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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