Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [127]
Someone kicked Godalming in the head. Police whistles shrilled. Sir Charles, thinking himself in the thick of an African battle, was in charge again, dispensing orders, having constables snap to attention, gesturing with his pistol.
Reinforcements poured out of the Yard, summoned by the disturbance. Many brandished guns: Sir Charles liked his men to go armed, no matter what regulations specified. The Commissioner directed them to put down the mob. With truncheons out, a platoon of policemen battered the few remaining loiterers, driving them towards the Embankment. Godalming saw the new-born who had stabbed Mackenzie with this group, applying his stick to the head of a clergyman. The constables drove the rabble into the fog. The assassin would not return.
Mackenzie was face-down on the cobbles, unmoving. The dark patch on the back of his coat showed he had been neatly skewered through the heart. The Carpathian stood over him, blood-dipped knife in his hand and no expression on his dead face.
‘Arrest this murderer,’ Sir Charles ordered.
The three new-born constables around them hesitated. Godalming wondered if they could subdue the elder. The Carpathian contemptuously cast away the knife and held out his hands. One of the coppers obliged, fastening purely formal handcuffs around the elder’s wrists. He could have broken them with a flex but let himself be taken.
‘We shall have an explanation of you,’ Sir Charles said, holding up a finger as if daring the vampire to bite it off.
The constables hauled the Carpathian away.
‘That’s better,’ the Commissioner said, surveying the calm. The streets had been cleared. Paint dripped on the walls. The cobbles were littered with still-rolling missiles and the odd constable’s helmet, but peace had been enforced. ‘That’s much more like it. Order and discipline, Godalming. That’s the stuff we need. Mustn’t slacken.’
Sir Charles returned to the building, striding purposefully, followed by several of his men. The natives had been momentarily repulsed but Godalming heard the jungle drums summoning more cannibals. He remained in the fog for a moment, head racing. Of all who had been there, only he – and the assassin – really knew what had happened. He was coming into his full powers, acquiring the insights and sensitivities if not of an elder then of a vampire who could no longer be described as a new-born. He could survey calm and see the chaos beneath. Lord Ruthven had told him to look for an advantage, then to pursue it ruthlessly. This knowledge could be turned to his supreme advantage.
47
LOVE AND MR BEAUREGARD
He stood in front of his open fireplace, hands behind him, feeling the heat. Even the short stroll from Caversham Street to Cheyne Walk had chilled him to the bone. Bairstow had set the fire earlier and the room was warm and welcoming.
Geneviève wandered around the room like a cat getting acquainted with a new home, alighting on this and that and examining, almost tasting, an object, before replacing it, sometimes making a slight adjustment to a position.
‘This was Pamela?’ she said, holding up the last photograph. ‘She was beautiful.’
Beauregard agreed.
‘Many women wouldn’t care to be photographed when they were with child,’ Geneviève said. ‘It might seem indecent.’
‘Pamela was not like many women.’
‘I don’t doubt it, to judge by her influence on her survivors.’
Beauregard remembered.
‘She didn’t wish you to give up the rest of your life, though,’ she said, setting the picture down. ‘And she certainly did not want her cousin to reshape herself in her image.’
Beauregard had no answer. Geneviève made him see his late engagement in an unhealthy light. Neither Penelope nor he had been honest with themselves or each other. But he could not blame Penelope, or Mrs Churchward, or Florence Stoker. It had all been his own fault.
‘What’s gone is gone,’ Geneviève continued. ‘I should know. I’ve buried centuries.’
For a moment she