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By Root 678 0

said Lulu had left their attic some time between three and four in the morning. The body had been discovered by Constable George Neve, walking his beat shortly after six. After finishing Lulu, presumably in plain sight on Chicksand Street, the murderer had dumped her on the doorstep of a basement flat. A family of Polish Jews, of whom only the littlest child could speak anything approaching English, had been inside. They all stated, as translated by the tiny girl after a Yiddish babel of argument, not to have heard anything until Constable Neve roused them by practically battering down their door. Rebecca Kosminksi, the self-assured spokeswoman, was the only vampire in the family. Geneviève had seen her kind before; Melissa d’Acques, who had turned Chandagnac, was one. Rebecca might live to become the all-powerful matriarch of her extended clan, but she would never grow up.

Lestrade fidgeted throughout, describing it cruelly as ‘comedy relief ’. He would rather have been out combing the crime scene than sitting on a hardwood bench made for the tough bottoms and short legs of twelve-year-olds, but he could not get in Fred Abberline’s way too often. He gloomily told Geneviève that Baxter was known for the length of his inquests. The coroner’s approach was characterised by an obsessive, not to say tedious, insistence on dragging out irrelevant details and the flamboyant off-handedness of his summings-up. In his closing remarks on Anne Chapman, Baxter had invented the theory, on the basis of gossip overheard at the Middlesex Hospital, that an American doctor was either the murderer or the employer of the murderer. The unknown doctor, researching the physiognomy of the un-dead, was rumoured to have offered twenty guineas for a fresh vampire heart. There had been a brief flurry of activity as Abberline tried to locate the foreigner, but it turned out vampire hearts, mainly somewhat damaged, could be unethically purchased from mortuaries for as little as sixpence.

Baxter had adjourned before midnight, and reconvened the inquest this morning. Now evidence from the post-mortem was available, and today’s business mainly concerned a succession of medical men, all of whom had crammed themselves into Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary Mortuary to examine the mortal remains of Lulu Schön.

First came Dr George Bagster Phillips, the H Division Police Surgeon – well known at Toynbee Hall – who had done the preliminary examination of the body in Chicksand Street and performed the more detailed post-mortem. It boiled down to the simple facts that Lulu Schön had been heart-stabbed, disembowelled and decapitated. It took much desk-banging to quieten the outrage that followed these not unexpected revelations.

By law, inquests had to be held in public places and be open to the press. From the several appearances Geneviève had made as a witness in connection with the deaths of paupers in Toynbee Hall beds, she knew the only audience was usually a bored stringer from the Central News Agency, with the occasional friend or relation of the deceased. But the lecture hall was even more thickly populated today than it had been yesterday, the benches as heavily burdened as if Con Donovan were on the stage, rematching with Monk for the Featherweight Title. Aside from the reporters hogging the front row, Geneviève noticed a gaggle of haggard mainly un-dead women in colourful dresses, a scattering of well-dressed men, some of Lestrade’s uniformed juniors, and a sprinkling of sensation-seekers, clergymen and social reformers.

In the centre of the room, spaces all around unoccupied despite the surplus of attendees, sat a long-haired vampire warrior. Not a new-born, he wore the uniform, including a steel breastplate, of the Prince Consort’s Own Carpathian Guard, augmented by a tasselled fez. His face was withered white parchment but his eyes, blood-red marbles set in the dead waste of skin, constantly twitched.

‘Do you know who that is?’ Lestrade asked.

Geneviève did. ‘Kostaki, one of Vlad Tepes’s hangers-on.’

‘That sort gives me the creeps,’ commented