The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Read online

  * * * *

  The Secret Files of

  The Diogenes Club

  [Diogenes Club 02]

  By Kim Newman

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  Contents

  The Gypsies in the Wood

  Richard Riddle, Boy Detective

  Angel Down, Sussex

  Clubland Heroes

  The Big Fish

  Another Fish Story

  Cold Snap

  Notes

  Who’s Who

  * * * *

  The Gypsies In The Wood

  ACT I: THE CHILDREN OF EYE

  i: “we take an interest”

  “Mr. Charles Beauregard?” asked Dr. Rud, squinting through pince-nez.

  Charles allowed he was who hiscarte de visite said he was.

  “Of... the Diogenes Club?”

  “Indeed.”

  He stood at the front door. The Criftins, the doctor’s house, was large but lopsided, several buildings close together, cobbled into one by additions in different stone. At once household, clinic, and dispensary, it was an important place in the parish of Eye, if not a noteworthy landmark in the county of Herefordshire. On the map Charles had studied on the down train, Eye was a double-yolked egg: two communities, Ashton Eye and Moreton Eye, separated by a rise of trees called Hill Wood and an open space of common ground called Fair Field.

  It was mid-evening, full dark and freezing. His breath frosted. Snow had settled thick in recent weeks. Under a quarter moon, the countryside was dingy white, with black scabs where the fall was melted or cleared away.

  Charles leaned forward a little, slipping his face into light-spill to give the doctor a good, reassuring look at him.

  Rud, unused to answering his own front door, was grumpily pitching in during the crisis. After another token glance at Charles’s card, the doctor threw up his hands and stood aside.

  A Royal Welsh Fusilier lounged in the hallway, giving cheek to a tweeny. The maid, who carried a heavy basin, tolerated none of his malarkey. She barged past the guard, opening the parlour door with a practiced hip-shove, and slipped inside with an equally practiced flounce, agitating the bustle-like bow of her apron-ties.

  Charles stepped over the threshold.

  The guard clattered upright, rifle to shoulder. Stomach in, shoulders out, eyes front, chin up. The tweeny, returning from the parlour, smirked at his tin soldier pose. The lad blushed violet. Realising Charles wore no uniform, he relaxed into an attitude of merely casual vigilance.

  “I assume you are another wave of this invasion?” stated the doctor.

  “Someone called out the army,” said Charles. “Through channels, the army called out us. Which means you get me, I’m afraid.”

  Rud was stout and bald, hair pomaded into a laurel-curl fringe. Five cultivated strands plastered across his pate, a sixth hanging awry—like a bell-pull attached to his brain. Tonight, the doctor received visitors without ceremony, collarless, in shirtsleeves and waistcoat. He ought to be accustomed to intrusions at all hours. A country practice never closed. Charles gathered that the last few days had been more than ordinarily trying.

  “I did not expect a curfew, sir. We’re good, honest Englishmen in Eye. And Welshmen too. Not some rebellious settlement in the Hindu Kush. Not an enemy position, to be taken, occupied and looted!”

  The guard’s blush was still vivid. The tweeny put her hands on her broad hips and laughed.

  “Your ‘natives’ seem to put up a sterling defence.”

  “Major Chilcot has set up inspection points, prohibited entry to Hill Wood, closed the Small Man.

  “I imagine it’s for your protection. Though I’ll see what I can do. If anything is liable to lead to mutiny, it’s shutting the pub.”

  “You are correct in that assumption, sir. Correct.”

  Charles assessed Rud as quick to bristle. He was used to being listened to. Hereabouts, he was a force with which to be reckoned. Troubles, medical and otherwise, were brought to him. If Eye was a fiefdom, the Criftins was its castle and Dr. Rud—not the vicar, Justice of the Peace or other local worthy—its Lord. The doctor didn’t care to be outranked by outsiders. It was painful for him to admit that some troubles fell beyond his experience.

  It would be too easy to take against the man. Charles would never entirely trust a doctor.

  The bite-mark in his forearm twinged.

  Pamela came to mind. His wife. His late wife.

  She would have cautioned him against unthinking prejudice. He conceded that Rud could hardly be expected to cope. His usual run was births and deaths, boils and fevers, writing prescriptions and filling in certificates.

  None of that would help now.

  This sort of affair rang bells in distant places. Disturbed the web of the great spider. Prompted the deployment of someone like Mr. Charles Beauregard.

  A long-case clock ticked off each second. The steady passage of time was a given, like drips of subterranean water forming a stalactite. Time was perhaps subjectively slower here than in the bustle of London—but as inevitable, unvarying, inexorable.

  This business made the clock a liar. Rud did not care to think that. If time could play tricks, what could one trust?

  The doctor escorted Charles along the hallway. Gas lights burned in glass roses, whistling slightly. Bowls of dried petals provided sweet scent to cover medical odours.

  At the parlour door, the soldier renewed his effort to simulate attention. Rud showed the man Charles’s card. The fusilier saluted.

  “Not strictly necessary,” said Charles.

  “Better safe than sorry, sah!”

  Rud tapped the card, turning so that he barred the door, looking up at Charles with frayed determination.

  “By the bye, how precisely does membership of this institution, this club—with which I am unfamiliar—give you the right to interview my patient?”

  “We take an interest. In matters like these.”

  Rud, who had probably thought his capacity for astonishment exhausted, at once caught the implication.

  “Surely this case is singular? Unique?”

  Charles said nothing to contradict him.

  “This has happened before? How often?”

  “I’m afraid I really can’t say.”

  Rud was fully aghast. “Seldom? Once in a blue moon? Every second Thursday?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  The doctor threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said, “quiz the poor lad. I’ve no explanation for him. Maybe you’ll be able to shed light. It’ll be a relief to pass on the case to someone in authority.”

  “Strictly, the Diogenes Club has status rather than authority.”

  This was too much for Rud to take aboard. Even the mandarins of the Ruling Cabal could not satisfactorily define the standing of the Diogenes Club. Outwardly, the premises in Pall Mall housed elderly, crotchety misanthropes dedicated only to being left in peace. There were, however, other layers: sections of the club busied behind locked steel doors, taking an interest. Gentlemanly agreements struck in Whitehall invested the Diogenes Club as an unostentatious instrument of Her Majesty’s government. More often than the public knew, matters arose beyond the purview of the police, the diplomatic service, or the armed forces. Matters few institutions could afford to acknowledge even as possibilities. Some body had to take responsibility, even if only a job lot of semiofficial amateurs.

  “Come in, come in,” said Rud, opening the parlour door. “Mrs. Zeals has been feeding the patient broth.”

  The Criftins was low-ceilinged, with h
eavy beams. Charles doffed his hat to pass under the lintel.

  From this moment, the business was his responsibility.

  * * * *

  ii: “my mother said I never should”

  The parlour had fallen into gloom. Dr. Rud turned the gas-key, bringing up light as if the play were about to begin. Act 1, Scene 1: The parlour of the Criftins. Huddled in an armchair by the fire is...

  “Davey Harvill?”

  The patient squirmed at the sound of Charles’s voice, pulling up and hugging his knees, hiding his lower face. Charles put his hat on an occasional table and took off his heavy ulster, folding it over a high-backed chair.

  The patient’s eyes skittered, huge-pupilled.

  “This gentleman is...”

  Charles waved his fingers, shutting off the doctor’s preamble. He did not want to present an alarming, mysterious figure.

  The patient’s trousers stretched tight around thin shanks, ripped in many places, cuffs high on the calf like knee-britches. He was shirtless and shoeless, a muffler wrapped around bird-thin shoulders. His calloused feet rested in a basin of dirtied water. His toenails were like thorns. Many old sores and scars made scarlet lakes and rivers on the map of his very white skin. His thatch of hair was starched with clay into the semblance of an oversized magistrate’s wig; his beard matted into pelt-like chest-hair, threaded through with twigs; his moustaches hung in twisted braids, strung with bead-like pebbles.

  Glimpsing himself in a glass, Rud smoothed his own stray hair-strand across his scalp.

  Charles pulled a footstool close to the basin.

  The patient looked like Robinson Crusoe after years on the island. Except Crusoe would have been tanned. This fellow’s pallor suggested a prisoner freed from an oubliette. Wherever he had been marooned was away from the sun, under the earth.

  An animal smell was about him.

  Charles sat on the stool and took the patient’s thin hands, lifting them from his knees. His fingernails were long and jagged.

  “My name is Charles. May I talk with you?”

  The eyes fixed on him, sharp and bright. A tiny flesh-bulb, like a drop of fresh blood, clung to the corner of the right eyelid.

  “Talk, mister?”

  The voice was thin and high. He spoke as if English were unfamiliar, and his native tongue lacked important consonants.

  “Yes, just talk.”

  “Frightened, mister. Been so long.”

  The face was seamed. Charles would have estimated the patient’s age at around his own, thirty-five.

  Last week, Davey Harvill had celebrated his ninth birthday.

  The patient had a child’s eyes, frightened but innocent. He closed them, shutting out the world, and shrank into the chair. His nails pressed into the meat of Charles’s hands.

  Charles let go and stood.

  The patient—Davey, he had to be called—wound a corner of the muffler in his fingers, screwing it up close to his mouth. Tears followed runnels in his cheeks.

  Mrs. Zeals tried to comfort him, with coos and more broth.

  “Rest,” said Charles. “You’re safe now. Talking can wait.”

  Red crescents were pressed into the heels of Charles’s hands, already fading. Davey was not weak.

  The patient’s eyes flicked open, glittering in firelight. There was a cunning in them, now. Childlike, but dangerous.

  Davey gripped Charles’s arm, making him wince.

  “My mother said, I never should... play with the gypsies in the wood... if I did, she would say, ‘naughty girl to disobey!’“

  Davey let him go.

  The rhyme came in a lower voice, more assured, almost mocking. Not a grown-up voice, though. A feathery chill brushed Charles’s spine. It was not a boy’s rhyme, but something a girl would sing. Davey smiled a secret smile, then swallowed it. He was as he had been, frightened rather than frightening.

  Charles patted his shoulder.

  “Has he an appetite?” he asked the housekeeper.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep feeding hirn.”

  Mrs. Zeals nodded. She was part-nurse, probably midwife too. The sort of woman never missed until she was needed, but who then meant life or death. If a Mrs. Zeals had been in the Hill Country, Charles might still be a husband and father. She radiated good sense, though this case tested the limitations of good sense as a strategy for coping.

  “We shall talk again later, Davey. When you’re rested.”

  Davey nodded, as much to himself as Charles.

  “Dr. Rud, do you have a study? I should like to review the facts.”

  The doctor had hung back by the door, well out of reach.

  “You’re in charge, Mrs. Zeals,” he said, stepping backwards out of the room, eyes on the patient. “Mr. Beauregard and I have matters of import to discuss. Have Jane bring up tea, a light supper, and a bottle of port.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  Rud shot a look at the soldier. He disapproved of the invasion, but at present felt safer with an armed guard in his home.

  “It’s this way,” he told Charles, indicating with his hands, still watching the patient. “Up the back stairs.”

  Charles bowed to Mrs. Zeals, smiled again at Davey, and followed the doctor.

  “Extraordinary thing, wouldn’t you say?” Rud gabbled.

  “Certainly,” Charles agreed.

  “Of course, he can’t be who he says he is. There’s some trick to this.”

  * * * *

  iii: “pebble in a pond”

  Rud’s consulting room was on two levels, a step running across the floor raising a section like a small stage. One wall was lined with document-boxes. Locked cabinets held phials of salves, balms, cures, and patent potions. A collection of bird and small mammal skeletons, mounted under glass domes, was posed upon items—rocks, branches, green cloth representing grass—suggestive of natural habitat.

  On the raised area was a desk of many drawers and recesses. Above this, a studio photograph of Dr. and Mrs. Oliver Rud was flanked by framed documents, the doctor’s diploma and his wife’s death certificate. Glancing at this last item, careful not to be seen to do so, Charles noted cause of death was down as diphth. and the signature was of another physician. He wondered if it was prominently displayed to caution the doctor against medical hubris, or to forewarn patients that miracles were not always possible.

  Where was Pamela’s death certificate? India?

  Rud sat by the desk, indicating for Charles an adjustable chair in the lower portion of the room, obviously intended for patients. Charles sat down, suppressing a thought that straps could suddenly be fixed over his wrists, binding him at a mad surgeon’s mercy. Such things, unfortunately, were within his experience. The doctor rolled up the desk-cover and opened a folder containing scrawled notes.

  “Hieroglyphs,” he said, showing the sheaf. “But I understand them.”

  A maid came in with the fare Rud had ordered. Charles took tea, while the doctor poured himself a full measure of port. A plate of precisely cut sandwiches went untouched.

  “If you’ll start at the beginning.”

  “I’ve been through this with Major Chilcot, and...”

  Charles raised a finger.

  “I know it’s tiresome to rehash over and over, but this is a tale you’ll retell for some years, no matter how it comes out. It’ll be valuable to have its raw, original form before the facts become, as it were, encrusted with anecdotal frills.”

  Rud, vaguely offended, was realist enough to see the point.

  “The yarns in circulation at the Small Man are already wild, Mr. Beauregard. By the end of the month, it’ll be full-blown myth. And heaven knows what the newspapers will make of it.”

  “We can take care of that.”

  “Can you, indeed? What useful connections to have... at any rate, the facts? Where to begin?”

  “Tell me about Davey Harvill.”

  Rud adjusted his pince-nez and delved into the folder.


  “An ordinary little boy. The usual childhood ailments and scrapes, none fatal. Father was well set-up for a man of his stripe. Cabinet-maker. Skilled craftsman. Made most of the furniture in this room.”

  “Was well set-up? Past tense.”

  “Yes, cut his arm open with a chisel and bled out before anything could be done. Two years ago. Undoubtedly an accident. Risk of the trade, I understand. By the time I was summoned, it was too late. Davey and his sisters, Sairey and Maeve, were raised by their mother, Mrs. Harvill. Admirable woman. Her children will have every chance in life. Would have had, rather. Now, it’s anyone’s guess. Sairey, the eldest child, is married to the local baker, Philip Riddle. She’s expecting her first this spring. Maeve... well, Maeve’s an unknown quantity. She is—was—two years older than her brother. A quiet, queer little girl. The sort who’d rather play by herself. Davey, or whoever this vagrant might be, says Maeve is still ‘in the wood.’“