The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01] Read online

  At nine o’clock, chortling, he told a young mother that her son’s cancer was inoperable. At ten, snickering, he personally informed the founder of a biscuit factory that he’d been unseated in a boardroom coup and would be lucky to escape prosecution over a series of mystery customer ailments. At eleven, in full view of a party of schoolboys, he wielded a length of two-by-four to execute an aged polar bear that a small zoo could no longer afford to feed. At twelve, almost unable to hold the saw steady for his shaking mirth, he cut down a seven-hundred-year-old oak tree on the village green of Little Middling by the Weir, to make way for a road-widening scheme. The chants of the protesters were especially rib-tickling.

  From one until two, he had a fine lunch in a Jolly Glutton motorway restaurant. Two straight sausages and a helping of near-liquid mash. An individual apple pie with processed cream. It was a privilege to taste this, the food of the future. Each portion perfect, and identical with each other portion. That struck him as funny too.

  At two-thirty, controlling himself, he murdered three old folks in a private home, with the hankie-over-the-mouth-and-nose hold. Their savings had run out and this was kinder than turning them loose to fend for themselves. His five o’clock appointment was something similar, a journalist working on a news item about hovercraft safety for the telly program Tomorrow’s News.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” he told the surprised young woman.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “I’m Mr. Joyful. Aren’t you interested in my news?”

  “Why are you grinning like that? Is this a joke?”

  He was about to go off again. Amused tears pricked the backs of his eyes. Laughter began to scream inside his brain, clamouring for escape.

  “Your contract is cancelled,” he managed to get out.

  It was too, too funny.

  He produced the silenced pistol. One quick phut in the face and he could knock off for the day.

  He was laughing like a drain.

  What this woman didn’t know—but would find out unless stopped— was that the Chairman of the Board of Directors of her employer, Greater London Television, was also responsible for Amalgamated British Hoverlines, and had personally authorised the cost-cutting scheme that resulted in the deaths of twenty-eight day-trippers.

  His gun barrel shook as it pointed.

  The look on the woman’s face was too much. He barked laughter, like the policeman in the comedy record. His sides literally split, great tears running down from his armpits to his hips.

  His shot creased the woman’s shoulder.

  That was funny too. People held him down, wrestling the gun out of his grip. Someone even kicked him in the tummy. It was too much to bear.

  He kept on laughing, blind with tears, lances of agony stabbing into his torso. Then he stopped.

  * * * *

  ACT I: VANESSA IS COMMITTED

  She was comfortably lotused among orange and purple scatter-cushions in the conference room of the Chelsea mansion, rainbow-socked feet tucked neatly into the kinks of her knees. Vanessa wore a scarlet leotard with a white angora cardigan. Her long red hair was in a rope-braid, knotted end gripped in a giant turquoise clothes peg. Fred Regent sat nearby, on a wire-net bucket chair, in his usual jeans and jean jacket, square head almost shaven.

  Jazz harpsichord tinkled out of the sound system concealed behind eighteenth-century wood panelling. Matched Lichtenstein explosions hung over the marble mantelpiece. A bundle of joss sticks smoked in a Meissen vase on a kidney-shaped coffee table.

  Richard Jeperson, silver kaftan rippling with reflected light, nested cross-legged in a white plastic chair that hung from the ceiling on an anchor chain. It was shaped like a giant egg sliced vertically, with yolk-yellow padding inside.

  He showed them a photograph of a happy-looking fat man. Then another one, of the same man, lying on the floor in a pool of mess.

  “Jolyon Fuller,” he announced.

  Vanessa compared the shots. Fuller looked even happier in the one where he was dead.

  “He made his living in an interesting way,” Richard said. “He delivered bad news.”

  “I thought that was Reginald Bosanquet’s job,” put in Fred.

  “Fuller doesn’t look gloomy,” Vanessa ventured.

  “Apparently, he wasn’t,” Richard said. “He laughed himself to death. Literally. Matters you or I would consider tragic were high comedy to him. His wires were crossed somewhere up here.”

  He tapped his head.

  Taking back the pictures, hawkbrows momentarily clenched, he gave them consideration. Shoulder-length black ringlets and the mandarin’s moustache gave his face a soft, almost girlish cast, but the piercing eyes and sharp cheekbones were predatory. After all they’d been through together, Vanessa still hadn’t got to the bottom of Richard Jeperson.

  It had been weeks since the last interesting problem to come along, the business of the Satanist Scoutmaster and his scheme to fell the Post Office Tower. Richard had summoned his assistants to announce that they were to investigate a string of strangenesses. This was often the way of their affairs. At the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall, a group of clever and wise minds—under the direction of Edwin Winthrop, Grand Old Man of the Ruling Cabal—constantly sifted through court records, police reports, newspapers and statements from members of the public, ear-marking the unusual and red-flagging the impossible. If the inexplicabilities mounted up, the matter was referred to one of the Club’s Valued Members. Currently, Richard was reckoned the Most Valued Member.

  “Here’s another pretty fizzog. Harry Egge.”

  Richard showed them a glossy of a boxer, gloves up, bruises on his face.

  “He was supposed to be the next ‘Enery Cooper,” said Fred, who followed sport. “He could take the Punishment for fifty rounds. Couldn’t feel pain or didn’t care about it. No matter how much battering he took, he kept on punching.”

  “I read about him,” Vanessa said. “Didn’t he die?”

  “Indeed he did,” Richard explained. “In his home, in a fire caused by faulty wiring.”

  “He was trapped,” she said. “How horrible.”

  “Actually, he wasn’t trapped. He could have walked away, easily. But he fought the fire, literally. He punched it and battered it, but it caught him and burned him to the bone. Very odd. When you put your hand in flame, you take it out sharpish. It’s what pain is for, to make you do things before you think about them. Nature’s fire alarm. Harry Egge kept fighting the fire, as if he could win by a knockout.”

  “Was he kinky for pain?”

  “A masochist, Vanessa? Not really. He just wasn’t afraid of being hurt.”

  “And that makes him barmy?”

  “Quite so, Fred. Utterly barmy.”

  Vanessa wondered what Jolyon Fuller and Harry Egge had in common, besides being mad and dead.

  “There are more odd folk to consider,” Richard continued, producing more photographs and reports. “Nicholas Mix-Elgin: head of security at a multinational computer firm. He became so suspicious that he searched his children’s pets for listening devices. Internally. Serafine Xavier: convent school teacher turned high-priced call girl, the only patient ever hospitalised on the National Health with ‘clinical nymphomania.’ We only know about her because several male patients on her ward died during visits from her. Lieutenant Commander Hilary Roehampton: a naval officer who insisted on volunteering for a series of missions so dangerous only a lunatic would consider them.”

  “Like what?” asked Fred.

  “Sea-testing leaky submarines.”

  “Cor blimey!”

  Vanessa had to agree.

  “These people held more or less responsible positions. It’s only by chance that their files were passed on to us. The grande horizontale was, I believe, retained by the FO for the intimate entertainment of visiting dignitaries.”

  “They all sound like loonies to me,” Fred said.

  “Ah yes,” Richard agree
d, extending a finger, “but their lunacies worked for them, at least in the short term. You are familiar with that allegedly humorous mass-produced plaque you see up in offices and other sordid places? ‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here’—asterisk— ‘But it Helps.’ Sometimes being mad really does help. After all, a head of security should be a bit of a paranoiac, a boxer needs to have a touch of the masochist.”

  “Don’t most firms and all government agencies make prospective employees take a battery of psychiatric tests these days? To weed out the maniacs?”

  “Indeed they do, my dear. I have copies here.”

  He indicated a thick sheaf of papers. She reached out.

  “Don’t bother. All our interesting friends were evaluated within the last three years as one hundred percent sane.”

  “The tests must be rigged,” Fred said. “You don’t just go bonkers overnight. This lot must have been in and out of nut-hatches all their lives.”

  “As a matter of fact, they were all rated with Certificates of Mental Health.”

  Fred didn’t believe it.

  “And who gave out the certificates?” she asked.

  Richard arched an eyebrow. She’d asked the right question. That was the connection.

  “Strangely enough, all these persons were certified as sane by the same practitioner, one Dr. Iain Menzies Ballance. He is Director of the Pleasant Green Centre, near Whipplewell in Sussex.”

  “Pleasant Green. Is that a private asylum?”

  “Not officially,” he told her. “It offers training courses for executives and other high-earners. Like a health farm for the mind. Sweat off those unsightly phobias, that sort of thing.”

  She looked at a glossy prospectus that was in with all the case files. A Regency mansion set among rolling downs. Dr. Ballance smiling with his caring staff, all beautiful young women. Testimonials from leaders of industry and government figures. A table of fees, starting at £500 a week.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Fred. “Sane people go in ...”

  “And mad people come out,” Richard announced.

  She felt a little chill. There was something cracked in Dr. Ballance’s half-smile. And his staff couldn’t quite not look like the dolly bird wing of the SS.

  “The question which now presents itself, of course, is which of us would most benefit from a week or two under the care of the good Dr. Ballance.”

  Richard looked from Fred to her. Fred just looked at her.

  “You’re the sanest person I know, Ness,” Fred said.

  “That’s not saying much,” she countered.

  Richard was about to give a speech about knowing how dangerous the assignment would be and not wanting her to take it unless she was absolutely sure. She cut him off. After all, she owed him too much—her sanity, at least, probably her life—to protest.

  “Just tell me who I am,” she said.

  Richard smiled like a shark and produced a folder.

  * * * *

  In the garage of the Chelsea house, her white Lotus Elan looked like a Dinky Toy parked next to Richard’s Rolls Royce ShadowShark; but it could almost match the great beast for speed and had the edge for manoeuvrability. She should get down to Sussex inside an hour.

  Fred was already in Whipplewell. If asked, he was a bird-watcher out after a look-see at some unprecedented avocets. Richard had given him an I-Spy Book of Birds to memorise. He would watch over her.

  Richard had turned out to see her off. He wore an orange frock coat with matching boots and top hat, over a psychedelic waistcoat and a lime-green shirt with collar-points wider than his shoulders. He fixed her with his deep dark eyes.

  “My love, remember who you are.”

  When they had met, she’d been a different person, not in command of herself. Something it was easiest to call a demon had had her in a thrall it was easiest to call possession. He’d been able to reach her because he understood.

  “We have less memory than most. That’s why what we have, what we are, is so precious.”

  Richard was an amnesiac, a foundling of the war. He had proved to her that it was possible to live without a past that could be proved with memory. Once, since the first time, she had come under the influence of another entity—she shuddered at the memory of a pier on the South Coast—but had been able to throw off a cloak dropped over her mind.

  “You’ll be pretending to be a new person, this Vanessa Vail. That’s a snakeskin you can shed at any time. While the act must be perfect, you must not give yourself up to it completely. They can do a great deal to ‘Vanessa Vail’ without touching Vanessa the Real. You must have a core that is you alone.”

  She thought she understood.

  “Vanessa,” he repeated, kissing her. “Vanessa.”

  She vaulted into the driving seat of the Lotus.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She told him, and drove off.

  * * * *

  “You are an army officer?” Dr. Ballance asked, looking up from the folder. He had a hard Scots accent of the sort popularly associated with John Laurie, penny-pinching, wife-beating and sheep abuse.

  Vanessa nodded. She was supposed to be a paratrooper. Looking at her long legs and big eyes, people thought she must be a fashion model, but she had the height to be a convincing warrior woman. And she could look after herself in hand-to-hand combat. It wasn’t a great snakeskin, but it was wearable.

  “Things have changed since my day, Lieutenant Vail.”

  She hated her new name. The double V sounded so cartoony. But you couldn’t be in the army without a surname.

  “Were you in the services, Dr. Ballance?”

  He nodded, and one side of his mouth smiled. The left half of his face was frozen.

  She imagined him in uniform, tunic tight on his barrel chest, cap perched on his butter-coloured cloud of hair, tiger stripes on his blandly bespectacled face. She wondered which side he had been on in whichever war he had fought.

  “You will be Lieutenant Veevee,” he said. “For ‘vivacious.’ We rename all our guests. The world outside does not trouble us here in Pleasant Green. We are interested only in the world inside.”

  She crossed her legs and rearranged her khaki miniskirt for decency’s sake. Dr. Ballance’s one mobile eye followed the line of her leg down to her polished brogue. She was wearing a regimental tie tucked into a fatigue blouse, and a blazer with the proper pocket badge. Richard had suggested medal ribbons, but she thought that would be over-egging the pud.

  “I’ll have Miss Dove show you to your quarters,” said Dr. Ballance. “You will join us for the evening meal, and I shall work up a programme of tests and exercises for you. Nothing too strenuous at first.”

  “I’ve passed commando training,” she said.

  It was true. Yesterday, getting into character, she had humped herself through mud with an incredulous platoon of real paratroopers. At first, they gallantly tried to help her. Then, when it looked like she’d score the highest marks on the course, they did their best to drag her back and keep her down. She gave a few combat-ready squaddies some nasty surprises and came in third. The sergeant offered to have her back to keep his lads in line.

  “Your body is in fine shape, Lieutenant Veevee,” said Dr. Ballance, eye running back up her leg, pausing at chest-level, then twitching up to her face. “Now we shall see what we can do about tailoring your mind to fit it.”

  Dr. Ballance pressed a buzzer switch. A young woman appeared in the office. She wore a thigh-length flared doctor’s coat over white PVC knee-boots, a too-small T-shirt and hot-pants. Her blonde hair was kept back by an Alice band.

  “Miss Dove, show Lieutenant Veevee where we’re putting her.”

  The attendant smiled, making dimples.

  Vanessa stood and was led out of the office.

  * * * *

  Pleasant Green Manor House had been gutted, and the interior remodelled in steel and glass. Vanessa took note of various gym facilities and therapy
centres. All were in use, with “guests” exercising or playing mind games under the supervision of attendants dressed exactly like Miss Dove. They looked like Pan’s People rehearsing a hospital-themed dance number. Some processes were obvious, but others involved peculiar machines and dentist’s chairs with straps and restraints.