Mask of the Verdoy (45 page)

‘Pembroke?’

‘Yes—of course! Pembroke! His old man’s up there. Find the vicar’s old man and you’ll have the answer.’

Harley scribbled furiously on the paper. When he’d finished writing he was dismayed to find the vision of Moloch flickering out again.

‘This is it, George … 
Abyssinia …
’

‘No, wait, Moloch! What is the Rye Wolf—
what is it?
’

‘Rye Wolf?’ said Moloch, flickering back for a moment. ‘Why, it’s the Barley Wolf, of course!
The Barley Wolf!
’

Then, with a guttural wail the six foot feline pounced onto the private detective, knocking him back in his chair, pinning him to the floor. Harley turned his head to the side as the cat’s red maw—bristling with dagger-like teeth—gaped open an inch or so from his face.

‘It’s the Barley Wolf, Harley! Beowulf
… Beowulf! Beooowwww!’
Moloch’s last word morphed into a vicious growl.

With all the strength he could summon Harley now heaved the monster away from him. As Moloch hit the door he gave a yelp of surprise and pain, scrambling to his feet to dash on all fours behind the large chaise longue.

Harley took his chance and made a grab for the glass of antidote on the bureau, just as the cat-man reappeared from his hiding place, hissing with hackles raised, brandishing scrimshawed claws like a fistful of daggers.

He chugged down the magenta liquid in one draft and threw the glass to the floor.

Moloch gave one long tuneless caterwaul, and then the room faded to black …

***

Annoyed that he’d been unable to finish his habitual second cup of morning coffee, Chief Inspector Warren burst into the late DI Quigg’s office with DS Webbe in tow.

‘Ah, Chief Inspector—there you are!’ said Ambrose Box-Hartnell, regarding the new arrivals over his pince-nez from behind Quigg’s desk.

‘Home Secretary, erm … what exactly is going on here?’ Warren frowned at the two anonymous-looking civil servants who were busily clearing the piles of paperwork from the desktop and emptying the drawers into a large grey sack.

‘Oh, it’s all quite simple, I assure you. We’re requisitioning all of Detective Inspector Quigg’s effects, both personal and official.’

‘But I’ve only just received word from Commissioner Swales’ office. He’s requested exactly the same thing—there’s an assistant on his way over as we speak. Perhaps we should wait until we’ve spoken to the General?’

‘No, Chief Inspector, we won’t be doing that.’

‘May I ask, Home Secretary, why you require these effects?’

‘I’m afraid that is a matter of state security.’

‘This one’s locked, sir,’ said one of Box-Hartnell’s cronies, rattling the handle of a small filing cabinet.

‘Well, force it, man! We haven’t the time to dally around.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said the assistant, rummaging through a canvas bag on the floor and coming up with a crowbar in his hand.

‘I say! Is that really necessary?’ said Warren. ‘I mean, I’m sure we’ll have a duplicate key somewhere.’

‘
Somewhere
, Chief Inspector? Is that so? Could you produce the key within the next five minutes?’

‘Well, now,’ said Warren, coughing nervously, ‘I’m not entirely sure that I—’

‘Force the lock, Jenkins.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘
Well, I never!
This is most extraordinary, Home Secretary, I must say!’

‘Indeed it is, Chief Inspector Warren, indeed it is … You see, following the death of your Detective Inspector Quigg, evidence has come to light to suggest that he was involved in a number of illegal activities. To wit: fraud, extortion, coercion of witnesses, living off immoral earnings, the receipt of bribes … to name but a few. If these accusations prove to have any substance … Well now, such corruption—from a senior officer under your command?’

Warren’s face flushed as he gave DC Webbe a quick glance.

‘I assure you, Home Secretary, we will do everything in our power to help investigate such allegations. I’ll admit, this news comes as a great shock to me … but I give you my word, sir, that I will endeavour to leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of the truth.’

Box-Hartnell smiled his weasel-like smile.

‘I’m very glad to hear it, Mr. Warren.’

‘Is there anything that we can do immediately to assist, Home Secretary?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, there is, Chief Inspector—I’d like you to arrest the private detective George Harley.’

‘George Harley, sir? On what grounds?’

‘On suspicion of murder.’

‘Murder, Home Secretary? Really? And may I ask the name of the victim?’

‘Detective Inspector Aloysius Quigg.’

Warren glanced nervously again at DC Webbe.

‘DI Quigg? But we have Able Seaman Highstead in custody for that. He was found in possession of the murder weapon at the scene of the crime. There are a number of eye witnesses who have identified him as the murderer and he has subsequently provided a full written confession. To my knowledge we are not pursuing any further lines of enquiry, are we Webbe?’

‘No, sir—Charlie Highstead’s our man, alright.’

‘And I might just point out, Home Secretary, that this George Harley is currently working as a special consultant to General Swales. As with any death of a serving officer I’ve been keeping a close eye on the case myself—to my knowledge we have no evidence to suggest that Harley is involved at all.’

‘And I’m telling you
he is!
’ said Box-Hartnell, pocketing his pince-nez.

He stood up and collected a folder of papers from the desk in front of him. ‘Now, Chief Inspector Warren, either you follow my orders to have George Harley arrested—without delay—or I shall have you suspended, pending a full investigation into your involvement in these allegations of corruption. After all, there must be some reason for you flagrantly disobeying your Home Secretary in this manner … you’ve obviously something to hide.’

Turning a deeper shade of purple, Warren turned to Webbe and barked into his face: ‘Well, Webbe—what are you waiting for? You heard the Home Secretary! Get out there and bring Harley in for questioning—immediately! And take at least two cars with you—my guess is the fellow will be a bit of a handful.’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘On second thoughts, Sergeant, put a call in to the Flying Squad—tell them we need some back-up on this.’

‘The Flying Squad, sir? Really?’

‘Yes,
really
, Sergeant! Now get on with it, man!’

‘Very good, sir!’ said Webbe rushing out of the office.

‘Much better, Mr. Warren,’ said Box-Hartnell, heading for the door followed by the civil servants who were now weighed down with Quigg’s paperwork. ‘Make sure that you contact my office the moment you have him in custody. And take care, Chief Inspector, the man’s a subversive. As I say, this is a matter of state security—you won’t allow him to slip through your fingers now, will you?’

‘Of course not, sir. Rest assured, you can depend on the Metropolitan Police, Home Secretary.’

Box-Hartnell raised one eyebrow at this comment and then strode out of the room, leaving Warren to slump down in the chair and survey the ransacked office.

***

Harley awoke with his head on the bureau, the image of the Green Man crumpled in his hand. The pale sepia of a London morning was pushing its way through the crack in the curtains and the city birdsong, along with the fading clip-clopping of the milkman’s horse on the cobbled street below, heralded the start of a new day.

He sat up and rubbed a hand across his eyes. He was painfully hung-over, his face slick with a cold, greasy sweat.

Straightening out the crumpled paper he peered through bleary eyes to read back the results of his experiment with the hallucinogenic dreambugs.

‘
Pamphlet from C, filed under E …’

Harley now started at a loud scratching sound coming from the direction of the door … but was relieved to see it was just Moloch—thankfully transformed back to his old feline self—pawing to be let out.

‘Sorry, mate!’ said the private detective, getting up and opening the door to allow the tattered old tom cat to slip out onto the landing and down the stairs. ‘Off you go, then! And say hello to that little molly of yours for me, won’t yer? You dirty old cove!’

Harley smiled, then immediately frowned at the stabbing pain this produced at the base of his skull.

‘Jesus—my ’ead!’

He followed Moloch downstairs and searched out a packet of aspirin in the bathroom cabinet, made himself a cup of strong, sweet tea and retrieved the fresh pack of Gold Flake from his overcoat.

Back in the library, having drunk most of the tea and already halfway through his second smoke, Harley felt suitably recovered to scrutinize in detail the notes he’d made from the previous night.

‘Filed under ‘E’ …’ he said, drumming his fingers on the desk. ‘Alright then, here we go.’

Although still a little shaky from the come-down, he managed to negotiate the rickety library steps to scan the box files on the relevant shelf, hoping that the sight of the title might jog his memory enough to avoid having to go through every clipping and article that he’d archived under ‘E’.

‘Entomology … Entozoology … Epidemiology … Éprouvette testing … Eugenics—of course!
Eugenics!
’

The memory of that afternoon now came flooding back—Cynthia’s anger at the proposals she’d heard being made at the meeting she’d attended with her orchestra’s conductor, of the sterilization of the deaf and the blind, promiscuous women and homosexuals. Harley also recalled his own jealousy at the oily Cecil Whatley’s interest in his fiancée, and how he’d argued with Cynthia, each of them sulking for the remainder of the day. He allowed the memory to taunt him for a moment, then pulled out the box file and climbed down the steps.

He flicked through the assortment of newspaper clippings and copied extracts from text books. There it was—the small pamphlet from the Eugenics Society that Cynthia had returned with that day.

‘Bingo!’ he said, returning to the desk to study his find.

The image on the cover showed a large sprawling tree, named as “The Tree of Human Evolution”, whose meandering roots were emblazoned with labels such as “Genealogy”, “Anthropology”, “Mental Testing” and “Statistics”. But it was the tree’s branches that had immediately caught Harley’s attention. Each leaf-covered bough was heavy with what was labelled as “The Fruits of Humanity”—a crop of Green Man masks, identical in design to the one stolen from Viscount Chantry, bearing titles such as “Music”, “Politics”, “Scientific Discovery”, “Sport” and “Society”.

‘Christ! I
knew
I’d seen these before. So the Verdoy are mixed up with this Eugenics bollocks, are they? Well, no surprise there, I guess—what with Saint Clair always banging on about the watering down of the Nation’s Blood … Alright—we’ll come back to that later.’

Now Harley looked to the second note to himself that he’d made. This time the frantic scribbling under the words “Rye Wolf” took a little more time to decipher.

‘Ah … Pembroke’s
old man!
’

He returned to the bookshelves and hunted through the personnel files under “P”—but the only notes he had in his archive were the ones he’d made recently on the Reverend Giles Pembroke himself.
But his old man was also a vicar, wasn’t he …
he thought. He extracted some of the notes on Giles Pembroke, replaced the box file and moved to a lower shelf to hunt out an old edition of “Crockford’s Clerical Directory”.

‘Here he is:
Arthur Reginald Pembroke … born eighteen-forty-seven …
Don’t know what all those poxy abbreviations are, but then … 
Oxford … Chantry Hall … Grubberton
 … 
died nineteen-twenty …
’

Harley slammed the book closed, producing a little puff of dust.

‘Nothing obvious there.’

He came down from the steps and thought for a moment, drawing his fingers through his dishevelled hair.

‘Come on, George—
think!
’

His eyes wandered along the shelves, coming to rest on the section labelled “Religion & Mythology”. He pulled out a series of large text books, thumbing through each to find the index and list of contributors; but nowhere could he discover any reference to the Reverend Arthur Reginald Pembroke.

Harley now changed tack, leaving the reference section and moving to the wall opposite, which housed a selection of fiction—mostly collected by his Uncle Blake, although with a few esoteric additions that he’d picked up himself over the years. The theme of the majority of these novels was the occult and the supernatural; a subject which—contrary to his scientific leanings—Harley had had a fascination with since childhood.

But a trawl through the various authors’ names on the spines of the novels failed to turn up any anything new.

Feeling enervated and dejected from the after effects of the previous night’s ordeal, Harley slumped back down at the bureau and finished off the last dregs of the cold, sweet tea. He sparked up another cigarette and stared at the book shelves, hoping for a flash of inspiration.

He picked up the notes on Giles Pembroke and read through them again.

‘
Chaplain at Chantry Hall … childhood friend … keen amateur historian—
hold on! Didn’t Effie say the old man was a historian as well? I wonder …’

Returning to the reference shelves he now studied the spines of the volumes in the History section.

‘Here we go!
“Saint Anthony’s Fire—Being an Account of the Outbreak of Ergotism in a Somerset Village in 1340”, by A. R. Pembroke
. Got you, you bugger! Jesus! I don’t even remember ever seeing this thing before, let alone reading it—Moloch, you’re a pal!’

He pulled out the thin volume and sat down in the wing chair to pore through its contents, underlining the sections of text that he felt were relevant:

“Ergotism, an epidemic malady linked to bad harvests … mixture of poisoned grains in rye or other corn … after a wet sowing or a wet season of growth some of the rye heads become infected with the fungal parasite
Claviceps purpurea
,
bearing long brown or purple corns … rye-bread infected with ergot may be blacker in appearance, but has no discernable difference in taste … although rye was scantily cultivated in England during the medieval period, it continued to be an occasional crop on the Chantry Hall estate … particularly wet summer in 1340 … outbreak affected a large percentage of the peasantry in the local village of Grubberton.”