The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(56)
“Holmes!” I said. I could see he was impatient with any delay to getting to the crime scene, and gave little to no consideration to what traumatic experiences might have brought this man to us.
“I should think,” Holmes said, “that the distinction is obvious. Ninety-nine vampires out of a hundred come from the grave with a taste for human blood that, once indulged, can never be quenched. They feed on nothing else, and continue to feed on nothing else for as long as they live. Since there is no court of law that can touch them, it falls to us to apply the only effective solution. As it did with your mother. Vampires that do not murder have nothing to fear from us.” He fixed the younger man with a steely gaze. “Is that clear enough for you?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said miserably.
“Now,” Holmes said. “Where is Miss Winter?”
“This way,” Somersby said.
We were hidden from the entrance itself, and any attendants, by a slight curve in the stone wall. At this time of night, of course, the cemetery was closed. Somersby looked around circumspectly, and seeing no sign of anyone else on the street, led us over the four-foot wall. We dropped down onto a lawn of grass and walked round a row of poplar trees and onto one of the many wide lanes that ran through the carefully tended grounds of Highgate Cemetery. I could hear and smell the teeming life all around us. Highgate was as much a wildlife preserve as a burial site. A pair of foxes worrying at a fresh kill, a small bird of some sort, near a distant crypt, stopped and watched us warily as we passed.
As always, I was struck by the grandeur, the open beauty of the place, as we passed stone angels, scrollwork-etched crosses and even an obelisk with roses cut into the stone to match the garden of real rose bushes around it, the colours dimmed by the night. It must have been quite a blind and gloomy expedition for Holmes and Somersby, but darkness was no navigational obstacle to me. Even in the dark, everything jumped out into sharp relief as if cut out by an engraver’s etching tool. When the moon broke from the clouds, the intermittent rain transformed everything into a shimmering wonder.
We walked through the West Cemetery, skirting around the Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon, though we could see the ancient cedar tree that sat in the centre. Somersby led us deeper into grounds, where there were fewer markers, and more of them dripping curtains of woven ivy. The decorative walls were made of brick, rather than stone.
A dark shape detached from a moon-shadowed row of beeches with a suddenness that made me start and pull my lips back from my teeth. I wasn’t used to being taken by surprise, but vampires are reliant on scent, and give off very little scent themselves. This probably accounted for some of the disconcerting feelings that Miss Winter always stirred in me, if only some. We did not know all the details of how Miss Winter had come through the transformation, but clearly she had not come through untouched. I had Holmes’s word that she no longer represented a danger to the citizenry of London, but I had my doubts.
“Finally!” Miss Winter said sharply. “Took your time, didn’t you?” Then, without waiting for an answer, said, “You have it, then?” She was both paler and fiercer than ever, yet worn with the sorrow and sin that had made her bitter and fragile. She was an unsettling creature, ageless now, as I was, yet I could not imagine her lasting out the year. A dun coat, which had probably never been cleaned, hung from her restlessly moving gaunt frame. A matching hat, equally shapeless, covered her head, doing very little to restrain the wild mane of fiery hair beneath. I knew that Holmes paid both her and Somersby well, so the fact that she chose, still, to dress like a tramp of the streets was difficult to fathom. She carried a small, shapeless and colourless moleskin pouch in one hand that she worried at with her thumb.
“Miss Winter,” Somersby said, “perhaps now isn’t—”
“Just you hush!” Miss Winter said. “I’ll have what he promised me, by cripes!”
“I have the second artefact here,” Holmes said. “Just as we agreed.” He took a packet out of his coat pocket, unwrapped the paper to reveal a shard of bone inside without touching it. He slowly held it out so that she might take the fragment herself.
She snatched it up eagerly, her eyes blazing. For a moment, the moon shone on her firebrand hair, and she looked alive, vibrant and beautiful in the way she must have before the streets of London and Adelbert Gruner had gotten a hold of her.
She undid the strings of the moleskin pouch and peered inside. “Oh, Porky,” she said, her expression softening. “You deserved better, you fat, lovely, cunning, good-hearted devil. You deserved better than what you got.” Then she turned a wicked grin on the shard Holmes had just given her. “And you… you cunning, dirty devil… well, now I have you both!” She tucked the fragment inside and tied the strings of her pouch up again.
She seemed a wild thing herself, and while I had Holmes’s word that she had no human blood on her hands, it still seemed to me that she had a savage, ferocious core in her that would never be tamed, that would always be a danger, both to herself and those around her. Miss Winter, was, in my estimation, always one short step away from a life of violent murder. Still, she had not taken it as of yet.
“Come on, then,” she said. “The body you’re after is down the path this way. They left it in one of the unused graves.” The expression of fierce anger reasserted itself on her face as she turned away from us.