Dark Detectives Page 13

  “And the cause?” I said. “What caused it?”

  Carnacki shook his head.

  “God knows,” he answered, with a peculiar, sincere reverence. “If that thing was what it seemed to be one might suggest an explanation which would not offend one’s reason, but which may be utterly wrong. Yet I have thought, though it would take a long lecture on Thought Induction to get you to appreciate my reasons, that Parsket had produced what I might term a kind of ‘induced haunting,’ a kind of induced simulation of his mental conceptions due to his desperate thoughts and broodings. It is impossible to make it clearer in a few words.”

  “But the old story!” I said. “Why may not there have been something in that?”

  “There may have been something in it,” said Carnacki. “But I do not think it had anything to do with this. I have not clearly thought out my reasons, yet; but later I may be able to tell you why I think so.”

  “And the marriage? And the cellar—was there anything found there?” asked Taylor.

  “Yes, the marriage was performed that day in spite of the tragedy,” Carnacki told us. “It was the wisest thing to do—considering the things that I cannot explain. Yes, I had the floor of that big cellar up, for I had a feeling I might find something there to give me some light. But there was nothing.

  “You know, the whole thing is tremendous and extraordinary. I shall never forget the look on Parsket’s face. And afterwards the disgusting sounds of those great hoofs going away through the quiet house.”

  Carnacki stood up:—

  “Out you go!” he said in friendly fashion, using the recognised formula.

  And we went presently out into the quiet of the Embankment, and so to our homes.

  Edwin Winthrop and Catriona Kaye

  SEVEN STARS EPISODE TWO

  THE MAGICIAN AND THE MATINEE IDOL

  by KIM NEWMAN

  Mustachioed ex-intelligence officer Edwin Winthrop and Catriona Kaye, the daughter of a West Country parson and an investigator into psychical research, are a partnership. Although not under the command of the Diogenes Club, they occasionally assist Edwin’s mentor Charles Beauregard who, after years of service, now sits on the Ruling Cabal, highest echelon of the Secret Service.

  Edwin and Catriona first appeared in Kim Newman’s 1981 play My One Little Murder Can’t Do Any Harm, a 1920s country house whodunit. For the record, the author portrayed Winthrop, and Catriona was portrayed by Catriona O’Callaghan. They have a flashback to themselves, with the rest of the cast of the play, in Newman’s novel Jago (1991), and Edwin is a leading character in The Bloody Red Baron (1995). He also rates a tiny mention in Jack Yeovil’s Demon Download (1990) and appears in ‘The Big Fish’ (Interzone #76, October 1993), ‘Angel Down, Sussex’ (Interzone #149, November 1999), ‘You Don’t Have to be Mad …’ (White of the Moon, 1999), ‘Clubland Heroes’ (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, 2007), ‘Sorcerer Conjuror Wizard Witch’ (Mysteries of the Diogenes Club, 2010) and the Titan Books edition of Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron (2012).

  As well as turning up in ‘Angel Down, Sussex’, ‘Clubland Heroes’, ‘Sorcerer Conjuror Wizard Witch’ and The Bloody Red Baron with Edwin Winthrop, Catriona Kaye is also in ‘The Pierce Arrow Stalled, and …’ (Famous Monsters, 1995), ‘Cold Snap’ (The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club), An English Ghost Story (2013) and the forthcoming novel The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School.

  Celebrated stage and screen actor John Barrymore (1882– 1942) was the brother of Ethel and Lionel Barrymore. A romantic matinée idol famous for his “Great Profile”, he squandered his talents, and his career ultimately floundered in alcoholism and self-parody. At the peak of his powers he portrayed the titular detective in Sherlock Holmes (1922), directed by Albert Parker for Goldwyn Pictures. Although a Hollywood production, extensive location shooting took place in London. Roland Young played Dr. Watson, with Austrian actor Gustav von Seyffertitz as a Caligari-like Moriarty, under which name the film was released in Britain.

  THE FEBRUARY CHILL made Catriona Kaye wish hemlines weren’t being worn above the knee this season. Her bobbed hair, tucked under a cloche hat, left her slender neck bare, prompting her to wrap her fur collar tight around her throat.

  Born with the century, now just twenty-two, she sometimes felt her obligation to follow the fashions of the times was a curse. Her father, a West Country parson, was always on at her about the scandalous way she dressed, not to mention her cacophonous American tastes in music. Edwin never chided, sometimes claiming in his lofty manner that she was a useful barometer: when she was up, so was the world; when she was down, calamity was in the offing.

  Presently, she had much in common with the Grand Old Duke of York’s Ten Thousand Men. She was neither up nor down. The wind blowing down Baker Street was winter, but the clarity of the air—no fog, no rain—was spring.

  Things were about to change.

  *

  Two elderly matrons nearby had noticed the celebrity. They were frankly goggling, like children at the circus. Catriona thought them rather sweet about it.

  The celebrity had just stepped out of a door which bore a famous, and famously hard-to-locate, address: 221B. He wore a fore-and-aft cap, and a checked ulster of Victorian cut. He turned to cast a hawk-like gaze at the distance, sharp profile distinct and distinctive, and raised a magnifying glass to his eye.

  “Isn’t that …?” began one of the matrons.

  The object of their amazement was accompanied by a shorter, plumper, huffier man, in a bowler hat and moustache. He held a revolver.

  “I do believe it is,” the other matron agreed. “John Barrymore!”

  The Great Profile turned full-face to the admiring dears, one eye hugely magnified by his glass, flashed a thin grin, and gallantly doffed his deerstalker. One matron swooned in the other’s arms.

  Catriona couldn’t help but giggle.

  A short man with a megaphone began shouting, chiding the matinee idol for “playing at the rear stalls”.

  “I’m afraid I shall never get the hang of this film business,” Barrymore lamented.

  Catriona understood the actor was mostly concerned with his impending Hamlet, and had little concentration left over for this photoplay of Mr. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, or rather Mr. William Gillette’s celebrated stage drama. From what she’d seen of the “shooting”, Barrymore’s sleuth had quite a bit of the gloomy Dane about him and spent a great deal more time making goo-goo eyes at the heroine than plodding over the scene of the crime with Good Old Watson. Mycroft Holmes would be revolving—very slowly, and with great gravity—in his grave.

  Edwin, her “whatever”, affected to be interested in the intricacies of the camera, and spent his time interrogating the crew on tiny technical points. She knew that trick of his, to pretend one overwhelming enthusiasm in order to winkle out all manner of other unconnected information from those he was politely and unnoticeably interrogating.

  Not for the first time, she felt a lot like Good Old Watson. She and Edwin were a partnership, but too many people—though not Edwin himself—thought of her as a decorative adjunct to the genius of a Great Man.

  Admittedly, she wasn’t expected to pen adulatory accounts of the exploits she shared with Edwin Winthrop. In most cases, the principles would certainly not care to find their confidential affairs written up in the popular press. The bally Baskervilles can hardly have been delighted to have the whole nation privy to their nasty squabbles, come to that. There were also, in some instances connected with Edwin’s shadowy employers in the late War, questions of state secrecy to be considered.

  Barrymore was annoying the director, a man named Parker, with his diffidence. When disinterested in his work, he tended to ignore his Prince’s sound advice against “sawing the air”. She noticed Roland Young, the cove playing Good Old Watson, was managing with extremely British tact not to be annoyed, in such a manner that his actual feelings were plain. Now that was real acting.

  After tw
o days of hanging about as the American film crew took location “shots”, she was used to being mistaken for an actress or even one of the Great Profile’s surplus mistresses. Remembering Edwin’s advice, she took pains never to contradict or confirm assumptions.

  As their occasional government commissions went, this was hardly momentous. Their business was usually with the living who are being bothered by the dead; in this case, they were here to protect the interests of the dead against slander. Edwin was doing an unofficial favour for the Diogenes Club, the institution which had found him official employment during the Great War and which still had occasional need to call on his services.

  Mycroft Holmes, the consulting detective’s less famous but more perspicacious brother, had once sat on the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Club, in the seat now occupied by the somewhat slimmer-hipped Mr. Charles Beauregard, to whom Edwin reported.

  Last year, Edwin and Catriona had been involved by the Diogenes Club in a row involving a phantasmal samurai who wielded a very substantial sword in the Japanese Embassy, lopping off the heads of several uncomplaining staff members. The bloody business was eventually brought to a satisfactory conclusion, with human deviltry exposed and psychic shenanigans explained away. She was now the only girl she knew with a personal scroll of commendation from the Emperor of Japan in her dresser drawer.

  This was far more routine. It came down to reputation. Though never under the command of the Diogenes Club, the Great Detective had once or twice assisted his brother with problems much as Edwin and Catriona now assisted Beauregard. It had been the cause of something of a rift between the Holmes Boyos that Good Old Watson and Mr. Doyle had written up a few of these bits of business, going so far as to mention the institution in print and giving some hint as to Mycroft Holmes’s actual position in the British government.

  That was all blown over now. But Beauregard, as much out of respect for the memory of his old chief, wanted the cloak of obscurity habitually worn by the Diogenes Club and all its operatives to fall heavy again.

  “It will almost be a holiday,” Beauregard had said. “Mingling with show-folk. Just make sure they stay away from the facts.”

  Parker was on at Barrymore again about his famous moustache. It was still not shaven off. Apparently, it would not show in “long shots”, but would have to go for the “close-ups”.

  Catriona wondered whether Edwin’s moustache was only coincidentally identical to the actor’s. He professed to disdain fashion when he was making fun of her kimonos or shaven hackles, but he could be a touch dandyish in his own appearance.

  “You’d be fastidious too,” he would say, “if you’d spent four years in a uniform stiff with mud.”

  The War excused a lot.

  Parker stormed away from the actors. Barrymore, treating the wide step of 221B as a stage, gave a bow for the gallery. The on-looking crowds applauded mightily. The director glared in frustration and muttered about cracking the whip when the company got back to the States.

  “You, technical advisor,” Parker addressed her. “What’s wrong with that scene?”

  “I don’t like to mention it really,” she said.

  “It’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? It’s that blasted lip-fungus of John’s.”

  “He could be in disguise,” she said, trying to be generous.

  Parker laughed bitterly.

  “It’s the address,” she piped. “The front door would just have 221 on it. A and B and, for all we know C, would have doors on the landings.”

  Parker shook his head and stalked off.

  “I am right,” she told his back.

  Though they lived—together! in sin! scandalously!—in the Somerset house Edwin had inherited from his disreputable father, they were more often found these modern days in their London pied-à-terre, a nice little flat in Bloomsbury which Catriona officially kept as a residence to allow her father to avoid a heart attack by believing she lived apart from Edwin. This evening, with Paul Whiteman’s ‘Whispering’ on the gramophone, they discussed the day’s work as they danced, occasionally dropping the odd inconvenient item of clothing.

  “Old Beauregard has nothing to worry about, Cat,” said Edwin, almost directly into her ear. “Along the chain that leads from Holmes to Watson to Doyle to Gillette to Barrymore, anything that might be taken as real or referring to reality has been stripped away.”

  “The Diogenes doesn’t figure in the film scenario?”

  One hand firmly in the small of her back, Edwin dipped her over, supporting her weight. She often felt on the point of losing her balance, but Edwin would pull her back just in time.

  “No.”

  They kissed. The song ended. They occupied themselves upon the divan.

  *

  Afterwards, propped up among Turkish cushions, drawing on a cigarette through a long holder, kimono loose about her shoulders, she thought again about the errand.

  “Surely, after all these years, no one actually cares about the dratted Bruce-Partington Plans any more.”

  Edwin laughed lazily. He was drifting towards a doze as she was becoming more awake. He claimed to be catching up on all the sleep missed through four years of shelling day and night.

  “It’s the principle, poppet. Secrecy. If everybody knew everything, there’d be mass panic.”

  She wondered about that.

  “Darkness has become a habit for too many, Edwin.”

  “You shall cast light, Cat. You are a beacon.”

  He stroked her leg. She considered stabbing him with her lighted cigarette.

  “Rotter,” she snorted.

  Edwin sat up, unconsciously passed his fingers over his (John Barrymore) moustache, and paid attention.

  “Old secrets, dear,” she said. “There are too many of them. And new ones piled on top.”

  “We only need dawdle about the kinema wallahs for a few more days,” he said, taking her hand. “Then, I promise, we can find a nice ghost story, a bleeding nun with ghastly groans or a castle spectre with clanking chains. We shall explain it away with the shining light of science and rationality. Bit by bit, we shall banish the darkness from these isles.”

  She biffed him with a cushion.

  Mostly, the darkness was subject to banishment when they applied themselves. But sometimes …

  “What more do we need to know about this silly film?”

  “Nothing, really. I telephoned Beauregard and passed on all that we’ve ferreted out. He particularly asked that we be present at the next ‘location’, to represent the nation’s interests.”

  “The nation’s interests?”

  “Indeed. The Goldwyn Company has secured permission to take film in the private recesses of the national collection, in the basements of the British Museum—some confrontation between Holmesy and that mathematics professor of sorry memory—and we’re to be there to see they don’t break anything. They will be ‘shooting’ at night, after everyone has gone home.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m a serious person,” she announced. “A scientific inquirer. My field, in which I am widely published and hailed even at my tender age, is psychical research. I do not mind, under certain circumstances, serving my country as a more-or-less secret agent. However, I draw the line at working as an unsalaried night watchman!”

  He embraced her, and she knew she’d give in eventually.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to find out what’s really kept in all those vaults? We shall get to root about among artefacts and manuscripts forbidden to the public.”

  That was not fair. He knew she couldn’t resist that temptation.

  She kissed him, hungry again.

  “You shall shine in the dark,” he said.

  *

  The cellar was vast, a vaulted ceiling above a crate-filled trench. Though the tiled walls were cold to the touch, the cellar was remarkably free of damp. At one end, an uncrated Easter Island head, crown scraping the ceiling, surveyed the scene. The statue was as lo
ng-faced and beaky as the unprepossessing original currently impersonated by the classically handsome actor grappling centre stage with an ersatz Napoleon of Crime.

  “This looks like an underground railway station,” she commented.

  “Exactly, Clever Cat,” Edwin agreed. “Built as a stop for British Museum, but never finished. The company was bankrupted. Most of the line caved in, but the Museum has kept this as its deepest storeroom. Some things are too huge to stack in an ordinary basement.”

  “How silly,” she said. “Plainly, the underground railway should be operated by a single company for the benefit of the nation, not by competing and inept rival factions who’ll honeycomb under London until the whole city falls in.”

  He did not give her an argument.

  Parker called “cut!”, his megaphone-amplified voice booming through the cellar.

  Barrymore—lip shorn at last, not entirely to the detriment of his looks—stood up, and a girl dashed in to reapply greasepaint to his cheeks. The site of his battle with Moriarty was now swarming with “crew”, all intent on some tiny task.

  A youth in knickerbockers assisted “Moriarty” to his feet. The Prof was impersonated by an authentically frightening-looking fellow with ragged hair, eyes like corpse-candle flames, and a thin-lipped sneer. An assistant director who, she realised, was slightly sweet on her, said Moriarty’s impersonator was an Austrian by the aptly villainous name of Gustav von Seyffertitz. He had signed himself with the absurdly Yankee alias of “G. Butler Clonblough” during the late unpleasantness.

  Barrymore could switch his Sherlock off and on like an electric lamp, melodramatic when the camera was cranking but larking outrageously between “takes”. Von Seyffertitz, whom Barrymore liked because he made him look even more handsome by contrast, seemed always to be “on”, and occupied himself by skulking villainously as the director shouted at Barrymore.