By Kim Newman
PROLOGUE: A GRADUATE OF THE LAUGHING ACADEMY
He arrived bright and early in the morning. At eight o’clock, the entire workforce was assembled in the open air. The managing director introduced him as an outside consultant with bad news to deliver and handed him the loud-hailer. Barely restraining giggles, Mr. Joyful announced the shipyard would close down at the end of the year and they were all sacked.
Escorted off site by armed guards, ignoring the snarls and taunts of to-be-unemployed-by-1971 workmen, he was back in his bubble car, stomach knotted with hilarious agony, by eight-fifteen. He managed to drive a few miles before he was forced to pull over and give vent to the laughter that had built up inside him like painful gas. Tears coursed down his cheeks. The interior of his space-age transport vibrated with the explosions of his merriment.
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.
* * * *
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 agreed, 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.
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 reached 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.
* * * *
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.
“I understand you’re one of the spooks of the Diogenes Club,” the Whitehall man said. “Winthrop’s creature.”
Richard shrugged, allowing the truth of it. The Diogenes Club was loosely attached to the Government of the Day and tied into the tangle of British Intelligence agencies, but Edwin Winthrop of the Ruling Cabal had kept a certain distance from the Gnomes of Cheltenham since the war, and was given to running Diogenes more or less as a private fiefdom.
It was said of one of Winthrop’s predecessors that he not only worked for the British Government but that under some circumstances he was the British Government. Winthrop did not match that, but was keen on keeping Diogenes out of the bailiwick of Whitehall, if only because its stock in trade was everything that couldn’t be circumscribed by rules and regulations, whether the procedures of the Civil Service or the Laws of Physics. Richard was not a civil servant, not beholden to the United Kingdom for salary and pension, but did think of himself as loyal to certain ideals, even to the Crown.
“I’m afraid this is typical of Diogenes’ behaviour lately,” Garnett said. “There’s been the most almighty snarl-up in the Pleasant Green affair.”
Garnett, Richard gathered, was one of the faction who thought the independence of the Diogenes Club a dangerous luxury. They were waiting patiently for Winthrop’s passing so that everything could be tied down with red tape and sealing wax.
“Pleasant Green is being looked into,” Richard said.
“That’s just it. You’re jolly well to stop looking. Any expenses you’ve incurred will be met upon production of proper accounts. But all documentation, including notes or memoranda you or your associates have made, must be surrendered within forty-eight hours. It’s a matter of national security.”
Richard had been expecting this curtain to lower.
“It’s ours, isn’t it?” he said, smiling. “Pleasant Green?”
“You are not cleared for that information. Rest assured that the unhappy events which came to your notice will not reoccur. The matter is at an end.”
Richard kept his smile fixed and ironic, but he had a gnawing worry. It was all very well to be cut out of the case, but Vanessa was inside. If he wanted to extract her, there would be dangers. He had been careful not to let Garnett gather exactly what sort of investigation he had mounted, but it had been necessary to call in favours from the armed forces to kit the girl up with a snakeskin. Garnett might know Vanessa was undercover at Pleasant Green, and could well have blown her cover with Dr. Iain M. Ballance.
Garnett finished his g and t and settled the bar bill. He asked the surprised rollergirl for a receipt. She scribbled a figure on a cigarette paper and handed it over with an apologetic shrug.
“Good night to you,” the Whitehall man said, leaving.
Richard gave Garnett five minutes to get clear of the Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel and slipped out himself.
The ShadowShark was parked round the corner. Vanessa usually drove for him, and Fred was occasionally allowed the wheel as a treat, but they were both down in darkest Sussex. He slid into the driver’s seat and lowered the partition.
“You were right, Edwin,” he told the man in the back seat.
Winthrop nodded. Though he wore a clipped white moustache and had not bulked out in age, there was a certain Churchillian gravity to the Old Man. He had fought for King and Country in three world wars, only two of which the history books bothered with.
“Ghastly business,” Winthrop snorted, with disgust.
“I’ve been asked to cease and desist all investigation of Pleasant Green and Dr. Ballance.”
“Well, my boy, that you must do. We all have our masters.”
Richard did not need to mention Vanessa. Winthrop had made the call to an old army comrade to help outfit “Lieutenant Vail” with a believable life.
“The investigation was a formality, anyway,” Winthrop said. “After all, we knew at once what Ballance was up to. He drives people off their heads. Now, we know who he mostly does it for. He has private-sector clients, but his major business is to provide tailor-made psychopaths who are placed at the disposal of certain official and semiofficial forces in our society. It’s funny, really. The people behind Ballance are much like us, like the Diogenes Club. Governments come and go, but they’re always there. There are times when any objective observer would think them on the side of the angels and us batting for the other lot. You know what our trouble is, Richard? England’s trouble? We won all our wars. At great cost, but we won. We needed a new enemy. Our American cousins might be content to clash sabres with the Soviets, but Ivan was never going to be our dragon. We made our own enemy, birthed it at home, and raised it up. Maybe it was always here and we are the sports and freaks.”
Richard understood.
“I know what Garnett wants me to do,” he said. “What does Diogenes want?”
“Obviously, you are to stop investigating Dr. Ballance’s business. And start dismantling it.”
* * * *
In the morning room, comfortable armchairs were arranged in a full circle. Group sessions were important at Pleasant Green.
In the next seat was a middle-aged man. Dr. Ballance asked him to stand first.
“My name is Mr. Ease,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Ease,” they all replied.
”...and I cheat and steal.”
“Good show,” murmured an approving voice, echoed by the rest of Group. She clapped and smiled with the rest of them. Dr. Ballance looked on with paternal approval.
He was a businessman. It had apparently been difficult to wash away the last of his scruples. Now, after a week of Pleasant Green, Mr. Ease was unencumbered by ethics or fear of the law. He had been worried about prison, but that phobia was overcome completely.
“My name is Captain Naughty,” said a hard-faced man, a uniformed airline pilot. “And I want to punish people who do bad things. Firmly. Most of all, I want to punish people who do nothing at all.”
“Very good, Captain,” said Dr. Ballance.
Next up was the patrician woman who always wore blue dresses, the star of Group.
“My name is Mrs. Empty,” she announced. “And I feel nothing for anyone.”
She got no applause or hug. She earned respect, not love. Mr. Ease and Captain Naughty were clearly smitten with Mrs. Empty, not in any romantic sense but in that they couldn’t stay away from the sucking void of her arctic charisma. Even Dr. Ballance’s staff were in awe of her.
“My name is Rumour,” drawled a craggy Australian. “And I want everything everyone thinks to come through me.”
“Good on you, sir,” Captain Naughty said, looking sideways to seek approval, not from Dr. Ballance—like everyone else in Group—but from Mrs. Empty.
“My name is Peace,” said a young, quiet Yorkshireman. “I like killing women.”
Peace, as always, got only perfunctory approval. The others didn’t like him. He made them think about themselves.
She was last. She stood, glancing around at the ring of encouraging faces.
The Group was supportive. But this would be difficult.
“My name is Lieutenant Veevee,” she said.
“Hello, Veevee,” everyone shouted, with ragged cheer.
She took a deep breath, and said it.
“... and I will kill people.”
There. She felt stronger, now.
Mr. Ease reached up, took her hand and gave a friendly squeeze. Miss Lark gave her a hug. She sat down.
“Thank you all,” said Dr. Ballance. “You are very special to Pleasant Green, as individuals and as Group. You’re our first perfect people. When you leave here, which you’re very nearly ready to do, you’ll accomplish great things. You will take Pleasant Green with you. It won’t happen soon, maybe not for years. But I have faith in you all. You are creatures of the future. You will be the Masters of the 1980s.”
Already, complex relationships had formed within Group. Mr. Ease and Captain Naughty competed to be friends with Mrs. Empty, but she liked Rumour best of all. Peace was drawn to Veevee, but afraid of her.
“Would anyone like to tell us anything?” Dr. Ballance asked.
Captain Naughty and Mr. Ease stuck hands up. Mrs. Empty flashed her eyes, expecting to be preferred without having to put herself forward.
“It’s always you two,” Dr. Ballance said. “Let’s hear from one of the quiet ones.”
He looked at her, then passed on.
“Peace,” the doctor said. “Have you thoughts to share?”
The youth was tongue-tied. He was unusual here. He had learned to accept who he was and what he wanted, but was nervous about speaking up in the presence of his “betters.” Whenever Mrs. Empty made speeches about eliminating laziness or what was best for people, Peace opened and closed his sweaty hands nervously but looked at the woman with something like love.
“I was wondering, like,” he said. “What’s the best way to a tart’s heart? I mean, physically. Between which ribs to stab, like?”
Captain Naughty clucked in disgust.
Peace looked at her. She lifted her left arm to raise her breast, then tapped just under it with her right forefinger.
“About here,” she said.
Peace flushed red. “Thank you, Veevee.”
The others were appalled.
“Do we have to listen to this rot?” Captain Naughty asked. “It’s just filth.”
Peace was a National Health referral, while the others were Private.
“You’ve just run against your last barrier, Captain,” Dr. Ballance announced. “You—all of you—have begun to realise your potential, have cut away the parts of your personae that were holding you back. But before you can leave with your Pleasant Green diploma, you must acknowledge your kinship with Peace. Whatever you say outside this place, you must have in your mind a space like Pleasant Green, where you have no hypocrisy. It will ground you, give you strength. We must all have our secret spaces. Peace will get his hands dirtier than yours, but what he does will be for Group just as what you do will be for Group.”
Mrs. Empty nodded, fiercely. She understood.
“That will be all for today,” Dr. Ballance said, dismissing Group. “Veevee, if you would stay behind a moment. I’d like a word.”
The others got up and left. She sat still.
She didn’t know how long she had been at Pleasant Green, but it could have been months or days. She had been taken back to the nursery and grown up all over again, this time with a direction and purpose. Dr. Ballance was father and mother to her psyche, and Pleasant Green was home and school.
Dr. Ballance sat next to her.
“You’re ready to go, Veevee,” he said, hand on her knee.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“But there’s something you must do, first.”
“What is that, Doctor?”
“What you want to do, Veevee. What you like to do.”
She trembled a little. “Kill people?”
“Yes, my dear. There’s a ‘bird-watcher’ on the downs. Fred Regent.”
“Fred.”
“You know Fred, of course. A man is coming down from London. He will join Fred in Whipplewell, at the Coach and Horses.”
“Richard.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant Veevee. Richard Jeperson.”
Dr. Ballance took a wrapped bundle out of his white coat and gave it to her. She unrolled the white flannel, and found a polished silver scalpel.
“You will go to the Coach and Horses,” he told her. “You will find Fred and Richard. You will bring them back here. And you will kill them for us.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Then, when you have passed that final exam, you will seek out a man called Edwin Winthrop.”
“I’ve met him.”
“Good. You have been brought up for this purpose specifically, to kill Edwin Winthrop. After that, you can rest. I’m sure other jobs will come up, but Winthrop is to be your primary target. It is more important that he die than that you live. Do you understand?”
She did. Killing Winthrop meant more to her than her own life.
“Good girl. Now, go and have dinner. Extra custard for you today.”
She wrapped the scalpel up again and put it in her pocket.
* * * *
“You’ve been in there five days, Ness,” Fred told her.
“It seems longer,” she said. “Much longer.”
Richard nodded sagely. “Very advanced techniques, I’ll be bound.”
They were cramped together in her Elan. She drove carefully, across the downs. After dark, the road could be treacherous.
“I was close to you in the wood on the first night,” Fred said. “For the soldier games. What was that all about?”
She shrugged.
Richard was quiet. He must understand. That would make it easier.
She parked in a layby.
“There’s a path through here,” she said. “To Pleasant Green.”
“Lead on,” Richard said.
They walked through the dark wood. In a clearing, she paused and looked up at the bright half-moon.
“There’s something,” Fred said. “Listen.”
It was the bagpiper, wailing “Cinderella Rockefeller.” Dr. Ballance stepped into the clearing. Lights came on. The rest of the Pleasant Green staff were there, too: Miss Lark, Miss Wren and the others. To one side, Mrs. Empty stood, wrapped up in a thick blue coat.
“It seems we’re expected,” Richard drawled.
“Indeed,” said Dr. Ballance.
Fred looked at her, anger in his eyes. He made fists.
“It’s not her fault,” Richard told him. “She’s not quite herself.”
“Bastard,” Fred spat at Dr. Ballance.
Mrs. Empty cringed in distaste at the language.
Dr. Ballance said “Veevee, if you would ...”
She took her scalpel out and put it to Richard’s neck, just behind the ear. She knew just how much pressure to apply, how deep to cut, how long the incision should be. He would bleed to death inside a minute. She even judged the angle so her ankle-length brown suede coat and calfskin high-heeled thigh boots would not be splattered.
“She’s a treasure, you know,” Dr. Ballance said to Richard. “Thank you for sending her to us. She has enlivened the whole Group. Really. We’re going to have need of her, of people like her. She’s so sharp, so perfect, so pointed.”
Richard was relaxed in her embrace. She felt his heart beating, normally.
“And quite mad, surely?” Richard said.
“Mad? What does that mean, Mr. Jeperson? Out of step with the rest of the world? What if the rest of the world is mad? And what if your sanity is what is holding you back, preventing you from attaining your potential? Who among us can say that they are really sane? Really normal?”
“I can,” said Mrs. Empty, quietly and firmly.
“We have always needed mad people,” Dr. Ballance continues. “At Rorke’s Drift, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Festival of Britain, we must have been mad to carry on as we did, and thank mercy for that madness. Times are a-changing, and we will need new types of madness. I can provide that, Mr. Jeperson. These women are perfect, you know. They have no conscience at all, no feeling for others. Do you know how hard it is to expunge that from the female psyche? We teach our daughters all their lives to become mothers, to love and sacrifice. These two are my masterpieces. Lieutenant Veevee, your gift to us, will be the greatest assassin of the era. And Mrs. Empty is even more special. She will take my madness and spread it over the whole world.”
“I suppose it would be redundant to call you mad?” Richard ventured.
Dr. Ballance giggled.
Vanessa had Richard slightly off-balance, but was holding him up. The line of her scalpel was impressed against his jugular, steady.
“Ness won’t do it,” Fred said.
“You think not?” Dr. Ballance smiled. “Anybody would. You would, to me, right now. It’s just a matter of redirecting the circuits, to apply the willingness to a worthwhile end. She feels no anger or remorse or hate or joy in what she does. She just does it. Like a tin-opener.”
“Vanessa,” Richard said.
Click.
That was her name. Not Veevee.
Just his voice and her name. It was a switch thrown inside her.
Long ago, they had agreed. When she first came to Richard, under the control of something else, she had been at that zero to which the Pleasant Green treatment was supposed to reduce her. She had escaped, with his help, then built herself up, with his love and encouragement. She was the stronger for it. Her name, which she had chosen, was the core of her strength. It was the code word that brought her out of a trance.
Everything Pleasant Green had done to her was meaningless now. She was Vanessa.
Not Veevee.
She didn’t change, didn’t move.
But she was herself again.
“That’s all it takes,” Richard said, straightening up. “A name. You don’t really make people, Doctor. You just fake them. Like wind-up toys, they may work for a while. Then they run down. Like Mr. Joyful ... Mr. Achy ... Mr. Enemy ... Miss Essex ... Lieutenant-Commander Hero?”
He enunciated the names clearly. Each one was a jab at Dr. Ballance. The living half of his face froze, matching the dead side.
“This Group is better than them.”
“No more crack-ups, eh? They’re just mad enough, but not too broken to function?”
Mrs. Empty’s cold eyes were fixed on them.
“To survive in the world we are making,” Dr. Ballance said, “everybody will have to be mad.”
He reached into his coat and brought out a gun. In a blink, Vanessa tossed her scalpel. It spun over and over, catching moonlight, and embedded its point in Dr. Ballance’s forehead. A red tear dripped and he crashed backwards.
When he had gone for the gun, he had admitted defeat. He had doubted her. At the last, he had been proved wrong.
It all came crashing in. The programming, the torture, the disorientation—there had been drugs as well as everything else—fell apart.
With a scream, Miss Dove flew at her. She pirouetted and landed a foot in the attendant’s face. The girl was knocked backwards and sprawled on the ground. She bounced back up, and came for her.
It was no match. Miss Dove was a master of disco-style roughhouse. All her movements came from her hips and her shoulders. Vanessa fell back on the all-purpose jeet kune do—the style developed by Bruce Lee which was starting to be called kung fu—and launched kicks and punches at the girl, battering her on her feet until she dropped.
The others backed away. Mrs. Empty walked off, into the dark.
Fred checked Dr. Ballance, and shook his head.
“Well done,” Richard said. “I never doubted you.”
She was completely wrung out. Again, she was on the point of exploding into tears.
Richard held her and kissed her.
“I trusted you here, rather than go myself or send Fred, because I know your heart,” he said kindly. “Neither of us could have survived Pleasant Green. We’re too dark to begin with. We could be made into killers. You couldn’t. You can’t. You’re an angel of mercy, my love, not of death.”
Over his shoulder, she saw Ballance stretched out with a stick of steel in his head. She loved Richard for what he felt about her, but he was wrong. The Pleasant Green treatment might have failed to make her a malleable assassin, but Dr. Ballance had turned her into a killer all the same. After his doubt, had he known a split-second of triumph?
“It was about Winthrop,” she said. “After you and Fred, he wanted me to kill Winthrop. It was part of some plan.”
He nodded grimly, understanding.
* * * *
On the croquet lawn of the Pleasant Green manor house, Richard found an Oriental woman feeding a bonfire with an armful of file folders. Fred took hold of her and wrestled her to the ground, but she had done her job with swift efficiency. Filing cabinets had been dragged out of the prefab buildings and emptied. Documents turned to ash and photographs curled in flame.
Vanessa, cloaked with her coat, was still pale. It would take a while for her to recover fully, but he had been right about her. She had steel.
The Oriental—Miss Lark—produced a stiletto and made a few passes at Fred’s stomach, forcing him back. Then, she tried to slip the blade into her own heart. Vanessa, snapping out of her daze, grabbed the woman’s wrist and made her drop the knife.
“No more,” she said.
Miss Lark looked at them with loathing. Dr. Ballance would never have approved of an emotion like that.
The rest of the staff had vanished into the night, melting away to wherever it was minions languished between paying jobs. Bewildered folks in dressing gowns, among them the electric-eyed woman who had been in the wood, had drifted out to see what the fuss was all about and found themselves abandoned. The other members of the Group.
Car headlamps raked the lawns, throwing shadows against the big house. Doors opened and people got out. They were all anonymous men.
“Jeperson,” shouted Garnett.
The Whitehall Man strode across the lawns, waving his umbrella like a truncheon.
Richard opened his hands and felt no guilt.
“I think you’ll find Dr. Ballance exceeded his authority, Mr. Garnett. If you look around, you’ll find serious questions raised.”
“Where is the Doctor?” demanded Garnett.
“In the wood. He seems to be dead.”
The civil servant was furious.
“He has a gun in his hand. I think he intended to kill someone or other. Very possibly me.”
Garnett obviously thought it a pity Ballance hadn’t finished the job. It was a shame this would end here, Richard thought. Important folk had been sponsoring Dr. Ballance, and had passed down orders to act against the Diogenes Club. Winthrop would be grimly amused to learn he was the eventual target of the plan.
“It wasn’t working, though,” Richard said.
“What?” Garnett said.
“The Ballance Process or whatever he called it. He was trying to manufacture functioning psychotics, wasn’t he? Well, none of them ever functioned. Didn’t you notice? Look at them, poor lost souls.”
He indicated the people in dressing gowns. Ambulances had arrived, and the Pleasant Green guests were being helped into them.
“What use do you think they’ll be now?”
By the ambulances was parked a car whose silhouette Richard knew all too well. There were only five Rolls Royce ShadowSharks in existence; and he owned three of them, all in silver. This was painted in night black, with opaque windows to match. A junior functionary like Garnett wouldn’t run to this antichrist of the road.
He would know the machine again. And the man inside it, who had ordered his death and Edwin’s.
Garnett turned away and scurried across the lawn, to report to the man in the ShadowShark. The woman from the wood firmly resisted orderlies who were trying to help her into an ambulance. She asked no questions and made no protests, but wouldn’t be manhandled, wouldn’t be turned.
“Who is that?” he asked Vanessa.
“Mrs. Empty,” she said. “The star pupil.”
He shuddered. Mrs. Empty was quite, quite mad, he intuited. Yet she was strong, mind unclouded by compassion or uncertainty, character untempered by humour or generosity. In a precognitive flash that made him momentarily weak with terror, he saw a cold blue flame burning in the future.
She was assisted finally into an ambulance, but made the action seem like that of a queen ascending a throne, surrounded by courtiers.
The ambulances left. The ShadowShark stayed behind a moment. Richard imagined cold eyes looking out at him through the one-way black glass. Then, the motor turned over and the Rolls withdrew.
He looked at Fred and Vanessa.
“Let’s forget this place,” he said.
“That might not be easy,” Vanessa said.
“Then we shall have to try very hard.”