The Man from the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 01] Page 7

  She was shown her room, which contained a four-poster bed and other genuine antique furniture. A large window looked out over the grounds. Among rolling lawns were an arrangement of prefab buildings and some concrete block bunkers. Beyond the window was a discreet steel grille, “for protection.”

  “We don’t get many gels at Pleasant Green, Lieutenant Veevee,” said Miss Dove. “It’s mostly fellows. High-powered executives and the like.”

  “Women are more and more represented in all the professions.”

  “We’ve one other gel here. Mrs. Empty. Dr. Ballance thinks she’s promising. You’ll have competition. I hope you’ll be chums.”

  “So do I.”

  “I think you’re going to fit in perfectly, Lieutenant.”

  Miss Dove hugged her.

  Vanessa tensed, as if attacked. She barely restrained herself from popping the woman one on the chin. Miss Dove air-kissed her on both cheeks and let her go. Vanessa realised she had been very subtly frisked during the spontaneous embrace. She had chosen not to bring any obvious weapons or burglar tools.

  “See you at din-din,” Miss Dove said, and skipped out.

  Vanessa allowed herself a long breath. She assumed the wall-size mirror was a front for a camera. She had noticed a lot of extra wiring and guessed Dr. Ballance would have a closed-circuit TV set-up. She put her face close to the mirror, searching for an imaginary blackhead, and thought she heard the whirring of a lens adjustment.

  There was no telephone on the bedside table.

  Her bags were open, her clothes put in the wardrobe. She hoped they had taken the trouble to examine her marvellously genuine army credentials. It had taken a lot of work to get them up to scratch, and she wanted the effort appreciated.

  She looked out of the window. At the far end of the lawns was a wooded area and beyond that the Sussex Downs. Fred ought to be out there somewhere with a flat cap, a Thermos of tea and a pair of binoculars. He was putting up in the Coach and Horses at Whipplewell, where there were no bars on the windows and you could undress in front of the mirror without giving some crackpot a free show.

  Where was Richard all this time? He must be pulling strings somehow. He was supposed to be following up on the graduates of Pleasant Green.

  She felt sleepy. It was late afternoon, the gold of the sun dappling the lawn. She shouldn’t be exhausted. There was a faint hissing. She darted around, scanning for ventilation grilles, holding her breath. She couldn’t keep it up, and if she made an attempt the watchers would know she was a fake. She decided to go with it. Climbing onto the soft bed, she felt eiderdowns rise to embrace her. She let the tasteless, odourless gas into her lungs, and tried to arrange herself on the bed with some decorum.

  She nodded off.

  * * * *

  Something snapped in front of her face and stung her nostrils. Her head cleared. Everything was suddenly sharp, hyper-real.

  She was sitting at a long dinner table, in mixed company, wearing a yellow-and-lime striped cocktail dress. Her hair was done up in a towering beehive. A thick layer of make-up—which she rarely used—was lacquered over her face. Even her nails were done, in stripes to match her dress. Overhead fluorescents cruelly illuminated the table and guests, but the walls were in darkness and incalculable distance away from the long island of light. The echoey room was noisy with conversation, the clatter of cutlery and The Move’s “Fire Brigade.” She had a mouthful of food and had to chew to save herself from choking.

  “You are enjoying your eyeball, Lieutenant?”

  The questioner was a slight Oriental girl in a man’s tuxedo. Her hair was marcelled into a Hokusai wave. A name tag identified her as “Miss Lark.”

  Eyeball?

  Chewing on jellying meat, she glanced down at her plate. A cooked pig’s face looked back up at her, one eye glazed in its socket, the other a juicy red gouge. She didn’t know whether to choke, swallow or spit.

  The pig’s stiff snout creaked into a porcine smile.

  Vanessa expectorated most of the pulpy eye back at its owner.

  Conversation and consumption stopped. Miss Lark tutted. Dr. Ballance, a tartan sash over his red jacket, stared a wordless rebuke.

  The pig snarled now, baring sharp teeth at her.

  A fog ocean washed around Vanessa’s brain. This time, she struggled. Flares of light that weren’t there made her blink. Her own eyeballs might have been Vaselined over. The room rippled and faces stretched. The guests were all one-eyed pigs.

  Some eye slipped down her throat. She went away.

  * * * *

  This time, the smell of cooking brought her to. She was in an underground kitchen or workshop. Sizzling and screeching was in the air. Infernal red lighting gave an impression of a low ceiling, smoky red bricks arched like an old-fashioned bread-oven.

  In her hands were a pair of devices which fit like gloves. Black leather straps kept her hands around contoured grips like the handles of a skipping rope, and her thumbs were pressed down on studs inset into the apparatus. Wires led from the grips into a junction box at her feet.

  She was wearing black high-heeled boots, goggles that covered half her face and a rubber fetish bikini. Oil and sweat trickled on her tight stomach, and down her smoke-rouged arms and calves. Her hair was pulled back and fanned stickily on her shoulders.

  Her thumbs were jamming down the studs.

  Jethro Tull was performing “Living in the Past.”

  And someone was screaming. There was an electric discharge in the air. In the gloom of the near distance, a white shape writhed. The goggles were clouded, making it impossible to get more than a vague sense of what she was looking at.

  She relaxed her thumbs, instantly. The writhing and screaming halted. Cold guilt chilled her mind. She fought the fuzziness.

  Someone panted and sobbed.

  “I think you’ve shown us just what you think of the cook, Lieutenant Veevee,” said Dr. Ballance.

  He stood nearby, in a kilt and a black leather Gestapo cap. A pink feather boa entwined his broad, naked chest like a real snake.

  “Have you expressed yourself fully?” he asked.

  She could still taste the eyeball. Still see the damned pig face making a grin.

  Red anger sparked. She jammed her thumbs down.

  A full-blooded scream ripped through the room, hammering against the bricks and her ears. A blue arc of electricity lit up one wall. The white shape convulsed and she kept her thumbs down, pouring her rage into the faceless victim.

  No. That was what they wanted.

  She flipped her thumbs erect, letting go of the studs.

  The arc stopped; the shape slumped.

  Half Dr. Ballance’s face expressed disappointment.

  “Forgiveness and mercy, eh, Lieutenant? We shall have to do something about that.”

  Attendants took down the shape—was it a man? a woman? an animal?—she had been shocking.

  Vanessa felt a certain triumph. They hadn’t turned her into a torturer.

  “Now cook has the switch,” said Dr. Ballance.

  She looked into the darkness, following the wires.

  Shock hit her in the hands and ran up her arms, a rising ratchet of voltage. It was like being lashed with pain.

  Her mind was whipped out.

  * * * *

  She was doing push-ups. Her arms and stomach told her she had been doing push-ups for some time. A voice counted in the mid-hundreds.

  Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” was playing.

  She concentrated on shoving ground away from her, lifting her whole body, breathing properly, getting past pain. Her back and legs were rigid.

  Glancing to one side, she saw a polished pair of boots.

  Numbers were shouted at her. She upped the rate, smiling tightly. This, she could take. She was trained in dance (ballroom, modern and ballet) and Oriental boxing (judo, karate and jeet kune do), her body tuned well beyond the standards of the commandos. She reach
ed her thousand. Inside five seconds, she gave ten more for luck.

  “On your feet, soldier,” she was ordered.

  She sprung upright, to attention. She was wearing fatigues and combat boots.

  A black woman inspected her. She had a shaved head, three parallel weals on each cheek, and “Sergeant-Mistress Finch” stencilled on her top pocket.

  Her tight fist jammed into Vanessa’s stomach.

  She clenched her tummy muscles a split second before hard knuckles landed. Agony still exploded in her gut, but she didn’t go down like a broken doll.

  Sergeant-Mistress Finch wrung out her fist.

  “Good girl,” she said. “Give Lieutenant Veevee a lollipop.”

  Miss Dove, who was dressed as a soldier, produced a lollipop the size of a stop sign, with a hypnotic red and white swirl pattern. She handed it to Vanessa.

  “By the numbers,” Sergeant-Mistress Finch ordered, “lick!”

  Vanessa had a taste-flash of the pig’s eyeball, but overcame remembered disgust. She stuck her tongue to the surface of the lollipop and licked. A sugar rush hit her brain.

  “Punishments and rewards,” commented a Scots voice.

  * * * *

  She woke with the taste of sugar in her mouth and a gun in her hand. She was wearing a kilt, a tight cutaway jacket over a massively ruffled shirt, and a feathered cap. Black tartan tags stuck out of her thick grey socks and from her gilt epaulettes.

  Sergeant-Mistress Finch knelt in front of her, hands cuffed behind her, forehead resting against the barrel of Vanessa’s pistol.

  “S-M Finch is a traitor to the unit,” said Dr. Ballance. Vanessa swivelled to look at him. He wore the full dress uniform of the Black Watch.

  They were out in the woods somewhere, after dark. A bonfire burned nearby. Soldiers (all girls) stood around. There was a woodsy tang in the air and a night chill settling in. A lone bagpiper mournfully played “Knock Knock, Who’s There?,” a recent chart hit for Mary Hopkin.

  “Do your duty, Lieutenant Veevee.”

  Vanessa’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  This was some test. But would she pass if she shot or refused to shoot? Surely, Dr. Ballance wouldn’t let her really kill one of the attendants. If he ran Pleasant Green like that, he would run out of staff.

  The gun must not be loaded.

  She shifted the pistol four inches to the left, aiming past the Sergeant-Mistress’ head, and pulled the trigger. There was an explosion out of all proportion with the size of the gun. A crescent of red ripped out of Finch’s left ear. The Sergeant-Mistress clapped a hand over her spurting wound and fell sideways.

  Vanessa’s head rang with the impossibly loud sound.

  * * * *

  She looked out through white bars. She was in a big crib, a pen floored with cushioning and surrounded by a fence of wooden bars taller than she was. She wore an outsized pinafore and inch-thick woollen knee-socks. Her head felt huge, as if jabbed all over with dental anaesthetic. When she tried to stand, the floor wobbled and she had to grab the bars for support. She was not steady on her feet at all. She had not yet learned to walk.

  Veevee crawled. A rattle lay in the folds of the floor, almost too big for her grasp. She focused on her hand. It was slim, long-fingered. She could make a fist. She was a grown-up, not a baby

  A tannoy was softly broadcasting “Jake the Peg (With the Extra Leg)” by Rolf Harris.

  She picked up the rattle.

  The bars sank into the floor, and she crawled over the row of holes where they had been. She was in a playroom. Huge alphabet blocks were strewn around in Stonehenge arrangements, spelling words she couldn’t yet pronounce. Two wooden soldiers, taller than she was, stood guard, circles of red on their cheeks, stiff Zebedee moustaches on their round faces, shakoes on their heads, bayonet-tipped rifles in their spherical hands.

  Plumped in a rocking chair was Dr. Ballance, in a velvet jacket with matching knickerbockers, a tartan cravat frothing under his chin, a yard-wide tam o’shanter perched on his head.

  “Veevee want to play-play?” he asked.

  She wasn’t sure any more. This game had been going on too long. She had forgotten how it started.

  There were other children in the play room. Miss Dove and Miss Lark, in identical sailor suits. And others: Miss Wren, Miss Robin and Miss Sparrow. Sergeant-Mistress Finch was home sick today, with an earache.

  The friends sang “Ring-a-ring-a-rosy” and danced around Veevee. The dance made her dizzy again. She tried to stand, but her pinafore was sewn together at the crotch and too short to allow her body to unbend.

  “You’re it,” Miss Dove said, slapping her.

  Veevee wanted to cry. But big girls didn’t blub. And she was a very big girl.

  She was a grown-up. She looked at her hand to remind herself. It was an inflated, blubbery fist, knuckles sunk in babyfat.

  The others were all bigger than her.

  Veevee sat down and cried and cried.

  * * * *

  ACT II: RICHARD IS RUMBLED

  Alastair Garnett, the Whitehall man, had wanted to meet in a multistorey car park, but Richard explained that nothing could be more conspicuous than his ShadowShark. Besides, two men exchanging briefcases in a car park at dead of night was always something to be suspicious about. Instead, he had set a date for two in the morning in the Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel, a discotheque in the King’s Road.

  He sat at the bar, sipping a tequila sunrise from a heavy glass shaped like a crystal ball. An extremely active girl in a polka-dot halter and matching shorts roller-skated behind the long bar, deftly balancing drinks.

  Richard was wearing a floor-length green suede Edwardian motorist’s coat over a tiger-striped orange-and-black silk shirt, zebra-striped white-and-black flared jeans and hand-made zigzag-striped yellow-and-black leather moccasins. In place of a tie, he wore an amulet with the CND peace symbol inset into the eyes of a griffin rampant. In his lapel was a single white carnation, so Garnett could identify him.

  He lowered his sunglasses—thin-diamond-shaped emerald-tint lenses with a gold wire frame—and looked around the cavernous room. Many girls and some boys had Egyptian eye motifs painted on bare midriffs, thighs, upper arms, throats or foreheads. The paint was luminous and, as the lights flashed on and off in five-second bursts, moments of darkness were inhabited by a hundred dancing eyes.

  A band of long-haired young men played on a raised circular stage. They were called The Heat, and were in the middle of “Non-Copyright Stock Jazz Track 2,” a thirty-five minute improvised fugue around themes from their debut album Neutral Background Music.

  A pleasantly chubby girl in a cutaway catsuit, rhinestone-studded patch over one eye, sat next to Richard and suggested they might have been lovers in earlier incarnations. He admitted the possibility, but sadly confessed they’d have to postpone any reunion until later lives. She shrugged cheerfully and took his hand, producing an eyebrow pencil to write her telephone number on his palm. As she wrote, she noticed the other number tattooed on his wrist and looked at him again. A tear started from her own exposed eye and she kissed him.

  “Peace, love,” she said, launching herself back onto the dance floor and connecting with a Viking youth in a woven waistcoat and motorcycle boots.

  Across the room, he saw a thin man who wore a dark grey overcoat, a black bowler hat and a wing-collar tight over a light grey tie, and carried a tightly-furled Union Jack umbrella. Richard tapped his carnation and the man from Whitehall spotted him.

  “What a racket,” Garnett said, sitting at the bar. “Call that music? You can’t understand the words. Not like the proper songs they used to have.”

  ‘“Doodly-Acky-Sacky, Want Some Seafood, Mama’?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A hit for the Andrews Sisters in the 1940s,” Richard explained.

  “Harrumph,” said Garnett.

  A boy dressed in tie-dyed biblical robes, with an enormous bush of beard and hair, paused at
the bar while buying a drink and looked over Garnett. The Whitehall man held tight to his umbrella.

  “That’s a crazy look, man,” the boy said, flashing a reversed V sign.

  A crimson undertone rose in Garnett’s face. He ordered a gin and tonic and tried to get down to business. Though The Heat were playing loud enough to whip the dancers into a frenzy, there was a quietish zone at the bar which allowed them to have a real conversation.