Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [174]
Seaton Begg had inspected several victims. Long after the Marriage’s case, a senior Lloyd’s officer was discovered in a Streatham brothel. His costume had greatly excited the popular imagination but Begg had been impressed by his horrified expression, the peculiar silvery sheen of the skin, the bloodless wound like a kiss. Save for the wound’s position, the Prime Minister had died in exactly the same way. “As if their souls had been drained?” Begg ordered two more pints of Vortex Water.
Sinclair was enthusiastic. “Quite. It’s not the first time you and I have run up against so-called black magic, but this affair beats everything, eh? Witnesses?”
Begg had no useful witnesses. Those who had heard voices from the Prime Minister’s sitting room could not tell if the other speaker was native or foreign. Someone had glimpsed what he described as a “stained-glass window” full of every imaginable colour which seemed to take the shape of a jeweled cup, its gold and silver blazing so powerfully he was almost blinded before it vanished. The piteous, bloodcurdling cry awakened Downing Street at 4 a.m. Someone heard the front door close. Sleeping soldiers and police outside were discovered unhurt. “But I’m seeing two chaps tomorrow morning who sound better. One claims he spotted the murderer leaving BBIC on the night in question, when most of Barbican’s closest associates called a crisis meeting at their HQ and were identically murdered. Noises, like music or singing, and a brilliant glow were reported, but the assassin was invisible. I gather my first witness believes he saw the Devil.”
Begg added: “Only once before have I felt so thoroughly in the presence of the Supernatural. Rationally we must assume this is a clever murderer using superstition to terrify his victims in advance, enabling him to kill them without any significant resistance. That night he murdered fourteen of the City’s cleverest men, including Sir John Sheppard, Lord Charles Peace, Duval of the Credite Lyonesse, Thomas King, Ricky Turpin and all three Al Glaouis. Only a day later he killed a whole school of Wall Street sharks over here in similar haste—Bass, Floyd, Cassidy, J.W. Harding, the James brothers, Schultz, the Bush boys and several others equally renowned. Not a bad score.”
“You don’t suggest this chap’s done the world a favour?”
“Those who feed like parasites upon their fellows pretty much deserve to have the life sucked out of them, I’d say. The amounts of laundered crack money alone were obscene. This business sickens me, old man. Cabinet ministers are dying faster than they can resign. I’ve no love of the vigilante, but I cannot say I mourn the rascals’ passing. My chief regret is that they did not die with their Swiss account numbers branded on their foreheads.”
Begg’s uncharacteristic pronouncements surprised Sinclair. “You seem to have more sympathy for the assassin than his prey.”
“Absolutely true,” Begg agreed. “Believe me, Taffy, it’s my very sympathy which should soon bring me face to face with our murderer!”
CHAPTER TWO
An Interview with Lady Ratchet
The Prime Minister had not been the only politician to die violently on Christmas Eve. Over in Limehouse, in identical circumstances, while his wife and children were at church praying for his mediocre soul, the education minister, Oswald Quelch, was discovered at the centre of a pentacle, not part of the seasonal decorations, designed to save him from the demon he believed he had summoned.
Seaton’s first witness claimed to have bumped into the murderer as he was leaving Eel House, Quelch’s eighteenth-century merchant’s mansion. There were only two entrances to Eel House—the first from the river, the second from a low gate into an apparently dead-end alley where Ken “Corky” Clarke, a small-time sneak-thief, had been, as he put it, “catching his breath” in the heavy fog so characteristic of London since the repeal of the Clean Air Act. Hearing a