Anno Dracula

8

THE MYSTERY OF THE HANSOM CAB

Beauregard strolled in the fog, endeavouring to digest all he had gleaned from the inquest. He would have to make a full report to the cabal; he must have the facts, such as they were, ordered.

His wandering was not random: from the Working Lads’ Institute, he walked down Whitechapel Road, turned right into Great Garden Street, left into Chicksand Street. He allowed himself to be drawn to the site of the recent murder. Even with the churning fog and the Silver Knife panic, the streets were crowded. As midnight approached, the un-dead emerged. Public houses and music halls were illuminated, crammed with laughing and shouting people. Costermongers hawked sheet music, phials of ‘human’ blood, scissors, Royal souvenirs. Chestnuts roasted in a barrel-fire on Old Montague Street were sold to new-born and warm alike. Vampires had no need of solid food, but the habit of eating was hard to leave behind. Boys sold fancifully illustrated broadsheets with gruesome details piping hot from Lulu Schön’s inquest. A good many more uniformed constables were about than was usual, mostly new-borns. Beauregard supposed any suspicious characters loitering around Whitechapel and Spitalfields must come in for close inspection, presenting the police with a thorny problem, since the district thronged with nothing but suspicious characters.

A street organ ground an air: ‘Take a Pair of Crimson Eyes’, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Vampyres of Venice; or: A Maid, a Shade and a Blade. That seemed apt. The maid – so to speak – and the blade were obviously present in the case. The shade was the murderer, obscured by fog and blood.

Despite Dr Jekyll’s testimony and Baxter’s verdict, he considered the notion that the crimes to date were the work of different hands, ritual killings like thuggee stranglings or Camorra executions. The extent of the mutilation was superfluous to necessity if the murderer’s purpose was simply to end life. The Pall Mall Gazette ventured that the savage excess of the crimes were reminiscent of an Aztec rite. Even more, Beauregard was reminded of incidents in China, Egypt and Sicily, in connection with secret societies. The purpose of such atrocities was not merely to eliminate an enemy but also to deliver a message to the victim’s confederates or any who might choose to stand with him. The metropolis was as warm with secret societies and their agents; it was not improbable that there were already Freemasonries sworn to continue Abraham Van Helsing’s crusade against the Prince Consort and his get. In a sense, as an agent of the Diogenes Club, Beauregard was actually a member of such a faction; the ruling cabal was divided in itself, torn between loyalty to the Queen and suspicion of the Lord Protector.

Sharp eyes took note of his good clothes but their owners mainly kept out of his way. Beauregard was conscious of the watch in his waistcoat and the wallet in his inside breast pocket. Nimble fingers were around, and long-nailed claws. Blood was not all the new-borns wanted. He swung his cane purposefully, warding off evil.

A thick-necked vampire with size-twelve boots lounged opposite where Lulu had been killed, trying half-heartedly not to look like a detective constable posted on the off chance that the old saw about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime were true. The area around the Kosminskis’ doorway had been picked clean by the police and souvenir hunters. He tried to imagine the last moments of the vampire girl. The detective, the monotony of his duty broken by the presence of a man in a cloak with morbid interests, lumbered from his spot. Beauregard had his card out ready. The new-born saw the words ‘Diogenes Club’ and did a curious little dance with his hands and face, half-salute and half-snarl. Then he stepped in front of the doorway, shielding Beauregard from sight, like the look-out for a cracksman.

He stood on the spot where the girl had died and felt nothing but the cold. Psychical mediums were reputedly able to track a man by invisible ectoplasmic residue, like a bloodhound following a trail. Any such who had offered assistance to the Metropolitan Police had not achieved notable results. The hollow where Silver Knife had worked was tiny. Lulu Schön, a small woman, had had to be twisted and trampled to be crammed down into it. Scrubbed-clean brickwork blotches, as shocking on the soot-blackened wall as an exposed patch of white bone, showed unmistakably where the blood-stains had been. There was nothing more, Beauregard thought, to be gained by this macabre visit.

He bade the detective a good-night and walked off to find a cab. A vampire whore in Flower & Dean Street offered to make him immortal for an ounce or two of his blood. He flipped her a copper coin and went on his way. How long would he have the strength to resist? At thirty-five, he was already aware that he was slowing. In the cold, he felt his wounds. At fifty, at sixty, would his resolve to stay warm to the grave seem ridiculous, perverse? Sinful, even? Was refusing vampirism the moral equivalent of suicide? His father had died at fifty-eight.

Vampires needed the warm to feed and succour them, to keep the city running through the days. There were already un-dead – here in the East End, if not in the salons of Mayfair – starving as the poor had always starved. How soon would it be before the ‘desperate measures’ Sir Danvers Carew advocated in Parliament were seriously considered? Carew favoured the penning-up of still more warm, not only criminals but any simply healthy specimens, to serve as cattle for the vampires of breeding essential to the governance of the country. Stories crept back from Devil’s Dyke that made ice of Beauregard’s heart. Already the definition of criminality extended to include too many good men and women who were simply unable to come to an accommodation with the new regime.

At length, he found a hansom and offered the cabby two florins to take him back to Cheyne Walk. The driver touched his whip to the brim of his topper. Beauregard settled down behind the folding half-doors. With an interior upholstered in red like the plush coffins displayed in the shops along Oxford Street, the hansom was altogether too luxurious a conveyance for this quarter. He wondered whether it had carried a distinguished visitor in search of amorous adventures. Houses all over the district catered to every taste. Women and boys, warm and vampire, were freely available for a few shillings. Drabs like Polly Nichols and Lulu Schön could be had for coppers or a squirt of blood. It was possible the murderer was not from the area, that he was just another toff pursuing peculiar pleasures. You could get anything in Whitechapel, either by paying for it or taking it.

His duties had taken him to worse places. He had spent weeks as a one-eyed beggar in Afghanistan, dogging the movements of a Russian envoy suspected of stirring up the hill-tribes. During the Boer Rebellion, he had negotiated a treaty with the Amahagger, whose idea of an evening’s entertainment was baking the heads of captives in pots. However it had been something of a surprise to return, after a spell abroad in the discreet service of Her Majesty, to find London itself transformed into a city more strange, dangerous and bizarre than any in his experience. No longer the heart of Empire, it was a sponge absorbing the blood of the realm until it burst.

The cab’s wheels rattled on the road, lulling him like the soft crash of waves under a ship. Beauregard thought again of his possible secret society; the Hermetic Order of the Stake perhaps, or the Friends of Van Helsing. In one feature, the crimes were unlike ritual murders: in such cases it was important there be an unmistakable signature, like the five orange pips sent by the Ku Klux Klan to a traitor or the cold fish left beside a Sicilian who defied the mafia. Here the only signature was a kind of directed frenzy. This was the doing of a madman not an insurrectionist. That would not prevent street-corner ranters like those who had interrupted the inquest from claiming these pathetic eviscerations as victories for the warm. It would not be beyond the capabilities of many a secret society to take advantage of a hapless lunatic, systematically to drive a man mad in a certain direction as if he were a weapon being aimed, then discharging him into the streets to do his bloody business.

He might have drifted into sleep, to be awakened outside his own front door by the cabby’s rap, but something irritated him. He had grown used to trusting his occasional feelings of irritation. On several occasions, they had been the saving of his life.

The cab was in the Commercial Road, heading east, not west. Towards Limehouse. Beauregard could smell the docks. He resolved to see this out. It was an intriguing development. He had hopes that the cabby did not merely intend to murder and rob him.

He eased aside the catch in the head of his cane and slid a few inches of shining steel out of the body of the stick. The sword would draw freely if he needed it. Still, it was only steel.