A Rush of Blood

by David Mark

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent titles by David Mark

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Hilda

  Molly

  Mr Farkas

  Lottie

  Hilda

  Molly

  Hilda

  Molly

  Hilda

  Molly

  Hilda

  Molly

  Hilda

  Mr Farkas

  Lottie

  Molly

  Hilda

  Molly

  Lottie

  Mr Farkas

  Molly

  Hilda

  Mr Farkas

  Molly

  Hilda

  Molly

  Mr Farkas

  Hilda

  Recent titles by David Mark

  Novels

  THE ZEALOT’S BONES

  THE MAUSOLEUM *

  A RUSH OF BLOOD *

  The DS Aector McAvoy series

  DARK WINTER

  ORIGINAL SKIN

  SORROW BOUND

  TAKING PITY

  A BAD DEATH

  DEAD PRETTY

  CRUEL MERCY

  SCORCHED EARTH

  COLD BONES

  * available from Severn House

  A RUSH OF BLOOD

  David Mark

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  First published in the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by David Mark.

  The right of David Mark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8905-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-648-7 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0347-2 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For Nicola.

  ‘For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.’

  – Leviticus, 17.11

  PROLOGUE

  Cecil Court, Central London

  The book smelled of meat, as if its pages had once been used to line a butcher’s block. It carried the whisper of old churches; of pork-fat candles and blotted blood.

  It was a slim volume. Fine calligraphy to the title and flyleaf. No missing pages. A sheen to the black ink. Some philistine had scrawled some spidery opinions over some of the pages, but if it was period graffiti then it could well add to the value. A quality item.

  Mr Farkas raised his fingers to his mouth and sniffed them. Enjoyed them. He thought the aroma of old books unendingly pleasing. Warm, somehow. It made him think of clothes that had been left to dry in a snug kitchen.

  He looked around him. The little bookshop in the handsome arcade was rarely busy but the teeming rain and thundery skies had today depleted the numbers even more. He had the little bookshop to himself. He lifted the book to his face, breathing deeply, as if trying to draw the fading whiff of carnality into the very centre of his being.

  Behind closed eyes, he saw her. Saw his girl …

  Mr Farkas had to bite down on his tongue to prevent himself from crying out. He reached forward, taking his weight upon his left hand. He realized he was trembling. He anchored himself; planting his sensible shoes on the scarred wooden floor. The years were catching up with him. The past months had leeched the last of his youth from his skin and he had taken on the grey pallor of somebody who spent too much time indoors.

  ‘Focus, Mr Farkas,’ he whispered, and the similarity of the two words suddenly struck him as amusing. ‘Focus, Farkas, focus, Farkas …’ He had to press his lips together to suppress the giggle that threatened to shoot forth from his lips. The woozy feeling was hovering around the horizon of his consciousness and there was that same stale sickness in his gut. He wondered if bitterness could metastasize. Whether unshed tears could become a tumour.

  Relaxation time. That was what his wife had insisted he pursue. No work. No hospitals. No running around. Go and do what helps you relax …

  He examined the book again, his pulse quickening. What a find! A first edition. A real Jean Denys! He knew of the existence of the book but never imagined he would stumble upon one in a stack of yellowing paper and medical guides at the little bookshop two minutes from Trafalgar Square. He pictured the faces of his rivals when they learned he’d found an original. He concentrated on dredging up what he knew about the tome. It had been controversial, he remembered that. Had there not been talk of blasphemy, of Pagan practices? Blood from pig to man; from lamb to dog; from adult to child. Denys had claimed to have discovered the secret of soul transference: a way to alter the personalities of madmen by filling them with the blood of meeker creatures. The transfusionist had seen it as the first step towards a kind of immortality, a way to keep blood flowing even when the original host vessel has long since perished. It had been sent to the Royal Society in 1665: born in a time of plague and fire. It was a significant artefact: a true collector’s item. A bonanza of a find.

  ‘Beautiful,’ whispered Mr Farkas as he stroked the book’s cover. The paper felt luxurious against his fingertips. Waxy. He was tempted to put the tip of his tongue against the page.

  He leafed through the pages; fingers gentle, as if shushing a frightened bird. Two words, scrawled in reddish-brown, swam suddenly into his vision.

  George Acton.

  He felt himself start to shake.

  Acton. Alchemist to the Royal Court. Royal Physician. A pioneer whose experiments in blood transfusion had led to some of the great discoveries of the age. A figure on the fringes of immortality who flared brightly then disappeared from history.

  Excitement bloomed like a folded rose. He took a deep breath and felt a fresh twinge of pain. He realized he had been squatting for too long. He raised himself up, gingerly, still holding the pamphlet. He had to act calm. The bookseller might see his enthusiasm and claim there had been an error in the pricing. The thought of losing the book within moments of discovering it was too much to bear. He felt a sudden rush of light-headedness. He chided himself as he realized he had forgotten to eat again. He would be scolded when he got home.

  Mr Farkas cuffed at his eyes as he felt
a tear bubble up like blood from a pin prick. He raised his hands a moment too late. The droplet of salt water had tumbled on to the precious papers he held in his pale hands. He looked down through blurred vision. The teardrop sat reverentially on the ‘A’ of Acton. It held its form, pearlescent and perfect. Then it dissolved into the page.

  The copper scrawl began to swell. To dissolve.

  It was like watching blood seep from a corpse.

  Mr Farkas started to feel unwell. He could no longer see what was written on the page. He began to shake. Spit gathered at the corner of his mouth. His pupils contracted: dead flies in rancid milk. He began to see things. Taste things. Felt something moving inside his skin. He jerked, suddenly, as if he had emerged from icy water. He was clutching the pamphlet in a fist. He had scored crescent moons into the page. They leered up at him like smiling mouths.

  Mr Farkas smiled back.

  HILDA

  Her name was Meda, and people said she looked like me.

  She wasn’t much of a dancer. Always half a step behind, like a buffering download. She had a habit of throwing an extra 180 degrees into each pirouette. Finished up facing backwards, looking at the audience with her broad shoulders and big round backside and wondering where everybody had gone. Mum said she looked like a plucked goose in a sparkly leotard, which was a bit upsetting, considering how often she told me we looked alike.

  She only came to Streetdance class on a Wednesday night so her mum could earn a few quid cleaning offices at the end of Coronation Road. She didn’t hold out much hope of turning Meda into a star. Her little princess wasn’t an athletic sort. Used to be shiny and damp and pink by the end of the warm-up. If you pressed her cheeks you could leave big white fingerprints on her skin.

  She had a surname too. Stauskas, or something not far off. Lithuanian. I can see her now. A furry hood on her puffer jacket and baggy knees to her leggings. Tall for her age and ungainly in that pre-teen way. All arms and legs. You wouldn’t have felt safe taking her for a look around an antique shop. Wouldn’t have let her pour from your favourite vintage teapot, though she would have loved to be given the chance. Liked old things, did Meda. Could have spent forever stroking a pair of fox-fur cuffs or staring into the back of a carriage clock. Didn’t suit modern clothes, though her Mum dressed her like a pop star. Hooped earrings and hair pulled back too tight. Flashes of make-up on her cheeks. It just gave her a haughty kind of face that made me think of old Victorian photographs: all high necks and cameo brooches and lap dogs snacking on Turkish delight.

  Her family lived in a flat between Bethnal Green and Stepney. Three brothers, a sister, her mum, dad and Uncle Steppen, squished together into five rooms on the second floor of a drab, grey-fronted old building with a rubbish-strewn balcony secured behind chicken wire and broken glass. She liked cartoons and knew how to use a sewing machine. She wore high-topped trainers with Velcro and her hands were always cold. She kept a handkerchief up her sleeve like old ladies do. She ate fruit like it was sweets and carried a miniature book of animal facts in the inside pocket of her coat. That was what got us talking. One of those ‘who likes animals more?’ contests that I used to be so competitive about. Meda rose to the challenge. Took me on with some degree-level knowledge on meerkats and told me I was ‘talking bullocks’ with my assertion that hippos only had four teeth. I took the defeat uncommonly well. Made her laugh with an impression of a King Charles spaniel on a motorboat. We tossed some facts back and forth about Siberian huskies and Alaskan Malamutes. We got to know each other the way kids sometimes can. Best friends in the time it takes to drink a can of Fanta. She spoke with an accent. I thought she might be from Liverpool or Newcastle but she explained that home was a city called Visaginas, which looked like a butterfly if you saw it from above. She’d had a Pomeranian when she still lived there. Sasha, she said, though I thought that was more of a girl’s name. Had to be brushed twice a day and he’d been stolen once by some men who were having some kind of dispute with her dad over money. He was on a farm now, out in the countryside, with grandparents who could give him room to run around. Sasha, that is. Not her dad. I told her about my cat, Ripper. Big fat face and fur the colour of turning leaves. Told her she could come meet him if it was all right with her mum. She looked like I’d told her it was going to be Christmas every day from now on.

  I was breathless when I introduced her to Mum.

  This is Meda, I said, pronouncing it properly. She’s Lithuanian. She’s taught me to say hello and thank you and ‘Welcome to the Jolly Bonnet’. She likes animals. Do you think we look alike? I do. She doesn’t. We’re going to open a sanctuary for mistreated dogs. But no Chihuahuas or yappy Yorkshire terriers. We don’t like them. She knows her mum’s number if you want to ring and arrange it. She doesn’t live far from here. She walks herself home. You should let me do that. I know these streets. We could walk together …

  I can see her now. Can picture her face. Two big teeth at the front and two little ones where her fangs would be if she were a vampire. Not the prettiest of girls, though her mum was a looker. She would have grown into her looks, I think. I don’t know if she would ever have got any more elegant. She moved as though it was her first day in a new body. Bloody liability at showcase events. Sylvie had to stick her in the back row after the competition in Putney. With her big frame and long arms she’d seemed the best of all of us to be entrusted with the job of catching little Reena as she somersaulted down from the top of our three-tier human pyramid in a dazzling whirl of sequins and pigtails. Meda got into position a moment too late. Reena hit the wooden floor like she had fallen from a plane, arms and legs still fully extended. The imprint she left on the polished boards looked like a gingerbread man. We all heard the thud. All saw our parents and brothers and sisters wince in unison as the dark-haired little Bangladeshi girl hit the ground and stayed there, mumbling incomprehensibly into the shiny wooden boards. We kept dancing, like Sylvie had taught us. Kept high-kicking and back-flipping while Beyoncé bellowed from the speakers that girls run the world. Only stopped when the sound technician pulled the plug on our music and the St John Ambulance man shouted at Paulette for accidentally kicking over the oxygen cylinder. Meda felt awful about it all, though she still grumbled when Sylvie moved her into the back line at the next class. Reena was OK by then, although a rumour went around school that she could no longer count past the number six and would only answer to the name of Kevin. Even in the back line it was hard to disguise Meda’s inadequacies. I can see her now, staring intently at the other girls and mimicking our actions an instant too late. Had she made it into the cast of Riverdance, the chorus line would have toppled like dominoes.

  She was good at making me laugh. Everything sounded funny the way she said it. She didn’t smile when she told jokes, which somehow made them funnier. And she would get her words wrong sometimes. She would try and use phrases that somebody had told her we used in London but they always sounded weird coming out of her mouth. She would tell me that she had been ‘bubble busy’ instead of ‘double’ and it took us ages to work out that she was trying to say ‘stone the crows’ when she responded to some piece of gossip with the claim she had been ‘stoning her clothes’.

  I don’t spend a lot of time wondering what Meda would have become. It’s not that the thoughts make me sad or that I get all maudlin about it. I just don’t think there’s any way I could come up with an answer. We were only friends for a few weeks. You could count the amount of time we spent together in hours. One class a week, every Wednesday night, from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. Believerz street dance class. Two hours of sweating and giggling and trying to keep up with the black girls in the care of a passive-aggressive French lady who lived on runner beans and water and had once appeared in a video for a band I had never heard of and who Mum said looked like she was made out of varnished baguettes.

  Outside of the classes and competitions I only ever saw Meda twice. She came with us to the Stepney Green city farm one blustery Saturday. Fe
d the goats and did impressions of the chickens and ate every scrap of the packed lunch that Mum had made us. Spent her pocket money on a hot chocolate and a little book about British birds. Picked up some leaflets from the display stand and spent a few minutes watching a man in a green jumper demonstrate traditional crafts and then chainsaw some tree stumps into wooden toadstools. She came home with us after that. Loved my room. Played with my stuffed wolves and Polly Pockets and grinned like something from a cartoon when she saw Mum getting ready for work and slipping into her Victorian wig and gown. She thought the whole flat was ‘exceptional’. She liked that word. Mum’s artwork, displayed corner to corner against bare brick walls, was ‘exceptional’. The antique typewriters and microscopes and the dozens of dead mice displayed in top hats and wedding dresses on wall-mounted potato crates. The old doctor’s bag and the antique stethoscope and the dozens of fat old books stacked like logs against the chimney breast. All were ‘exceptional’. I could tell she was sad to leave.

  Meda. My friend. Big and clumsy and happy to be in England. Loved having a friend who was a real Londoner. She was my friend and I was hers and if I think about anything other than what I know for sure, I might find myself conjuring up images of her worst moments, strapped to that stark white bed in that stark white room – watching her blood fall on to the starched sheets like rose petals on to snow. And I don’t want to think about that. It brings back too many of my own memories. Memories of absolute darkness and brilliant, painful light. Memories of gleaming brass and shining glass and blood flowing into and out of my arm. Memories of a reflection – my face obscured behind a mask made of someone else’s skin. And when I think of that, I feel myself growing bitter. Growing jealous of Meda. Of all the girls who didn’t come back. They became one thing instead of another. They went from alive to dead. Their heart ceased to beat. Their blood ceased to flow.