The People's Will (20 page)

But the French occupation of Juniper Hall brought more than mere language to that corner of Surrey. It also brought death. The first body was found in the ditch beside the road from Oxshott to Chessington. The European obsession with vampires had not at the time reached England’s shores and so, while the wounds to the man’s neck were mysterious, their cause was not as immediately obvious as it might have been to a Slavic observer. The victim was never identified. In the end it was concluded that he was one of a gang of footpads who’d fallen foul of his comrades.

But Richard Cain jumped to no such precipitate conclusions. He simply noted in his journal the time, location and manner of the death and wondered – perhaps hoped – whether such a thing would happen again. He had no reason to suppose that it was anything but a solitary happenstance, but instinct told him there would soon be more of the same. His instinct proved correct. Within two months four other murders had come to light. More followed.

The locations of the deaths formed a rough circle, with reports from as far afield as Crawley and Guildford marking its extremities. He never identified Juniper Hall as the precise hub of the wheel, but was unsurprised when he learned the truth. As far as he could tell the events all occurred at weekends, on either a Friday or a Saturday night. Richard recorded them in a calendar and plotted them on a map, and slowly saw the pattern emerging.

And all this might have been spotted by others attempting to investigate the crime had it not been for a series of additional deaths, again with the same wounds to the throat. The difference, and the cause of the confusion, was that in these cases the victims were not men but animals.

Richard was not confused. He knew perfectly well there was
no single killer out there, but that the killer of the animals – a dog, several rabbits, a cat and a deer – was a different creature from the killer of the men. He knew it because he had killed the animals. He had taken no pleasure in it – not in the slaughter itself – but it had been a challenge to reproduce with so great a degree of accuracy the neck wounds that were the distinctive trait of the killer.

The first step had been to get a good look at the bodies. There had been no real trouble there. Two of them had been buried in the cemetery of Richard’s father’s own church, and so it was no problem for him to borrow a set of keys and creep into the deadhouse – if the rickety shed beside the church merited such a name – to look closely at the bodies before they were interred. On many occasions, he wasn’t alone. By the age of fourteen he had acquired a number of friends, although his later understanding of human nature led him to question the term. They were the boys who in general chose not to punch him on the way to or from school. Richard soon learned that one way to maintain this peaceful state was to distract them with the sight of something gruesome. A dissected frog or a spider devouring a fly would normally be enough, but a visit to look at a corpse – particularly the victim of a murder – might keep Richard free of their unwanted attentions for a week or more. For his own part, Richard studied the wounds, took notes, made measurements – in short he behaved exactly as his father had taught him. And yet at no level did he feel that in doing so he was being a ‘good boy’. There was no self-delusion that his actions could, through misinterpretation, be justified. He knew that he was twisting his father’s wishes to an end which the rector would not have desired, and the knowledge pleased him.

It was not only the boys from school to whom Richard provided tours of his world of the macabre – there was also a girl. Susanna Fowler was the daughter of Edward and Lucy Fowler, who kept house for Richard’s father. She was a year older than him, and while in their younger days they had lived very much apart, Susanna had for several years been old enough to share much of the housework with her mother, and so she and Richard came increasingly into contact.

They often talked as friends. He would learn from her about the world outside his somewhat cloistered upbringing at the rectory, and he would tell her of his world, reading from his journals and showing her the remarkable diversity of animal life that could be found without venturing outside the churchyard. He even described to her the mechanisms of reproduction, not as handed down to him by his father – that conversation had never taken place – but from his observation of animals. He had seen what dogs and cats did, and what the oxen in the fields did, and learned from the farmers that it led to calves. He was not surprised to learn from Susanna that people procreated in much the same way. He had assumed it based on extrapolation, but was pleased to have it confirmed, and noted the discovery in his journal. He noticed, as they discussed the matter, that her manner changed slightly and that her face became a little flushed. He himself felt unusual – a little more excited than at most of his scientific discoveries. He noted down these observations too.

And so it was quite natural that Richard should show Susanna each of the two mutilated bodies that rested overnight in the deadhouse. With the boys he brought them in as a crowd, but with her it was just the two of them. On the first occasion, she remained quite calm. Richard suspected she was hiding her fear and made an effort to describe to her in detail everything he had observed about the wounds to the neck. Still she showed no outward signs of apprehension, and so he had pulled back the victim’s head, holding it by the chin, thus allowing, as he described it, a full and clear view of the damage done to the internal structures of the neck. She fled. Richard savoured the moment, enjoying the knowledge that he had managed to in some way control her, without any need for coercion or force.

She had come to ask him to show her the second body that had been laid there. Richard gladly obliged and on this occasion she seemed to have prepared herself, to have stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood, and no amount of detail on Richard’s part had made her show any desire to flee. Even so, after they had left the deadhouse together and stood facing each other, shaded by the pale stone wall of the church, Richard had noticed a stiffness in her movements and a shortness in her speech that
hinted she was still hiding her emotions. It was most enjoyable to observe.

And then, quite unaccountably, he kissed her. From where inside him the urge arose he could not say, but it could only be related to her terror. For a moment she remained very still, her fear now augmented by surprise, but then he felt her hands on his head. Her mouth opened and he felt the moisture of her tongue on his own lips. It was a kiss that he had begun, but which she had taken over. It lasted only a few seconds and then she pulled away. She looked at him, smiling, her hands still cupping his head; then she giggled and ran off. Even a century on, it remained a pleasant memory.

Richard had now gathered enough information to be able to recreate the wounds on the murder victims. Their most notable feature was that, in all the mess and devastation of the attacks, there were always two points of incision. Richard quickly came up with a mechanism to mimic the injuries. He took two knives and placed them side by side, so that their handles touched and their blades sat parallel, pointing in the same direction. He bound them together with twine. The first animal he practised on was a rabbit. The reproduction of the wounds was remarkably accurate.

Richard chose a much simpler pattern in which to lay out the corpses of the animals with which he baited his trap, one that would be easy for the genuine killer to understand. In terms of ‘when’, Richard followed the same calendar – always killing at weekends. The ‘where’ was in a circle, a much smaller circle than the killer used. This one had a radius of just a furlong, and its centre was his father’s church.

Each weekend Richard would kill an animal and place its body somewhere on that circle. Then he would return to the church and place a lighted candle in one of the arched vaults of the crypt that just managed to peep above the level of the ground. He would hide in the branches of the great yew tree that hung over the churchyard and wait.

If the killer had been only what Richard was expecting – some deranged lunatic with a lust for blood – then it was madness for a fourteen-year-old boy to try to capture him on his own. If Richard had understood what he was truly dealing with, a supernatural
creature with strength ten times that of any man, he would have fled, knowing his task was hopeless. But his ignorance robbed him of fear. Perhaps on a thousand other occasions it would have been hopeless; in a thousand other worlds Richard would have lain dead, the blood sucked from his body, and he would not have grown to be the creature he was today; perhaps some malign spirit was watching over him. Whatever the cause, Richard was lucky.

It was on the seventh weekend, on the Friday night, that Richard observed the figure of a man skulking through the undergrowth, heading, by a twisting path, towards the candle that had been set to trap him. When a few yards from the opening to the crypt, the figure paused. It shouted in French: ‘Are you there?’

With no response forthcoming, the figure moved a little closer to the crypt, crouching almost on its hands and knees, and called again. It crawled further, so that it was now peering into the space beneath the church, its hand perched on the ledge. Richard moved. He covered the ground between him and the church in seconds and charged the figure with the full force of his shoulder. It was taken quite by surprise and tumbled forward into the crypt. The fall was only six feet or so, and was unlikely to harm even a man – but by the same token, even a man might quickly escape. But Richard was prepared. He slammed down the old iron grate that he had propped open when placing the candle and slipped the lock back into place. His prisoner was secure.

He peered down into the dark crypt. The candle had been knocked over and extinguished in the tussle. Outside the light of the half-moon was bright enough, but it did not penetrate far into darkness. It didn’t need to. Seconds later hands gripped the iron bars and a face appeared, twisted with rage, its lips bared in a ferocious snarl which revealed to Richard its long, sharp pointed teeth.

And at that moment, although he might not yet fully appreciate the import of the word, Richard knew that he was looking into the face of a vampire.

That had been eighty-nine years before, and now Richard preferred to call himself Iuda, and now
he
was a vampire, and a prisoner in a cell with only one small window high up in the wall. But he would not climb up there and snarl at those who passed by – it would do no good. Iuda had better plans for escape, perhaps even for rescue. But to get help he must be able to call for help, and there the continual tapping of the prisoners on the pipes would be his salvation.

He had analysed the signals and observed that the smallest unit of communication was a pair of numbers – tapped against the pipe with some metal object and separated by a pause. The first number was never greater than five and the second never greater than six. This gave a combination of thirty possibilities – close enough to the thirty-seven of the Russian alphabet, within which there were a number of letters that were rarely if ever used, being virtual duplicates of other letters. The whole system was ripe for revision. Thus ‘І’ could be replaced by ‘И’, ‘Ө’ by ‘Ф’, ‘Ѣ’ by ‘Е’ and ‘Ѵ’ by ‘В’. At a push, even ‘Щ’ and ‘Ш’ could be treated as a single letter. The hard and soft sounds – ‘Ъ’ and ‘Ь’ – could be ignored, and that reduced the number of letters to thirty. Iuda arranged them alphabetically on a grid.

Originally he drew it in the dust of the floor, but it was easy enough to memorize and he soon wiped it away so that no guard would see. Any letter could be transmitted by a pair of taps. 3 and 5 would signify ‘П’; 4 and 6 gave ‘Ц’. Iuda’s own name was
2,4 – 4,3 – 1,5 – 1,1. He listened to the messages coming through the pipes and analysed them. They all made sense.

Iuda picked up the tin mug that the guards had given him and threw the water from it on to the cell floor. Then he squatted down beside the pipes and began to tap out a message of his own.

SATURDAY BEGAN MUCH
as friday had done, with a short walk to Maksimilianovsky Lane, a nod to the
dvornik
at number 15 and a march up the stairs to apartment 7. This time the door was opened by a familiar face – familiar from a photograph and from one passing glance in the Summer Gardens the previous day.

‘Mihail Konstantinovich Lukin, I presume,’ said Luka, opening the door wider to allow Mihail in.

There was no one else in the apartment. Mihail had half expected to see Dusya there, or one of the two men he had observed leaving the previous day, but he was alone with his half-brother.

‘How do you know my name?’ asked Mihail. The answer was obvious enough. He had told Dusya his name; somehow she had seen him.

‘How do you know my address?’ countered Luka.

‘We have a mutual friend.’

This much appeared to pique Luka’s interest. He gestured towards a chair, which Mihail took.

‘Tea?’ Luka asked.