The murder victim lay gutted, crumpled and bloody in the Whitechapel alleyway
while the forensics team gathered evidence: evidence that in this age of
science might raise the inconvenient suspicion that a body can still be walking
the earth and killing after more than a century.
The other one walked unchallenged through the crowd inside the taped area; a
business-suited chameleon invisible to officialdom trained to respect uniforms.
I too go uniformed to sneak in wherever power and curiosity threaten me and
mine with exposure.
Our eyes met. “Will you write to them again this time?” I asked. “Graphologists
may recognise your hand. They’ll wonder how you can still be alive after a
hundred years.”
“Did we meet before? My memory falters in these hungry days. Do you have one of
these?” Engraved and ancient bronze glittered at his throat when flash
photography briefly silvered the fog.
“We didn't meet because I was elsewhere in London disguising my life as fiction and my
death as fact. The life of a secret immigrant was difficult even then. And no;
my immortality does not require concoctions such as -” I paused and reasoned
for a moment “- alchemy and a tamed and obedient Great Plague bacillus. Never
mind. I ask again: will you write to them?”
“I will. I’ll taunt them with a keepsake from that pretty, exhausted battery
over there with taunts crafted to twist their righteous anger into sinful wrath
and so kindle my sorcery afresh. My letter will be larded with misspellings;
it’s one’s genius one must disguise rather than one’s antiquity, don’t you
think? Ah, and now I know you for who you are.”
He nodded towards the dome of his great contemporary’s greatest monument; still
standing despite the lesser fires of the Blitz. “They ignore so much. A thousand
stories name you and a million trinkets carry pictures of your race: some of
you are even imagined to be loveable. Believing you’re a myth blinds your prey
to their plight. And so it is with me. For decades their self-proclaimed
brightest minds have failed to connect the emblem on their computers with the
anecdote for which the common herd knows me best. With my student gone and
sainted for his tutored genius only secretive bankers and silent lawyers might
guess there was another proprietor, and how else might the cattle discover me
for who I am?”
“It is not who you are that concerns me” I said, reaching for his throat.
Exposure of what he was might also point to me.
A paramedic can go almost anywhere in London by day; even one burdened with a weighty
biohazard container, but at night I’m almost invulnerable. And the Thames was
not far away.
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