by Hall, Alexis
Tash pulled out her phone. “I’ll email you some photos. It’s [email protected], right?”
I nodded. I remember when you had to wander around with a single copy of a crappy Polaroid. It’s way easier now everybody puts a tonne of shit online, but you still have to remember that, whatever people say about our media-obsessed age, people don’t put their whole lives on Facebook—just the bits of their lives they want their friends to know about. It’s not like you ever see so-and-so has updated their status: Borrowed 20 grand from Jimmy “Machete” Carter to fund my secret crack habit.
Tash glanced up again. “Done. I’ve also sent you all his contact details and his girlfriend’s address. Her name’s Sarah. They met at York when he was in his first year. They’ve been going out forever, like three years or something.”
“And the internship?”
“It was with Locke Enterprises. Hugh wouldn’t stop talking about it.”
Well, fuck. I was about to be hired by a woman I’d very nearly slept with to find her missing brother who was working for the woman who’d left me for a tech start-up at the tech start-up she left me for.
Not that it’s a start-up anymore. I’ve never quite understood what Eve does, but whatever it is, it’s massive. She’s the only person I’ve ever heard of who’s been on the front cover of TIME, WIRED, and DIVA in the same month.
There was a slightly uncomfortable silence.
“How much is . . .” began Tash. “I mean, how much do you—”
“Well, it depends on how much work I end up having to do, but it’ll probably work out at about three hundred a day.”
Tash turned a sort of grey colour. “Do you think you can find him?”
“I can’t make any promises.”
“I’ll get the money. I’ve got some savings and I can ask my parents if I have to.”
I nodded. “Have you still got the same number?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll contact you if I need more information. And if you think of something or hear anything, let me know immediately.”
“So, what, do I just wait around?”
“Pretty much. But I’ll keep you up-to-date.”
Tash nodded, put down her almost untouched tea, and made her way to the door. She turned. “Thanks, Kate.”
“It’s okay; it’s my job. I’ll do what I can.”
“Okay.” She left.
“Well, it looks like those accounts are going to have to wait.” I tried not to sound inappropriately happy that some guy had gone missing.
“You seem devastated, Miss Kane.”
“We’ll need background checks on Shawcross, Tash, the girlfriend, and the family as well. There probably won’t be anything, but you never know when someone is going to turn out to be a secret member of The Royal Society for the Promotion of Human Sacrifice.”
“I will take care of it.”
“Thanks. And try to find out a bit more about this internship. What it involved, who else went for it, that kind of thing.”
“Of course, Miss Kane.”
I could really get used to having Elise around. She dealt with all the things I didn’t want to deal with, like paperwork and my ex-girlfriends.
I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I’m going to head to the hospital, see if I can find out why the police don’t think this is shady as all hell.”
“I will forward any relevant information to you.”
I nodded, grabbed my hat and my coat, and jumped on the Tube to Archway. It was a short walk up Highgate Hill to the Whittington, which was one of those shiny hospitals, all yellow brick, revolving doors, and gleaming glass. The reception area looked like something out of a hotel. Or maybe a spaceship. White floor, white tiles, and a circular pine-effect desk.
I took the direct approach.
By which I mean, I lied.
“I’m here to visit Hugh Shawcross. He’s in with a broken leg.”
The receptionist tapped apathetically at his keyboard. “He was moved to Nightingale ward the morning after he was admitted but”—more tapping—“it looks like he’s no longer a patient here.”
“You mean you sent him home?”
Tap tap tap. “Mr. Shawcross appears to have informally discharged himself.”
I guess that was hospital speak for just walked out.
“Thanks anyway.”
Nobody was paying attention to what I was doing, and the receptionist was already dealing with another enquiry, so I wandered off down a corridor. Hospitals are a funny mix of high and low security. They’ll never tell you anything, but because they’re technically public buildings, you can bod around them as much as you like, as long you don’t try to walk into intensive care or something.
I followed the signs to Nightingale ward. Once I got away from reception, it was quite busy. There was a lot of running around and people in white coats whispering to each other in the corridors. I got the feeling this was not a happy hospital. Closer to Nightingale, things got even more frenetic, and I arrived just in time to see them rushing a covered body off the ward and into an elevator.
I’m not a doctor, but this wasn’t looking good.
Nightingale turned out to be the respiratory unit, which struck me as a strange place to stick a guy with a broken leg. The whole ward was in lockdown. I went to peer through the glass panels in the doors, but then I got pulled out of the way by a man in blue pyjamas who told me I shouldn’t be there.
“I heard my friend was transferred.”
“The ward is off limits to visitors at the moment.”
I faked concern. Probably not very convincingly. I’m fine with lying, but emotions, in general, are outside my comfort zone. “Oh no. Why? What’s wrong? Will he be okay?”
“The ward’s very crowded, but everything’s under control. Why don’t you try calling the hospital for an update in a day or two?”
My distraught visitor impression had exhausted my limited acting ability. “Okay.” I walked off the way I’d come.
So, Hugh had been admitted with a broken leg and ended up with some unknown contagious disease. This is exactly why I don’t like hospitals.
I really, really hoped this wasn’t going to be another zombie plague. There’d been an outbreak when I’d taken Eve up to Lake Windermere for our third anniversary, and we’d spent the whole weekend under siege in the hotel, making Molotovs from the minibar and clubbing reanimated tourists to death with souvenir walking sticks.
It sounded like the only thing I was going to pick up hanging round the ward was a horrible illness. It was time for a new approach. I don’t know much about hospitals, but I do know if you want information about pretty much anything, you find an administrator. It’s easy to be dismissive about pen pushers and bean counters, but there comes a point in your life when you really need to know where your pens are and how many beans you’ve got.
I followed the signs to the admin block and blustered my way into the hospital administrator’s office. She was young, hot, sleek, and irate. But then I had just barged in on her unannounced. The plaque on the desk read Rhona Conway.
“Can I help you?” she asked, in a tone that suggested she intended to do nothing of the sort.
There were two ways to do this. I could be subtle and clever and tease the information out of her with a plausible sequence of well-constructed fictions. Or I could not do that.
“Name’s Kane, Kate Kane. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by the family of Hugh Shawcross to investigate his disappearance.”
Rhona raised one perfectly shaped brow into a delicate arch. “Thank you, Miss Kane, but I’ve already told everything I know to the actual police.”
Ooh. Burn.
Was it wrong that I kind of wanted to do her right there?
Okay, Kate. Be professional about this. Also you have a girlfriend. A girlfriend who can juggle cars.
“A man is missing, Ms. Conway. One of your wards is locked down. Mr. Shawcross was admitted with a
broken leg, contracted an unknown respiratory infection, and then simply disappeared. This isn’t looking good for you.”
“I’m under no legal obligation to talk to you. In fact, I’m fully entitled to have you ejected from the building.”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t care how you run your hospital. I don’t care what’s going on in Nightingale ward. All I want to do is find Mr. Shawcross. I don’t want to make your job difficult, but I can.”
Rhona’s eyebrow went up again. Ngh. “Can you?”
“Mr. Shawcross’s sister is very upset and very photogenic. And the only thing the newspapers love more than a kidnapping is a health scare.”
“He wasn’t kidnapped,” she snapped.
“You seem pretty certain of that.”
She sighed. “Fine, you can see the tapes if it’ll get you out my hair. But there’s no mystery here. He just got up and walked out.”
“With a broken leg?”
“People leave hospitals with injuries and illnesses all the time.”
“Why was he transferred to Nightingale?”
“That is none of your business.”
“His health will affect his behaviour. Is he dying? Is he delirious? It makes a difference.”
“I absolutely can’t discuss a patient’s confidential medical records with you.”
Well, it had been worth a try. “Can you at least tell me who was on duty the night he disappeared?”
“Give me a moment.” She keyed a few commands into her computer. “All right. It was Tony Suen. He’s on days from Thursday, but if I find you harassing my staff, I won’t hesitate to press charges.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t harass people. I just annoy them.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting in a back office, going through security footage with a bloke called Reg. This basically came down to watching empty corridors in real time for about six hours. And it’s not like you could kick back with a beer and a bucket of popcorn, although Reg did have a packet of dry-roasted peanuts, which he was happy to share. You can speed the process up very slightly by spinning through the bits where there’s blatantly nothing happening, although that can be counterproductive if you’re looking for supernatural creatures. Vampires move so quickly they’re hard to see even at regular speed, never mind on fast-forward. Sometimes I’d see a flicker and I’d have to go back and watch ten seconds frame by frame. By the end, Reg probably thought I was nuts.
A little bit after midnight on the third of December, the doors to Nightingale ward opened and Hugh Shawcross strolled out. Well, no wonder the police ruled out abduction. He was wearing jeans and a shirt and a knitted tank top, no coat and no cast. For a man with a broken leg and an unknown respiratory ailment, he seemed remarkably healthy. It took a moment to synch up the camera feeds but I managed to track his progress through the hospital. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and nobody stopped him, but why would they? The last shot was him walking across reception before he disappeared into the night.
I get quite a few missing persons cases that go this way. I’d been trying not to jump to any conclusions, but from where I was sitting now, it seemed fairly clear-cut. Sudden disappearance. Short respiratory illness. Immediately healed of minor physical injuries.
Sorry, Tash, your brother’s a vampire.
I rang Elise from the front entrance of the hospital.
“Good evening, Miss Kane.”
“Hugh’s a vampire.”
“Are you attempting to convey information, or are you trying to recreate a popular Abbott and Costello routine?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am sorry. I thought you may have wanted me to reply ‘I don’t know’ so that you could respond with ‘No, I don’t know’s a werewolf.’”
“Elise, you can rest easy in the knowledge that I would never, ever want you to do that.”
“That, Miss Kane, is because you have no soul.”
I started walking down the hill back towards Archway. “Okay, let me start again. Elise, Miss Shawcross’s brother is a vampire.”
“Does this mean the case is closed?”
“Well, I still haven’t found him. But at least now I know what I’m looking for.”
“Do you wish me to continue my current tasks?”
“There’s no point shutting anything down at the moment. I don’t know why he was turned, or who did it, but it’s even more important we find him quickly. He could freak out and nom a bunch of people.” I paused. “Actually, prioritise finding the girlfriend because she could be in danger. New vampires tend to go back to what they know, and they can have real self-control problems.”
I arrived at the Tube station and started pushing my way through commuters. I’d really timed this badly.
“Very well, Miss Kane,” said Elise. “Shall I meet you at home, or does this merit an all-nighter?”
“It’s okay for you. Some of us actually sleep. But you’re right, this is important. I’ll come back to the office.”
“Would you like me to compile the takeaway menus?”
“Can we just get pizza this time?”
I looked up and saw Sir Caradoc, the eldest vampire kid of the last Prince of Swords, coming towards me. People were getting out of his way quickly. I’d only met him once before, and I’d been unfortunately naked at the time.
“Give me a minute, Elise.” I slipped the phone in my pocket but didn’t hang up. You never know when you’ll be glad someone was listening.
I glanced over my shoulder. There was another vampire behind me and two more coming in on either side. They wore sharp black suits and crisp white shirts, which made them look like the undead FBI. But, for some reason, they seemed to have the St John Ambulance cross embroidered in red on their ties.
This was also probably not a social visit.
And they also probably weren’t going to teach me how to put people in the recovery position.
Sir Caradoc came steadily through the crowd and got right up in my grill. He was a chiselled, blond Hasselhoff-alike. If we hadn’t been in a crowded place, and he hadn’t been an eight-hundred-year-old vampire who could have ripped my head off without thinking about it, I’d have lamped him one.
“Katharine Kane,” he actually fucking intoned, “by the authority of the Council, I arrest you for the murder of Aeglica Thrice-Risen, Prince of Swords.”
Well, fuck.
I was dead.
I didn’t even bother to think about running. He’d have caught me before I could turn round. And trying to resist arrest would look really bad. Not that I was expecting a fair trial. People who get taken away by vampires don’t come back. When all else fails, try bravado.
“I don’t think so. First off, I didn’t do it. Secondly, if I go with you I’m fucked. If I don’t go with you, I’m fucked. If I try and run, I’m fucked. If I try and fight, I’m fucked. I’d rather you just killed me now and got it over with.”
“You have no choice. You will come with me, and you will stand trial for your crimes.”
He stared at me coldly, and fear came crashing over me. Vampires are creatures of passion, and the half of their power that doesn’t come from blood comes from overwhelming the emotions of others. Julian feeds on desire, pleasure, and surrender. My dickhead ex-boyfriend fed on the twisted needy obsession he called love. And Caradoc, like all his bloodline, feeds on fear. Things were way more fun with Julian.
I braced myself and tried to meet his gaze.
It was the primal irrational terror of childhood and phobias. The kind that freezes you and breaks you, even though you know it comes from nowhere.
I was shaking, but I tried not to show it. I dragged my head up and looked him in the eye. “Enough of that. Let’s get this over with.”
He blinked and it stopped.
His three minions swept in and deprived me of my knives and my phone. I didn’t know how much of the conversation Elise had heard or how much use it would be anyway. I wanted to te
ll her not to worry, but I didn’t want to let Caradoc know she might have been listening.
They marched me out of the station and into a black sedan with honest-to-God tinted windows.
I was so dead.
After a miserable stop-and-start drive through rush hour traffic, I was unloaded in front of Aeglica’s rundown mansion near Holland Park. They bundled me inside and dragged me downstairs where they locked me in the cellar.
Well, fuck.
It was one of those proper dungeony cellars that TV serial killers always seem to have. Stone walls, stone floor, reinforced doors with little bars on them. I briefly wondered how you got one of these things fitted. Is there some kind of bespoke dungeon outfitter you can call in?
I checked the obvious things. Sadly, none of the flagstones were loose, the door did not conveniently lift off its hinges, and if there were any secret passages, they were too secret for me to find.
I’d been expecting this to come back and bite me in the arse. The only question had been when. Three months ago, Julian had been abducted by a crazy faery lord and I’d formed a rescue posse, which had included Aeglica Thrice-Risen, the Prince of Swords and all-round vampire badass. Things had gone, as we say in the business, tits up, and we’d only got out because Aeglica had held the faery lord down while I ran them both through with a magic sword. I still felt pretty shitty about it. Although I was going to feel a lot worse if I got executed. I had no idea how vampire courts worked, but somehow I didn’t think they were big on mitigating circumstances.
There was a slightly grimy mattress in one corner of the room, which put it easily in the top ten nicest places I’ve ever been locked up. I went and lay down because what else can you do? I get captured a fair bit. It’s kind of an occupational hazard. I should probably take up tai chi or something to pass the time while I’m waiting for the villain to come in and explain their master plan to me.
After a while, I heard raised voices outside, and then a stream of smoke and shadows poured through the grill in the door before coalescing into Julian.
She was dressed in the closest thing she ever got to formal wear—knee boots, leather trousers, outrageous cravat, military greatcoat with gold frogging and epaulettes. She looked like the bastard lovechild of Audrey Hepburn and Captain Hook, and for a moment, despite being in prison, all I wanted to do was feed her chocolate and fuck her senseless. Unfortunately it looked like that was the last thing on her mind. She had that pale, cold look that vampires get when they’re seriously ticked off.