‘Have you seen the newspapers?’ he asked. ‘There has been another communiqué from Jack the Ripper. A postcard.’
‘“Double event this time”,’ she quoted.
‘Quite. “Had not time to get ears for police”.’
‘Didn’t he try to sever Cathy’s ear?’
Beauregard had obviously memorised Dr Gordon Brown’s report. ‘There was some such injury, but it was probably incidental. Her face was extensively mutilated. Even if our letter-writer is not the murderer, he may have an inside source of information.’
‘Like whom? A journalist?’
‘That is a possibility. The fact that the letters were sent to the Central News Agency, and therefore available to all the newspapers, is unusual. Few outside the press even know what a news agency is. If the letters had been sent to a specific periodical, then individual journalists would benefit from the “scoop”.’
‘And also fall under suspicion?’
‘Precisely.’
They were in the city now. Wide, well-lit streets, houses far enough apart to allow for grassy spaces and trees. Everything was so much cleaner here. Although in one square Geneviève noticed three bodies spitted on stakes. Children played hide-and-seek in the bushes around the impaled, red-eyed little vampires seeking out their plump playfellows and giving them affectionate nips with sharpening teeth.
‘Upon whom are we calling?’ she asked.
‘Someone of whom you will approve. Dr Henry Jekyll.’
‘The research scientist? He was at Lulu Schön’s inquest.’
‘That’s the fellow. He has no gods but Darwin and Huxley. No magic at all is admitted past his doorstep. And, speaking of Dr Jekyll’s doorstep, I should hope that this is it.’
The cab stopped. Charles climbed out and helped her down. She remembered to gather her dress and steady herself as she was extricated from the hansom. He told the cabby to wait.
They were in a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from high estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-engravers, architects, Carpathians, shady lawyers, and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort though it was now in darkness except for the fan-light, Charles knocked. An elderly servant opened the door. Charles presented his card, which Geneviève gathered was a free pass to every dwelling or institution in the country.
‘And this is Miss Dieudonné,’ Charles explained, ‘the elder.’
The servant took note, and admitted the visitors into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved with flags, warmed after the fashion of a country house by a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak.
‘Dr Jekyll is in his laboratory with the other gentleman, sir,’ the servant said. ‘I shall announce you.’
He vanished into another part of the house, leaving Geneviève and Charles in the hall. In the dark, she could see more clearly. There were strange shapes in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the ceiling.
‘Dr Jekyll obviously doesn’t believe in the incandescent lamp,’ she commented.
‘It’s an old house.’
‘I expected a man of science to live among the shining apparatus of the future, not lurk in the dark of the past.’
Charles shrugged, and leaned on his cane. The servant returned, and led them to the back of the house. They passed through a covered courtyard, and came to a well-lit building which abutted Jekyll’s house back-to-back. A red-baize door hung open and voices came from within.
Charles stood aside, and let her enter. The laboratory was a high-ceilinged space like an operating theatre, its walls covered with bookshelves and charts, tables and benches set up all around with intricate arrangements of retorts, tubes and burners. The place smelled strongly of soap, but other scents were not quite obliterated by regular scrubbing-down.
‘Poole, thank you,’ said Jekyll, dismissing his servant, who retreated to the main house with what Geneviève fancied was relief. The master had been in conversation with a broad-shouldered, prematurely white-haired man.
‘Mr Beauregard, welcome,’ Jekyll said. ‘And Miss Dieudonné.’
He bowed slightly and wiped his hands on his leather apron, leaving smears of some substance.
‘This is my colleague, Dr Moreau.’
The white-haired man raised a hand in greeting. Geneviève’s impression was that she would not care for Dr Moreau.
‘We have been talking of blood.’
‘A subject of much interest,’ Charles ventured.
‘Indeed. Of paramount interest. Moreau has radical notions on the classification of blood.’
The two scientists had been standing by a bench upon which was unrolled a length of oilcoth. Spread on the cloth was an arrangement of dust and bone fragments roughly in the shape of a man: a curved piece that might have been a forehead, some yellow teeth, a few staves that suggested ribs, and a great quantity of crumbly red-grey matter which she regretted that she had cause to recognise.
‘This was a vampire,’ she said. ‘An elder?’
A new-born would not decay so completely. Chandagnac had turned to ashes like these. He had been over four hundred at the time of his destruction.
‘We were lucky,’ Jekyll explained. ‘Count Vardalek committed an offence against the Prince Consort and was executed. As soon as I had word of the case, I made an application for his remains. The opportunity has proved invaluable.’
‘Vardalek?’
Jekyll waved away the name. ‘A Carpathian, I believe.’
‘I knew him.’
Jekyll, for a moment, was jarred out of his scientific enthusiasm. ‘I am profoundly sorry, you must forgive me my lack of tact...’
‘It is perfectly all right,’ she said, imagining the Hungarian’s painted face stretched over the skull remnants. ‘We were not intimates.’
‘We must study vampire physiology,’ Moreau said. ‘There are numerous points of interest.’
Charles was looking around the laboratory, peering casually at experiments in process. Sludge dripped into a beaker in front of his face, and fizzed into purple foam.
‘You see,’ Jekyll said to Moreau. ‘The precipitate reacts normally.’
The white-haired scientist made no reply. Evidently, a point had been scored against him.
‘Our concerns,’ Charles began, ‘are not so much scientific as criminal. We have been following the Whitechapel murders. The Jack the Ripper affair.’
Jekyll gave nothing away.
‘You have yourself taken an interest? Attended inquests, and so forth?’
Jekyll conceded that he had, but volunteered no more.
‘Have you formed conclusions?’
‘About the murderer? Very few. It is my contention that we are all of us, if freed from the restraints of civilised behaviour, capable of any extreme.’
‘Man is inherently a brute,’ Moreau said. ‘It is his secret strength.’
Moreau made hairy fists. It occurred to Geneviève that the scientist was physically enormously strong. There was something almost of the ape about his physique. It would be nothing to him to cut a throat or perform a swift dissection, dragging a silver blade through resisting meat, sawing apart bones.
‘My concern,’ Jekyll continued, ‘is with the victims. The new-borns. Most of them are dying, you know.’