The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(57)

Somersby watched her leave, looking even more unsettled than before. He leaned close to Holmes and whispered, “What was it that you gave her, Mr Holmes?”

Holmes’s austere face betrayed a flicker of doubt and misgiving, but only for a second. “Miss Winter and I entered into an arrangement which involved several conditions on both our parts. One of my responsibilities was to procure her two keepsakes from the two men in her life she wished to remember.”

“I knew one man,” Somersby said. “Porky – that is, Shinwell Johnson. But who, Mr Holmes, is the other?”

“The man responsible for Shinwell Johnson’s death,” Holmes said, “as well as shattering and twisting Miss Winter’s own life, causing her imprisonment and then transformation. Baron Adelbert Gruner.”

I shook my head. “One man she loved, and the other she hated.”

“And possibly also loved,” Holmes added. “And it may be anyone’s guess as to which emotion runs the strongest, for I doubt that she herself knows. Vampire or not, Kitty Winter is still a woman first, which perhaps should give us some hope.”

I shook my head. For a man of pure logic, his attitude towards women was never entirely logical, at least not to me.

“She scares me,” Somersby admitted, “though I’d not have her know it.”

“I’m afraid,” I said to Somersby, “that you’ll have to speak much quieter than that if you wish to be discreet. Miss Winter is vampire enough to hear you as clearly as if you’d whispered into her own ear. Indeed, I could have heard you from the other side of the wall.”

“Then Miss Winter would have heard…” He went pale.

“I’m afraid so,” I said, pitying the poor man.

“I didn’t mean…” he started.

“Come!” Holmes said. “We have precious little time.”

Somersby swallowed his fear and led us on. We caught up with Miss Winter down the path, near a swath of land sheltered on either side by fifty feet of towering trees. Graves were dug on both sides of the road, waiting with dark empty mouths for the tragedies that might fill them. The body lay in one of the closest graves, just as she’d said. Holmes waved everyone back, then crouched and lit the dark lantern so that he could get a better look at the ground, though the rain must have obliterated most traces.

“We don’t know much about him,” Somersby said. “But we have a little information. He had a wallet with some money, one pound fifteen, and a cheque issued from the Highgate Cemetery’s bank to Victor Apligian, which we take to be the dead man. The cheque is issued for twenty pounds. He’s also got correspondence that corroborates our theory as to his identity, an envelope addressed from Victor Apligian to Mason Hardweather, but there is no letter in it and the envelope has no postmark yet. The sender’s address is a place on North Hill Street, not far from here. The destination is on Strait Road, near the Albert Dock.”

“Likely the North Hill Street address is Apligian’s home address, since there is no postmark.”

“That was our thought as well, Mr Holmes. It’s our guess that he was one of the groundskeepers here.”

“I quite agree,” Holmes said, still looking down. “You’ve handled that part adequately enough, but you’ve trampled all traces of evidence around the grave here. Usually wet earth is excellent for leaving impressions, but a pack of buffalo might have run through here.”

“Didn’t know it was a crime scene, did I?” Miss Winter said. “Not until after I found the body, anyway.”

“I did take care during my approach,” Somersby said quickly.

“Not enough,” Holmes said.

“How did you discover it?” I said. “Surely you don’t check all the graves every night?”

“Oh no,” Somersby said. “It would take an army for that. But we do keep tabs, per Mr Holmes’s instructions, on the doings in the local morgues, the hospitals, police stations and here in the cemeteries. At least in this section of London. I gather other agents or teams of the Midnight Watch do the same in other areas.”

“Quite,” Holmes agreed.

“A complete accident we discovered him at all,” Somersby admitted. “We were walking past and Kitty smelled him. We could just as easily have missed him.”

“And did you find any?” I asked.

“No, sir,” Somersby said. “Only the body. Kitty says there are no signs of him rising.”

“He stinks, he does,” Miss Winter said.

Holmes finished his examination of the ground. “As I feared, the rain and other footprints have made it quite impossible to tell for certain, but I think it likely that this man died elsewhere and the body was brought here. Come, Watson, help me bring the body up into the light.”

Victor Apligian had been a tall man, just short of six feet, but not overly burly, and no great burden. Handsome and boyish-looking, with black curly hair, wide mutton chops, and a face that might have been well-featured and affable, before death had drained it of expression. His clothes were somewhat more expensively cut than I expected from a gardener and workman, and I should have been surprised if his brown pinstripe suit did not turn out to be the most expensive ensemble he owned. There was no sign of hat, overcoat or umbrella. That he’d been bitten was evident enough: there were no less than three pairs of bite marks on the neck. But this paled in comparison to his bloodstained shirt front.