Spirit Animals (Ritual Crime Unit Book 3) (8 page)

“—victim has been identified as twenty-six-year-old Matt Harrison of Newark-on-Trent. So far there’s been no official statement from police at the scene, but the date and location match the profile of past murders by the Valentine Vampire, and internet reports claim that officers from the northern Ritual Crime Unit were called to the scene.”

The camera cut to an interview with one of Harrison’s gym buddies, saying all the usual things that TV channels passed off as news. Pierce growled in disgust. Even if the news stations were still hedging their bets, the cat was clearly well out of the bag—more than likely released by some so-called professional at the crime scene who couldn’t resist sharing the gossip. Now they were going to be rushed into giving a statement before they had their facts straight.

She was flagged down by Jill at the front desk as soon as she got to work. “Let me guess,” Pierce said. “His nibs wants a word?”

“Got the impression that he wanted several,” Jill said with an arch look. Pierce smoothed down the front of her dubiously ironed shirt as she headed in to knock on the door of Superintendent Snow’s office.

“Enter,” he said curtly, and it was still a kick in the gut to hear those imperious tones in place of Howard Palmer’s voice. Pierce couldn’t say she and her old boss had been close, but she’d known the man over a decade, and it didn’t sit well to think he’d more than likely died unnoticed and unmourned, an inconvenient obstacle to those behind the cover-up.

As for Robert Snow... well, who was to say whether he was an innocent replacement filling the empty seat, or up to his neck in the conspiracy and watching her every move? Without knowing, there was no way Pierce could trust him.

She got the impression he didn’t like her very much either, but that might just be her department’s appalling statistics.

“Pierce,” he said, with a face like he’d just bitten into a lemon. He was a handsome silver-haired man with an aquiline nose and military bearing, and seemed to approach these meetings as if he was a headmaster lecturing a wayward schoolgirl. “This ‘Valentine Vampire’ case.” Snow picked the term out with a disdain that matched her own, though she suspected for quite different reasons. “Why exactly is it splashed all over the morning news before I’ve so much as received a report?”

She shook her head slightly by reflex, though she knew that disavowing responsibility—however accurately—wouldn’t do her any favours with him. “We haven’t completed preliminary inquiries or got any of the forensics back yet, sir,” she said. “At this point it’s still far too soon to confirm any connection to the previous killings.”

“And yet the media show no such compunction.” He held up a newspaper so she could read the headline:
New murder sparks ‘Valentine Vampire’ fears
. No doubt the tabloids were being even less constrained. “If the connection to these past murders is so tenuous, then how did it find its way out to the public so quickly?”

“We still don’t know that, sir, but we’ll be investigating how the details of the crime scene leaked,” Pierce said. Or rather, with their lack of resources, punting it down to Nottinghamshire Police to investigate their own people and no doubt come back with nothing concrete. “All discussion of a possible connection to the Valentine Vampire murders was kept strictly between Dawson, Sergeant Mistry and myself, but it’s possible someone else at the crime scene recognised the MO and spread the word.”

And no doubt they could thank Christopher Tomb’s bloody book for that as well. That sensationalist piece of tripe had done more to cement the public image of some blood-guzzling supernatural creature stalking the country’s young and healthy than any number of news reports.

“Well, connection or no connection, I want you to make this case your top priority,” Snow said sternly. “The media are already discussing the past failures of the police in investigating these killings, and I’m not about to have that happen again on my watch. Whether this is a copycat or the original murderer returning, I expect to see this killer found and brought to justice.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Easy for him to bloody say.

B
Y THE TIME
Pierce got into the office, Dawson had already buggered off back to Nottinghamshire with Constable Taylor in tow, apparently still under the impression that this was his case. Rather than pursue them, she opted to take her other constable off to York to revisit the scene of the failed raid fourteen years ago. “If we’re lucky, there might still be some neighbours around who can tell us something about Leo’s mystery woman.” If she was the one who’d called in the tipoff about the vampire cult living there, then maybe she knew more about them than she’d said at the time.

They followed the satnav’s directions into the winding streets of York. “Busy,” Gemma noted, as they joined a tailback of traffic. When they arrived at their destination, a narrow terraced street with red brick houses on the right and greenery on the left, there seemed to be an excessive number of cars parked up on the grass. Pierce cursed as she spotted a news van down the end.

“Well, somebody remembers their local history.” Had the details of the house been in that bloody book as well? She really ought to read the thing. A headache bloomed as she saw the odds of them performing a nice, low-profile enquiry shrivel away. With the media on the scene, everybody was no doubt already racking their brains for the most sensationally gory details they could convince themselves they ‘remembered.’

A small crowd had gathered around the news van, but Pierce could see she and Gemma still stood out in their suits. A few of the gawkers might have been neighbours who’d emerged to see what the fuss was about, but many of the others looked like what Pierce might be dating herself to call ‘goths’: dyed black hair, Victorian fashion and caked white make-up everywhere. The uniform of your average vampire enthusiast.

And there was worse to come; Pierce held back a grimace as she got her first clear look at their destination, the house at the end of the row. No surprise it still stood empty after all these years, or that graffiti artists had taken to the chipboard that covered the door and windows, but amongst the usual tags there were some vaguely occult squiggles and less customary slogans like
we are all meat
and
blood is life
. Clustered around the low front wall were various small offerings, candles, little figurines and the like. Pierce hoped they were memorials to the victims, but suspected that she might be disappointed.

This place had become a bloody shrine for vampire wannabes.

Gemma drew her phone to take some photos of the house, unnoticed among a mob of others doing the same. Pierce hung well back from the news team on the corner, not wanting to take the chance that they’d sent someone who would know her as the face of the RCU. She surveyed the gathered crowd instead, looking for someone who seemed both old enough to have been here fourteen years ago and not too entranced by all the drama.

The road ended after the final house, continuing only as a cycle track. Pierce grimaced to see a small children’s play area on the corner opposite the murder house: she remembered that sight well from the news stories of the time, every reporter worth their salt eager to get a shot of it in the background as they interviewed the horrified neighbours. The brightly coloured paint of the metal slide and climbing frames was flaked and rusted now, and as graffitied as the house.

Beyond the play area was a line of scruffy trees—and among them stood a woman.

She caught Pierce’s eye with the very
still
way that she was silently observing the scene, removed from the rest of the eagerly gawking crowd. Not one of the goths, though she would have fitted among their number at first glance, pale-faced and dark-haired; she was wearing a simple grey hoodie, though, and against the T-shirt underneath Pierce saw the glint of something silver. Her eyes weren’t up to the task of identifying it at this distance, but she supposed it could have been the necklace Leo described.

Leo’s girl witness from fourteen years ago? Even if she’d been a teenager back then she should be older than this woman looked, but faces could be deceptive. Pierce took a step towards her, picking her way through the assembled crowd. She glanced over her shoulder for Gemma, but she’d moved away to take more pictures of the house from round the side, and there was no way to get her attention without drawing other people’s.

Pierce turned back to her quarry, and saw that in the brief moment her attention had been diverted, the woman had already moved, heading away into the trees. She cursed silently to herself and hurried through the fringes of the crowd to follow.

By the time she reached the tree line herself, the woman was already some distance away across the sloping green, and Pierce almost had to jog to just to match her walking speed. “Hey!” she called out. “Police! I need to speak to you.” That didn’t always get a positive reaction, but a negative one could tell her something too.

In this case it got a complete non-reaction, the woman disappearing behind another cluster of trees without so much as looking back. Pierce chased after her, and found they’d reached a gravel footpath, leading to a set of metal gates with bold yellow warning signs. Pierce could see the overhead cables of the railway line beyond.

Perhaps realising she was cornered, or willing to talk now they were out of sight of the people on the street, the woman had stopped just ahead of the fence. She turned back to face Pierce with a guarded expression.

Pierce raised her hands to signal her peaceable intentions, slowing her approach to a non-threatening pace. “I just want to ask you some questions about the boarded-up house at the end of the row,” she said. “Are you a neighbour? Do you know anything about the people who used to live there?”

Was
this the girl that Leo had seen on the day of the raid? If it was, then Pierce thought that he must have overestimated her age back then: she didn’t look like she could be out of her late twenties now. But even if this wasn’t her, they still had one thing in common—she was indeed wearing a silver necklace in the shape of a bat with outstretched wings.

“Listen,” Pierce said, in her most calmly encouraging tones. “My name is DCI Claire Pierce. I’m with the Ritual Crime Unit. Nobody’s in trouble, I just want to—” She was interrupted by the ring of her own phone, a loud electronic blurt that shattered the relative peace of the scene. Probably Gemma, checking where she’d got to. “Sorry, if you’ll just bear with me a second....” She struggled to wrestle her phone free from her overstuffed pocket.

By the time that she had it in her hand, the woman was already gone.

“Hey!” Pierce ran forward to the railway fence, looking both ways before she glimpsed a flash of a grey hoodie disappearing under the concrete bridge off to the right. She eyed the fence herself for one abortive moment, but even if she’d been stupid enough to trespass on the tracks, the thing had nasty spikes running along the top.

The woman obviously knew the area well, and Pierce stepped back from the fence with a defeated sigh. There was no way that she’d catch her now.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
T TURNED OUT
to be Deepan on the phone.

“Something come up?” Pierce asked, wandering fruitlessly up the hill along the line of the railway fence, though the woman was long gone.

“Big operation just nabbed a gang of thieves in Leeds,” Deepan told her. “Local police had a warrant to search one of their properties for stolen goods and found a shed full of ritual artefacts. I had a look and it seems pretty legit—there’s a few things that I recognise, and some of them are nasty enough that I’d rather have more educated eyeballs going through the place before we try to shift it all.”

“All right, I’ll join you there.” It didn’t look like there was going to be a lot of point in her hanging around here. “Might be an idea to grab Cliff as well.” The RCU’s magical analysts rarely made house calls—mostly too bloody busy and more useful to the team where they were—but while she had decades of crime scene experience under her belt, Cliff was the one who’d made it his life’s work to keep up with the study of occult artefacts.

“Mind you don’t let him wander in before you’ve checked everything for trigger runes and the like, though,” she added as an afterthought. Her experience at the barn yesterday was still fresh in her mind, and Cliff was used to getting his artefacts safely parcelled up in an evidence box after someone else had done the dirty work.