‘Call me Foma,’ he said. ‘I’ll enjoy remembering Geser.’
‘Have you known him for long?’
‘Yes. Geser has older friends, but I don’t… I’ve heard a lot about you, Anton.’
I let that pass. There was nothing I could say. I hadn’t heard of the head of the Edinburgh Night Watch before yesterday.
‘You’ve been talking to Bruce. What do you make of our vampire Master?’
I paused to formulate my impression precisely:
‘Spiteful, unhappy, ironic. But they’re all spiteful, unhappy and ironic. Of course, he didn’t kill Victor.’
‘You put pressure on him,’ Lermont said, not asking but stating.
‘Yes, that was just the way it worked out. He doesn’t know anything.’
‘No need to make excuses,’ said Lermont, taking a sip of his beer. ‘It worked out just fine. His own vanity will make sure that he keeps quiet, and we have the information … All right, what did you see in the Dungeons of Scotland?’
‘Scary stories for children. The show’s closed, but I managed to speak to one of the actors. And take a look at the crime scene.’
‘Well?’ Lermont asked keenly. ‘So what did you find out, Anton?’
I’d learned a lot from all those years dealing with Geser. Nowadays I could tell when the boss’s hand was poised to swat down a young magician who had overreached himself.
‘That River of Blood where Victor’s throat was cut…’ I glanced at the impassive Lermont and corrected myself: ‘Where Victor was killed. There’s blood in the water. A lot of human blood. It doesn’t look as if it was a vampire who sucked the boy’s blood out. Someone opened his artery and held him while his blood spilled out into the trench. But we need an analysis of the water. We could bring in the police, they could do a DNA analysis…’
‘Oh, what great faith you have in technology,’ Foma said with a frown. ‘It’s Victor’s blood in the trench. We checked the very first day. Simple similitude magic, no more than fifth-level Power required.’
But I wasn’t about to give in. Dealing with Geser had also taught me the art of wriggling out of things.
‘It’s no help to us, but the police ought to be given the idea too. Let them know that the blood was drained into the trench, and that will put an end to any rumours about vampires.’
‘The police here are good,’ Foma said calmly. ‘They checked everything too, and they’re conducting an investigation. But putting an end to stupid rumours is none of their business. Who takes any notice of the yellow press?’
I felt encouraged. I had gone straight to the right conclusions after all.
‘I don’t think any more intervention will be required from us,’ I said. ‘Murder is evil, but let people fight their own evil themselves. It’s a pity about the boy, of course, but…’
Foma nodded once or twice and took another sip of beer. Then he said:
‘Yes, a pity about the boy … But Anton, what are we going to do about the bite?’
‘What bite?’
Foma leaned forward across the table and whispered:
‘It wasn’t a knife wound on Victor’s neck, Anton. There’s absolutely no doubt that the marks were left by a vampire’s fangs. Now, that’s an unfortunate problem, isn’t it?’
I felt my ears burning.
‘Is that definite?’
‘Ab-so-lute-ly. Just how would a hit man know so much about the way a vampire’s fang is structured and how it works? The lateral grooves, the tapping point, Dracula’s fissure, the corkscrew twist on entry …’
By this time my entire face was blazing red. I could see the classroom where I had once been taught, and my teacher Polina Vasilievna with her pointer, and the huge rubber model on the desk: a pointed, twisted object like a corkscrew and a white fibreglass board with black letters: ‘Vampire’s right canine (operational) tooth. Model, scale 25:1.’ It had been a working model at one stage: when a button was pressed it had elongated and begun to rotate. But the electric motor had burnt out long ago, and nobody had taken the trouble to repair it, so the fang was permanently frozen in a position between concealed and operational.
‘I was too hasty with my conclusions,’ I admitted. ‘It’s my fault, Mr Lermont.’
‘It’s nobody’s fault, you simply didn’t want any Others to be involved,’ Foma said generously. ‘If you’d familiarised yourself with the results of the autopsy, you’d have realised that your version was wrong. So now what do you say?’
‘If the vampire was very hungry and he sucked the man dry’ – I frowned – ‘he could have puked up afterwards. But not all the blood. Were there any traces of anaesthetic serum in the water?’
‘No, there weren’t,’ Foma said, with a nod of approval. ‘But then, that doesn’t mean anything, the vampire could have been in such a hurry that he didn’t bother with the anaesthetic.’
‘He could have been,’ I agreed. ‘So either he puked or he bit and then held the victim until he bled out. But what for?’
‘To confuse us all and mislead the investigation.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Why confuse things? Why leave the marks of a vampire’s bite and drain away the blood? They’re very careful with it, they wouldn’t just pour it away. Our vampires even have a saying for novices: “Blood spilt on the ground is mother’s milk wasted”.’
‘You can always find a way to make sense of anything,’ Foma declared didactically. ‘For example – the killer vampire needed to make us suspect a young, hungry vampire. So he bit the boy but he didn’t drink, just poured the blood away, hoping that it wouldn’t be found. Or the vampire was hungry, but as soon as he bit he realised what he’d done and decided to pour the blood away, to create the impression of falsified evidence …’
Completely carried away now, I fluttered my hands in the air, as if I was talking to Geser.
‘Oh, come on, Bo—Foma! You can come up with lots of theories, but I’ve never met a hungry vampire who would leave the blood once he had his fangs in. This argument isn’t getting us anywhere. What’s far more important is why the boy was killed. Was he a random victim? Then we really do have to look for a tourist or a novice. Or did someone have a special reason for killing Victor?’
‘A vampire can kill a man with a single blow,’ said Foma. ‘And without even touching him. Why would he leave any clues behind? Victor could have died from a heart attack, and no one would have suspected a thing.’
‘Agreed,’ I said, with a nod. ‘Then … then your Master is right. It’s some vampire from out of town, and the boy just happened to be in the wrong place. He bit him, then got frightened and puked up the blood.’
‘It looks that way,’ Foma agreed. ‘But there’s still something bothering me, Anton.’
We finished our beer without another word.
‘Have you tried testing traces from the body?’ I asked.
I didn’t have to say that I meant traces left by an aura.
‘A dead aura from a dead body?’ Foma said, with a sceptical shake of his head. ‘That’s never been much help. But we did try. No traces were found … Tell me, watchman, what else did you see that was unusual in the Dungeons?’
‘There are Others working there,’ I said. ‘There’s no blue moss, although the place is overflowing with emotions. Someone cleans it out regularly.’
‘There are no Others working there,’ Foma snapped. ‘The blue moss just doesn’t grow there.’
I looked at him uncertainly.
‘Out of interest, we tried bringing it in from outside. It withers and falls off in an hour. A sort of natural anomaly.’
‘Well… it happens, I suppose,’ I said, making a mental note to check in the archives.