Authors: Scott G. Mariani
‘Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. One thing I do know, love, is that I don’t know you.’
‘Maybe you’ve heard of Rudi Bertolino?’ she said, returning his stare. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’
The barman shrugged. ‘You need to talk to Cheap Eddie. Through there.’ He motioned at a door in the corner.
On the other side was a dingy corridor. It was lit by a naked bulb encrusted with last summer’s dead bluebottles. There was another door at the end of the passage, and she went through it without knocking. Inside the room, a morbidly obese guy of about sixty was sitting on a worn armchair, reading a rumpled copy of the
Racing Times
with a fat stogie clamped between his teeth. The room stank of stale cigar smoke. He didn’t glance up as the door creaked open.
‘Can’t you fuckin’ knock, Terry?’
‘No wonder they call you Cheap Eddie,’ Alex said as she walked in and shut the door behind her. ‘That thing smells like shit. Or is it you?’
A brindled pit bull stalked out from behind the fat man’s armchair, locked eyes on Alex and drew its lips back in a snarl. Alex calmly turned to meet its gaze, and it whimpered and drew away with its tail curled up tight between its legs.
Cheap Eddie stared at the cowering animal, then up at Alex. He plucked the cigar out of his mouth. ‘What’ve you done to my dog?’
‘Nothing yet.’
His bloodshot eyes bulged. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Someone who’ll go easy on you if I get the information I want.’
He scowled, then his stubbly face creased up into a laugh. ‘Oh yeah? And what information would that be, flowerpot?’
‘Like where I can find Four-Finger Paulie Lomax and his mate Vinnie.’
Eddie took a big puff of his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke at her. ‘Never heard of them.’
Alex didn’t blink at the billow of foul smoke around her face. ‘I don’t have time for smart guys, Eddie.’
‘I’m not sure I like your tone, sweetheart.’
‘Better get used to it,’ she said. She slipped the .44 out of its holster, took a step towards him. Grabbed him by the throat, yanked him towards her and stuffed the gun muzzle hard under his cheekbone. ‘I really hate repeating myself, Eddie.’
He struggled against her grip. Close on thirty stone of muscle and lard, lifted half out of his armchair, one-handed, by a woman a fraction his size, and he couldn’t budge her an inch. Beads of sweat formed on his brow.
‘Okay, okay. They was here a few nights ago. Haven’t seen ‘em since.’
‘See how well we’re getting on now? Who were they with?’
‘Bunch of foreigners. They were talking in the corner.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s all I remember.’
‘Sure?’ She cocked the gun.
Eddie went a shade paler. ‘Wait. Hold on. Later on, after closing time, I was stacking crates in the alley when I saw Paulie hanging about with this big black geezer and this woman.’
‘Good-looking woman with black hair?’
Eddie nodded. ‘Real corker. Looked like she stepped out of a lads’ mag.’
Alex thought hard. So Rudi Bertolino hadn’t betrayed her. He’d been used to feed her information that would lead her into a trap. But how had Stone’s people known he was her informant?
‘Where does Paulie live?’ she asked Cheap Eddie.
‘Harlesden somewhere.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that, Eddie.’
‘I don’t have the address, honest.’ He gulped. Sweat poured off his nose and through the white bristles over his upper lip. ‘But I can get it.’
Alex let him go, and he slumped back into his armchair, breathing hard. She holstered the revolver and grabbed his wrist and a ballpoint pen from his desk.
‘You call me on this number,’ she said as she wrote it across the back of his chubby hand. ‘I’d better hear from you, Eddie. And I’d better not find out you talked to anyone about our chat. Either way, I’ll be back here to finish it.’
Thames Valley Police Headquarters, Kidlington
1.49 p.m.
‘I’ve just got off the phone,’ Chief Superintendent Page said as Joel was marched into his office by two officers in uniform. ‘You want to know who with?’
Joel said nothing. Sam Carter stepped into the room after him and hung about uncomfortably in the background.
Page glared at Joel from across the broad desk. He was a heavyset man in his late fifties, with a downturned mouth like a razor slash. When he was pissed off, which was most of the time, the rash of broken veins across his cheeks glowed scarlet. At this moment they were the wrong side of beetroot.
‘Do you know whose employee you beat up? Do you have
any
idea the kind of friends Gabriel Stone has?’
‘I didn’t beat anyone up,’ Joel muttered resignedly. ‘But I have the feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.’
‘Jeremy Lonsdale. Name familiar?’
‘Let me think,’ Joel said. He could feel Carter’s gaze on his back, silently pleading with him to watch his mouth.
‘Probably our next Prime Minister. You certainly pick them, Inspector.’ Page shook his head in disbelief, and his jowls wobbled. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What’s
wrong
with you?’ Page repeated more loudly. ‘Destruction of valuable antique property. Accusations more bizarre and ridiculous than anything I’ve heard in nearly forty years in the force. Letting some dopehead kid fill your brain with nonsense. Secret passages. Underground crypts. And then beating up an innocent member of the public. Did you know Seymour Finch has a terminal medical condition?’
He punches pretty well for a dying man,
Joel wanted to say. But that might have been pushing his luck.
‘And that’s not all,’ Page went on, warming to his anger. ‘I had a talk with a solicitor this morning. A certain Jonathan Hawthorne. Ring any bells? Apparently you were round at his home yesterday afternoon, harassing his family and upsetting a sick girl. Tell me this isn’t true.’
‘I wouldn’t call it harassment.’
‘So you’re not denying this?’
‘Something’s going on, sir.’
‘Damn right something’s going on. In your head. Meanwhile, we’ve got a suspected serial killer going around our county. And this is what I have to deal with? One of my best officers going into a complete fucking meltdown.’ Page’s voice had risen to a shout, and he was out of his chair with his fists on the desk. His whole body seemed to be quivering with rage. ‘You’re suspended, Solomon.’
‘What?’
At the back of the room, Carter rolled his eyes. ‘Told you so,’ his expression said.
‘Six months. That’s it. No questions. And consider yourself bloody fortunate that you’re dealing with reasonable men. Jeremy Lonsdale has told me that neither Mr Finch nor Mr Stone will be pressing charges. If something like this got into the press…’ Page puffed out his cheeks. The veins were alarmingly inflamed. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’ He pointed a stubby finger in Joel’s face. ‘But I’m warning you. I know you. I know you’re a determined bastard when you want to be. Go anywhere near the Stone estate – I’m talking within a mile of it – or anywhere near him or any of his employees…’ He made a face. ‘You even
think
about them, and I’ll have your bloody head on a plate. Tell me that’s as clear as I could possibly make myself.’
‘It is very clear, sir.’
‘Yes, it is. Now get out. I don’t want to see your face or hear your name for six months. I just hope that when you come back you’ll have learned some sense.’
Joel stormed out of Page’s office and slammed the door behind him with a noise like the crack of a rifle shot. He was halfway down the corridor when the door opened again and Carter came running out after him.
‘Hey, slow down.’
Joel pointed. ‘That stupid bastard has no idea what’s going on here.’
‘And you do?’
‘I think I do, yeah.’
‘So tell me. I’m all ears.’
‘I’m not sure you’d want to know.’
Carter looked at his watch. ‘I have a meeting this afternoon, but I can spare a few minutes. Let’s go for a pint.’
Thirty minutes later they were sitting at a quiet corner table in the Wheatsheaf pub in central Oxford, just up the road from the police station. Talking quietly, Joel spilled out what he knew, what he feared, until there was nothing left to say and he was staring numbly into his beer. His head was still bursting with pain from where Finch had hit him.
Across the table, Sam Carter was quiet for a long time. He picked up his beer, was about to take a sip, then put the glass down again.
‘Vampires,’ he said in a flat tone.
‘This is exactly how I told you you’d react.’
‘Uh, vampires, Joel. The Undead. Human sacrifices.’
Joel shook his head. ‘It’s not a sacrifice. They do it to get the—’
‘The blood. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’ve seen the movies.’
‘This is not a movie, Sam. This is real.’
‘This is real.’
‘Absolutely real. I saw them. And I’ve seen them before. Years ago.’
‘You’ve seen them before.’
‘You just going to keep repeating everything I say, or are you going to tell me what you think?’
Carter stared at him. ‘You’re completely fucking serious, aren’t you? Do you have
any
idea what you’re laying on me with this?’
‘You’ve known me a long time. When have I ever bullshitted you?’
‘Yeah, but this—’
‘Okay, you think it’s crazy.’
‘No, I wouldn’t use that word. Floridly insane, maybe – crazy doesn’t quite cover it.’
‘Thanks.’
Carter jabbed a finger at him. ‘Listen to me like you’ve never listened to anyone before. Do not – do
not
– breathe a single solitary word of this to anyone else. They won’t just put you on suspension. They’ll have you fucking committed, mate.’
‘You think all this doesn’t sound mad to me too?’
‘Be straight with me. Are you drinking? Doing drugs? Happens to the best of us. Goes with this shitty job. Christ knows I have moments when I’d like to dive in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and swim around in there the rest of my life, happy as a sandboy. Except I don’t, Joel. I bounce back, every fucking time, because that’s what you do.’
‘I’m not drinking, and I don’t do drugs. You know that.’
‘Yeah, and I also know Tania walking out hit you a lot harder than you liked to let on.’
Joel sighed. ‘That was nearly seven months ago. I’m over it.’
‘Good. Then here’s my advice. Find yourself a nice young lady. Take a holiday together somewhere that has lots of sun and sand and cocktails. Shag your brains out for a week or two.’
‘I hate beaches,’ Joel said.
‘Right. I forgot you’re one of these nutjobs who gets his jollies hanging off a cliff face or diving into some icy lake in the middle of nowhere. Whatever. All I’m saying is, get out of here and forget about the Super, forget about everything. Most of all, do yourself a favour and forget about fucking
vampires.
Jesus Christ, Joel.’
Joel shook his head. ‘I can’t do that. I have to go on with it, my own way.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that.’ Carter sighed. ‘Fine. You’re my friend. If you need me, you know where to find me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shit. Got to run.’ He slurped back the last of his beer, got up and clapped Joel on the shoulder. ‘You take care, all right?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Get out of here. You’re going to be late.’ Joel watched Carter muscle his way out of the door, then finished his drink and went to get another. For a few minutes he sat drinking and gazing into the middle distance.
Maybe it was true. Maybe he’d just lost his mind.
With all his heart he yearned to be wrong, to have just concocted all this out of a stress-frazzled brain. More than anything, he wished that he could take advantage of his suspension to relax, take it easy and then wake up one morning and realise that these crazy ideas had simply evaporated from his mind.
But he knew that wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t just going to go away. Things could only get worse, and he was going to have to face it, alone. Completely alone.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I could have helped you.
As the words came back to him, he reached for his wallet and dug out the business card Alex Bishop had given him in the hospital.
What had she meant by that? There was only one way to find out. And he couldn’t pretend to himself that he didn’t want to see her again anyway. He dialled her number, but the answering service told him the phone was switched off. He swore.
‘I’ve got to do something,’ he muttered to himself.
Then he knew what that something was.
He left his drink unfinished on the table.
By four in the afternoon, he was hard on the throttle of the Hayabusa, battling against a ninety-mile-an-hour wind as he headed north away from the city to a place he hadn’t seen for eighteen years and had never wanted to see again.
90 km from Norilsk, Central Siberian Plateau
6.45 p.m. GMT/1.45 a.m. local time
The journey wasn’t far from double the distance between London and Moscow, and Gabriel Stone had been dormant in his crate for most of the time that Jeremy Lonsdale’s borrowed Gulfstream had been cutting eastwards across Europe.
Many time zones had come and gone, and it was late night by the time the jet reached the small airfield a few kilometres from the remote mining outpost of Norilsk. Stone emerged from the sanctuary of his container into a world utterly different from the one he’d left behind him. The temperature had dropped to minus fifteen centigrade.
One of only three cities worldwide residing in a continuous permafrost zone, Norilsk lay at the heart of the Russian province known as Krasnoyarsk Krai. More than two million square kilometres of sub-arctic tundra, mountains and lakes, it was one of the most inaccessible and inhospitable wildernesses on the planet. For the community of mostly miners that endured the conditions there, it was an icy hell.
For the other creatures who had chosen it as their home, it was perfect.