad.

  ‘Come through to the study,’ he said, dislodging the Siamese, who streaked squirrel-fast up branches to the second-floor landing. The plant was a spreading green apocalypse, a tree that became a vine when it suited. It was stapled to the wall in several crucial places.

  ‘Would you believe this began as a cutting? From Yggdrasil, the Norse world-tree. A gift to the Diogenes Club from William Morris in the days of gaslight and pea-soup fogs. When Mycroft Holmes sat on the Ruling Cabal. Brother of the more famous. Charles Beauregard lived in this house then. You won’t have heard of him, though some scholar has been struggling to research a biography for years. I met Beauregard once, when I was a little lad. Nearly a hundred, but kept au fait with the comings and goings. A very interesting Englishman. Unlike me. I’m foreign, you know. Non-specific, but foreign.’

  He slipped back the cuff of his kaftan, to show a blue tattooed number.

  ‘Adopted by an Englishman, adopted by the Club. Raised for the position, as it were. I’m a foundling of War. I must have had a name and a nationality before 1945, but the cylinders don’t fire up here.’

  He tapped his temple.

  ‘Nothing before the Liberation. A few other gaps, sadly. It’s been a crowded life, so I have had to forget things to make room. Wish I could have planned better. I remember a great many things it would make sense to forget. But not…’

  He let the thought dangle and opened a door.

  The white study was strip lit. Windowpanes were whitewashed to match the walls, ceiling and carpet. A large picture hung opposite, canvas as blankly white as the frame. A milk-white shelving unit contained books with white, featureless spines. Soft white plastic cubes formed a settee along one wall and chairs around the room. Hard white plastic boxes made a desk and tables. A perfect-bound magazine for the blind, glossy pages stamped with Braille, lay open on a low table. A towering sound system, white as a fridge, played ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. The almost-invisible CD jewel-case on the floor reminded her the song was from the White Album.