Anno Dracula (6 page)

Conversation was permitted in only two areas, the Strangers’ Room, where clubmen occasionally entertained indispensable guests, and, far less famously, in the sound-proofed suite on the top floor. This was set aside for the use of the club’s ruling cabal, a group of persons connected, mostly in minor official capacities, with Her Majesty’s Government. The ruling cabal consisted of five worthies, each serving in rotation as chairman. In the fourteen years Beauregard had been at the disposal of the Diogenes Club, nine men had served on the cabal. When a member passed on and was discreetly replaced, it was always overnight.

As he was kept waiting, Beauregard was carefully watched by unseen eyes. During the Fenian Dynamite Campaign, Ivan Dragomiloff had penetrated the Club, intent on executing a commission to exterminate the entire ruling cabal. Detained in the foyer by a porter, the
soi-disant
ethical assassin had been noiselessly garrotted so as not to offend the sensibilities or excite the interest of the ordinary members. After a minute or two – no ticking clocks disturbed the peace – the valet, as if acting on telepathic command, lifted the purple rope that barred the unremarkable staircase leading directly to the top floor, and gave Beauregard the nod.

On the stairs, he remembered the several times he had been summoned before the ruling cabal. Such a call inevitably resulted in a voyage to some far corner of the world, and involved confidential matters affecting the interests of Great Britain. Beauregard supposed he was something between a diplomat and a courier, although he had at times been required to be an explorer, a burglar, an impostor,
or a civil servant. Sometimes the business of the Diogenes Club was known in the outside world as the Great Game. The invisible business of government – conducted not in parliaments or palaces but in Bombay alleys and Riviera gambling hells – had afforded him a varied and intriguing career, even if it was of such a nature that he could hardly profit in his retirement by writing his memoirs.

While he had been away pursuing this Great Game, Vlad Dracula had taken London. Prince of Wallachia and King of Vampires, he had wooed and won Victoria, persuading her to abandon her widow’s black. Then he had reshaped the greatest Empire on the globe to suit his tastes. Beauregard had vowed death would not interfere with his loyalty to the Queen’s person, but he had thought he meant his own death.

The carpeted stairs did not creak. The thick walls admitted no noise from the bustling city without. Venturing into the Diogenes Club was like sampling deafness.

The Prince Consort, who had taken for himself the additional title of Lord Protector, ruled Great Britain now, his get executing his wishes and whims. An elite Carpathian Guard patrolled the grounds of Buckingham Palace and caroused throughout the West End like sacred terrors. The army, the navy, the diplomatic corps, the police and the church were all in Dracula’s thrall, new-borns promoted over the warm at every opportunity. While much continued as always, there were changes: people vanished from public and private life, camps such as Devil’s Dyke springing up in remote areas of the country, and the apparatus of a government – secret police, sudden arrests, casual executions – he associated not with the Queen but with Tsars and Shahs. There were Republican bands playing Robin Hood in the wilds of Scotland and Ireland, and cross-waving curates
were always trying to brand new-born provincial mayors with the mark of Cain.

On the top landing was a man with a military moustache and a neck the thickness of his head, even in civvies the absolute image of a sergeant-major. Beauregard passed inspection and the guard opened the familiar green door, stepping aside to allow the clubman to enter. He was inside the suite sometimes referred to as ‘the Star Chamber’ before a realisation sank in: Sergeant Dravot, the man on guard, was a vampire, the first he had seen within the walls of the Diogenes Club. For a horrid, sinking moment, he assumed his eyes would get used to the gloom within the Star Chamber and alight upon five bloated leeches, sharp-fanged horrors ruddy with stolen blood. If the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club had fallen, the long reign of the living would genuinely be at an end.

‘Beauregard,’ came a voice, normally pitched but sounding, even after only a minute in the silence of the Club, like a thunderclap from God. His moment of fear passed, replaced by a mild puzzlement. There were no vampires in the room, but things were changed.

‘Mr Chairman,’ he acknowledged.

It was convention not to address any of the cabal by name or title in their suite, but Beauregard knew he faced Sir Mandeville Messervy, a supposedly retired admiral who had made his name in the suppression, twenty years earlier, of the Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean. Also present were Mycroft, an enormously corpulent gentleman who had been chairman on Beauregard’s last visit, and Waverly, an avuncular figure Beauregard understood to be personally responsible for the downfall of Colonel Ahmad Arabi and the occupation of Cairo in 1882. There were two empty seats at the round table.

‘Alas, you find us depleted. There have, as you know, been changes. The Diogenes Club is not what it was.’

‘A cigarette?’ offered Waverly, producing a silverwork case and offering it.

Beauregard declined but Waverly tossed him the case anyway. He was fast enough to catch it and return it. Waverly smiled as he slipped the case into his breast pocket.

‘Cold silver,’ he explained.

‘There was no need for that,’ said Messervy. ‘I apologise. Still, it was an effective demonstration.’

‘I am not a vampire,’ Beauregard said, showing his unburned fingers. ‘That much should be obvious.’

‘They’re tricky, Beauregard,’ said Waverly.

‘You have one outside, you know.’

‘Dravot is a special case.’

Formerly, Beauregard had considered the ruling cabal of the Diogenes Club impregnable, the ever-beating lion-heart of Britannia. Now, not for the first time since his return from abroad, he was forced to realise how radically the country was altered.

‘That was a fine piece of work in Shanghai, Beauregard,’ the chairman commented. ‘Very deft. As we have come to expect of you.’

‘Thank you, Mr Chairman.’

‘It will be some years, I believe, before we hear again of those yellow devils in the Si-Fan.’

‘I wish I shared your confidence.’

Messervy nodded sagely. The criminal
tong
was as impossible to root out and destroy as any other common weed.

Waverly had a small pile of folders in front of him. ‘You’re a well-travelled man,’ he said. ‘Afghanistan, Mexico, the Transvaal.’

Beauregard agreed, wondering where he was being led.

‘You’ve been of great service to the Crown in many situations. But now we need you closer to home. Very close.’

Mycroft, who might have been sleeping with his eyes open for all the attention he seemed to pay, now leaned forwards. The current chairman was obviously so used to deferring to his colleague that he sat back and allowed him to take over.

‘Beauregard,’ said Mycroft, ‘have you heard of the murders in Whitechapel? The so-called Silver Knife killings?’

‘W
hat’s to be done?’ shouted a new-born in a peaked cap. ‘What’s to stop this fiend slaughtering more of our women?’

Coroner Wynne Baxter angrily tried to keep control of the inquest. A pompous, middle-aged politician, Geneviève understood him to be unpopular. Unlike a High Court judge, he had no gavel and so was forced to slap his wooden desk with an open hand.

‘Any further interruptions of this nature,’ Baxter said, glaring, ‘and I shall be forced to clear the public from the room.’

The surly rough, who must have looked hungry even when warm, slouched back to his bench. He was surrounded by a similar crew. She knew the type: long scarves, ragged coats, pockets distended by books, heavy boots and thin beards. Whitechapel had all manner of Republican, anarchist, socialist and insurrectionist factions.

‘Thank you,’ said the coroner ironically, rearranging his notes. The troublemaker bared his fangs and muttered. New-borns disliked situations where someone warm had the authority. But a lifetime of cringing when officials frowned left habits.

This was the second day of the inquest. Yesterday, Geneviève had sat at the back of the Hall while sundry witnesses gave testimony
relating to Lulu Schön’s origins and movements. She had been out of the ordinary among East End streetwalkers. Countess Geschwitz, a mannish vampire who claimed to have come from Germany with the girl, blurted out something of Lulu’s history: a procession of acquired names, dubious associations and dead husbands. If born with a real name, no one knew it. According to a telegraph from Berlin, the German police still wanted to talk to her in connection with the shooting of one of her more recent husbands. All the witnesses – including Geschwitz, who had turned her – were transparently in love with Lulu, or at least desired her beyond all reason. Evidently the new-born could have been one of
les Grandes Horizontales
of Europe, but foolishness and ill fortune had reduced her to fourpenny knee-tremblers in London’s meaner streets and finally delivered her to the sharp mercies of Silver Knife.

Throughout the testimony, Lestrade muttered about opening up Pandora’s Box. It was almost certain the only connection between the Whitechapel Murderer and his victims came at the point of their deaths, but the police investigation could not afford to overlook the possibility that these were pre-meditated killings of specific women. Back in Commercial Street, Abberline, Thick and the others were assembling and cross-referencing biographies, more exhaustively detailed than any life of a great statesman, of Nichols, Chapman and Schön. If any connection could be established between the women, beyond the fact that they were all vampire prostitutes, then that might lead to their killer.

As the inquest, commenced in the early afternoon, proceeded into the evening, Baxter had turned his attention to Schön’s doings on the night of her death. Geschwitz, face red from a recent feeding, said Lulu had left their attic some time between three and four in the morning.
The body had been discovered by Constable George Neve, walking his beat shortly after six. After finishing Lulu, presumably in plain sight on Chicksand Street, the murderer had dumped her on the doorstep of a basement flat. A family of Polish Jews, of whom only the littlest child could speak anything approaching English, had been inside. They all stated, as translated by the tiny girl after a Yiddish babel of argument, not to have heard anything until Constable Neve roused them by practically battering down their door. Rebecca Kosminksi, the self-assured spokeswoman, was the only vampire in the family. Geneviève had seen her kind before; Melissa d’Acques, who had turned Chandagnac, was one. Rebecca might live to become the all-powerful matriarch of her extended clan, but she would never grow up.

Lestrade fidgeted throughout, describing it cruelly as ‘comedy relief ’. He would rather have been out combing the crime scene than sitting on a hardwood bench made for the tough bottoms and short legs of twelve-year-olds, but he could not get in Fred Abberline’s way too often. He gloomily told Geneviève that Baxter was known for the length of his inquests. The coroner’s approach was characterised by an obsessive, not to say tedious, insistence on dragging out irrelevant details and the flamboyant off-handedness of his summings-up. In his closing remarks on Anne Chapman, Baxter had invented the theory, on the basis of gossip overheard at the Middlesex Hospital, that an American doctor was either the murderer or the employer of the murderer. The unknown doctor, researching the physiognomy of the un-dead, was rumoured to have offered twenty guineas for a fresh vampire heart. There had been a brief flurry of activity as Abberline tried to locate the foreigner, but it turned out vampire hearts, mainly somewhat damaged, could be unethically purchased from mortuaries for as little as sixpence.

Baxter had adjourned before midnight, and reconvened the inquest this morning. Now evidence from the post-mortem was available, and today’s business mainly concerned a succession of medical men, all of whom had crammed themselves into Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary Mortuary to examine the mortal remains of Lulu Schön.

First came Dr George Bagster Phillips, the H Division Police Surgeon – well known at Toynbee Hall – who had done the preliminary examination of the body in Chicksand Street and performed the more detailed post-mortem. It boiled down to the simple facts that Lulu Schön had been heart-stabbed, disembowelled and decapitated. It took much desk-banging to quieten the outrage that followed these not unexpected revelations.

By law, inquests had to be held in public places and be open to the press. From the several appearances Geneviève had made as a witness in connection with the deaths of paupers in Toynbee Hall beds, she knew the only audience was usually a bored stringer from the Central News Agency, with the occasional friend or relation of the deceased. But the lecture hall was even more thickly populated today than it had been yesterday, the benches as heavily burdened as if Con Donovan were on the stage, rematching with Monk for the Featherweight Title. Aside from the reporters hogging the front row, Geneviève noticed a gaggle of haggard mainly un-dead women in colourful dresses, a scattering of well-dressed men, some of Lestrade’s uniformed juniors, and a sprinkling of sensation-seekers, clergymen and social reformers.