Ruthven had been listening to this in silence, and now went over to the sideboard and splashed whiskey into a glass. “Go on,” he said, coming over to press the drink into Cranswell’s hand. “I think we’d better hear the rest of it.”
Cranswell looked up at him, blinking, and then wrapped his fingers around the glass. The cut-crystal facets glittered as his hand shook. He swallowed half its contents, coughed explosively, and then settled back in the chair looking slightly steadier.
“I was okay when I left the Museum,” he continued, looking down. “But as I was walking down Drury Lane, I started … seeing little points of light again. Blue light. More than one of them. In pairs, just for a moment. Nobody else seemed to see anything out of the ordinary, I mean, it was dark and raining and everyone was in a hurry to get wherever they were going, but nobody else seemed to notice the … eyes.” He shivered, once, hard, like a dog coming out of deep water. “Then I happened to look down a side street where all the lamps were out, and there were lots of them. A whole swarm of little points of light. They were watching me—I don’t just think, I know—and then they moved, they were coming toward me, and—that’s when I ran.”
He drank off the rest of the whiskey and shut his eyes for a long moment. “But I got you the books you wanted. Sorry I’m late.”
Fastitocalon watched Ruthven’s face go through a rapid series of expressions, ending up with a kind of fond exasperation. “Never mind that,” he said. “Thank you for bringing them, and I want you to stay here tonight, Cranswell; I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t like it.”
Greta’s flat in Crouch End was quite a long way away from both her clinic and Ruthven’s house, and at times like this she often found herself thinking that she’d really rather suck it up and deal with the vagaries of public transportation for the commute instead of driving; she’d spent the past half an hour stuck in traffic on Farringdon Road, and her fingers on the wheel were crossed that her phone wouldn’t ring with urgent summonses to anywhere.
She had turned the radio off ten minutes earlier after flipping through the stations to see if she could find any useful traffic information, and now turned it on again in search of something other than car horns to listen to.
“… a second killing today,” someone on the news was saying, her smooth announcer’s voice not quite smooth enough to hide a kind of horrified fascination. “That’s ten murders now in six weeks. Neil, what do we know so far about the latest cases?”
“Well, Sheri, both seem to point unquestionably to the serial killer popularly known as the Rosary Ripper, from what the Met have released so far. The first victim of the day was found in Whitechapel, as we reported previously, early this morning. The second body was found in Soho just hours ago, and the MO and the signature rosary left at the scene of each crime are consistent with the other cases. Investigations are still under way to locate the source of the rosaries.”
I should hope so, too, thought Greta, staring at the radio, her eyes wide. Two more murders, one done in broad daylight? How the hell is he—or they—getting away with this?
Before last night, before she had had any reason to suspect that there was more than one individual involved in the killings, she had thought about it only at a distance. She’d felt strongly if obscurely that whoever was doing the killing was male. Most serial killers were men; those few women who committed multiple murders tended to do it with poison, as far as Greta knew, and for monetary gain. This—whoever it was, or they were—seemed to be doing it for the sheer hell of the thing, and so far it looked like they weren’t slowing down at all.
The unpleasant thought occurred to her that perhaps the unsatisfactory result of the attack on Varney had spurred them on to more active efforts, to make up for that particular failure. They hadn’t killed him, but hey, perhaps two humans were worth as much as one vampyre to whoever was behind this business.
Neil the announcer was continuing: “Police have issued safety recommendations for the public, which are available on their website as well as all main news agencies. It is strongly advised that people travel in groups and stay in well-lit areas as much as possible. Remain alert and aware of your surroundings at all times.”
“This may be the most prolific serial killer who has been active in greater London since Dennis Nilsen, often referred to as the British Jeffrey Dahmer,” his colleague put in, still with the tinge of fascinated horror in her voice. “Nilsen murdered at least twelve young men in the years between 1978 and 1983. So far it seems that the so-called Rosary Ripper’s motivation in these murders does not appear to be sexual, unlike Nilsen’s crimes, but police have declined to speculate on the real motives behind the recent spree of killings. We can be sure of one thing, Neil, I think.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“London is a frightened city.”
Greta turned the radio off. “London,” she told the darkened dial, “contains multitudes.” The apparent presence of a lunatic or lunatics plural running around the city stabbing people to death was certainly unpleasant, but the world in which she moved was rather more complicated than that inhabited by Neil and Sheri and the majority of their listening public.
Until now, the vicissitudes of the surface world had not impinged noticeably on the version her patients inhabited, and she liked it that way. The idea that the Ripper was responsible for the attack on Varney did not so much frighten Greta as offend her.
And it had to be stopped. It had to be stopped for a number of very obvious reasons, but among them was the fact that such a crossover from the ordinary human world to that of the supernatural represented a clear and present danger to the rest of the supernatural community. Secrecy was safety, and a breach in one was a breach in both.
Her first priority was Varney’s recovery. Once he was well again she could turn her attention to the problem of somehow tracking down whoever was responsible.
Greta had no illusions about her own capacity to go up against something like this herself. That was going to have to be Ruthven’s job; Ruthven, or one of the other people she knew who were capable of casually unscrewing somebody’s head.
Up ahead the traffic was finally beginning to thin out. Greta relaxed a little. It shouldn’t take her long to collect what she needed, and the drive back would be a lot less wearisome.