‘Bloody hell,’ said April in a low voice.
What was he saying about no monsters?
She quickly scrolled down, but that was all her dad had written so far. She went back to the ‘recent items’ list and opened another file. ‘Chapters?’
It was a list, which read:
The Plague
The Great Fire
Unexplained Outbreaks of Violence
Riots and Rookeries
Jack the Ripper
Dr Crippen
The Krays
‘What is this thing?’ she breathed. What had her father discovered to link all of this together? He’d mentioned the plague, hadn’t he? Now April was feeling distinctly unsettled. She closed the laptop and began to sort through the things on the desk. There was a pile of buff cardboard folders stamped with the words ‘Ham and High Archive, Please Return’. Inside she found yellowing old newspaper clippings attached to boards - some of them very old indeed. The
Islington Chronicle
, the
Hampstead Weekly News,
the
Camden Bugle
. Stories of crowds attacking policemen, unprovoked attacks on clergymen, gangs of youths on the rampage, all in north London, all within miles of her home. One cutting about murder - a woman was found with her throat torn out on Hampstead Heath - was disturbingly close, but it was dated 1903. The more she read, the more uncomfortable April felt. There were many more stories of horrible slayings; torture, decapitation, even mass graves. Individually, these incidents just looked like disturbing but unremarkable events, but if there was something gluing them all together, then that was extremely worrying, especially if it had something to do with the area where she now lived. She carefully put the cuttings back as they had been and tried the desk drawers. The large right-hand one was locked, but the middle drawer slid open. Her father’s diary was inside, each day crammed with appointments, phone numbers and doodles. Under that, she found a battered old notebook. Now this was more like it - her dad’s spidery handwriting filled pages with random thoughts and ideas he had jotted down as he’d been doing his research.
I need to look at that in more detail
, she decided. Putting it to one side, she picked up a large reference book called
A Topographical History of London,
which had loads of coloured Post-its sticking out of the top marking various pages. The marked pages were old maps of London, some of the streets, some of the sewers; one was a map charting the course of the River Fleet, which passed through Highgate on its meandering journey down to the Thames. She turned over a few more pages, finding another map with pencil notes in her dad’s handwriting. It was dated 1884 and showed the expansion of the Tube - the Metropolitan District line and the East London line stretching into the East End. Her father had drawn a ring around Whitechapel Station.
‘Hang on,’ murmured April. She switched off the light and, picking up the notebook, tiptoed back into the kitchen. Once there, she consulted
The Dark Victorian Age
book on the counter. Yes, she was right—Jack the Ripper had been running about killing women in 1888.
Are the two things linked?
But that was absurd, how could people building the Tube be connected to Jack the Ripper? It made no sense. But then, according to the book, there was such a huge network of tunnels, sewers, canals and rivers, even secret passageways and roads under the City, that nobody actually knew how many miles of pipe there were under the ground. Things could move around without anyone suspecting. Had Jack the Ripper escaped detection by nipping down the sewers? Or was there more to it than that? April had seen the Johnny Depp movie using the conspiracy theory that the Ripper was linked to the royal family. Were they infected by this disease too?
‘April?’
She screamed.
‘Woah, woah,’ said her father, holding up his hands. ‘It’s okay, it’s just me.’
April’s heart was beating rapidly, partly from the surprise, but also because she had almost been caught red-handed. In fact, she had been. Her dad’s notebook was still in her hand.
‘Dad, I—’
‘WILL!’ came a roar from the top of the stairs. ‘What the
bloody
hell’s going on down there?’
William took a step back towards the kitchen door.
‘God, woman, don’t be so dramatic, it’s just us,’ he shouted. ‘Go back to bed!’
April stuffed the notebook into her school bag while he was distracted.
‘Sheesh,’ he said. ‘It’s a good job they don’t allow guns in this country. She’d have been down here blasting away at imaginary burglars.’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ said April, ‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down for my book,’ she added, showing him the John Wyndham omnibus.
‘They’re working you hard already, aren’t they?’ he said with a smile.
‘I don’t know how I’m going to have time to do anything else. You should see the reading list they’ve given us for English Lit, it’s huge.’
Her father grinned affectionately and put his arm around her, leading her back towards the stairs.
‘Well, you’d better get back to bed, or you won’t be awake enough to read anything tomorrow.’
April nodded gratefully and they began to walk up the stairs. They stopped on the landing and she leant in to give her father a kiss. Just as she was turning away, he put his hand on her arm.
‘How did you find it?’ he asked.
April’s heart jumped.
He knows,
she thought,
he knows I’ve been snooping
.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, as evenly as she could.
‘School, darling. How did you find it all? Didn’t really ask you earlier, it must have been difficult.’
‘Oh, school. It was okay. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Well, you’re up at one o’clock in the morning, so I’m thinking maybe you’ve got something on your mind. No one’s giving you a hard time for being the new girl, are they?’
‘No, not really. It’s a bit of a worry, I suppose, especially starting right in the middle of term. But actually I’ve already made a couple of friends. One girl I think you’ll really get on with - she’s just like you.’
William pulled a face. ‘Not too much, I hope.’ He smiled.
‘There’s worse things to be, Dad,’ she said, and ran up the stairs.
Ripper—who? Victim of his environment. Infected? Disease released from underground? Possible, but why such violence? Royal link? Part of cover-up?
William Dunne’s handwriting was so bad April was amazed he’d managed to make a living as a journalist all these years. Maybe he could read it. She flipped over another page of his battered and closely written notebook and cocked her head, listening for any movement. There had been a brief fight in her parents’ room as soon as her father went back to bed: ‘Up all hours, it’s not natural.’ ‘Give her a break, she’s just started a new school.’ ‘Whose fault is that?’—all the usual things, but they had quickly blown themselves out and now all was quiet. April turned back to the notebook. It was just a scrawl in some places and, as the notes were meant for himself, the meaning of much of it was frustratingly unclear to April.
Whitechapel branch, plague pits—Def. Roman remains under Spitalfields—connection? What about the coffin/west End rumour; possible urban myth? Another royal connection with Ripper murders?
One word was written in the middle of a page in big letters and underlined a number of times: ‘
DISEASE’
.
‘A disease?’ whispered April. That was what her dad had said in the kitchen, but how could a disease make you go on a killing spree? How could it make Jack the Ripper hack up all those women? It sounded pretty far-fetched; after all, if there was some virus floating around turning people into homicidal maniacs, wouldn’t it make the news more often? Anyway, even if there were some truth to it, it still didn’t answer the question that had brought her to this point: what was the local connection? If her dad thought that the Underground network had spread this disease, that didn’t really make sense in Highgate - the highest point in London wasn’t the ideal spot for digging a tunnel, you even had to walk to the bottom of the hill to catch the Tube.
Underneath the word ‘
Disease’
were a number of arrows pointing to words and phrases: ‘bleeding gums’, ‘pale skin’, ‘hypersexuality’. Her dad had circled them and drawn another arrow to one word.
‘
Vampires.’
April laughed out loud, despite herself. ‘You’re kidding me ...’ she whispered. ‘Caro will love this.’
Actually, April felt a sense of relief. She had been getting herself all worked up, convinced her father had uncovered some plot to poison the Tube or something, but no - he was back on the usual stuff: beasties and werewolves. She frowned. So why had he told her he wasn’t? ‘No monsters’, that was what he had said - but why lie about it? And then she turned over the page and felt her skin go cold. Written at the top of the page were two words:
Highgate Vampire
.
Chapter Seven
April wasn’t having a good morning. She had woken up with a pounding headache and the worst case of Bed Head Hair in the history of sleep; she looked like she’d spent the night in an eighties metal band. She also had a vaguely unsettled feeling, as if she had been having nightmares she couldn’t remember. Worse, at breakfast it was immediately clear that her parents weren’t talking - if it wasn’t for the black atmosphere they were generating, she might have been impressed that they had managed to slot in a full-scale fight before their cereal. Still, hearing them hissing at each other had given her time to slip into her dad’s study and return his notebook. Strolling into the kitchen, muttering something about an early start, April had grabbed some toast and tried to make a run for it, but her dad caught her at the door.
‘April, it’s raining,’ he had said firmly. ‘I’m giving you a lift. Besides, I don’t like you walking about around here until we know a bit more about what’s going on.’
For the first few minutes they sat in silence, listening to the
swoosh-swoosh
of the windscreen wipers, neither keen to discuss or acknowledge the cloud slowly descending on their family. April dearly wanted to grill her dad about the vampire thing, but she could hardly say, ‘Hey, Dad, so I was going through all your things last night, and I was wondering ...’ She still couldn’t get her head around why he had lied to her about the book. Why wouldn’t he tell her the truth? After all, he’d written stuff about crop circles and Bigfoot. What was so different about this? She gazed through the window at the grey houses and dark road. So drab, so depressing, she’d almost welcome a bit of supernatural excitement. And the atmosphere in the house was becoming unbearable.
‘Listen, April, we need to talk,’ said William finally.
She looked at him with alarm. Was he reading her thoughts?
‘I know you don’t want to hear this, love—’
Oh God, no, thought April, fixing her gaze on the car in front, it’s the divorce, it’s the divorce! He’s going to tell me Silvia’s having an affair with her tennis coach and that I’ve got to choose between Dad and Roger Federer.
‘—But there was another murder last night.’
April looked up sharply, curiously disappointed that her father wasn’t announcing a domestic upheaval.
‘Where? Here?’ she asked. ‘In Highgate?’
William Dunne looked at his daughter warily, then nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. One of the lads on the news desk called early this morning to talk over the new edition. Your mother wasn’t too pleased to be disturbed, as you can imagine.’
Ah, so that explained the frosty atmosphere. Silvia wouldn’t have been impressed that Dad’s ‘silly little rag’ had needed to rewrite its front page, plus her mother had some loopy idea that the morning light was bad for her skin and she was always furious if anyone dared to interfere with her beauty sleep.
‘But I thought the Alix Graves thing was just some shady business deal gone wrong or something,’ said April, a strange sinking feeling in her stomach.
Her father glanced over at her again. ‘That was the theory. But it’s possible the two murders may be linked.’