Charley studied the card, then secreted it in his tunic, somewhat reassured by this proof of gentility. "Right, sir. Just you rest yourself here. I'll have a bit of a look about."
Asher leaned back in the chair, fighting to remain conscious as the policeman left the darkening room. The shock of the fight was coming over him, clouding his mind, and his whole body ached. The face of the daylight vampire swam before his thoughts, queerly colorless as Ysidro's was, but not smooth and dry-looking-rather it was swollen, puffy, pustulant. Thin rags of fair hair had clung to the scalp; he tried to recall eyebrows and could not-only those huge teeth, grotesque and outsize, and the staring hatred of the blue eyes.
Forcing his mind back to alertness, he fished the picklocks from his coat pocket-clumsily, for he had to reach across his body to do so- and placed them inconspicuously on a blackwood sideboard near the French doors. He guessed he would be under enough suspicion without having those found on his person. Staggering back to the chair, he mentally began ticking off details: brown jacket, corduroy or tweed, countrified and incongruous on that massive shape; and lobeless ears, oddly ordinary given the deformation of the rest of the face. He glanced at his left arm. Blood was staining the claw rips in the coat sleeve.
Dear God, was that what vampires became, if they lived long enough? Was that what the Plague, mixing with God only knew what other organisms of the vampire syndrome, could do? Would he, at the last, have to track down and kill Ysidro, to prevent him from turning into that?
He realized he was singularly lucky to be still alive.
The name, he thought. The voice had shouted a name, just as his head had cracked against the wall. His recollection was blurry, drown-ing under shock and pain and the weight of the vampire's dark mind. Then there was the rattle of harness, the clatter of retreating wheels...
The images faded as his consciousness slipped toward darkness.
"You!"
A powerful hand grabbed him and thrust him back against the back of the chair. His mind cleared, and he saw Grippen looming in the shadows of the now-dark room.
Still holding his swollen right hand to his chest, Asher said wearily, "Let me alone, Lionel. The killer was
here. Grippen...!" For the vampire had turned sharply and, had Asher not seized the corner of his cloak, would have been already halfway to the stairs. Grippen whirled back, his scarred face dark with impatient fury. Quietly, Asher said, "The red-haired girl."
"What red-haired girl? Let go, man!"
The cloak was gone from his grip-even his unbroken left hand hadn't much strength to it. Asher got to his feet, fighting a surge of dizziness as he strode after the vampire up the stairs.
He found Grippen in one of the upper bedrooms, an attic chamber that had at one time housed the maids. He had to light one of the bedroom candles before ascending the narrow stair, no easy feat with only one workable hand; though the vaguest twilight still lingered out-side, the windows of all the attics had been boarded shut, and the place was dark as pitch. He could hear nothing of the bobby Charley moving about the upper regions of the house. Presumably he was lying in one of the bedrooms in a trance cast by the master vampire's mind. That unnatural slumber pressed on his own consciousness as he staggered up the stairs. The pain in his broken wrist helped.
In the darkness he heard Grippen whisper, "Christ's bowels," un-voiced as the wind. The candle gleam caught a velvety sheen from his spreading cloak, and beyond it something glinted, polished gold-the brass mountings of a casket.
There was a coffin in the attic.
Asher stumbled forward into the room. As he did so his foot brushed something on the floor that scraped... a crowbar. Grippen was kneeling beside the coffin, staring in shock at what lay within. Asher's glance went to the window; the boards were gouged but intact. The killers must have been just starting that part of the operation, he thought, when his own footfalls had drawn them from their task.
Grippen whispered again, "Sweet Jesu."
Asher came silently to his side.
Chloe Winterdon lay in the coffin, her head tilted to one side among the pillowing mounds of her gilt hair, her mouth open, fangs bared in her colorless gums, her eyes staring in frozen horror. She was clearly dead, almost withered-looking, the white flesh sunken back onto her bones.
Only slightly bloodied, the pounded end of a stake protruded from between her breasts.
Ragged white punctures marked her throat.
Quietly, Grippen said, "Her blood has all been drained."
Seventeen
At least, Asher reflected with exasperated irony at some point in the long hours between six-thirty and ten, when he was finally released from the Charing Cross station house, they couldn't charge him with Chloe Winterdon's murder. But this was only because Grip-pen had gently gathered the blonde girl's body into his arms and van-ished through some bolthole in the roof, leaving Asher to the tedious business of finding some story to tell the police-which they didn't believe-being held for questioning, and getting
his broken hand splinted by the police surgeon. They injected it with novocaine and warned him to take it to a regular doctor in the morning, but Asher refused all offers of veronal or other sedatives. He knew already it would be a long night.
To questioning, he responded that he was a friend of Dr. Grippen's, that he had gone there on the off chance that a mutual acquaintance, Miss Merridew, had taken refuge with the doctor; she had been missing some days. No, he hadn't reported it before-he had just returned from Paris to find her gone. No, he didn't know where Dr. Grippen could be reached. No, he had no idea why the burglars would have silver-tipped bullets in their gun. They made no comments about the bite marks on his throat and wrists, which was just as well.
It was raining when he stepped outside, a thin, dispiriting rain. Wea-riness made him cold to the bones as he descended the station house steps, his brown ulster flapping cloakwise about him, his right arm in its sling folded up underneath. Even with the novocaine, it hurt damnably. Nearly half the night gone, he thought, and no nearer to finding Lydia than he had been that afternoon.
There was a cab stand at the end of the street. He started toward it, and a dark shape was suddenly at his side, seeming to materialize from the misty rain. A heavy hand caught his elbow. "You're coming with me."
It was Grippen.
"Good," Asher said wearily. "I want to talk to you." After the thing that had attacked him, Grippen no longer impressed him much.
Ysidro was waiting for them in a four-wheeler a little ways down the street. "You certainly took long enough," he remarked, and Asher firmly resisted the urge to punch him as he slumped into the seat at his side.
"I took a few hours out for dinner at the Cafe Royale and a nap," he retorted instead. "If you'd put in an appearance earlier you could have joined me for coffee. They have very handsome waiters." The cab jolted into movement, its wheels swishing softly on the wet pavement; Asher's arm throbbed sharply in its sling. "Lydia's gone. And I've seen the killer."
"Lydia?" Grippen said, puzzled.
"My wife." Asher's brown eyes narrowed as he looked across at the big vampire in his rain-dewed evening cloak, the blunt, square head shadowed by the brim of his silk top hat. "The red-haired girl I asked you about, whose life is the price I'm allegedly being paid for this investigation." Cold anger still filled him at Ysidro, at Grippen, at all of them, and at himself most of all for leading her into this.
"Ah," the master vampire said softly, and his hard, gray glance flicked to Ysidro. "I wondered on that."