Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

  It was obvious, just looking in the hall, that the house had been abandoned. The shutters on the windows were down, and the ground floor had been pithed of electrical equipment. There wasn’t a television in the downstairs lounge, just a trio of big leather sofas arranged to give a good view of the place where it had once stood. A few CDs were scattered about the floor, but they’d obviously been abandoned while their brethren were removed, along with whatever stereo equipment had once stood on a coffee table in a corner. Leonard would have bet that it involved a turntable or two, judging from some of the posters he found about the place, as somebody had deemed vinyl more worthy of survival than digital media. Probably it was worth more, but that wasn’t likely to be the only factor involved. The bookshelves filling one wall had been filleted rather than emptied. Gaps, sometimes big enough to topple rows sideways, were far more conspicuous than the books that were still there. The same vibe as the missing television and record collection, really.

  The bedrooms upstairs had been gutted: most of the furniture was still there, and abandoned clothing lay limp in hangers or strewn about the floor, but anything that might have revealed a whiff of the inhabitants was gone. There were items of jewellery and trinkets lying around, but not the kind that had been worn or pawed often enough to reveal anything to a psychometrist. This was all dispensable: the good shit was gone. Anything that anybody cared about or felt sentiment for had obviously left with them.

  There was one exception. In one of the bedrooms, Leonard found a flurry of clothing that had been ripped apart, and in some cases torn to shreds or burnt. He had an inkling that this might have been Chelsea’s room: the fact that that somebody had nailed a pink vinyl bikini to the wall and crowded the space its occupant would have filled with marker-penned insults and abuse suggested that she’d put a few noses out of joint by leaving in the way she had. Leonard suspected that the bile-filled avatar of her form was rather unflattering. Small wonder that she hadn’t had a very good time after being recaptured.

  Having peeked through the door on his first circuit of the house, Leonard knew that the holy of holies was downstairs. This was the dominatrix’s inner sanctum, and so Leonard had checked the rest of the house first, letting his anticipation build. Apart from the vivisected vampire’s supposed hidden key, which he’d look for next, anything of any great interest that had been left behind was likely to be found here. As it turned out, she’d covered her tracks very thoroughly. This was the only room in the house with a working fireplace. There wasn’t a heater across its mouth, and the chimney hadn’t been capped. The grate was full of ashes. Leonard looked about, and sighed. This room had been cleaned out more thoroughly than the rest of the house. There were no abandoned clothes or trinkets to be found, and the furniture had all been removed as well. The only books left in the room were Victorian pornography, ageing science-fiction paperbacks and Germaine Greer, stacked up on a dark, flattened patch of carpet that had once supported a wardrobe or bookcase. Leonard started to gather these into the airline carry-on he’d brought along. (He knew that The Tawsingham Papers, The Rise And Fall Of The Trigan Empire and the Daily Mirror Garth Annuals were worth a lot, and wouldn’t rule out some of the rest being valuable.) And thus it was that he finally hit pay dirt, purely by accident.

  A hardback copy of Gray’s Anatomy that he found in one stack slithered out of its dust-jacket when he picked it up. Leonard quickly realised the reason the dust-jacket didn’t fit was that the book inside was a slimmer volume than any edition of Gray’s he’d ever seen. Flipping it open, he saw that it was a journal, its unruled pages filled in an elegant and old-fashioned copperplate hand. Leonard knew that he had got lucky, and slipped the book into his coat pocket. Chelsea’s den mother had doubtless filled a lot of diaries over the course of her life, and couldn’t be expected to have kept track of all of them. It was likely to be an interesting read, and perhaps even informative. She’d taken the rest of her journals with her, it seemed; but for some reason, she’d missed this one. Leonard smiled to himself as he left the room and went to look for the hidden key his guest had told him about. This looked like being a very productive morning.

  Hayley stirred uneasily as somebody walked across her grave. On returning to the warehouse, she and Lucinda had quickly decided that it didn’t look too safe anymore, and had gone to ground in a flat in Moss Side. Hayley had an idea that the flat’s owner had been some sort of big deal: Lucinda had seen him at speed-garage nights a few times, surrounded by young women in very short skirts. Lucinda’s belief that these pretty young things were coke whores had been vindicated by events over the course of the previous few hours. He’d definitely been more interested in Hayley than in Lucinda. His flat had proved to contain a stash of illegal stimulants that would have impressed Superfly. No Curtis Mayfield records, though. Hayley had flipped through his collection of rap waxings with disdain, before finally finding a few CDs she could put up with. Currently she was sat in a corner, away from the bed Lucinda was sleeping under and the windows, listening to an Ohio Players compilation on repeat. He had owned quite a lot of drill and bass, and some P funk stuff as well, but Hayley wasn’t in the mood for that. She could remember listening to a lot of borderline pornographic soul while the punk wars were raging, as her father had preferred that to the prog that most of his peers had gone onto after whatever they’d been into during their teens.

  Hayley assumed that whoever had removed Chelsea from the warehouse would have her best interests at heart. Even if they were slavering perverts who planned to sell her to white slavers after gang raping her, they would probably manage a closer approximation than Coral had of looking out for her welfare. Having convinced Lucinda to help her do away with Rachael, Hayley had been planning to present Coral with a fait accompli and walk out with Chelsea. It was possible that, in an uprising under those circumstances, Coral might have been faced with other defectors. Hayley wouldn’t have put it past Michelle, and knew that if a similar situation had arisen at any other time between that night in the Hacienda in 1986 and now, she’d have jumped at it. Somebody had beaten her to the attempt at rescuing Chelsea, it seemed, and done a very thorough job of it. It was a pity they’d killed Michelle, though. Hayley had always liked Michelle. She still wanted to touch base with Chelsea, even if she had been rescued by her former boyfriend. If nothing else, she wanted to let Chelsea know that she was in the clear and there were no hard feelings. She was dubious that it would be viable for Chelsea to maintain a functional relationship with somebody who didn’t share their affliction, and thought it would be as well to stay in touch in case that became a problem.

  Hayley couldn’t sleep. It had probably been a mistake to dip into her belated new friend’s cocaine stash, but the temptation had been too much to bear. After the run-around she’d had from the flat’s owner, she’d needed a pick me up, anyway. Much to their irritation, Hayley and Lucinda had been forced to keep him happy until the opportunity had arrived to kill him quietly. In his bedside table drawer, he’d had a big gun that could well have killed one or the other of them if he’d started shooting, and would have left them looking for somewhere else to hole up for the day even if it hadn’t. Hayley thought the huge, long-barrelled automatic was a .357 or a .44, though she had no idea which. She was sure she’d seen the same model in a Chuck Norris film once. There had been a lot of bullets in the drawer, but no sign of an instruction manual.

  Hayley had an inkling that they were burning down Manchester of late, and it might be an idea to split town for a while after they’d found Chelsea. She could live with that. She didn’t think she’d miss it. Once it started to get dark outside and her eyes stopped itching, she’d have a look through the address book she’d found on the male corpse in the warehouse. The flat in Salford from which Chelsea had been retrieved was likely to be a dead loss, but there’d be other places to try. At least the late coke dealer had very heavy, light-proof curtains at his bedroom windows. Having seen
the decor elsewhere in the flat, Hayley had been concerned that he’d have those ridiculous Venetian blinds or something of the sort. Still, it was far too late to start worrying about that. Hayley wondered which city it might be interesting to visit next. She treated herself to another toot before sticking ‘Rollercoaster of Love’ on again.

  Leonard had made a point of being sure that all his associates at the City General had known he was visiting Jay that morning. That way, he’d figured, nobody would be expecting him to call again later the same day. It wasn’t quite an alibi, but it was close enough for rock and roll.

  Jay was dozing when he arrived, on the nod from whatever they’d given him to take his mind off the pain in his side and what was left of his shoulder. He’d lost that arm, as far as Leonard could tell from the notes. He had no idea who they thought they were fooling by putting Jay’s shoulder in traction when he was obviously not going to get the use of his arm back. The drip was, perhaps pointedly, hooked into the crook of Jay’s other arm.

  Leonard didn’t feel very happy about murdering one of his oldest friends, but there was no way that Jay would be willing to countenance his plans for Chelsea. He was also the only person who could link any possible police investigation of the odd affair he’d been involved in to Leonard, which was even less appealing. Leonard had always been very fond of Jay, but he’d decided that freedom from the polycythaemia that was slowly killing him was worth more to him than his friend was. Besides which, Jay was in a real mess, probably in trouble with the police if they’d found powder traces on his hands, and might even appreciate the chance to slip quietly into the night rather than be confronted with further inconvenience and hassles. Leonard had resigned himself to the fact that Jay had to go, and was busily rearranging his interpretation of the facts to justify this to himself. He was more than a little uneasy that his motives were essentially selfish, but with a year or two’s hindsight, he was sure to have convinced himself that he’d performed a kindness by putting Jay out of his misery.

  One approach Leonard had considered had been to inject a syringe full of air into one of the blood vessels feeding Jay’s brain. This would form bubbles in the bloodstream, which couldn’t fail to cause a brain embolism, which was almost certain to be lethal. Unfortunately, it was also a very unpleasant way to die. Leonard had decided instead to add a stiff dose of succinyl choline to Jay’s meds. Jay would probably have been treated with the stuff during his surgery, so an overdose might not attract undue attention in the event of an autopsy. Testing for succs was always for its presence rather than its quantity in any case, and in a suitably large (or slightly mismanaged) dose, the muscle relaxant didn’t just relax and anaesthetise the meat that was being cut, but also the muscles that were run by the autonomic nervous system, such as the heart and the diaphragm. Jay wouldn’t feel a thing, Leonard mused, while he was zonked out from the opiates he’d been pumped full of. He administered a lethal dose through the cannula to which Jay’s drip was attached.

  It was a shame to kill a friend without saying goodbye, but the situation didn’t really lend itself to conversation, and Jay wouldn’t want to talk about Leonard’s plans for his ex anyway. Leonard watched Jay’s chest stop moving, checked that there was no longer any pulse to be found, then left. He was in and out in 10 minutes flat: Dr Benway the ninja. Now he could read the journal he’d found, collect the stash of papers his late houseguest had tipped him off about, and work out what to do about the problem of Chelsea while she was still sleeping. If he secured her on top of the bed and left the curtains open all day, he wouldn’t even need to resort to the sun lamp. Having seen her head-butt a doorpost the other morning, he had an idea that fresh sunlight would prove a lot more effective than a frozen facsimile.

  Leaving Chelsea restrained in broad daylight would probably convince her not to mess him around any, but that was a last resort as yet. Once he’d finished his shopping, he planned to make a strong pot of coffee, cancel his plans for the next few days and let events unfold as they would. Subduing Chelsea might be a problem, but intimidating her wouldn’t. The physical resilience she and her friends possessed wasn’t actually an asset in a situation where it meant that they could be subjected to far worse indignities than anyone else without dying of shock. If the remaining vampires had abandoned their warehouse after the events of the previous night, it could be worth looking up there for further papers. Leonard thought it might be best to leave that for a day or two, though. If he could coerce Chelsea into a suitably receptive frame of mind, she could probably tell him what he wanted to know. She struck Leonard as being a lot more perceptive than the other vampire he’d spoken to.

  Chelsea’s right hand was slowly knitting back together as she slept. It would be weeks before it healed completely, but she’d eventually regain the use of it. The braces Leonard had strapped around it wouldn’t quite compensate for the damage Rachael had inflicted, but it wouldn’t go any more out of true, and her hand hadn’t been bound long enough for the joints to start fusing together. Chelsea’s mind seethed and fizzed like dissolving aspirin as it painted over the knocks it had taken recently. She slithered from nightmare to nightmare as the sun lumbered across the sky.

  Downstairs, Leonard let himself back in and threw down his bag, which was now loaded with the papers from the den mother’s left luggage locker – plus a hand gun that he’d found there. Then he loaded the percolator. He’d been planning to wait for the coffee to finish before starting in on the papers, but he found that he couldn’t contain his impatience that long. He quickly flipped through the first dozen or so pages of the journal he’d found at Faulchion Close, grimacing at the immaculately-formed but opaque handwriting, then put it to one side and began to sort through the rest of the papers.

  One small volume was printed, rather than handwritten. Leonard took one look at the title page, then whooped with glee. This was precisely the sort of thing he had been looking for, and while the language was archaic, the typesetting was far clearer than the vampire dominatrix’s handwriting. After devouring the first half-dozen pages, Leonard forgot all about his coffee and decided to treat himself to a brandy instead. It was early, but he knew that he was going to be too busy that evening for a relaxed drink later. He dug a balloon glass out of the cupboard, half filled it, and carried it into the living room with the book he was reading.

  The rest of the papers could wait. This was the important one.

  7: Lost And Found

  Lucinda struggled into the kitchen, where Hayley was shuffling agitatedly from foot to foot beside the table, her nervous system buzzing from the coke. The western sky was still clotted with lingering shreds of sunset, and Lucinda didn’t like rising this early.

  ‘I can’t believe you did all of that coke,’ Lucinda said. ‘There must have been at least a third of a kilo there.’

  ‘It’s very moreish,’ Hayley replied. ‘You know that, Lucy. I didn’t do all of it, anyway. There’s a bit left. That’ll get you moving.’

  Lucinda looked at the four fat lines on the table in front of her, then at Hayley, and shrugged. Superfly had a ’50s-diner-style beaker full of drinking straws in his kitchen, the sort of thing you normally see only in theme bars, and Hayley had been thoughtful enough to remove a straw and lay it out on the tabletop for her. Lucinda snorted the cocaine up. It would have been rude to refuse; and at least, she reasoned, it’d stop Hayley from taking any more of the stuff herself. She had clearly done quite enough of it already. Lucinda supposed she was lucky that Hayley hadn’t woken her up early, just so that she’d have somebody to yack at.

  ‘I was trying to stay awake,’ Hayley said, as Lucinda straightened up and dropped the straw. From Lucinda’s viewpoint, the pause in the conversation hadn’t been quite as drawn out as it had no doubt seemed to Hayley.

  ‘You probably won’t get any sleep until October now,’ Lucinda said. ‘And your nose has been bleeding.’

  ‘H
as it?’ Hayley poked her nostril with her little finger, and found a violet crust under the nail. She had thought her nose was sore. She gave her septum a discreet little tug to check that it was still there. It didn’t move.

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ Lucinda asked. ‘Find anything useful in that address book?’

  ‘Addresses, mostly,’ Hayley said. Lucinda rolled her eyes. ‘One of them has a phone number by it that matches a number on that mobile we found by Michelle. I think that one could be a good place to start.’

  At least Hayley wasn’t so fucked up that her faculties had stopped working. That was a pretty sharp piece of research. Lucinda resisted the temptation to lick up any traces of cocaine she’d left behind and looked out of the window. ‘Sounds like an idea. Want to see if the Saab is still where we left it?’

  Hayley looked at the drift of violet flakes on her fingertip. ‘I think I should maybe wash my face and do my make-up first,’ she said.

  ‘You do that, Hayles,’ Lucinda said. While Hayley was in the bathroom, she picked up Superfly’s gun and tucked it into the back of her tight leggings. The gun wouldn’t fit into her pocket, but her cream leather coat was plenty long enough to cover the small of her back. With Coral dead, Lucinda didn’t have to worry any more about wearing whatever label was hip in the clubs. She’d enjoyed paying attention to that when she was in university and through her first job, but that had been a long time ago. Now that she was heading out to face Chelsea, having a big gun to hand struck Lucinda as a good idea. Chelsea’s friends were obviously holding, and the idea of attending a gunfight unarmed didn’t have a lot of appeal. Lucinda hoped that things wouldn’t escalate to that level if she and Hayley made the effort to talk before starting a fight, but it was always a good idea to be prepared for the worst.