Prisoner of Midnight Read online

  She paused again, to listen, and the golden-haired girl whom Lydia recognized from the Third Class gangway broke from the woman with her – raw-boned and powerful as a farm-horse with a face like stone – and squirmed her way to Ossolinska. In German the girl said, ‘It is true, Madame. Valentyn is rough in his ways but he loved her dearly. When they brought her body in he wept, as I have never seen a man weep …’

  ‘Ariane!’ snapped the hard-faced woman, and pushed through to grab the girl’s arm. ‘Get away from them! Slavs! Heretics!’

  Pan Marek flushed – evidently he recognized at least the words for ‘Slav’ and ‘heretic’ – and shouted, gesturing toward another group: ‘Oni sa heretykami …’

  A gray-haired woman in another group thrust forward and yelled, ‘Who you call heretic, Nemecky?’

  ‘What else do you call those who insult the Mother of God? Whose priests are whoremasters—’

  ‘Please!’ An old man whose long white beard nearly hid the Greek cross around his neck limped from among the Russians as more people started to shout. ‘This is not the time …’

  ‘Indeed is not!’ A heavy-shouldered, dark-faced man pushed up beside him. He was missing an eye and several fingers of his right hand: indeed, of the dozen men in the dining salon, few were of military age. Of those few, only a handful were without recent injuries.

  In rough German, the one-eyed man went on, ‘We know what kill this girl. We all know.’ He looked around him fiercely, met old Pan Marek’s eye, then Ossolinska’s, then swept his gaze to all the crowd around.

  ‘It is vampire. There is vampire, hiding somewhere on this ship.’

  ‘Gospodin Vodusek,’ pleaded the priest.

  ‘We all know signs, Father Kirn,’ said the man Vodusek. ‘We all know, could be nothing else. Drinker of innocent blood! Murderer of children! Must be found! Must be destroyed.’

  The men crowded closer. Lydia heard the word passed back among them: Upír. Volkodlak … And among the little crowd of Bosnian Muslims, Ghawl …

  ‘That’s cock,’ snapped the scar-faced blond man Lydia had glimpsed in the glare of the waiting-room lights the night before last. Hearing him speak to his friends outside the waiting shed in German, she’d thought that he must be one of the Sudetendeutsche from Western Bohemia. ‘And you’re an imbecile, Vodusek, if you believe it! It is superstition that the bosses have used for centuries, to get us to sit down and shut up and let them do our thinking for us.’

  Vodusek shouted Nemecky – German – and something else which Lydia guessed wasn’t complimentary. The German swung around on him and shouted back – in Slovene – then turned again to the gathering, muttering crowd.

  ‘Are you all children?’ he demanded. ‘A man doesn’t need to drink blood and sleep in a coffin to do evil—’

  Someone had translated this to old Pan Marek, who seized the German’s shoulder and spun him around; only the scar-faced man’s lightning reflexes blocked a punch that would have stunned a horse. Lydia backed hastily out of the way of the escalating fight, but the German didn’t return the blow. He stepped back, pale eyes blazing as he glared from the furious grandfather to the glowering vampire hunter to the confused, frightened, angry faces of the people now pressing close around them. He looked as if he might shout something else at them, then shook his head like a dog trying to clear nettles from its ears, and pushed away through them and out of the dining room.

  Pan Marek growled something, and his daughter-in-law explained – through Ossolinska – to Tania, ‘The man is a Communist, an atheist. No one who had seen poor Pavlina’s body could believe that it was anything but a vampire who did this terrible thing!’

  ‘But we must not go saying it is one of us.’ The old priest addressed Lydia and the princess in halting German. ‘That way leads into shadow indeed.’

  ‘But how are we to explain it to an American?’ pleaded Pani Marek, through the impassive Ossolinska. ‘Americans have no belief! No God! They do not see what we see, what we know!’

  ‘Please understand,’ went on the priest, drawing closer to Lydia and the princess as the room dissolved into shouting and gesticulation again around them. ‘These people are all frightened, terribly frightened. They flee to new land of which they know nothing. All have come through nightmare. None who have not been there can know.’

  He turned to the haggard-faced Pani Marek and addressed her, haltingly, in Russian. She nodded, and when her gruff old father snapped at him – Lydia caught the words Chrystus and heretykami – heretic – and guessed the old enmity between Catholic and Orthodox was involved – she shook her head, pleading. When the priest made the sign of blessing – using three fingers in the Orthodox fashion – the old Pole made an insulting flick of his hand with two fingers, for the Catholic custom, and walked away.

  The old priest turned back to Lydia and the princess. ‘You are here from First Class, maybe? Friends of our good Tania—’ he smiled at the servant – ‘who has brought such happiness to our poor little ones here? If you can – if there is any way such can be done – I beg of you, speak to someone of ship’s company. Convince them poor Valentyn would not have harm this girl. I think they seek above all to stop panic: they arrest someone, anyone, and say, “So! Problem is solved.” But this is unjust. And problem is not solved.’

  He sank his voice – mellow, beautiful, and deep despite his years and his emaciated appearance. ‘It is volkodlak that has done this terrible thing. It is somewhere on this ship. And it will strike again.’

  SEVEN

  Old Father Kirn and Pani Marek showed Lydia and Princess Natalia where Pavlina Jancu’s body had been found, at the bottom of a staircase that led up to the Second Class accommodations on D deck. A couple of stewards had found it, the woman told them, around three in the morning. ‘She was still warm,’ she whispered, words which Ossolinska translated softly, visibly upset now as she had not been in the dining saloon when the whole matter had been one of words only.

  Lydia opened her mouth to remark that bodies frequently retained perceptible heat for three or four hours after death – more perceptible, indeed, to men whose hands were cold from the chill of the corridors – but closed it again. It was not something this woman needed to hear. Instead she looked up and down the corridor – evidently the main communications passage for crew and service staff between bow and stern – and closely scrutinized the metal steps, particularly where they met the wall. Like everything else on the City of Gold, they’d been thoroughly swabbed down earlier that morning (including the cranny beside the wall, drat their scrupulous care!). She stepped aside as three men came down from above. One of them touched his hat to the little group, asked, ‘Can I help you?’ in flat American English and the tone of one who really means, Get along, now, nothing to see here …

  Lydia propped her glasses more firmly on her nose and replied, ‘Maybe. This is the spot where that poor girl was found, wasn’t it?’

  The crewman – a cabin steward, by the look of his uniform – looked nonplussed, and a little impatient (damn sensation-seeking women). ‘I don’t know much about—’ he began, but one of the men with him, with rather more braid on his uniform sleeves, stepped politely forward and bowed to the princess, then to Lydia.

  ‘It is, M’am, yes,’ he said to Her Highness. ‘But the man who did it’s been arrested, and is under restraint. A crime of passion, we understand.’

  Natalia opened her mouth to object, and Lydia touched her sleeve warningly. ‘Do you happen to know if there was any blood found at the scene? We’ve had a little discussion among the passengers,’ she added, with a deprecating smile, ‘about how it could have been done. I mean, this is a rather public place, isn’t it? Even at three in the morning? Mightn’t she have been killed somewhere else, and brought here?’

  The young officer looked vexed at the idea that the crime was a subject for ‘discussion among the passengers’, and his eyes flickered to the two obvious Third Class peasants included in the group. But he an
swered politely, ‘No, so far as I know, there was no blood anywhere, though of course the whole area was swabbed down immediately, M’am. As for being killed someplace else –’ he frowned slightly, looking more human – ‘it wouldn’t be that hard to bring her here. This whole corridor’s pretty quiet at that hour, in the middle of the graveyard shift. But why would anybody do that? If somebody wants to get rid of somebody on board a ship, you’d dump the body overside, if you were gonna go carrying it around. And the Third Class gangplank door is just down the hall there. It’s not that hard to open.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Lydia widened her eyes as if enlightened by these words. ‘You’re quite right. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘My pleasure, M’am. Princess,’ he added, touching his cap with slight bows to both her and Natalia. The crewmen walked away, and Pani Marek, and Father Kirn, looked at Lydia with uncomprehending inquiry in their faces.

  ‘You did not speak to this man of Valentyn?’ asked the priest hesitantly.

  Lydia shook her head. ‘They’re going to be like that awful German—’

  ‘Heller,’ confirmed Father Kirn, his lined face grim and sad. ‘A Communist, here on the ship with false papers. A thug, wanted in his own country for murdering a man.’

  ‘And a man who believes himself to be right,’ said Lydia. ‘Just as the captain, and the ship’s officers, and everyone will believe themselves to be right, if we start pestering about a vampire, without proof in hand. I think we shall be able to get proof – to get evidence – much more easily, if they’re not looking at us and thinking, “Hmph. Silly superstitious women”.’

  Against Ossolinska’s soft-voiced translation for the benefit of the woman, the priest nodded and said, ‘You are wise, Gnä’ Frau.’

  ‘Well, I try to be.’ Lydia removed her glasses and tucked them out of sight. ‘Only sometimes it’s not easy, to know what’s best to do.’

  And if Simon did this, she thought, shivering a little as she and the princess ascended the steps towards the more rarefied regions above, does that mean he’s managed to escape from his prison, wherever it is? That he’s wandering at large around the ship? And, why didn’t he dump that poor girl’s body over the side, if the Third Class gangplank door is just down the corridor? At three in the morning it would have been easy.

  She glanced back at the foot of the stair, even now by daylight augmented with the overhead electrical glare.

  Has he gone mad? She shivered, not only with fear, but with pity. From pain, from overexposure to silver – I really must make more of a study of vampire physiology, though if Simon has gone mad how would I get my information? – or from some cause I don’t know?

  The princess was saying something to her but Lydia barely heard, struggling with the appalling prospect of hunting for a deranged vampire through the dark bowels of engine-room, bilges, storage-holds where light never came.

  Or did his kidnapper bring him the girl and then … What? Dump her where she’d be easily found, advertising to everybody on board – or everybody in Third Class anyway – that there’s a vampire on the ship?

  That made no sense, either.

  It made less sense when Lydia, escaping from Her Illustrious Highness and the disapproving Mademoiselle Ossolinska – who seemed to share the German thug Heller’s opinion about belief in vampires but had the good sense not to air this opinion to her employer – obtained permission to see Pavlina Jancu’s body. The ship’s surgeon, Dr Liggatt, accompanied her, having (Lydia was surprised and gratified to learn) read two of her articles on pituitary gland function, written in those halcyon days before the War. He didn’t seem to find it odd that she would want to see the victim of an unexplained death.

  ‘For I’m at a loss, M’am,’ he said, in his soft Virginia drawl, ‘to account for this poor girl’s murder – and murder it was. Not a slash, but two short cuts in the carotid artery below the left ear, and her body near drained of blood.’

  This was true. The cuts were deep and mangled-looking, as if the flesh had been pinched or squeezed, and her mouth was open a little: she had died gasping for breath. Her eyes were shut, her hair, dark maize-gold, was still braided beneath a headscarf of red and white. Her nails, when Lydia turned her hands over, were unbroken.

  No struggle.

  ‘Where did the blood go?’ Lydia pulled her coat more tightly around her. As Pan Marek had said, they had placed Pavlina’s body in one of the refrigerated meat lockers on D deck, deep in the complex of kitchens, pantries, vegetable rooms and sculleries that served both First and Second Class. The sides of beef, gutted carcasses of lambs and pigs, row after row of suspended chickens, ducks, pheasants, had all been doubled up into some other of the meat rooms. The empty hooks and vacant slabs gave the place the look of a torture chamber.

  Lydia couldn’t keep herself from wondering – though she knew not to ask – whether the American Shipping Line would replace the stone slab on which the girl’s body lay, before the next voyage. She herself had never been squeamish, and two and a half years at the Front had cured her of any revulsion at things like picking maggots out of her food, but she suspected that travelers like Mrs Tilcott would object if they knew that the slab on which the roast lamb served up in the First Class dining room had been used as a morgue table.

  ‘Now that’s what I can’t understand, M’am.’ Liggatt scratched his head. ‘I’ve asked just about every member of this crew, and there wasn’t a drop found at the scene, bar the little bit you see there, on the collar of her dress. Nor anywhere else on the ship, far as I’ve heard. For certain she wasn’t killed where she was found. There’s crew quarters up and down that corridor and she’s got to have cried out.’

  Not if a vampire killed her. Lydia recalled the warm, soft crush of a hunting vampire’s power over the mind of the victim: a delicious sleepiness that, if not fought consciously and desperately, yielded everything.

  But she only said, ‘It certainly is odd.’

  The electrical refrigeration chilled her to the bone, even through her stout (and decidedly Second Class) coat. Emerging from the locker, she rubbed her hands as she climbed to the promenade deck. It was good to be in the fresh air, bitter though it was under a threatening sky. The sight of her fellow passengers, stylish in walking suits and firmly pinned-down hats, taking the air or sitting in their deck chairs (now where did Aunt Louise say ours were?) made her realize that it was long past lunchtime.

  Miranda would be asking for her.

  She was halfway to her cabin when a steward, hurrying along the promenade, stopped and said, ‘Mrs Asher! I was just coming from your stateroom. This came for you just now.’

  From his pocket he drew a small beige envelope, stamped with a little picture of the City of Gold.

  ‘And I must say, I’m a bit surprised we were still in wireless range of Brest.’

  Lydia tipped the man, had the envelope open before she even reached her stateroom. (And thank God he didn’t leave it in the stateroom for Aunt Louise to open.)

  It was from Jamie.

  Best Beloved nothing to forgive you are always the treasure of my heart stop the author’s name is Aloysius Bibgnum stop love you always James

  It was the code they used for short words and names, and she carried the rules in her head.

  The first name was always window-dressing, and it needed only moments to decipher the second.

  Cochran.

  Now what?

  James Asher leaned back on the hard bench of what had been a second-class car of the Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest, and watched the snaggle of sidings, sheds, allotments and stacks of disused railway ties peter out as the train steamed out of Rennes. On either side of him, jammed elbow-to-elbow, Cameron Highlanders smoked Woodbines until the air was blue, and traded hungover grumbles as they headed back to the Front. Noon sun glinted through naked trees, clumps of mistletoe caught in their branches like immense birds’ nests.

  Two women in black walked along the road below the embankment of the track
s.

  There were a lot of women in black in France these days. In England, Asher had heard, as in Germany, women were discouraged from mourning the loss of husbands, brothers, sweethearts and sons, ‘lest civilian morale be eroded’ by the sheer and mounting numbers of women wearing black. Meaning, he guessed, ‘lest people start questioning the war’.

  If the train wasn’t side-tracked in favor of more urgently required supplies, they should be in Paris by dark.

  Spenser Cochran. Asher thumbed mentally through that morning’s conversation – it already felt like days ago – with Cyril Britten at the embassy. He’d known the deceptively frail-looking old man back when first he’d worked for the Department, and knew he would have everything at his fingertips: which Americans owned sufficient stock in Barclay’s Bank and the Banque d’Algerie – and the half-dozen other financial institutions among which Don Simon Ysidro held funds under his various names – to make things difficult for the vampire.

  ‘Well, we keep an eye on Cochran, of course,’ the elderly clerk had said, sipping the tea (or what was supposed to be tea) that a quiet-footed woman had brought up to his fusty attic cubicle. ‘Like all these rich Americans he owns factories in Germany and Russia, so we do like to be sure whose side he’s really on.’

  ‘And whose side is he really on?’ Asher had inquired, and Britten had emitted a creaky chuckle. Below them, the elegant eighteenth-century hôtel had been just stirring to life, colder than ever with the shortages of fuel. Coming up the fourth flight of stairs to these upper offices, Asher had been struck by the silence. Nearly all the younger clerks were gone.

  ‘Mostly his own.’ Britten frowned into middle distance, and pushed a plate of stale biscuits in Asher’s direction. A large gray cat with white mittens emerged briefly from around a stack of file boxes, hissed gently at Asher, and withdrew. Despite the cold, the whole attic smelled of cats.