“I’ve read about it; who hasn’t? Quite catching the public imagination.”
“Arthur also wants to go back to the Leicester Square Vampire.”
“And you wish to expose my diaries to the light. Very well, but in return, you must help me put up our Christmas tree; we’re short of strong lads.” She pointed to a bedraggled pine propped in the corner.
“Don’t tell me you’ve forsaken your usual pagan iconology and have become infected with the pernicious spirit of Christmas,” said Bryant in surprise. “Aren’t you a few months premature?”
“We’re equal opportunity worshippers,” Maggie pointed out. “Anyway, Christmas is incorrectly placed in the calendar, so we’ve moved it forward by way of recompense. The celebration is rooted in the belief that during the winter solstice, the door between our world and the one containing evil spirits is left open. When dark entities attempt to step across the gap in search of human souls, we ward them off with talismans; hence all the ornaments. And that’s not a Christmas pine, it’s a representation of the great snake Ydragsil.”
“It wasn’t last year, when you stuck a fairy on top of it,” Bryant reminded her. He still recalled the deformed angel she had constructed from dead pigeon wings, crepe paper, and a cat skull that owed less to the spirit of St Nicholas and more to that of Ed Gein.
“I hope you won’t try to weasel out of our canticle service again this year,” said Maggie. “Maureen dropped beetroot salad inside the harmonium, so it sounds like it’s being played by Hornblas, the patron devil of musical discord, but that’s what happens when you eat snack lunches from a Jiffy bag. Come into the office.” She led the way to a small room stacked with books and newspapers, in the midst of which an ancient computer screen stuttered and rolled. April sat in one corner, almost buried behind the white witch’s notebooks.
“Your handwriting is awful, Maggie,” she complained. “Half of it looks back to front.”
“That’s because it is, darling. Mirror-writing. Arthur taught me years ago. I’m left-handed, you see; it makes less mess to go right to left on right-hand pages. Arthur is here with your grandfather.”
“I think we’ve got what you asked for, Arthur,” said April, tapping her notebook.
“You’ve already briefed her?” asked May, surprised.
“You’d be proud of me, Grandad – I got on a tube train this morning.” She raised a small amulet shaped like a miniature astrolabe. “Maggie gave it to me for my agoraphobia.”
“Chased silver,” said Maggie proudly. “A colony of druids on the Orkney Islands nearly blinded themselves making it.”
“Wait a minute, how long have you two known each other?” asked May, waggling a finger between them.
April smiled conspiratorially. “Get in the game, John. Uncle Arthur introduced me to Maggie years ago. We don’t all have to stay in touch through you, you know.”
“I don’t want you filling her head with strange ideas,” May admonished. “She has quite enough to worry about.”
“Rubbish, the child is old enough to make up her own mind about the world.”
“I’ve been assisting Maggie on-line for a while now,” April explained. “When I couldn’t go out, Maggie found me incantations that could help.”
“There was nothing magical about them, it was just good psychology,” Maggie assured him. The white witch stood beside April, examining the books. “Would you care to hear what we’ve found?” Maggie hauled up her spectacle chain and squinted at a sheet of paper containing April’s notes. “The first publicly recorded attack of the Leicester Square Vampire was, as you rightly mention, in 1973, but the first time you mentioned such an incident to me was just after the war.”
“Are you sure?” asked Bryant, rubbing his watery cobalt eyes. “I don’t remember that.”
“Because your predator had no name at that point,” Maggie reminded him. “It was an isolated incident. He sucked blood from a Wren.”
“Show me.”
She turned the diary to him. “Two days after that, he attacked a nineteen-year-old typist from Dagenham, bit her on throat and wrist, cracked two ribs, multiple bruising.”
Bryant read the entry. “Didn’t I follow this up? John, do you remember?”
“Only vaguely,” May admitted. “I recall that the girl was badly shaken. We had no leads, and there were more important things to worry about. We were trying to find a murderer stalking the cast of
“You may not have realised it, but the Leicester Square attacks continued with a fair amount of regularity,” said Maggie. “We only found it because of the Panic Site. It’s a Web site set up by Dr Harold Masters.”
“That strange academic who runs the Insomnia Squad?” asked Bryant. Masters’s group of intellectual misfits regularly stayed up all night arguing about everything from Arthurian fellowships and Islamic mythology to the semantics of old Superman comics. It was a wonder they were still able to hold down regular jobs.
“Lately he’s been cataloguing social panics and outbreaks of mass hysteria. He noted activities consistent with mob violence around the square and traced them to dozens of attacks over a period of over forty years.”
“That’s rather a long time for someone to operate in such a small area without getting caught, don’t you think?” said May.
Maggie ignored him. “You wanted to know how he picked his victims, Arthur, when and where he decided to strike, so I rang an old psychic friend of mine.”
It was on the tip of May’s tongue to ask if the psychic had answered the phone before it rang, but he thought better of it.
“Unfortunately, Madame Lilith’s information proved to be incorrect.”
“There’s a surprise,” May said without meaning to.
Maggie fixed him with an eye that could have drawn the past from a paperweight. She returned to April’s notes. “The various witness descriptions are remarkably constant.”
“I checked news files on the Web and found myself going back even further,” said April. “His first appearance may well have been in the 1740s.”
“You mean we’re looking for some kind of ageless, mythical monster?” asked Bryant with excited incredulity.
That was enough for May. He threw his hands up in protest. “Has everyone gone mad? We are not looking for him or any other kind of monster, thank you, we’re after someone completely different, someone who has been operating for barely a fortnight.”
“Are you, though?” asked Maggie. “Across the centuries there have been many attackers who have gained mythical status. They seek to leave behind a permanent mark on the city.”
“It’s true,” Bryant agreed. “London has a secret all-but-forgotten history of crimes and criminals that have caught the public imagination. James Whitney, William Hawke, the Earl of Pembroke, Dr Thomas Cream, Charley Peace, Thomas Savage, the Hammersmith Ghost, the Lollards, the Kennington Maniac, the Stockwell Strangler, the London Monster, Jack the Ripper. Few were ever caught, but all excited interest and grew to legendary status. The Highwayman is merely the latest in a long line of seemingly superhuman English villains.”
“How does this knowledge connect us to the present, exactly?” asked May. “You’re not going to try and convince me that they’re all linked.”
“But they are, John, via the children on the Roland Plumbe Community Estate. There has been trouble on the site for generations, owing to arguments over land access. In every village, town, and city, champions are found, victims are chosen, villains emerge, and gradually the most memorable ones enter the realm of legend. These cases are rooted in fact but acquire supernatural status because of the hysterical reaction of the public. If their deeds passed unnoticed, they would never find a place in history. ‘Hue and cry’ was a procedure developed under which a robbery victim could insist upon passersby giving chase to catch the criminal. It encouraged mob hysteria. Look at the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, and how the public hammered a stake through the heart of the killer’s corpse before burying him under a pavement. Panic swept the capital. Families began locking their doors for the first time, and Parliament recommended the creation of a police force. Or take the case of the London Monster. April, do you have my original notes on him?”
“Here. Do you want me to read them back?”
May was about to protest but decided against it. His granddaughter was clearly interested in helping with the case, and perhaps it was better to hear her out.
April began to read aloud. “‘Between 1788 and 1790, women in Mayfair were terrorised by ‘The Monster’,
