by Kim Newman
‘Business,’ snorted a military-looking vampire, ‘time is money, remember...’
‘A thousand pardons, Colonel Moran. In the East, things are different. Here, we must bow to your Western ways, hurry and bustle, haste and industry.’
The cigar-smoker stood up, unbending a lanky figure from which hung a frock coat marked around the pockets with chalk. The Colonel deferred to him and sat back, eyes falling. The smoker’s head oscillated from side to side like a lizard’s, eye-teeth protruding over his lower lip.
‘My associate is a businessman,’ he explained between puffs, ‘our cricketing friend is a dilettante, Griffin over there is a scientist, Captain Macheath – who, by the way, sends his apologies – is a soldier, Sikes is continuing his family business, I am a mathematician, but you, my dear doctor, are an artist.’
‘The Professor flatters me.’
Beauregard had heard of the Professor too. Mycroft’s brother, the consulting detective, had a craze of sorts for him. He might well be the worst Englishman unhanged.
‘With two of the three most dangerous men in the world in one room,’ he observed, ‘I have to ask myself where the third might be?’
‘I see our names and positions are not unknown to you, Mr Beauregard,’ said the Chinaman. ‘Dr Nikola is unavailable for our little gathering. I believe he may be found investigating some sunken ships off the coast of Tasmania. He no longer concerns us. He has his own interests.’
Beauregard looked at the others in the meeting, those still unaccounted for. Griffin, whom the Professor had mentioned, was an albino who seemed to fade into the background. Sikes was a pig-faced man, warm, short, burly and brutal. With a loud striped jacket and cheap oil on his hair, he looked out of place in such a distinguished gathering. Alone in the company, he was the image of a criminal.
‘Professor, if you would care to explain to our honoured guest...’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ replied the man sometimes called ‘the Napoleon of Crime’. ‘Mr Beauregard, as you are aware none of us – and I include you among our number – has what we might call common cause. We pursue our own furrows. If they happen to intersect... well, that is often unfortunate. Lately there have been the changes, but, whatever personal metamorphoses we might welcome, our calling has remained essentially the same. We are, as we always have been, a shadow community. To an extent, we have reached an accommodation. We pit our wits against each other, but when the sun comes up we draw a line. We let well enough alone. It grieves me greatly to have to say this, but that line seems not to be holding...’
‘There was police raids all over the East End,’ Sikes interrupted. ‘Balmy Charlie Warren’s sent in another bleedin’ cavalry charge. Years of bloody work overturned in a single night. ’Ouses smashed. Gamblin’, opium, girls: nuffin’ sacred. Our business ’as been bought ’n’ paid for, an’ the filthy peelers done us dirty when they went back on the deal.’
‘I have no connection with the police,’ Beauregard said.
‘Do not think us naïve,’ said the Professor. ‘Like all agents of the Diogenes Club, you have no official position at all. But what is official and what is effective are separate things.’
‘This persecution of our interests will continue,’ the Doctor said, ‘so long as the gentleman known as Silver Knife is at liberty.’
Beauregard nodded. ‘I suppose so. There’s always a chance the murderer will be turned up by the raids.’
‘He’s not one of us,’ snorted Colonel Moran.
‘’E’s a ravin’ nutter, that’s what ’e is. Listen, none of us is ’zactly squeamish – know what I mean? – but this bloke is takin’ it too far. If an ’ore gets too rorty, you takes a razor to ’er fyce not ’er bleedin’ froat.’
‘There’s never been any suggestion, so far as I know, that any of you are involved in the murders.’
‘That is not the point, Mr Beauregard,’ the Professor continued. ‘Our shadow empire is like a spider-web. It extends throughout the world but it concentrates here, in this city. Thick and complicated and surprisingly delicate. If enough threads are severed, it will fall. And threads are being severed left and right. We have all suffered since Mary Ann Nichols was killed, and the inconvenience will redouble with each fresh atrocity. Every time this murderer strikes at the public, he stabs at us also.’
‘My ’ores don’t wanna go on the streets wiv ’im out there. It’s ’urtin’ me pockets. I’m seriously out of the uxter.’
‘I’m sure the police will catch the man. There’s a reward of fifty pounds for information.’
‘And we have posted a reward of a thousand guineas but nothing has come of it.’
‘Forget what they say about us on the screw stickin’ together like Ikeys. If we tumbled old Silver Knife, ’e’d be narked to the esclop quicker’n an Irish dipper can flimp a drunkard’s pogue.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Mr Beauregard,’ said the Doctor. ‘What our associate is venturing to suggest is that we should like to add our humble efforts to those of your most estimable police. We pledge that any intimate knowledge which comes into our possession – as knowledge on so many matters so often does – shall be passed directly to you. In return we ask that the personal interest in this matter, which we know the Diogenes Club has required you take, be persecuted with the utmost vigour.’
He tried not to show it, but was deeply shocked that the innermost workings of the ruling cabal were somehow known to the Lord of Strange Deaths. And yet the Chinaman evidently knew in detail of the briefing he had been given barely two days earlier. The briefing at which it had been assumed no more would be heard from the Si-Fan for some years.
‘This bounder is letting the side down,’ the amateur cracksman said, ‘and it’d be best if he stripped his whites and slunk back to the bally pavilion.’
‘We’ve put up a thousand guineas for information,’ the Colonel said, ‘and two thousand for his rotten head.’
‘Unlike the police, we have no trouble with mendacious individuals coming forward offering false information in the hope of swindling us out of a reward. Such individuals do not long survive in our spider-web world. Do we have an understanding, Mr Beauregard?’
‘Yes, Professor.’
The new-born smiled a thin smile. One murderer meant very little to these men, but a loose cannon of crime was an inconvenience they would not brook.
‘And when the Whitechapel Murderer is caught?’
‘Then it’s business as usual,’ said Moran.
The Doctor nodded sagely, and Sikes spat out ‘too bloody right, pal.’
‘Once our agreement is at an end,’ the Chinaman announced, ‘we shall revert to our former positions. And I should advise you to settle down with your Miss Churchward and leave the affairs of my countrymen to other hands. You have been unlucky with wives and you deserve your few years of contentment.’
Beauregard contained his anger. The threat to Penelope was beyond the boundaries.
‘For myself,’ said the Professor, eyes gleaming, ‘I hope to disengage, and hand over the everyday running of my organisation to Colonel Moran. I now have the opportunity to live for centuries, which will give me the time I need to refine my model of the universe. I intend to undertake a voyage into pure mathematics, a voyage which will take me beyond the dull geometries of space.’
The Doctor smiled, crinkling his eyes and lifting his thin moustaches. Only he seemed to appreciate the Professor’s grandiose schemes. Everyone else in the ring looked as if they had eaten bad eggs while the Professor’s eyes glowed with the thought of an infinity of multiplying theorems, expanding to fill all space.
‘Conceive of it,’ the Professor said, ‘one theorem encompassing everything.’
‘A cab will take you to Cheyne Walk,’ the Celestial explained. ‘This meeting is at an end. Serve our purpose, and you will be rewarded. Fail us, and the consequences will be... not so pleasant.’
With a wave, Beauregard was dismissed.
‘Our regards to your Miss Churchward,’ said Moran, leering nastily. Beauregard fancied he detected a moue of distaste on the Chinaman’s proverbially inscrutable face.
As the sportsman took him back up through the passages, Beauregard wondered how many Devils he would have to ally himself with to discharge his duty. He resisted the urge to demonstrate bravado by forging ahead and leading his guide to the entrance. He could have pulled off the stunt, but it might be as well to remain in the underestimation of the ring.
When they reached the surface, it was near dawn. The first streaks of blue-grey crept upwards from the East, and the seagulls drawn inland by the Thames squawked for breakfast.
The cab still stood in the yard, the driver perched on the box, swaddled in black blankets. Beauregard’s hat, cloak and cane were waiting for him inside.
‘Toodle-oo,’ said the cricketer, red eyes shining. ‘See you at Lords.’
11
MATTERS OF NO IMPORTANCE
‘Why so quiet, Penny?’
‘What?’ she blurted, shocked out of her angry reverie. The noise of the reception was momentarily overwhelming, seeming to resolve itself to a stage buzz of background chatter.
With sham outrage, Art rebuked her. ‘Penelope, I believe you were dreaming. I have been expending my meagre wit upon you for minutes, yet you’ve not taken in a word. When I try to be amusing you murmur “oh, how true” with a palpable sigh, and when I endeavour to add a sombre note in an attempt to secure your sympathies, you politely laugh behind your fan.’
The outing was wasted. It was to have been her first public appearance with Charles, her first showing as an engaged woman. She had planned for weeks, selecting exactly the right dress, the correct corsage, the proper event, the suitable company. Thanks to Charles’s mysterious masters, it was a ruin. She had been out of sorts all evening, trying not to revert to her old habit of wrinkling her forehead. Her governess, Madame de la Rougierre, had often warned her if the wind changed her face would set that way; now, if she examined herself in the glass for even the trace of a line, she knew the old biddy had not been wrong.
‘You are right, Art,’ she admitted, quelling the interior fury that always came to her when things were not just so. ‘I was gone.’
‘That hardly says much for my powers of vampire fascination.’
When he tried to look comically offended, the tips of his teeth stuck out like grains of rice stuck to his lower lip.
Across the hotel restaurant, Florence was engaged in conversation with a tiddly gentleman whom Penelope understood to be the critic from the Telegraph. Florence was supposed to be the leader of this tiny expedition into hostile territory – their sympathies were naturally with the Lyceum, and this was the Criterion – but she had abandoned her supporters to each other’s company. That was typical of Florence. She was flighty, and, even at the advanced age of thirty, a flirt. No wonder her husband disappeared. As Charles had disappeared this evening.
‘You were thinking of Charles?’
She nodded, wondering if there were anything in the stories about vampire mind-reading abilities. Her mind, she admitted, must just now be written in large print. She would concentrate on keeping her forehead smooth or she would end up like poor silly Kate, only twenty-two and her face already pulled out of shape by laughing and crying.
‘Even when I have you all to myself for an evening, Charles is between us. Curse the fellow.’
Charles, due to accompany the first-night party, had sent his man with a message, pleading off and entrusting Penelope to Florence’s care for the evening. He was off on some government business she could not be expected to bother with. It was most vexing. After the wedding, unless she underestimated her own powers of persuasion, the situation in the Beauregard household would be much changed.
Her stays were so tight she could hardly breathe, and her décolletage so low the whole stretch of skin between her chin and bosom was insensate with the cold. And there was nothing to do with her fan but wave it about, for she could not risk setting it down on a chair and having some tipsy clod sit on it.
The original scheme had been for Art to chaperone Florence but he was as abandoned by her as Penelope had been by her fiancé and evidently felt obliged to loiter about like an ardent swain. They had been twice accosted by acquaintances who congratulated her, then indicated Art with an embarrassing ‘and is this the lucky gentleman?’ Lord Godalming was taking it with remarkable good humour.
‘I did not mean to speak ill of Charles, Penny. I apologise.’
Since the announcement, Art had been most solicitous. He had once been engaged himself, to a girl Penelope remembered quite well, but something horrid had come of it. Art was easy to understand, especially set beside Charles. Her fiancé always paused before addressing her by name. He had never called her Pamela but they were both waiting in dread for that awful, inevitable moment. All through life, she had been plodding in her cousin’s brilliant wake, chilling inside whenever anyone silently compared her with Pam, knowing she must eternally be judged the lesser of the Misses Churchward. But she was alive and Pam was not. She was older now than Pamela had been when she was taken from them.
‘You can be sure that any matters which detain Charles are of the utmost importance. His name may never appear in the lists, but he is well known in Whitehall, if only to the best of the best, and rated highly.’
‘Surely, Art, you are important too.’
Art shrugged, his curls shaking. ‘I’m simply a messenger boy with a title and good manners.’
‘But the Prime Minister...’
‘I’m Ruthven’s pet this month, but that means little.’
Florence returned, bearing an official verdict on the piece. It had been something called Clarimonde’s Coming-Out, by the famous author of The Silver King and Saints and Sinners, Henry A. Jones.
‘Mr Sala says “there is a rift in the clouds, a break of blue in the dramatic heavens, and seems as if we are fairly at the end of the unlovely”.’
The play had been a specimen of the ‘rattling farce’ for which the Criterion was known. The new-born leading lady had a past and her supposed father but actual husband, a cynical Queen’s Counsel, was given to addressing sarcasms directly to the dress circle, affording the actor-manager Charles Wyndham opportunities to demonstrate his aptitude for aphorism. Frequent changes of costume and backdrop took the characters from London to the country to Italy to a haunted castle and back again. By the final curtain, lovers were reconciled, cads were ruined, fortunes inherited justly and secrets exposed without harm. Barely an hour after the last act, Penelope could accurately describe to the smallest detail each of the heroine’s gowns but could not recall the name of the actress who took her part.
‘Penny, darling,’ came a tiny, grating voice. ‘Florence, and Lord Godalming. Hail and well-met.’
It was Kate Reed, in a drab little dress, trailing a jowly new-born Penelope knew to be her Uncle Diarmid. A senior staffer at the Central News Agency, he was sponsor to the poor girl’s so-called career in cheap journalism. He had a reputation as one of the grubbiest of the Grub Street grubs. Everyone except Penelope found him amusing, and so he was mostly tolerated.
Art wasted his time kissing Kate’s knuckly hand and she turned red as a beetroot. Diarmid Reed greeted Florence with a beery burp and enquired after her health, never a sound tactic in the case of Mrs Stoker, who was quite capable of describing extensive infirmities. Mercifully, she took another tack and asked why Mr Reed had lately not been attending the after-darks.
‘We quite miss you in Cheyne Walk, Mr Reed. You always have such stories of the highs and lows of life.’
‘I regret that I’ve been trawling the lows of late, Mrs Stoker. These Silver Knife murders in Whitechapel.’
‘Dreadful business,’ spluttered Art.
‘Indeed. But deuced good for the circulation. The Star and the Gazette and all the other dogs are in it to the death. The Agency can’t keep them fed.
They’ll take almost anything.’
Penelope did not care for talk of murder and vileness. She did not take the newspapers, and indeed read nothing but improving books.
‘Miss Churchward,’ Mr Reed addressed himself to her, ‘I understand congratulations are the order of the day.’
She smiled at him in such a way as not to line her face.
‘Where’s Charles?’ asked Kate, blundering as usual. Some girls should be beaten regularly, Penelope thought, like carpets.
‘Charles has let us down,’ Art said. ‘Most unwisely, in my opinion.’
Penelope burned inside, but hoped it did not show on her face.
‘Charles Beauregard, eh?’ said Mr Reed. ‘Good man in a pinch, I understand. You know, I could swear I saw the fellow in Whitechapel only the other night. With some of the detectives on the Silver Knife case.’
‘That is highly unlikely,’ Penelope said. She had never been to Whitechapel, a district where people were often murdered. ‘I cannot imagine what would take Charles to such a quarter.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Art. ‘The Diogenes Club has queer interests, in all manner of queer quarters.’
Penelope wished Art had not mentioned that institution. Mr Reed’s ears pricked up and he was about to quiz Art further when they were all saved from embarrassment by another arrival.
‘Look,’ squealed Florence with delight, ‘at who has come again to plague us with his incorrigibility. It’s Oscar.’
A large new-born with plenty of wavy hair and a well-fed look was swanning over to them, green carnation in his lapel, hands in his pockets to bulge out the front of his striped trousers.
‘Evening, Wilde,’ said Art.
The poet sneered a curt ‘Godalming’ of acknowledgement at Art, and then extravagantly paid court to Florence, pouring so much charm over her that a quantity of it naturally splashed over on to Penelope and even Kate. Mr Oscar Wilde had apparently once proposed to Florence, when she was Miss Balcombe of Dublin, but been beaten out by the now-never-mentioned Bram. Penelope found it easy to believe Wilde might have made proposals to a number of persons, simply so the rebuffs would give him something else about which to be wittily unconventional.
