Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [13]
‘We don’t know that,’ Abberline snapped, ‘and I don’t want to read it in the Police Gazette.’
Thick kept quiet, satisfied that he was right. In their interview, the sergeant admitted his personal belief was that Silver Knife imagined he had been wronged – or, more likely, actually had been wronged – by Vlad Tepes’s get. Geneviève, expert enough to know the capabilities of her kind, agreed, but knew the description fit so many in London that it would be fruitless to extrapolate a list of suspects from the theory.
‘I believe Sergeant Thick is right,’ she told the policemen.
Lestrade assented, but Abberline turned away to give an order to his own pet sergeant, George Godley. Geneviève smiled at Thick and saw him shiver. Like most of the warm, he knew even less about bloodline, about the infinite varieties and gradations of vampire, than the Prince Consort’s glut of new-borns. Thick looked at her and saw a vampire... just like the bloodsucker who had turned his daughter, violated his wife, taken his promotion, killed his friend. She didn’t know his history but supposed his theory formed by personal experience, that he guessed the murderer’s motive because he could understand it.
Abberline had spent the day interrogating the constables who were first at the scene of the murder, then going over the ground himself. He had not immediately discovered anything of any relevance and was even holding off on committing to a statement that Schön was indeed another victim of the so-called Whitechapel Murderer. On the short walk from Toynbee Hall, they had heard newsboys shouting about Silver Knife; but the official flannel was that only Chapman and Nichols were demonstrably dead by the same hand. Various other unsolved cases – Schön now joining Tabram, Smith and sundry others – linked in the press could conceivably be entirely separate crimes. Silver Knife hardly held the patent on homicide, even in the immediate locality.
Lestrade and Abberline went off to have a huddle. Abberline – without realising it? – elaborately came up with other things to do with his hands whenever the possibility of pressing flesh with a vampire was raised. He lit a pipe and listened as Lestrade ticked off points on his fingers. A jurisdictional dispute was in the offing between Abberline, head of H Division CID, and Lestrade. The Scotland Yard interloper was assumed to be one of Dr Anderson’s spies, dispatched by Swanson to check up on the detectives in the field, ready to swoop in whenever glory was to be claimed but anonymous if results were lacking. Anderson, Swanson and Lestrade were the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Englishman of the music hall stories, and had been pictured as such by Weedon Grossmith in Punch, traipsing over a murder site and obliterating clues to the annoyance of a local copper who somewhat resembled Fred Abberline. Geneviève wondered if she, hardly the epitome of the French girl from the same stories, fitted into the scheme. Did Lestrade intend her for a lever?
She looked about the already busy reception room. The doors pushed open constantly, admitting foggy draughts, and banged shut. Outside were several groups of interested parties. A Salvation Army band, flying the Cross of St George, supported a Christian Crusade preacher who called down God’s Justice on vampirekind, upholding Silver Knife as a true instrument of the Will of Christ. The Speakers’ Corner Torquemada was heckled by a few professional insurrectionists, ragged-trousered longhairs of various socialist or Republican stripes, and ridiculed by a knot of painted vampire women, who offered expensive kisses and a quick turning. Many new-borns paid to become some street tart’s get, purchasing immortality for as little as a shilling.
‘Who’s the reverend gentleman?’ Geneviève asked Thick.
The sergeant glanced out at the mob and groaned. ‘A bloody nuisance, Miss. Name of John Jago, so he says.’
The Jago was a notorious slum at the upper end of Brick Lane, a criminal jungle of tiny courts and overpopulated