He crouched on the floor with his knees drawn up and his chin resting on them. His arms circled loosely around his shins, the one a little lower than the other due to the dislocated shoulder. He glowered at me.
“Who sent you for Master Purcell?”
“An old friend whose business he tends.”
Jakob sniffed. “That’s nothing.”
“And that’s all you need to know. I need to know what’s become of Purcell and the business he was taking care of.”
The creature shrugged. “Some of them blood drinkers came in the night—late, as the river sang of the rising tide—and took him.”
“How long ago?”
“I can’t count your time—s’meaningless.”
Before I tried again, I considered: He was a creature from the tidal river. Sunrise and sunset meant little to him. But tides and moon phases would.
“How many high tides since Purcell was taken?”
He almost smiled. “Thirty-seven.”
Unless the Thames was a freak of nature, it had two high and two low tides per day. So Purcell had been missing for eighteen and a half days, give or take a bit. Financial investments and power rarely fall apart from a mere fortnight’s absence, so someone had done something beyond just grabbing Edward’s British comptroller. “Blood drinkers” Jakob had called them, so vampires were responsible; and since I’d rarely heard of the sanguinary brotherhood cooperating with humans willingly, it looked increasingly like the vampires of Clerkenwell had moved against Edward personally. “At whose instigation and why?” would be the next questions to answer, but that was going to be a lot tougher without tipping Edward’s hand.
If it wasn’t tipped already. There was still the matter of someone or something following me.
“Who sent them?” I asked, knowing vampires rarely acted on their own unless they were planning a coup, and even then they tended to gather cronies and work as a pack. I hoped Jakob would be able to tell me who was behind Edward’s problem so I could get back to worrying about my own.
“I dunno! Their king or queen, the little one—or whatever they call it, I s’pose.”
“Did the vampires take anything besides Purcell?” I asked.
“Papers.” Jakob flung his good arm toward a doorway behind him. “From the table in there.”
“What sort of papers?”
He giggled. “No idea. I can’t read your scratchings.”
“So you never did any paperwork for him, didn’t carry any of those things to anyone else?”
Jakob nodded. “I’ve done, but only to fetch and carry and pay.”
“To whom recently?”
He giggled again; it sounded like bubbles in an aquarium. “Y’think I know, or could say? One small-eyed, ugly face is very like another. Only the smell of your blood tells you apart.” He leaned forward, showing his teeth again. “Can you smell living blood? Would y’know the scent of one or another of you if I told you? The blood drinkers, they smell of their meals and their death. And you, you smell of. ” He took a deep breath through slitted nostrils. Then he pulled a face. “You smell. of water and gun smoke, death in steel, blood. and too much magic.” Jakob scooted backward. “I don’t care for your stink.”
“I could do without yours, too, frog-boy.”
He flashed his teeth but said nothing. A lot of magical bindings cease at death, but Purcell had been dead to begin with, so I wasn’t sure how the magic would hold up if Purcell was dead in a more permanent way. Would Jakob keep on thinking he had a master long after Purcell was nothing but an empty coffin and a forgotten name? I wasn’t sure.
I changed tack. “May I see the desk?”
Jakob shrugged. “Can’t do more harm.”
I took that for sufficient invitation and stood up to cross into the far room. Jakob took a desultory swipe at me as I passed and I kicked at him with equal interest.
The room must have started as a dining room. The tall narrow windows peered out at the next building with only the thinnest view of the sky above, but light still managed to find its way down the gap between the buildings and lend a wan illumination to the place. It was a clever security system for a vampire in its way, the daylight being a natural barrier to others and ensuring that the owner would always be awake when the room was habitable. Purcell had clearly not been having any dinner parties; the room was strewn with detritus, ripped paper, upended boxes and furniture, torn curtains, and general upheaval—and not all of it was recent. The table that must have served as a desk had been toppled onto one side, upsetting an old-fashioned ink bottle so it had stained the thick old Oriental rug below. A small pile of recent correspondence was neatly stacked on the one remaining intact chair—Jakob’s concession to duty—but other than that, there wasn’t much chance of finding anything useful in the heap.
I picked up the letters and shuffled through them. One was from TPM in Seattle; several others appeared to be advertising, or regular bills. I tore open the TPM letter, but it was only Edward asking after Purcell and what was going on with some import duty. There was a related note from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs requesting payment of overdue duties on the import of half a dozen Greek amphorae, and another note about rents in someplace called Bishop’s Stortford. Useless. I put the envelopes back on the chair and returned to the main room, where Jakob glowered at me but did nothing as I wandered around and took a look at the rest of the tall, shallow house.
In the basement were seventeenth-century kitchens, long abandoned, and a storage room that had been made over into Purcell’s resting place far from the sun and difficult to storm. A wrecked safe stood ajar next to an ornate copper coffin and a massive double wardrobe filled with fashionable and expensive business clothes from several eras. The upper rooms were bedrooms and a tiny Victorian bathroom with an only slightly newer toilet and a massive claw-footed tub that appeared to be Jakob’s sleeping place. A delicate French commode cabinet, wedged between the utilities, was filled with waterlogged trinkets and bits of jewelry. The attic was a wonderland of antiques and trunks filled with ancient odd and ends. My collector’s sensibilities were overwhelmed, but judging by the dust, nothing had been disturbed in ages. I took nothing and put things back into their respective places, turning away to find Jakob silently watching me with his one good fog-lamp eye.
CHAPTER 21
I looked back at Jakob with a bland face but keeping very still, just in case he was poised to leap at me again. “Nothing to say what’s become of Purcell,” I said, feeling the need to explain my snooping.
“Course not.”
“Why do you think he was taken?”
Jakob made a face. “I don’t know an’ I don’t care.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t be upset if he were dead.”
He snorted. “I wouldn’t care were he gone forever, though would he were floating in the river where I might find him and eat his heart—if he has one.”
“Bloodthirsty little monster, aren’t you?”
He smiled and bowed his head. “Are y’done now? There’s naught else to see and naught to tell.”
“I have one question. What was the last thing you did for your master? What job? Where did it take you?”
He made a coughing noise and scrambled down the narrow staircase ahead of me. “I carried a letter to a place what smelled of old things and sanctified theft. A big white shop with pots in the window and there was a black stone creature over the door—half a woman with a lion’s head. She don’t like me.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
Jakob snorted again and led me down until we were back in the original sitting room I’d first entered. He scrambled to the door and held it open for me, stooped and inhuman now that I could better see him.
“Now go on your way. I’ve done with you.”
I took the hint and left. I held my shudders until I was out in Jerusalem Passage again where the sunlight had slipped to an obtuse angle and long shadows had moved into the corners and overhangs. I looked around—more in reaction to Jakob than anything else—and started back toward St. John’s Lane.