Vampire "Unseen" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 2) (13 page)

He pushed and rolled her, struggling with the awkwardness.

That was when he realised she wasn’t breathing. Her eyelids were open, her eyes rolled over to white. She was lifeless.

He’d killed her.

“No... No, don’t you fucking dare,” he rasped as he slammed his palm onto the centre of her chest and pressed down to try and revive her.

She couldn’t die yet... He had to revive her, needed to. He had to have his fun first. Furiously, he pressed her ribs hard and bounced the back of the car’s suspension as he did so.

There was no movement.  Then he saw the blisters forming on her lip, a reaction to the chemical already. A shock reaction. It had burned her. Chemical burns to her lips, to her mouth and throat. She had scarred and blistered in seconds.

“Oh fuck... oh fucking hell!”

Paul grabbed her and lifted, she breathed in as her head fell back to open the airway. It was a ragged, weakened breath. Her airway must be swollen. The chemicals had reacted and the swelling was closing the airway, but it was her position and unconsciousness that had stopped her breathing rather than the chemistry.

Paul pulled her, positioning her in a way that tilted her head backwards to keep her airway open. She was still alive, barely. She may not survive.

A car pulled around the far corner of the road making Paul slam the boot before he was satisfied her position allowed her to breathe.

Fuck it.

He walked the long way to the drivers side of the car, moving onto the pavement and into shadow as the car passed. Paul dipped his head, watching the car from under the peak of his cap. The car didn’t slow or show any undue attention. He saw Nisha’s handbag and picked it up.

It would take thirty or forty minutes to get across town to the squat. If she woke up in the boot and started shouting he would pull over and slice her throat with the knives. If she had died when they arrived he would just abandon the car. There was no reason to risk getting caught. After all, it was only Nisha. She was as good as dead anyway.

----- X -----

There were too many people in the street. Paul had been parked up in front of the squat for over ten minutes waiting for them to thin out. It was only a handful of people here and there, but he would have to be careful if he were to lift an unconscious girl from the boot without arousing suspicion.

There had been no signs or sounds from Nisha. No moans or shuffles. He decided to open it and check. People further up the street wouldn’t be able to see. He left the keys in the ignition and rolled the window down a little with the hope the car would get stolen again and be driven far away from here. He brought her handbag and checked the interior to make sure he hadn’t left anything obvious behind.

As the boot opened he was hit by a combination smell of vomit and antiseptic that made him gag. Nisha looked up at him with her eyes rolling in her head, confused, disoriented, but quiet. Dried vomit was on her chin and coat. She made eye contact with him and let out a very soft moan, frightened, but too doped to physically resist. He hoped she understood what was happening; the thought of her being consciously aware but incapacitated was… arousing.

The alley leading to the back of the squat was only ten yards away. He pulled Nisha harshly to lift her over the lip of the boot and allowed her head and torso to hang over the side of the car. The knife came from under his coat and sliced through the nylon zip tie. Her arms flopped forward to the road. He pulled her harder over the lip until gravity dropped her across the edge and onto the floor like she was stone drunk.

Her purple beret was in the boot. He took it and quickly checked for any other obvious items left behind. He found the second nylon zip tie and brought that too.

He lifted Nisha by putting her arm around the back of his neck and gripping her wrist whilst wrapping his other arm around her waist to walk her. Her legs moved but her feet made no purchase with the ground. They shuffled and dragged, tripping over themselves. It was only Paul’s increased strength that got her the ten yards to the alley and off the street.

Nisha made moans with every step. Her head lifted to look forward then flopped backwards and rolled back to the front. She made a loud snoring noise as the position of her head closed her airway. Paul decided it was better to just drag her than try to walk. He laid her on her back and left her for a few seconds to unlock the back gate. Still holding her handbag and beret, he hooked his hands under her arms and dragged her backwards until inside the yard. She was heavy and awkward and the effort was making him sweat despite his strength.

He pulled her down the stairs into the cellar.

It was prepared.

A single damp mattress and a few blankets. Eye-bolts fixed to the ceiling and wall. Chain and padlocks. The table lamp he had used upstairs in the squat was plugged in for illumination. A perfect concrete prison cell for a girl about to die.

She was finished.

He dropped her on the mattress and for the first time looked at her in the light. She was still the same Indian beauty that he remembered. Still the same dusky skin and thin brown hair, but the beauty was disfigured by lesions and blisters around her mouth. He reached down to examine her lips and noticed he was still wearing the rubber gloves. He touched her mouth with them, rolling her lips back to see how extensive the blistering was. Her teeth were perfect. A Hollywood smile of pearly whites.

He knelt beside her for a few minutes resisting the temptation to use his knives on her whilst she slept. It was an interesting fantasy to scar and disfigure her whilst she was still anaesthetised. She could wake up with a scarred face and spend the rest of her life not knowing how it had happened; but that negated his thirst for vengeance. He wanted her to look at him and recognise him and to tremble in terror, knowing that she was going to suffer the consequence for what she had done.

He undressed her. It was awkward, laborious. There was nothing sexual to her nudity until he wrapped a length of heavy security chain around her waist and padlocked it; only then did he pay attention to her as an object of lust. He had her, he really had her. The chain was attached to a heavy eye-bolt, an O shaped ring that was fastened to the wall with security anchors; heavy duty masonry bolts used for fixing safes to brick walls. Once they were screwed in, they couldn’t be unscrewed without bringing the wall down. The eye-bolt was rated to a metric ton in weight as were the chains. He’d left her enough slack to make it to the toilet.

The chain was heavy around her tiny waist. She looked delicate and fragile. He caressed her flank, feeling her ribs through her skin and ran his fingers across her breasts. He pushed her legs slightly apart to examine how she shaved her pussy into a thin landing strip and felt the stubble where it had began to grow back.

Do it... cut her.

Her skin was dusky, beautiful.

She fucking deserved this.

Paul took a second length of thinner, but no less sturdy chain and padlocked it around her neck; this long chain went through a second eye-bolt in the ceiling and fixed to the wall anchor. It was thinking ahead. Whenever he came down here he could pull on this second chain and hoist her onto her feet without ever going near her. He couldn’t imagine her fighting back against him, but it was a safety precaution. He couldn’t be here all the time and Nisha would be left alone with nothing better to do than plan her escape, or find someway to signal for help. Despite sitting here for hours and trying to plan how he would escape in the same situation, he wasn’t entirely convinced he’d thought of everything. Was there a weapon she could find or fashion here in the basement?

He dropped the blankets by her feet, not caring enough to cover her. He unplugged the table lamp and replaced it with a child’s night light, casting her in a soft peach glow. He watched her for a few minutes. Then he closed the door at the bottom of the cellar and padlocked it from the outside. Nisha wouldn’t be able to reach the door, but if she did the lock was solid. But just in case she did make it this far and get the door open he’d prepared a warning system. Fixed to the bottom of the door was a neodymium magnet touching a reed switch that in turn connected to the hacked cell-phone. If the door was opened the magnet would pull away and the cell-phone would send a text message to his matching pre-paid phone, all that had to happen was the magnet be pulled off the switch. It was a great system and although he’d built it perfectly from the plans on the internet, and although he’d tested it at least fifty times, it gave him more anxiety than anything else. He wasn’t familiar enough with electronics to be confident it would work one hundred percent. If one thing was to fail he was sure this would be it.

At the top of the stairs he closed the second door and padlocked it also. In the event that Nisha somehow got through the lower door, she still had to get through this upper door and this one had the strongest locks and hinges he could find.

There was a part of the preparation that hadn’t worked. He’d prepared a live webcam to be able to check up on Nisha at any point but the pub wi-fi didn’t have the bandwidth to carry it. He liked the idea of being able to open his laptop and view Nisha suffering in the basement from afar, but it hadn’t happened.

With his prize locked away and nothing to do until she woke he spent time examining her clothes and handbag. He found her purse, a bright red leather clutch with a  gold clasp. Inside he found cash, almost a hundred pounds which he put into his own pocket. There was a travel card and various credit cards, a lipstick, some keys and a few receipts. He took the cap off the lipstick and screwed the base to see the colour and was shocked that it started buzzing and was made of plastic. The filthy girl had a concealed vibrator in her purse. He looked to the cellar door thinking about her using this thing, self pleasuring whilst out and about. Without even thinking he licked his lips and put it in his mouth to taste then dropped it back in the purse and put it aside.

He searched her clothes carefully, feeling the fabric, smelling her on the linen. He folded the clothes neatly and placed them on the draining board. He searched the pockets of her coat and discovered her cell-phone.

Fuck.

He pulled off the back and removed the battery to shut it off. Mobile phones show their position, anti-theft phones can activate the camera and microphone as well as reveal their location. He would take it with him when he left. He would take the phone to King’s Cross station and dump it. Better still, he would turn it on and leave it on a bus or something, get rid of it in a way that it went for a journey. His bedsit wasn’t far away. He would dispose of it creatively on his way home.

He folded her coat and placed it neatly with the other clothes, then placed her beret on top. Somehow it felt important to do this neatly. It was part of ensuring things were done right. There were so many things that could go wrong with this. He could have been seen, the car could be tracked across the city by the cameras that make sure motorists have paid to drive into central London. Nisha may find that one overlooked detail and escape, she might make an escape tool from a spring in the mattress or some other ingenious thing.

The right thing to do was to kill her now and get it over with. He’d already crossed the point of no return. Nisha could not survive this. But before she died he needed to tell her why she was there. He would wait until tomorrow, then when she was fully awake and terrified and begging for her life, then he would have his confrontation.

----- X -----

The bottle of bourbon was beside the laptop. The glass was next to the bottle. The computer was waiting to receive the video call from Noica.

The police meeting was the typical touching point; Europol wasn’t an organisation as much as it was a structure for sharing intelligence. In Britain, Latis had no greater police powers than a tourist but what he did have was access to information that would otherwise be confidential. They had shown him the electronic trail on McGovern, his use of banks to obtain loans and his use of credit cards as he went to cash before dropping off the grid.

There were a few angles of approach the British police would look at. The most promising was a search to identify the MAC address of his laptop. The MAC was a unique identifier assigned to every network adapter in every electronic device that can connect to the internet. Whether a mobile phone, a computer, a tablet or e-reader, if it connected to the internet it had a unique electronic signature. If they could find the MAC for his laptop, then all internet providers in the UK could be put on alert to look for it. If McGovern’s laptop connected to the internet, the internet company could give a real-time alert on where he was connecting from. The downside to this plan was some internet providers only recorded the MAC of the modem and ignored the MAC addresses behind them. It would also take time to figure out what his MAC address was. Less hopeful still was McGovern may have discarded the device and no longer be using it. The police already had access to his emails but there was little of use and, wisely, McGovern hadn’t logged on to check his mail. Since going on the run all of his usual connections had gone dark. McGovern wasn’t a fan of online social networking. He had accounts and a handful of friends but a cursory glance at his friendships revealed a tiny network of no more than a dozen people; at least this made locating and interviewing people easy. There were a few messages of congratulations and well wishes for his trip to Romania. ‘Good luck with the writing’ and ‘have a blast in Romania’. Those people were priorities as they knew what McGovern’s plans had been.

The computer played chimes. Incoming call.

Latis clicked to open the conversation and felt his eyes drift to the alcohol.

“Cornel.” Noica sat in an executive chair with bookcases and wood panels on the wall behind him. He looked perfectly lit and photographed as though his video calls were made from a TV studio.

“Hello,” Latis replied.

“Did you meet with Europol today? How are things?”