‘I’m calling the police!’ yelled someone else, stepping between them.
And April was off and running again, blindly taking the first road she came to, sprinting between towering white buildings, then taking a sharp left into an alleyway. As she ran she scrabbled with her phone, clumsily scrolling to Reece’s mobile number and pressing the ‘call’ button.
‘Come on, come on,’ she panted, holding the phone to her ear without breaking stride.
‘This is Detective Inspector Ian Reece ...’
‘DI Reece! This is April ... April Dunne,’ she gasped desperately.
‘... leave a message after the tone.’
Dammit!
Voicemail.
As the tone sounded, she tried again. ‘DI Reece, this is April Dunne, I’m in ...’ She looked around her desperately. ‘Somewhere in London, near Trafalgar Square, I think I’m being foll—’
And then she was talking to the air. Her phone had been snatched out of her hand. She twisted around, stumbled and fell, landing on the ground with a jolt. Gabriel was standing over her, peering at the phone.
‘Who were you calling? The
police?
’
April opened her mouth to scream again, but Gabriel was too quick. He jumped forward and before she could do anything, his hands were on her.
This is it,
she thought,
strangled
at sixteen.
But to her surprise, he simply lifted her back onto her feet.
‘What are you doing?’ he said to her angrily, barely out of breath. ‘Why are you running away from me?’
‘Because you’re a murderer!’ shouted April and kicked him as hard as she could in the shin.
‘Ow, Jesus!’ he cried, doubling over, and April ran. She ran as fast as she could go. At the end of the alley were some wide steps where the lane became an arched tunnel and she jumped down them three at a time, her footsteps echoing, her breath rasping. Ahead of her she could see some people and she shouted out to them.
‘Please help me! Please, he’s after me!’
The first of them caught her as she ran into him. ‘Hey, hey!’ he said, laughing. ‘What’s the rush? Who’s after you, love?’
The man was in his twenties, dressed in an expensive-looking polo shirt, his hair slicked back. His three companions were also young men similarly dressed in flashy retro trainers and short-sleeved shirts, despite the cold. One of them had tattoos running up his arms.
‘Him!’ gasped April, pointing to Gabriel, who was now standing at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the light inside the tunnel.
‘Who’s that, your boyfriend?’ asked one of the other men, sniggering.
‘Or her pimp,’ shouted another and they all laughed. April could now smell the booze on their breath.
‘Having a domestic, love?’ said the first man, the yellow light of the tunnel shining on his hair. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort him for you.’
‘Let her go,’ said Gabriel, walking towards them. ‘I won’t tell you again.’
‘Oo-ooh!’ mocked one of the men, to more raucous laughter. ‘He won’t tell us again.’
Slick Hair stepped forwards and another of the men grabbed April’s arms from behind.
‘Well, how about I tell you something, pal,’ said Slick Hair.
‘She’s with us now. We’ll take good care of her, won’t we, boys?’
‘Yeah!’ They all laughed and the man holding April twisted his head around to leer at her.
Slick Hair reached into his pocket and, with a flash of metal, he produced a knife.
‘So unless you want some of this,’ he began, waving the blade in front of Gabriel’s face, ‘I suggest you—’ But he never got to finish the sentence. Faster than the eye could see, Gabriel grabbed his hand and twisted. There was a sickening crack that sounded horribly loud in the tunnel, followed by an even louder scream. The next few seconds were a blur: the man holding April tossed her to one side and she dropped to the floor. Then she heard a terrible guttural roar like a charging wolf and the man flew past her, his head cracking against the sloped wall of the tunnel. There were more thuds and another scream and then it was over; all of the men were lying on the ground and Gabriel was bending over April to help her up.
‘It’s okay,’ he said softly, ‘it’s over now.’
‘Get away from me,’ she screamed, scrabbling along the ground until her back met the wall.
‘April, they were going to hurt you,’ he said, bending down towards her, but before he could touch her one of the men got back to his feet and grabbed Gabriel’s coat, shouting obscenities. April spotted the knife, lying on the floor by her leg. She quickly reached out, grabbed it and stuffed it into her coat pocket as she clambered to her feet and ran up the steps, but Gabriel caught her at the top and pushed her into a doorway, his face cold with anger.
‘You have to believe me, I had nothing to do with your father’s death.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Okay, you want to call the police?’ he said, handing her back the phone. ‘Go ahead, call your Detective Inspector Reece, ask him where he was when your father was killed.’
She looked up at him, then down at the phone. With shaking fingers, she dialled Reece’s number.
‘April?’ said Reece urgently down the line. ‘Where are you? What’s happened? I tried to call you back, but it went to voicemail. Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ said April. ‘Look, I know this sounds crazy, but can I ask you something? Where were you when my father was killed?’
There was silence at the end of the phone. ‘What’s this about, April?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Are you in trouble?’
‘Please, DI Reece, can you just tell me? It’s important.’
She could hear the policeman take in a deep breath and let it out. ‘I was interviewing a witness,’ he said. ‘A lad from your school, actually, Gabriel Swift. Had to cut it short when Carling got the call about your dad on the radio. Listen, what’s going on? Aren’t you with your mum?’
‘I’m just going home now,’ she said, looking at Gabriel. ‘Hang on, he was a witness? To my dad’s murder?’
‘Another case,’ said Reece. He paused for a moment. ‘Isabelle Davis, in fact. He saw something that night too. Listen, April, do you need me to—’
‘Sorry, Detective Inspector, I’ve got to go,’ she said and hung up, immediately turning towards the Embankment Tube entrance only metres away.
Gabriel grabbed her arm, but she pulled it free. ‘Let go of me,’ she hissed, gripping the knife in her pocket.‘Do you want me to scream again?’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Gabriel, holding his hands up in surrender. ‘But at least let me explain.’
‘I’m not interested in anything you’ve got to say,’ said April, turning back towards the station.
‘I can tell you what’s been going on.’
That stopped April in her tracks. She looked back at him. Was he telling the truth this time? He’d promised to explain before but hadn’t followed through. Okay, so he wasn’t there when her dad died - and she was more relieved than she thought she’d be about that - but he could still have killed Isabelle and he still obviously knew something he wasn’t telling her. And April had to know. She
had
to.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You’ve got two minutes.’
Gabriel nodded towards the little park next to the station. ‘Maybe we’d better go somewhere a little more private.’
‘No, first tell me why you’re suddenly a police witness for the Isabelle Davis case,’ said April.
Gabriel could see she wasn’t going to budge and sighed. ‘I called the police anonymously that night to tell them I’d found the body - and I didn’t tell them you were there - I later found out that you didn’t tell them I was there either. I’ve never thanked you for that, by the way.’
April shrugged. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, with slightly more sarcasm than she intended. ‘But why were you talking to Reece when my dad was killed?’
Gabriel paused before answering.
‘I called them again, told them I’d thought of something else. I wanted to help them catch Isabelle’s killer.’
‘But what made you wait a week? Why did you suddenly get all public-spirited?’
‘Because of the party,’ said Gabriel. ‘Because I saw what they were doing, what they were going to do, and I thought I might be able to help stop it.’
‘Stop what?’ said April. ‘And who are “they”, exactly?’
Gabriel glanced around him. ‘Listen, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but I can’t talk about it out here. Come on, I promise I won’t hurt you,’ he said, walking backwards towards the park as he spoke.
April shrugged and followed. What was the worst that could happen?
He could kill you and eat you,
said a voice in her head. Considering how her day had been going, that didn’t seem so bad to April right then.
‘So what have you got to tell me?’ said April impatiently as they walked through the gardens. ‘You can start with that night in the cemetery. What exactly happened to Isabelle Davis? And what were you doing there?’
‘I know you have no reason to believe anything I say,’ he said slowly, ‘but she was killed by a vicious animal and I was there trying to protect you.’
‘What, the way you did back there with those blokes?’
‘They weren’t going to help you, April. Believe me, they had bad things in mind.’
‘And how would you know that? Can you read minds?’
Gabriel walked on a few more steps, looking down at his feet. ‘Listen, April,’ he said. ‘I still can’t tell you everything, not all at once.’
‘Oh Jesus Christ, forget it!’ shouted April. ‘I’m supposed to trust everything you say, however ridiculous, but you won’t trust me with your precious secrets? Just forget it!’ She turned to leave the park.
‘I could smell them.’
April gave him a double take. He had said it in such a quiet voice, she wasn’t sure she could have heard him correctly. She gave a nervous laugh.
‘You could smell them?’
Gabriel nodded, his eyes hooded and faraway. He certainly didn’t look like he was joking.
‘Okay, and what did they smell of?’
‘Violence, cruelty. Sex. The bad kind.’
April just blinked at him. He was serious, this wasn’t a wind-up. Her stomach felt like an express lift dropping between floors. She looked back towards the bright entrance of the Tube station, but they were too far away now. No one would see them from this distance. She glanced behind her; the park gates were there, but they opened onto the Embankment, thick with roaring traffic. She was trapped.
‘I can smell you too, April,’ he said. ‘I can smell fear, regret and ... something else - what is that?’
‘Leave me alone,’ she whispered, backing away horrified.
‘You were right about me, April,’ he said, matching her step for step. ‘I
am
a killer. A hunter. We all are. Some of us are just better at it than others.’
And finally the penny dropped, finally she understood what he was talking about, what the real story had been all along.
‘You are kidding me,’ she said. April knew she should have been scared, mesmerised, rooted to the spot with terror, but instead she was furious. ‘You are not
serious
!’ she screamed, stepping towards Gabriel, her hand groping in her pocket. She pulled out her mobile phone, held it up and clicked the button. The flash lit up the little park and Gabriel jerked back, momentarily stunned.
‘No way,’ whispered April as she looked down at the screen, because Gabriel wasn’t there.
He’s not there. No trick of the light. No faulty camera. He’s simply not there.
‘You’re a vampire?’ She looked up at him in disbelief. ‘You’re a bloody vampire?’
Gabriel took a step forwards. ‘April—’