The Man From the Diogenes Club Page 7

  ‘Steady on. You’re steaming up the Plexiglas.’

  ‘I mean, look at it. Angel Down, the Mummy’s Heart, the Blame Game, the Witch War, the Unhappy Medium… She was there, for all of them, in the thick of it.’

  ‘She wasn’t alone. A fellow named Winthrop was there too. He usually sits in Catriona’s chair.’

  ‘I’d expect you to say that. She’s had to fight her whole career against people like you.’

  ‘I’m very fond of Catriona Kaye…’

  …who was, in fact, the nearest thing he had to a mother. If Whitney Gauge were cleared to know more secrets, he could tell her Catriona wasn’t even the first female member of the Diogenes Club. Geneviève Dieudonné, Kate Reed, Amy Thomsett and Annette Amboise (whose memory was always a tiny stick-pin in his heart) also figured on the rolls… not to speak of Vanessa, Richard’s own ward, currently orienteering in the New Forest, picking up tradecraft between A levels at Cheltenham and a Sociology degree at the LSE. Provisional membership was waiting for Vanessa when she graduated, then she’d be in Nanny’s passenger seat on jaunts like this.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Hmmn, yes, what?’

  Richard back-tracked.

  ‘You’re absolutely right. Catriona sets a mark few can hope to live up to. You couldn’t choose a better heroine. And… the fact that your AD can’t see past your chest just goes to show why our country is better than yours.’

  Whitney Gauge’s mouth formed a perfect Lancôme Ô.

  ‘Just kidding, Minnie Mouse. Hands across the sea, and all that. This is an Anglo-American operation. Our two great nations are equal partners in the marriage.’

  ‘Only Britain is the chick, right? You do the dishes and have America’s dinner ready when it comes home?’

  Richard laughed. ‘Let’s not continue down that path. Besides, we’re where we’re going. Sekforde Street, Clerkenwell. That’s the Temple of Domina Oriens.’

  Aside from a gilded plaster man-in-the-moon on the lintel, the building had no distinguishing features. Near-identical premises housed a socialist reading room and a community centre for Piedmontese exiles, both closed. Trades union activists and Italian mini-monarchists were at home in front of the telly.

  ‘Ready for EVA?’ he asked.

  ‘Always.’

  He released the catch, and the dome rose. They got out and he shut the car.

  ‘Are you feeling anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Relief at being able to stand up and breathe. From the sidewalk, nada. You think I should try the door?’

  ‘Go on, fondle the knocker.’

  That came out as rather too Carry On, he felt.

  ‘I’d rather grab the knob,’ she said, and took hold. She let go again, sharply.

  ‘A shock?’

  ‘You think I’d know better,’ she admitted, momentarily pale under her tan. ‘The last hand that touched this was dipped in blood.’

  He looked at her palm.

  ‘Metaphorically, I mean,’ she explained. ‘If he got any on himself, I’m sure he wiped afterwards.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘I’m getting a man. In a hurry. And a lot of blood.’

  Richard pushed the door. It opened.

  ‘Too much of a hurry to lock up behind him.’

  Whitney Gauge reached for the gun she wasn’t carrying.

  ‘Do you have a nightstick or anything? What do you call it, a truncheon?’

  ‘I am not a policeman,’ he responded, with dignity.

  They stepped into the Temple. The foyer looked and smelled like the front of house of a small theatre. A tea urn and an assortment of biscuits filled a refreshments corner. A notice board behind the cashier’s desk displayed type-written schedules of ‘rituals, rites, oblations and obeisances’. A painting of an alien landscape was hung prominently. A lush, purplish-green jungle was inhabited by furtive creatures which might be crossbreeds of cockatoo and praying mantis. A gap in the fungoid trees showed a night-sky where the Earth shone amid a sprinkle of stars. He didn’t have to be a sensitive to intuit that this was the work of Luna Selene Moon.

  ‘Don’t look like fairies to me,’ said Whitney Gauge. ‘More like bugs.’

  ‘Have you ever met any fairies?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know what they look like?’

  ‘Imagination.’

  ‘Good answer.’

  A set of double-doors opened into an auditorium with a raised stage. The house-lights were on. An altar-cum-lectern was set up in front of a triptych which showed three faces of the moon. The symmetrical triple-moon, repeated on the backdrop and the altar, featured a grinning full moon sandwiched between two cruelly sly crescent profiles. Folding chairs were set out for a congregation or audience. A group of the chairs were overturned or had snapped shut. A person was curled up and bleeding in the middle of the mess.

  ‘Moon moon moon,’ he muttered.

  It was a middle-aged woman in a white robe with a yellow moon on the front. Luna Moon, the former Bridget Tully. Her long hair splayed around her head like an electrified crown. She had been stabbed or shot through the moon on her robe.

  Richard checked for a pulse and caught a last flicker.

  Then he was overwhelmed by visions. He was usually attuned simply to inchoate feelings or moods. Only in extreme circumstances did he pick up anything like an image.

  This was the most extreme circumstance.

  As the High Priestess departed her earthly shell for parts unknown, pictures crowded into Richard’s mind.

  Pictures in the style of Luna Moon.

  Trees with meaty leaves, greenish spongy craters, sugary glistening webs spun by asymmetric spiders with cherry-glacé eyes. The artist’s moon was edible. People in robes or jewelled diving suits frolicked – there was no other word for it – with the cockatoo-mantises or their relations, who looked like walrus-weasels or giraffe-fish. The pictures sped up, flickering like Méliès’ moon-shot film.

  ‘Richard?’

  He was on his knees by the dead woman, struck by acute ice-cream headache and stabbing chest pain.

  He had to let go of her, for fear that his consciousness would be pulled wherever hers had gone.

  Whitney snapped fingers in front of his face.

  He tried to keep the pictures in his memory. Each was crowded out by the next, like pages falling from an album into a fire.

  A final image lingered a few instants longer than the others. A different subject, a different style. An Earthscape, a weathered sign in a country lane. Woods and fields. It was daytime, but the moon was out, rising above the roof of an uninviting, large house.

  ‘Mildew Manor,’ he said.

  The image was gone, self-destructing in memory.

  But in speaking the words on the sign aloud, he had captured them.

  ‘Mildew Manor?’ Whitney responded. ‘What is that? A place? A picture? A state of mind?’

  ‘A novel by Thomas Love Peacock? I don’t know.’

  ‘Peacock wrote Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle…’

  ‘…and Headlong Hall and Gryll Grange…’

  ‘…but no Mildew Manor, so far as I know. He died trying to save his books from a fire.’

  ‘You didn’t learn that in the Mickey Mouse Club.’

  ‘We have libraries in California, too.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. I thought they’d all been torn down and turned into drive-in churches and no-tell motels…’

  Whitney let go of him, and they stood up.

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ she said, ‘this Olde Englishe Temple is exactly the kind of ridiculous made-up religion you’re stereotyping as Californian. Oh, and shouldn’t we concentrate on the bleeding woman?’

  ‘She can’t help us any more, poor love.’

  ‘She can’t help you, Richard…’

  Whitney knelt, and put her palm to the woman’s face.

  ‘You read people, I read things. She’s not people any more…’


  Whitney made contact, as with the door-knob, and juddered as if holding a live wire. She closed her eyes, pressed hard on Luna Moon’s face and forced herself to maintain the touch.

  Richard was concerned.

  She let go, opened her eyes and breathed again.

  ‘I hate that,’ she said.

  He helped her into the foyer. She sat on a saggy armchair next to a low table piled with mimeographed occult newsletters and glossy art magazines. She flipped open a powder-compact and examined her hairline minutely in the mirror.

  ‘Shall I get you tea from the urn? You need to replenish your electrolytes. Maybe some biscuits?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cookies.’

  ‘No, just tea… cold, if possible.’

  ‘Is there any other kind? This’ll be stewed.’

  He turned a spigot and thick brownish liquid filled a mug. The Temple had their own crockery, with a smiley moon decal.

  ‘Ah,’ Whitney said, in triumph, ‘there’s the slut!’

  She had plucked a single, silver-white hair from her head.

  ‘Every time,’ she said. ‘There’s always one.’

  She put her compact away and took the cold tea. She drained the mug as if on a dare, trying to get it down without tasting.

  He nibbled a stale custard cream.

  ‘What did you get from her?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think, Sherlock? A sharp, stabbing pain in the chest.’

  ‘Fear, annoyance…?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, that’s what you’ll have felt. Empathy, remember? I just get things. Sights, sounds, processes. Pain is a thing, not an emotion. The last thing she saw was a face, fading to black.’

  ‘Can you describe the murderer?’

  She held up her mug and pointed to the decal.

  ‘A moon-mask?’

  She nodded. ‘Something like that. But weirder. Yellow, hook nose, cratery skin, bulby forehead. Under curved glass, like a TV screen or a biker’s visor. No, not a crash helmet, a space helmet. No NASA or CCCP logo. It was a custom spacesuit. Old-fashioned, if that’s possible.’

  ‘Did you get an idea of the weapon.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The bastard held it up, showed it to her. A double-edged knife. Silvery. Carvings on the blade and hilt. That triple-moon thing.’

  ‘An athamé?’ suggested Richard. He knew she’d know what an athamé was.

  ‘Like that. Though it can’t have been a ritual killing. She wasn’t on the altar, or I’d have seen ceiling and the blade coming down. She was tapped on the shoulder, turned round, and was stabbed in the heart.’

  ‘Your moon-faced astronaut murdered her?’

  ‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘That’s what she saw. What did she feel?’

  Richard tried to remember the impressions he had taken from Luna Moon.

  ‘What I said. Not so much fear, more annoyance. She was irritated at being murdered, as if she’d had other things to do today and was more concerned about not ticking them off her list than being killed. I got a lot of pictures from her, but not real things. Whatever you think of that –’ he indicated the painting on the wall – ‘she was serious about art. The images in her mind were the ones she painted. Important to her. Pregnant with personal meaning.’

  ‘Mildew Manor?’

  ‘That stood out,’ he said. ‘All the other things were mental moonscapes. The Mildew Manor picture was earthly. The English countryside, somewhere.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a real place?’

  ‘No, but it’s important. Like your “old-fashioned” astronaut.’

  ‘Major Stabby.’

  ‘That’s his name?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it, but we have to call him something. You have to call out someone or something before you go after it. That’s good practice in magic, isn’t it?’

  He agreed.

  ‘Have you got your Girl Scout badge on you?’ he asked. She nodded. ‘Good. You might have to claim diplomatic immunity. Strictly speaking what we’ve done counts as tampering with Her Majesty’s Evidence in a Murder Inquiry. The plods won’t like it, but they’ll lump it. Luckily, we have a friend in New Scotland Yard…’

  Stumbling over a corpse within an hour of accepting a commission bordered on the vulgar. A telephone was on the front desk. He picked it up. First he would call Catriona Kaye. Then the police.

  * * *

  ‘This isn’t what I think of as a hotel bar,’ Whitney said. ‘Too big, too well lit, too classy.’

  ‘I trust you didn’t ring down to ask how to make the bed vibrate.’

  She poked her tongue out at him.

  Normally, that would have excited disapproval in Claridge’s, but even here everyone was only paying attention to the moon voyage. A single barman stayed at his post, while the rest of the staff were in a back room lit by a television set.

  Eight hours into its mission, Apollo 11 had shed its Saturn V rocket stages and left Earth orbit for cislunar space. Columbia, the command/service module, separated from the third stage and docked with the Eagle, the lunar excursion module. Broadcasters were already fed up with the technical chatter tossed between the Apollo crew and Mission Control (‘Houston’) but the public still found magic in the curt, arcane, tinny American voices. They were talking from outer space!

  Whitney had changed into a hot-pink minidress with a matching Alice band and go-go boots. Even the Claridge’s barman noticed her, and Richard was sure the great hotels put something in the staff tea to control natural urges insofar as lady guests were concerned.

  The only other people in the bar were a table of drunk young execs in city mod uniform – paisley foulards, dayglo shirts, two pieces of three-piece Savile row suits, shaped sideburns. They were toasting a guy named Roly, who had something to do with the packaging of Sky-Ray lollies (a big seller this season). Roly took credit for the visionary spirit of the space age between sudden, rapid trips to the Gents.

  None of the execs were so drunk that they didn’t shoot looks over at Whitney Gauge. She noticed. Richard noticed she noticed. She noticed Richard noticing. No one was in any doubt. She had conquered Britain without really trying.

  Naturally, Richard had ordered champagne and a platter of fresh strawberries. This was still a business meeting.

  Richard had remained on hand at the Temple of Domina Oriens as Inspector Price, the Diogenes Club’s liaison with Scotland Yard’s Department of Queer Complaints, supervised a team of scene-of-crime officers and forensics men as they examined and then removed the body of Luna Moon, and searched the building. The Club and DQC had a policy of sharing information, not always observed. No bloody bootprints or daubed messages were found. Richard gave a reasonably detailed report of what he and Whitney had gathered from the deceased, but Price couldn’t make much use of it. His boys were stuck with looking for witnesses, chasing up grasses and hoping for a credible confession. Embarrassingly often, even in Diogenes Club cases, boring old police-work turned up an answer before spookery. And you could take it into court, too.

  ‘Have we been through that rigmarole,’ said Whitney, biting down on a big ripe strawberry, ‘where the cops warn us off the case but we stay on it anyway?’

  ‘It’s not our place to catch murderers, love,’ he told her. ‘Though I daresay Euan Price would be grateful if we turned over a stone and found this one. If finding out who killed Miss Moon Moon Moon leads us to understand why we don’t have a Magister Rex Chalfont on the books, we should sleuth away to our hearts’ content. If it’s a side-issue, we drop it and try something else. Let’s face it, it would be just too bloody easy if Chalfont were our Major Stabby…’

  ‘Magisters generally leave athamé-work to minions. Unless it’s Aztec heart-ripping stuff.’

  ‘In Aztec mythology, the moon is the severed head of the goddess Coyolxauhqui, murdered – along with four hundred siblings – by her foetal half-brother Huitzilopochtli to forestall Coyolxauhqui’s attempt to force their mother Coatl
icue to have an abortion. How unlike the home-life of our own dear deity! Chup-Kamui, moon goddess of the Ainu, was so disgusted at having to bear witness to the night-time naughtiness of adulterers she swapped places in the pantheon with her brother and became a sun goddess instead.’

  ‘You’ve read this up, right?’

  Richard admitted it. ‘I took this from the Temple, and skimmed it while you were napping off jet lag.’

  He tossed over a slender volume. Moon Myths, by Enzo Yarikh.

  ‘If you need to tell your Basque Ilazki from your Dahomeyan Gleti, this is your I-Spy Guide… They’re all moon gods and goddesses. Mostly goddesses. Selene was a Greek goddess. Well, a Titan. Luna was Roman, aka Luna Noctiluca. Humanity has been venerating our satellite since cave-days. There’s a Neolithic stone circle in the Hebrides that tracks the risings of the moon in an extremely sophisticated manner. Looking up at the night sky is nothing new. And the moon is the biggest, shiniest thing in it.’

  Whitney flicked through the pages.

  ‘No pictures,’ she said.

  ‘The moon affects the tides, women’s cycles, the proverbial lunatic… and some werewolves, though not as many as Lon Chaney Junior would have you believe…’

  Whitney gave him back the book and stretched in her chair like a cat. On the other side of the room, she won enthusiastic reviews.

  The mastermind of lolly wrapper design finally got drunk enough to do more than look sidelong at the tall blond bird. Encouraged by perhaps ill-intentioned comrades, Roly spacewalked across acres of carpet and stood over their table. He had a transparent moustache.

  ‘Is this hippie bothering you, Pink Lady?’ he asked Whitney, using the burp-speech recommended for those who have lost a larynx to throat-cancer. ‘Because, if he is, I could… ah… take care of him for you.’

  The other execs cheered. Roly was unsteady on his feet. Mr Sky-Ray Lolly didn’t look as if he were in any position to ‘take care of’ a stick insect on crutches.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, hoss – but this is my grandfather. I’m seeing he doesn’t get into trouble. He’s uncontrollable around women.’

  The young exec looked at Richard, trying to focus.

  ‘Have a strawberry, old chap,’ said Richard.