Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (46 page)

The spell in the darkroom with Lin Tang had made her slightly light-headed. Lack of blood, exposure to sunlight and general irritability were working on her too. She wasn’t seeing something.

She arranged the photographs in chronological order, trying to find a story in them. She had to go against instincts and read down columns rather than across. Even that might be a mistake. The sheets read deceptively like a Japanese-Italian photo-comic, but Nolan didn’t always catch relevant moments. He hadn’t known he was compiling a record of the last hours of Carol Thatcher’s life. More false leads than true clues.

‘Let’s play Spot the Ball,’ said Bellaver, peering through the glass. ‘Professor, can you haul Golden Boy over here?’

Monserrat commanded Nolan to get up and go to the table. The hypnotist had more difficulty crossing the studio than his subject. His wife had to help. Annoyed, he tried to shrug off her firm arm-grip.

Blankly, Nolan stood at the table.

‘Does this ring any bells?’ the Super asked.

‘He only hears my voice,’ said Monserrat, lisping softly. ‘Look at the pictures, Thomas. At
your
pictures.’

Nolan hung his head and ran his fingers over the wet sheets, as if they were secret messages in Braille.

The photographer mumbled. Snatches of lyrics. Songs from the party?

The most interesting thing about Nolan’s pictures was that vampires showed up in them. Edwina can’t have sprinkled silver talcum on everyone. Lin Tang said Nolan was conducting experiments with chemical processes and new makes of fast film. It was an obsession: finding a way of taking good likenesses of vampires. Kodak had marketed a film for the undead in the 1950s, Kate remembered. Results were iffy. Nolan wasn’t fully there yet, and maybe it couldn’t be done, but vampires at the party weren’t invisible. Some were negative images, some see-through and some sketchy or featureless — but they were captured on film. Bellaver was interested, too. Taking mug-shots of vampires was a challenge, let alone using photographs in evidence. Some were incautious about public behaviour, since revealing pictures would
not
show up in the scandal sheets. If Nolan’s work continued, contingent upon him getting his wits back, habits would have to change. Was Carol’s death incidental? Could the real purpose of the crime committed in Maryon Park be to stop Nolan developing the art of vampire photography?

‘Recognise any of these spooks?’ Bellaver asked her.

‘Surprisingly, yes,’ Kate admitted. ‘That’s Herbert von Krolock in the lime-green shorts and t-shirt, snogging that actor from
A Kind of Bleeding.
What’s his name, Alan Bates? The pretty boy is Paul Durward, an elder who sings a bit. I don’t know the warm blonde with the cleavage who’s all over him. This one is unmistakable, though I can’t name any of his coterie…’

She tapped a picture of a grey man. His hair was more bouffant than when she’d last seen him. He kept ‘with it’ in a wide-collared dayglo suit and frilly-fronted, floppy-cuffed orange shirt. But his face was congealed death. Nolan’s process showed up patches of rot on his cheeks and forehead which might not be visible to the naked eye.

‘Caleb Croft,’ said Bellaver.

Kate shuddered at the name. If ever a vampire were a monster.

Professor Croft was flanked by vampires in matching monk-hoods. Their faces were indistinct, hollows in the cowls. One wore a black-and-white St Bartolph’s scarf. This year, everyone was seeking a guru. The thought of Croft getting his teeth or — worse — mind-hooks into young people, warm or vampire, was appalling. That scarf caught her attention. Having noticed it once, she saw it over and over. Not always on the same person.

‘These pictures,’ Monserrat said to Nolan. ‘They are not last night, they are now. Tell us what’s happening.’

‘I’m on a boat,’ said Nolan. ‘It’s a trip. A far-out trip.’

‘Is there a girl?’ asked the hypnotist.

Even deep under the fluence, Nolan smiled. ‘Girl. Girls.’

Nolan photographed any woman who crossed his viewfinder. He even took a few exposures of Lin Tang, who had — somehow — changed her outfit two or three times during the party. Kate recognised fabulous birds from films, telly and the rotogravure. Julie Christie, Catherine Cornelius, Sandie Shaw, Moira Kent, Anita Pallenberg, Fontaine Khaled, Julie Ege, Ayesha Brough. One shot caught actress-model-singers Gillian Hills and Jane Birkin, giggling conspiratorially, regarding the camera with a gleam at once promising and predatory. Penelope Churchward, who moved in these circles, wasn’t at this do; Kate thought Penny was in New York just now, keeping secrets.

‘One girl,’ said Monserrat. ‘Carol.’

In the party photographs, Carol went from extra — cut off at the sides of pictures — to leading role. She had caught Nolan’s attention: a whole sheet consisted of shots of her at the party, sometimes chatting or dancing with others, but mostly on her own, smiling or puzzled. Why her, of all the girls there? Did Nolan have an instinct for spotting the soon-to-die? If so, Kate should be wary since he’d snapped off a reel on her too. Was Carol flattered that the cyclops singled her out? Or spooked? For a model, but Kate thought Carol seemed uncomfortable at being photographed. That could have been pathetic fallacy, an awareness of the tragic ending shadowing innocent looks with spurious meaning. Timothy Lea was in a few early shots, stuffing his gob with canapés, then got lost in the crowd. Had he been got rid of? Lin Tang, Edwina and the wrestler — Milton — were in the pictures. Might they have hustled Timmy out of the way to give Nolan a clear run at the girl?

Now, Nolan saw the ghostface girl and mumbled.

‘Carol,’ he said.

‘Is he remembering?’ asked Bellaver.

‘She’s a white flame,’ said Nolan.

Beyond the party photos, they came to shots taken inside the taxi Carol had been in sometime between the boat and the park. The Daughter of the Dragon said Nolan took off without her. Kate intuited that Lin Tang was still irritated by that escape, and would have been even if it hadn’t ended in murder.

In the cab, Carol wore the St Bartolph’s scarf. Nolan used high-contrast black-and-white film. Other people were in the back of the taxi, but Nolan was working close, shooting Carol’s face whenever light came through the windows. Shadows chopped across the pictures. These exposures would be blown up. Perhaps a hand — with one of those fabled, distinctive rings — might be resting on her knee in one shot? Or an array of blobs would coalesce into a recognisable culprit? Kate thought they couldn’t be that lucky.

Nolan was interested in
Carol’s
face. Not some vampire licking his lips in the shadows.

Even hypnotised, he was drawn to her. He put fingerprints on the sticky pictures.

Having seen Carol dead, Kate was struck by how alive she’d been. She understood why so many wanted to get close. Timmy Lea was lost without her. Not that he’d have been able to hang on in her life if she were taken up by Nolan’s circle. She was, or seemed in stills, luminous. Or perhaps Kate was projecting on a blank, dead slate.

The last contact sheet was a roll of colour, taken in Maryon Park in the blue light of pre-dawn. Magic hour. Carol, trailing that scarf, walked a path towards the trees, looking over her shoulder, smiling. At Nolan, of course, but also at others. Shadows clustered on the ground.

Kate couldn’t help but hope Croft was there. She’d waited decades for him to be caught red-mouthed. It was as likely Carol had snatched the scarf from a student and run off with it as a trophy. Why should she latch onto a mouldy professor and his inky followers? So many more exciting, dazzling, dangerous persons were on hand.

‘That scarf,’ she whispered to Bellaver. ‘Was it found near the body?’

The Super checked his notebook. ‘Nope. Unless Griffin missed it.’

‘There was no scarf,’ confirmed Rogers, defending the sergeant.

Nolan was shaking now, quite alarmingly.

‘What are you seeing, Thomas?’ Monserrat asked.

‘Red,’ he said. ‘Sunlight, like blood. No. Blood, like sunlight.’

Ideally, the final photograph would have shown Carol in a clinch with a gore-smeared monster — his (or her) face captured perfectly in the light of dawn, fanged maw open wide and guilty. Instead, it was an empty frame, or a
seemingly
empty frame: a blur of bushes and grass and jagged shadow, and Carol’s torn-open neck and shoulder.

‘Who’s here?’ Kate asked, pointing at the photograph. Monserrat passed on her question. ‘Who’s with Carol?’

‘Eyes,’ he said. ‘Sunrise eyes. Burning blind.’

‘He doesn’t know any more,’ Kate told Bellaver. ‘If you push too far, he’ll break.’

‘Who is in this picture?’ Monserrat insisted.

‘Can’t say. Eyes, ice, aieee!’

Nolan’s mouth was full of white froth. Some leaked onto the photos.

‘Bring him out of it,’ said Kate to Monserrat. ‘Or he’ll shrink inside his head. You’ll never get him back.’

Monserrat wasn’t taking instructions from her, but Bellaver gave him the nod.

‘Wake up, Thomas,’ he said, ‘in three-two-one…’

Monserrat snapped his fingers and Nolan collapsed. A
Thunderbirds
puppet, suddenly unstrung. Despite the hypnotist’s order, the photographer hadn’t woken up. He’d gone to sleep, which couldn’t be good. WPC Rogers caught Nolan easily and heaved his deadweight upright. He came round, then found himself in the grips of a uniformed vampire and took fright.

‘What?’

Rogers patted him down as if he were a Saturday night drunk and handed him to Edwina. The make-up girl led Nolan away, promising a nice cup of tea and a suggestive biscuit. Thomas Nolan was insulated like a child. He had people to nanny him after his tantrums and coddle him when he was showing off.

Bellaver looked at the disarrayed photographs and shrugged. ‘I’d say “every little helps”, but it doesn’t, does it?’

Kate had to admit he was right. She took the magnifying glass and twiddled with it.

She kept going over the contact sheets. There was something she wasn’t seeing. Or something she was seeing she shouldn’t. A notion fluttered, demanding attention — but when she looked again, through the glass, at particular pictures, she couldn’t see what it was.

It was mid-evening, still light out but cool. The sun that had risen on Carol Thatcher’s death was going down. Kate, bone-tired and headache-hammered in daytime, felt senses sharpening with the coming of night. With dark-adapted eyes, she might see more.

Edwina came back then. She had corralled someone else to make the tea.

‘Phone call,’ she said. ‘For the Superintendent.’

‘Probably the Chief Constable, dishing out a bollocking,’ Bellaver said to Kate. ‘He doesn’t like being bothered by your lot — journalists — on Sundays, or any other time. And he likes to spread the joy.’

Bellaver went to the waiting room.

Kate was intrigued by Edwina’s healthy throat. She was a very English girl — almost prim — with an attractive little croak in her voice.

‘If you’re thinking of biting me, luvvy, you can shove off,’ she said.

Kate shut her mouth and — she was sure — went red. She’d be looking like a pillar-box again. She didn’t drink from other women, except in the most antiseptic, unromantic of circumstances. The possibility, even, only occurred to her during dry spells. She supposed she was still a Victorian. Not that the Victorian times she remembered were any less omnisexually adventurous than the swinging ’60s; people were just better about keeping quiet.

Bellaver came back, obviously bearing bad news.

‘The Chief Constable?’

‘Worse. George Dixon. There’s been another one. A dead girl. Another white-lips. He’s not going to stop at that, is he? The bastard. It’s a flaming spree.’

6

A
rc-lights rigged inside the police perimeter made the building site seem like a film location. The harsh, fizzing glare hurt less than the sun. At midnight, Kate felt sharper, less muddy-headed than at dawn.

Griffin lifted the smeared polythene as if it were a see-through shroud. Laura Jane Bellows was folded up inside a wheelbarrow. She had long dark hair and white, white skin.

‘Gawd,’ said Bellaver.

Rogers looked critically, as if judging the murderer’s aesthetic sense in posing the corpse. Dried blood was smeared around the girl’s throat. Whoever had bitten her made a mess of it. On her last night out, Laura had worn a black bikini, black thigh-boots and a black crochet poncho. Witnesses would remember the outfit.

The dead girl had been identified quickly. Her dabs were on file from a pot bust. She hadn’t paid her fine. So far as anyone could tell from a quick ring-round, Laura was an ordinary flower child. From Hatfield, originally — where was that? — she’d shared a flat off the King’s Road with two other girls. After dropping out of college, she’d worked in a coffee bar and a travel agents but hadn’t stuck to either long. She’d been scrounging rent money from her parents and going to parties she wasn’t really invited to. Kate recognised her as one of the incidental pretty faces in Nolan’s photos of the
Fevre Dream
bacchanal. Girls like Laura Bellows were welcome anywhere. Heavies who might resolutely guard a door against speccy reporters would step aside at the flash of a smile and the twirl of a poncho-fringe. There was a downside. Girls like Laura Bellows and Carol Thatcher weren’t in short supply. Their murderer wasn’t alone in seeing them as disposable, to be used once or twice and thrown away.