Authors: Scott G. Mariani
‘No, Bertie! Not in the water!’ Last time he’d gone for an impromptu swim, he’d been impossible to recall, had got absolutely filthy and completely saturated the back seat of the Volvo.
Christopher had not been at all pleased. But then again, not much pleased Christopher.
‘Bertie, you bloody dog! Get back here now!’
It was too late. Bertie completely ignored his mistress’s shouts as he went ploughing straight through the reeds, sending up a spray of mud and water. She huffed in exasperation as he hunted around in the shallows, rustling the long reeds as he sniffed excitedly here and there. Then he seemed to freeze, as if he’d found the stick.
Oh, good.
‘Good boy, Bertie! Fetch now; bring it to Mummy!’
And, thank God, he was responding. She could see the yellow of his fur through the reeds as he scrabbled back onto the bank. Now she was going to get the damn animal on the lead, so he couldn’t run off again. She was sure she’d stuffed the lead into her pocket, but it wasn’t there. She tried the other pocket.
There it was.
She looked back at the riverbank. Bertie was up on dry land now, still half hidden in the grass. She called him again, but he didn’t respond. She sighed in irritation, went striding over the grass to grab his collar and snap the lead on.
Bertie looked up at her as she approached. He was standing over something, his soggy tail flicking back and forth as if to say, ‘Look what
I
found!’
Whatever it was he’d fished out of the river, it wasn’t the stick.
Sandra took a step closer, and peered down at the thing. It was grey and bloated and horrible.
It was a couple of seconds before she realised what she was looking at. She recoiled, tasting the vomit that instantly shot up her throat.
The young girl’s face stared up at her from the grass. She had no body. All that remained attached to the head was part of the left shoulder and a section of upper trunk. The throat was slashed wide open, black with congealed blood.
Sandra began to scream.
St Aldates Police Station
12.39 p.m.
The ham and cheese baguette sat untouched on Joel’s desk. He’d peeled half the cellophane wrapping off it ten minutes ago, before realising that the hollow, gnawing feeling at the pit of his stomach wasn’t hunger. He couldn’t eat a bite.
He’d been sitting staring blankly at his lunch ever since; but what he was seeing in front of him wasn’t an uneaten sandwich. It was the pale face and dark-ringed eyes of a badly frightened young guy in a hospital ward, locked in a mental battle against himself. His brain tearing itself in two, striving yet dreading to believe the impossible. The only thing more terrifying than the fear that you were going crazy was the fear that the nightmare was for real.
Joel knew that. He’d been through it before, and he was fighting desperately not to start feeling that way again now. It was as if he were suddenly viewing the world through a distorting lens. Reality had shifted gears, sidestepped into a parallel dimension where the normal parameters of logic and rationality had been blown away. He was standing on the brink of the abyss, looking down.
He shoved the sandwich out of the way and snatched up his phone. Dan Cleland was Joel’s closest contact at the forensic lab. Joel asked him if there was any way they could speed up the tests on the Maddon samples.
‘That depends on what you mean by speed up.’
‘Today?’
‘Hmmm. Pushing it.’
‘It’s pretty important, Dan.’
Cleland sighed. ‘Okay, because it’s you. Leave it with me, and I’ll get back to you by the end of the afternoon.’
Joel felt better after the call. If Dec Maddon’s pills turned out to be ecstasy and the blood sample tested positive for the drug, then maybe he could breathe again. Maybe the world would return to normal. Maybe the vampires inside his head would go slinking back into the world of the imagination where they belonged, and bad dreams would remain just dreams.
Maybe.
Joel lobbed the ham and cheese baguette into his waste bin and reached for his coffee. It was cold.
The Jag was blasting down the outside lane of the motorway at just a shade under ninety, heading in towards London, as Alex talked to Harry Rumble on her phone. He listened quietly as she ran through the account of her morning. There was just one thing she left out.
‘What I don’t get,’ Rumble said after she’d finished, ‘is why a detective inspector, someone high up, a guy up to his eyeballs day to day in serious crime, even in a hick town like Oxford, would go out of his way like that to talk to some kid on a petty drugs charge who’s raving on about stuff no humans would take seriously.’
‘That’s because he believes the story, Harry.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘I could smell his fear. I saw the look in his eyes. I don’t think he wants to admit it to himself yet. He’s holding back. But trust me. He believes.’
Rumble thought for a moment. ‘He believes, even though he has nothing to go on but the testimony of a kid who might very well have dreamed the whole thing up on drugs? Then he’s either highly impressionable—’
‘Which he isn’t,’ Alex cut in. ‘He’s young, around thirty. If he’s made DI by then, it means he’s ambitious and determined and he’s no idiot. Guys like him don’t
do
impressionable. There’s another reason.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.
When the call was over, she gripped the steering wheel and pressed a little harder on the gas, felt the surge of the Jaguar’s engine as the needle flirted with the hundred mark. Her acute senses could make out every minute detail of the rushing tarmac, computing speed and distance to a degree of accuracy that a fighter pilot could only dream of. She was completely in control, completely zoned in. Of course she was: she was a vampire.
So why was her heart fluttering like this?
That was the part she hadn’t told Harry.
As she drove, all she could think about was Joel Solomon. And she knew the reason why.
Joel was on his way over to the machine to get himself a fresh cup of warm coffee when he spotted Carter steaming the other way down the corridor with a phalanx of uniformed officers in his wake. He was built like a bear and when he was moving fast, like he was now, the world simply parted to make way for him or it got knocked flat on its back.
Superintendent Sam Carter was thirteen years older than Joel, and they’d been friends for ten of those years, ever since Joel had joined up with Thames Valley. Joel knew him pretty well – well enough to know that behind the gruff exterior was a guy who burst into tears at the mere sound of Dolly Parton’s voice, especially when he was drunk, which wasn’t unusual for him. And well enough to know that when he had the grim look on his face that he was wearing now, something extremely serious was up.
‘What’s happening?’ Joel asked as Carter swept past. It was like trying to catch a ride on a moving train.
‘You want to know? Come with me.’
Carter filled Joel in as the squad car sped out of Oxford and headed south towards Sonning Eye.
‘Member of the public found her half an hour ago. Or a piece of her, at any rate. Hell of a mess. The divers are still fishing bits out of the river.’
‘Do we know who she is?’
‘Not a clue.’ Carter looked at him. ‘You look like shit, Solomon.’
‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.’ And Joel was beginning to feel it.
The scene was already milling with personnel and vehicles by the time they got there. A quarter-mile stretch of river had been cordoned off with police barrier tape. Extra officers were being drafted in from across the county to keep back the crowd of locals that was quickly growing as word spread of the grisly find. Inflatable launches burbled up and down the river carrying frogmen and recovery equipment. As Joel followed Carter across the grassy bank towards the riverside, he could see a lot of very sick expressions on the officers’ faces. Away in the trees, where he thought nobody could see him, a young rookie constable was heaving his guts out.
The police pathologist at the scene was Jack Brier. Mutilated corpses were his stock in trade, but even he looked a little greyer than Joel had ever seen him before. He was crouched over a bodybag in the grass, pulling off a pair of surgical gloves as Joel crossed the inner cordon and walked over to him. A couple of police photographers had just finished up and were packing away their equipment.
‘Hell of a thing,’ Brier muttered to Joel and Carter. ‘Have you had lunch? Then don’t look.’
Joel stared down at the thing in the bodybag.
Brier chuckled at the expression on his face. ‘Told you. She’s seen better days, that’s for sure. We’ve recovered the head, most of the trunk, the left arm and what’s left of the right leg. The rest could have floated down into Berkshire by now.’
‘What did this?’ Carter asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Brier shrugged. ‘Hard to tell, until we get her on the slab and have a poke around inside. If this was Alaska, I’d say a grizzly had taken a bite out of her.’ He gave a dark grin. ‘But this isn’t Alaska.’
‘Jesus,’ Carter mumbled. He’d seen enough. He looked away, watching the divers and visibly trying to control his emotions.
‘The strangest thing is,’ Brier went on. ‘I mean, I can’t be sure just yet, but look how little lividity there is. And she’s still fresh, too. Not been in the water more than six, seven hours tops. Cut a long story short, it looks to me like this young lady has been completely exsanguinated, even before she was dissected.’
‘In English,’ Carter said.
Joel answered for Brier. ‘He’s saying something drained her blood.’
‘Drained her blood,’ Carter repeated flatly.
Brier nodded. ‘Every last drop of it.’
Joel was still staring at the pieces of the girl’s body as Brier got to his feet and went off with Carter to confer with some of the others. Just then, his phone started to vibrate in his pocket. He fished it out and saw that the call was from Dan Cleland.
‘And for my next miracle,’ Cleland said.
‘You got the results already?’
‘Just in. Specially for my favourite CID officer.’
Joel tensed. Dan was one of those guys who liked to string things out for effect. ‘Well?’
‘The arresting officer was right about the pills. Not top stuff, but definitely ecstasy.’
‘And the blood test, Dan?’
‘Goodness, we are in a tizzy today.’
‘If you were standing here looking at a dead girl’s head in a bag, so would you be.’
‘All right, all right. Well, if your man’s dealing, he doesn’t use from his own stash. Blood test was clean.’
‘What about alcohol?’
‘Zilch. Soberer than a Sons of Temperance convention.’
‘You’re sure about that? Quite certain?’
‘When have I ever been wrong?’
‘Never. Thanks, Dan.’
‘You owe me now, Solomon.’
‘Right.’ Joel ended the call and was about to flip the phone shut. Then he stopped. Glanced around him. Brier was deep in conversation with his colleagues and Carter was getting belligerent with someone on the police radio. Nobody was watching him.
He quickly turned on the camera function on his phone, crouched down in the grass and took two snaps of the victim. One of her face, the glassy eyes staring right into the lens.
And the other of the spider tattoo on what was left of her neck.
Villa Oriana, forty miles from Florence
1.50 p.m. local time
The butler in the crisp white jacket emerged into the sun carrying the tray with the chilled lemon vodka, prepared exactly the way his employer liked it. He climbed the steps to the balustraded terrace and set the drink down on the marble-topped table at the man’s side.
Jeremy Lonsdale ignored him, didn’t even glance at the drink until the butler had disappeared back inside the villa. Only then, he reached for the glass and winced as the iced vodka burned away the aftertaste of the lobster he’d eaten for lunch.
He closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair and felt the sun on his face. Soaking into him, its glow burning orange through his closed eyelids. Even in early November, it was still easily warm enough to have breakfast and lunch outside. That was one of the things Lonsdale loved most about his Tuscan bachelor hideaway. The gloom and drizzle of that piteous little island called Britain depressed him. He had no affection for the place and certainly no allegiance. He was just one of the ones lucky enough to ride the wave and enrich themselves before the remains of the dying empire imploded into the Third World country it was waiting to become. Whenever he could, he’d jump on his private jet and come out here to soak up the sun. There’d come a day when he wouldn’t return. That had always been his plan.
Lonsdale had been a multi-millionaire for twenty-seven years, which at forty-nine was well over half his life. He could have retired a long time ago, if it hadn’t been for his love of his political career. He was passionate about that whole world of lies and deceit. He loved the way he looked in the public eye when he took up some worthless cause to champion the innocent victims of…whatever. He loved the flash of the cameras and the simper of the media as he kissed babies in Manchester or Liverpool, while the arms companies that earned him millions a year in investments were churning out products to kill other people’s babies in some faraway country nobody gave a shit about, as long as they were kept sated with their television and sport and beer and infantile gadgets. It was all a big game. To win, you just needed the right attitude.
And he’d always thought he was the master of the game, until that day in February. That day had changed everything.
Lonsdale had snatched a week out of his schedule to take a skiing holiday in Lichtenstein. On the third night, as he lounged in the bar of his luxury hotel with a martini cocktail and some nameless floozy at his elbow, he’d spotted the tall figure across the crowded room. Men of wealth and taste were ten a penny in Lonsdale’s world, but this one was different. A man so effortlessly self-possessed, radiating an air of such supreme indifference that he made Lonsdale feel like a schoolboy. He seemed to draw the most beautiful women to him with mesmeric, almost uncanny ease and then dismissed them as though they were nothing. Here was a man who understood power, lived and breathed it. Was he a prince? Unable to recall his face from the society pages, Lonsdale had been desperate to talk to him, but the chance had escaped him when some paunchy dullard of an oil billionaire had appeared to pin him down in gratingly boring conversation. By the time he’d been able to wriggle away from the guy, the fascinating man had disappeared along with his female entourage.