The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  Before he could begin to read his telephone buzzed.

  He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Caller Unknown. He frowned. That was impossible. He knew the number of everyone who might call him on this phone. They only knew the number because he had given it to them.

  “Who is this?” he asked. “How do you have this number?”

  “It does not matter who I am, not yet.” Her voice was largely unaccented, although he believed he detected just a hint of French in it. “As for how I know the number, I am not without resources.”

  Call knew he should just press the red button, get up and leave the café, dumping the phone in the first garbage bin he found. He knew that was what he should do. Asking “Why are you calling me?” was what he actually did.

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  There was something about her voice, something distantly familiar, that piqued his interest, overrode his caution, drowned out the siren of his common sense. “What sort of proposition would that be?”

  “I need someone found.”

  “Why call me?”

  “He is the sort of person you specialise in finding, the sort of person who justifies the title you so enjoy.”

  For a moment Call didn’t breathe. It was hardly public knowledge what sort of creature he lived to seek. His was a most particular speciality. Most people didn’t believe those he found even existed, and should they discover the truth, it was mostly too late for it to make any difference to them.

  “If you are interested, meet me outside the main entrance to the National Gallery at midday tomorrow.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “That would be wise.”

  ‘Don’t you patronise me, lady,’ Call thought. He’d made too many missteps in his life not to consider every next step as carefully as he could. His life depended on it. It might not be much of a life any more, but it was the only one he had, and he intended to live it until he was dragged off, kicking and screaming and complaining there was a mix up in the paperwork. “How will I recognise you?”

  He didn’t hear her laugh. He didn’t need to. “Do not worry about that. I am familiar with your appearance.” Which was more unsettling than anything else she had said. Anonymity was his armour, his ability to pass unseen, unnoticed, unrecognised.

  Then she was gone, leaving him staring at his phone, and wondering what he should do next. What he did was drop the phone into his pocket, tip the raki down his throat and get to his feet before he could breathe again. One or two pairs of eyes followed him as he walked away, but not many. They all knew he was just a white man who deluded himself that he lived close to the edge, not a copper or a snout, not even maybe a journalist.

  Those Cypriot boys, and men, knew who their enemies were and were happy to share a table and conversation with them, because that was what hospitality demanded. What was the old saying; keep your friends close and your enemies closer? That white man was neither their friend nor their enemy. He wasn’t worth their attention. He came, he left, nothing more.

  Ordinarily Call went to Dimas’ Taverna to eat because he liked Greek food, stifado and kleftiko and especially baklava, and Dimas served as good Greek food as there was to be found in London outside of a Greek mama’s kitchen, even if it was not quite as tasty as red mullet eaten at a quayside taverna in Irapetra.

  Those two weeks with Marion in Irapetra before he discovered what he really was had been the happiest days of his life. He would never forget them, however hard he tried. Those days, those memories, were real the reason he came to this part of north London so often.

  Marion lived nearby, on the ever so ironically named Milton Road, lived there with Claire and Roger and her new partner, Stephen. Stephen was in advertising. He kept them in a manner she approved, and wasn’t likely to get them killed as a by-product of his business. Call almost liked him. Not that he had ever met him, of course, face to face, a manly handshake exchanged, the proprieties observed. He had only observed him from a distance, through a long lens, playing with Claire and Roger in the park, acting as though he was their real father; or glimpsed through that large bay window in which the curtains were never drawn closed.

  That window was dark today as Call strolled insouciantly along the other side of the road, glancing surreptitiously. All the windows were dark and Roger’s black BMW SUV was not parked outside the house, its space protected by planks laid crosswise on a couple of crates with a pair of borrowed day-glo orange traffic bollards to make it appear official.

  Milton Road was just like every other residential road in north London, the registered address of far more cars than could possibly park there at the same time, except in piles three or four high. A disagreement about whose parking space it was had ended up with one driver bleeding out in the dusty gutter and the other not needing to park anywhere but Wormwood Scrubs for eight years, although that might be an apocryphal story. On the other hand, it might not.

  He walked past the house, turned at the end of the road and walked back. Just as he arrived at the junction with the main road a black X5 turned in. It might have been Marion and the kids, but he didn’t even glance in their direction to see. If it was, he didn’t want them to see him. After all, Marion still had a court order out against him and he was well within the 400 metres distance that required him to keep between himself and his ex-wife.

  If it wasn’t them he didn’t care. He didn’t even glance behind himself before he turned right and made for the Underground station. At least that was some progress, not looking back, not hoping.

  He didn’t expect to sleep when he got home, so he warmed some milk and made a mug of coffee the way his grandmother used to make it, about as bitter as liquid sugar and just as soothing.

  No American would recognise it as coffee, but at least he had made it with instant granules rather than the liquid Camp ‘coffee essence’ throwback to the war she used right up until she died, holding animated one sided conversations with the extravagantly uniformed Sikh bahadur on the label, who went on smiling and never answered her back.

  When he woke the following morning the mug was on the night stand, still half full, a disgusting skin on the top of the milk. He felt remarkably refreshed, even so. The night after a cleansing rarely saw him sleep well. Today he might as well be waking after twelve uninterrupted hours. Whether he should feel good about that or not he did not know. His routines were significant to him, always had been. He felt he lived by them and ignoring them might get him killed. Change unsettled him.

  On the other hand, this was another day, pregnant with promise and anticipation. All it required of him was that he seize whatever opportunity arose, and try not to be too intimidated by whatever it was he was going to meet in Trafalgar Square.

  Chapter Five

  Trafalgar Square heaved with tourists, as it did come rain, come shine when it was daylight, and often enough even when it was dark.

  It was years since Call had been in the Square, and sitting on the low wall outside the porticoed entrance to the National Gallery, he noticed a change in the population.

  There were far more Chinese than there had been then, when those Chinese who were in London were there to make money, not spend it. There were Russians too, noticeable by their language and the probably not fake Rolexes on their wrists.

  With the Americans and the Japanese, it was a metropolitan crowd, but it made him uncomfortable, just like any other crowd. En masse, humans made his eyes hurt and his nose constrict, made breathing an effort rather than an autonomic action. These were the symptoms of panic, he knew and he preferred to be as cool, aloof, and in control of himself and his surroundings as he could be.

  He had arrived a quarter of an hour early, thinking to reconnoitre the area, make himself comfortable and spy out his appointment before she saw him. Of course, that had proved a futile plan. Perhaps someone with live access to all the CCTV cameras covering the area might have been able to pick out a single person moving t
hrough the crowd, if they had known that person’s appearance and had access to the very best facial recognition technology.

  Down at ground level, looking up at a kaleidoscope of faces, he had no chance at all. When some bell nearby began to chime the hour he almost got to his feet and ran away, the sound of his heart pounding in his ears drowning out everything else, even the traffic. As it was, he managed to wipe the sweat from his face and put the tissue into his jacket pocket just in time to look up into the face of the most beautiful woman he had ever met.

  She was tall and slender, with a pale face and long, straight nose, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. Her most obvious feature, however, was a head of red-gold curls, held in place on her neck by a silver barre and cascading down to the small of her back. Actresses would kill to have hair like that, and there was something about it – about her – that seemed familiar in a way he could not quite pinpoint.

  “Roger Call?” she enquired. Hers was certainly the voice on the telephone.

  He did jump to his feet this time and clumsily took hold of her outstretched hand. Her skin was smooth and cool and her grip was surprisingly strong. His, he knew, was clammy and soft.

  “I am Roxane Hart,” she said, releasing his hand for him to wipe it dry on his jeans as surreptitiously as he could. “Shall we find somewhere out of this crowd where we can talk?”

  ‘Somewhere’ turned out to be a café beside the National Portrait Gallery, one of the few left in London that did not serve ‘coffee’ that was mostly frothed milk. She graciously allowed him to buy her something that would have approximated to café au lait in any other European capital, but declined the offer of anything to eat. He brought a slightly stale BLT sandwich to the table to eat with the pot of stewed tea he had to drink. Coffee the Middle Eastern proprietor had mastered, but tea made the English way was still beyond him.

  “Why did you want to meet here?” he asked after an uncomfortable, decorous silence during which he had tried to study her without actually looking it her and she had stared directly into his face. He had become aware of that distant sensation of unease again, and it was that more than anything that made him speak.

  “It is one of my very favourite places,” she replied. “There are always so many interesting people to see, and when I tire of people watching there is always the treasure trove of art to be found inside.”

  “I’m not an arty person,” he lied, his tone dismissive, as though he was one of those who only read biographies of successful men and other guides to climbing the ladder of life while surreptitiously trampling on the foreheads of those on the rungs below.

  He did not know why he lied. As a youth he had manifested some artistic skill, and there had been talk at school of his going to art college rather than university, but he got involved with a girl who had inherited her stock-broker father’s attitude that art was expensive interior design, nothing more, and so he changed to studying business rather than art and Marion’s father gave him a job at his firm when he left university with his slightly disappointing 2:1 degree. The woman’s response to this was to smile and say nothing.

  They sat in silence a little longer before he finally asked “Why did you want to meet me at all?”

  The smile iced over. “As I said, I have a proposition for you.”

  “Let’s hear it, then.”

  “You know who I am, what I am, I take it.” He got the impression she was peering at him down her long nose over the top of those old fashioned spectacles she was wearing, even though she was not. He thought about his reply for some time.

  “I know your name, as for what you are… I presume you are one of those I specialise in finding.”

  As he spoke Call studied her face very closely, noting that she was not just beautiful, if a little thin by classical standards, but that her skin was flawlessly smooth, and that she was not wearing any make up apart from a hint of eye liner and a pale pink lipstick.

  She was either blessed by her parents’ genes or there was some other reason for it. Even as he spoke the realisation crashed down on him like a wave breaking on a rocky shore. She really was a vampire. In that moment all warmth went out of the day. He was more afraid than he had ever been before.

  She smiled just a little, a flick of the corners of her mouth and an extra flash of light in her eyes.

  “Very good, Mr Call. I am, indeed, such a person.”

  Breathing was, once again, something he had to consciously make himself do. The cold that enveloped him made him physically shiver, even though he knew it was merely his imagination. If she was telling the truth, and he believed she was – it explained that faraway sensation of unease, if nothing else – then she was considerably older and more powerful than any vampire he had ever encountered before.

  Sunlight was no danger to her, that was obvious, and so far as he knew he had never encountered a vampire that did not turn into flame and ash if sunlight touched their skin. He had heard of such creatures, but had never really believed they still existed, until now. She was speaking the truth; there was no reason for her to lie, other than the necessity of every vampire to lie to him before he destroyed them.

  “You do not seem to be afraid of me,” he said, eventually.

  Her smile broadened, and his chill receded. It was a lovely smile.

  “Not every creature needs to fear the hunter, even so adept a hunter as you, Roger Call. As you have surmised, I am of an age and power such that you cannot harm me. There is only one creature I need fear, and I have not seen him in centuries.”

  That creature was her maker, Call knew, the vampire who had taken her into the world of eternal shadows. It was a simple statement of fact. She had no reason to fear him while he had every reason to fear her.

  “But you need not concern yourself, I mean you no harm. I have no concern for those things you hunt, like those two foolish creatures you despatched in the early hours of Sunday…”

  “You were there!”

  “We were both hunting that night, Mr Call. You found them and saved that silly girl’s life. I might not have found who I was searching for, but I did find you.”

  “You seem very calm about talking with a vampire hunter, phlegmatic even.”

  “Phlegmatic,” she nodded. “That is a good word, an apposite word. As I say, I do not fear you, and I am unconcerned for gaudy blood drinkers. Any ecology that endures requires checks and balances. Were my kind permitted to flourish the ecology in which I live would be quickly unbalanced, which is why there are your kind, discrete, professional executioners. I can live with that.”

  The conversation made Call feel dizzy. He sensed himself being seduced by her, falling under her influence, not knowing whether she was deliberately trying to sweep him up or if it was just the inevitable consequence of being exposed to such a literally fabulous creature. She was as close kin to the vampires he had destroyed as a tiger is to a mange ridden alley cat.

  If he did not assert himself now he might never surface again. Drowning in her eyes would be such a sweet, desirable death.

  “Who is it you want me to find?”

  “My brother.”

  Call felt as though the breath had been sucked out of him. The idea of one such vampire was troubling enough; two were a great deal more than twice the trouble.

  “Why ask me?” It seemed like a reasonable question. Why should a day-walking vampire enlist the help of the only vampire hunter in the city to find another day-walking vampire, who could crush him between his finger tips and pause only to lick Call’s blood from his fingers.

  “Because there is nobody alive better at finding vampires than you, Mr Call, not in this city, and not in this country… perhaps not at all.”

  Her smile did not fool him for a moment

  “I want him found because he is my brother and I have lost him. I have searched everywhere in this city for more than a six month and I cannot find him. I am concerned for him, for his welfare”

  He realised that she was
scared for her brother. To his knowledge there was almost nothing that could harm a vampire of her antiquity and strength, yet she feared for her brother, who he guessed was her equal. A vampire who was afraid, now that was a novelty.

  “Because he is my brother, and I love him.”

  Call shook his head. “You’ll understand if my heart strings aren’t tugged. So far as I know, you are incapable of loving anything or anyone. You would not be what you are if you were.”

  She smiled at him, and her dark glasses slid down her nose just enough for him to see the grey, almost colourless eyes behind them. They were pushed back into place immediately. “I appreciate your candour, Mr Call, and I understand why a man like you should think as you do. All I can say is that you are wrong.”

  In that moment Call knew he would do what she asked, even if he did not understand why. Whatever else his parents had raised him to be, he was an old fashioned gentleman. If a lady asked his help he was duty bound not to disappoint her. This might be an ancient vampire sitting across the table from him, but she gave every impression of being a lady. She looked like one, spoke like one, dressed like one. To all intents and purposes, she was a lady. There weren’t many left, in Call’s estimation.

  “Of course, there is always the certainty that if you do not help me I will kill you. You will not know where, or when, just that I will. I shall not enjoy it, but I shall kill you.”

  Call seemed to think for a moment, closing his eyes, furrowing his brow.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”