The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01] Page 14

Vanessa had a trowel. She cleared some of the sand and picked out dried-up mortar.

  “Good girl,” said Jeperson.

  He heaved again. The bottom half of the stone cracked through completely, then fell out of the doorway. The top half slid down in grooves and broke in two pieces. A lot more sand avalanched.

  Fred tugged Lillywhite out of the way. Jeperson and Vanessa had already stepped aside.

  A scarecrow-thin human figure stood in the shifting sands, hands raised as if to thump, teeth bared in a gruesome grin. It pitched forward on its face and broke apart like a poorly made dummy. If it were a Guy, it would not earn a penny from the most intimidated or kindly passerby.

  “That’s not George Oldrid Bunning,” gasped Lillywhite.

  “No,” said Jeperson. “I rather fear that it’s his butler.”

  * * * *

  There were five of them, strewn around the stone sarcophagus, bundles of bones in browned wrappings.

  “A butler, a footman, a cook, a housekeeper and a maid,” said Jeperson. Under his tan, he was pale. He held himself rigidly, so that he wouldn’t shake with rage and despair. He understood this sort of horror all too well—having lost the memory of a boyhood torn away in a Nazi camp—but never got used to it.

  The servant bodies wore the remains of uniforms.

  Lillywhite was upset. He was sitting on the grass, with his head between his knees.

  Vanessa, less sensitive than Jeperson, was looking about the tomb with a torch.

  “It’s a good size,” she called out. “Extensive foundations.”

  “They were alive,” bleated Lillywhite.

  “For a while,” said Jeperson.

  “What a bastard,” said Fred. “Old George Oldrid Bunning. He got his pharaoh’s funeral all right, with all his servants buried alive to shine his boots and tug their forelocks through all eternity. How did he do it?”

  “Careful planning,” said Jeperson. “And a total lack of scruple.”

  Lillywhite looked up. He concentrated, falling back on expertise to damp down the shock.

  “It was a special design. When he was dying, George Oldrid contracted a master mason to create his tomb. It’s the only one here that’s survived substantially intact. The mason died before Bunning. Suspiciously.”

  “Pharaohs had their architects killed, to preserve the secrets of their tombs from grave robbers. There were all kind of traps in the pyramids, to discourage looters.”

  A loud noise came from inside the tomb. Something snapping shut with a clang.

  Jeperson’s cool vanished.

  “Vanessa?” he shouted.

  Vanessa came out of the tomb, hair awry and pinned back by her raised sunglasses. She had a nasty graze on her knee.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing a tot won’t cure.”

  She found a silver flask in her hold-all and took a swallow, then passed it round. Fred took a jolting shot of brandy.

  “Who’d leave a man-trap in a tomb? Coiled steel, with enough tensile strength after a century to bisect a poor girl, or at least take her leg off, if she didn’t have a dancer’s reflexes.”

  “George Oldrid Bunning,” said Jeperson.

  “Bastard General,” clarified Fred.

  “Just so. He must have been thebastardo di tutti bastardi. It would have been in the will that he be laid personally to rest by his servants, with no other witnesses, at dead of night. They were probably expecting healthy bequests. The sad, greedy lot. When closed, the sarcophagus lid triggered a mechanism and the stone door slammed down. Forever, or at least until Vanessa and her crowbar. The tomb is soundproof. Weatherproof. Escape-proof.”

  “There’s treasure,” said Vanessa. “Gold and silver. Some Egyptian things. Genuine, I think. Ushabti figures, a death-mask. A lot of it is broken. The downstairs mob must have tried to improvise tools. Not that it did them any good.”

  The now-shattered stone door showed signs of ancient scratching. But the breaks were new, and clean.

  “How long did they ...?”

  “Best not to think of it, Lillywhite,” said Jeperson.

  “In death, they got strong,” said Vanessa. “They finally cracked the door, or we’d never have been able to shift it.”

  The little maid, tiny skull in a mob-cap, was especially disturbing. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

  “No wonder the ghosts have been making a racket,” said Fred. “If someone did that to me, I’d give nobody any rest until it was made right.”

  Jeperson tapped his front tooth, thinking.

  “But why wait until now? As you said, they’ve had a hundred years in which to manifest their understandable ire. And why the Egyptian thing? Shouldn’t they be Victorian servant ghosts? I should think an experience like being buried alive by a crackpot with a King Tut complex would sour one on ancient cultures in general and Egypt in particular.”

  “They’re trying to tell us something,” said Vanessa.

  “Sharp girl. Indeed they are.”

  Fred looked away from the tomb. Across the city.

  The Horus Tower caught the light. It was a black glass block, surmounted by a gold pyramid.

  “George Rameses Bunning is dying,” said Lillywhite. “A recurrence of some tropical disease. News got out just after Derek Leech Incorporated started suing Pyramid Press. It’s had a disastrous effect on the company stock. He’s liable to die broke.”

  “If he’s anything like his great-great, then he deserves it,” said Vanessa.

  Jeperson snapped his fingers.

  “I think he’s a lot like his great-great. And I know what the ghosts have been trying to tell us. Quick, Fred, get the Rolls. Vanessa, ring Inspector Price at New Scotland Yard, and have him meet us at the Horus Tower immediately. He might want to bring a lot of hearty fellows with him. Some with guns. This is going to make a big noise.”

  * * * *

  Fred didn’t care to set foot inside the Horus Tower. Just thinking about what had been done in the building made him sick to his stomach. He was on the forecourt as the coughing, shrunken, handcuffed George Rameses Bunning was led out by Inspector Euan Price. Jeperson had accompanied the police up to the pyramid on top of the tower, to be there at the arrest.

  Employees gathered at their windows, looking down as the boss was hauled off to pokey. Rumours of what he had intended for them—for two hundred and thirty-eight men and women, from senior editors to junior copy-boys—would already be circulating already, though Fred guessed many wouldn’t believe them. Derek Leech’s paper would carry the story, but few people put any credence in those loony crime stories in the Comet.

  “He’ll be dead before he comes to trial,” said Jeperson. “Unless they find a cure.”

  “I hope they do, Richard,” said Fred. “And he spends a good few years buried alive himself, in a concrete cell.”

  “His Board of Directors were wondering why, with the company on the verge of liquidation, Bunning had authorised such extensive remodelling of his corporate HQ. It was done, you know. He could have thrown the switch tomorrow, or next week. Whenever all was lost.”

  Now Fred shivered. Cemeteries didn’t bother him, but places like this—concrete, glass and steel traps for the enslavement and destruction of living human beings—did.

  “What did he tell what’s-his-name, the architect? Drache?”

  “It was supposed to be about security, locking down the tower against armed insurrection. Rioting investors wanting their dividends, perhaps. The spray nozzles that were to flood the building with nerve gas were a new kind of fire-prevention system.”

  “And Drache believed him?”

  “He believed the money.”

  “Another bastard, then.”

  “Culpable, but not indictable.”

  The Horus Tower was equipped with shutters that would seal every window, door and ventilation duct. When the master switch was thrown, they would all come down and lock tight. Then deadly gas would fill every office space, instan
tly preserving in death the entire workforce. Had George Rameses Bunning intended to keep publishing magazines in the afterlife? Did he really think his personal tomb would be left inviolate in perpetuity with all the corpses at their desks, a monument to himself for all eternity? Of course, George Oldrid Bunning had got away with it for a century.

  “George Rameses knew?”

  “About George Oldrid’s funerary arrangements? Yes.”

  “Bastard bastard.”

  “Quite.”

  People began to file out of the skyscraper. The workday was over early.

  There was a commotion.

  A policeman was on the concrete, writhing around his kneed groin. Still handcuffed, George Rameses sprinted back towards his tower, shouldering through his employees.

  Jeperson shouted to Price. “Get everyone out, now!”

  Fred’s old boss understood at once. He got a bullhorn and ordered everyone away from the building.

  “He’ll take the stairs,” said Jeperson. “He won’t chance us stopping the lifts. That’ll give everyone time to make it out.”

  Alarm bells sounded. The flood of people leaving the Horus Tower grew to exodus proportions.

  “Should I send someone in to catch him?” asked Price. “It should be easy to snag him on the stairs. He’ll be out of puff by the fifth floor, let alone the thirtieth.”

  Jeperson shook his head.

  “Too much of a risk, Inspector. Just make sure everyone else is out. This should be interesting.”

  “Interesting?” spat Fred.

  “Come on. Don’t you want to see if it works? The big clockwork trap. The plans I saw were ingenious. A real economy of construction. No electricals. Just levers, sand and water. Drache kept to Egyptian technology. Modern materials, though.”

  “And nerve gas?” said Fred.

  “Yes, there is that.”

  “You’d better hope Drache’s shutters are damn good, or half London is going to drop dead.”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  Vanessa crossed the forecourt. She was with the still-bewildered Lillywhite.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “George Rameses is back inside, racing towards his master switch.”

  “Good grief.”

  “Never fear, Vanessa. Inspector, it might be an idea to find some managerial bods in the crowd. Read the class register, as it were. Just make sure everyone’s out of the tower.”

  “Good idea, Jeperson.”

  The policeman hurried off.

  Jeperson looked up at the building. The afternoon sun was reflected in black.

  Then the reflection was gone.

  Matte shutters closed like eyelids over every window. Black grilles came down behind the glass walls of the lobby, jaws meshing around floor-holes. The pyramid atop the tower twisted on a stem and lowered, locking into place. It was all done before the noise registered, a great mechanical wheezing and clanking. Torrents of water gushed from drains around the building, squirting up fifty feet in the air from the ornamental fountain.

  “He’s escaped,” said Fred. “A quick, easy death from the gas and it’ll take twenty years to break through all that engineering.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Jeperson. “Fifteen at the most. Modern methods, you know.”

  “The ghosts won’t rest,” said Lillywhite. “Not without revenge or restitution.”

  “I think they might,” said Jeperson. “You see, George Rameses is still alive in his tomb. Alone, ill and, after his struggle up all those stairs, severely out of breath. Though I left the bulk of his self-burial mechanism alone, I took the precaution of disabling the nerve gas.”

  “Is that a scream I hear?” said Vanessa.

  “I doubt it,” said Jeperson. “If nothing else, George Rameses has just soundproofed his tomb.”

  <>

  * * * *

  SOHO GOLEM

  “Of all quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London, Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit.... Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.”

  John Galsworthy

  1: SPOILING THE BARREL

  On a fine May day in 197-, Fred Regent and Richard Jeperson stood in Old Compton Street, London N1. The pavement underfoot was warm and slightly tacky, as if it might retain the prints of Fred’s scruffy but sturdy Doc Martens and Richard’s elastic-sided claret-coloured thigh-high boots.

  Slightly to the North of but parallel with the theatrical parade of Shaftesbury Avenue, Old Compton Street was among Soho’s main thoroughfares. Blitzed in the war, the square-mile patch had regenerated patchwork fashion to satisfy or exploit the desires of a constant flux of passers-through. People came here for every kind of “lift.” Italian coffeehouses had opened on this street a century ago; now, you could buy a thousand varieties of frothy heart attack in a cup. This was where waves of “dangerous” music broke, from bebop to glitter rock. Within sight, careers had begun and ended: Tommy Steele strumming in an espresso skiffle trio, Jimi Hendrix choking in an alley beside The Intrepid Fox.

  Also, famously and blatantly, Soho was a red-light district, home to the city’s vice rackets for two hundred years. Above window displays were neon and plastic come-ons: girls girls girls—live nude bed revue— goldiloxxx and the three bares. Above doorbells were hand-printed cards: “French Model One Flight Up,” “Busty Brunette, Bell Two,” “House of Thwacks: Discipline Enforced.”

  Fred checked the address against his scribbled note.

  “The scene of the crime,” he told Richard.

  Richard took off and folded his slim, side-panelled sunglasses. They slid into a tube that clipped to his top pocket like a thick fountain-pen.

  “Just the one crime?” he said.

  “Couldn’t say, guv,” replied Fred. “One big one, so far this week.”

  Richard shrugged—which, in today’s peacock-pattern watered silk safari jacket, was dangerously close to flouncing. Even in the cosmopolitan freak show of Soho, Richard’s Carnabethan ensemble attracted attention from all sexes. Currently, he wore scarlet buccaneer britches fit tighter than a surgical glove, a black-and-white spiral-pattern beret pinned to his frizzy length of coal-black hair, a frill-fronted mauve shirt with a collar-points wider than his shoulders, and a filmy ascot whose colours shifted with the light.

  “I certainly feel a measure of recent turmoil,” said Richard, who called himself “sensitive” rather than “spooky.” He flexed long fingers, as if taking a Braille reading from the air. “It certainly could be a death unnatural and occult. Still, in this parish, it’d be unusual not to find a soupçon of eldritch atmos, eh? This is East of Piccadilly, mon ami. Vibes swirl like a walnut whip. If London has a psychic storm centre, it’s on this page of the A to Z. Look about, pal—most punters here are dowsing with their dickybirds. It’s not hard to find water.”

  A skinny blonde in hot-pants, platforms and a paisley halter top sidled out of Crawford Street. She cast a lazy look at them, eyes hoisting pennyweights of pancake and false lash. Richard bowed to her with a cavalier flourish, smile lifting his Fu Manchu. The girl’s own psychic powers cut in.

  “Fuzz,” she sniffed, and scarpered.

  “Everyone’s a detective,” Richard observed, straightening.

  “Or a tart,” said Fred.

  The girl fled. Heart-shaped windows cut out of the seat of her shorts showed pale skin and a sliver of Marks & Sparks knicker. Four-inch stack-soles made for a tottering,Thunderbirds-puppet gait that was funnier than sexy.

  “That said, shouldn’t this place be veritably swarming with the filth?” commented Richard. “One of their own down, and all that. Uniforms, sirens, yellow tape across the door, Black Mariahs hauling in the usual susses, grasses shaken down? All holidays cancelled, whole shift working overtime to nick the toerag who snuffed a
copper while he was about his duty? And where’s the wreath? There should be one on the street, with some junior Hawkshaw posted in that alcove there, in case the crim revisits the scene to gloat and lingers long enough to get nabbed.”

  Richard had put his finger on something that had bothered Fred. One of the man’s talents was noticing things unusual by their absence. The proverbial dog that didn’t bark in the night.

  “This isn’t Dock Green, Richard. And DI Brian ‘Boot Boy’ Booth isn’t—wasn’t—George Dixon.”