Fred Vargas - An Uncertain Place

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘The feet are for Radstock to deal with. They’re behind us on the other side of the Channel now.’

‘You said it might be an offering. Who to? Is the cemetery owned by someone?’

‘In a manner of speaking. There’s a master.’

‘What’s he called?’

‘The Entity,’ replied Danglard with a smile.

‘Since when?’

‘The west end of the cemetery, the oldest part, where we were the day before yesterday, was opened in 1839. But of course the master might have lived there before that.’

‘Right.’

‘Some people say that it was because the Entity lived there already in the ancient chapel on Highgate Hill that the place was chosen as a site for a cemetery.’

‘A woman?’

‘No, a man. More or less. And it was his power that drew the dead and the cemetery towards him, you see?’

‘Yes.’

‘They don’t bury anyone now in the west section, it’s become a well-known historical site, it’s famous. There are extraordinary monuments there, strange things of all kinds, and the graves of famous people, like Dickens or Marx.’

A flicker of anxiety crossed the face of the young brigadier . Estalère never tried to conceal either his ignorance or the great embarrassment it caused him.

‘Karl Marx,’ Danglard explained. ‘He wrote an important work on the class struggle, the economy, that kind of thing. He’s the father of communism.’

‘Right,’ said Estalère. ‘But is that something to do with the owner of Highgate?’

‘Call him the Master, most people do. No, Marx is nothing to do with him. It was just to show you that West Highgate Cemetery is famous worldwide. And feared.’

‘Yes, Radstock was afraid. But why?’

Danglard hesitated. Where to begin this story? If he told it at all.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘nearly forty years ago, in 1970, two girls were coming home from school and they took a short cut across the cemetery. They arrived home in distress, saying they had been chased by a black shape, and that they had seen the dead rise from their graves. One of the girls fell ill and started sleepwalking. When she did this, she used to go into the cemetery and always walked towards the same catacomb, the Master’s catacomb, as they called it. The Master must have been calling her. They kept a watch and followed her, and found several dead animals drained of all their blood. The neighbourhood began to panic, the rumour spread, the papers got hold of it and it snowballed. So some sort of self-styled priest decided to go along with other people who were equally worked up to exorcise the Master of Highgate. They went into the vault and found a coffin without a name, somewhat apart from the others. They opened it up. You can guess the rest.’

‘No.’

‘There was a body in the coffin, but it looked neither living nor dead. It was lying there perfectly preserved. A man, but an unknown and nameless person. The exorcist hesitated to put a stake through his heart, because the Church forbids it.’

‘Why would he want to do that anyway?’

‘Estalère, don’t you know what one’s supposed to do to vampires?’

‘Ah,’ the young man said, ‘so this was a vampire .’

Danglard sighed, and wiped some condensation from the train window.

‘Well, that’s what the people thought, and they’d come along with crucifixes, garlic and stakes. And their leader pronounced an exorcism in front of the open coffin: “Get thee gone, wicked being, bearer of all evil and falsehoods! Depart this place, creature of vice.”’

Adamsberg opened his eyes wide.

‘You know this story?’ said Danglard, slightly combatively.

‘Not this one, I know others. At this moment in the story, there’s usually an unearthly cry.’

‘Precisely. There was a great sound of roaring in the vault. The exorcist threw some garlic in and got out, and they stopped up the entry to the catacomb with bricks.’

Adamsberg shrugged.

‘You don’t stop vampires with bricks.’

‘No, and it didn’t work. Four years later, there was gossip that a nearby house was haunted, an old Victorian house in Gothic style. The same exorcist searched the house and found a coffin in the basement, which he recognised as the very same one he had bricked up four years earlier.’

‘And was there a body inside?’ asked Estalère.

‘That I don’t know.’

‘There’s an even older story, isn’t there?’ asked Adamsberg. ‘Or Stock wouldn’t have been so frightened.’

‘I don’t want to get into that,’ muttered Danglard.

‘But Stock knows it, commandant . So we ought to know about it too.

‘It’s his problem.’

‘No, we saw it too. So when does the old story go back to?’

‘Eighteen sixty-two,’ said Danglard with extreme reluctance. ‘Twenty-three years after the cemetery was created.’

‘Go on.’

‘That year, a certain Elizabeth Siddal, known as Lizzie, was buried there. She’d overdosed on laudanum. A kind of dope they had in Victorian times,’ he added, for Estalère’s benefit.

‘I see.’

‘Her husband was a famous man, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Pre-Raphaelite painter and a poet. Some manuscripts of her husband’s poems were buried with her in the coffin.’

‘It’s not long till we get there,’ said Estalère, looking suddenly alarmed. ‘Will we have time for this?’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Seven years later, the husband had the grave opened. Then there are two versions of this. The first says that Rossetti regretted his romantic gesture and wanted to get his poems back in order to publish them. According to the second version, he couldn’t bear living without his wife, and he had this rather scary friend, called Bram Stoker. Have you heard of him, Estalère?’

‘No, never.’

‘Well, he’s the creator of Count Dracula, a very powerful vampire.’

Estalère looked alarmed once again.

‘It’s only a novel,’ Danglard explained, ‘but we do know that the whole subject had an unhealthy fascination for Bram Stoker. He knew all these rituals that relate the living to the undead. So anyway, he was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s.’

In his effort to concentrate, Estalère was twisting another paper napkin, anxious not to miss a word.

‘Some champagne?’ Danglard asked. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. It’s not a nice story but it’s quite short.’

Estalère shot a glance at Adamsberg, who seemed indifferent, and accepted. If he was making Danglard tell the story, it would be only polite to drink his champagne.

‘Bram Stoker was passionately interested in Highgate Cemetery,’ Danglard continued, stopping the drinks trolley again. ‘He made one of his heroines, Lucy, go wandering there, and he made the place famous. Or perhaps, some people say, he was driven to it by the Entity itself. According to the second version, it was Stoker who persuaded Rossetti to look once more at his dead wife. Well, anyway, Rossetti did break open the coffin seven years after her death. And it was then, or perhaps earlier, that the Highgate catacomb was first opened.’

Danglard stopped speaking, as if he too were caught up in Dante Gabriel’s dark wanderings, faced with the keen gaze of Adamsberg and the bemused expression of Estalère.

‘Right,’ said Estalère, ‘he broke open the coffin – and he saw something?’

‘Yes. Well. He discovered with dread that his wife was perfectly preserved. She had kept her long auburn hair, her skin was as fresh and pink and her nails as long as if she had just died, even better than she had looked in life. That’s the truth, Estalère. As if the seven years had done her nothing but good. Not a trace of decomposition.’