Sophie Morgan (Book 2): Death in the Family

by Treharne, Helen

  Darren didn't like being preached to. He knitted his eyebrows together in a frown and picked at the crispy bacon on his plate.

  "It's more complicated than that," he said. "It was a quick rental and they wanted it. Anyway, like I said, I've taken the meter readings and I'll drop them off after we're done here. They'll know I'm not fiddling them if I tell them I need more money off them for utilities or anything."

  I raised my eyebrows and nodded. What business was it of mine anyway? I took another bite of my bagel and a swig of tea from the heavy yellow mug. The cafe was one of those places which desperately try to appear bohemian, all mismatched chairs and heavy, oversized crockery. Each sip I took made me feel like I was doing kettlebell training.

  "So,” I said, brushing crumbs and poppy seeds from my hands, "you said you had some properties you wanted me to take a look at?"

  "Oh yes, of course. Let me just find them, hang on."

  As Darren rummaged through his bag, a woman sprinted past the window, dressed in Lycra, hair bouncing as she ran. She reminded me of Rachel. A chill ran down the length of my spine.

  A pile of papers landed on the table with a thwack.

  “So, what do you think?” Darren asked. “Am I barking up the wrong tree?”

  I didn't know a huge amount about the property market in Cardiff, but I did know the type of house that would generally rent quickly. Darren had a couple of gems in his pile of estate agent listings, and one or two modern properties which I suspected he'd like but were a bit too niche. The industrial look isn't for everyone.

  “Maybe this one,” I said, pointing to a three-bed terrace in Canton. “This one too I’d have thought.”

  Darren’s shoulder’s sunk. “I’m just mulling things over at this stage.”

  “Well, it’s good to research before committing,” I said cheerfully.

  "Well, thanks for that,” he said once we'd finished discussing the last house on his list. I didn't feel like I'd been particularly helpful and he hadn't even taken a single note, but he had done a quite a lot of nodding and grunting while I spoke. Perhaps he had taken something in.

  "Anytime," I said. "You had something you wanted to give me too?"

  Darren sat bemused for a moment, then remembered what he had for me. He pulled out a sketchbook from his messenger bag and showed me pages and pages of colourful swirls, geometric shapes and swishes. I liked most of them, although in truth my eye is about as artistic as my left leg - not in the least.

  Darren added another sugar to his tea. "You don't like them?"

  "No, no, I do. I've just never done, or even thought, about stuff like this before. I mean, up until recently we've been using a letting agent. I've just moved back here and we don't even have a website, you know."

  "Ah. Sorry, I get carried away."

  "But I think it's something we should think about. This is good stuff, honestly. Can I maybe take them with me, have a chat to my mum, and mull it over?"

  "Sure."

  "I mean, we might only be looking at some letter headed paper, and..."

  "And business cards."

  "Yes, business cards. But I'll definitely think about it, yeah for sure."

  "Okay. Well, I've got some other stuff at home too. Do you want me to send them on to you or just leave it?"

  I felt bad. He'd already gone to a lot of effort. I didn't want him to waste his time, but I didn't want to seem ungrateful either. "Sure. Email, post, whatever is easiest."

  I pulled my leather jacket off the back of my chair and clutched it in my lap. I suddenly felt uncomfortable. "Yes, okay. Well..."

  "Yeah, yeah, I better be going too. I need to drop these meter readings off and then I've got to meet another client - housing association, need to get over to Penarth."

  "Great, well, bye then." I stood up and slid my arms through my jacket sleeves, shook out my tangled morning hair and extended my hand to shake his.

  "We're not saying bye yet."

  "No?" Boy, this was awkward.

  "No. I'm off down Cathedral Road too. It's about five minutes away, no point moving the car. I'll walk with you."

  "Great," I smiled. At least that's what my face thought it was doing.

  There was something about walking down the street with Darren that made me feel guilty. I felt like I was cheating on Mickey. Not that I was having unclean thoughts or anything. Yes, Darren was sort of good-looking in a conventionally attractive handsome way, with artistic flair and all that malarkey, but he made me feel a bit, well, uncomfortable. He was verging on patronising in some moments, yet shifty and nervous in others.

  He wasn't rude or anything, in fact quite the opposite. Darren made a point of asking me what I had planned for the week.

  Thankfully, it didn't take long to get to Cathedral Road and as I counted down the house numbers, I hoped that he'd be heading off on his own soon.

  "This is me," he said nodding at the house with the slightly overgrown garden. It wasn't much, a small patch to separate the street from the front door. Most residents had paved over theirs to create a parking area. This one had cracked concrete slabs and a few unkempt pots, brimming over with brown leaves.

  "Right, well, good. I'll let you know about the business cards and such shall I?" I asked. I didn't even want to look at him.

  "Yep, please do."

  "Right, well I'm down here."

  "Oh right. Well, I'll wait for you to call shall I?"

  "Uh, yeah." I extended a nervous hand and he shook it. The handshake was a little limper than I expected. "Unless you want any advice or anything, you know, about the houses or anything."

  I withdrew my hand from his and rammed it into my coat pocket. For some reason, I felt like I needed to hide it away in case he had an urge to grab it. I turned on my heel and waved a goodbye that was as weak as his handshake. He didn't seem to notice; he was too busy rummaging around his bag, pulling out papers, as he rang the doorbell. I couldn't see who let him in, but he appeared agitated. When I peered over my shoulder again, he was gone.

  23

  I walked down Cathedral Road, my fingers trembling and my legs a little wobbly. I checked each house number carefully, eventually reaching one hundred and forty eight, the address that Kurt had left for me.

  The house was quiet. Curtains closed. Silent. But what did I expect? It was barely ten o'clock. The sun was bright and high in the sky. The rush hour traffic had subsided. People were at work.

  He was probably at work too, I thought. Yeah, just leave a note Sophie. I shouldn't have come. This is stupid. No, you're going to do what you came here for. But perhaps a note would be better?

  I glanced down the street. The house, that Darren told me he owned, was still in sight. I told myself that if Darren left the house, if I saw him, then I’d catch him up and leave a note for Kurt instead of knocking the door.

  I stood, hopefully, in the porch with a notebook and pen in my hand, staring longingly and with confusion over the garden walls to the house that Darren rented out. He didn't appear.

  Okay, you can do this, I told myself. You are a strong, confident, vampire-killing, woman. You have money in the bank. You have a perfectly pleasant, albeit modest home. You run a business. You're young, yes, but you've managed perfectly well without a father; you can jolly well get along without an uncle. He was the one all whiney and in a flap, remember? You took control of the situation then. You can take control of it now. You have the power. You are the one deciding how this happens. Now knock the damn door, woman.

  I closed the jotter, slipped the slim pen through its wire comb and popped it into my bag. I closed the zip and wiped the cold sweat from my palms on my jeans. I flicked out my hair, shook my shoulders loose and took a deep breath.

  My knotted guts twisted. A pang of stress pain reminded me I was human and vulnerable. No demons, no vampires, no killing. Just plain old-fashioned stress and family drama. If this is what an extended family means, you can keep it, I thought.

  Three raps
on the door resulted in nothing. Then I noticed the door bell and pressed the button. Once, nothing. Twice, nothing. This surely has to be a sign, Sophie. On tip-toe, I pressed my face against the leaded, stained glass panel. No movement. Must be at work, I concluded. I took the jotter pad out of my bag, leaned into the door and scribbled my number. I folded the small sheet of paper over and scrawled ’we need to talk’ on the blank side. On balance, I'd rather leave my phone number and have him call me, rather than have him continue to stalk me. What the hell was that about?

  The brass letterbox smacked shut with a snap, almost taking my fingers with it as I pushed the folded-up paper through the brush that lined it. I withdrew them quickly, shoved my hands deep into my jacket pockets and shuffled down the garden path. Now that my mission had been abandoned, I hoped I wouldn't see Darren. I just wanted out and back home.

  The gate, blue paint peeling from the metal, was damp with morning dew, still lingering in the chill of the January air. A woman walked passed me, nodding a hello as she walked her dog. She wore her scarf high around her neck, covering her mouth, while the dachshund she paraded modelled a woollen, tartan coat. It was cold, but not that cold, I thought, in fact, it was pretty mild for the time of year.

  I smiled a greeting at the dog walker and closed the gate behind me. That was when I heard the faint creak of woodwork - the door to Kurt Andersen's house opened, and with a small voice of trepidation murmuring in my ear, I re-opened the gate and walked up to the front door.

  "What the hell have you done?" Richard asked. He was on his hands and knees, mopping up the blood from the hallway. "Jesus, can't you be left alone for a single bloody minute?"

  "I was hungry," Rachel said, pouting. "And he was here."

  Richard swore under his breath. "You're going to have to tell Charles. He's not going to be happy about this. What are we going to do with the body? What if he’s reported missing? We're on a main bloody street, someone is bound to have seen him. For fucks sake, this is his bloody house!"

  Rachel tiptoed around the blood, sat on the bottom step of the stairs and strapped on her shoes. "I swear I only took a bite. I promise that's all I did. There must be something wrong with him. I couldn't stop the blood, it was coming out too fast. I didn't know what to do?"

  "Did you call for Charles?"

  "He's been out since last night. He went to see the professor; he called earlier to ask me to go round there, but I'm late now. I didn't know how long I'd be and I was hungry. I really am trying to be better at this, but I don't have your, well lack of interest. I have feelings, needs, you know."

  Profanity rumbled under Richard's breath. "Well, go on then, fuck off, and tell Charles what you've done while you're at it. I'll catch up with you once I've cleaned this up."

  "You could put the body in the bath until Charles tells us what to do with it,” Rachel suggested helpfully.

  "Uhuh, yeah, great." Richard didn't look up from his cleaning. "Go, on, get out."

  Rachel huffed and slammed the door behind her. Richard removed the blood-stained clothing from the body and stuffed it into refuse bags. There was nothing much of interest in the messenger bag strapped around Darren Thomas' body. A tablet computer, a sketchpad, an assortment of pens, car keys. He'd check if the car was parked nearby later and move it if necessary.

  Then Richard found the wallet. Bankcard, driving licence, a medical condition information card declaring Darren to be a haemophiliac. That explains something, he thought. Then another business card, cheap-looking and wedged in between two credit cards. It was for Sophie Morgan. Brilliant, he thought, bloody fucking marvellous.

  Kasper was troubled. He'd waited for hours for his brother to return with the manuscript. He should have been back ages ago. He sat on the candlewick bedspread and stared at the clock. Damn you Kurt, he said, what have you done? Kasper grabbed his leather jacket, the keys to his rented Skoda and slammed the door to his room behind him.

  24

  The hallway was dark, painted in a deep shade of red and decorated with paintings and heavy, foreboding Victorian woodwork. The tiled floor was ornate, the original tile I supposed, a geometric pattern of blues, rusts and charcoals. It reminded me of those ‘magic eye’ pictures that, if you stare at them for long enough, make you see a spaceship or the number nine. They always gave me a shocking nausea, like the waltzers at the fair.

  I pushed the heavy door further back, but nobody was there. Mmmm, it's not that windy. The door must have been shut, I'm pretty sure it was when I pressed on it.

  "Hello?" I said, stepping over the entrance and into the modestly-sized but ornate hall. "Hi. It's Sophie. Sophie Morgan. I'm looking for Mr Andersen."

  It felt odd walking into someone's house uninvited. Entering a stranger's house was bad form. Then again, I didn't know if I would have the bottle to invite myself to Kurt's house again.

  So, if this was my one shot at confronting him, I thought, I'll go all in. Bet the house so to speak. Besides, if he wasn't in then and he'd left his door unlocked, I was certainly doing him a favour by checking that nobody had broken in and then shutting the door firmly behind me on my way out.

  My eyes scanned the hallway, assessing what it said of the man that lived there. After all, he seemed to know a bit about me; the least I could have, was the opportunity to rifle through his post. Disappointingly, there were no guilty pleasures on view, no weird and wonderful correspondence in the small collection of unopened letters on the side table.

  "Okay Sophie," I said to myself, "nothing to see here." I felt deflated. "Right professor, if you're about, you've missed your boat. I'm off. My number is on the side if you want."

  A grumble came from the bowels of the house, somewhere deep and dark below. A muffled human cry, trying to form words made entirely of vowels. My stomach dropped. My throat seized up.

  "What the fu..?"

  The groan came again, words taking shape as the sound became that of a man's voice, deeper and spittle-filled, ripe with fear and pain. I moved into its direction, past what I took to be his living room, dark and cold in the absence of a lit fire. Stairs ascended before me, swirling carpet held in place by brass rods. Two doors were ahead. One at the far end, leading to the rear of the house, a kitchen perhaps. A second, tucked away, behind the stairwell.

  I crept up to it and carefully placed my ear next to the varnished wood. A whisper of cold air brushed by. Cellar, I thought. A couple of similar properties had come up at the auction I'd been to, I could guess at the layout of this one. The brass handle felt cold against my skin as I gripped the handle.

  "Nomuwsooof," the murmur warned.

  It's strange what passes through your mind in those moments you know will ultimately change your life forever. Perhaps most people would wonder if someone was injured, had fallen down the stairs and was lying in a heap on the cellar floor, with a broken leg. Others might reflect on that crime thriller they watched on the TV the previous night and wonder if some poor woman was bound and held hostage. The man down the street might attribute the noise to the water pump or dodgy boiler that has residence in the dingy bowels of the house.

  For me, there were some other options. All of them could change my life. Firstly, this uncle character could be injured and I'd have to perform my civic duty and attend to him. That could lead to a sense of responsibility or camaraderie which I wasn't yet ready for. All I wanted to do, was say my piece and lay down some ground rules. The second option was something altogether worse, although at least something I had experience of - gruesome, ghoulish, vampires.

  Okay, so I'd packed up my bags and done a runner as soon as my neighbour Richard decided to become one of the ‘undead’ anyway, but this was different. If this was a vampire in someone else's home, then I couldn't, in good knowledge and in sound mind, let them kill. Yes, I was terrified and wanted to chuck my guts up over that beautiful Victorian tile, but I wasn't a monster. If someone was trapped down there, with a vampire or anything else, I needed to do something, eve
n if it was some weird family member I'd never met before.

  Just do it Sophie. Just do it. Turn the handle. The door was lighter and easier to move than I imagined. The dim glow of a light came up the wooden stairs, allowing me to see down the dozen or so steep wooden steps into the cellar below.

  The cellar appeared bright and well-kept - the little I could see. The steps nestled against the wall, ending at the near corner of the room below. The staircase for the main body of house cut their descent, meaning that I had to duck once I passed the second step. Shadows moved in the space beneath.

  With each step, I was literally descending into the unknown, my sight blighted by the walls either side of the stairwell until the last few rungs. Although I crept silently, I feared my tell-tale heart would give me away as it pounded through my chest. Blood ripped through my veins, rushing to my head. My mouth was dry. My throat constricted. Oh, sweet Jesus, I realised I didn't even have a weapon with me. No, no you do Sophie, don't be so stupid. Yes, of course, I had my screwdriver in my bag. I slipped my hand into my purse and gripped the handle.

  As I reached the final few steps, the room opened up before me and I saw it. I saw the hell that was laid out before me like some terrible tableaux. It could have been set up for my entertainment alone, a scene perfectly crafted for me.

  There stood Charles Ferrers, the vampire I was convinced I had escaped, towering over Kurt, who was still wearing a raincoat, tied to a chair and covered in blood. His body was beaten and broken. Blood bubbled through his lips as he weakly lifted his chin. Tears poured from his eyes, meandering through the rivers of blood staining his cheeks. His spectacles dangled from one ear, one lens fractured.

  "Ruughh, Surfeee..." Even forming words was too much for him now. If something didn't happen soon, he would be dead.