COMMERCIAL STREET BLUES

At Commercial Street Police Station, Lestrade introduced her to Frederick Abberline. At the sufferance of Assistant Commissioner Dr Robert Anderson and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, Inspector Abberline had charge of the continuing investigation. Having pursued the Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman cases with his customary tenacity but without notable results, the warm detective was now saddled with Lulu Sch?n, and any yet to come.

'If I can help in any way,' Genevieve offered.

'Listen to her, Fred,' Lestrade said, 'she's wise to the ways.'

Abberline, obviously unimpressed, knew it was politic to be polite. Like Genevieve, he could not see why Lestrade wanted her dogging the case.

'Think of her as an expert,' Lestrade said. 'She knows vampires. And this case comes down to vampires.'

The inspector waved the offer aside, but one of the several sergeants in the room  -  William Thick, whom they called 'Johnny Upright'  -  nodded agreement. He had interviewed Genevieve after the first murder, and seemed as fair and smart as his reputation would have him, even if his taste in suits did run to lamentable checks.

'Silver Knife is definitely a vampire-slayer,' Thick put in. 'Not some rip-merchant killing to cover theft.'

'We don't know that,' Abberline snapped, 'and I don't want to read it in the Police Gazette.'

Thick kept quiet, satisfied that he was right. In their interview, the sergeant admitted his personal belief was that Silver Knife imagined he had been wronged  -  or, more likely, actually had been wronged  -  by Vlad Tepes's get. Genevieve, expert enough to know the capabilities of her kind, agreed, but knew the description fit so many in London that it would be fruitless to extrapolate a list of suspects from the theory.

'I believe Sergeant Thick is right,' she told the policemen.

Lestrade assented, but Abberline turned away to give an order to his own pet sergeant, George Godley. Genevieve smiled at Thick and saw him shiver. Like most of the warm, he knew even less about bloodline, about the infinite varieties and gradations of vampire, than the Prince Consort's glut of new-borns. Thick looked at her and saw a vampire... just like the bloodsucker who had turned his daughter, violated his wife, taken his promotion, killed his friend. She didn't know his history but supposed his theory formed by personal experience, that he guessed the murderer's motive because he could understand it.

Abberline had spent the day interrogating the constables who were first at the scene of the murder, then going over the ground himself. He had not immediately discovered anything of any relevance and was even holding off on committing to a statement that Sch?n was indeed another victim of the so-called Whitechapel Murderer. On the short walk from Toynbee Hall, they had heard newsboys shouting about Silver Knife; but the official flannel was that only Chapman and Nichols were demonstrably dead by the same hand. Various other unsolved cases  -  Sch?n now joining Tabram, Smith and sundry others  -  linked in the press could conceivably be entirely separate crimes. Silver Knife hardly held the patent on homicide, even in the immediate locality.

Lestrade and Abberline went off to have a huddle. Abberline  -  without realising it?  -  elaborately came up with other things to do with his hands whenever the possibility of pressing flesh with a vampire was raised. He lit a pipe and listened as Lestrade ticked off points on his fingers. A jurisdictional dispute was in the offing between Abberline, head of H Division CID, and Lestrade. The Scotland Yard interloper was assumed to be one of Dr Anderson's spies, dispatched by Swanson to check up on the detectives in the field, ready to swoop in whenever glory was to be claimed but anonymous if results were lacking. Anderson, Swanson and Lestrade were the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Englishman of the music hall stories, and had been pictured as such by Weedon Grossmith in Punch, traipsing over a murder site and obliterating clues to the annoyance of a local copper who somewhat resembled Fred Abberline. Genevieve wondered if she, hardly the epitome of the French girl from the same stories, fitted into the scheme. Did Lestrade intend her for a lever?

She looked about the already busy reception room. The doors pushed open constantly, admitting foggy draughts, and banged shut. Outside were several groups of interested parties. A Salvation Army band, flying the Cross of St George, supported a Christian Crusade preacher who called down God's Justice on vampirekind, upholding Silver Knife as a true instrument of the Will of Christ. The Speakers' Corner Torquemada was heckled by a few professional insurrectionists, ragged-trousered longhairs of various socialist or Republican stripes, and ridiculed by a knot of painted vampire women, who offered expensive kisses and a quick turning. Many new-borns paid to become some street tart's get, purchasing immortality for as little as a shilling.

'Who's the reverend gentleman?' Genevieve asked Thick.

The sergeant glanced out at the mob and groaned. 'A bloody nuisance, Miss. Name of John Jago, so he says.'

The Jago was a notorious slum at the upper end of Brick Lane, a criminal jungle of tiny courts and overpopulated rooms. It was undoubtedly the worst rookery in the East End.

'Any rate, that's where he comes from. He talks up an inferno, makes them all feel righteous and proper about shoving a stake through some trollop. He's been in and out of here all year for fire-breathing. And drunk and disorderly, with the odd common assault tossed in.'

Jago was a wild-eyed fanatic but some of the crowd listened to him. A few years ago, he would have been preaching against the Jews, or Fenians, or the Heathen Chinee. Now, it was vampires.

'Fire and the stake,' Jago cried. 'The unclean leeches, the cast-outs of Hell, the blood-bloated filth. All must perish by fire and the stake. All must be purified.'

The preacher had a few men soliciting donations in caps. They were rough-looking enough to blur the line between extortion and collection.

'He's not short of a few pennies,' Thick commented.

'Enough to get his bread-knife silver-plated?'

Thick had already thought of that. 'Five Christian Crusaders claim he was preaching his little heart out to them just when Polly Nichols was being gutted. Same for Annie Chapman. And last night's too, I'll lay odds.'

'Strange hours for a sermon?'

'Between two and three in the morning, and five and six for the second job,' Thick agreed. 'Does seem a trifle too done up in pink string and sealing wax, doesn't it? Still, we all have to be night-birds now.'

'You probably stay up all night regularly. Would you want to listen to God and Glory at five o'clock?'

'It's darkest just before dawn, they say.' Thick snorted, and added, 'besides, I wouldn't listen to John Jago at any hour of the day or night. Especially on a Sunday.'

Thick stepped out and mingled with the crowd, getting the feel of the situation. Genevieve, at a loose end, wondered whether she should be getting back to the Hall. The desk sergeant checked his watch and gave the order to turn out the station's regulars. A group of shabby men and women were let out of the cells, marginally more sober than they had been when they were pulled in. They lined up to be officially set free. Genevieve recognised most of them: there were plenty  -  warm and vampire  -  who spent their nights shuffling between the holding cells, the Workhouse Infirmary and Toynbee Hall, in the constant search for a bed and a free feed.

'Miss Dee,' said a woman, 'Miss Dee...'

A lot of people had trouble pronouncing 'Dieudonne', so she often used her initial. Like many in Whitechapel, she had more names than the usual.

'Cathy,' she said, acknowledging the new-born, 'are you being well treated?'

'Loverly, miss, loverly,' she said, simpering at the desk sergeant, 'it's an 'ome from 'ome.'

Cathy Eddowes looked hardly better as a vampire than she'd done when warm. Gin and nights outdoors had raddled her; the red shine in her eyes and on her hair didn't outweigh the mottled skin under her heavy powder. Like many on the streets, Cathy still exchanged her body for drink. Her customers' blood was probably as alcohol-heavy as the gin which had been her warm ruin. The new-born primped her hair, arranging a red ribbon that kept her tight curls away from her wide face. There was a running sore on the back of her hand.

'Let me look at that, Cathy.'

Genevieve had seen marks like these. New-borns had to be careful. They were stronger than the warm, but too much of their diet was tainted. Disease was still a danger; the Prince Consort's Dark Kiss, at whatever remove, did something strange to diseases a person happened to carry over from warm life to their un-dead state.

'Do you have many of these sores?'

Cathy shook her head but Genevieve knew she meant yes. A clear fluid was weeping from the red patch on the back of her hand. Damp marks on her tight bodice suggested more. She wore her scarf in an unnatural fashion, covering her neck and the upper part of her breasts. Genevieve peeled the wool away from several glistening sores and smelled the pungent discharge. Something was wrong, but Cathy Eddowes was superstitiously afraid of finding out what it was.

'You must call in at the Hall tonight. See Dr Seward. He's a better man than you'd get at the Infirmary. Something can be done for your condition. I promise you.'

'I'll be all right, love.'

'Not unless you get treatment, Cathy.'

Cathy tried to laugh and tottered out on to the streets. One of her boot-heels was gone, so she had a comical limp. She held up her head, wrapping the scarf around her like a duchess's fur stole, and wiggled provocatively past Jago's Christian Crusade, slipping into the fog.

'Dead in a year,' remarked the desk sergeant, a new-born with a snout-like protrusion in the centre of his face.

Genevieve said, 'Not if I can help it.'

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