by Helen Harper
‘It has to be, sir.’ I stared at the body. I’d shaken it and turned it over and examined the skin. There was no blemish or mark or pulsating lump that indicated where the bugbear had gone, but it was in there somewhere. This wasn’t over yet.
‘It disappeared inside him a moment before he died. But I don’t know anything about bugbears, so I don’t know if it died when he did. I don’t know if it’s concealing itself inside Lazarus’s body until it gathers enough strength to attack us again. There’s been no sign of it since just before Lazarus hit the ground.’ Angry frustration bit at me. ‘Whether it’s still alive in there or not, I should have stopped it before it merged back so we could know for sure.’
Boateng looked at me. ‘You saved Miranda and Albion James,’ he said quietly. He glanced at the flashing blue lights on the ambulance where they were being checked over before being taken to the hospital. ‘That’s down to you. You got the guy. You’ve done a good day’s work, Emma.’
It didn’t feel that way. ‘Until we know what’s happened to that damned bugbear, this isn’t over.’
‘The body will be monitored at all times. If that parasite is still in there and it tries to come out, we’ll know about it.’ He gave me a meaningful look. ‘You killed a man. You know the drill. I need to ask for your badge.’
‘I shot that bugbear several times with silver bolts and it didn’t even flinch,’ I said. ‘It’s a supe – and a fucking powerful one at that. I can follow police protocol and head off to wait until I’ve been debriefed and cleared, but this is a supe crime and we’re dealing with a supe murderer that might still be lurking inside that corpse. A dozen of your officers won’t be a match for it.’
Boateng grimaced. ‘Should we…?’ He hesitated, unwilling to say the words out loud.
‘Should we cut him open and see what’s in there?’ I asked grimly. It was not an appealing thought but needs must. ‘I reckon so. But not here. We need to do it in a closed environment where we have full control and there’s no risk that it will escape.’
I glanced at Lukas. He was watching me with concerned eyes. I managed a smile and he smiled back briefly.
‘This Lazarus fellow was on the same train as you from London?’ Boateng asked.
I returned my attention to him and nodded. ‘He was sitting opposite to me all the way to Appledore. No doubt he killed Patrick Lacey, came to London to make sure I learned about that murder and then came to Barchapel to check it out. He was making sure that I did what he wanted.’ My mouth turned down. ‘And laughing at me, too.’
‘You got him in the end,’ Boateng repeated. ‘That’s what counts.’ He sighed heavily and rubbed his hand over his head. ‘Public safety takes priority over protocol. If you tell me you’re okay to continue, you can remain on duty until we know for sure that the bugbear has been taken care of.’
‘I’m okay, sir.’ In truth, I was more than okay. I didn’t know Lazarus’s real identity, but I knew he was dead. The man who’d murdered my parents was gone from this world and I couldn’t be sad about that, not even for a moment.
The ambulance transporting Miranda and Albion started up and carefully drove away. I watched it disappear down the driveway then looked at Boateng again. ‘We need to check out the campsite. Who was Lazarus? What was his real name? Why didn’t we pick up on him before? I know he was old and looked harmless, but he must have been interviewed. His presence must have been registered by someone.’
‘Believe me,’ Boateng said, ‘I’ll be looking into that. There’s already a team heading to the campsite. By the time dawn breaks, we’ll know everything there is to know about Lazarus, including whether there’s a monster hiding inside his dead body.’
Rothsay trotted up. He stopped when he reached us and stared down at Lazarus’s corpse. ‘Uh…’ He scratched his neck. ‘There’s an armour-plated vehicle on its way to transport him to Maidstone.’
Good. Laura was still at the morgue there; if anyone could find whether there was a monster inside a monster, it was her.
Lukas had apparently heard enough chatter. He strode up to me and put an arm round my waist. Rothsay leapt about three metres back; maybe he was afraid that Lukas would try and hug him, too.
‘We can’t rest yet,’ Lukas muttered. ‘We can’t leave that thing alone until we know what’s happened to the bugbear.’
‘It almost had you.’
He smiled down at me and my heart skipped a beat. ‘You saved me, D’Artagnan. Again.’
Boateng cleared his throat. ‘You two will travel with the body to Maidstone. We can’t take any chances. If the bugbear is still alive, it will be found.’ He gazed at Lukas. ‘And if it is still alive…’
Lukas glanced at me and then at Boateng. ‘We’ll take care of it.’
I drew back my shoulders. This was my job. ‘We will.’
Boateng barked suddenly at Rothsay, ‘Robert! Don’t stand so close to the body!’
The young policeman turned white as a sheet and hurled himself away from Lazarus and the rest of us. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he swallowed hard. ‘Sorry.’
‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. You have to be careful.’
Rothsay nodded, his eyes wide. I suspected he would be having nightmares for some time to come; maybe all of us would. Still, at least DCI Boateng wouldn’t let anyone make the mistake of thinking the case was closed. Until we had absolute proof that the bugbear’s existence had been snuffed out, he wouldn’t relax. That was just as well because I couldn’t shake the sensation that this was far from over.
It was an odd feeling sitting in the back of an armour-plated vehicle that was usually used for transporting dangerous prisoners. The narrow benches weren’t particularly comfortable, and it didn’t help that I felt compelled to stare at Lazarus’s dead body in case the bugbear decided to make another appearance.
I still didn’t feel any guilt or sadness at having killed Lazarus, but neither was there euphoria or relief at having brought down a dangerous criminal. More than anything, I just felt tired.
I put my head onto Lukas’s shoulder and sighed as I pictured Lazarus’s eyes taunting me. The lack of the bugbear’s body and the overwhelming exhaustion weren’t the only reasons I didn’t feel like celebrating.
‘All these years,’ I whispered. ‘He’s been free all these years while Samuel Beswick paid the price for his crimes. He slaughtered my parents, and goodness knows how many others since then. And we let him get away with it.’
‘You know it’s not your fault that the wrong man was sent to prison, right? You were a kid, Emma.’
‘If I could have remembered something – anything – then maybe…’
‘You were five years old. This is not on you.’ He smoothed back my hair. ‘Has it occurred to you that this is what Lazarus wanted? He wanted you to suffer, to question everything and feel guilty. He might be dead now, but you’re playing into his hands. You don’t have to. This is not your fault.’
‘It feels like it is.’
‘It’s not.’
Deep down I recognised that, but it was still hard to shake off the gnawing guilt. I stared hard at Lazarus. In death he looked even more frail; his body was already sinking into itself as if it were shrinking before our eyes.
The van went over a pothole. The body jerked, even though it was strapped down. I jumped, and so did Lukas. We shared a grin born of both humour and nervousness. I gazed at Lazarus again and frowned. ‘His feet,’ I murmured.
‘What about them?’
‘They look small. The man who killed Patrick Lacey and Julie Mackintosh, and who waited in my wardrobe to kill me, he had big feet. He left plenty of boot prints to prove it.’
‘You said that at least one set of those prints had been left deliberately. He wanted you to find them. Maybe wearing a large pair of boots was another misdirection.’
‘Maybe.’ The back of my neck prickled.
‘What is it?’
I didn’t have words for what I felt
. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m uneasy, that’s all.’
‘It’s hardly surprising, given all that’s happened.’
Yeah. I shuffled even closer to Lukas. He was probably right.
Laura met us at the entrance to Maidstone Hospital. I felt her eyes on me as soon as I stepped out of the vehicle. ‘I’m fine,’ I told her before she asked.
‘Uh huh.’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘Sure thing, Em.’
I gave her an exasperated look then helped Lukas cover Lazarus’s body with a sheet to conceal him from unwary passers-by before sliding him onto the waiting gurney.
‘So this is the man?’ Laura asked.
‘Man. Beast.’ I shrugged uneasily. ‘I don’t really know what he is. He might still be dangerous.’
‘He doesn’t look dangerous.’
I met her eyes. ‘You and I both know that the dead don’t always stay that way. Not these days.’ I explained about the bugbear.
Laura simply raised her eyebrows. ‘Huh,’ she said. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘Interesting? Not scary? Gruesome? Disgusting? Enough to make you turn tail and run away screaming, demanding that someone else performs what could be a life-threatening post-mortem?’
Laura grinned. ‘You know me, I like a challenge. And I didn’t run screaming from you,’ she added pointedly.
‘You probably should have,’ Lukas said.
She smirked at him. ‘You’re the one who sleeps with her.’
‘I do a lot more than that.’
I could feel my cheeks turning red. ‘Let’s get on with the examination, shall we?’
‘Slicing and dicing,’ Laura said with a brief grin. ‘My favourite thing.’
We followed her into the hospital and took the large lift down to the basement. Morgues were always in the damned basement. Maybe we liked to pretend that death wasn’t an intrinsic part of life; if we shoved it out of the way where we couldn’t see it, we could kid ourselves that it didn’t happen. Of course, that was easy for me to say because I’d died five times so far. Not one of those deaths had stuck. Yet.
The morgue was almost identical to the one where Laura usually worked and she’d obviously made herself right at home. We wheeled Lazarus into the first room and slid his body from the gurney onto the table.
There was still no sign of the bugbear, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I stepped back and lifted my crossbow, training it on Lazarus’s unmoving chest as if the creature were about to spring out from his ribcage in a splatter of blood and I was Sigourney Weaver.
Lukas appeared equally wary. He took up position at the door so that he could block the bugbear’s escape if need be. If the damned thing was still alive, we had to keep it contained.
‘So,’ Laura said, pulling on a pair of plastic goggles and some disposable gloves, ‘you think that the bugbear entered and exited the body from the spine?’
I nodded, not taking my eyes off Lazarus for a second. ‘In between its shoulder blades.’
‘Like angel wings,’ Laura murmured to herself.
Except Lazarus had been far from angelic.
‘Normally,’ she told us, ‘we’d start from the chest and examine the body that way. Given what you’ve said, however, I think it’s more appropriate if we flip him over and begin at his spine.’
She waved at her young assistant and together they carefully turned the body. ‘It’s probably best if you leave now,’ she said kindly to him. The assistant didn’t need telling twice; he all but sprinted out of the room.
Laura used a pair of scissors to cut through Lazarus’s shirt and reveal the skin underneath. I leaned forward, holding my breath and tightening my grip on the crossbow. No bugbear. Not yet.
Without his clothes, it was surprising how thin Lazarus was. The skin on his back was mottled with several angry looking red patches. Laura frowned, then she stepped back, lifted one of his hands and turned it over to look at his fingernails.
‘What is it?’
‘He has a rash and his nails are dark.’ She held up his hand so I could see, then moved to his head and gently parted his thin white hair. A clump came away in her hand. She held it up. ‘I’d need to do further tests to be sure, but it appears that Lazarus has been undergoing chemotherapy. His body is showing a lot of the side effects that you might expect from aggressive treatment.’
‘He had cancer?’ Lukas asked.
‘It looks that way. Did he have any ID on him?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. No wallet. No credit cards. Nothing that might tell us who he really is.’
‘It might be worth checking his picture against local oncology wards,’ Laura advised. She cut off his trousers and underwear and disposed of them in a plastic evidence bag, then continued checking for external abnormalities or indications.
I watched her every move, expecting the bugbear to magically leap from Lazarus’s back and lunge for her at any moment, but it was still refusing to show itself. Eventually, when Laura was satisfied and had made several notations on her chart, she made the first incision.
Nothing. I waited, pretending not to notice the slick layer of sweat on my palms.
After what seemed like an age she said, ‘There’s no indication at all of anything out of the ordinary here.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lukas and I remained at the Maidstone Hospital until the wee hours of the morning, when Laura concluded the post-mortem. ‘I’m not sure whether to apologise or be grateful for finding no sign of a parasitical supernatural creature,’ she told us.
Neither was I. I hugged her all the same and thanked her for her efforts.
Lukas shook her hand but his expression remained grim. ‘We should escort the body back,’ he said. ‘We don’t know enough about the bugbear. Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. The best thing would be to cremate him as soon as we can.’
I could only agree. I wasn’t prepared to take any chances. I called Boateng and updated him on what we hadn’t discovered. It didn’t take long.
He remained silent as I spoke, listening carefully. ‘We’ve been busy here,’ he said. ‘We’ve searched the campsite where Lazarus was staying. He didn’t have many belongings but there was a bag containing several different IDs. We’ve checked them out and they’re all fake. We still have no way of knowing who he really is or what he’s done over the years.’
Fuck.
Unfortunately, Boateng wasn’t finished. ‘We also found something that confirms your pathologist’s cancer theory. There was a discarded hospital wristband in a bin close to Lazarus’s tent. It’s from a small hospital in London.’
‘What name is it under?’
‘Derek Bentley.’
‘Does that name ring any bells?’ I asked.
Boateng sighed; he sounded as tired as I felt. ‘In 1953, a man called Derek Bentley was convicted of the murder of a police officer and executed. It was his accomplice who committed the murder, not Bentley himself.’
Lazarus had stayed true to form. I was in no doubt that he’d deliberately chosen the name of a man wrongly convicted for the murder of a police officer to add to his taunts. The bastard was still causing problems from beyond the grave.
‘What’s the bet,’ I said softly, ‘that Lazarus or Derek Bentley or Gwynne Evans or whatever we call him, was dying. Maybe all this shit in Barchapel was him tying up all the loose ends before he died.’ In other words me. I was his loose end.
‘It’s entirely possible,’ Boateng agreed. ‘I’ve contacted the hospital to see if they have any more information about him. He must have chatted to some of the hospital staff – nurses, doctors, even hospital porters or cleaners. There’s no telling what he might have said.’
I pinched the bridge of my nose. It was a reasonable line of enquiry but that wasn’t what concerned me at this moment. ‘Has there been any sign of the bugbear? Footprints? Attacks?’
‘Nothing. We’ll go door to door ac
ross Barchapel and the surrounding countryside this morning. But if that creature escaped into the woods, it could be anywhere by now.’
I rubbed the back of my neck and told him about the cremation plan.
‘I think that’s wise,’ he said. ‘There’s a crematorium between Appledore and Barchapel. I’ll call and tell them you’re on the way. If I can’t make it myself, I’ll send somebody else as a witness. We need to cross the Ts and dot the Is. As soon as it’s done, you and your Lord ought to go and get some rest.’
Despite my fatigue I wasn’t sure I would ever sleep again, but I murmured agreement anyway. ‘Call me if you find anything new,’ I said. ‘And you should get some sleep yourself.’
‘All in good time, detective.’ He sighed darkly. ‘All in good time.’
The journey back to Barchapel felt interminable, although it was still early so at least the roads were quiet. We pulled up in front of the small crematorium shortly before dawn, just as the birds were stirring and streaks of light appeared over the distant hills on the horizon. It was a brand new day.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t imbued with sunny optimism. The only good thing was that DCI Boateng had come through. A dark-suited man was waiting for us inside the crematorium lobby. As soon as Lukas and I opened the door, he put down his mug of coffee and sprang to his feet.
‘I’m DC Emma Bellamy,’ I said. ‘And this is Lord Lukas Horvath.’
‘Alistair Finch.’ He shook my hand and smiled awkwardly at Lukas. ‘I’ve been expecting you. I have to say that this is the first time I’ve had an urgent cremation to perform.’
I was far from willing to explain why; the less Mr Finch knew, the better. For his sake. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I appreciate the early start.’
He inclined his head. ‘Is it because he’s a vampire?’ he blurted out suddenly.
My eyes narrowed.
‘I’ve heard,’ Finch continued, ‘that vampires are usually cremated within twenty-four hours of their passing.’ He nodded at Lukas. ‘And he’s a vampire so…’