Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [17]
‘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?’
6
PANDORA’S BOX
‘What’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,