She was more and more reminded of those times.

Last year, on the eve of April Fool's Day, she'd taken part in a peaceful protest against Mrs Thatcher's Poll Tax and found herself - for the second time - caught in Trafalgar Square between rioters and the police. Memories of the Bloody Sunday of 1887, when radicals were left dead after the melee, came back in a rush as a young vampire plod battered her with a plexiglass shield and dragged her off to be charged with breach of the peace.

Mrs Thatcher was gone now. But Dracula was back.

It had to be true. She'd seen it on television.

There was no point in dawdling on the pavement. She felt in her blood that someone was in the square, out of sight, intent upon her. It was beyond her skills to lure her stalker into the open. He, she or it was just a distraction. She had a call to make.

The names by the buzzers were mostly typed or dymo-taped, but the one she was looking for was scrawled in a spidery hand on a yellowed strip of card.

Just the surname: Pretorius.

Or Pretorious or Praetorius, no one seemed quite sure how it was spelled. From the card, it was impossible to tell.

She pressed the entry-phone button and waited.

She tried to suppress unease. Whoever was tracking her shouldn't have the satisfaction of knowing she was spooked. She was, after all, a bloodsucking fiend. She ought to be beyond fearing the reaper.

The door clicked open with an insect buzz and she stepped into a dreary hallway. The tile floor was dusty and scuffed. Two expensive-looking bicycles were chained to a clunky old radiator. A junk-shop table was piled with circulars, letters and rolled magazines.

Most of the mansion was carved into flats, but Pretorius leased a separate building accessible across a courtyard. She understood it had once been Jekyll's laboratory.

The man appeared at the end of the passage. Ancient but spry, with cracked papery skin and an arrangement of fine, white, flyaway hair, he wore a white medical smock which flowed down past his ankles. He was not a vampire but she recognised in him the symptoms of a long, long life.

She'd run into other shady characters who persisted in clinging to warmth, preserving themselves like living Egyptian mummies. The Daughter of the Dragon ran an investment bank from a glass tower in Docklands, built where the Lord of Strange Deaths once operated opium dens and smuggling rackets.

'Reed, I presume,' Pretorius snipped. 'Come in, come in. No need to stand on ceremony. My time is too valuable to waste on faffing about.'

'Quite,' she replied.

He turned and scuttled through a door. Following him, she found herself in the courtyard. Little light filtered down into the stone well.

'Cheerless, is it not? Your Victorian friends loved their Sunday gloom like a scourge.'

'Hardly my Victorian friends.'

He stopped short and turned to her.

'But you are that Katharine Reed, are you not? The Irish insurrectionist and scribbler?'

'That's me all right. I just don't think of myself as a typical Victorian.'

He barked. It took seconds to register as a laugh.

'Nonsense. Look at you. Buttoned up to the neck and down to the ankle. Hair up under your hat, with just one long red strand out of place. And those wire-framed spectacles. You dress like a governess.'

'I narrowly escaped that fate, I admit. By taking on a career.'

'And becoming a monster?'

'A vampire.'

'Quibbles, quibbles. Monsters, vampires, men, women. All the same. Blood and bone and meat and that vital spark. Enter my lair, Ms Reed.'

He pulled open a door in the wall.

The laboratory was a barn-like space, musty with trapped air and stale chemicals. Alcoves were curtained off with sacking. Against the walls stood benches piled with complex arrangements of tubes and retorts. Dozens of specimens were displayed in sealed test tubes, marked with runes she couldn't interpret. A patched-together computer grew out of a roll-top desk bored through with cable-holes, a walnut-veneer '50s television cabinet housing the monitor, an old Remington portable typewriter hooked up with a thousand copper wires as a keyboard.

Pretorius took a stoppered bottle of clear liquid and a couple of beakers down from a shelf.

'Would you like some gin? It's my only weakness.'

He unstoppered the bottle. At five paces, her nose and eyes stung. He must distil the juniper himself, refining spirits that could legally be classed as a poison.

She waved a polite turn down.

'Don't mind if I tipple? I promise not to topple.'

He giggled at his wordplay, decanted a calculated measure, showed her his teeth, and took a sip. Perhaps it wasn't just gin. Maybe it was his elixir vitae. She had no idea how old he was. Genevieve had said he looked this age in 1959. The only picture in his Guardian cuttings file was from 1935; it showed exactly this face lurking at the back of a society wedding. Something about the Pretorius countenance was mediaeval. He might be a heretical monk or a cynical inquisitor.

'Do sit down. Clear off that chair.'

She lifted a pile of petit-point magazines, labelled with the address of a nearby dentist, and settled in a battered old armchair. The furniture was her vintage. She remembered Uncle Diarmid, who'd gently tugged her into journalism, spending his last, gout-ridden years in just such a chair, railing against the injustices of the world and the poor prose of those who now wrote for the journals he'd kept alive during the Terror.

Pretorius preferred to stand. Not a tall man, he liked a dramatic backdrop. It struck her that this scientific clutter might not actually work. The apparatus was put together like a live-in sculpture, to give the impression of a mad scientist's lair.

'So, the famous Kate Reed comes a-calling? She must be on the trail of a story. What story, pray, could interest such a distinguished lady scribbler? Only one springs to mind this cold, cold January.'

'Dracula.'

The scientist looked up at the corners of his space, mobile eyebrows vibrating like antennae. He arranged his wrinkles into a wry smile.

'That name. So familiar, yet so strange. Three syllables. Dra. Cu. La.' He threw in a Transylvanian flourish, fluttering his dry-stick fingers, gesturing with an imaginary cape. 'Count Dracula. Prince Dracula. King of the Cats. Vampirus Rex Redivivus. He who was dead and walks once more.'

'You watch television, then?'

'Avidly. Though the medium has not recovered from the cancellation of Crossroads.'

'You've seen the Concert for Transylvania?'

'Who hasn't?'

The finale had been repeated more often than the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. Whole talk shows and quickie paperbacks were devoted to picking over what had actually happened barely a month ago, after the Short Lion and Timmy V finished squawking through 'Imagine'.

'"I... am... Dracula,"' quoted Pretorius. 'Easy to say, of course.'

She remembered Marlon Brando repeating the line for a whole night's shoot. In Transylvania.

'But hard to mean,' she said.

'Oh yes. Very hard to mean.'

'I saw Dracula dead. In Rome, in 1959. I saw his head struck off. I was covered with his blood. Later, on a beach, I saw his body burned. Ashes scattered.'

Pretorius nodded.

'You performed the autopsy, Doctor. My friend Genevieve Dieudonne identified the body in the morgue where you were working.'

'I remember. Pretty girl. Blonde. Nice smile, if you like smiles.'

'Was there anything unusual about the corpse? Something that didn't get into the reports?'

'My dear Ms Reed, there was everything unusual about the corpse. It was Count Dracula. Don't you understand? He was not - as you are not -a natural being. We are all law-breakers now, violating a dozen of God's ordinances every day. Just by wearing spectacles, you refuse to accept the heavenly verdict of myopia. And by turning vampire, you venture into regions where science can be of only limited help. The Count journeyed far further. You have turned and stopped. He kept turning, turning, turning.'

The gin gave Pretorius strange inner fire. She wondered if she should have accepted his drink offer.

'I know it was Dracula who died,' she said. 'But, thinking back, I don't know if it was him we burned.'

The doctor barked again and his skinny body shook with mirth. He raised fingernails to his mouth, like a baroness covering a belch.

'You think I sewed his head back on? Hooked him up to a car battery with jump-leads? Did I bring him back to life? Not just a vampire, but a zombie of science, a revivified corpse?'

Kate knew she was blushing.

'Your assistant in Rome was...'

'Herbert West. Little American pipsqueak.'

'He once published a paper...'

'...on reanimation of dead tissue through a glowing reagent. Tomfoolery, piffle, flimflammery, nonsense and bullshit. He could never get it to work. His results were more pathetic than those of... well, a name best forgotten. Let us say the American never equalled the achievements of the Swiss, and the Swiss was merely a pupil who trotted along in my tracks. A C-grade student.'

'So West couldn't have brought him back?'

'A beheaded vampire? No.'

'Could you?'

He saw the trap she had manoeuvred him into.

'If I'd put my mind to it, I daresay I could have. I enjoy a challenge. But it seemed at the time a fruitless avenue of research. Still does. If I put my mind to it, I could develop an otherwise harmless retrovirus that would turn the whole human race a nice shade of eggshell blue. Even a scientist as pure as I, needs some sense of practical application.'

'A blue world might exist without racism.'

'Touche, Ms Reed. As it happens, Dracula seems to have returned without my genius.'

Kate thought of the face on television.

She'd only ever seen Dracula dead. Truly dead. When he was in England a hundred years ago, she'd gone to great lengths not to meet him. In exile, he had kept out of the way. Genevieve and Charles had seen him in London, at his zenith. Penelope Churchward saw him in Rome, when he was a fading presence. Penny was with the Count at the moment of death. The true death that now seemed to have been revoked.

Was this moving, living face the Count?

Dracula had lacked a reflection, but the man at the concert cast an image that could be transmitted. A strange image, like a photo-realistic Max Headroom. Fixed and perfect, while other, human, images had a slight flicker as signal lines were misread by the eye as a coherent picture.

Was she right about the face?

She wouldn't have recognised Dracula, but she did see in this face someone she knew, or had known. He was changed, but still there.

It didn't mean he wasn't Dracula.

'For what it's worth, Ms Reed. I think it is him. It may be that somebody has to be Dracula. His bloodline is by far the most powerful, the most widespread in the world. More vampires claim descent from him than any other father-in-darkness.'

That was true. She was herself of the Dracula line, three or four times removed. Most new-borns of the 1880s were, not all to their advantage.

'I took some of his blood in Rome,' said Pretorius, reaching for a test tube of scarlet fluid. 'I've puzzled over it ever since. Still fresh, you know. Still alive in this tube, as in the veins of his children-in-darkness. It has transformative qualities, beyond those you might know about.'

She wasn't a shapeshifter.

No, she chose not to be a shapeshifter. She could do fangs and claws. She was too timid or sensible to go further, remembering what that led to. Others had gone far beyond human shape, becoming beings even she thought of as monsters. During the First World War, when Dracula was in Germany, scientists experimenting with the shapeshifting ability of his bloodline created a strain of bat-warriors. Since then, others had pursued the project. Kate stuck close to who she had been, wary of launching into unknown darknesses which might end with the loss of her self.

'Dracula spread his bloodline,' said Pretorius. 'It may be there was a purpose to that we didn't perceive. He turned his get like all vampires, by giving blood as well as taking. The gift may have concealed a surprise. A passenger, like a parasite egg. I think his unique blood trails invisible kite-strings. He has followed one of these strands to batten onto one of his get, slipped into a skull and taken up residence, to redecorate and restore.'

Kate watched and listened.

The blood in the tube moved as Pretorius gestured. She'd woken once with that stuff all over her and a murder charge in the offing. But it wasn't to that memory Dracula's blood called, but to the vampire strain in her veins, the blood the Count had passed to a Carpathian, who had passed it to her father-in-darkness, who had passed it to her.

What would happen if anyone drank that blood? What if, here in Jekyll's old laboratory, she or Pretorius were to unstopper the tube and drain it down? She had already turned once. Into a vampire. If, as a vampire, she turned again, what would she become?

'He was tired, though,' she said. 'His death in '59 was as much suicide as murder.'

'He was tired in 1959, but what about 1945 or 1888 or 1720? He used himself up many times over. It seems he has come back not as he was at the end, but as he was in his prime.'

Kate remembered to be scared.

It was dark in here, even to her vampire eyes. Pretorius stood in a shaft of light, face etched with expressive shadows. Dracula's blood had a dark neon shine.

'I've missed him, you know,' he said. 'Dracula makes things interesting. And these times. How he will love them, how he will fit in with them.'

She knew he was right.

Not, she hoped, about everything. But he was right about the times.

Last week she'd visited Richard Jeperson at the Diogenes Club to talk about the Dracula situation. He was the last caretaker of an abandoned building, keeping everything in his head because all the files were compromised. The club, sponsor to Charles Beauregard and Edwin Winthrop, had been levered out of its position in British Intelligence, which was now run from Cheltenham by Caleb Croft. Only Jeperson, a faded dandy, remained at his post. His Lovelies were scattered. Sergeant Dravot was assigned to a retirement colony for spies in North Wales. Hamish Bond was back on the active list, working behind the scenes in the Persian Gulf.

With Thatcher ousted by a typical Tory free-for-all backstabbing, Lord Ruthven, that great political survivor, was again Prime Minister. Jeperson said Ruthven wasn't sorry to see Baron Meinster dead and was all too ready to do business with this new Dracula. Transylvania was now the vampire homeland Meinster had agitated for, but Dracula announced he would maintain residences in Los Angeles, London (he still owned property in Piccadilly) and New York, leaving to others the governance of a country he could call a private fiefdom.

This time, the Count was a global presence, head of a corporation registered in a land where he could write his own laws. His power was in information technology, entertainment and finance, not the petty businesses of martial conquest and political office. Under the guise of putting together the Concert for Transylvania, Dracula had assembled a fair-sized media empire. He had already scooped up enough magazine and newspaper ownerships to drive Kate out of the business if he could be bothered with her.