The Man From the Diogenes Club Read online

  ‘How did Tippi Hedren get out of this in The Birds?’ Whitney asked.

  ‘Hard to say. The film has an ambiguous ending.’

  They began to back away, very slowly. More ducks made it to land.

  ‘What about in the original story?’ Whitney asked.

  ‘That doesn’t have an ambiguous ending. That has an apocalyptic ending.’

  ‘So, no help there. Thank you, Daphne Du Maurier.’

  ‘Dame Daphne. It was in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.’

  ‘Swell. Remind me to send a congratulation card. Should we turn and run now?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You really think they might be friendly lunatic psycho ducks?’

  Richard held out his hand, flat-palmed, and said, ‘Stop!’

  It worked, for almost a second. Then the ducks flew at them, and they ran.

  * * *

  The doorman of the Diogenes Club passed no comment on the state of their apparel. Over the years, he had seen worse.

  Richard and Whitney were bloodied and shredded, bruised by bills and scratched by webbed feet – who knew duck-feet had barbs? They’d only got away because the birds wouldn’t leave the park.

  ‘Really,’ said Major Took-Flemyng to no one in particular, as they entered the lobby, ‘it’s a bloody disgrace!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Richard to the Major. ‘Bit of a difficult day.’

  ‘Still, to bring a woman into the club…’

  Richard gripped Whitney’s arm. In her current ticked-off and duck-assailed state, she might serve the Major worse than her brother Trap.

  ‘Is there a problem, Major?’ asked Catriona, popping out of the Quiet Room, which was on the first-floor landing, to stood at the top of the broad stairs.

  Took-Flemyng’s misogyny evaporated in an instant. He revealed dentures in a would-be ingratiating grin and bowed low.

  ‘No indeed, Miss Kaye. No problem of any kind. Might I say how charming you look this afternoon?’

  ‘You might. Now, run along, Major.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Kaye.’

  Took-Flemyng trotted into the Informal Room, glowing like a schoolgirl awarded a gold star by ‘Miss’ in front of the whole form.

  ‘If Daphne Du Maurier got damed, why not Catriona Kaye?’ Whitney whispered.

  ‘Diogenes Club tradition,’ he told her. ‘Turning down the K. I’ve only turned down the MBE. Catriona turned down a peerage once. We don’t like to clutter our calling cards with letters.’

  ‘If you say so, Galahad.’

  Catriona had Hills bring them a change of clothes – a mauve tracksuit with white piping for Whitney, an orange-and-black kaftan for Richard – and personally cleaned and dressed their minor wounds. The Diogenes Club first-aid kit had a few unusual items. Besides iodine, Catriona applied sigils of something herbal to speed the healing.

  ‘Attacked by ducks,’ said Catriona, as Richard and Whitney drank tea in the Quiet Room. ‘That’s not the strangest item today. We’ve had a rash of incidents. People and animals howling at the moon. Even in daylight. There’s a lot of – and I use the word carefully – lunacy about. Schoolchildren playing “spacemen and monsters” on a bomb site in Streatham managed to vaporise a builders’ hut with plastic rayguns. A horticulturist in Surrey nearly choked to death on the poisonous exhalations of a greenhouse full of man-in-the-moon marigolds. Leaping fish beset an angler on the Trent.’

  ‘Is it all connected?’ Whitney asked.

  ‘Almost certainly. Tiresome, isn’t it? So, you’ve been to see the Witch. Any joy?’

  Richard passed on what Margery Device had told them.

  ‘She told us Luna Moon was in this Chalfont Group,’ he said. ‘It might be worth our while running down a membership list. Chalfont is off the books, but if we identify known intimates we ought to get a better picture.’

  He expected Catriona to use the antique telephone to ring through to the Archive Room.

  Instead, she said, ‘I daresay the Chalfont Group found room for a science fiction writer called Mungo Zyle, an explorer named Walter Vereker and a middle-aged dropout born Lawson Hogg but known as “the Hermit of Taunton”.’

  She let the names lie.

  ‘You didn’t know about them yesterday,’ he said. ‘What brought them to your attention?’

  ‘They were alive yesterday morning,’ she admitted. ‘In the afternoon and evening, in quick succession, in locations five hundred miles apart, they were stabbed to death. Probably with the same athamé used to kill Luna Moon. Zyle’s wound had traces of someone else’s blood in it. The assassin didn’t even wipe tools between jobs.’

  ‘Can we definitely link them to Chalfont?’

  ‘Only by inference. We can link them to each other, though. They were of a like age, fell into the category of “crank”, and have criss-crossing biographies. Luna Moon did covers for Mungo Zyle’s books. Zyle and his wife Anemone co-authored the Moonmist Trilogy. It’s all trilogies nowadays. I blame Johnny Tolkien. Vereker was arrested at Glastonbury Tor in 1949, taking part in a druidical erotic hullabaloo involving Hogg and a gaggle of silly women in robes. All our victims have a roundabout or direct interest in the topic of the day. Moon-worship. You’ll appreciate this: Hogg’s farm makes green cheese.’

  ‘Is the Chalfont Group wiped out?’ asked Whitney. ‘Are there any surviving members?’

  ‘We can take a guess at Anemone Zyle, since she’s disappeared. In other circumstances, she’d be our favoured suspect. I’ve got research moles digging for others with connections to one or more of our dead people. They’ve made some suppositions. There’s a publisher named Maurice Nordstrom, who isn’t in his office today. I had a nice chat with his secretary. Nordstrom & Haw specialise in science fiction, so you’d think he’d be high on Apollo. In fact, he’s been in a sulk for months.’

  ‘There’s a theory the moon landing is bad for science fiction.’

  ‘I’ve heard it. Nordstrom publishes the Zyles, also Vereker’s books on mountain-climbing. Vereker used to scale Swiss and South American peaks with a Rudolf Gosling, a nasty piece of work who leads the English Liberation Front – which is a fancy name for yet another fascist party. Their command bunker is called “the Laburnums”. It’s in Acacia Road, Frinton. It has net curtains. The ELF tried to get Enoch Powell to join the cause, and got an erudite earful. Gosling is another of Bridget Tully’s old beaux. According to his deputy leader, he’s too busy to talk with strange women. Speaking of strange women, Hogg’s Farm was home to a quantity of loose young persons who helped make his cheese. I imagined hermits lived alone, but evidently this one liked the company. They’ve all scarpered without trace. So, that’s quite a little lot of disappearees.’

  ‘The only one I’ve met is Rudy Gosling,’ said Richard. ‘His party symbol is an Eismond, a moon of ice. It derives from one of Himmler’s crackpot notions. We couldn’t prove anything, but came away from that Handsworth Thuggee business with a strong sense that the ELF were mixed up in it. I wouldn’t put it past him to stick an athamé into anyone.’

  ‘I began one of those Moonmist novels,’ said Whitney. ‘It had a map on the first page, with place-names that were anagrams of brands of detergent. Then a glossary of “moon talk” that went on for pages. After that, on the first page proper, the lunar controller was described as “resting her chin on her elbows”. I threw the book in the trash.’

  ‘Margery said Luna Moon was in “the moderate wing” of the Chalfont Group,’ said Richard. ‘I suppose the other victims were with her. Which leaves, what? The radical wing.’

  ‘The nasty wing,’ said Whitney.

  ‘As good a label as any. Put it on a T-shirt. Chalfont, or whoever heads the group, has had his Night of the Long Athamé and cleaned house. So, where have the nasties disappeared?’

  ‘Everyone’s gone to the moon?’ suggested Whitney.

  Richard tried not to hum that song.

  ‘Initially, I think Cumberland more likely,’ said Catr
iona. ‘That’s the hint Margery was dropping. The Witch is usually on the money.’

  ‘Where the hell is Cumberland?’ asked Whitney.

  ‘Beyond the range of the Trident,’ said Richard. ‘We’ll need the Rolls.’

  Catriona picked up the phone and began dialling with the end of her cigarette holder. ‘I’m concerned about Margery’s “prepare to repel boarders” analogy,’ she said. ‘I want to make sure you don’t visit Mildew Manor without proper covering fire.’

  Whitney saluted. Richard could almost hear drums.

  Catriona got through to the underground exchange, and played the code-word-and-response parlour game to clear a classified international line. It took her less time than it would take an ordinary telephone subscriber to reach the speaking clock.

  ‘Houston,’ she said, when connected, ‘you have a problem.’

  * * *

  ‘A pick-and-mix landscape, Cumberland,’ said Whitney. ‘You’ve got your rocks, your grass, your lakes, your mountains. And, oh, no matter how summery it is, it’s wet underfoot.’

  ‘Funnily enough, that’s been noticed before.’

  Richard’s Rolls-Royce ShadowShark was parked in a lay-by opposite the chained-off turning. The ‘Private Road – Trespassers Will Be Dealt With Harshly’ sign Margery Device had described hung from the chain. The ‘o’ in ‘Road’ was a stuck-on Eismond decal with ELF written across it. It might as well have been a neon sign with ‘Secret Lair’ on it.

  Richard wore baggy jungle camouflage trousers and a padded mint-green cagoule, custom-made army boots with gadgets secreted in heel and sole, a jaunty ‘Che Guevara’ beret and World War One aviator goggles. Whitney had kept the tracksuit and photochromatic shades from yesterday, augmented with an even jauntier ‘Bonnie Parker’ beret. He had turned down several offers of guns, and persuaded a reluctant Whitney not to tool up either. She’d acquired a knobkerrie walking stick – the sort country people said they needed for walking down lanes, but mainly used for beating townies who trespassed in fields – and could twirl it like a baton.

  Two army lorries were parked nearby. A platoon of squaddies was having tea around a mobile canteen, wondering why they weren’t back in barracks watching the telly. Apollo 11 was only hours away from lunar orbit. A matching US Army team was due to show up to make this a joint Anglo-American operation. A diversion was in force, steering traffic away from the Mildew Manor area. Fell-walkers were being advised to fell-walk the other way. Anthrax was mentioned, though the cover story was getting whiskery. If you added up the times the British public were warned of an anthrax spill to keep them away from something that would terrify them even more, you’d assume the United Kingdom was knee-deep in the stuff. According to Whitney, the American equivalent was ‘experimental nerve toxin’ – though when an experimental nerve toxin actually leaked, the no-go area was blamed on foot-and-mouth.

  Catriona insisted the soldiers were only there to maintain a perimeter. This was a business for specialists.

  ‘Spectacular views all around,’ said Whitney, ‘except in that direction.’

  A thicket of trees lined the private road and swelled to a copse.

  ‘You’d think it’d been cultivated that way,’ she said.

  ‘A shrewd observation. Successive owners of Mildew Manor have had things to hide. In the eighteenth century, when banditti prowled the Lake District, this was the home of the wickedest man in England, Nick Goodman – yes, the irony was noticed in his lifetime – and his equally depraved wife, the dreadful Eithne Orfe. We’ve got two filing cabinets on them.’

  ‘But nothing on Rex Chalfont.’

  ‘No need to rub it in.’

  Catriona had a theory that Chalfont had a government connection, and used his pull years ago to stay out of the files. In London, she was following this up – in the few moments when she wasn’t suffering transatlantic phone calls from aggrieved, disbelieving and distracted American officials.

  The intelligence had not been well received at NASA, even after Assistant Director Spilsby endorsed the report. He took the issue more seriously now than four days ago, when he had packed Whitney Gauge off to poke into it. Along with the global epidemic of moon madness, ‘developments’ in space were troubling. LM Pilot Aldrin’s report that he ‘saw a light moving which was not a star’ was bleeped from television coverage. Anyone who used the term ‘unidentified flying object’ was liable to summary dismissal. Ranger 8 and Surveyor 5, unmanned probes officially dead since their publicly announced missions, had long since repurposed as weaponised robots – packed full of gizmos which guaranteed the Soviets a hot-foot if they tried to steal a march on Apollo with their Zond moon orbital vehicle. The probes had gone ‘offline’ after broadcasting signals that they were subject to Unusual Uncategorised Stress. Surveyor 5’s last message suggested it was being ‘eaten’. It was hotly debated how seriously spook stuff should be taken. A roomful of technocrats and science guys were having a hard time adjusting their worldview to take in a magic threat. Richard had suggested telling them the UUS was an anthrax outbreak.

  Dusty contingency plans for engaging with ‘hostiles’ on the moon were hauled out of cabinets and had their seals broken. These turned out to be of no practical use: they were all contingent on either a) an unknown foreign power whose spacecraft had markings in the Cyrillic alphabet having sneakily established a covert moonbase, or b) an aggressive extra-terrestrial intelligence lurking in the craters with rayguns in its tentacles. Whoever was responsible for Plan B didn’t take seriously the possibility of it ever being considered for use, and proposed drafting Flash Gordon and Captain Video. Interested parties argued over what to tell the astronauts, awaiting a decision from Senator Edward Kennedy. It turned out Kennedy chaired the Oversight Committee which effectively ran the ‘Unnameables’. Even Richard was surprised to learn that. When JFK appointed Bobby Attorney General, he gave his other brother a secret job Teddy had hung on to through successive administrations.

  In a lorry designated ‘Forward Command Post One’, Captain ‘Mac’ Maitland – who sported a rakish eyepatch, but had a haircut more suited to a Swinging Blue Jean than an officer in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces – was on the field telephone.

  ‘The American army took a wrong turn and are up the Old Man of Coniston,’ said Mac in cut-glass Sandhurst tones – though Richard had read his file and knew he was the son of a Durham miner. ‘Typical shambles. The Yanks can put a man on the moon, but get lost in a tourist attraction. No offence, miss.’

  Richard and Whitney weren’t supposed to venture near Mildew Manor until Anglo-American combined forces were in situ.

  ‘Can we offer you tea?’ said Mac.

  Richard declined politely.

  A flight of birds broke out of the copse, giving Richard harrowing duckpond flashbacks…

  …then lightning struck out of a clear blue sky, three times. Close by. Flashes, no thunder. So, not ordinary lightning.

  Three lithe figures appeared in the road. They wore silver body-stockings, loose but clingy enough to show female form, bulbous spherical fish-bowl helmets, thick silver boots and gauntlets, plates of shiny body-armour and gunslinger belts hung with mystery tools. Their faces were painted bright green. Contoured chest-pieces were numbered in swirly hippie script: One, Two, Five. Richard looked around, but Three and Four weren’t here. Their absences made dents in the space-women’s formation.

  A couple of the squaddies laughed. None reached for rifles.

  The space-women all carried knives. Athamés.

  ‘Have you noticed we’ve been wearing “Attack Me” buttons ever since we visited the Temple of Domina Oriens?’ said Whitney.

  ‘Yes.’

  Two made the first move, tossing her athamé straight at Richard’s eyes. The blade was for stabbing, not balanced for knife-throwing. Whitney swung her knobkerrie and knocked the knife off course – it stuck into the side of Maitland’s lorry, inches from his head.

  One came at Whitney, high. Whitn
ey bent over as if to cartwheel, kicking out with a straight leg, catching One in her midriff, knocking her over. Her head rattled inside her fishbowl, but she got back on her feet.

  The soldiers had guns at hand now, but no idea what to do with them.

  Two jumped in the air, as if beginning a somersault, then popped out of space and reappeared instantly behind Richard, grabbing his arms. The country air was heavy with the smell of chemical discharge. Two had a solid hold on him, and he only hurt his head by ramming at her nose and thumping a heavy faceplate. Five advanced, lower lip sucked into her mouth, tossing her athamé from hand to hand like a Teddy girl with a flick-knife. She made teasing, stabbing motions. Now might be a good time for Maitland’s men to overcome natural gallantry and fire a warning shot into Five’s helmet.

  Whitney and One circled each other, short knife against long stick. Both made test jabs.

  Lightning struck again, cracking into the copse.

  Another space-woman – Three or Four? – was stuck in the tree. Not stuck up it, like a cat – in it, trunk and limbs embedded in old wood, head kinking out like a broken branch, face rough like bark.

  Two noticed and let Richard go. She grabbed her own helmet and twisted, but it wouldn’t come off. Five was distracted by what had happened to the scrambled space-woman, so Richard took her athamé away.

  Lightning unstruck – or so it seemed – and Whitney was blinking. One wasn’t there any more, though her smoking silver boots were.

  Two dropped to her knees, frantically struggling with her fishbowl.

  ‘Help her,’ Richard said to Five.

  He saw concern in the space-woman’s green face. After hesitation, she tried to help Two get her helmet off. Five held out her hand. Richard gave her back her knife, knowing she wanted it to cut through Two’s neck-piece not stick into his chest. Another practical, everyday use for his Talent. The blade broke and Five threw the hilt away in frustration. If Two’s face weren’t painted, she’d have gone green of her own accord. Her eyes bulged and her mouth gaped like the little boy in the dire warning public information commercial who ‘played spaceman’ with a plastic bag over his head.