Vampire "Unseen" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 2) (25 page)

Paul took an internet connection at the back of the café. He searched for The Institute of Psychopathological Research. Nothing. He tried adding Latis name and got nothing but news items. He found a Romanian language search engine and tried again. Nothing still. Paul scanned the newspapers looking for a missing clue but found no further information. He rearranged the words in the search term just to make sure it wasn’t worded oddly in Romanian but still no matches came. There was no internet presence for this institute. On the outside chance he used a translation service to convert the name into Romanian and tried again.

Institutul de Cercetare Psihopatologice.

There was a webpage.

Information was scant. They had a photograph of an imposing building amongst mountains and a sign displaying the name of the institute but the contact address was a street in Bucharest. Was this the place that Latis worked? He found a street-view of the given address. It was a doorway in a busy street, not the same building as the photograph.

There was a name associated with the institute, The director was a man named Lucian Noica. Paul searched the name and was deluged with information. Lucian Noica was a media whore. Articles in magazines, scientific papers in medical journals. The first article was called, ‘Iluzii si Violenta’. Paul copied the text and translated it online. ‘Delusions and Violence.’ The sub heading translated as ‘The care and management of dangerous men.’ This had to be the place where Latis worked. He went back to the search results and clicked images.

Lucian Noica.

Groomed. Perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect smile. He’d never seen the man before but there was something utterly familiar about his face, as though he’d seen a long lost friend. It was the deepest deja vu ever felt. “Do I know you?” His hands began trembling, even his knees began to shake. He looked at the name again in the search bar. Doctor Lucian Noica, director of a research institute, a man who writes articles about men suffering delusions and violence.

The penny dropped. The realisation was profound.

“Holy shit…” Paul clamped his hands over his mouth at the realisation. “You know about this. You know about the illness, you know what makes vampires… You’ve got a whole fucking research institute.”

Paul went back to the search results. Medical reports, articles, original research. He needed this. He’d just walked into the goldmine. Everything he needed was known by this man. The articles needed translating to English and printing out. He needed to get to work studying this stuff. He needed to know what Noica knew… He needed to talk with him.

Latis.

Corneliu Latis was his lapdog in London. He was here somewhere in the city and he knew what was going on. Latis was scum who deserved to be slaughtered, but before that, he needed to talk.

----- X -----

Corneliu couldn’t face spending time with Bogdan, or networking, or anything else that he was supposed to do. He chose to spend a few days resting before going back to the task. Bogdan’s intentions added an unwanted dynamic to the situation.

He was comfortable in London. The praise and admiration bestowed on him almost made life tolerable. He walked the streets and drank in bars. He found himself enjoying strolls along the South Bank of the river, sitting on benches with his coat pulled tight against the cold. It was the space he needed to clear his head. What would his future hold? Could this brief success be leveraged into something positive? Was there a future career with Noica?

He waited a few days then visited Nisha Khumari in hospital. She was slumped upright in bed and an older woman with large thick rimmed glasses was feeding her with a syringe; he assumed it was her mother. Nisha wore a loose fitting hospital gown and her face was wrapped in a plastic half-mask like the Phantom of the Opera; a padded bandage ran over her head and under her chin which seemed double the size it should be.

“Hi, My name is Corneliu Latis, I am the policeman who found you,” he said.

Her eyes rolled around sleepily and closed; he thought she’d fallen asleep until tears began running and she found the strength to hum a noise of acknowledgement.

“Her jaw is wired, Mr. Latis, she can’t speak,” her mother said. “Come in, please.”

“Thank you... oh, these are for you.” He handed over flowers picked up in the gift shop and took a seat. Nisha wrote tiredly in a notebook.

Her mother smiled at him. “We’ve been talking about you, Mr. Latis.”

Fighting against sedatives, Nisha pushed the notebook forward, it said, “Thank you for everything,” and was followed by three love hearts. For a moment, Corneliu felt his own emotions swell and had to fight them down to remain composed. He nodded courteously and smiled but didn’t speak less he wore his heart on his sleeve.

Nisha was damaged but would survive. She wasn’t cold and dead in the boot of a car missing organs. It was never his fault what had happened to those girls but he realised now that he’d taken on the responsibility. Those girls were what happened when he failed at his job. Nisha was what happened when he succeeded.

She reached out and took hold of his hand. He felt awkward. He had nothing to say and was thankful when her mother resumed feeding her with a syringe.

“Are you any closer to catching Paul McGovern?” the mother asked. He felt Nisha squeeze his hand.

“I think the police are making progress. I feel confident that what can be done is being done.”

“They said in the newspapers that you only found Nisha because you were searching for Paul McGovern. They said the British police weren’t searching.”

“No, that’s not true. The British police tracked Nisha’s mobile telephone. I was in the area at the time looking for McGovern when the information came through.” He turned to Nisha directly. “We knew he had been in King’s Cross and when we saw your mobile phone in the same place we started looking everywhere. If I hadn’t found you, then someone else would have.” It was a kind lie; she would have died without him. She squeezed his hand. “Everybody was looking for you,” he reiterated. “There is no way they wouldn’t have found you.”

Nisha wrote in the book, “What will happen when they catch him?”

Corneliu felt a cold shiver thinking about Bogdan and his guns. He thought about what Bogdan had said of SCO19 and how they would put McGovern down. “When he’s caught, I assume he’ll be put on trial here first and Romania will request to extradite him. He’s wanted for two murders in Romania. Either way, he’ll be going to prison for the rest of his life.”

“He deserves to,” the mother said.

Corneliu nodded. “I think so too.”

----- X -----

The few days break Cornel gave himself gently stretched out to a week. He received an email from Blackwell with a slew of magazine articles written by McGovern, some of which were for a fish keeping journal. The publishers would send McGovern the data and he would fashion the articles. He’d utilised this knowledge of fish and aquariums to get the job at UCL. McGovern’s resourcefulness constantly surprised.

He drip fed the articles to Noica in daily emails. Subterfuge, to make it look like he was working, sending a new article or short story here and there as though he had just discovered it when in reality he was strolling along the river every day.

He wasn’t motivated for the tedious task of combing McGovern’s contacts and knew they wouldn’t find him like that; McGovern had faked an identity and lived off the grid. He didn’t rely on other people to survive. The ball was now in the court of the British police and all they could do was wait for him to surface.

A large part of his apathy was that he didn’t want to play a role engineering the ending. If Bogdan was to be believed, McGovern would die in a hail of bullets from SCO19, or a well placed shot from himself. As bad as McGovern was, Corneliu didn’t want any part arranging his murder.

One thing that did play on his conscience was Nisha Khumari. He had photos of her injuries that made him feel sick. The photographs of her breasts in particular set his teeth on edge. The pictures showed deep slices, sutured with heavy butterfly stitches and painted with yellow antiseptic gel. The poor girl. The photographs were taken whilst she laid unconscious in bed with a huge dressing obscuring her face. Lovely dusky skin, then these horrendous wounds of mutilation to her breasts. He would never want her to know how close she came to being like those other victims. She was only a few moves away from being found butchered with her organs missing.

McGovern was a sadist. He had stripped her naked, chained her up, then cut her to inflict unbearable physical torture through some kind of misogynistic sadism. There was no reason for it, no reason at all. If he’d wanted to kill her he could have killed her, if he’d wanted to rape her he could have raped her; why had he wanted this? He had subjected Nisha Khumari to an unimaginable terror. He broke her skull, her jaw, shattered her cheekbone, sliced deeply through her breasts then locked her in absolute darkness. How could one human being inflict so much pain onto another?

It was the darkness that really got to Cornel. Nisha was horrifically injured and McGovern left her to cry and panic in a dungeon of utter helplessness.

His cruelty was absolute.

His behaviour irredeemable.

Maybe Bogdan was right. Maybe he did deserve to be put down like a sick animal. One thing was for certain, he had to be stopped before he did this to someone else, but what was wrong with him? What had made him change into this? Paul McGovern was a quiet kid who wrote magazine articles on how to keep tropical fish. Something had happened to him, some strange and inexplicable thing had turned that nice, capable young man with a promising future into a multiple murderer. Noica called it the source. There no longer seemed any reason to doubt. Corneliu had always insisted that he didn’t believe in vampires. Then Paul McGovern happened.

He realised he’d changed his mind.

Vampires aren’t storybook creatures that fly in the night. Vampires don’t have supernatural powers or a fear of garlic or engage in high-school romances… but real vampires exist… one of them was out there… and he was terrifying.

----- X -----

Paul built a database of all the medium to expensive hotels within one mile of Scotland Yard. There were over two hundred. He would never have imagined there could be so many. His presumption was that Latis would have to stay somewhere close. He could be staying in a rented apartment or some other lodgings, but this seemed a fair way to begin.

He dialled the first number.

“Good morning, Royal Hotel, how can I help?”

“Morning, can you put me through to a guest room please, the name is Corneliu Latis.”

“Just a moment, Sir,” the switchboard operator said. There was music playing whilst on hold, classical strings. “Hello, I’m sorry, Sir, I can’t find that guest name.”

“Oh, really, never mind he may not have checked in yet. Thank you.” He crossed the hotel off the list.

His mind drifted to thoughts of a new passport. He would pick it up in three days, fourteen days after making the application. Wendy’s guesthouse was in a row of terraced homes. If there were police waiting for him to return, they could be in any of the buildings adjacent or opposite, looking out, waiting for him to appear. There was no way to know whether he was walking into a trap without springing it. It would require some thought.

“Good morning, Stevenage House, Andre speaking.”

“Hello Andre, can you connect me to a guest room please, the name is Corneliu Latis.”

The sound of keys being typed, breathing into the microphone. “Can you spell the surname for me?”

“L.A.T.I.S. Latis.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have that guest name in house.”

Paul crossed it off the list.

Would the passport application be successful? The post office had a document checking service which he used. They checked the form and ensured all the documents were in place, but was there anything suspicious in what he’d submitted? Suppose the application raised a red flag, something wrong in the background check, what would they do? Would they involve the police? Probably. Would the police visit Wendy’s B&B which he’d given as an address? Probably, yes.

“Arbour Hotel. Good morning.”

“Good morning, can you connect me to the room of Corneliu Latis. L.A.T.I.S.”

“Yes, Sir,”

An automated advert. “Why not dine with us in our award winning restaurant, where head chef Jean-Marie La…”

“...Hello sir, I’m afraid I can’t find that name.”

What if the passport application triggered a red flag and under the added scrutiny he was identified. When he turned up at the guesthouse he would be facing a riot squad. He would face ten men with helmets and shields. They would have attack dogs to chase him down. They would be sitting in the street behind twitching curtains waiting for him to arrive. They would close in, cut off the means of escape.

He had to take the risk. That passport was the route to another life. He was a hunted man in Britain, but if he could make it to the continent on a new identity then he could travel anywhere and do anything.

He should visit Noica in Romania.

That was a stupidly dangerous idea but one that he couldn’t put down. Noica was the expert on the illness. At some point he would have to meet with him.

It was no more stupid than what he was doing now. Searching for Corneliu Latis. He must be crazy to be seeking out the man who wanted to capture him. Yet here he was, telephoning hotels in the hope of finding where he stayed. He’d called seventy hotels throughout the day. Then he dialled the number for the seventy first hotel on his list.

“International Hotel, Victoria,” the girl on the switchboard said.

“Can you put me through to a guest room. Corneliu Latis. L.A.T.I.S.”

“One moment, Sir… Yes, sir, putting you through now.”

The phone rang. Paul hung up instantly.

“Gotcha.”

----- X -----

Passport day. Paul adopted the complete Alan Jay disguise and groomed to the hilt. He even bought a tie from a second hand store to complete the image of a man going for a job interview. When accessorised with the tinted glasses it added an edge of rock and roll to the ensemble. It was a million miles away from Paul McGovern or Joseph Frady.