weren’t ideal, but they were better than the ragged garments that he had worn for three years in gaol. They would be enough to get him into the hotel without raising too many eyebrows. There he had plenty of other outfits to choose from. And he would need them. Tomorrow was the appointed day for his meeting. It would not do to be ill-dressed for that.
He headed south, back to the centre of town.
There were three rooms in the suite: a bathroom, a bedroom and a study. The bathroom and bedroom were much as might have been expected in any great hotel, except that nothing had been cleaned or even touched for many months. The windows were shuttered. A thick layer of dust sat upon every surface. The wardrobes and drawers were filled with clothes of every style, from the finest evening dress, through a variety of military uniforms, to peasant outfits. Iuda was prepared for any eventuality – for any disguise he might need to adopt. He had not, it seemed, been prepared for moths. Half of the garments were unwearable, most had one or two holes. But it was not these for which Mihail had come.
The study contained three locked cabinets. Mihail had no qualms about wrenching them open. Within he found what he’d been looking for – and much more. The first cupboard contained notebooks – more than fifty of them, all written in English. Some dated back to the 1810s, the latest was as recent as 1877. Mihail had brought a knapsack for the very purpose, but he could not take all of them. With luck he would have the chance to return for more later, but he could not be sure of it. He skimmed through them, trying to determine which were the most valuable, checking dates and headings and glancing over the body of the text for any words that might shout out at him. His English was good, but he did not read it like he could Russian; each word had to be deciphered and understood, rather than simply recognized as a familiar shape. It took him two to three minutes to scan the first volume. He moved on to the second.
He froze. There it was, written in the Latin alphabet but still unmistakable, his grandfather’s name: Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov. Preceded by one and followed by two others that Mihail knew almost as well: Vadim Fyodorovich Savin, Dmitry Fetyukovich Petrenko and Maksim Sergeivich Lukin. The last bore the surname that Mihail had adopted and was still using. There was nothing much to the entry – just a note that they were the four officers who would be liaising with Iuda and the others when they were in Russia. It was dated 27 August 1812. It was the beginning of a story that Mihail knew well.
He quickly worked his way through the notebooks. There may have been other references familiar to him, but if there were he missed them. Everything was in too much detail to be of any real use. These were the day-by-day observations of a scientist; they described the minutiae of what Iuda had seen, but made little effort to explain it. It was only when it got to the more recent volumes, from the 1870s, that Iuda had begun to set down his conclusions about the nature of vampires, drawn from so many years’ experimentation. These Mihail slipped into his bag, along with those from 1855 to 1860 – the years that Tamara had been in contact with Iuda, and a few more after that. Mihail was keen to discover how much Iuda had really known about his mother and, vitally, whether he even guessed at Mihail’s existence.
The second cupboard contained other papers – not Iuda’s own writings but mostly correspondence he had received. Rather than being categorized by date they were divided into folders named after cities: Constantinople, London, Moscow, Simferopol, Saint Petersburg and others – the cities Iuda had been in when he received the letters, Mihail guessed. Again, he had to compromise and took only Moscow and Saint Petersburg. At the bottom of that cabinet there was also money – both paper and coins, some Russian, some from across Europe. The coinage would be too heavy, but he took the banknotes. He wasn’t short of funds, but there was a pleasure in stealing from Iuda – a breach of the eighth commandment that served as an aperitif to the violation of the sixth that Mihail would soon