Knightly sat quietly for a long time, deep in thought. ‘Normally, of course, I would have to charge for my services.’
‘I don’t have much money,’ Dec blurted out. ‘But I’ve thought about that. I’m a mechanic, so I am. Well, trainee, like, but I could fix that Bentley of yours. That’s a nasty oil leak. I’ll valet the Porsche, too. I’ll clean your windows. Skim the moat. I’ll do anyth—’
Knightly raised his hand, cutting him off. ‘None of that will be necessary. In fact, under the circumstances, I would be willing to pay you, if you’d agree to let me include this incredible material in my next book. I’m already working on it. But I don’t have anything like the kind of stuff—’ Knightly broke off suddenly. He was sweating. ‘How does a hundred pounds sound?’
Dec frowned. ‘You don’t understand, Mr Knightly. I want you to help me catch them. Like you said, they dwell amongst us.’
‘It’s “lurk”. They lurk amongst us.’
‘Dwell, lurk, whatever. I want to rid the world of them. All of them. I want you to learn me everything you know. I want to become a vampire hunter just like you. I want—’
Knightly’s face flushed. He stood up and walked to one of the library’s tall windows, gazing out to sea and thinking hard.
‘If you aren’t going to help me,’ Dec said in a pained voice, ‘I’ll have to find someone else.’ He thought for a moment, then added more brightly, ‘Maybe I could join up with that Federation. You know, the one you talked about on TV. Maybe they’d take me on?’
‘Fact is, Dec, I don’t know any more about them than you do. I’ve no idea how you could contact them, or who they are. That video clip isn’t much to go on.’
Dec’s shoulders drooped. He slumped deep in his chair with a look of defeated resignation. ‘Then it looks like I came all this way for nothing, so it does.’
Knightly sighed heavily, and turned away from the window to face him. ‘Where are your family? Who else knows you’re here?’
‘Me ma and da and brother Cormac are home in Wallingford. I didn’t tell them where I was going.’
‘What about work? College? Is anyone expecting you back tomorrow?’
Dec shook his head. ‘I work for me da. I can call him and make an excuse. I do it all the time. He’s used to it.’
Knightly let out another big sigh. ‘Very well. I’ll help you.
You can stay here for a while. I’ll teach you everything I know. I’ll train you in the use of anti-vampire weaponry. I’ll even give you one of my advanced vampire detection kits – worth £49.99. You can be my apprentice.’
Suddenly glowing with joy, Dec jumped out of his armchair. ‘Cool!’
‘On the strict understanding that every evening, after your training’s over, you’ll sit with me and help me get every detail of this down on paper. I mean everything. The house. The vampires themselves, what they looked like, how they talked, how they dressed, exactly what they did.’
‘No problem. I remember it all.’
‘And all about this cross. This library has books centuries old, filled with illustrations of ancient crosses. We’ll go through them systematically, until we find one that’s similar to yours. We’ll make drawings of it. You’ll tell me precisely what happened when your friend pointed it at Kate. Every last shred of detail.’
Dec’s face fell. ‘I can remember that too. I could never forget it.’
‘It’s a deal, then?’
‘Deal,’ Dec agreed.
Knightly grabbed his wallet and peeled off two fifty-pound notes. ‘Here’s the money.’
Dec hesitated, embarrassed, then thought of the credit card payments for the new laptop and took the cash.
‘Good. Now, I need to make a phone call,’ Knightly said, looking at his watch. ‘Griffin will show you to the guest quarters.’ He walked over to the sash and gave it a yank to summon his manservant.
As the bent old man led Dec away from the library, Knightly waited until they were gone, then ripped a mobile phone from his waistcoat pocket and feverishly dialled his agent’s number in London.
‘Harley, it’s me,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Listen, you won’t believe what’s just happened. You know the thing I told you about . . .?’
‘Your little, ah, problem?’ the agent’s voice said dryly.
‘My writer’s block.’
‘Or basic lack of material,’ Harley said. ‘Other than that phoney video footage some nutter sent you from Romania. Maybe if you’d ever done any of the things you’ve written about, instead of just putting on this dismal Van Helsing act for your readers. It would help even more if you actually believed in vampires.’
‘I do believe in them,’ Knightly exploded, deeply hurt. ‘Just because I’ve never had actual, you know, first-hand experience of them . . .’ He flapped his arm impatiently, as if the inconvenient truth was an irritating mosquito he could swat away. ‘Anyway, never mind all that. I’ve just come across enough material for three more bloody books. Five more, if we pad it out a bit.’
‘So you won’t have to refund that hundred grand advance-on-signature payment,’ Harley said. ‘That’s welcome news.’
‘And you’ll get to keep your commission.’
‘Even better. What is this new material?’
‘Pure gold. I’ll tell you all about it over a champagne lunch next week,’ Knightly said. ‘You’re going to love it. The publishers are going to love it even more.’
Chapter Nineteen
London
It was just before midday by the time Alex arrived at the Ritz off Piccadilly and walked up to the desk.
‘Hailey Adams,’ she said to the receptionist, charming but authoritative, flashing her VIA ID too quickly for the woman to scrutinise it. ‘Starburst Pictures. I’m here to see Mr Burnett. The Trafalgar Suite, right?’ It was only fifty–fifty, she thought as the receptionist checked the register, that Baxter hadn’t left his regular London hideaway and headed back home to the States. Life as one of the beautiful people.
The receptionist smiled. ‘Trafalgar Suite, that’s right.’
Alex used the stairs. Lifts were too slow. Arriving at the door to the suite, she pushed straight through with a splintering of wood.
The lavish rooms were just as she remembered them. Except . . . no Baxter. The only sign of him was the Armani jacket carelessly thrown over the back of one of the Louis XI settees and the laptop sitting open on a marble-topped coffee table. Alex strode across the Persian rug and peered at the screen-saver, a handsome close-up of Baxter’s face, a still shot from one of his Berserker movies – Alex couldn’t remember which. Still, it was definitely his computer.
With a flick of the keys, the screen-saver vanished to reveal Baxter’s opened email program. The last message to have come in was clocked at 10.38 that morning. Its heading was ‘Let’s have lunch’.
The name of the sender, Piers Bullivant, was one Alex recognised. A cinema fan right from the days of silent movies, she’d been there for the heyday of Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, all the greats, and must have seen a hundred thousand films since. She rarely missed an issue of Movie Mad magazine, and Piers Bullivant was one of their long-standing writers. Alex had read enough of his articles to know that Bullivant was a savage and vitriolic critic of anything to do with the commercial movie industry, Hollywood in general, and vulgar, untalented and overpaid stars like Baxter Burnett in particular.
Let’s have lunch? It seemed just a little unusual, Alex thought to herself, that Baxter should be in friendly email correspondence with the critic who, more than anyone, seemed to delight in every opportunity to hack and bludgeon him to death with the pen. But then, looking at the message more closely, she saw something even odder. Bullivant’s reply read:
Dear Gwendolyn – Lovely to hear from you again. Yes, I agree, it would be great to meet up. How about lunch today, my place?
Below, Bullivant gave his address in Wimbledon. Seeing that the email had been replied to, Alex clicked into
the sent messages folder. The reply from GwendolynCooper@hotmail. com had been posted at 11.46, just a few minutes before she’d got here.
Hi Piers,
It’s a date. See you at 12.30. I’ll bring a bottle.
Gwendolyn xxx
‘Shit,’ Alex muttered as Baxter’s ploy began to dawn on her. She scrolled up and found six more messages from ‘Gwendolyn’ to Bullivant. Attached to the first message was a picture that most definitely wasn’t of Baxter Burnett. The blonde was maybe nineteen or twenty. Low-cut blouse, painted-on jeans, heavy eye-shadow, glossy lipstick, provocative pout, the works. Apparently, she was a final-year media student at London University and a huge fan of Piers’s work, passionate about getting into film journalism; and did he know of any openings coming up at Movie Mad? She’d just love to meet and talk.
‘Come on, Bullivant,’ Alex snorted. ‘Even a human can’t be this easily taken in.’
But, seemingly, a human could. It hadn’t taken much wooing from Baxter before the critic had gulped down the bait.
‘Bugger,’ Alex said, looking at her watch. Baxter must have left just a few minutes ago, but he still had a pretty good headstart on her. She’d little more than quarter of an hour to cut across town to Wimbledon, if she wanted to interrupt the romantic lunch date before it went too badly for Piers Bullivant.
Seconds later, Alex was tearing out of the smashed door of the Trafalgar Suite and running for the stairs.
Chapter Twenty
Wimbledon
A giant poster of Jean-Luc Godard frowned sardonically down from the wall over Piers Bullivant’s desk in the cramped study of what he liked to call his bijou residence. Tapping on his keyboard and pausing every few words to titter to himself, the critic was just putting the finishing touch to his latest torpedo attack.
On the strength of its director and most of its cast, Firestorm has the potential to be a passable little thriller, by Hollywood standards at least. However, even before the cameras shoot a single frame, this movie is doomed by a fatal, irredeemable flaw. And the name of that flaw is Baxter Burnett. Never in the history of cinema has an actor been so guaranteed to destroy single-handedly any production in which he takes part . . .
When he’d finished tinkering with it, Piers read the piece back out loud and gave a satisfied cackle. He looked at his watch, wishing it was a twenty-four-carat Rolex Oyster like the one that bastard Baxter Burnett had been flaunting in his last TV interview. But, Piers quickly consoled himself, was it not he, and not the hated Burnett, who was about to be visited by the super-hot Gwendolyn Cooper? Was it not he who . . .
12.26. She’d be here any minute. Piers shot out of his desk chair and hurried into the tiny living room of his flat. He put on some mood music, lit a scented candle, tore open a bottle of wine, set two glasses on the table, polished his thick spectacles with the hem of his short-sleeved shirt, adjusted his tie in the mirror, took a breath spray out of his pocket and gave it a couple of squirts. He smiled and felt in his other pocket, touching his fingers against the packets of condoms in there and wondering if two would be enough.
Piers’s heart leaped as the doorbell rang. After a last-minute armpit sniff-check, he raced to the door and flung it open with a beaming smile on his face. ‘Come in, Gwe—’
That was as far as he got before Baxter Burnett grabbed him by the tie and almost ripped his head off as he hurled him backwards into the room. Piers triple-somersaulted into the sofa and overturned it, sprawling across the rug. Baxter slammed the door shut and marched inside the flat. He was wearing a heavy black cowhide motorcycle jacket, leather jeans and boots. In his hand was a torn-out page from Movie Mad.
Squirming on the floor, Piers recognised it as last month’s review of Baxter’s star vehicle, Berserker 6.
Baxter stood over him. ‘Pleasure to meet you at last, asshole. Hey, nice fucking place you got here, toilet licker. Couldn’t swing a mouse in it, but hey, you won’t be needing it much longer. Now, something I wanted to ask you about what you wrote.’
Piers stared up at him and could only whimper.
Baxter held the torn-out page out in front of him and stabbed the text of the article with his finger. ‘Says here, now let’s see . . . “the Parisian café scene is one of the most risible pieces of cinema ever committed to celluloid, featuring a Burnett performance so wooden that one might have mistaken him for part of the pine café furniture”. Oh, yeah?’ Baxter shook the paper furiously. ‘And what about this bit – “The twist that follows is so insultingly contrived that the smallest infant could see it coming from thirty miles away. This is a film that should never have been allowed to escape from pre-production . . .”’ Baxter lashed out with his foot, and Piers doubled up in agony. ‘All right, scum sucker, let’s talk about the twist. Tell me what you know, dumbass. Spit it out.’
Piers opened his mouth, but all that emerged was a string of bloody mucus.
‘Oh, the great critic’s at a loss for fucking words. You know what? I don’t think you even saw this movie. You know how I know that, inchworm? Because that part was in the fucking trailer’ – Baxter kicked again, harder, and Piers screamed – ‘and it never even made it to the final fucking cut. So you just gave yourself away, you big dicksmoking phoney.’ Baxter crumpled up the sheet and smiled. ‘And now you’re gonna die.’
Piers Bullivant’s bladder let go at the precise moment that Baxter opened his mouth wide and the fangs came out.
The Jaguar’s dashboard clock read 12.37 as Alex skidded to a halt outside Piers Bullivant’s apartment building. She sprinted to the entrance. Pounded up the stairs, and crashed through Bullivant’s door.
Whoops. Too late.
Among the blood-soaked wreckage of the tiny living room, the movie star was crouched on the floor, bent low over the twitching, but very obviously lifeless, body of his critic, gnawing and sucking at the ripped flesh of his throat. Baxter looked up as Alex appeared in the doorway. The blood that slicked his chin was running down his throat and soaking into his shirt.
‘Hi there, Agent Bishop,’ he said, bright red foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth.
Alex popped the retaining strap of her shoulder holster and drew the pistol. ‘Don’t do anything silly, Baxter. You know what I’ve got here, don’t you?’
‘Nosferol bullets,’ Baxter sneered. ‘Right. As if your goddamn Feds won’t pump me full of that shit anyway.’
‘What’s got into you, Baxter?’
‘Fuck you!’ Baxter sprang to his feet, seized the overturned sofa and hurled it across the room. Alex ducked out of the way, but the sofa hammered into the wall next to her and bounced back at an angle, knocking the gun out her hand before landing with a crash on a side table. A pair of wine glasses and a lit candlestick tumbled across the carpet. Flames quickly caught a hold on the bottom of one of Bullivant’s flowery curtains, but there wasn’t much Alex could do about that right now. She grabbed the pistol from the floor as Baxter leaped across the room and through a doorway into the tiny kitchenette. There was a smashing of glass.
Chasing after him, Alex got there just in time to see him dropping the eight yards to the ground and sprinting franti c ally away through the little gardens at the back of the apartment building. She raised the Desert Eagle and felt the light trigger break against the pad of her fingertip. The blast of the gunshot punching against her eardrums. The hard recoil back into her palms being absorbed through her elbows. The fat .50 calibre shell casing spat from the pistol’s maw as the breech opened and closed faster than even a vampire eye could see. Masonry dust erupted from the wall of the neighbouring building as Baxter darted around the corner and out of sight. Alex vaulted out of the window after him and hit the ground running for all she was worth towards the spot where Baxter had disappeared.
She heard the roar of the engine a fraction of a second before the blazing headlight and raked-out chrome front forks of the Indian V-twin motorcycle bore down on her from around the corner. Baxter’s fists were tight
on the handlebars and his hate-filled face glared at her from between the clocks. She dived aside just in time to avoid being run down. The bike thundered past and kept on going.
Alex scrambled to one knee and let off three more pounding shots from the Desert Eagle. The Indian’s back light exploded and its rear wheel stepped out of line as the fat tyre burst apart. Baxter sawed wildly at the handlebars, but couldn’t prevent the machine from toppling over and sliding across the pavement with a grinding of steel on stone, showering sparks. The movie star tumbled to the ground but was quickly back up on his feet. A glance over his shoulder at Alex already coming after him with the gun, and he was off like a madman down the street.
It was a quiet residential area, only a few terrified passersby and a smattering of traffic. Public gun battles weren’t strictly part of VIA’s low-profile policy, but then allowing a celebrity vampire to run amok wasn’t exactly on the agenda either. Alex raised the pistol again and was about to fire at the fleeing figure of Baxter Burnett when she realised that the set of open wrought-iron gates he’d just sprinted past was the entrance to a school and that there was a crowd of kids gathered just inside them. Some of the older ones, girls and boys of up to about twelve or thirteen, had ignored the frantic shouts of their teachers to get inside, and had come running towards the street at the sound of the gunshots. Alex lowered the gun, not daring to risk a shot. Killing humans wasn’t on the cards for her.
A couple of yards from the crowd of schoolkids, Baxter’s run faltered. He turned to look at them. Suddenly they were all pointing at him, eyes were opening wide and mouths were dropping open. There was a shout of ‘It’s Baxter Burnett!’ Those who could tear their gaze from their cinema idol stared delightedly at Alex. Not a camera or crew anywhere in sight, but they obviously thought they were in the middle of a film shoot, complete with blank-firing movie weapons.
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