The Man From the Diogenes Club Read online

  ‘And Her Britannic Majesty,’ said Sewell Head, conquering panic and rising to the occasion, ‘at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar; and that no refuge or shelter shall be allowed to any Moorish ships of war in the harbour of the said town, whereby the communication between Spain and Ceuta may be obstructed, or the coasts of Spain be infested by the excursions of the Moors.’

  Rory laughed and pointed.

  ‘I love this guy. Penny in the slot. He knows the answer. Anyway, by the end of the evening, Local Hero is bleeding from the arse, fallen faces all round the room. Our Mr Head is off with a fistful of notes. And that’s another pub off the list. They call him the Triv Terminator.’

  ‘It’s not a memory trick,’ said Onions, warming. ‘He’s not some autistic savant with a set of encyclopaedias. He’s a puzzle-solver. We’ve never tested anything like him. He’s a Talent. Off the scale.’

  Head shrugged modestly.

  ‘I like to think things through,’ he said. ‘Make everything neat and tidy.’

  ‘Call him the zen master of quantum cleverness,’ said Rory.

  ‘Duke have offered the dean’s left nut for a free run at him,’ said Onions. ‘The Tibetans have their antennae a-twitch. He could take the field up to the next level. Scientifically verifiable. None of your “feelings” and “intuitions”, Jeperson. Cold, hard, steely data. And he can do it every time, under laboratory conditions.’

  Jeperson looked down at the little man.

  ‘He works in a sweet shop,’ said Rory.

  Onions gave a what-a-waste sigh.

  ‘Nothing in the constitution says everyone should be ambitious,’ continued Rory. ‘We dug out his old report book from Coal Hill Secondary Modern. Min Inf keeps copies of those, you know. I burned mine. Forgotten what your netball teacher thought of you, Detective Sergeant? We could find out. Any guesses which phrase came up all the time in young Sewell Head’s reports? All his teachers said it. Over and over.’

  Jeperson stroked his moustaches. He nodded to Stacy.

  “Could do better if he tried,”’ she said, flatly.

  Rory thumped the desk in delight.

  ‘Spot bloody-on. Give Juliet Bravo a cuddly panda. Cripes, the brainpower in this room! Find a way to harness it, and we could light up Blackpool’s Golden Mile.’

  Jeperson gave Rory a penetrating look, then left Head in his corner.

  He took off his coat and threw it on the table. It flopped over Morag Duff’s minidisc recorder, and lay like the king’s deer tossed dead onto Guy of Gisbourne’s table by Robin Hood.

  ‘Adam,’ said Jeperson, seriously, ‘tell me about the apport.’

  Rory tried a ‘now-we-come-to-brass-tacks’ chuckle but it died.

  Onions looked at the coat. Stacy unrolled the brown paper and let the other coat (the same coat?) lie next to the original (copy?).

  Onions bit his lower lip.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeperson, insistently, ‘they’re the same. Not in the way two peas in a pod are the same, but in the way one unique special never-to-be-repeated, once-in-a-lifetime pea is the same as itself.’

  ‘What’s an apport?’ Stacy asked.

  ‘A physical object manifested supernaturally,’ said Sewell Head.

  ‘Rabbit out of a hat,’ footnoted Jeperson.

  ‘At I-Psi-T, we’ve documented the phenomenon extensively,’ said Onions. ‘Apports are often household items. Inanimate. We have a collection. Hairbrushes, fireplace pokers, a clock with mangled guts. One theory is that they slip through wormholes, travel in time. Miss 1893 loses her garter and it pops up a hundred years later, to the bewilderment of all concerned. Others don’t obviously come from the past or future but from somewhere else.’

  ‘Dimension Xxxx,’ said Jeperson in a hollow, echoey, radio-announcer voice.

  ‘We discourage that sort of talk, but yes… some other continuum, where things are put together differently. That clock is interesting. Turned up in a bus station in Eastbourne. We have it on the surveillance camera. Not there one instant, there the next. Its insides are the bones of small animals we can’t identify, fitted together with sticky gum we can’t analyse, generating a small but quantifiable electric current. Because it didn’t keep very good time, we thought it was something disguised as a clock. Then Mr Head worked out that it keeps perfect time, if hours were to ebb and flow like the tides, getting longer then shorter again. The cycle is beyond me but he says it makes perfect sense.’

  Head nodded.

  ‘So this is pretending to be your coat?’ she asked Jeperson.

  ‘No, this isn’t like the clock. This is my coat. Messrs Drecker and Coote, Savile Row and Carnaby Street. Made to my order in 1968. And this is my coat too. It has just come here by a different route.’

  ‘A rough route, by the looks of it,’ said Rory. ‘We DNA-tested the blood.’

  ‘Some of it’s yours,’ said Onions, enjoying the thought.

  ‘And the rest of it’s mine,’ put in Sewell Head.

  VII.

  Skerra Landsby barely qualified as a ruin. All the buildings were roofless, and most of the walls had fallen. A war memorial (Boer, 1914–1918) was a brass plaque, names unreadable, plinth aswarm with bubblewrap seaweed. Stacy remembered mindlessly happy childhood days at Southend-on-Sea, bursting the little brown bags between thumb and forefinger, jimmying whelks off rocks with her Swiss Army knife.

  More collapsed tents flapped in the wind, tethered by skewers.

  Onions’s torch was the only light.

  There was supposed to be a Royal Navy assault team here, despatched under cover of a training exercise, kitted out with arms to last through a small war. Her understanding was that the boffins’ security would be provided by Captain Vernon’s mob, who had been here before and scoped out the potential dangers. That was out the window.

  ‘What do you suppose happened?’ Persephone asked her.

  ‘Nothing good.’

  The Droning of Skerra chewed that over. As the expedition’s volunteer, she must be kicking herself. Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory had decided they ought to ask Persephone before camping out on her island. She’d given in to a whim, insisting she be taken along to check out her realm. Ascot was a wash this year, evidently.

  Onions and Yoland climbed a wall which extended into the sea, and walked out across the waves. Onions shone his torch at the A-Boat, which was in a sorry state, hull shattered below the waterline.

  ‘We should be below,’ said Jeperson.

  ‘Out of this bloody weather,’ put in Persephone. ‘Too right.’

  Head skinned the wrapper from a Twix and bit off both biscuit fingers at once.

  ‘My understanding,’ said Jeperson, calling out to Onions, ‘was that all the observed manifestations were in the caverns. Up here, it’s just wind and goats.’

  Yoland and Onions stuck out their arms like tightrope walkers and came back to shore, footing wobbly on none-too-secure stones. Yoland took a run at the last few feet and jumped onto dry land.

  Onions made a show of coming to a decision.

  ‘We should make our way to the Blowhole,’ he said.

  Jeperson refrained from pointing out that he had made that suggestion when it was still light.

  ‘Lead on,’ said Stacy.

  Onions looked at his map and strode uphill.

  Before his light got too far away, everyone fell in behind him.

  VIII.

  CI Regent had turned up at Euston to see the party off on the midnight sleeper for Edinburgh. While Really-a-Good-Bloke Rory issued ‘non-optional suggestions’ to the man from ‘Pronounced “Eyesight”’ and Sewell Head filled a carrier-bag with sweeties, Regent had a moment with Richard Jeperson. Stacy gathered they hadn’t talked in over ten years. She hung back tactfully and wondered if she’d packed enough warm clothes. Before she boarded the train, he
r guv’nor took her aside, nodded at Jeperson, and said, ‘He’s special, take care of him.’ She agreed he was and promised she would.

  The first leg didn’t even get them halfway to Skerra. At Edinburgh Airport, they breakfasted and Persephone Gill joined the party, with luggage. A private jet, a luxurious waiting room with wings, flew them to Thurso, almost as far north on the mainland as John O’Groats. Stacy had never been to Scotland before. Edinburgh seemed essentially London with different accents. Only after flying over green glens and glinting thin lochs for tedious hours, did she have a real sense of being hideously off her patch.

  If she’d been asked yesterday where Thurso was, she’d have ventured a guess at Antarctica; she wasn’t sure now that she’d have been wrong. At home, whether in her flat or on duty, she knew how to get Tampax, small-arms ammunition or last Thursday’s daily papers at three in the morning. Here, she wasn’t even sure what to ask for when she needed directions to the Ladies.

  In Thurso, mid-afternoon, they all had complete medical check-ups at the Air-Sea Rescue station clinic. She got a five-minute once-over and a nurse congratulated her on not being pregnant and having all her limbs. Jeperson was in with the woman for an hour and a half. Everyone else sat around a reception area. Sewell Head offered round Fisherman’s Friends, and hers went tasteless during the wait. When let free, Jeperson shrugged an apology. He kissed the nurse’s hand; she gave him a seal of approval that struck Stacy as a lot more personal than the one everyone else in the party had stamped on their file.

  Then they were all put in a ‘guest house’, opened especially out of season. Before dinner, Viscount Henry de Maltby made himself known. He looked with disdain down Persephone’s dress, said ‘uhhhm’ several times, then had a huddle with Adam Onions to go over charts and reports. Aircrewman Kydd was there, too, rubber-faced and cheery, Falklands and Gulf War I insignia on his jersey shoulder.

  ‘Better get an early night,’ suggested Onions.

  That made Jeperson decide to stay up by the fire in the snug. Stacy’s prime directive was to be his minder so she did too. Onions frowned a little, but plodded off up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire without complaint.

  This was the first time she had been alone with her charge since leaving his house thirty hours previously.

  She still didn’t know what to make of him.

  ‘And who might you be, my dear?’ he asked.

  The snug was warm, but the question chilled her.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jeperson. ‘We’ve met. Pardon me.’

  He shut his eyes and massaged his temples. Then, he clicked his fingers.

  ‘All present and correct, Stacy. Fearfully sorry to give you a fright.’

  The knot inside her relaxed. Jeperson was so spry and mercurial it was too easy to forget his fragilities.

  He insisted on killing a bottle of thirty-year-old Scotch. After two busy days, a single tot made her head swim and she was seeing shapes in the fire. But he drank steadily without seeming more or less affected.

  By firelight, his face was dramatic, almost pantomimish.

  ‘CI Regent told me to catch up on my secret history,’ she ventured.

  ‘Sound advice.’

  ‘But if it’s secret…’

  ‘I see your problem. Don’t you have that welcomed-to-the-inner-circle feeling yet? Corridors of power, meetings with mandarins, transport laid on, Royals and Nobs, accommodation to order. It’s very different from chasing villains and making court dates.’

  ‘I still get the impression I’ve not been told anything.’

  Jeperson chuckled. ‘I’ve been in this game as long as I can remember, and I mean literally, and I feel like that too. Of course, I’m supposed to be super-sensitive. I don’t need to be told, because I have to keep on proving that I’m still sharp. I have to intuit, feel, scry…’

  He waved his fingers.

  ‘You and CI— You and Fred… used to work like this? In the seventies?’

  ‘Not quite like this, though he also came to the Diogenes Club from the Met. Only just out of uniform. Shaved his head to go undercover with a bovver gang.’

  So that was how he lost his hair!

  ‘Diogenes was the philosopher who lived in the barrel,’ she said, ‘told Alexander to get out of his light.’

  Jeperson raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve been on trivia teams too,’ she said. ‘But what is the Diogenes Club? Everyone goes on as if it were famous, but I’d never heard of it.’

  ‘The original idea was to be obscure. It was a club for the unclubbable. Also, a trunk of our family tree of intelligence agencies. It was there for all the business the other plods weren’t comfy with. Businesses like Misery Maudsley. That’d have been a Diogenes show in my day. Angel Down, Sussex. Tomorrow Town. The Seven Stars. Many other matters mysterious and malign. Few of which mean anything to the general public. Part of the game has always been protecting the Great British from knowledge deemed likely to send them off their collective nut.’

  ‘In my experience, the general public can cope with a lot.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ he said, swivelling his eyes to peer at her, thinking. ‘However, for more than a hundred years, the Diogenes Club was a court of last resort. The Ruling Cabal were the original “spooks”. Before me, the Club harboured others with special interests. Mycroft Holmes, Charles Beauregard, Henry Merrivale. Women, too: the Diogenes was the first gentleman’s club to go co-ed. Katharine Reed, Catriona Kaye, Dion Fortune. My immediate sponsors were my adoptive father, Geoffrey Jeperson, and Beauregard’s protégé, Edwin Winthrop. My intention was that Fred and… and another person, unknown to you… should succeed me. It didn’t work out like that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing dramatic. Drip-drip-drip of history. Some might blame Arthur Conan Doyle. He let Dr Watson put in print the observation that Mycroft Holmes not only worked for the British Government but “on some occasions, was the British Government”. Naturally, that earned a black demerit in Whitehall. Steps were taken to ensure that those occasions never reoccaised. Winston Churchill spent years trying to set limits on the remit of the Diogenes Club. He was a man for fixations, hanging onto Hitler, standing up to India (pardon me, twixt and about) and curbing that blasted Club.’

  Jeperson frowned and somehow made his face Churchillian. He laughed, breaking the illusion, and refilled his glass.

  ‘When I was under Winthrop, adventuring with Fred, successive governments were fractious. This is what happens when you become Prime Minister, or used to anyway. Just after you’ve had tea with the Queen and been given the launch codes for the independent nuclear deterrent, the man from the Diogenes Club presents you with irrefutable evidence that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than came up on Any Questions? during the election campaign. If you’re very polite, the Man tells you who Jack the Ripper was, what happened to the Mary Celeste and where that thing at Roswell the Yanks are so bloody sure is an alien spacecraft actually comes from. PMs shudder and stick their heads in the sand. The Diogenes Club is then left to get on with defending the realm from ghosties and ghoulies.’

  She thought of pressing him on the identity of Jack the Ripper, but the moment passed.

  ‘Winthrop did Wilson and Heath. Your darlin’ Harold grumbled a bit but sat up straight when he was shown a genuine fifteenth-century manuscript describing the course late-twentieth-century history would take if British troops were committed to fight in Vietnam. Ted Heath got very enthusiastic and interested in curses and banes in the context of industrial relations, then bothered Winthrop with “suggestions”. By the time Jim Callaghan took over, Winthrop was gone and I wound up with the thankless task. Actually, that’s inaccurate. Callaghan said, “Thank you very much.” I told him that the chicken entrails suggested it might be an idea to keep a gunboat or two near the Falklands, and he said right-o. Otherwise, he continued as if we didn’t exist. Which was as it should be. Then, in 1979… I bet you can guess the rest.’

&nb
sp; ‘Margaret Thatcher.’

  Jeperson raised his glass in toast.

  ‘Got it in one, Stacy. Margaret Hilda Roberts Boudicca Thatcher. Not so much a new broom as a new defoliant.’

  ‘She refused to believe in anything?’

  Jeperson smiled.

  ‘Oh no. She knew it all beforehand. She had associations. The Club was never alone in its interests. It always had powerful rivals, and Mrs Empty… Mistress M. T.… was a sponsee of the worst of ’em. There was talk of privatisation, but in the end she went for dismantling us, tearing up the historic charter, boarding up the premises in Pall Mall. Those who could be pensioned off, were. Some others were kept out of it with the threat of prosecution or worse. Fred was seconded back to his original job and began his long slow climb at the Yard. I, ah, had several episodes which did me no credit. There is such a thing as feeling too deeply. Mrs Empty, you’ll gather, scrapped the South Atlantic gunboats too. You know how that played out.’

  ‘Where does Onions come into it?’

  ‘O-nye-ons? He’s a scientist, you know. Not a crackpot. Well, just because the Diogenes Club was out of commission didn’t mean that the vast and strange forces of the world slacked off. There were still ghosties and ghoulies. And some official response was required. “Pronounced ‘Eyesight’” was a typical Thatcher body – not responsible to parliament, a huge drain on public money, and with barely a result to show for it. But it is scientific. It’s a wonder they didn’t try to sell shares. Onions publishes enough to keep tenure and submits reports on the practical applications of the paranormal. John Major’s man originally, he’s very New Labour now. The woman who left her cap at that meeting is covertly the Minister for All Things Weird. “Heritage and Sport” is a euphemism, of course. The last Big Idea was that economic blackspots were under ancient curses. Focus groups were quizzed as to how to lift the gloom. They came up with the Millennium Dome. One could be forgiven for weeping. The whole apparatus trundles along, most of the time. It has managed tolerably without me.’

  ‘And you? You left it all behind?’