Magistrates of Hell Read online

  ‘Whether there are masters and fledglings among them, as among vampires, he knew not, nor how they communicate amongst themselves. None has ever heard one speak.’

  ‘Asher, old man!’

  Asher turned at the sound of Hobart’s booming voice and held out his hand.

  ‘Eddington told me you’d showed up on the doorstep looking for me. More dark doings at the crossroad, eh?’

  Asher laid a finger to his lips, his expression only half-humorous. The British Legation’s Senior Translator grinned and shook Asher’s hand as if he were operating a pump. Asher made no move to introduce Don Simon, as he was fairly sure Hobart was completely unaware of the vampire’s elegant presence in the shadowed niche between curtains and window glass.

  ‘I need someone to vouch for me,’ said Asher. ‘To tell anyone who asks – and I’m pretty sure that someone from the German Legation will ask after me – that Lord, yes, you knew me at Oxford and know for a fact that I haven’t stirred from the place in twenty-five years.’

  ‘Hah! I knew it!’ Hobart’s pale-blue eyes sparkled, and he bared his stained teeth again. ‘All that sneaking about Shantung in ninety-eight, with a German accent and that moth-eaten beard—’

  ‘I mean it, Hobart,’ said Asher quietly. ‘If you recognized me back then, there’s always the chance that someone will recognize me now. And it is vital that inquiries be discouraged – or led as quickly as possible up the garden path.’

  ‘You can count on me, old fellow.’ The big man saluted, then sobered and cast a sour glance across the parlor at the uniformed Germans. They were now in conversation with one of President Yuan Shi-k’ai’s aides, a sleek, rather ferret-like man with a beautiful Chinese woman of perhaps fifty supported on one arm. ‘The Huns are thick as thieves with Yuan,’ he added in a lower voice. ‘I’ll swear they were the ones who swung those loans he got from every bank in Europe. That’s Huang Da-feng with them now, Yuan’s go-between with the criminal bosses in the town. And that woman – you wouldn’t think it to look at her – runs half the brothels in Peking . . . Not that Sir Allyn has an inkling, I’ll go bail.’

  Hobart nodded in the direction of the drawing room doorway, where their host and his sharp-faced hostess were conferring with the Chinese butler in his white coat. ‘With that wife of his looking over his shoulder I doubt Sir Allyn knows what a sing-song girl is.’ The big man grimaced: he was one of the old China hands, who had been in Peking for twenty years while ministers, attachés, and diplomats came and went. ‘If you need a hand with anything, Richard or I – you know my boy Richard’s out here with me now? Secretary – I needed someone I could trust . . . and needed to get the boy away from the company he was keeping in London, if truth be known. But if you need help . . .’

  ‘Not my business.’ Asher held up his hand. ‘This time I really am here only in quest of verb forms and legends. In particular, a legend about rat-people – shu-jen, or shu-kwei. In particular I’m looking for a missionary named Dr Christina Bauer.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, her!’ Hobart made another face. ‘Hand in glove with the Kaiser, if you ask me. Colonel von Mehren’s been out to Mingliang Village half a dozen times this past year, and you can’t tell me it’s all to do with the Kuo Min-tang militias in the countryside. Mingliang’s where the Bauer woman’s got her church and what she claims is a clinic. But you could hide a regiment in some of those caves in the hills, and nobody in Peking would be the wiser. I’ll send Richard out there with you—’

  Lady Eddington’s shrill voice reached them above the babble of the crowd. ‘He knew the engagement was to be announced tonight! It’s a deliberate insult!’

  The red, wrinkled skin of Hobart’s face seemed to darken with his frown. ‘Told the boy he’d better show his face here tonight,’ he grumbled. ‘I don’t know what else she wants me to do. Go down to the Chinese city looking for him?’ He laughed rudely. ‘Wouldn’t put it past the girl – and her mother – to have made the whole thing up. But it’s damned awkward. For all I know Ricky did ask Holly Eddington to marry him: the boy drinks too much. I got him out of a scrape in Cambridge when some harpy of a landlady’d got her claws in him over her so-called daughter—’

  His gray-shot mustache bristled as he pursed his lips. ‘You haven’t got a son, have you, Asher? I heard someone say you finally pulled it off with old Willoughby’s heiress. Never thought I’d see that happen.’

  ‘Miss Willoughby did me the honor of accepting my hand, yes.’ Asher kept his voice level, but remembered several reasons he hadn’t liked Grant Hobart at Oxford.

  ‘She here with you? I understand old Willoughby cut up to the tune of a couple of million.’

  ‘Mrs Asher accompanied me to China, yes.’ If I break this ass’s nose for him, I’m sure it would draw Colonel von Mehren’s attention to me. ‘We arrived this afternoon on the Royal Charlotte and are staying at the Hotel Wagons-Lits. And yes, we have a daughter, Miranda, born at the beginning of this year.’

  Even the mention of her name lifted Asher’s heart.

  Hobart dug him in the ribs with his elbow. ‘Eh, you old dog . . . You just watch out when the girl grows up. If old Willoughby’s shekels are settled on her, you’re going to be for it, with fortune-hunters coming out of the woods all ’round you like Hottentots. Every girl in Oxford was after Ricky like the hounds of Hell on account of his mother’s fortune. Not that the men here aren’t ten times worse if there’s an heiress to be had. Well, you know how it is: if a man’s in the diplomatic he’s got to marry money, even if it’s only a couple hundred—’

  His words were cut off by a woman’s scream. The garden, thought Asher as he flung open the window behind him – Ysidro had vanished, he wasn’t even sure when. Bitter night wind smote him, and in the dark of the garden a blur of white moved.

  Another scream: horror and shock.

  Asher was out the window and across the brick terrace in two running strides. Light fell through the drawing room windows behind him, through a door further along the house, enough to show him bare thin trees and a frozen bird-bath, and a gate in the garden wall at the far end. Two white-coated Chinese servants ran out with lanterns, followed by the first rush of guests. The jolting glare showed Asher a young dark-haired woman standing in the graveled path – he recalled her slim-cut pale gown from the drawing room – and, a few feet in front of her, the white form of a woman lying on the ground.

  Ysidro—

  Shock nearly suffocated him, rage and horror.

  He’d never—

  He knelt. There were two bodies, not one.

  The woman who had screamed sobbed out, ‘Holly! Dio mio, Holly—!’

  It was indeed Holly Eddington who lay on the path. Asher recognized the dress – white tulle with pink rosebuds at the bosom, appropriate for a girl of seventeen but not for a woman whose age (when he’d seen her speaking to her mother) he’d guessed as mid-twenties. He’d have been hard put to recognize her face, so distorted it was with strangulation and unuttered screams. She’d been garroted with a man’s necktie, the red-and-blue silk still twisted tight around her throat.

  The man sprawled on his face a few paces from her snored drunkenly. Despite both cold and the wind Asher could smell the liquor on him. Tweed trousers and a well-cut jacket of the same material: wherever he’d been, he’d left for there in the afternoon. The gleam of the lantern picked out bronze-gold glints in his rumpled hair. When he stirred, and fumbled about him with his hands as if to rise, Asher saw he was young – probably barely twenty – and that his collar was open, his throat bare.

  Sir Allyn Eddington pushed his way to the front of the crowd, cried, ‘Holly! Oh, God!’ in a voice that seemed to rip the words from his viscera.

  His wife screamed, ‘NO!!!’ and shoved Asher aside, fell on her knees beside the girl in white. ‘Oh, God, is there a doctor—?’

  The surgeon from the German Hospital struggled out of the crowd, squatted beside Holly Eddington, whom Asher knew at a glance to be already dead.


  The young man beside her struggled to his hands and knees, blinked owlishly up at the crowd before him, then threw up with alcoholic comprehensiveness.

  Eddington screamed, ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ as if those were the worst words that he could produce, and flung himself on the young man. Asher and the Japanese attaché Mizukami grabbed him by the arms before he could reach his intended target. The Trade Secretary fought them like a roped tiger. ‘You murdering young pig! You filthy beast—!’

  Grant Hobart thrust past them, dropped to his knees beside the drunken youth.

  ‘Richard!’ His cry was the sob of one who has lost his final hope of salvation.

  TWO

  ‘A known killer attends a festivity, at which a young girl is killed.’ Rebbe Solomon Karlebach’s deep voice ground the words with a heavy-handed sarcasm that was almost relish. ‘I am astonished! Do you suppose there is some connection?’

  ‘There might be.’ Asher refused to be baited. He glanced at the doorway which separated the parlor of his suite at the Hotel Wagons-Lits from the little hall which led to the servants’ rooms and the nursery, where the widowed Mrs Pilley – twenty-two, sweet-natured, and wholly convinced that China would be a better place if taken over by England and forcibly converted to Methodism – slumbered with tiny Miranda.

  Then he crossed to the other chair, took his wife Lydia’s hands, and kissed her. ‘On the other hand, I am a known killer – known in certain circles, which I trust do not include anyone here in Peking – in that I’ve murdered total strangers when no war has been declared between our countries.’ And not always total strangers . . .

  His mind flinched from that memory. ‘Colonel von Mehren has killed people, if he’s been in the German Army for thirty years. I know – of my own knowledge, as the lawyers say – that Count Mizukami killed at least one man in the Shantung Peninsula fourteen years ago, because I saw him do it. And I’m sure he had his bodyguard on the premises somewhere—’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ The old professor leaned back in the deep-green velvet chair beside the hearth, folded the more mobile of his arthritis-crippled hands over the gnarled and frozen knot of the other. His dark eyes, far from the mocking tone of his voice, studied Asher with troubled concern.

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Asher tightened his grip on his wife’s long, ink-stained fingers. After six weeks at sea together in the Royal Charlotte, she still wouldn’t wear her spectacles in Karlebach’s presence, and consequently – by the look of the cribbage board on the marble-topped table between them – was being annihilated at the game. Like a leggy, red-haired marsh-fairy in one of her astonishing collection of lace tea-gowns, and nearly blind as a mole, Lydia was unshakeably convinced of her homeliness and to Asher’s knowledge had only been seen wearing her glasses by himself, their tiny daughter Miranda, very occasionally by her maid Ellen . . .

  And by Don Simon Ysidro.

  He went on, ‘But I doubt Don Simon had anything to do with Miss Eddington’s death. She was strangled with Richard Hobart’s necktie, not bitten and exsanguinated.’

  ‘It is death that the vampire feeds upon,’ retorted Karlebach darkly, ‘not the blood alone. This you know, Jamie. The energies released by the human psyche in death are what feed his ability to manipulate the minds of men. He was being careful. He knew he had been seen.’

  ‘Yes, but in that case, why kill at all?’ Lydia moved over to make room for Asher on the arm of her chair. ‘Why murder the daughter of the Assistant Trade Secretary, of all people, in a public place, when there were probably Chinese beggars asleep in some alleyway twenty feet from the spot? No one would make a fuss if they died.’

  Karlebach sighed deeply and regarded Lydia for a moment over the rims of his own spectacles, beneath a shelf of white eyebrows that seemed to curl with the strength of his vital personality. ‘You defend him too, little bird?’

  Lydia looked away.

  Someone – probably Ellen – had, in the few hours that Asher had been gone, rearranged the parlor of the Ashers’ suite with all the small comforts that Lydia had brought from home to adorn their stateroom on the Royal Charlotte: small red-and-blue silk pillows had been added to the green velvet chairs, favorite books placed in the shelves and on the room’s central table. Even the familiar gold-and-sky-blue Royal Doulton tea-set was laid out, the pot gently steaming.

  Though Asher always felt bemused when he traveled with his wife and his wife’s staggering caravan of luggage, there was a good deal to be said, he reflected, for coming in from an icy foreign night to find all things exactly as they were at the house on Holywell Street in Oxford.

  ‘Who knows why the Undead do as they do?’ Karlebach held up one crooked hand, as if to stop an argument that neither his former student, nor Lydia, made any attempt to pursue. ‘The vampires cease to be human when they pass beyond the realm of the living. Their thoughts are not like ours. Neither are their motives anything which the living can fathom.’

  He lapsed into brooding silence, and Asher – who knew that Lydia tended to become absorbed in conversation, to say nothing of not being able to see across the table – fetched the teapot and refilled the old professor’s empty cup.

  Rebbe Solomon Karlebach had been old when Asher had first met him almost thirty years ago, an undergraduate already on his second tour of Mitteleuropa and eager to speak with one of the most respected scholars of the superstitions rife in the remoter corners of what had been the Old Holy Roman Empire. He had spent all that summer of 1884, and the following three, studying at Karlebach’s feet in that moldering stone house in the Prague ghetto, and had come to love the old man as a father. Only the previous year, however – some years after he himself had encountered, in Undead flesh, what he had long believed to exist only in legends – had it occurred to Asher to ask his teacher whether he, too, had had personal contact with vampires.

  Karlebach now plucked a sugar cube from the saucer Asher offered him, tucked it into his cheek behind its jungle of snowy beard, and sipped his tea through it, lost for a time in his own thoughts. ‘And did he speak to you, this vampire of yours?’ he asked at length. ‘Did he tell you of the Others? Of whether the thing that this Bauer woman found is the same as the creatures that haunt the crypts beneath Prague?’

  ‘He did,’ replied Asher. ‘But he could tell me nothing beyond what you and I already know.’

  ‘Could tell you, or would tell you.’ The old man’s dark eyes glinted in the dim gleam of the shaded electric lamps. ‘You cannot trust the vampire, Jamie. Even in the tiniest of matters, they deceive. It is their nature.’

  ‘That’s as may be. But before the killing was discovered, Sir Grant Hobart told me that Dr Bauer has a clinic in a place called Mingliang Village in the Western Hills, about twenty miles from here. There are bandit gangs in the hills, to say nothing of the Kuo Min-tang – Republican fighters opposed to President Yuan and the Army. I expect we’ll need an escort. Hobart suggested his son,’ he added drily. ‘But it doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen.’

  ‘Beast!’ Lydia rapped his elbow with the backs of her knuckles as he returned to the chair arm at her side. ‘Her poor parents – what a horrible thing! And poor Sir Grant! One would think, though,’ she added reflectively, ‘that if Richard Hobart had proposed to Miss Eddington in his cups, and truly couldn’t stick going through with it, he could simply have fled the country.’

  ‘That depends on what he was drinking. If he was down in the Chinese city, it could have been anything.’

  Lydia winced, but nodded sadly. Despite the elfin features and her air, in company, of having never done anything in her life but attend dress fittings and Royal Flower Shows, Lydia had trained as a physician at a charity clinic in Whitechapel and had had ample occasion to observe the effect on human behavior of alcohol. She started to ask something else, glanced at Karlebach, and closed her mouth again; Asher guessed her question echoed his own thought.

  What, if anything, did Ysidro see?
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br />   Evidently Karlebach guessed this as well. For later, when Asher walked him down the hall to his own small room, the old man brought up the subject of the vampire again. ‘Trust not what he tells you, Jamie,’ he rumbled in his thick bass. ‘This vampire seeks to use you for the purposes of the Undead. Deception and seduction is how they hunt. You well know how they can manipulate the human mind to see things as they wish you to see them.’

  It was late – the clock had struck midnight when Asher had first come into the parlor – and even Rue Meiji, one of the main streets of the Legation Quarter that lay below the windows of Asher’s suite, had gone quiet. In the bright glare of the electric lamps, the corridor had the queer, dead look of such places very late at night; doubly disturbing, Asher had found, since he had learned what walked the dark hours.

  ‘When first you spoke to me of this Spanish vampire of yours,’ Karlebach went on, ‘I feared for you, my son. I could see that he had placed you under the spell of the vampire mind: the spell whose first effect is to make the victim believe that he is not under a spell. Fear this. Fear him.’

  ‘I do,’ said Asher, quite truthfully.

  ‘It is unfortunate that your friend Hobart will now be taken up with this shocking business. Quite aside from his personal agony, of course – but the truth is that we could have done with one who could help us, here in the Legations.’ The old professor opened the door to his room, which was freezing cold. Asher pushed him into a chair, fetched every shawl he could find for him, and made up the fire, despite Karlebach’s somewhat mendacious protests that there was no need to bother about him . . .

  No matter how tough the old scholar was, he was still ninety – not an age at which a man should be obliged to journey to China to hunt monsters. Yet Karlebach, when he had turned up – to Asher’s shock – in Oxford in September, had insisted, and would not be left behind.

  As Asher set a pan of water on the hob to heat for the old-fashioned stone water-bottle, Karlebach continued, ‘I could speak to mine own ambassador about an escort, but they will want to know why. And I fear who they might tell, if indeed we find these creatures here.’