Those Who Hunt the Night: A James Asher Novel Read online

  “Certainly, Professor Asher.” She folded her gloved hands primly in her rose twill lap and widened her eyes at him sweetly. “And what would you like me to look up in the afternoon?”

  He laughed ruefully. “Gas company records for private residences that show abnormally high consumption? I’d like to get at banking records, but that means pulling F.O. or Yard credentials, and that might get back to Ysidro. Leave whatever notes you make in the message-drop at the Museum—I’ll keep them in a locker at Euston rather than at my rooms overnight. At the moment, I’d rather Ysidro and his friends have no idea the way my research is tending. And, Lydia—let me know if you run across any evidence that someone else is following the same trails.”

  “The killer, you mean.” By her voice she’d already thought of it; he nodded. “Will you kill them, then?”

  Something in her tone brought his eyes back to her face; its look of regret surprised him. She shook her head, dismissing her reservations. “It’s just that I’d like the chance to examine one of them medically.”

  The concern was so typical of Lydia that Asher nearly laughed. “Yes,” he said, and then the lightness faded from his face and his soul. “I’ll have to for a number of reasons,not the least of which is that if I don’t catch the killer, sooner or later they’re going to suspect me of killing them anyway, and using the original murders to mask whatever I may do. They have to be destroyed, Lydia,” he went on quietly. “But if—and when—it comes to that, I’d better get them all, because God help both of us if even one survives.”

  Asher got off the train at Reading, taking a slow local to Baling and then the Underground the long way round, through Victoria and the City, and thence back to Euston Station, to avoid being anywhere near Paddington when Lydia debarked. It was now fully dark. Staring through the rattling windows at the high brick walls and the occasional flickering reflection of gaslight where the Underground ran through cuts rather than tunnels, he wondered whether the vampires ever took the Underground, ever hunted its third-class carriages. Could they use its passages as boltholes, emergency hiding places safe from the sun? How much sun was fatal to that white, fragile flesh?

  Not a great deal, he thought, crossing the platform and ascending the steps that led upward to the open square of night outside. Even with its door open, the crypt in Highgate wouldn’t be brightly lighted, looking as it did into the gloom of the narrow avenue of tombs.

  As he reached the flagway, he felt a pang of uneasiness for Lydia, disembarking by herself at Paddington. Not that she wasn’t perfectly capable of looking out for herself in the crowd of a railway station, where she would undoubtedly have six or seven handsome young men fighting to carry her luggage, but his brush with Ysidro had frightened him.

  How much were the vampires capable of knowing or guessing about those who began to piece together their trails? Perhaps Lydia was right—perhaps the warning wasonly intended to keep him away. There must be very few relatives and friends of victims who looked past the comfort of the “logical explanation,” particularly, as Ysidro had pointed out, if there was no second set of suspicious circumstances to link it with. And yet …

  He reminded himself firmly, as he joined the crowding throng on Euston Road, that Ysidro would have no way of knowing that he had gone up to Oxford and returned twice that day, instead of once. He might have guessed …

  Asher shook his head firmly. He was exhausted past the point, he was beginning to suspect, of rational thought. He’d been without unbroken sleep for over thirty-six hours; he was starting at shadows. That queer prickling on the back of his neck was nerves, he told himself, not the instincts of years of the secret life whispering to him. His uneasiness was simply the result of knowing he might be watched, rather than a certainty that he was.

  He slowed his steps. Casually, he scanned the hurrying line of traffic, the crowds jostling along in the glare of the gaslights—clerks and shopgirls bustling toward the Underground to catch the next train to whatever dreary suburb they called home, laborers eager for a cheap dinner of bubble and squeak and a few beers at the local pub. The gaslight was deceptive, making all faces queer, but he could see no sign of any whiter and more still than the rest.

  Why, then, he wondered, did he have the growing conviction of missing something, the sensation of a blind spot somewhere in his mind?

  At the corner, he crossed Gower Street, walking down its western side, casually scanning the stream of traffic passing before the long line of Georgian shops. There were a number of motorbuses and lorries, an omnibus and motorized cabs, and horse trams with gaudy advertising posters on their sides, but for the most part it was a crowding mêlée of horses and high wheels—delivery vans drawnby hairy-footed nags, open Victoria carriages, the closed broughams favored by doctors, and high-topped hansom cabs. He was very tired and his vision blurred; the glare of streetlight and shadow made it all the worse, but it would have to be risked. The traffic was thick and therefore not moving fast, except where an occasional cabby lashed his horse into a dash for a momentary hole. Well, there was always that chance …

  Without warning, as he came opposite the turning of Little Museum Street that led to Prince of Wales Colonnade, Asher stepped sideways off the curb and plunged into the thick of the mêlée. With a shrill neigh, a cab horse pulled sideways nearly on top of him. Hooters and curses in exotic dialect—What was a Yorkshireman doing driving a cab in London? he wondered—pursued him across the road. The macadam was wet and slippery with horse dung; he ducked and wove between shifting masses of flesh, wood, and iron, and on the opposite side turned suddenly, looking back at the way he had come.

  A costermonger’s horse in the midst of the road flung up its head and swerved; a motorcab’s brakes screeched. Asher wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw a shadow flit through the glare of the electric headlamps.

  Good, he thought, and turned down Little Museum Street, still panting from his exertions. Pit your immortality against that one, my haemophagic friend.

  At Prince of Wales Colonnade he turned up the gas, leaving the window curtains open. He shed coat, bowler, scarf, and cravat and opened the valise he’d brought down from Oxford strapped to the narrow carrier of the motorcycle, now safely bestowed in a shed in the yard—half a dozen clean shirts, a change of clothing, clean collars, shaving tackle, and books. Whatever else he would need of the arcane paraphernalia of vampire-hunters, he supposed, could be purchased in London, and his ill-regulated imaginationmomentarily conjured a small shop in some dark street specializing in silver bullets, hawthorn stakes, and garlic. He grinned. With HARKER AND VAN HELSING painted above the door, presumably. Keeping himself in the line of sight of the window, he turned toward the dresser, frowned, and looked around as if something he had meant to bring were missing from its chipped marble top, then strode impatiently from the room.

  He descended two flights of curving stairs at a silent run, and another to the basement. His landlady looked up, startled, as he passed the kitchen door, but he was already out in the tiny, sunken well of the areaway, standing on the narrow twist of moss-flecked stone steps to raise his eye level just above that of the pavement of the alley behind the house.

  Evidently taken in by his feigned exit, the dark shape in the alley was still watching his lighted window. It stood motionless, nearly invisible in the dense gloom between the tall rows of houses; even so, he could make out the almost luminous whiteness of an unhuman face raised toward the light above. For a moment he kept his eyes on that dark form, scarcely daring to breathe, remembering the quickness of vampire hearing. Then, as if he had blinked, the figure was gone.

  Thirty minutes later he had unpacked and put away the last of his things, changed clothes, and shaved. Though this refreshed him slightly, he still ached for sleep, feeling half-tempted to leave Ysidro to wait in his damp alley, if that was what he wanted to do, while he went to bed. But in that case, he was certain, the vampire would simply break in, Don Simon having apparently never heard that vampir
es could not enter any new place save at the bidding of one of its inhabitants.

  On the other hand, Asher thought as he stepped fromthe lighted doorway of Number Six and strolled slowly up the pavement through the foggy darkness, what place in London could be called new? Six Prince of Wales Colonnade had obviously been standing since the latter days of George IV’s reign; his own house in Oxford since Anne’s. Don Simon Ysidro had been quietly killing in the streets of London since long before either place was built.

  It crossed his mind to wonder about that ancient London—a thick gaggle of half-timbered houses, tiny churches, old stone monasteries near the river, and a dozen conflicting legal jurisdictions whose officers could not cross the street to apprehend criminals—a London whose jammed houses spilled across the bridge onto Southwark, with its cheap theaters where Shakespeare was learning his trade as an actor and cobbler-up of plays, and taverns where men who sailed with Francis Drake could be found drinking to the health of the red-haired queen …

  “We cannot continue to meet this way,” purred a soft, familiar voice beside him. “People will begin to talk.”

  Asher swung quickly around, cursing his momentary abstraction of mind. He was tired, true, but ordinarily he was more aware of someone that close to him.

  Ysidro had fed; his face, though still pale, had lost the cold gleam that had caught Asher’s attention in the gloom of the alley. His black cloak half concealed sable evening dress; his stiff white shirt front was of silk, and several shades paler, now, than the skin tailored so delicately over his cheekbones. As always, he was bare-headed, the high horns of his forehead gleaming faintly as they passed beneath the lamps of the houses round the square. Pearl-gray gloves clasped the crystal head of a slender ebony stick.

  “I had a good mind to let you wait in that alley,” Asher retorted. “You should know for yourself I’ll have nothing to report except that, as you’ve seen, I’ve taken roomshere.” He nodded back toward Number Six, indistinguishable from the other houses of the terrace, its glowing windows casting soft spangles of light on the trees of the narrow square across the street. “Now that we’ve spoken, I have every intention of going back to them and getting some sleep.”

  “Alley?” The vampire tilted his head a little, a gesture somehow reminiscent of a mantis.

  “You didn’t follow me as soon as it grew dark? Watch me from the alley while I was unpacking?”

  Ysidro hesitated for a long moment, sifting through possible replies, picking and choosing what it was best to admit. Exasperated, Asher stopped upon the pavement and turned to face him. “Look. You don’t trust me, I know, and I’d certainly be a fool to trust you. But it’s you who’s in danger, not me, and unless you give me more information—unless you stop this endless game of ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with anything I want to know—I won’t be able to help you.”

  “Is helping us your object?” The vampire tipped his head to one side, looking up the handspan of difference in their heights. There was no hint of sarcasm in his tone—he asked as if truly interested in the answer.

  “No,” said Asher bluntly. “But neither is killing you—not at the moment. You’ve made the stake pretty high for me. So be it. I’ve taken what precautions I can to keep Lydia safe, as you’ve probably guessed, and, believe me, it wasn’t easy to come up with answers to her questions about why she had to leave Oxford. But I can’t do anything until you’re willing to answer some questions so I’ll have something to work on.”

  “Very well.” The vampire studied him for the count of several breaths, leisurely as if this quiet Bloomsbury square were a private room and entirely at his convenience.“I will meet you here tomorrow at this time, and we shall visit, as you say, the scene of the crime. As for what you saw in the alley…” His small silence lay in the conversation like a floating spot of light upon water, too deliberate to be called a hesitation; nothing in his face changed to indicate the flow of his thoughts. “That was not me.”

  FIVE

  “OH, LORD, YES,” said the woman whom the shop sign identified as Minette as clearly as her accent indicated that the name had probably originally been Minnie. “That hair! A truer blonde could never have worn that vivid a gold—turn her yellow as cheese, it would. But it just picked up the green in her eyes. My gran used to tell me folk with that dark rim ’round the iris had the second sight.”

  She regarded Asher with eyes that were enormous, the most delicate shade of clear crystal blue and, though without any evidence of second sight whatsoever, clearly sharp with business acumen. Though he had shut the shop door behind him, Asher could still hear the din of traffic in Great Marlborough Street—the clatter of hooves, the rattle of iron tires on granite paving blocks, and the yelling of a costermonger on the corner—striving against the rhythmic clatter of sewing machines from upstairs.

  He tugged down the very slightly tinted spectacles he wore balanced on the end of his nose—spectacles whose glass was virtually plain but which he kept as a prop toindicate harmless ineffectuality—and looked at her over their tops. “And did she tell you she was an actress?”

  Minette, perched on a stool behind the white-painted counter, cocked her head a little, black curls falling in a tempting bunch, like grapes, on the ruffled ecru of her collar lace. “Wasn’t she, then?” There was no surprise in her voice—rather, the curiosity of one whose suspicions are about to be confirmed.

  Asher made his mouth smaller under his thick brown mustache and sighed audibly. But he held off committing himself until the dressmaker added, “You know, I thought there was something a bit rum about it. I know actresses at the Empire don’t get up and about ’til evening and are on ’til all hours, but they do get days off, you know. I always figured she spent them with one of her fancy men, and that was why she always insisted on coming in the evenings—between houses, she said. I will say for her she always did make it worth my while, which comes in handy in the off season when all the nobs are out of town.”

  “Fancy men,” Asher reiterated, with another small sigh, and produced a notebook in which he made a brief entry. The blue eyes followed the movement, then flicked back to his face.

  “You a ’tec?”

  “Certainly not,” he replied primly. “I am, in fact, a solicitor for a Mr. Gobey, whose son was—or is—a—er—friend of Miss Harshaw’s—or Miss Branhame’s, as she called herself to you. Did Mr. Gobey—Mr. Thomas Gobey—at any time buy Miss Lotta Harshaw anything here? Or pay her bills for her?”

  Thomas Gobey’s had been among the freshest-looking of the cards of invitation found in Lotta’s reticule; it was better than even odds that, even if he were dead by now, the dressmaker hadn’t heard of it. As it transpired, Gobey had, two years ago, paid seventy-five pounds to Minette LaTour for a gown of russet silk mull with a fur-trimmed jacket to match, ordered and fitted, like everything else Lotta had purchased there, in the evening.

  Discreetly peering down over Mlle. Minette’s shoulder as she turned the ledger pages, Asher noted the names of other men who had paid Lotta’s bills, on those frequent occasions on which she did not pay them herself. Most were familiar, names found on cards and stationery in her rooms; poor Bertie Westmoreland had disbursed, at a quick estimate, several hundred pounds to buy his murderess frocks and hats and an opera cloak of amber cut velvet beaded with jet.

  Six months ago, he was interested to note, Lotta had purchased an Alice-blue “sailor hat”—Lydia had one, and it was nothing Asher had ever seen any sailor wear in his life—with ostrich plumes, which had been paid for by Valentin Calvaire, at an address in the Bayswater Road.

  He shut his notebook with a snap. “The problem, my dear Mademoiselle La Tour, is this. Young Mr. Gobey has been missing since the beginning of the week. Upon making inquiries, his family learned that Miss Harshaw—who is not, in fact, an actress—has also disappeared. At the moment we are simply making routine inquiries to get in touch with them—searching out possible friends or people who might know where they ha
ve gone. Did Miss Harshaw ever come here with female friends?”

  “Oh, Lor’ bless you, sir, they all do, don’t they? It’s half the fun of fittings. She came in once or twice with Mrs. Wren—the lady who introduced her to us, and a customer of long standing, poor woman. In fact it was because I am willing to oblige and do fittings at night by gaslight—for a bit extra, which she was always willing to pay up, like the true lady she is…”

  “Do you have an address for Mrs. Wren?” Asher inquired, flipping open his notebook again.

  The dressmaker shook her head, her black curls bouncing. She was a young woman—just under thirty, Asher guessed—and still building her clientele. The shop, though narrow and in a not quite fashionable street, was brightly painted in white and primrose, which went a long way toward relieving the dinginess of its solitary window. It took a wealthy and established modiste indeed to live comfortably and pay seamstresses and headers during the off season when fashionable society deserted the West End for Brighton or the country—by August, Minette would probably have agreed to do fittings at midnight just to stay working.

  “Now, that I don’t, for she’ll pay up in cash. In any case, I doubt they’re really friends. Goodness knows how they met in the first place, for a blind man could see Mrs. Wren wasn’t her sort of woman at all—not that it’s Mrs. Wren’s real name, I’ll wager, either. She has a drunkard of a husband, who won’t let her out of the house—she has to slip out when he’s gone to his club to buy herself so much as a new petticoat. I suggest you look up her other friend, Miss Celestine du Bois, though if you was to ask me…”She gave him a saucy wink. “ … Miss du Bois is about as French as I am.”

  Though thoroughly tickled and amused, Asher managed to look frostily disapproving of the whole sordid business as he stalked out of Mlle. La Tour’s.