Like This, for Ever

32




‘NO! NO! GET off me! I won’t.’

Dana sat up, struggling to understand why there was a frightened child in her house. Helen, always a good sleeper, didn’t stir. Of course. Huck and Mark were in the next room – Huck always liked to stay over when Helen was down. She heard Mark spring out of bed and cross the room.

‘It’s OK,’ she heard him say. ‘Just a nightmare. I’m here.’

‘He’s at the window. Dad, he’s trying to get in.’

Dana got out of bed and left the room. She knocked gently on the door of the guest room and pushed it open.

Mark, wearing nothing but checked pyjama bottoms, was sitting on Huck’s bed. He’d pulled his son’s small body on to his lap and his arms were tight around him. ‘There’s no one at the window,’ he was saying. ‘You had a bad dream, that’s all.’

‘Mark?’ asked Dana from the doorway. ‘Is Huck OK?’

‘He’s fine. Bad dream. Want to tell me about it, buddy?’

Huck pressed his face against his father’s bare shoulder and shook his head.

‘Wouldn’t be vampires by any chance, would it?’

The small head clamped against his father didn’t move. Mark looked up and caught Dana’s eye. Then Huck’s head was up, alert again. ‘There is something at the window! It’s a bat!’

‘Huck, it’ll be a pigeon.’ Dana crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain. ‘They nest on all the roofs round here. They’re a darned nuisance but we can’t seem to get rid of them. Look, there are three of them on the window ledge across the back. Want to see?’

Huck shook his head, but he wasn’t clinging quite so tightly.

‘There are no bats in London,’ said Mark.

Dana opened her mouth to correct him and thought better of it. After all, it was February, the bats that regularly flew around the trees in the gardens were all hibernating. She watched Huck raise his head and look at his dad. ‘They can get under doors,’ he said.

‘What? Vampires?’

Huck nodded. ‘They turn into mist and sneak under doors. Some boys at school were talking and it’s on this Facebook page as well. They come into your room at night and drink your blood and after a few days you die because you’ve got no blood left, just like those boys Auntie Dana found, and if you’ve drunk the vampire’s blood, you become one of them and then you have to kill everyone in your family.’

‘I have never heard such bollocks in all my life,’ said Mark.

‘Actually, as a summary of the vampire legends, it’s pretty accurate,’ said Dana. ‘But Huck, they’re stories. They’re no more true than Harry Potter.’

‘And by the way, Huck, since when have you been going on Facebook? You’re not old enough.’

Huck’s scared look became half defiant. ‘I use Mum’s page,’ he admitted.

‘I’ll be having a word with your mother.’

‘So, who is killing these boys then?’ Huck asked, deftly moving the conversation on.

‘A man,’ said his father. ‘Very bad, but otherwise very ordinary. And your godmother will catch him.’

Downstairs, Dana put the kettle on and immediately wondered why she’d bothered. She didn’t want tea or coffee. In the cupboard by the fridge she found the single Highland malt that Helen had brought down.

She’d been waiting ten minutes when Mark appeared. He’d pulled a sweatshirt on and she was glad. Normally, male nudity held no more interest for her than a well-executed painting, but just lately, it seemed, she never felt entirely comfortable close to Mark.

‘Is he asleep?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘You’ve got to get this guy soon, Dana,’ he said. ‘Kids are terrified. They think there’s a monster out there and he’s after little boys.’

‘Trouble is, they’re right.’

‘This frigging Facebook business is a menace. Can you not get this site they’re all obsessing with closed down?’

Dana pulled a face. ‘Possibly. But we’ve been monitoring it quite closely. A lot of the contributors knew the victims.’

‘You think the killer could be using it?’

‘Quite likely he is.’

‘Can we have a look?’

Dana led the way to her study and switched on her desktop computer. The page was saved under Favourites.

But just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled.

Yeah, I love that quote. One of my favourites. Wolves or vampires – which does it for you?

Wolves every time. The ripping apart of flesh. Something well savage about a wolf.

‘Christ,’ said Mark, after flicking through the latest postings. ‘I’m going to have to talk to Carrie. I don’t want Huck reading this crap, let alone getting involved.’

‘There’s a chap called Peter we’re particularly interested in,’ said Dana. ‘He’s quite often ahead of the game when it comes to talking about the case. He announced we’d found the Barlow twins a couple of hours before we made it public.’

Mark was flicking down the postings. ‘This one?’ he asked, the cursor hovering over a quote from the book that Peter Sweep had posted.

There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.

Dana leaned closer. It was funny, how different to women men smelled close up.

‘Yeah, that’s him. He’s been quoting from the Bram Stoker book ad nauseam since Bart Hunt put the idea into his head. He’s clever, though. Sweep, I mean, not Hunt. Uses public computers, never the same place twice. He’s hiding something.’

‘What’s with the red roses?’ asked Mark, indicating Peter’s profile picture. ‘If they’re supposed to be symbolic, you’d think a dagger dripping blood would be more to the point.’

‘Do roses seem a little on the feminine side to you?’ said Dana.

‘How is your killer-wears-a-dress theory shaping up?’

‘I did what you suggested and pulled up a list of boys aged eight to twelve who died in Greater London in the last five years. Not a long list, thankfully. Some road traffic accidents, a few natural causes. Nothing struck me. Neil’s going through it too, but I’m not hopeful.’

He nodded. ‘Worth a try.’

Dana thought for a second. Made her mind up. ‘I saw a woman on that beach tonight,’ she said. ‘You know, the one under Tower Bridge where the twins were found?’

‘In the dark?’

‘That’s what I thought. The tide was coming in fast, so there couldn’t have been more than a yard or so of shore left. She ran when I called to her.’

‘Would you recognize her again?’

‘Almost certainly. I’ve seen her before.’

Mark waited. She gave her temple a little slap, as though trying to shake a memory loose. ‘It won’t come,’ she said. ‘I can’t think how I know her. Just that, when she turned round, I knew I wasn’t looking at that face for the first time.’

‘Worth looking through WADS?’

WADS stood for Witness Album Display System, an online database of mugshots. If the woman she’d seen on the beach had been charged or arrested anywhere in the UK in recent years, her photograph would be stored on the system.

Dana nodded her agreement. ‘Huck’s worried about you,’ she said.

His brow creased. ‘Did he tell you?’

She nodded. ‘He thinks you need a girlfriend.’

‘He’s probably right, but you’re spoken for.’

Suddenly horribly self-conscious, Dana stepped back. He’d said that a dozen times before. There’d been a time when he’d simply refused to accept that she was gay. Why was it bothering her now, knowing he didn’t mean it any more? She risked looking up again. There were lines around his eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. And his skin was coarser than it had been fifteen years ago when they’d met. He’d aged, of course, and so had she, it just wasn’t a process you really associated with people you were close to.

‘It’s not easy, is it?’ she said. ‘Wanting something you can’t have.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘What is it you want?’

He was her best friend, one of the few people in the world she completely trusted. If she couldn’t tell him, who could she tell?

‘I think I want a baby,’ she replied, knowing in that instant that she had never properly thought about it before, and also that it was completely and undeniably true.

He leaned back in his chair, increasing the distance between them, and pursed his lips into a long, slow whistle. ‘I have a huge amount of time for Helen,’ he said. ‘But I think she’s going to struggle with that one.’

Dana couldn’t help the smile, couldn’t stop the tears.

‘Come here,’ he said, holding out his arms. She stepped forward, had felt the brush of his hands on her upper arms when her phone started to ring. She turned to look at it, as though to check it really was a phone and it really was ringing. Well past midnight. A phone call at this hour couldn’t be good. She walked over, checked the display screen and turned back to Mark in surprise.

‘It’s Lacey,’ she said.