The men holding his arms fell silent and Asher smelled blood again, a moment before Grippen’s claws scratched his face in pulling the blindfold down.
‘Leave him go.’ The Master of London’s voice was cold slag. ‘And get out.’
The feeble gleam of a dark lantern showed Asher brick support piers crumbling to nothing, and between them what might have been two dozen makeshift bunks in a space barely larger than his parlor in Oxford.
The bunks were empty. From the darkness that clotted the farther end of the room a draft breathed the scent of deeper underground, mud and wet rock.
‘The Russkys want back in,’ said one of the men behind him. ‘’Fraid we’ll steal their blankets – faugh! Ol’ ’Atter at the two-to-one wouldn’t touch ’em wi’ a bargepole—’
‘Tell ’em, the man that comes in now, wears his blanket for a shroud ere morning.’ Grippen put a hand on Asher’s shoulder, hooked dark claws against the skin of his neck. The men murmured and retreated. The screaming argument outside grew louder for a few seconds as the door was opened, and the cold fog flowed down the stair.
Then stillness.
‘You’ve a rare craving to get your veins opened, Professor.’
‘I’ve a rare craving for a word with you.’
The broad nostrils flared. ‘And cocky with it.’
‘I want you to leave my wife alone,’ said Asher. ‘And return our daughter. I’ll do whatever it is you ask me to do – find this Zahorec and kill him –’
If it’s the book he’s seeking, let him think we misunderstand.
‘– and give you a list of where he’s been hiding, but give her back to us. You’ve no need to hold her prisoner, for me to do as you ask.’
‘Huh.’ The noise was a grunt rather than any attempt at a laugh. ‘The minute you have her you’ll discover on a sudden that what I ask is what you can’t do on any consideration, and I haven’t time to prove to you otherwise. You’ll get the brat back when I’ve what I want. She’s well.’
‘Prove it.’
‘And you prove to me I’ll live forever and go to Heaven when I die.’
‘I think we can both see how promises about that worked to make you a good and holy man in life.’
The vampire growled within his throat. Massive in the grubby frock coat of forty years ago, his gaudy vest of Chinese silk stained and spotted with old blood, Grippen reminded Asher of the lions that roved the veldt in his African days: eyes intelligent but without the slightest resemblance to humanity. Still as shadow.
‘Fear for our child has stolen Mrs Asher’s sleep,’ Asher went on. ‘You know – none better – that in such a state one makes mistakes.’
At the word mistakes Grippen moved his head a little. Mistakes – inattention through weariness or distraction – were the vampire’s power, what he lived by, hunted by. He knew indeed how deadly they were.
‘You say our child is well. But what about the nursery maid you took to look after her? She’s young, and frightened – and probably not frightened enough. She may try to escape, and run afoul of those who have them in keeping. What if your fledglings start one of their damned games with her, what if they lie to you, tell you she escaped or tried to escape … What do they do with her, with my daughter, when they go hunting?’
He watched Grippen as he spoke, and though the Master Vampire had some of Don Simon Ysidro’s quality of stillness, yet he saw him relax, just slightly, when Asher spoke of the fledglings.
Lydia was right. She’s being watched over by the living.
He has that much sense.
‘You leave that to me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’ll have to.’ Fangs glinted with the lift of his lip.
‘Will you do this, then?’ said Asher, when the silence had gone on long enough for the Master of London to turn over all possibilities in his mind. ‘Have the nursery maid write me a note. Tell her that if what she says in it is the truth, she’s to mention Lydia’s favorite book in it. If she’s being forced to lie, she’s to mention my favorite book.’
‘And the chit’ll know these?’
If she’s not so exhausted that she can’t think straight …
‘She will.’
The vampire growled again. ‘There’s a reason I want your woman doing the job for me, Professor, and not yourself. You say you fear this girl of yours will try to escape, or try to get the child out of there, through not being afraid enough. Not afraid enough is what I see in your eyes. Fathers get stupid, when it comes to their girls. They do stupid things. A mother I can trust, to do as I bid her without thinkin’ she knows better than me what I want.’
‘I won’t have her in this,’ repeated Asher stubbornly. ‘I can deal with your fledglings. She can’t.’
‘I’ll deal with my get.’
‘You haven’t seen her,’ said Asher. ‘She can’t continue.’
Grippen stood silent, big head a little to one side, barely more than a monster shadow in the dimness. As if he sensed the lie. ‘Then I’ll say to you as I said to her. You find me this Zahorec’s lairs. You don’t speak of ’em, not to the livin’, not to the dead. When you find a lair, you don’t put a foot across its threshold—’
‘Why not?’
‘You’d learn soon enow why, an’ you put foot in one, or e’en left the scent of your breath where Zahorec could smell it. He butchers and doesn’t care where he leaves the remains or who knows it. Two he killed last night, at the head of All Hallows Pier, and a woman and her two brats in a house on Priest Alley t’night before. The constables are runnin’ about squeakin’ with their aprons over their faces and the quicker you find me where he lairs up the better for us all it’ll be.’
‘Why not get Millward, then?’ demanded Asher. ‘You could do it without his knowing who he’s working for.’
‘Millward?’ The vampire snarled. ‘I’ll not have that quim-faced jolterhead poking about below the city, nor his pasty little punks. They’ve learned enough as it is, about old crypts and old drains and old tunnels that the Underground dug and walled up and forgot. Nay, you do as you’re told and not a dram’s weight more. And if you play me false in this, Professor—’
‘No,’ said Asher quietly. ‘It’s you who’s played me false, Grippen. You said to me once that a man whose own ox has not been gored doesn’t make a persistent hunter. And you were right in that, to my everlasting shame. In six years I’ve known you and your kind walked London’s streets – fed on London’s poor and London’s innocent – and multiplied yourself like rats breeding in the darkness. And I kept my silence and held my hand, because of Lydia, and later because of my child. I would not risk their lives – I would not risk my happiness – to go to war with the Undead. Take them from me and I guarantee you I will cause as much damage to you as I can before you kill me … and after you kill me, Zahorec will still wait for you in the dark.’
Grippen struck at him. It was like dodging the strike of a cat but Asher at least saw it coming, turned his body and stepped clear of the clawed, heavy hand as it flashed by his face.
The vampire’s eyes blazed – clearly he had not expected to be dodged – and the next instant – but there was no ‘instant’, only the crushing black weight of darkness that closed on Asher’s mind like a fist – Grippen struck in earnest. Impossibly, Asher found himself waking – only he could not imagine how he could have slept – as Grippen forced him to his knees, crushed and twisted his right arm in a brutal grasp as he tore the sleeves of jacket and shirt to the elbow. Asher tried to slither free as the vampire’s claws ripped the flesh of his arm. He gouged at the dark eyes with his free hand only to have that wrist caught, too, and effortlessly wrenched around behind his back with pain that held him immobile as the vampire drank.
Asher woke up again on the floor, not certain how long he’d been out.
Grippen laughed and wiped blood from his mouth. ‘Don’t take on, man, I’ve done you no hurt. You’ll not even turn into one of us fou
l abominations, or whatever the story is. There’s more in that than just the blood. Get up.’
The floor swooped and spun. Asher fought to breathe, fumbled at the remains of his neckerchief with shaking hands, to staunch the blood that still ran from the torn vein in his wrist.
Grippen yelled, ‘Mulligan!’ and the door creaked in the darkness behind Asher.
‘Yeah, Dr G?’
‘Get Greene to take our friend here home. See he gets there safe, mind. Where be you sleeping, Professor?’
He suspected he wouldn’t make it as far as the Tower without being assaulted by other denizens of the neighborhood. In any case he could change hotels when the sun was up. ‘Porton’s. Moscow Road.’ He jerked the knot of his makeshift bandage tight with his teeth. ‘Bayswater.’
Someone yelled, ‘Tommy!’ into the fog-muffled darkness of the court.
Head swimming, Asher nodded towards the men, asked softly, ‘Do they know who you are?’
‘Would they care?’ Grippen chuckled. ‘All they know is I’m the man what buys up their debts and gets the Jews off their backs. Or a few on ’em, I’m the man gets ’em what they need, every now and again. The art of holding a slave is seeing which men go about with chains on ’em already, Professor. I just pick up the trailin’ end.’
And then I’ll be free? Ysidro’s tame bank clerk had whispered to Lydia, with tears in his eyes. And then I’ll be free?
Mulligan and another of the men took him under the arms and led him to the door. Asher recognized the place from earlier in the night. The square spire and pepperpot towers of St George in the East were just visible above the sagging roof lines. Ragged laundry draped the old inn’s galleries, and behind the few windows that hadn’t been bricked up to avoid the window tax of a century ago, only the dimmest of grimy yellow light bleared. Children played in the gutters, though it was past midnight. The couple who’d been screaming at one another were still doing so.
From the slippery stair of what looked to be the ruin of an old chapel, Asher glanced back over his shoulder down into the crypt. Grippen was gone, but it seemed to him that his eyes still gleamed in the shadow.
As they shoved him into the evil-smelling cab that waited at the end of Sun Alley for him, the Irishman said, ‘You’re lucky, mate.’
Asher just had time, by the sickly glimmer of the cab’s lamps, to observe the cab’s number, before Mulligan yelled Asher’s destination to the driver – Greene, Asher remembered his name was – and the vehicle lurched into motion.
A four-wheeler, with the front wheels slightly narrower than the rear.
Not that it mattered any longer.
He closed his eyes.
As interviews went, it hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared it might. He pulled his torn sleeve over his bandaged arm, shivered in the night’s clammy chill. He’d learned some useful things.
Most importantly, he’d drawn the master vampire’s attention from Lydia to himself. With luck, that was a situation which would last long enough for her to track down where Miranda really was.
FIFTEEN
Even without spectacles, Lydia gasped ‘Jamie!’ when he came near her table at the Metropole’s café the following afternoon.
‘I’m all right.’ This was a complete lie and he knew it as he took the chair beside her. Despite thirteen hours of sleep and several pints of cider and broth, even the walk from the cab into the hotel had exhausted him.
She scrambled for the silver case in her reticule, unheard-of behavior in so public and fashionable a venue. Behind the thick rounds of glass her eyes widened in shock as she realized what must have happened to him, and she turned as pale as he had been when he’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning to shave.
‘I’m all right,’ he repeated, and put his hand over hers. ‘Grippen has a ring of human helpers in the East End, led – I think – by the publican Henry Scrooby, and by an Irishman named Mulligan. They’re the ones guarding Miranda. I doubt his fledglings even know where. Grippen himself has a lair off Sun Alley in the City, about a quarter mile south-west of St George’s. I think Miranda and Nan were taken away in the cab of a man named Greene – number 1349 – not that it matters now …’
When she still did not reply, only gazed at him with tears filling her eyes, he added gently, ‘This is war. I took a wound. I’ve come closer to being killed for information less valuable, and for the sake of people whose heads I would trade on silver platters – I’d even buy the platters – for a single doll to give Miranda.’
‘Of course.’ She wiped her eyes, then glanced guiltily around them, pulled off her eyeglasses, and concealed them again in her handbag, a vanity that Asher found both endearing and exasperating.
‘Next time this happens I’ll wear a little rouge.’
Her smile flickered into being, ducked out of sight. ‘Oh, don’t! Nothing looks worse than rouge when one is pale: like paint on a barn! And besides, you’d probably run slap into Uncle Ambrose and your reputation would never recover. I met Mr Rolleston this afternoon.’ From her handbag she pulled a slim packet of papers. ‘Damien Zahorec opened an account at Barclays in Sofia on the eighteenth of October of last year—’
‘The day after Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece declared war on the Turks.’
‘Well, he seems to have been on the run, or else this woman Ippolyta has control of his money. Not only had there been no previous contact with the bank, but his initial deposit was in gold and silver, worth about a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He went on almost immediately to Venice, where he withdrew seven hundred lira. A few days later he deposited five hundred and fifty lira, and three hundred French francs. He withdrew another hundred and fifty lira when he arrived in Florence on the twenty-eighth of October, and deposited six hundred lira there on the second of November, and thirty-one pounds on the tenth.’
‘Sounds like he’s robbing his victims.’ Asher poured coffee for himself in the cup the waiter brought, and noted how heavy the pot seemed. ‘Either that or gambling. I wonder what the local masters had to say about that.’
‘It would be easy for him to hunt tourists. Trains run from Venice to places like Verona and Padua all the time.’ Anger touched her cheekbones with red, for the families whose Uncle Clarence or Tante Eugènie never came back from abroad. ‘The odd thing is, I stopped at the University Club on the way here and checked the old newspapers at the library. The cities of Tuscany and the Veneto are smaller than London, but I didn’t find anywhere accounts of extensive killings or disappearances at the time that Zahorec was there. My Italian isn’t very good, but I do know words like assassinio and saugue.’
‘Full marks for you, Dr Asher.’ He kissed her hand. ‘I wonder what changed?’ He took the papers, studied the cramped, minuscule handwriting.
‘I wondered that, too. The Armisteads reached Florence on the twentieth of October, and went on to Paris on November fifteenth. Zahorec followed them almost immediately. He’d met Cece in Florence and been warned off by Mr Armistead. In Paris he wasted no time becoming bosom friends with Lord Colwich, whom he then introduced to Cece. Then on December the thirtieth –’ Lydia turned over the page she was reading – ‘seven hundred and fifty pounds was paid into Zahorec’s account by Lord Colwich—’
Asher’s eyebrows shot up.
‘—which Zahorec immediately laid out to purchase a property called Thamesmire, three miles downriver from Woolwich.’
‘On the railway line,’ Asher remarked into the ensuing silence. ‘Half an hour from Waterloo station. And well outside of what might be considered Grippen’s hunting ground.’
The light strains of the café’s pianist floated over the well-bred chatter of the patrons: ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.’ Asher reflected for a moment upon some of the murkier honey-traps he had witnessed in his service to Department and Queen. Such affairs were always safer if one had both sides of a couple ensnared.
Lydia shuffled the papers. ‘There’s reference here to repairs Zahorec has ordered
on a house which he evidently owns in Keppel Street, though there’s no mention of him buying it. There seems to be another in Marlborough Road, which can’t be more than a hundred feet away. Colwich put fifty pounds into Zahorec’s bank account just before he left for England in January – Zahorec had only a hundred and thirty in it at the time – and since then money has been paid, in the amount of fifty pounds a week – either directly from Colwich’s account or in almost-identical amounts in cash – into Zahorec’s account.’
Asher said, ‘Hmmn.’
‘I’m meeting with Hellice Spills – Cece’s maid, you know – in a tea shop in Finsbury Circus at five.’ Lydia took a sip of her tea. ‘I’m quite prepared to blackmail her, but it really doesn’t sound like it will be necessary. I’m only sorry Don Simon and I didn’t look more thoroughly through the house while we were there Monday night. We might have found the accountant doing something disgraceful as well.’
She fell silent, turning Rolleston’s close-scribbled page of notes over in her fingers with the same abstraction with which she arranged and rearranged silverware. Then she sighed, and produced a folded note from her handbag. Asher recognized Don Simon Ysidro’s spiky sixteenth-century hand. ‘This was waiting for me at the hotel this morning.’
Mistress, I beg forgiveness. I continue to seek one at the Bank of England willing to serve, yet stone hath not yet yielded to water. Ever your servant, Ysidro.
‘I hope whoever he finds for me there isn’t going to be like Mr Rolleston,’ she went on in constrained voice. ‘Though I suppose any bank clerk willing to violate professional confidentiality to a total stranger on the strength of something he saw in a dream isn’t likely to be completely sane. This morning, when Mr Rolleston handed me these notes, he poured out his heart for half an hour about how I mustn’t be afraid of him despite the things he’s done.’
Another long silence, her attention seemingly absorbed in turning her cup in its saucer. Afternoon sunlight lengthened across the gold-rimmed café china, and at the next table a woman said, ‘To be honest, I didn’t know who he was. At Jenny’s house-parties, how would you know …?’
The Kindred of Darkness Page 15
