Angels of Music (16 page)

Jones was doubled over now, racking with coughs.

Ayda fetched him water from a jug on a sideboard. He looked up, clutching his stomach. Blood was dripping from his lips.

Unorna started.

‘Yes,’ said Sophy, ‘I see it too. It’s real this time.’

Jones brushed aside the jug, which exploded on the floor, and tried to stand.

Madame Van Helsing and Monsieur Paillardin looked at this interruption with annoyance.

Jones got to his feet. The blood was all down his front now.

His eyes were wide with pain, but he was smiling.

‘
Sacrebleu!
’ gasped the one-armed old railwayman. ‘He’s a bloody vampire!’

L
A
M
ARMOSET AND
Unorna warily approached the stricken Giovanni Jones.

Sophy Kratides held back. When there was commotion, someone had to pay attention to everyone else in the room. Commotions were also distractions.

The suspicious one-eyed railwayman assumed a
savate
stance. Grey powder shook out of his hair.

Madame Van Helsing frowned at the interruption.

M. Henri Paillardin of the Society for Rational Psychical Research fainted dead away in terror. He seemed to have run out of rational explanations.

Ayda Heidari had a small pistol in her hand.

Fair enough – Sophy slid a jack-knife out of her sleeve.

Jones flailed, beating away people who might have helped him. His eyes were red as his shirt-front.

The smile was widening, as if fishhooks inside his cheeks were tugging his lips.

He was a big man – well-cushioned but towering, surprisingly powerful. His lungs were capacious enough to produce a voice which filled the auditorium of the Paris Opéra, after all. La Marmoset ducked under his elbow and tried to get a hold on him.

Croaking, he pushed her away.

He would not be told anyone was trying to help. He saw only enemies around him.

‘This outrageous is,’ declared Madame Van Helsing. ‘I must be let finish. Heard must be truth.’

That ship had sailed and sunk, Sophy thought.

Jones blurted up a mist of blood. He roared and charged like a blinded bull elephant, ploughing across the room, knocking chairs and patrons aside. The plainclothes policeman got tangled up in his chair and fumbled for a whistle.

The doors were flung open and Jones staggered onto the street.

La Marmoset gave Sophy the nod. She was best placed to follow.

Pulling on her coat and scarf, Sophy left the railwaymen’s institute.

A trail of blood was on the pavement.

She wasn’t the only person following the tracks. In the gutter, she saw an eyepatch and a half-mask of crinkled crepe.

The fake railwayman had a head start.

She walked briskly down the street. If she ran, she’d attract attention. Someone would get in the way.

The institute was near the Gare du Nord. Crowds were coming to and from the station even in the middle of the evening. She lost the trail amid so many scything feet and sweeping dress hems… but found it again, only to realise that it petered out.

Was Jones poisoned or possessed?

The frontage of the station was illuminated like a theatre. Carriages were lined up for disembarking passengers.

She found the railwayman’s old coat stuffed into a street waste bin.

Crowds passed on all sides. Her quarry had got away.

‘That lady’s got a knife,’ said a small child in a sailor suit, pointing.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said his mother. ‘She’s much too respectable. Look at her.’

Sophy had jammed her knife up her sleeve.

She had lost Jones and his other pursuer, though. She did not like to lose people – unless it was on her terms.

La Marmoset would probably be able to identify the fake railwayman from his coat. Perhaps he had stained it with a unique blend of tobaccos or had his name written in onion-juice in mirror writing inside a pocket. By the time the Queen of Detectives had made her deductions, it would be too late for some poor soul, though…

She was being unfair, she knew. Not all Great Detectives were alike.

Under the coat, she found the imposter’s clay pipe. She noticed the bowl was empty and still white. Picking the thing up, she found it wasn’t a real pipe but a disguised blowdart gun. So, Giovanni Jones had been stuck with something poisonous.

At least she had learned –
detected
– something, even if she’d lost the trail.

Something small and furry darted between her feet. And another one. There were squeals and squeaks all around…
rats
! Speeding towards the station, whiskers twitching, cramming into the gutters and grates, as if summoned by a rat-horn inaudible to human ears. The vampire’s familiars.

‘There are people up there,’ said the observant little boy. ‘On the front of the station.’

‘Ridiculous,’ said the mother. ‘The nonsense I have to put up with!’

‘But, Maman…’

The child was hauled away, wailing at the injustice.

Sophy looked up and saw the sharp-eyed lad was right again.

Surmounting the station were nine commanding statues: eight representing destinations in other countries, the central figure standing in for Paris herself. Below, on the façade, fourteen more modest statues represented less important cities; on a narrow ledge between these minor arcana, under the great clock, people were struggling.

Giovanni Jones… three women in white, agile like acrobats… and a masked man, all in black with a billowing cloak.

The women were the Countesses Dorabella, Clarimonde and Géraldine. Up to no good, Sophy would be bound – though she hadn’t expected their high-living would stretch to high-flying.

Were they more familiars of the Black Bat?

Sophy couldn’t read the situation.

The struggle was a mess. She couldn’t tell whether the Countesses were attacking Jones while fighting off the man in black, or the victims of a combined assault by the vampire singer and his dark master, or were getting between the two strange men, to protect one from the other, or keep them apart for their own ends.

She was the wrong Angel for this. La Marmoset or Unorna would both
know
what they were looking at.

Others in the crowd had happened to look up. Soon, everyone on the street was staring. Whistles sounded, so the police were on their way too.

‘The vampire… the vampire…’ went the whisper, which became a cry.

Yes, but which was the vampire?

Gasps of alarm rose as Countess Clarimonde lost her foothold and tumbled backwards… then gasps of wonder, as she seemed to catch on invisible wires and propel herself up to get a firm grip on the neck of the statue representing Rouen. She held on so hard that the crowned head came off. She caught the stone head in one hand and bowled it like a cannon-ball at the man in black. He deflected it with one ribbed cape-wing, and it smashed through a window. Shards of glass pattered down onto the pavement and people backed away.

The other Countesses grasped perches with their toes and clawed at the Black Bat with dagger-nails.

Were these really the frivolous playthings of a Romanian nobleman? They were more like harpies!

Jones dangled, limp as a deflating gas-bag. His braces were hooked on the sword-pommel of the statue representing Lille. He still smiled.

The man in black wore a snarling mask with shiny dark glass over the eyes and flared batwing ears. His chin and mouth were exposed.

All the better to bite you with?

Sophy assumed the Black Bat had worn the railwayman disguise.

His intricate cloak-wing contraption reminded her of a Da Vinci drawing. He wore a tight tunic with double rows of shiny buttons. Odd implements hung from a tool-belt. His boots had springs in the heels and his gauntlets had suction cups in the palms. The outfit should have been unwieldy, but he moved with practised ease, swatting the bothersome women.

The Countesses were barefoot, their shift-like evening dresses hiked up over their white limbs.

They already had admirers below, for their déshabillé… and the possibility that jewels might fall from their tiaras into eager hands.

How had they got up there?

Sophy scanned the front of the station, and saw a ladder…

She ran towards it.

Countess Géraldine got her hands around the throat of the man in black, hissing at him through gleaming teeth. Ungallantly, he punched her in the ribs and she sailed off into space, only to be caught by Countess Dorabella.

This seemed a personal fight.

Sophy had almost got to the ladder when Giovanni Jones’s strained braces snapped. The big baritone fell onto a carriage, crushing the wooden roof. The startled horse reared and neighed, and the coachman had to fight to keep the beast from bolting.

Looking up, she saw the Countesses leaping from statue to statue, and the Black Bat silhouetted against the sky. He was on the cornice, next to the great shield-bearing statue of Paris. His cloak-wings spread and he launched upwards, catching the wind like a kite. He flew out of sight.

The Countesses were gone too – through the broken window into the station.

Only Jones was left behind.

Sophy got to the carriage just as the singer rolled out of its wreckage like several sacks of potatoes.

He was still smiling. His throat wasn’t cut but pierced – two deep holes gouged into his jugular vein.

‘Ho, let me through,’ said a woman. ‘I’m a doctor.’

‘It’s not a doctor he needs,’ Sophy said.

‘He needs the kind of doctor I am,’ said Geneviève Dieudonné. ‘I’m the coroner, remember?’

Sophy looked at the French woman, who knelt by the body.

She pulled on thin white cotton gloves and touched the neck-holes with the tips of two fingers.

‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘The murderer was in too much of a hurry to make a mess of the throat this time, so we can see the real fatal wounds.’

‘A vampire bite?’

The coroner flashed a sharp smile up at Sophy. ‘There’s a resemblance to the traditional two little punctures, isn’t there? Lord Ruthven and Mircalla Karnstein couldn’t have done it more neatly… or obviously. Because they’re not so
little
, these punctures. They are, in fact, enormous.’

She easily slid her fingertips into the wounds, then took them out again.

‘Imagine having teeth this size,’ she said. ‘You’d never be able to close your mouth.’

Gendarmes gathered around, accepting the coroner’s authority. La Marmoset and Unorna were also here. Drawn to the station by the hullabaloo, they’d witnessed the aerial spectacle.

Dr Dieudonné took hold of Jones’s face, feeling the stretched cheek muscles.

‘Here’s that smile again,’ she continued, ‘and the lack of lividity which suggests enormous loss of blood.’

‘He was poisoned,’ said Sophy. ‘Shot with a blow-dart.’

‘Poisoned and bled out,’ said Dr Dieudonné. ‘A touch excessive, though it squares with the possibility of venom in the wounds of the other victims.’

‘Was the old railwayman a vampire?’ asked Unorna. ‘Did you see?’

‘He flew away,’ said Sophy. ‘His wings were mechanical.’

‘That explains a lot,’ said La Marmoset. ‘We’ve been chasing a very ingenious, inventive fellow. But it’s stage magic, not sorcery.’

‘The Countesses don’t use tricks, though,’ put in Unorna. ‘They could hardly have secretly strung the front of the Gare du Nord with the invisible wires they use in the circus. And those are never
really
invisible.’

‘I don’t know about the women,’ admitted Sophy. ‘But the bat-creature of the rooftops is a human man. Madame Van Helsing said his clothes were silly, but she’s wrong. They’re very clever.’

Dr Dieudonné stood, brushing dust off her knees.

The coroner looked at Sophy, La Marmoset and Unorna, smiling brightly, eyes a-glitter behind dark spectacles.

‘You’re those Opera Angels, aren’t you?’

I
N
L
A
M
ARMOSET
’
S
previous experience, coroners sat in their nice cold morgues and waited for bodies to be delivered before involving themselves in criminal investigations.

Geneviève Dieudonné was a new breed, evidently. She preferred her murder victims fresh-killed, and was interested in things beyond the simple – or, as in this case, not so simple – means of death.

She was unusual in several ways. Most of them suspicious.

Dr Dieudonné kept turning up in
l’affaire du vampire
, like a new-minted silver coin in a purse full of dull brown change. At Garron’s autopsy, La Marmoset saw how deft the doctor was. Now, she noticed she was also
quick
.

Standing over the bulky body of Giovanni Jones, the coroner had already made notes, which – with a trace of ghoulish excitement – she was eager to share with the Opera Ghost Agency.

‘As I was telling your colleague, the murderer didn’t have time to finish with this one. Perhaps now we can see what he’s really up to.’

‘He?’ prompted La Marmoset.

‘Murderers are
usually
he…’

Sophy snorted at that.

‘Vampires can be women,’ said Unorna. ‘The Karnstein case…’

‘I’m aware of it,’ said the coroner, off-handedly. ‘If there was such a person as Mircalla Karnstein, she wasn’t typical. Your usual vampire is a fatal man. Lord Ruthven, Sir Francis Varney, Arnold Paole, Ezzelin von Klatka…’

Dr Dieudonné seemed as eager as Saartje Van Helsing to dismiss the existence of vampires… unless they were men. In which case, she’d happily hoist the lot of them on poles.

‘…rotting dead-alive aristocrats, leeching the blood of peasants. It’s easy to see how the tales got started. The myth is a caricature of social injustice, is it not? Vampire stories tell us the rich are literally apart from the rest of humanity. Not really people, but monsters or devils. Predatory parasites. Spreaders of venereal disease. I’m surprised Émile Zola hasn’t written a novel about vampires.’

The gendarmes strung ropes to keep back
badauds
, the specific breed of Paris bystander who gather and gawk at any opportunity. Word spread that the vampire had struck again, and this new victim was also a famous opera singer. When people heard
which
famous opera singer, interest faded into disappointment. It would have been so much more titillating and horrifying to see the Great Anatole dead in a gutter than the plump has-been Giovanni Jones. Even in obituaries, he was upstaged.