Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [19]
Geneviève almost laughed. Kostaki was younger than she. His presence was almost certainly not due to mere curiosity. The Palace was taking an interest in Silver Knife.
‘People die every night in Whitechapel, in ways Vlad Tepes couldn’t devise, or live lives worse than any death,’ Geneviève said, ‘yet from one year’s end to the next, London pretends we’re as remote as Borneo. But give them a handful of gory murders and you can’t move for sightseers and prurient philanthropists.’
‘Maybe some good will come of it,’ Lestrade commented.
Dr Bagster Phillips was thanked and dismissed, and Baxter called for Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.CL., LL.D., F.R.S., etc. A dignified, smooth-faced man of fifty, obviously once handsome, approached the lectern and took the oath.
‘Whenever a vampire’s killed,’ Lestrade explained, ‘Jekyll comes creeping round. Something rum about him, if you get my drift...’
The scientific researcher, who first gave a detailed and anatomically precise description of the atrocities, was warm only in the sense that he was not a vampire. Dr Jekyll was self-controlled to a point that suggested a disturbing lack of empathy with the human subject of the inquest, but Geneviève listened with interest – certainly more than that expressed by the yawning reporters in the front row – to the comments Baxter solicited from him.
‘We have not learned enough about the precise changes in the human metabolism that accompany the so-called “turn” from normal life to the un-dead state. Precise information is hard to come by, and superstition hangs like a London fog over the subject. My studies have been checked by official indifference, even hostility. We could all benefit from research. Perhaps the divisions which lead to tragic incidents like the death of this girl could then be erased from our society.’
The anarchists were grumbling again. Without divisions, their cause would have no purpose.
‘Too much of what we believe about vampirism is sheer folklore,’ Dr Jekyll continued. ‘The stake through the heart, the silver scythe. The vampire corpus is remarkably resilient, but any major breach of the vital organs seems to produce true death, as here.’
Baxter hummed and questioned the doctor. ‘So the murderer has not, in your opinion, followed what we might deem the standard superstitious practice of the vampire killer?’
‘Indeed. I should like to put certain facts into the record, if only to provide a definitive contradiction of irresponsible journalism.’
Some of the reporters hooted quietly. A lightning sketch artist sitting in directly in front of Geneviève was deftly portraying Dr Jekyll for reproduction in the illustrated press. He pencilled in some dark shadows under the witness’s eyes to make him look more untrustworthy.
‘As with Nichols and Chapman, Schön was not penetrated with a wooden stake or paling. Her mouth was not stuffed with cloves of garlic, or fragments of communion wafer, or pages torn from a sacred text. No crucifix or cruciform object was found on or near the body. The dampness of her skirts and the residue of water on her face were almost certainly condensation from the fog. It is highly unlikely that the body was sprinkled with holy water.’
The artist, probably the man from the Police Gazette, drew in heavy eyebrows and tried to make Dr Jekyll’s thick but immaculately combed hair look shaggy. He went too far in distorting his subject and, tutting at his overenthusiasm, tore the sheet off his pad, crumpled it into his pocket, and began afresh.
Baxter jotted down some notes, and resumed his questioning. ‘Would you venture that the murderer was familiar with the workings of the human body, whether of a vampire or not?’
‘Yes, coroner. The extent of the injuries betokens a certain frenzy of enthusiasm, but the actual wounds – one might almost say incisions – have been wrought with some skill.’
‘Silver Knife’s a bleedin’ doctor,’ shouted the chief anarchist.
The court again exploded into uproar. The anarchists, about half-and-half warm and new-borns, stamped their feet