Anno Dracula - Kim Newman [77]
27
DR JEKYLL AND DR MOREAU
‘My dear Mlle Dieudonné,’ read the note, delivered by the estimable Ned, ‘I have a call to make in connection with our enquiries, and should like a vampire with me. Could you make yourself available this evening? A cab will be sent to Whitechapel for your use. More later. Beauregard.’
As it eventuated, the cab contained Charles Beauregard himself, freshly shaved and dressed, hat in his lap, cane at his side. He was becoming accustomed to vampire hours, she realised, sleeping by day and thriving by night. He gave the cabby an address across in the city. The hansom shifted pleasantly on its springs as it made its way out of the East End.
‘Nothing is so reassuring as the interior of a hansom cab,’ Charles declared. ‘It is a miniature fortress on wheels, a womb of comfort in the dark.’
Considering her companion’s evident inclination towards poetic thought, Geneviève was thankful she had taken care with her attire. She would not pass at the Palace, but her costume was at least not designed to radiate hostility to the male sex. She had bothered with a velvet cape and matching choker. She had spent some extra time brushing her hair, and now wore it loose about her shoulders. Jack Seward told her the arrangement was pleasing, and, denied the vain pleasures of a looking-glass, she would have to take his word.
‘You seem different this evening?’ Charles noticed.
She smiled, trying to keep her teeth from showing. ‘It’s this dress, I’m afraid. I can hardly breathe.’
‘I thought you didn’t need to breathe.’
‘That’s a common fallacy. Somehow, those who know nothing are able to maintain entirely irreconcilable beliefs. On the one hand, vampires can be detected because they do not breathe. On the other, vampires have the rankest breath imaginable.’
‘You are right, of course. That had never occurred to me.’
‘We are natural beings, like any others,’ she explained. ‘There’s no magic.’
‘What about the business with mirrors?’
That was the thing they always came down to, the business with mirrors. No one had an explanation for that.
‘Maybe a little magic,’ she said, holding her thumb and forefinger nearly together. ‘Just a touch.’
Charles smiled, a thing he did rarely. It improved his looks. There was something closed in the back of Charles Beauregard’s mind. She could not truly read thoughts, but she was sensitive. Charles was intent on keeping his mind private. Not a trick that came naturally; his life in the service of the Diogenes Club must have taught it him. Her impression was that this courteous gentleman was an old hand at keeping secrets.
‘Have you seen the newspapers?’ he asked. ‘There has been another communiqué from Jack the Ripper. A postcard.’
‘“Double event this time”,’ she quoted.
‘Quite. “Had not time to get ears for police”.’
‘Didn’t he try to sever Cathy’s ear?’
Beauregard had obviously memorised Dr Gordon Brown’s report. ‘There was some such injury, but it was probably incidental. Her face was extensively mutilated. Even if our letter-writer is not the murderer, he may have an inside source of information.’
‘Like whom? A journalist?’
‘That is a possibility. The fact that the letters were sent to the Central News Agency, and therefore available to all the newspapers, is unusual. Few outside the press even know what a