Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (45 page)

‘But I’m… I don’t… no reflection. No pictures.’

He smiled, tightly. ‘Let’s see if we can do something about that, luv. You’re definitely what I want.’

If this was the only way in, then.

Thomas led her into the inner studio. The wrestler thought better of stopping Bellaver from following.

The building was a former carriage-works. The studio still smelled of wood and horses. Large sheets of white or pastel paper were tacked to the walls. Cameras and lamps perched on stands.

The sobbing woman was a vampire, another tall blonde bone-bag in a silvery evening dress. Barefoot, her soles were grubby from the uncarpeted floor. Kate recognised Barbara von Weidenborn, a professional artists’ model under the name Barbarushka. A twig of the Dracula family tree, she was now in abject distress, like a harem bed-warmer who has failed to please the sultan and is doomed to the
oubliette.

Lin Tang snapped long-nailed fingers. The wrestler escorted the Dracutwig off the premises. Kate trusted there were no trapdoors hereabouts for such poor things. The Daughter must have moderated her methods of disposing of people, though brief acquaintance suggested Thomas Nolan could be as cold-blooded as the Lord of Strange Deaths.

Kate saw what Barbarushka’s problem was.

Scattered on the floor were developing Polaroid photographs, all of strange shadows on white paper.

‘I won’t photograph either,’ she insisted.

Nolan summoned an attractive, auburn-haired woman. She wore a black sweater and britches and had a cinema usherette’s tray slung around her neck, full of cosmetics rather than ice cream tubs.

‘Edwina,’ he ordered, ‘do your magic.’

The woman started puffing powder at Kate’s face.

It tingled, oddly. Her eyes watered.

‘That’s got silver in it,’ she said, gripping Edwina’s wrists.

‘It’s so you’ll show up,’ Nolan said.

‘I don’t necessarily want to,’ said Kate.

Edwina was strong, Kate realised. She might well be up to a tussle.

Bellaver stood back, amused. Kate had not signed up for whatever this was, especially if it involved disfigurement.

‘Mr Nolan is working on processes to photograph vampires,’ Lin Tang explained.

‘You have such a look,’ the photographer said. ‘But if it’s not on film, it’s wasted.’

‘That argument only works on girls who get older,’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t you like to see your own face?’

‘Not really. People weren’t kind about it.’

Nolan was puzzled.

‘She means she has red hair,’ Lin Tang said. ‘When she was warm, Western women with red hair were considered hideous…’

Kate must remember to thank the Daughter of the Dragon for her concision.

And glasses,’ Kate said. And freckles.’

Nolan peered at her and didn’t see a problem. Which ought to be cheering. The snapper spent his days peering through viewfinders at Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree. If he saw nothing wrong with specs, frecks and ginger, it was one in the eye for all those lads in cricket caps who made droll remarks about pillar-boxes and owls when not asking her to dance in 1886. They were mostly dead, of course.

He picked up a camera and started snapping at her.

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘More fang, please. And the eyes. Flash ’em, luv. Teeth and smiles. That’s the business, darling. Oh yes.’

Flashbulbs popped.

She was backed against a sheet of butchers’ paper, which fell down. The photographer advanced on her. Click click click.

Edwina also had a camera — the Polaroid, which spat out instant images.

She showed one to Nolan, who took a photograph of her holding it out to him.

Kate saw Edwina’s photograph. There she was, in it. A pale, round face. The blank circles of her specs. Prominent eyeteeth, a defensive snarl. Even her hair. The magic had worked.

Despite herself, she was interested.

Annoyingly, she looked startled in the picture. Like every long exposure taken when she was alive and had to sit in a chair with head-pincers to be photographed.

Bellaver failed to stifle laughter. Griffin was smirking too.

She’d make them pay later.

‘Now, stop all this,’ she said. ‘We’re here about something serious.’

To Thomas Nolan, this
was
serious. He shot more pictures, with various cameras, fixed on tripods and hand-held.

She tried to exert her will on his. It wasn’t one of her talents, but she’d been a vampire long enough to pick up some of the tricks.

Nothing.

Each snap was something taken from her. A layer of skin? It was like being bitten, being drained — which she’d only gone through
once,
albeit profoundly — being turned. She was worried she would fade.

Like ice in the sun, I melt away…

Edwina and Lin Tang stood to one side, attendant harpies. Why didn’t he photograph them instead? They were pretty.

A big lens was close to her face, like the probe of the Martian War Machine in the film of
War of the Worlds.
She had no reflection in it. The shutter irised inside the camera.

Click click click.

She shrank, cringing, almost in terror. Nolan went down on his knees, over her, aiming down, still shooting. She put a hand behind her, and felt the floor.

She was strong. She could throw him off.

She was thirsty. She could bite him.

Click click damnable click.

She didn’t resist. The clicks were kisses now. Her teeth cut her own lips. Her mouth would be reddened.

‘Stop,’ she said, firmly.

Nolan gripped her thighs with his knees. He bore down on her, a cyclops. The upper half of his face, above his cherub lips, was all camera, a big eye on an extending stalk.

There was an automatic quality to his clicking. He took a shot and rolled the film on, again and again.

She was wrung out, limp.

She saw what was wrong.

‘Bellaver,’ she said. ‘Get him off me. It’s about the case.’

As the Super stepped forward, Kate reached up and took away Nolan’s camera. He still made click-and-roll motions. He cooed at her, trying to capture the
look.

He was in a daze, imagining himself taking photographs.

‘Luv,’ he said, ‘come on, luv…’

Griffin and Bellaver helped him stand up. His hands still made motions. He wasn’t seeing anything.

His studio girls showed little concern. They were used to not questioning bizarre behaviour.

‘Lin Tang,’ she said. ‘He’s been fascinated. Barbarushka?’

The Daughter snorted contempt. ‘Not that one.’

‘Another vampire, then. Recently. How long has he been like this? Manic, not all here…’

The question didn’t mean anything to Lin Tang.

‘Good news and bad news, Super,’ she told Bellaver. ‘Nolan must know — must have known — something. But a vampire has got into his head and locked it up.’

The photographer was quieter now, suggestible. Edwina sat him in an egg-shaped chair that hung from the ceiling on a chain. His feet dangled, scraping the floor. He muttered, and his hands worked an invisible camera.

‘Were either of you with Nolan last night?’ Bellaver asked. ‘On a boat, and then somewhere else?’

Lin Tang nodded. Edwina shrugged.

‘Did he take any photographs last night?’ Kate asked.

‘Of course,’ said Lin Tang. ‘He always takes photographs.’

‘Have they been developed?’

‘No. He does that himself.’

‘We’ll need the film,’ said Bellaver.

‘That won’t be possible,’ said Lin Tang.

‘Make it possible, Lotus Blossom. Or we’ll find something to charge you with. Obstruction, most likely. If Insidious Fiendishness isn’t an actual offence, we’ll make it up specially.’

‘My name isn’t Lotus Blossom, Inspector Plodder. Or Suzie Wong.’

‘I did make it clear this is a
murder
enquiry.’

Lin Tang was unimpressed. Given who the woman was, Kate understood why. A murder? Only one?

‘Nolan will need help,’ Kate said. ‘To fix his head. You’d best cooperate.’

‘Very well,’ said Lin Tang. ‘But I will develop the film myself. One of you may join me in the darkroom.’

‘An offer you don’t hear every day,’ said Bellaver. ‘Katie, I’m assuming you can see in the dark.’

‘Like a cat,’ she said.

‘Miaow away, then. I’ll find someone to unscramble Tommy Sunshine’s brains.’

5

A
ccess to the darkroom, a former stable, was via an airlock set-up.

Two black blankets pegged on clotheslines. When Kate came out with the wet contact sheets, Bellaver’s pet hypnotist was shining lights into Thomas Nolan’s unseeing eyes.

Marcus Monserrat was a venerable, bowed gent with leg-braces and crutches, deeply suntanned or part-Asian, sporting a neatly trimmed white beard. A brain specialist, he’d returned from a sojourn in Tibet with a supposed mastery of ancient mesmeric techniques.

She remembered the ’20s and ’30s craze for going to Tibet and acquiring the power to cloud men’s minds.
The Disappearing Diplomat,
James Hilton’s biography of Hugh Conway, inspired a lost generation of fatheads to freeze their extremities off trudging up snowy Himalayas in search of Shangri-La, Shambhala or K’un-L’un. Kent Allard, a flier she’d known during the First World War, was one of the few who came back. With Tibet occupied by Red China, would-be mystics favoured the Maharishis of India. She understood
serious
dark postulants had moved on to a new continent. They hung about Ayers Rock soliciting Aboriginal shamen for the secret of killing via shouting or bone-pointing, as if there were a crying need for cleverer ways of murdering people.

For Monserrat, supernatural powers hadn’t meant material wealth. He didn’t seem to have set out to be an ascetic. Once a prosperous Harley Street neurologist, he now had cards up in newsagents’ in Marylebone High Street. His clientele ran to cash customers who wanted to give up smoking or biting their nails. Kate didn’t know how Monserrat came to be on B Division’s books. He must have helped on previous cases. This wasn’t the first time a witness to vampire crime had been
fascinated
into keeping schtumm. Clearing the fog would be a useful trick. If it wasn’t arrant quackery. Which, in Kate’s opinion, it was.

Nolan sat limply in his egg-chair, hands in his lap. Monserrat had at least got him to stop taking imaginary snaps. The subject was awake, but unresponsive.

Hypnotism had progressed from ‘watch the watch’. An array of multi-coloured lights mounted on one of Nolan’s own tripods flashed in arcane sequence. With ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ leaking in from the waiting room, the studio was like a duff discotheque. Kate wished they’d change the record. After hours of Procul Harem, she’d have taken Any Old Iron’ or ‘I Was in Kaiser Bill’s Bat-Staffel’. Or, for preference, ‘The Sound of Silence’.

Bellaver stood to one side, with Griffin and WPC Rogers — who’d brought Monserrat to Pottery Lane — and a slim, white-haired, elderly woman. Monserrat’s wife was a vampire, which meant she
chose
to seem the age she looked — probably to match her husband. Kate had come across that before and was not one to criticise whatever people did to make relationships work. But. Mrs Monserrat was bright-eyed and a little creepy. She stared hungrily, fangs out, at the young man under her husband’s ’fluence. Kate didn’t need a package holiday in India to know what she was thinking. It was a good job Enoch Powell wasn’t here: the expression on Mrs Monserrat’s face was exactly what vampire-haters were afraid of.

Monserrat was getting no response from Nolan.

Bellaver, bored, came over to look at the pictures.

Any joy?’ he asked.

‘Fifteen rolls of it,’ Kate said. ‘Lin Tang is making prints of every exposure, but here are the contact sheets. The
Fevre Dream
stuff could go to the
News of the Screws.
It’s what you’d expect. Rich, beautiful, famous, horrible people having a knees-up.’

‘So you don’t get invited to Syrie Van Epp’s parties?’

‘Please — if I ever fall in with that mob, stake me. They’re the worst sort of useless.’

‘Any pictures of Carol?’

‘Lots. At the party, and… afterwards.’

‘How afterwards?’

‘In a cab, I think. And in Maryon Park.’

Bellaver was reminded of another avenue of inquiry. ‘Griffin, have we rousted out last night’s taxi drivers?’

‘Yes, Super. No luck yet, but if Carol Thatcher went from the boat to the park in the small hours the cabbie should be traceable.’

‘If it’s easy, it should have been done by now, lad.’

‘Yes, Super,’ said Griffin, looking at his pointy shoes.

‘She must have got to the park just before dawn,’ said Kate. ‘There are twilight photos. Sun-up is — what? — four, four-thirty, this time of year?’

Kate laid out the contact sheets on an artist’s table. An overhead light brought out the sheen of the photographic paper. Columns of glistening images, in black and white and colour. She gave Bellaver a magnifying glass.

‘What’s that pong?’ the policeman asked.

‘Chemicals,’ she said. ‘No need to call the Drug Squad.’