Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘They’re saying –’ he went on as he threaded up a needle, once he’d made certain the wound was clean – ‘near as I can make out, that one of the Third Class casualties was the murderer all along.’

  ‘He was,’ affirmed Lydia. She had turned down the surgeon’s offer of morphine (‘I appreciate that, M’am, if it’s really all right with you. We’re short on it now and God knows how much we may need of it later’) but had accepted a few swallows of brandy, and as she spoke, kept her eyes resolutely on the corner of the wall just beyond his shoulder.

  ‘That’s what I was doing down there. I’d found out that one of the men had been stealing candy, and remembered the smell of chocolate on Luzia Pescariu’s hands, and of peppermint on Kemal Adamic’s lips. I told Mr Heller this and he and I rushed to the man’s room, and found a girl tied up in a locker nearby it, where we’d seen him Friday. It’s a long story. I promise I’ll tell you all about it—’

  ‘You better report it to the captain, if you haven’t, M’am.’ He applied a fresh dressing, and rubbed his eyes. He had, Lydia guessed, not been to bed at all. The men and women still waiting to be seen were the cuts-and-bruises end of the night’s casualties. Everybody really badly hurt would have been seen to while she herself had been trapped in Aunt Louise’s suite in the small hours.

  ‘I’ll do that.’ Lydia was aware that she should already have done so. ‘Were many badly hurt?’

  ‘How badly is badly? Seven men dead … four concussions, eight broken arms and two broken collarbones – not to speak of yourself. No, you sit back for a minute …’ He pressed another small glass of watered brandy – part of his private stock – into her hand. ‘Though what any of it had to do with those men planting a pipe bomb in the shaft tunnel—’

  ‘Nothing, I shouldn’t think.’ Lydia sipped cautiously. ‘Did anyone go through their pockets? The … the dead men, I mean. Or through the quarters of Mr Kimball and the other detectives? What happened to the other detectives, by the way? Mr Cochran had five …’

  ‘Boland and Jukes are locked in the ship’s brig.’ Liggatt turned away, and rinsed his hands in a small basin of permanganate of potash. ‘Captain Winstanley’s going to turn them over to the authorities the minute we reach port. The captain inventoried the possessions of the deceased – Mrs Cochran and that secretary of Cochran’s are threatening a lawsuit against the American Line, for not handing Cochran’s watch and hankie over to them – and secured them in the safe in his own quarters.’

  Drat it! ‘Nothing connected with sabotage or Germans, I trust?’ She made her voice dry and a little exasperated at the turn of events, and hoped it didn’t sound flippant.

  To her relief, Liggatt grinned tiredly and shook his head. ‘String and matches and about twenty-five cents – which I’ll swear was change he found lying on the deck! Not to speak ill of the dead, you understand. Barvell had a flask of whiskey, and some suitcase keys. But it was strange: both of them wore crucifixes around their necks – Catholic rosaries.’

  Lydia murmured, ‘How very strange.’

  ‘I reckon you’ve heard – we all have! – Cochran go on about papists, as if they were South Sea cannibals or something. And Cochran was transporting something in this huge trunk – it had triple locks on it, and they’d put another padlock on the suite door. But the trunk itself was empty, as far as we can tell – the mob literally tore it to bits. It was too big to account for that laboratory set-up Barvell had in his stateroom, and besides, that trunk was also in Barvell’s room. It’s a fishy set-up,’ he concluded, helping Lydia to her feet. ‘A fishy set-up whichever way you look at it. Something was sure going on, but I’m blessed if I can think of what. You sure you’re all right?’

  Lydia nodded, and stepped aside as the stout Mrs Roberts escorted a half-grown boy in, gingerly clutching a swollen hand.

  ‘And of course poor Mrs Cochran knows nothing about it. I gather she and her husband hadn’t lived as man and wife in years, for all those diamonds he gave her. There’ll be an inquest when we reach port. If we reach port.’

  If indeed, thought Lydia, returning to the corridor where Ellen waited with Miranda (and Mrs Marigold – ‘Mrs Marigold wanted to come because she’s afraid Mrs Frush is going to take and lock her up in the nursery.’).

  On their way back to the Promenade deck they encountered, to Lydia’s surprise, Heller, discreetly escorted by young Mr Travis. ‘They’ve had everybody on board who knows anything about wireless up into the Marconi room this morning,’ the German explained, when Lydia fell into step with them. ‘I was assistant to the wireless man, on the …’ He visibly bit back the word, ‘submarine’. ‘Once the regular Marconi operator tried to repair the apparatus, it became clear that not only had the wires been disconnected, the equipment itself had been damaged, and the store of spare parts rifled. The Marconi room itself is not constantly manned, you know – a stupid thing, in time of war. Anyone could have broken in, if they had a decent set of picklocks. In view of the sabotage to the propeller shafts—’

  ‘Have they searched Mr Cochran’s rooms?’

  Heller’s pale brows dove down. ‘Cochran?’

  Mr Travis gasped – he evidently knew enough German to follow the conversation. ‘Mrs Asher, surely you aren’t suggesting—’

  ‘I’m suggesting,’ said Lydia slowly, ‘that if Mr Kimball was being paid to sabotage the engines –’ and we’re not going to go into who was paying him – ‘he may well have hidden the spare parts somewhere in Mr Cochran’s suite, while his employer was at dinner some evening. I mean –’ she widened her eyes innocently – ‘who would dare search Mr Cochran’s suite?’

  Heller shot her a sidelong look, but the steward appeared thunderstruck. In English, he exclaimed, ‘By God, Mrs Asher, you may be right! M. Heller –’ switching to German – ‘if I can trust you to get yourself back to Third Class … The captain needs to be told this right away. Mrs Asher—’

  Heller bowed to the steward. ‘You can indeed trust me,’ he said, a little sardonically, ‘to retire to Third Class where I belong.’

  ‘Er – thank you.’ The steward looked awkward, as if aware of how gauche that had sounded. Lydia didn’t blame him – he didn’t look as if he’d had any sleep either, and dealing with Aunt Louise certainly couldn’t have helped. ‘Your help has been enormously appreciated. Mrs Asher, if you’ll come with me …’

  Captain Winstanley – who didn’t look as if he’d had any sleep either – sent at once for the chief radioman and the quartermaster. Lydia accompanied them to Cochran’s suite. But even as the captain unlocked the door, Oliver Cochran – who had been next door in conference with Mr Tilcott – strode up and demanded to know a) who had made such an accusation against his uncle and b) why he, or his aunt, as his uncle’s co-heirs, had not been consulted.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that passengers had anything to say concerning the scene of a crime on board a vessel in international waters,’ said the captain drily. Despite the bruises of sleeplessness under his eyes, he had changed into a fresh uniform (how many of them does he have? When did he take the time to do that?) and had trimmed and laundered his snowy beard. (Does he have a valet?)

  Young Mr Cochran, as if aware of the moral advantage of looking completely point-de-vice, had clearly done the same: clean shirt, tie tied, and not an atom of stubble on his freshly-barbered chin. ‘As my uncle’s heir I have the right to make sure that his name isn’t slandered by accusations of complicity in treason—’

  How did you know there was a question about his complicity in Kimball’s sabotage? Lydia had the good sense not to say – there being no point in throwing oil on what promised to be a roaring blaze. The captain having already unlocked the door (the silver padlock and its hasps had all disappeared), she slipped inside even as Oliver Cochran dispatched Tilcott’s butler to search for Mr Hipray, the Cochran lawyer.

  She might, Lydia reflected bitterly as she flicked on the lights of the inner rooms, have saved herself the trouble. Barv
ell’s laboratory had been well and truly sacked. Not only had Don Simon’s coffin been reduced to matchwood, but every phial and beaker in the laboratory had been smashed, the hypodermic case and all its ampoules trampled deliberately under heavy boots. The stink of blood and spilled chemicals took her by the throat, and the fouled carpet crunched underfoot with broken glass as she searched every drawer and cabinet for notes, formulae, anything that might help her. With a glance over her shoulder at the door, she produced a folding penknife from her pocket and quickly slit the lining of the luggage in the closet. (Who’ll notice, at this point?) Nothing. Nothing under the mattresses, or inside the pillowslips, of the bed.

  (‘—require you to sign an affidavit to that effect,’ she heard a man’s voice saying outside, and Winstanley’s deeper tones retorting, ‘You can go to hell! As captain of this vessel I have absolute authority—’)

  Nothing in Cochran’s room – or luggage – or the pockets of any of his clothing – or under the carpet. As she searched she remembered the old man’s seamed, foxy face, and recalled what Heller had told her about the men he’d casually ordered shot by his strike breakers.

  Yet she found herself wondering which of those splotches of blood on the carpet were his, and how long it had taken for the enraged men of Third Class to club him to death. There was blood spattered on the walls, too, and something white stuck in the blood on the floor that turned out to be two broken teeth.

  He would have enslaved Simon and used him as a supernatural assassin.

  She still couldn’t look at the teeth.

  His sabotage – purely to give himself time to find another vampire to enslave – has immobilized every person on this ship directly in the path of a German submarine.

  Her dream returned to her, the gray-green dimness underwater, the way the bubbles curled along the submarine’s sides. The voices of the captain and his officers, the stink of the air within …

  Heute Abend. Tonight.

  Where did that vision come from?

  Heller told me …

  When she slipped out of the suite again, the group on the Promenade had been augmented by Mr Hipray, stout and slightly greasy-looking with hair that curled thickly around a bald spot the size of a pancake, and two deck stewards. ‘—putting yourself and your company severely in the wrong,’ young Mr Cochran was saying. ‘I assure you, I will have no hesitation in bringing suit against both the American Shipping Line and against you, personally, for wrongful sequestration of a passenger’s goods—’

  ‘There is no proof as yet that those are your goods,’ Winstanley retorted, ‘unless you have a copy of your uncle’s will and proof that it was in fact his most recent testament. Until the reading, and probate, of such a will, you are putting yourself in danger of prosecution for impeding the conduct of a murder investigation, and, depending on what we find, as accessory after the fact to sabotage and quite possibly to treason as well—’

  Quietly, Lydia crossed the Promenade to where Ellen and Miranda (and Mrs Marigold) waited for her at the head of the steps. She took her daughter’s hand, said quietly, ‘Thank you, Ellen. I’ll let you go now – would you like to go down to the lower promenade, sweetheart? Where it’s a little quieter?’

  Miranda nodded. She looked pale and a bit overwhelmed. Together they descended the steps. As they did so, Miranda glanced back and above them, to where two watchers still stood on the lookout, scanning the uneasy sea.

  Lydia’s heart pounded hard. Those first seconds after the explosion returned to her, her own sickened terror at being caught five decks down and knowing there was no way she could have made it to a gangway, had water begun to pour in through a torpedo hole in the hull.

  Tonight, she thought.

  She knew the dream hadn’t been a dream.

  ‘Will Simon be all right?’ Miranda asked.

  Lydia stopped in her tracks. Around them on the silent – but oddly crowded – First Class Promenade, men and women were looking out to sea, or sitting, some of them wearing cork-and-canvas lifejackets, bundled in blankets or fur coats, on their deckchairs, unwilling to be caught indoors even in these upper cabins that had easy access to the boat deck. A few children played, and their mothers watched them anxiously. She heard Mrs Bowdoin call out, ‘No, sugar, stay here where Mama can see you …’

  Carefully, Lydia asked, ‘Where have you met Simon?’

  Miranda thought about it. Then she said, ‘He’s your friend.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lydia. ‘Yes, he is.’ She felt a curious stillness inside, hearing her daughter speak his name. The man who had saved her life, the man she had always hoped she could keep away from her. How can I tell her what he is? What he does? How can I make her understand how I can care for such a man?

  The little girl’s frown deepened. ‘I met him in the garden,’ she said slowly. ‘But I knew who he was.’

  She’d only been two and a half when Simon had gotten her away from the vampire Damien Zahorec.2 Surely she doesn’t remember. Yet she knew, too, how the very old vampires could reach into the minds of those whose eyes they met. Could, in many cases, whisper to their dreams, as she had seen Simon feed and manipulate the dreams of those he wished to dominate – sometimes, apparently, without even meeting them.

  Only from knowing something about them. From having some link.

  Jamie’s face came back to her, visible even in the pitch-black of … of where? Prison? Hideout? Tomb?

  Was the garden Miranda spoke of really the garden behind the house on Holywell Street? Or some bower in her dreams, where bees made bargains with snails about which flowers belonged to whom, and mice learned French from moles?

  ‘Did he speak to you?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘One time. When you went away to be in the war, he came and told me he’d take care of you and make sure you didn’t get hurt.’

  Lydia’s throat closed and she had to look away. The wind had picked up, throwing cold white spume from the crests of the waves.

  Beside her, Miranda went on, ‘I told him you could take care of yourself, and he said, even the Queen of the Amazons needed somebody to guard her back. Ellen read me about the Queen of the Amazons,’ she added. ‘Mrs Marigold was scared, but I wasn’t.’

  And then, more quietly, ‘Is Simon sick?’

  ‘He is,’ said Lydia. She wondered where he was now. A hammock in the chain locker? A corner of a coal bunker?

  What happens when they torpedo the ship?

  She could feel they were coming. Plowing through the gray water, long curls of bubbles streaming back from those lean gray steel sides.

  ‘Is he going to die?’

  He is dead already, she thought, her eyes still on the freezing blue-black ocean. He has been dead for three hundred years. And if the ship is torpedoed and goes down, he will be trapped in her bowels, conscious, freezing, and in agony at the bottom of the sea, until the poison destroys him …

  Heller, she thought. He looked into Heller’s eyes last night, in the locker. What I saw beneath the sea was part of Heller’s thoughts. The smell, the voices, the fear …

  Simon knows what Heller knows …

  Her eyes widened, shocked, shaken to her marrow, and she stepped to the rail, to look at the gray churning of the sky.

  Impatient at the uncommunicative clouds, she consulted her watch.

  Four o’clock. No wonder I have a headache, I didn’t have breakfast or lunch.

  She looked out at the sea again.

  Three hours til darkness. Eight until midnight. If we live til then.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Wait here for me.’ Lydia glanced up the fore gangway, where the grilled doors had been closed with the approach of twilight. A deck steward had been assigned to stand watch, given the imminent peril of torpedoing – more terrible, with the coming of darkness. Down here in the Third Class areas, the silence was even more eerie than it had been up on the First Class Promenade, for in her comings and goings in these lower quarters Lydia had grown used to the t
hrob of the engines, the vibration of the decking underfoot.

  Without the ship’s heartbeat, it became hideously obvious what the City of Gold had become.

  A metal coffin, dangling above an abyss.

  Four hours …

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. I – I have to find someone, someone you need to speak to …’

  Heller frowned into her eyes, his own pale in the electric gloom. She’d found him – after a hasty meal of tea and biscuits in the Willow Grove, since she suspected she might not get any dinner either – in the midst of a meeting in the Third Class dining room, a frightened conference among the emigrants as to what could be expected of the police when – if – they reached New York.

  The German had been preoccupied, patient as he’d helped organize and frame everybody’s stories to make the riot appear as if it had entirely concerned outrage at an act of sabotage. Mention of a vampire was to be entirely avoided. One might perhaps obtain clemency – or at least a degree of sympathy – for killing saboteurs in German pay. ‘If any man says “vampire”,’ he had said – and had waited for this to be translated into six different languages, ‘the pigs will say, “Hah! Superstitious immigrants who do murder from stupidity! Send them back where they come from!”’

  But alone now in the frightful silence near the stairway, Lydia saw his eyes shift.

  ‘Is it the man who was with you last night?’ he asked quietly. ‘The man in evening dress?’

  She said, ‘Yes.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Who is he? What is he?’

  And, when Lydia did not answer, he went on, almost desperately, ‘There is no such thing as a vampire. You know this, Comrade. Only those human ghouls who do not care about the men who die of black lung in their mines, the children who lose their fingers and hands in their factory machines. The women who burn up in their sweatshop fires because they lock all the doors to prevent them from sneaking out for some air. Those are the vampires. Those are the blood drinkers.’