CRIMSON EYES

(1994)

CHAPTER ONE

Crimes of the City

WE ARE ALL familiar with the wave of murders, scandals and suicides coinciding with the collapse of BBIC and culminating on Christmas Eve with the bizarre death of a profoundly unpopular Prime Minister.

“That poor fellow captained the most incompetent crew of self-impressed scamps ever to tangle themselves in the rigging of the ship of state,” declared Sir Seaton Begg, heading the investigation. “But, however apt, I wouldn’t wish a fate like his on anyone.” A Callahan Home Office appointee, Begg had led the inquiry into the financial affairs of his own nephew, Barbican Begg, whose mighty frauds had drained the country.

Barbican himself had disappeared, but the aristocrats, politicians and famous plutocrats left to face trial made a sensational list, especially as they began to be killed. Barbican Begg himself had been married to the Prime Minister’s sister, Wendy, who had overdosed two years earlier. A certain coolness between the two men had not interfered with their association. The government depended heavily on Begg’s help. It had continued to endorse BBIC while the cabinet gave authority to large-scale money laundering in the British Caribbean territories, for Begg was underwriting some of its most lunatic flotations.

The first murders in what soon emerged as a pattern had been discovered a year earlier, preceding Barbican Begg’s exposure by months. At Marriage’s Wharf, Wapping, three armed skinheads had been killed by a large blade leaving a single, identical wound which at first looked like the imprint of a pair of lips. The detective in charge believed the skinheads to have been slaughtered in self-defense. KGB, he thought. There was something subtly Slavic about the method. A former MI5 man, given to unfashionable and oversubtle analysis, he could not easily explain the corpses’ grotesque colour nor the hideous terror marking the dead faces, unless, he suggested, the blade had been poisoned.

The pathologist brought in was a retired Scotland Yard man whom Begg had known in his private detective days. Dr. “Taffy” Sinclair’s respect for Begg was returned. In the past, Dr. Sinclair had discovered causes of death previously never imagined but admitted bafflement in this case. “Clearly they were all stabbed,” he told his old colleague over Christmas pints of foaming Ackroyd’s at The Three Revenants, “yet I couldn’t swear they’d been stabbed to death.” The pathologist’s high, pale forehead had creased in a frown. “It’s fanciful, Begg, but if you asked how they’d died I’d have to say, well, that something was sucked out of them. Not blood, especially. Not even their lives, really. Something worse. And by some filthy means, too.” He shuddered.

Seaton Begg had inspected several victims. Long after the Marriage’s case, a senior Lloyd’s officer was discovered in a Streatham brothel. His costume had greatly excited the popular imagination but Begg had been impressed by his horrified expression, the peculiar silvery sheen of the skin, the bloodless wound like a kiss. Save for the wound’s position, the Prime Minister had died in exactly the same way. “As if their souls had been drained?” Begg ordered two more pints of Vortex Water.

Sinclair was enthusiastic. “Quite. It’s not the first time you and I have run up against so-called black magic, but this affair beats everything, eh? Witnesses?”

Begg had no useful witnesses. Those who had heard voices from the Prime Minister’s sitting room could not tell if the other speaker was native or foreign. Someone had glimpsed what he described as a “stained-glass window” full of every imaginable colour which seemed to take the shape of a jeweled cup, its gold and silver blazing so powerfully he was almost blinded before it vanished. The piteous, bloodcurdling cry awakened Downing Street at 4 a.m. Someone heard the front door close. Sleeping soldiers and police outside were discovered unhurt. “But I’m seeing two chaps tomorrow morning who sound better. One claims he spotted the murderer leaving BBIC on the night in question, when most of Barbican’s closest associates called a crisis meeting at their HQ and were identically murdered. Noises, like music or singing, and a brilliant glow were reported, but the assassin was invisible. I gather my first witness believes he saw the Devil.”

Begg added: “Only once before have I felt so thoroughly in the presence of the Supernatural. Rationally we must assume this is a clever murderer using superstition to terrify his victims in advance, enabling him to kill them without any significant resistance. That night he murdered fourteen of the City’s cleverest men, including Sir John Sheppard, Lord Charles Peace, Duval of the Credite Lyonesse, Thomas King, Ricky Turpin and all three Al Glaouis. Only a day later he killed a whole school of Wall Street sharks over here in similar haste—Bass, Floyd, Cassidy, J.W. Harding, the James brothers, Schultz, the Bush boys and several others equally renowned. Not a bad score.”

“You don’t suggest this chap’s done the world a favour?”

“Those who feed like parasites upon their fellows pretty much deserve to have the life sucked out of them, I’d say. The amounts of laundered crack money alone were obscene. This business sickens me, old man. Cabinet ministers are dying faster than they can resign. I’ve no love of the vigilante, but I cannot say I mourn the rascals’ passing. My chief regret is that they did not die with their Swiss account numbers branded on their foreheads.”

Begg’s uncharacteristic pronouncements surprised Sinclair. “You seem to have more sympathy for the assassin than his prey.”

“Absolutely true,” Begg agreed. “Believe me, Taffy, it’s my very sympathy which should soon bring me face to face with our murderer!”

CHAPTER TWO

An Interview with Lady Ratchet

The Prime Minister had not been the only politician to die violently on Christmas Eve. Over in Limehouse, in identical circumstances, while his wife and children were at church praying for his mediocre soul, the education minister, Oswald Quelch, was discovered at the centre of a pentacle, not part of the seasonal decorations, designed to save him from the demon he believed he had summoned.

Seaton’s first witness claimed to have bumped into the murderer as he was leaving Eel House, Quelch’s eighteenth-century merchant’s mansion. There were only two entrances to Eel House—the first from the river, the second from a low gate into an apparently dead-end alley where Ken “Corky” Clarke, a small-time sneak-thief, had been, as he put it, “catching his breath” in the heavy fog so characteristic of London since the repeal of the Clean Air Act. Hearing a soft movement behind him, he had turned to see what he first took to be two disembodied eyes…

“Red and troubled as the flames of Hell, Sir Seaton. Coming out of that evil, muddy fog. I swear I hadn’t had a drop.” Corky’s gin-bloated features contradicted his claim, but Begg was inclined to believe him. It was Boxing Day. They sat together in Begg’s rather austere morning chamber at Sporting Club Square where pale light, filtering through old lace, gave the room a silvery, rather unreal, appearance.

Clarke had glimpsed bone-white skin “like a leper’s,” a dark cape revealing a scarlet lining and the hilt of a massive sword in black, glowing iron, set with a huge ruby. “I thought he must be the Devil, Sir Seaton. You would have done, too. He came at me so sudden and horrible! His eyes pulled my heart out of my chest and left me gasping, tasting that sharp, oily fog as if it was the sweetest air of Kent, and so grateful for my life! I heard his footsteps, light and bright like a woman’s, tapping off up Salt Pie Passage. Oh, Lord, sir! I never want to endure that again. I thought all my sins had caught up with me. Those crimson eyes! I’m a new man now, sir, and conscience-bound to answer your poster.”

“Mr. Clarke, you’ve done well and I commend you!” Seaton Begg was excited. “You bring to mind an old neighbour of mine!” Corky’s description had triggered a train of thought Begg was anxious to pursue. “I note you’ve joined Purity Bottomley’s Born Again Tolstoyans and work for the relief of the homeless. Good man!” He pressed a couple of “shields” into the fellow’s palm.

“God bless you, Seaton Begg!”

“It’s you, Mr. Clarke, God will surely bless! Soon all Britain will have reason to thank you. Farewell, my good chap. I must shortly interview my next witness.” And with a flourish Begg opened the door for the reformed crook, telling his housekeeper, Mrs. Curry, to preserve his peace at all costs for the next hour. Whereupon he went immediately to his shelves, selecting a large German quarto, a jar of his favourite M&E and a baroque meerschaum. Reading eagerly he flung himself down at his table, his pipe already forgotten. Begg was smiling thoughtfully to himself when Mrs. Curry announced his next visitor.

Hamish Ogilvy worked as a porter-attendant at the New Billingsgate Fish Museum. Still in his uniform, he was a small, eager man with a soft Highland accent. On special leave, he was clearly in awe of the famous Seaton Begg as the investigator kindly coaxed his story from him.

On the night of the BBIC murders, Ogilvy, staying late in attendance on a pregnant cuttlefish, had missed the evening bus and decided to risk the walk to Liverpool Street. Ogilvy was soon lost in another fog, arriving at last in Crookburn Street at the corner of Sweetcake Court where BBIC’s brutal architecture was softened by the weather. Pausing to read a sign, he heard a cab behind him. Hoping to ask his way, he saw the cab had come for a shady figure hurrying from BBIC. “I saw her face through the taxi window, Sir Seaton. She was staring back, terrified out of her skin. It was that poor, loony Mrs. Ratchet, who used to be in the government. Pale as a ghost. I could almost hear her teeth chattering.”

Ogilvy was also rewarded and thanked, though less enthusiastically. Reluctantly Begg decided to follow up the account. Apart from Barbican Begg, Lady Ratchet was the only surviving BBIC director. Under the impression that she was variously the English Queen, the Israeli Prime Minister, the American President and Mary, Queen of Scots, she was at best an unreliable witness. She had moved South of the River on the assumption that her enemies could not cross running water and refused all visitors, even relatives. She went out only to “go over my books.” She did not trust modern electronics so her accountants kept a large ledger which she inspected every month. She agreed to a telephone interview only after Begg threatened, under his new powers, forcible entrance of her Esher Tudor castle.

Gentle and firm as possible with the babbling old creature, Begg believed a small, cunning and perfectly coherent mind lay beneath “interference” designed to bully and exhaust opposition. Steadfastly he refused her threats, whines, pathetic lies and claims and continued to demand an account of her whereabouts on the night of the murders. “Nonsense,” she insisted, “I was never there. I was not very well that evening. A touch of Alzheimer’s. My doctor will swear to it. I was at the pictures. Whoever you saw, it wasn’t me. An imposter. You’d better question your chum Elizabeth. She never liked me. They were after the cup, too, you know. They said it was theirs by right. Poppycock! They knew how much it was worth. We planned to set up an office in York. But it’s not safe there any more.”

Begg insisted he meet her and talk “chiefly for your own protection.” Eventually he persuaded her, by wonderfully veiled threats, to meet him or be arrested for murder.

“Very well, Sir Seaton.” She was suddenly brisk. “I respect your family name. Be ready to receive me this evening at six o’clock in Sporting Club Square. But please be prepared also to take responsibility for your actions…”

“I am very grateful, Lady Ratchet. By the by, would you try to recall on your way if you ever knew a fellow by the nickname of ‘Crimson Eyes’?”

A cold pause. At length Lady Ratchet replaced the receiver.

CHAPTER THREE

The Last Victim

Heavy snow was falling as the Boxing Day sun set over Sporting Club Square. Lady Ratchet, mad as she was, had never been late. Begg went to his sitting room windows and pulled back the rich, tawny Morris curtains on which the firelight made a new, dancing geometry. He peered through the blackness, through the big white flakes, through the sharply defined branches of plane trees, down into the square, towards the elaborate iron gates where “Mad Maggie” would enter.

At three minutes to six he was sure he heard a taxi setting down. Since then, save for the occasional muffled stamping of snow-laden feet, the Square had grown silent. Glancing again at his gleaming Tompion, Begg saw that it was four minutes past the hour. At that moment the soft winter air was pierced by the high-pitched shriek of a police whistle. Begg started, as if struck by a new idea, and hurried to don his overcoat. He reached the policeman outside the gates in less than a minute. “What’s up, officer?”

The answer lay before them, already touched by a thickening layer of snow. Begg instantly recognized the frail, twisted little body from the shoes subtly clashing with the skirt. It was poor old “Mad Maggie.” Noting the black leather trophy case in her left hand, Begg knelt beside the body, feeling uselessly for a pulse. The corpse seemed to shrivel as he watched, as if it had been animated solely by its owner’s lunacy. Her face stared up at him through snow still melting on her fading paint. It was an expression of unmitigated terror. There was no sign of a wound. Maggie had died clutching at her own throat. Who had known she was on her way to see him?

Begg looked around for footprints. The snow had already obscured the trail. By the way she lay half in the gutter and half on the pavement, Lady Ratchet had met her death as she entered the square.

“By God, sir,” exclaimed the policeman, “it’s like she ran into Jack the Ripper and Mr. Hyde at the same time. What do you think she saw, sir?”

“Oh, I’d guess something much worse than either,” said Seaton Begg.

CHAPTER FOUR

Old Blood

At one in the morning, Boxing Day over and snow continuing to fall, Begg, wrapped in a heavy Ulster and fur cap, stood in the darkness of an archway on the third floor of a Sporting Club Square mansion only five blocks from his own. Begg’s stoicism was famous, but tonight he felt his age. At last he heard a soft footfall in the snow outside. A door opened almost silently. Light steps sounded on the carpeted stairway, and at last a tall figure in full evening dress appeared on the landing, stepping forward with a latchkey held out in its bone-white hand.

Then Begg revealed himself.

“And did you enjoy the Messiaen, Monsieur?”

A death’s head whirled round to confront him. The eyes were covered with thick, round tinted lenses, as if sensitive to the faintest light. Gauntly handsome features showed amusement as Begg struck a match to reveal his own face.

“The Messiaen had its moments, you know,” said the albino. “But the English play French music impossibly badly. Good evening, old neighbour. You see I’m back in my chambers. We last met in Mirenburg when you did me a great service.”

With a movement of his head Begg let his old adversary open the door. A small oriental man appeared and took their outer garments, showing them into a sparsely furnished Japanese sitting room.

“A drink, Sir Seaton?” The albino removed his dark glasses to reveal crimson orbs whose strange light threatened to reach into Begg’s very being.

“If you still keep that St. Odhran Armagnac, Count Ulrich, I would love some.” Begg’s own eyes held steady, meeting the albino’s.

“I’ll join you!” To his servant: “Bring the St. Odhran” and then to his friend, “Well, Sir Seaton Begg, explain this small-hours melodrama!”

“You know my interest in the histories of our family’s various branches and my special fascination with our common Central European ancestors. If you would spare me a little time, I would tell you a story?”

“Late as it is, Sir Seaton, I’m always glad to listen to your yarns. A detective tale, is it?”

“Nothing less. It concerns an event frequently recorded in poetry, plays, novels and films all across that part of Europe where Slav meets German. Perhaps you recognize this doggerel?

“A call to the Cautious, a Word to the Wise;

Tonight’s the Night when Crimson Eyes,

His face bone-white and his Mouth blood-red,

Disdains the Body, but tastes the Head.”

Count von Bek laughed easily. “Some Rauber und Ritter nonsense? It means nothing to me. I have never been, as you have, fascinated by the patois and folklore of the streets, Sir Seaton.”

“The poem’s from Mirenburg.” Accepting a glass from the servant, Begg paused to enjoy its aroma. “Your family’s real home for centuries. Until Wäldenstein was absorbed into Austria, then Germany and then Czechoslovakia, the Saxon von Beks played a pretty important part in local politics. The legend I know from German literature is ‘Karmesinangen.’ The French called him Le Loup Blanc. Your family is closely associated with that and several other enduring Middle European legends.

“A recurrence of albinism is said to manifest itself every two generations through the maternal line of Lady Rose Perrott, kinswoman to Anne Boleyn, who married Count Michael von Bek in 1560 in Mirenburg and gave birth to albino twins, Ulrich and Oona. The albino line is traced back, people believe, before Attila, before the Romans, but like the story of your family’s special affinity with the Holy Grail and a black sword carved with living runes, the tale is comparatively recent. The event on which the poem is based took place in 1895 when Mirenburg was terrorized by a sequence of appalling murders. The victims were slain by a sword making a singular wound and leaving horrified corpses oddly coloured. A group of Rosicrucian exiles had obtained a jeweled cup they claimed was the Holy Grail and summoned a demon to help celebrate an unholy ritual. The ‘demon,’ drawn some say from Hell itself, was none other than a revived Count Ulrich von Bek, otherwise known as ‘Crimson Eyes,’ whose life-span is far longer than a common mortal’s, thanks to his sword.

“Not a demon at all, but an avenging angel! It is the von Beks’ duty to defend the Grail at all costs. Mirenburg legends say the family has a destiny to achieve the resolution of God and Satan.” Begg savoured his St. Odhran.

“Old folk tales, Sir Seaton. How people love to chill their blood! So much more mysterious and romantic than the prosaic truth! Regrettably, we have little time to chat further. I’m off on my travels tomorrow.”

“I would imagine your business here is over,” agreed Begg. “There’s talk Barbican fled to the Caymans.”

“By coincidence, exactly where I’m bound, Sir Seaton.” The albino drew a case from his jacket and offered Begg a thin, brown cigarette, taking one for himself when the investigator refused. “I’m growing too soft for these London winters.”

“The tale continues,” Begg went on equably. “It seems a City and Wall Street consortium came by an old von Bek family heirloom mislaid in 1943 when the Nazis arrested the count in Mirenburg. A Polish officer sold a cup which, it was said, could heal or even raise the recently dead! The potential profit from such a thing was enormous. But it would only display its powers in the presence of Barbican Begg, its steward, who tried to sell his interests to shore up BBIC. Well, as you know, members began to die pretty regularly, first in ones and twos, then by the boardroom-full. Every man who helped set up the vast BBIC fraud was being wiped out. In 1895 the Mirenburg press noted that Crimson Eyes never killed a woman, a child or an innocent. Crimson Eyes could not kill old Lady Ratchet. He let her run away and eventually cross the river into Esher. Her poor, baffled brain was addled once and for all. She locked herself up.

“Ironically, she had nothing to fear from Crimson Eyes. Neither she nor I knew that the von Beks had kept their Sporting Club Square flat. She ran into you while she was leaving her taxi and you were trying to catch it, because you were late for a supper concert at the Wig-more Hall. You did not even recognize her! But she knew you. She saw your eyes. She thought she had met her nemesis and she died of shock. Or, you might say, she died of guilt…”

Trained to hide his feelings, Count von Bek could not suppress a slight, sardonic smile. With a sigh, he sat back in his chair, his moody red eyes staring thoughtfully into the amber of the glass. “So it’s done at last. Apart from your nephew, of course, who seems to have taken the cup with him. I had not realized he was still in England until last week.”

“Hiding at Lady Ratchet’s. She’d grown to resent him. He believed she’d betray him. If he has the cup, you, presumably, have the sword?”

“A grotesque old family relic, really. Would you like to see it?” The albino’s voice had taken on a peculiar edge.

“That would be a privilege.” Begg’s own voice was steady as steel. Rising, von Bek swiftly crossed the room to open a door in the wall. From within came a distant murmuring like swarming bees. Von Bek stooped into the space and withdrew an ornate broadsword, scabbarded in heavily worked leather. A huge sphere in the hilt glowed red as the slender albino came to stand before Begg with the long scabbard stretched upon both white palms. “There’s our famous Mittelmarch blade, cousin. A rather rococo piece of smithery, you’ll recall.”

“Perhaps you could slip it from the scabbard?” Begg suggested evenly.

“Of course.” Frowning, von Bek changed his grip and drew out a few inches of the blade. His arm shook violently. Now the sound became an angry alien muttering. Seaton realized he looked upon a living thing. He sensed something horribly organic about the black metal within which red words swarmed, words in an alphabet Begg had seen only once before on three broken obsidian tablets buried in a tomb below a temple in Angkor Wat. Those runes bore no resemblance to anything else on Earth, and Begg could not free his eyes from them. He was in their power. Inch by inch the blade slipped from its scabbard, taking control of the creature who held it.

Then with an enormous effort of will, Begg broke from his trance to shout: “No! For the love of God, von Bek! Master your sword, man!”

He stepped back, watching as the albino, his red eyes blazing in their deep sockets, battled with the blade until at last he had resheathed it and fell exhausted back into his chair. The sword continued to mutter and shriek in thwarted lust.

“It would have taken your soul,” said von Bek coolly, “and fed me my share.”

“I remembered that,” said Begg. “I know the secret of your longevity. We have the murder weapon, eh? The chief motive was retribution. And we know the method. Barbican and company needed your experience when the Grail stopped ‘working.’ You were invited to London and came ashore at Marriage’s Wharf. As you realized what BBIC were up to, you took it upon yourself to ‘balance the books.’ I can’t say I approve.”

“You have evidence for any of this?” Von Bek lit another drugged cigarette.

“The blade doubtless matches the wounds, but I’m not sure we want to release it into the world, do we? You are right, count. I am unable to arrest you, but it has given me some satisfaction to solve this case and confront, as I had hoped, such an unusual killer. At a stroke or two you have considerably improved the probity of politics and business in this country. Yet still I disapprove of such actions.” He would not shake the pale hand when it was offered.

With a regretful shrug, Count Ulrich turned away. “Differing times and cultures refuse us a friendship. Can I offer you some more of the St. Odhran?”

But Begg, oddly depressed, made his excuses and left.

Returning home through the old year’s snows, he reflected that, while one act of barbarism did not justify another, he could not in his heart say that this had been an unrewarding Christmas. He looked forward to returning to the warmth of his own fireside, to opening the black trophy case Lady Ratchet had brought him, to stare with quiet ecstasy into that blazing miracle of confirmation, that great vessel of faith and conscience: the Grail, of which he was now the only steward.