by Ken Preston
“Help me get Mort inside,” he said.
Emma didn’t make any kind of move to get out of the car.
“I’ve got someplace to go. You’re a big fella, Joe, you can handle Craggs by yourself.”
Coffin held out his hand. “Come on inside with us. We need to talk.”
All of a sudden, Coffin looked strangely vulnerable. Emma flashed back to the club, Steffanie risen from the dead, naked and covered in blood.
“All right,” she said, quietly.
“Bring your bag with you,” Coffin said, as she started to get out of the car.
Emma stiffened, her arms springing out in goose pimples. “Why?”
“You don’t know who’s around. You leave it in your car, it probably won’t be there when you get back.”
“Yeah, sure.” Emma grabbed her bag and climbed out of the car.
They helped Craggs into the club, and took him straight upstairs, ignoring the stares from the Goths and the rockers and the punks. Emma had read about the fancy office that Craggs had at Angels, with the big desk and the sofas, and the drinks cabinet in the world globe, like something the villain in a James Bond movie would have. Nothing like that here. Just a bare room, with a tattered settee in it, and a basic kitchen in the corner, a table and some chairs.
Coffin lowered Craggs carefully onto the settee.
“Joe, call Frankie for me,” Craggs said. His eyelids were fluttering open and closed, and his lips drew back in a grimace of pain.
“I already did,” Coffin said. “He’ll be here any minute now.”
Craggs reached out and took Coffin’s hand. “You’re a good boy, Joe. I’m sorry you had to see all that shit tonight. Everything’s all fucked up right now, but we’ll sort it out, right? You’ve just got to stay strong.”
“Sure,” Coffin said. “We’ll sort it out.”
Emma turned away, suddenly uncomfortable in the presence of these two men, and the look of something approaching love that passed between them.
“Holy fucking shit! What the hell happened?”
A tall, gangly man stood in the open doorway. He had probably been good looking once, but with the row of studs along his bottom lip, and the spikes sticking from his cheeks and nose and eyebrows, and the spidery tattoos crawling over his face, you couldn’t really tell what he even looked like anymore.
“There’s been trouble over at Angels,” Coffin said.
“You’re not fucking kidding! You want me to round up the boys, go over there and sort it out?”
“No!” Craggs said. “Leave that to me and Joe. You’ve got this place to manage, Rob.”
Rob shifted from foot to foot. It looked very much to Emma as though he hadn’t offered to ‘sort it out’ because he was a loyal member of the team. From the disappointed look on his face, Emma suspected he just thought it would be fun.
“Are you sure?” he said. “Me and Stut, we can—”
“I said, no!”
Emma reflexively tightened her grip on her bag. Charlie ‘Stutterer’ Boyd, now known as Stut for short, was a vicious, cruel little psychopath, who wore his hair like a young Elvis, and strutted around town chewing gum, and acting like he was in a 1950s rock-and-roll movie. His idea of a relaxing night out was raping some poor girl who had been taken in by his smooth, if stuttered, chat up lines, and then maybe finding somebody to slice up with his flick knife.
Emma had thought he was still in jail for carving up that young lad who’d protested when Stut tried feeling up his girlfriend in the Yard of Ale one Saturday night.
Obviously not.
“Go on downstairs,” Coffin said. “And when Frankie Shaddock arrives, show him right up here.”
“All right,” Rob said, looking even more disappointed.
“Look, I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, and I’ve got places to be,” Emma said. “I should—”
“You should stay here, we need to talk,” Coffin said.
Emma didn’t like the look on Coffin’s face as he said that. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come up here, after all. Coffin would surely want answers from Emma about her involvement in this, about her dealings with Steffanie and the video footage of Coffin murdering Terry Wu that Emma had been about to publish.
She flinched as her mobile started buzzing. She pulled it out of her bag.
“Hey, Barry, what’s up?” she said, working hard to keep her voice calm and neutral.
“It’s the Birmingham Vampire,” Barry said, sounding breathless and excited. “He’s snatched some poor kid. Karl said to call you, you should come down here, the police are crawling all over the place.”
Emma glanced at Coffin.
“Where are you?”
“Selly Oak, down by the canal on Linden Road.”
“I’ll be right there.”
She flicked the connection off.
“Our friend’s back in action,” she said to Coffin. “I need to go.”
Coffin held out his hand.
“Give me your phone.”
“What?”
“Give me your phone. I’m going to put my number in your address book. You find out anything, you give me a call. That bastard is mine.”
Emma handed over her mobile, and Coffin tapped in his number.
“You can’t go down there, Joe,” Craggs said. “The cops will be everywhere.”
Coffin handed the mobile back to Emma.
“I know. I’ve got something else to do first.” He looked at Emma. “I’ll call you later.”
coffin buys a spade
First thing Coffin did when he left Edwards Number 9 was visit the nearest B&Q and buy himself a spade, some bungee cord, and a chainsaw. The store was almost empty, and the speakers, usually playing anonymous pop music, were silent. Coffin’s footsteps echoed faintly as he walked up and down the silent aisles until he found what he was looking for.
Outside, under shelter of the canopy thrumming with the sound of the rain, he ripped open the chainsaw’s packaging and strapped it and the spade onto his back with the bungee cord. Then he climbed back on the Harley and left the deserted car park.
It took him ten minutes of riding before he arrived at the church where Steffanie and Michael were buried. He walked through the graveyard, past the white tent the police had erected in the park where the tramp had been murdered, until he found Steffanie’s and Michael’s graves. He unstrapped the chainsaw and the spade from his back and squatted down between the two graves. They both looked undisturbed, just as he had last seen them.
Here, by her final resting place, Coffin found it impossible to believe that he had seen Steffanie only an hour or two ago. The woman at Angels was an impostor, she had to be. Some final plan of Tom’s, to fuck with his mind.
But why? That didn’t make any sense and was totally out of character for Tom. He had never had any imagination. Tom liked using guns or strong-arm tactics. He never would have cooked up a plan involving Coffin’s dead wife’s doppelganger. And what would be the point?
And yet, that woman had resembled Steffanie so closely, had even talked like Steffanie. And if she had been murdered by Abel, the Birmingham Vampire, as Tom said, and Abel really was a vampire, didn’t it make sense that Steffanie would return from the dead?
Coffin squeezed his eyes shut, letting the rainwater run down his face.
Vampires did not exist. Undead creatures of the dark, that prowled the night looking for victims to suck dry of their lifeblood, were nothing but shadows in books and films, and folklore. Figments of the imagination.
Vampires did not stalk the real world.
And yet…
Coffin opened his eyes and gazed at Steffanie’s grave.
Only one way to know for sure if that woman had been an impostor.
Coffin picked up the spade and stood up.
He started digging.
* * *
The physical act of digging proved easier than Coffin had expected. The grave still being relatively new, the soi
l hadn’t had a chance to become impacted, and the heavy rain had softened the ground.
Mentally, though, Coffin felt totally unprepared, and found himself battling warring desires. The thought of seeing his wife’s decomposing body, lying in her coffin, filled him with despair. How far would the decomposition have gone? Would he even recognise her? He imagined staring into her eyeless sockets, maggots crawling over her skull, eating the last remaining scraps of flesh clinging to the grey bone. As he worked, digging deeper into the soft ground, Coffin imagined that skull grinning up at him, Steffanie reaching out with a bony hand to embrace him.
Coffin paused in his digging for a moment, wiping rain water and sweat off his face. He had seen worse at the club, hadn’t he? His wife, alive, her face ripped apart by a bullet, standing before him. And there, that was the reason he wanted to see Steffanie’s decomposing body lying in her coffin. Because if her body was there, then that proved the woman in the club was an impostor.
But what did it say about the things Coffin had found out tonight? That Steffanie had been fucking Terry Wu. That she had conspired with Tom to set him up for Terry Wu’s murder. Had she been sleeping with Tom, too? Coffin had loved Steffanie, but had she not loved him? Had she hated him?
Coffin looked around the graveyard, checking for observers. He was fortunate that the weather was so foul, keeping people away. But still, he needed to get digging again, before he was discovered. His thoughts slipped away again, to Emma. How much had she known of all this? Had Steffanie really been trying to sell her story to the papers, complete with evidence that would have put Coffin away for a long time?
And the break in at his house. Emma and the baby wipes.
Coffin gazed at the puddles of dirty water forming in the hollows of the soil at his feet. Once he had finished here, he would meet up with Emma, and have a talk with her. He didn’t like it when people kept secrets from him.
Wiping water off his face, Coffin started digging again. The hole grew deeper, and the mound of earth beside him taller. After a while he lost himself in the physical hard work of digging the black soil out of the ground. There was peace to be found in a task like this. Coffin was a man of action, and could only truly be at one with himself when he was working, or wrestling with a problem.
Finally his spade hit the coffin lid with a flat thud. Joe Coffin continued digging and scraping the soil away until he had cleared a space at the end of the coffin where Steffanie’s head would be. This part of the lid had been open at the funeral service for viewing. The funeral parlour had done their best with the makeup, but Coffin’ chest had ached at the sight of her lifeless face.
Coffin threw the spade on the ground beside him, and tilted his head back, letting the rain run over his face, washing the sweat away. He closed his eyes. Here was the moment of truth, and suddenly Coffin realised that maybe he didn’t want to know the truth. What good would it do him?
He thought about the plans he had once had for a new life. His family’s murder had changed all that, but perhaps now was a good time to rethink it. Tom Mills, the instigator of those murders, was already dead. And once Coffin had dealt with the Birmingham Vampire, what was left? He could disappear forever, start again in another country, leave the old life behind.
Forget the truth. The truth was overrated.
Coffin opened his eyes.
No.
Maybe the truth was overrated, but he still needed to know.
Coffin knelt down and grasped the edge of the coffin, working his fingers between the wall of earth and the lid until he had a good grip. In one firm, strong motion, he pulled it open.
The coffin was empty.
He was not surprised. All along he had known it would be. Dark spots began forming on the light velvet interior as raindrops hit it. There was a single strand of Steffanie’s red hair lying on the velvet padding.
Coffin shut the lid.
Stood up.
As impossible as it seemed, Coffin knew there was no other explanation.
Steffanie was a vampire.
Joe Coffin pulled himself out of the grave and picked up the spade. He looked at Michael’s grave.
Coffin knew he had no other choice.
He had to know the truth.
jessica rabbit
Barry was sheltering beneath a large golfing umbrella, with a print of Jessica Rabbit on it. She was in a classic pose from the film, holding a microphone, one long, bare leg revealed from beneath her skin hugging red dress, barely covering those impossibly large breasts.
Emma sheltered from the rain with Barry, uncomfortably aware of his childish delight at being able to stand this close to her.
“The mother called the police after trying to get hold of her brother at his shop,” Barry shouted over the thrum of the rain against the umbrella. “She was worried about her daughter, had expected her home some time ago, but then when she couldn’t get hold of Frank, she started panicking.”
Emma looked at the police cars parked along the side of the road, and at the officers walking through the park, towards the belt of woodland on the far side. They were all holding big, powerful torches, and the beams of light cutting through the gloom and the rain made Emma feel like she was in a Hollywood thriller.
Or a horror movie.
“What happened?” she said.
“They found the girl’s uncle over there, lying face down in the grass.” Barry pointed into the park, past the police officer standing guard, keeping curious onlookers, and reporters, out. “He’d had a heart attack. But get this, he was holding onto one of Julie’s shoes, they had to prise it out of his fingers.”
“What do they think, that he had something to do with her disappearance?”
“No, he was still alive, and he managed to tell them he’d been out looking for her. They took him to the hospital, and now this place is crawling with cops. I told Karl there was no point you coming down here, the police aren’t saying anything, but he insisted.”
Flashes of light from in the woods, more police with their torches.
“What makes them think Julie was abducted by the Birmingham Vampire?”
Abel. That’s his name.
“I don’t know that they do, like I said, the police aren’t saying a thing. But who else could it be?”
“What about the dead maid they found at Keele services?”
Emma already had her own thoughts on that one. Steffanie, or the thousand year old man she kept company with.
“Maybe he decided the pickings were better back in Birmingham,” Barry said. “Serial killers are supposed to return to the scenes of their crime, aren’t they? Maybe they are like sharks, as well, and prefer to stay in the same feeding ground.”
“There’s that sharp detective mind of yours, working overtime again,” Emma said.
Barry looked at her, like he wasn’t sure if she was teasing him or not.
Emma watched as another police car pulled up, and a uniformed officer climbed out. Part of her hadn’t wanted to come down, in case Nick was here. The likelihood was that he would turn up at some point, if he wasn’t here already. After what had happened today, Nick was the last person she wanted to see. Witnessing Joe Coffin beat Tom Mills to death, did that make her an accessory to murder? As long as she kept silent about it, she supposed it did.
But how could she explain this situation to him, without sounding like she had lost the plot?
Hey, Nick, guess what? You know that killer you’re after, the one all the newspapers have nicknamed the Birmingham Vampire? Well, guess what? He really is a vampire! And he’s not the only one. Steffanie Coffin’s no longer lying at rest in her grave, but she’s up and about and causing all sorts of mischief and, you got it, she’s a vampire too. Oh, and then there’s this creepy old guy, looks like he’s about a thousand years old, and he’s another vampire.
Oh, and by the way, I stood by and watched while Joe Coffin beat Tom Mills’ head into a bloody pulp, and then helped him take Mortimer Craggs to a
safe place at one of his other clubs.
She couldn’t see that one going down too well.
Or was she just stalling, trying to delay the inevitable? Earlier, driving Craggs to Edwards Number 9, she’d had every intention of giving the whole story to Nick as soon as she got away. But now that she had got away?
Emma was scared that she was in too deep. She had withheld vital information about Jacob’s abductors and Peter’s killers. She was also a witness of the assault at the service station and had been spending time with members of the Slaughterhouse Mob. Most damning of all, was the fact that she had been holding back the information she held on Craggs, and Terry Wu’s murder.
But she had no other choice. She couldn’t sit on what she knew any longer. Best option was to head back to the office and organise her files, and her evidence, and then phone Nick, explain everything.
“Emma? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” Emma said. She looked up and down the empty street. “Have you talked to any of the neighbours yet? Anybody see anything?”
“Nope. Seems like the whole street is glued to their televisions, watching Strictly.”
“Never did see the appeal of that programme. Past their sell by date celebrities and ex politicians, dancing badly.”
“Me neither,” Barry said. “I prefer I’m a Celebrity. There’s usually a couple of fit birds wandering around in bikinis on that show.”
“You’re a real culture vulture, Barry, you know?”
“Hey, the human body is a great work of art, and I’m an admirer of art.”
“I’m going to go for a wander, see what I can see,” Emma said. “Why don’t you stay here, try and get one of these upstanding officers of the law to tell you something.”
Emma took hold of the umbrella. “I’ll take Jessica with me, she’s looking a little bored standing around here.”
“No way!” Barry said. “I’ll get soaked.”
“That’s right,” Emma replied, smiling. “But you’re a gentleman, and you would hate to see me ruin my hair in all this rain, right?”