Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“Helicopter?” queried Fred, distracted. “Who commutes by helicopter?”

“NATO. Defence considerations kept the Scotch Streak running long after its natural lifetime. Then they didn’t. March of bloody progress.”

Richard sat up. He took off and folded his glasses, then tucked them in his top pocket behind an emerald explosion of display handkerchief.

“It’s where I started, Frederick,” he said. “On the Scotch Streak. Everyone has a first time . . .”

“Not ’arf,” Fred smiled.

Richard smiled too, perhaps ruefully. “As you so eloquently put it, ‘not ‘arf. For you, it was that bad business at the end of the pier, in Seamouth. For your lovely Zarana, it was the Soho Golem. For Professor Corri it was the Curse of The Northern Barstows . For me, it was the Scotch Streak . . . the Ghost Train.”

Fred’s interest pricked. He’d worked with Richard Jeperson for more than ten years, but knew only scattered pieces about the man’s earlier years. Richard himself didn’t know about a swathe of his childhood. A foundling of war, he’d been pulled out of a refugee camp by Major Jeperson, a British officer who saw his sensitivity . Richard had been raised as much by the Diogenes Club as his adoptive father. He had no memory of any life before the camps. Even the tattoo on his arm was a mystery. The Nazis were appallingly meticulous about record-keeping, but Richard’s serial number didn’t match any name on lists of the interned or to-be-exterminated. The numbers weren’t even in a configuration like those of other Holocaust survivors or known victims. Suspicion was that the Germans had seen the boy’s qualities too and tried to make use of him in a facility destroyed, along with its records and presumably other inmates, before it could fall into Allied hands. The lad had slipped through the clean-up operation, scathed but alive. Major Geoffrey Jeperson named him Richard, after Richard Riddle – a boy detective who was his own childhood hero.

Of Richard’s doings between the War and the Seamouth Case, Fred knew not much. After Geoffrey’s death in 1954, Richard’s sponsors at the Club had been Edwin Winthrop, now dead but well-remembered, and Sir Giles Gallant, now retired and semi-disgraced. Vanessa came into the picture well before the Seamouth Case. She had Richard’s habit of being evasive without making a fuss about it. All Fred knew was that her first meeting with their patron was another horror story. Whenever it came up, she’d touch the almost-invisible scar through her eyebrow and change the subject with a shudder.

“Now we’re near the end of the line,” said Richard, “perhaps you should hear the tale.”

They were here for the night. Time enough for a ghost story.

“Frederick,” said Richard, “it was 195–, and I was down from Oxford . . .”

Act I: London Euston

I

. . . it was 195– and Richard Jeperson was down from Oxford. And the LSE. And Cambridge. And Manchester Poly. And RADA. And Harrow School of Art. And . . . well, suffice to say, many fine institutions, none of which felt obliged to award him any formal qualification.

Geoffrey Jeperson had sent him to St Cuthbert’s, his old school. Richard hadn’t lasted at “St Custard’s”, setting an unhappy precedent insofar as not lasting at schools went. After the Major’s death, Edwin Winthrop took over in loco parentis . He encouraged Richard to regard schooling as a cold buffet, picking at whatever took his fancy. Winthrop called himself a graduate of Flanders and the Somme, though as it happened he had a Double First in Classics and Natural Philosophy from All Souls. Since Richard was known for his instincts – his sensitivities , everyone said – he was allowed to follow his nose. He became a “New Elizabethan renaissance man”, though teachers tended to tut-tut as he acquired unsystematic tranches of unrelated expertise then got on with something else before he was properly finished.

Though the Diogenes Club supported him with a generous allowance, he took on jobs of work. He assisted with digs and explorations. He sleuthed through Europe in search of his past, and drew suspicious blanks – which persuaded him to pay more attention to his present. He spent a summer in a biscuit factory in Barnsley, making tea and enduring harassment from the female staff. He was a film extra in Italy, climbing out of the horse in Helen of Troy . He couriered documents between British Embassies in South America. He studied magic – stage magic, not yet the other stuff – with a veteran illusionist in Baltimore. He dug ditches, modelled for catalogues, worked fishing boats, wrote articles for manly magazines, and the like.

Between education and honest toil, he did his National Service. He was in the RAF but never saw an aeroplane. The Club placed him in a system of bunkers under the New Forest. He fetched and carried for boffins working on an oscillating wave device. After eighteen months, a coded message instructed him to sabotage an apparently routine experiment. Though he liked the backroom boys and had worked up enthusiasm for the project, he followed orders. The procedure failed and – he was later given to understand – an invasion of our plane of existence by malign extra-dimensional entities was prevented. That was how the Club worked under Edwin Winthrop: pre-emptive, unilateral, cutting out weeds before they sprouted, habitually secretive, pragmatically ruthless. A lid was kept on, though who knew whether the pot really had been boiling over?

After the RAF, Richard spear-carried for a season at the Old Vic, and played saxophone with The Frigidaires. The doo-wop group was on the point of signing with promoter Larry Parnes – of “parnes, shillings and pence” fame – when the girl singer married a quantity surveyor for the security. Though her rendition of ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’, lately a hit for Connie Francis, was acceptable, Richard couldn’t really argue with her. Frankly, the Frigidaires were never very good.

Richard only knew within a year or so how old he actually was, but must be out of his teens. Edwin felt it was time the boy knuckled down and got on with the work for which he had been prepared. Richard moved into a Georgian house in Chelsea which was in the gift of the Club, occasionally looked after by an Irish housekeeper who kept going home to have more children. He meditated, never missed Hancock’s Half Hour on the wireless and read William Morris and Hank Jansen. Edwin told him to wait for a summons to action.

Richard dressed in the “Edwardian” or “teddy boy” manner: scarlet velvet frock coat with midnight black lapels (straight-razor slipped into a special compartment in the sleeve), crepe-soled suede zip-up boots with winkle-picker toe-points, a conjurer’s waistcoat with seventeen secret pockets, his father’s watch and chain, bootlace tie with silver tips, navy-blue drainpipe jeans tighter than paint on his skinny legs. His thin moustache was only just established enough not to need augmentation with eyebrow pencil. A Brylcreem pompadour rose above his pale forehead like a constructivist sculpture in black candyfloss.

If he took his life to have begun when his memory did, his experience was limited. He had never seen a woman naked, except in Health & Efficiency magazine. He could not drive a car, though he intended to take lessons. He had never killed anything important. He had never had a broken bone. He had never eaten an avocado.

Within a year, all that would change.

One morning, a special messenger arrived on a motorbike, with instructions that he give himself over to a side-car and be conveyed to the Diogenes Club. This, he knew, was to be his debut.

The retired Royal Marine Sergeant who kept Door in the Mall went beet-coloured as Richard waltzed past his post. Outlandish folk must come and go from the Diogenes Club, but Richard’s clothes and hair were red rag to a bull for anyone over twenty-five – especially a uniformed middle-aged man with a short back and sides and medal ribbons. There was talk about playwrights and poets who were “angry young men”, but the older generation would not easily yield a monopoly on sputtering indignation.