Up ahead, in a foggy vignette, I saw Violet delve into her coat pocket with a leisurely, almost dreamlike movement. When her hand emerged, there was a small cylindrical object in her fingers. I didn't realize what it was, not until she swivelled the gilt casing and began to apply the lipstick to her mouth. Her hand was sure and steady; she had no need of a make-up mirror. Which was just as well, because even if there had been a mirror she would not have been able to see herself reflected in it.
Andreas Grauman was tall, but he was made even taller by the snakeskin boots with stacked heels and platform soles. They were the most ridiculous boots I had ever seen. Grauman told me later they were not particularly to his taste, but Violet had taken a fancy to them and bought them for him, and he had worn them ever since, out of respect.
The last thing I remembered was Violet putting on her lipstick, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the back seat of a car and a long-haired hippy with wire-rimmed spectacles was leaning over me with his hand up my skirt. My reaction was instantaneous and unthinking. I slapped the offending hand as hard as I could, and said, 'Stop that immediately!' He laughed. But took his hand away.
I suddenly remembered what I'd seen and sat up in a panic. 'Where is she? Where am I?' I twisted around, trying to look out of the windows, but they were all misted up. 'You are in my car,' he said, 'which is parked near the cemetery.' There was a slight accent. He wasn't English.
I thrashed around, trying to find a way out, but we were in the back seat of a Ford Cortina and the doors were at the front. 'Let me out,' I said. There wasn't a whole load of room to manoeuvre. One of my elbows caught him on the edge of his jaw, and he reacted as though he'd been cuffed by the heavyweight champion of the world, shying abruptly away, rubbing his chin and gingerly feeling around inside his mouth. 'Shit,' he said. 'Please be careful.'
'Sorry,' I said without thinking. Then I did think. This man was going to rape me, or worse. 'I've got to go,' I said, tipping up the driver's seat and lunging for the door handle.
He grabbed my wrist and hauled me back. 'Go where? After her? Oh no, you stay here with me.'
'I left a note; my parents know where I am; they'll call the police…'
'Bullshit,' he said, peering into my face. His attention made me feel uncomfortable and I quickly looked away. 'You are on something, yes? I can see from your eyes. What have you been taking?'
'Nothing,' I said, pulling my wrist free and rubbing it sulkily. 'I think you'd better let me out.'
He chuckled. 'Maybe later. Tell me, have you been introduced to Violet, or is it just the guy you are interested in?'
'Neither.'
'Don't lie to me. You were following her tonight, yes? How much do you know? Who is the guy?'
'And who the fuck are you?' I asked, outraged. 'Why don't you tell me what's going on?'
He said he would, all in good time, if only I behaved myself and sat quietly in the passenger's seat. On the way to Kensington Church Street we stopped several times at red lights. I had several chances to open the door and make a run for it, but something held me back. I had already decided that if I was going to be horribly murdered, it would have happened already, back in the cemetery where it had been nice and quiet. In fact, I had the feeling the man with the foreign accent had probably saved me from being horribly murdered. Not for the first time that night, curiosity got the better of me. I snatched a couple of sideways glances at him as he drove. He was dressed in brushed-denim flares and a brocade jacket, but something told me he was not of the peace and love persuasion. He had longish straw-coloured hair with sideburns, a beaky nose, and wire-rimmed spectacles. The hair looked bleached. I decided I didn't like him one little bit.
We parked in a side street. He frogmarched me to an anonymous brown door and pushed it open. Inside, a steep flight of stairs led downwards. I hovered warily. 'Well, go on,' he said. 'I have no sinister intentions. Here is the only place I know that is open at this hour. London is bad like that.' I started down, and he followed.
We were greeted at the bottom by a man in a shabby dinner jacket who asked to see a membership card. The man with the foreign accent said he'd forgotten it, but dropped several different names and that seemed to do the trick because we were waved in. It was a drinking club, unremarkable apart from its opening hours, decked out in peeling brown and maroon like any shabby old bar in urgent need of refurbishment. There were three or four middle-aged couples sitting around, talking quietly in advanced but practised states of inebriation. I slid into a corner booth and my companion, if you could call him that, fetched a bottle of red wine and two glasses. I sniffed the wine.
'It is not so bad,' he said in an offended tone. 'It is not German.'
'But you are?'
'My name is Andreas Sigismund Grauman.'
'Dora Rosamund Vale,' I said. We shook hands.
Andreas Grauman was not a vampire. He told me later that Violet called him her 'Hatman'. He never wore hats, he said. It was an ancient Moldavian term meaning Commander-in-Chief. He said this with a straight face, and I couldn't for the life of me tell whether or not he was having me on.
He was one of the creepiest people I'd ever met, but I was naive enough to think I could pump him for information. We circled each other warily for a while, smoking cigarettes (his cigarettes — I'd long since run out) and sipping wine, each trying not to give too much away while trying to find out how much the other knew. I got the impression that none of this conversational shuffle was strictly necessary — he was teasing me and enjoying it. I asked how long he'd known Violet. He told me they had a sort of working partnership which went 'way back'. Meanwhile, he was trying to find out more about the 'guy'. 'Do you know that guy? Is he your boyfriend?' I assumed he was referring to Duncan, and said no, we too had a sort of 'working partnership'.
Grauman grinned sarcastically. 'We are not getting very far. Why don't you tell me? You can trust me, you know. I am on your side.'
'Oh yes,' I said.
He gazed at me earnestly. 'You want to have your boyfriend back. I want you to have your boyfriend back. So — we both want the same thing.'
I squinted at him through the smoke from my latest cigarette. 'Don't tell me that woman — that thing — is your… mistress?'
He laughed. 'No, no, no. That would be like die Blutschande. Like fucking my own mother. But Livia is very precious to me, like my favourite aunt, and I do not want her to continue to meet with your friend. It is bad for her, you understand. Bad for health, bad for business. There are certain things she must do while she is here in London, and she is not doing them. Because of him. He is fucking everything up.'
'Livia? That's her real name?'
'She has many names.'
'How old is she really?'
He leaned forward conspiratorially. 'I tell you what. I tell you her age, and you tell me all about your boyfriend.'
'Not a very good bargain. You tell me her age and where she comes from and where she gets her money from.'
'OK.'
'And you go first,' I said.
He didn't know exactly how old she was. She either habitually lied about her age, or had genuinely lost count. But he put it at somewhere between two and three hundred years.
'Fernand Khnopff,' I said, more to myself than to him.
He stared at me in amazement. 'You have seen that painting?'