Thursday afternoon
Furbelow Hall, Synne’s manor house, was built in the early seventeenth century. At that time, the village was known officially as Lesser Synne, a name that stuck until well into the twentieth century, when Warwickshire County Council finally agreed to drop the “Lesser.” The villagers’ complaint was not that there was no longer any corresponding Greater Synne to justify the demeaning qualifier, but that there never had been one in the first place.
Synne had narrowly escaped being the site of an early Civil War battle when the young “Mad Cavalier” Prince Rupert of the Rhine stopped at the recently completed Furbelow Hall, eager to try out the confections from its state-of-the-art kitchens. He missed the Roundhead army because, hours later, he was still trying out his host’s state-of-the-art privy.
The Hall stood on the main road, about a third of a mile to the west of the village. If it had ever been surrounded by formal gardens, they had long since disappeared under ivy and bracken, but Effie found a cleared brick path from the iron gates to the main door. Like so many Jacobean mansions, the Hall’s floor plan was a huge uppercase H, with its principal entrance in the center of the crossbar. As Effie approached the door, the jaundiced yellow and gray stonework of the high, flanking wings seemed to envelop her, even though she was still outside. It was as if she were walking between the outstretched paws of a gigantic cat, crouching like a Sphinx, waiting for a clueless mouse to wander up.
She looked for a bell-pull or doorknocker, but seeing none, pushed against the door, which opened with a satisfying creak into a dark entrance hall. She could just make out an ornately carved wooden staircase, folding itself into the wall to the right, and the dim rectangles of paintings above the balustrade. She took a few paces, her footsteps reverberating across a sea of black and white tiles.
What was that? A noise, like another footstep, distant. It seemed to come from a curtained doorway to her left. She tiptoed across and pulled the heavy curtain aside, revealing a long corridor. A faint square of light at the end—and did she see the edge of a man, tall, sliding out of sight? Maybe it was another curtain at the far end, swaying in a draft.
“Welcome to my house!”
The deep male voice came from the top of the stairs. A monk stood on the landing, holding a single candle in a holder, his face mostly hidden beneath a cowl. He began a stately progress down the stairs, shielding the candle’s flame with his free hand, his floor-length black robe flowing over the steps.
“Welcome to my house,” declaimed the Vampire of Synne again as he descended. “Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring!”
“Mr. Snopp?” Effie inquired. The man waited until he had descended to her level, then inclined his head.
“I am Snopp. And I bid you welcome, Detective Sergeant Strongitharm, to my house. Kindly forgive the low light. Follow me.”
He led her into the corridor she had just inspected and opened the door to a room on the north side of the H’s crossbar. The curtains were closed, letting in only a sliver of daylight, which fell like a stream of pale fire onto a moth-eaten Indian carpet. But with more light than heat, the room was indifferent cold and damp. Snopp motioned Effie to take a seat on a dusty damask sofa. He sat opposite her in a wingback chair, placing the candle on a table beside him. Effie had only the vaguest impression of clean-shaven, middle-aged features, marred by patches of loose, flaky skin.
“My home is not conducive to hospitality,” Snopp intoned. “But for days that must be spent in darkness, Furbelow Hall has its charms.” He spread his hands, white in the candlelight, the robe’s cuffs falling back to reveal the sleeves of a sweatshirt and an expensive gold watch on his wrist. So Snopp was not penniless, she reflected.
“And one of those charms is that it looks better in the dark,” he was saying. “As do I, I might add.”
His voice was unusual—crisp and well-articulated, but there was a hint of another accent not too far beneath, English regional not foreign. The words seemed to flow easily, as if scripted or rehearsed, perhaps in a thousand imagined conversations during the long, shadowy solitude.
“You’ve had xeroderma pigmentosum all your life?” she asked.
“All my life. And an unusually long one for someone with the condition. According to the odds, I am presently living on borrowed time.”
He placed his hands, powerful fingers curved, like white spiders on the arms of the chair, motionless but as if a sudden claw-like grip could fling him upright.
“You live alone?” Effie continued, when it was clear that Snopp was not going to break the thick stillness with any further comment.
“Completely.”
“You must get lonely.” And it must have been a curtain caught in a cross-draft that she’d seen earlier.
“I am used to my own company. It never seems to leave me, even though it often tires of me.” His thin mouth curved into a small, crooked smile beneath the hood. She still could not see his eyes.
Effie asked him about the van he claimed to have seen on the night of Breedlove’s death, but as Culpepper had reported, the vampire’s brief impression in the moonlight had only isolated the word “Cooper” on the side of the speeding vehicle, among other writing, and he couldn’t even determine its make or color.
“This sighting was early, when I first ventured out,” he told her. “Probably before eleven o’clock. It’s an habitual route—I walk out of the village and beside the river toward Pigsneye. It was on my return journey, more than an hour later, that I saw the naked women on the Common.”
“Well, we don’t think there’s any connection between them and Mr. Breedlove’s death,” she said hastily. “Oh, did you hear that Breedlove’s open grave was filled in on the day of his funeral? Or rather, the night before.”
“How distressing.” Snopp did not sound convincing.
“The dirt used to fill the grave was not the dirt that had been dug out of the grave in the first place. Can you think of any reason why?”
Snopp’s head inclined forward for a moment, and he moved his hands slowly together. “I fear, Sergeant, that you have let the local legends cloud your judgment,” he stated. “I presume you’re hinting at the superstition that vampires can only sleep in the earth of their homeland, and so when they travel beyond their borders, a certain amount of soil must go with them to assure them of a haven for the night. But I have only a passing knowledge of this tradition. They call me the Vampire of Synne because of my necessarily nocturnal habits, but I can assure you I have never sought to encourage it.”
“Then why were your welcoming words to me lifted straight from Dracula? The book, not the old movie.”
Snopp’s face was immobile, and Effie could guess that his unseen eyes under the shadowy hood were looking intently at her. Then the mouth smiled again.
“Why? Affectation, my dear. Forgive me for underestimating you. Now if we are finished, even this amount of light may cause skin damage if I tolerate it for too long.” He stood up and blew out the candle, a wraith of white smoke barely visible in the darkened room. Effie stiffened, wondering if some form of attack was to follow in the darkness, the recluse clearly having better night vision. But there was only that voice, odd and strangely familiar, as if his words were the expressions of thoughts he’d had much earlier.
“If you’ll follow me,” he invited.
He had turned to go. She stayed in her seat.
“Was Dennis Breedlove blackmailing you because he knew you didn’t really suffer from XP?” she asked.
There was silence, then the sepulchral voice again. “What makes you ask that?”
“Is that a denial?”
“Not at all. I merely wanted to know how you found out.”
He strode to the door and turned on the light switch. The sudden glare of a candelabrum above Effie’s head dazzled her dark-adapted eye, and her reflexes prepared her again for a sudden opportunistic assault from Snopp. But he stayed with his back turned to her, his body entirely hidden by the black monk’s habit, those white hands now swathed in the long, wide sleeves.
“For a start, you have no marks of the disease on your hands,” she said, “not even freckles, and yet the hands get more sun exposure than most body parts. But mainly, you wear an expensive watch—the kind that is hardly likely to be luminous or have a bulb inside. Not much use for a man who needs to live in permanent darkness.”
Snopp laughed, still without turning round. “Excellent. It took several evening strolls with Dennis before he reached the same conclusion. That was not long after I arrived in Synne. Strange that the first man I befriended in my lonely life was a real blood-sucker, while I was merely a mock one.”
“Why the pretense though? I assume, despite what you said earlier, that you do, in fact, cultivate the Dracula persona?”
“It fits with the impression I wish to give, that I do suffer from that heartbreaking medical condition.”
“But why? Why choose to live this way if you don’t need to?” Effie looked around the illuminated room—it was spacious in the possession of dirt, the dust thick on every surface, and she was sure she’d walked through a cobweb on the way in. She’d need to shower again when she arrived back at the Swithins’ house.
“Now there, Dennis was ahead of you, my dear,” Snopp answered. “He not only knew what I didn’t have. He knew what I did have, and why I still choose isolation. Not the isolation of darkness, perhaps, but the isolation of loneliness. You see, a case of XP and a few mysterious but rather romantic habits may do no more than raise an eyebrow in such a place as Synne.” He lifted the hood from his face, slid his bent hands back into the opposite sleeves, and turned to Effie. “But my new neighbors may not be so tolerant if they discovered that in their midst, they had a leper.”