De Kliek 3

Another day, another private members' club in London's St James's district. This is the Pendragon Club, a place which makes even the most exclusive of establishments look like a drop-in centre. The Pendragon was established in 1796 and, although it is peculiar among its brethren for having allowed women to join since its inception, is is famed as much for its discretion as for the supposed calibre of its members. Suffice to say that, if I had the spare cash to take punts on the stock market, seeing our Prime Minister lunching with a certain leading tech figure the day I visit would have had me running outside to call my broker.

My research into the Jermyn family, and into the enigmatic Belgian antiquities "dealer", Anders Verhaeren, had not yielded much in the way of concrete results, but several lines of enquiry had thrown up the same name.

Melville Miles defies most conventional labels. He describes himself as a "freelance consultant", which seems to be an umbrella term for someone who travels the world as a kind of corporate "fixer", easing himself into disputes between governments and global corporations in order to smooth the passage of business deals and jurisdictional entanglements. At least, that's as much as I could really glean in terms of detail. More pertinently, perhaps, he is a cousin, albeit a distant one, of the Jermyn family.

I’m shown into a small reading room at the rear of the Pendragon Club where Melville Miles is waiting for me. We are the only people in the room and there is already a pot of coffee and two cups set on the table. Miles is, I would guess, in his late fifties (such routine biographical information does not seem to be available). He has a good head of hair with no signs of grey, although I've never been any good at spotting when men have dyed the grey out. He's sitting down, but I'd guess he's at least six-feet tall, and broad without seeming overweight. The suit is tailored and the tie is striped, of the kind that suggests some kind of club allegiance, but I have no clue which club it might be.

I was surprised when Miles agreed to meet me. The little information I could gather about him suggested that he was a man who valued his privacy. A little digging had unearthed an "enquiries@" email address for his consultancy, and I had shot off a message to it without any real hope of a response. And yet, less than an hour later, Melville Miles had got in touch directly and arranged this meeting.

Now that I'm in the room, he motions me to a chair and I can feel him studying me as I sit down and pour myself a cup of coffee. The other cup is unused and Miles declines my offer to fill it, "One cup first thing in the morning. Any more than that, and I'm a basket-case." The accent is pure British public school, but the voice itself is maybe an octave higher than I expected to come from a man of this stature.

I ask him why he agreed to meet me, and he smiles, comments that perhaps I am used to more of a chase. I ask if he's listened to our show and he tells me that he is "Aware of it", a phrase that is accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand.

"I understand we have a mutual acquaintance," he says. "Military chap, disappeared a few years back."

I realise he's talking about Jasper, and that immediately puts me on guard, which he senses. He smiles. "We weren't close. From what I understand, he won't be missed."

He shifts in his chair, picks a piece of lint from his trousers. "You're interested in my cousin, I understand? Arthur?"

"How exactly are you related? I couldn't find many off-shoots of the Jermyn family tree."

"No, I imagine not. It's all dim and distant. Second or third, once or twice removed, you know the sort of thing. Someone boffed a maid or a housekeeper and then had to write a cheque to make it all go away. If you're looking for a detailed genealogy, I'm afraid you're talking to the wrong man."

"And yet your name came up several times when I was looking into the Jermyn family."

He smiles. "A little trail was laid. Bait, I suppose you might say. My name planted in just enough places that anyone looking for details on the Jermyns couldn't fail to stumble across me."

"A trail laid by...?"

"I am the man who is supposed to throw you off the scent. Except I'm not going to do that, not today. Today, I am going to tell you the true story of the Jermyn family, or at least its latter members."

"Why?"

"Because poor Arthur is dead, and the family line ends with him. So there are no secrets left to protect. But there is one to expose, Mister Heawood, rather a big one. And I hope, if you'll hear me out, that you might be disposed to helping to expose it."

He adjusts his position again and looks out of the window for a brief moment. Then he clears his throat and starts talking.

The Statement of Melville Miles

The family goes all the way back. One of those old lines that can trace itself back to the Norman Conquest. But it's all strictly of academic interest until we get to Sir Robert Jermyn, Arthur's great-grandfather.

This is the 1920s and Sir Robert fancies himself the Great White Explorer. There were a lot of them about then, as you can imagine. Men with big moustaches striding about the place, bothering the natives and pilfering whatever treasure they might be able to sell. All in the name of improving our knowledge of the world, when mostly they were just looking for something they could flog to pay the upkeep on those inherited country piles that had become a millstone around their necks. Sir Robert was very much in that category. He'd spent the Great War safely tucked up miles from the front line, with some stripes on his arm, having a jolly nice time. But he'd come back to a pile of bills and, having no marketable skills whatsoever, he decided to totter off to what was then the Belgian Congo, in search of fortune and glory.

They called it the Jermyn Expedition, but it wasn't as grand as all that. Three clueless white men and a handful of poorly paid, and no-doubt roundly abused, natives carrying their bags. The other two men might be of interest to you; Rudolph Von Sebottendorf, who had just founded the Thule Society a few years earlier and then fled Germany under a bit of a cloud, and a man called Thomas Tillinghast, a recent emigré from America. I understand you were acquainted with his grandson, Sir Godfrey? Anyway off this unlikely trio trot into the Congolese jungle. They're looking for a lost city that supposedly contains a huge stash of treasure. All well and good, if a little unlikely. But the real problem, of course, is that these three haven't the faintest idea what they're doing and the whole party vanishes without trace within a few days of setting off.

Back home in England, the press are dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s on the obituary of Sir Robert Jermyn; yet another white man lost for good in deepest, darkest Africa. But then, a few months later, these three lunatics come crawling out of the jungle, sans natives, of course, because those poor buggers never seemed to survive those trips. Von Sebottendorf has contracted some kind of tropical disease that puts him in a sanitarium for the better part of a year, Thomas Tillinghast has gone completely tonto, raving about giant monkeys and some kind of "Great White Ape". But most interesting of all, Sir Robert, who hasn't a scratch on him, now has a pregnant wife in tow.

Now, the details on this are rather hazy. The wife was veiled, by all accounts, and no one seems to have got a good look at her. Sir Robert brings her back to England and installs her in the Dartmoor house but the staff are told not to go anywhere near her. She's basically shut up in a room and Sir Robert himself brings her meals and whatever else she needs. All very strange. And then she dies in childbirth and there's no funeral service, and the body isn't buried in the grounds. In fact, there's no record of what happened to the poor woman or where her remains might be found.

The child is a boy. Robert names him "Wade", for reasons passing understanding. The boy is home-schooled, never photographed, never leaves the grounds of the estate. The place haemorrhages staff around this time. Apparently the kid is hideous, deformed in some way. But before we get the violins out, it should be noted that the deformation was not, by all accounts, purely cosmetic; the monster is a monster through and through. Domestic animals are turning up dead, servants are being attacked. For his part, Sir Robert mostly seems to have locked himself away and had little contact with the boy.

Young Wade is sent away to school on the continent. Details of exactly where have never come to light, but there are rumours of a facility somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, started by a man called Penzoldt sometime in the 1890s. Whatever the specific situation with Wade Jermyn is, it seems there are more of them and that this Penzoldt chap knew how to deal with them.

Nothing more is heard from Wade Jermyn for several years. In the meantime, presumably prompted by his friendship with Von Sebottendorf, Sir Robert has become quite an enthusiastic Nazi. He finds himself in prison as the Second World War breaks out. Unbeknownst to him, the tumour that is going to kill him has been growing, undetected, for several years by that point and he dies in the prison infirmary in 1942. At this point, Wade returns to assume his position on the estate. He's in his twenties by now, and, against all odds, has got married. His wife is an Austrian woman called Charlotte. Wade remains a recluse on the estate, although the gossip among the staff is that he is far less objectionable now than he was as a child. Charlotte, on the other hand is, by all accounts, delightful. She throws herself into the running of the house, and into involvement with the local community; sings in the church choir, raises money for good causes, all that sort of thing. There are rumours, unsubstantiated, that she's carrying on with some of the local men. But no one seems to have judged her too harshly for that, given that her husband is barely ever seen outside his rooms.

At a certain point, Charlotte gets pregnant. There are the obvious rumours that the child is not Wade's, but it seems as though it may have been; two days after the child is born, Charlotte, a cheerful and upbeat soul by all accounts, hangs herself in one of the barns near the house. Now we might think that was postpartum depression, and perhaps it was, but one can't help but wonder... The child is another boy, named Alfred. While he is not physically deformed, he is clearly his father's son in other ways; by the time he is walking and talking, the staff are wary of him, if not actively frightened, and the domestic animals are kept away from him as much as possible.

Wade, meanwhile, is running something of a business empire from behind closed doors on the Estate. It seems that he made some contacts during his time in Europe, and has inherited still more from his late father. There are mining interests in the Congo, which doesn't seem like a coincidence, and he is masterminding a blackmarket trade in antiquities from Africa and the Middle-East. He's also involved with financing some very unsavoury far-right groups here and on the continent. But there are rumours of something larger; that the money Wade is raising is financing an organisation of which the Tillinghast family are also a part, an organisation with ties to the Marsh family in New England and to various sympathetic European groups...

Young Alfred is also sent away to this Carpathian Institute, which now seems to be largely funded by this organisation that Wade has set up. In a pattern that now becomes familiar, Wade dies of supposedly natural causes (no autopsy was allowed and his body was cremated) and Alfred returns from the Carpathians, with a new wife. But this is not a chance meeting or some strange jungle assignation; in this instance, the marriage is a business arrangement, put in place by Wade before he died. Alfred is married to a New York debutante called Mirabelle Fisher, progeny of a powerful New England family with ties to the New York branch of the Tillinghasts (and a very distant cousin or aunt or something of your podcasting partner).

Arthur Jermyn was Alfred and Mirabelle's only child. And, unusually, his upbringing seems to have been relatively unremarkable. His parents made an effort to be visible members of the local community, and to put to rest whatever rumours were still circulating about the bizarre history of the Jermyn Family. But this seems to have been a pretence. They were like sleeper agents; both working for the organisation that Wade had set up with the Tillinghasts, involved with the far-right, with antiquity smuggling, with that Belgian chap, Verhaeren, who apparently first came onto the scene about twenty years ago and was very tied in to whatever Sir Alfred and Mirabelle were up to.

Mirabelle and Alfred died in 1997 in the South of France. Someone shot them outside a church in a place called Rennes Le Chateau. No one knows what they were doing there and the gunman was never found. But the family business seems to have died with them. Perhaps they hadn't yet got around to briefing Arthur on his inheritance, perhaps one of them had decided to keep him out of it.

Either way, Arthur did not follow in his parents' footsteps. He sold a lot of the business assets and seems to have been more focused on the upkeep of the estate and in using his time and money on local causes. Whatever the Jermyn Family had been up to for the past hundred years seemed on course to stop with Arthur. He had no kids, as you know, so it was likely that everything was going to wind down and stop with him. Nice enough chap he seemed, too. I only met him a couple of times, but difficult to imagine him involving himself in whatever his family had been up to.

And then that man Verhaeren shows up one morning. And whatever he said or showed to Arthur seems to have unhinged the poor man's mind.

Melville Miles stops talking. He takes a long breath, checks his watch. I'm still trying to absorb and organise all the information he has given me. Mysterious trips into the Congo, a strange institute in the Carpathian Mountains, the Marsh Family, the Tillinghasts, the Fishers...

"This organisation that Sir Wade Jermyn put together..."

Miles looks at me, nods. "That's the thing, isn't it?"

"You said you wanted my help."

"I do... We do." He checks his watch again. "I have to go, I'm afraid. I'm going to hand you off to a colleague, if that's OK?"

He's already standing up when the door opens. His "colleague" breezes into the room. They barely acknowledge each other as Miles leaves. The newcomer settles into the vacated chair, pours some coffee into the unused mug. Then she looks at me from behind dark glasses, and smiles.

"Hello Matthew, you look well," says Parker. "We need to talk about De Kliek."