Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (42 page)

‘Enock is Rite’ was scratched on her front door, above a crude cartoon of a bat with a stake through it. The building’s other tenants were also vampires: Morgan Delt, an artist semi-permanently shifted into long-armed apeshape ‘to make a statement’, and a quiet Japanese girl whose nameplate was a
kanji
which meant ‘Mouse’. Delt had Kate sign a petition against some Van Helsing rally and asked her out to a counter-demo, but she’d had enough of police horses. Even she thought it best to keep her head down rather than risk deportation. In
Eire,
vampires had by law to be referred to as
Dearg-Dul
to keep the
Ghaeilge
word in use. Silver-toting priests strode about Dublin in a righteous fury which made Enoch seem vamp-symp.

‘Hello Katie,’ said Bellaver. ‘Sorry to keep you up after bed-time.’

‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’

‘Nasty business. Potentially political. We’ve already seen off Peculiar Crimes. Bryant and May want to bolt it onto their Leicester Square case. It’s no surprise your lot want it too. The Diogenes Bloody Club.’

‘My lot aren’t exactly mine.’

As ever, the situation between her and the British Secret State was delicate.

‘I heard something about that. They’ll never cut you loose.’

‘They might not be them any more. Not in any sense I recognise. It’s the Diogenes Happening now. Next it’ll be the Diogenes Experience. Mycroft Holmes would not have approved.’

She’d eventually have to go to Pall Mall and report to Richard Jeperson, Chair of the Ruling Cabal. He got a lie-in and the Sunday supplements in his big circular bed. She risked spontaneous combustion. It was ever thus.

‘Why was this place called Hanging Woods?’ Bellaver asked, out of the blue.

‘Why d’you think?’ she responded. ‘They hanged people here.’

‘In a minute, you’ll be sorry they stopped.’

‘I’ve never been in favour of capital punishment.’

‘Good for you, Katie,’ said Bellaver. ‘Twenty years on the job and I’m in favour of capital punishment
in schools.’

The Super led her towards the trees. More uniformed police stood about, all vampires, one a woman. WPC Rogers’ regulation hat came with a practical black veil. She darted birdlike looks about the park, quickened senses attracted to tiny sounds, scents and sights. It was overwhelming at first. Donna Rogers had the beginnings of a focus which would be handy in police work and offputting in her personal life. She could spot a new pin in a lawn and a peroxide hair on a lapel.

Geoff Brent, the warm police surgeon, was grave and useless. He wore a 1961 cream mac to spite the fabber world of this end of the decade. A sheet lay over someone on the ground. They weren’t taking a nap.

‘What makes this one of yours?’ she asked Bellaver.

‘It’s a vampire murder, ducks.’

Flashbacks. Whitechapel, 1888. Jack the Ripper. France, 1918. The Bloody Red Baron. Rome, 1959. The Crimson Executioner. If there was a string of vampire murders, she tended to trip over it. She had to admit it looked suspicious.

‘Not
that
kind of vampire murder,’ Bellaver said, knowing what she was thinking. ‘The other kind. Meet Carol Thatcher…’

He nodded. Griffin lifted the sheet.

A young woman. Formerly warm, now dead. Blonde, open-eyed. Make-up caked. Orange-and-pink Mary Quant dress torn off the shoulder, purple-and-taupe Balenciaga tights shredded, one white Courrèges go-go boot missing. On her neck, two ragged punctures. The classic ‘Seal of Dracula’.

Kate looked at Bellaver.

‘How long since... ?’

‘I knew you’d ask, so I checked out Edgar Lustgarten’s
Big Book of British Murderers.
In London, this is the first one of these since the Blitz. 1944. The Blackout Bloodsucker. John George Haigh. Remember him? Disposed of the drained
delicti
with sulphuric acid. Guillotined 1949. Peculiar Crimes’ Leicester Square case is a meat-skewer stabbing made to
look like
a vampire murder. Otherwise, there are rumours. But we scotch rumours. B Division is particular about closing those cases.’

Kate knelt by the dead girl, Carol.

‘Vampires kill, all right,’ said the Super. ‘We don’t need Edgar Bloodlustgarten to tell us that. Vampires kill like every other sod. You know the songs. “Couldn’t stand the wife’s nagging any longer so I shut her up.” “He called my pint a poof so I went for him.” On top of that, vampires get carried away and suck some poor popsy dry. A very specific type of manslaughter, Katie. I’ve seen too many bloated, befuddled mugs when sun comes up and the girlfriend’s cold.’

She hadn’t been there herself, but dreaded the possibility. The warm didn’t understand what a mouthful — even a
taste
— of blood was to a vampire. Some vamps had contingency plans for how to get rid of the body, cope with the guilt and carry on. Kate cared more about not being a monster than about getting away with it when the red thirst became the red
mania.
Too many otherwise decent vampires lost self-control while battening on innocents. She wasn’t immune. She was only a hundred and five, seventy-nine years a vampire. Her elder friend Geneviève confided that over the centuries she’d killed three people without meaning to.

‘There are vampire villains out there too,’ Bellaver went on, warming to the subject. ‘Proper impalers like Waldo Zhernikov, smug leeches like Big Bloodsucker Hog and motorcycle maniacs like the Living Dead. They certainly kill people. And use teeth and claws to do it. But they kill because they want to or to prove a point, not because they need the blood. Blood’s everywhere, Katie. You can buy it in a Wimpy Bar. Since they’re at each other’s throats all the time, vampire villains mostly kill other vampire villains. They’d do their own mum if she got between them and a payroll blag. Tears are not shed in B Division, truth be told, when the likes of Jack “the Bat” McVitie fetch up with tent-pegs through their ribs.’

Griffin gathered up the sheet and made a mess of it. WPC Rogers took it away and folded it properly into a square.

Kate had an impulse to touch the dead girl’s wounds.

‘This is what vampires used to do,’ she said. ‘B.D. Before Dracula.’

‘On the nose, Katie. It’s new and old at the same time. What you mob were like when folk scarcely believed you existed. Drag a bird off the street, bite her neck, suck her like an orange, chuck the peel in the bushes.’

‘He’ll do it again,’ she said.

‘Or
she
,’ said the WPC.

‘Good point, Rogers,’ admitted Bellaver. ‘Female of the species and all. But, returning to the nub — yes, he or she will most likely re-offend. Kill again. Haigh did six before Inspector Hornleigh nabbed him.’

Kate was sick to her stomach, disgusted with the way her fangs sharpened and the
need
pricked in the back of her throat. She knew this would be bad. There were
implications.

‘So here we are again,’ Bellaver said. ‘In the vampire-hunting business, God help us. Any tips?’

‘Take early retirement?’

‘No such luck.’

‘Then, get a shit-proof sou’wester. When Carol gets her picture in the papers, it’s going to start pouring.’

From his face, Kate saw Bellaver had already worked that out.

2

T
he Super left Griffin in the park, overseeing vital work. Bins and bushes had to be gone through. Few killers were considerate enough to discard engraved calling cards or one-of-a-kind signet rings at the scene of the crime, but there was a chance something incriminating might turn up among the used Durexes and Sky Ray wrappers.

Carol Thatcher’s body was collected by an ambulance and sent for autopsy. Bellaver found Kate space in one of B Division’s battered blue Austins. She left her four-year-old red Mini Cooper in the Charlton car park.

‘We’ve invaded the local nick,’ the Super told her. ‘Dixon has set up an incident room. The Shooter’s Hill woodentops aren’t happy about us getting comfy on their manor, but such is life. Regan’s bringing in Carol’s gentleman protector, one Timothy Lea. From the state of Timmy’s bird, I’d say he hasn’t done a bang-up job of protecting her lately. We can hold “living off immoral earnings” over the ponce until he coughs up anything he knows. Strewth, what’s this…’

The car stopped.

‘Bloody students,’ said Peter Steiger, the driver.

‘Not another demo!’ Bellaver said. ‘What is it this time? Ban the bomb? Stop the War? Free the pit-ponies?’

A solemn, fancy-dress funeral procession blocked the road. Whitefaced youths in black robes and cowls carted a twelve-foot cardboard coffin with ‘Old Britannia’ scrawled in its side in red paint. A mime brass band waved silent instruments. Some wore distinctive black-and-white striped scarves.

‘It’s Rag Week,’ said Steiger.

‘Stone the crows and plough on through. You have a horn, man. Honk!’

‘It’s Sunday morning, sir,’ the driver protested.

Bellaver leant over and punched the horn. Students turned and leered, snarling through kabuki make-up. Some wore fake fangs over real ones. Most were vampires, of a more recent vintage than their dress-up costumes. New-borns playing at being elders. There’d been masses of those when Kate turned. The murgatroyds of the ’80s. What happened to them? The same thing that would happen to these sharp kids. They’d die off or grow up.

As a last resort, the Super turned on the
nee-naw-nee-naw.
When a passing police siren made her stick fingers in her ears, she hadn’t thought how much more irritating the two-tone was if you were
inside
the cop car. She felt the noise in her teeth. At least the siren startled the students into making way.

Bellaver wound down the window and shouted, ‘Turn out your pockets, get your hair cut…’

The coffin fell, disclosing a giant white papier maché skeleton. Packets of pills hit the street.

The crowd made oinking and grunting noises.

‘My daughter’s at the University of Watermouth,’ Bellaver said. ‘She tells her mates her dad’s a lavatory cleaner. Anything’s better than being a copper.’

The students were from St Bartolph’s, a college well away from the city centre. It didn’t have the firebrand rep of the L.S.E. but was a minor hub of suburban student unrest. Vice-Chancellor Walter Goodrich was one of those Establishment worthies constitutionally unable to open his mouth without prompting a sit-in or freak-out. Banning the sale of
Socialist Vampire
outside lecture halls had led to scuffles between staff and bussed-in radicals. Among the first institutions to boast a School of Vampirism, St Bartolph’s had made controversial appointments. Kate was appalled that Caleb Croft, her least-favourite vampire elder, held the Chair of Sociology. Croft, Dracula’s Chief of Secret Police during the Terror, had lodged in the security services for the best part of sixty years before retiring to teach.

The
Mail
indicted St Bartolph’s as a hotbed of Maoist revolution. The
News of the Screws
alleged kinky nude blood frolics in the Halls of Residence.
Bikini Girl
ran a lay-out of topless student vampire girls in dramatic poses.

Lately, St Bartolph’s biggest stories came out of the formerly obscure School of Botany. After years of tedious, unfruitful research into fungus parasites on wheat, Professor Bowles-Ottery happened on a powerful, naturally-occurring hallucinogen. His ergot derivative was a hit with astral voyagers and hippies who dreaded missing the magic bus. The American SF legend E.B. Fern chewed Bowles-Ottery Pellets, known as BOP, like winegums. Fern came to London to take personal receipt of an unprecedented
New Worlds
advance, but got distracted by BOP. Moorcock had yet to see a word of Fern’s serial
Dr Shambleau, or: The Whores of Axos,
though Fern had sent in seven rice paper Rorschach blots and said that was the first instalment.

Bellaver shut off the siren.

A young vampire doffed a tall hat and bowed, magnanimously letting them pass. He was dressed as an undertaker, ringmaster or conjurer, head-to-foot in black but for crimson cravat and scarlet sunglasses. The new-born looked like a cock: livid and healthy, sculpted raven hair, Kirk Douglas chin. All his teeth were fangs. Such a handsome lad would have no trouble glutting himself on the willing warm. He must miss mirrors, though.

‘Want a suspect?’ she asked Bellaver.

The policeman considered the mockingly gracious vampire. He wasn’t impressed.

‘What does that flash git think he’s playing at?’

‘He doesn’t think he’s playing,’ she said.

Steiger drove them through the gap in the rag procession. The new-born buck swivelled, eyes on her. He all but licked his lips.

‘Bring back National Service, I say,’ muttered Bellaver.

That face — red, red mouth, as if stained — would stick in her mind. Who was the student leader? Greenwich’s answer to Dany le Rouge?

The cop shop on the corner of Well Hall Road was a redbrick castle, built on the site of yet another London gallows. At least the condemned had a good view before taking the drop. Shooter’s Hill was one of the highest points in London. You could see for miles and miles and miles. The late Count Dracula bought property here, following a fourteenth century instinct to put fortresses on top of mountains.