‘His words... he made us do as he asked,’ replied the smaller one. ‘Besides, he did us a favour taking the body. Saving us from having to dig another hole in the garden.’
‘You want to know what I think?’ I asked, certain they didn’t. ‘I think you made this hooded bloke up. I think you dragged Fergal’s body to the Heath, put a rock in his hand and made him bash in some bloke you were having a barney with.’
‘You are wrong.’
‘You know nothing, ghost,’ said the other.
It seemed they were sticking to their story. Fine. Their testimony was obviously bullshit, which made them the guilty parties. Soon as I’d dealt with them, Fergal got his wings and this case was closed.
‘Well, it’s been nice talking to you gents,’ I said, giving the grenade one last squeeze, ‘but I reckon I’m going to call it a day.’
Time to light the place up. I pulled the pin, wound up my throwing arm and tossed the UV bomb into the centre of the room—
—But just as it landed, the smaller of the vampires snatched a tin bucket from a pile of junk, flipped it over, and slammed it down on the ground, muffling the explosion.
Poof.
The grenade detonated harmlessly under the light-proof container.
Bugger.
There was one frozen second, then I saw two sets of pink eyes flick my way.
‘Easy there, lads,’ I said, backing up.
The vampires pounced, fangs bared, saliva streaming down their waxy chins.
If you’ll permit me to take a quick pause here, I’d like to spend a moment talking about fighting.
See, there are two kinds of brawls. First there’s the movie kind: all Jackie Chan leg sweeps and bullet-time balletics. Then there’s the real kind: scrappy, awkward, and done in a few seconds.
This was the second kind.
The real kind.
I didn’t take my opponents down with a devastating double face kick.
I didn’t make a nimble side-step and turn one’s power against the other.
No.
I clocked the little vampire in the chin, and while he was flapping around on the floor, I kicked his mate square in the knackers.
Wallop. Wallop.
No pissing about.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Where did this guy learn to throw a punch?” you ask. I get it. You see a bloke in a sharp suit and a tidy haircut and you think, “if it comes to a ruckus, this one’s going home with his head on backwards.” It’s cool, I can see your confusion. I know I don’t look like I’d be much use in a scuffle, but believe me when I tell you I’ve learned to hold my own over the years. After that business with Mark and the handcuffs I decided I’d had enough of getting kicked around. An all-boys Catholic school is no place for a victim, so instead of taking it on the chin the next time one of the big kids decided he wanted to boost his ego at my expense, I knocked some teeth down his throat.
I got tough.
Picked up some weights. Did some boxing. Tried out a martial art or two.
It didn’t come easy. I took a lot of lumps on my way to being a half-decent scrapper. A lot of lumps. See, the thing about fighting is, you only really get good at it by doing a lot of it. Lucky for me, I was given plenty of opportunity to brush up on my skills. Day in, day out those kids came at me, and every time, I fought my corner. It didn’t feel like I was being done any favours at the time, but here, outnumbered two-to-one and fighting on someone else’s turf, I was grateful for every shove, every punch, every Chinese burn. Whatever happened to me next, it wouldn’t happen quietly.
While the big vamp lay on the floor clutching his undead unmentionables, his pal staggered to his feet and came at me again. I put up my dukes and went to plant another fist in his face, but he was quick and managed to duck my swing.
He caught me with the butt of his shoulder and barged me to the ground.
Crash.
The pair of us went south in a messy heap, smashing through a stool piled high with old magazines and sending splintered wood and yellowed pages every which way. As we hit the concrete floor, I tried to roll with the fall so I ended up on top of my attacker, but he was having none of it. Instead, he kept the high ground and started raining down blows on my face. I got my arms up to defend myself though, which forced him to find a new spot to inflict pain on.
Shifting his weight, he dug his knee into my chest and pressed down hard. He did it with such force and with such conviction that I felt the bones of my ribcage buckle and spread. Being a ghost, pain isn’t something I get to feel every day. Physically speaking, most things pass right through me, whether I want them to or not. For that reason, it’s easy to lose touch with the simple sensation of… well, touch. Blinding agony? That’s something I hadn’t felt for a good, long while. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I enjoy the act of getting hurt, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that I am at least semi-alive. Not that I was about to thank the bloodsucker crushing my ribcage for it.
I elbowed the vampire in the jaw but it only served to piss him off. Snarling, he went to put my eyes out with his claws, but I managed to get my hands around his wrists just in time. He was unnaturally strong though, and despite my best efforts, the pointed tips of his thumbnails edged closer and closer to my eyeballs. As he bore down on me with all his might, I turned my head to avoid a blinding.
That’s when I saw it.
A broken stool leg, snapped from its seat during our fall.
The vamp saw what I was looking at and pressed down even harder.
He managed to get his hands to my face and hooked his thumbs into my eye sockets.
I felt the tip of his claws graze my eyelids.
Felt them scrape against the fragile membranes.
I saw the wooden leg. Saw its sharp, splintered end.
I’d only get one chance at this.
One chance to snatch it up and plug it in this fucker’s back.
But turning a hand solid enough to do that required concentration.
The kind of concentration the vampire wasn’t leaving much room for.
‘Die!’ he hissed.
It was now or never.
I let go of his wrist and shot a hand out for the chair leg.
Felt my fingers wrap around it.
And with everything I had, I rammed it home.
The sharp end entered his back right between the shoulder blades and sank in deep.
The vampire’s eyes shot open wide. ‘Wha—?’ he gurgled and coughed up a glob of rich, red blood.
I whacked the chair leg with the heel of my palm, driving it home so hard it almost shot through the vamp’s chest.
‘Have some of that!’ I roared, as he gasped and went slack on top of me.
Jazz Hands was right.
No one likes a stake through the heart.
I rolled the bloodsucker off and clambered to my feet just in time to see his mate, Billy Big Bollocks, untwist his nutsack and come at me for round two.
I’d had enough of the rough stuff for one day, so I went for the second grenade and pulled the pin.
I shielded my eyes, expecting the cellar to be flooded with brilliant, cleansing light. Instead, the grenade fizzled like a soggy firework, and with one final sputter, died.
‘Oh, shit,’ I said.
‘You’re going down,’ said the vamp with a razor blade smile, and he darted towards me, teeth gnashing.
Panicking, I did the only thing I could think to do with the dud grenade and hurled it at the nearest blacked-out window. Thankfully, my aim was true, and the lump sailed over the vamp’s shoulder and tore through the glass.
A knife of sunlight struck him in the back and sent him sprawling, and I used on the moment of opportunity to slam my heel down on his skull. As he lay there floundering, I grabbed him by the neck and rammed him against the nearest wall.
‘Tell me the truth!’ I demanded.
‘What truth?’
‘About the body!’ I screamed. ‘Why did you do
that with Fergal’s body?’
With both hands on the vampire’s throat, I forced him towards the lozenge of sunshine that had settled on the brick wall. As I inched the vamp’s head into the light, strands of his hair caught fire, burning to their roots like lit fuses. He fought and hissed and spat, but I clung onto him, refusing to let go.
‘Do you want to die?’ I hollered.
‘No!’
‘Then admit it! Admit that you fitted Fergal up!’
Smoke poured from the bloodsucker as I pushed him fully into the light. I was grilling him in every sense of the word. The flesh on his forehead began to pucker and crisp, sizzling like cooked bacon.
‘We had nothing to do with that!’ the vamp screamed, then, with one last, desperate, pain-fuelled burst of adrenalin, fetched me a blow to the skull that dropped me like a bag of hammers.
Crack.
My head was spinning.
I shook off the tweeting birdies and looked up to see the vampire looming over me.
‘Did you really think you could beat me, ghost?’ he asked, ejecting a set of needle-sharp claws.
‘Beat you?’ I replied. ‘Mate, I’m going to bury you so deep Google won’t be able to find you.’
He chuckled. ‘That’s good. You’re a funny man, you know that?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I replied. ‘One way or another I’ll have you in stitches…’
I sprung up and slugged the vamp in the face. He recoiled, stunned, and I followed up with a barrage of blows, punching, kicking, kneeing, putting some real divots in the guy. I wouldn’t take him down—a bloke his size could take whatever I threw at him—but the plan was never to deck him. The plan was to get him to the other side of the room. To get him to the window covered by that flimsy piece of cardboard...
Darting out a hand, I snatched a corner of gaffer tape and whipped off the makeshift blind. Sunlight streamed through the window, providing a firewall between the two of us that the vampire couldn’t cross. Matter of fact, he couldn’t even get out from his corner. I had him boxed in good and proper.
‘Ready to talk now?’ I asked.
The vampire crouched into a panting ball.
‘It won’t do you any good staying schtum, mate,’ I told him. ‘The sun’s coming up still, and at the rate it’s moving your way, you’re gonna be toast in about five minutes flat.’
He shuffled backwards, drawing tight into his corner, the sunlight nibbling at his bare toes. ‘Go to Hell,’ he hissed.
‘Reckon that’s more your department,’ I replied, watching as he drew back his feet and pulled his knees into his chest. ‘Of course, I could always put that bit of cardboard back and we could call this a day. I mean, just so long as you tell me what Fergal’s body was doing out there on the Heath.’
‘How many times do you need to hear it?’ he screeched. ‘A man came. A man in a hood. He took away the body and that’s all I know!’
I narrowed my eyes at him. Even under duress, the vamp was sticking to his story. For all the implausibility of it, it was starting to sound annoyingly like the truth.
The wall of sunlight had him completely hemmed in now. He stood, sucking in his stomach to avoid its fiery wrath. ‘Well?’ he cried. ‘You said you were going to help me!’
I remembered the picture on the sideboard upstairs. The one of the mother and daughter. I remembered the crib collecting dust.
‘I lied,’ I said, and turned my head just as the screaming started.
10
Dealing with those bloodsuckers had left a real knot in my head, and my body felt like it had been bounced down a flight of stairs built by M.C. Escher.
I ransacked the rest of the vampire den before I left. In the back garden I uncovered a fresh grave plot, and around that, several more disturbed patches of earth where other bodies had been buried. To the back of the garden I saw thriving flowers, fertilised no doubt by the husks of even older victims, long since turned to compost. Given time, I’d do everything in my power to make sure these victims were tracked down and shown the way to the Good Place, but until then I had a promise to keep.
A quick visit to the roadside Fergal was haunting told me that he’d yet to be released from the material plane. Executing the vampires would only have brought Fergal justice so long as they were the last pieces of the puzzle, and since the midnight caller story seemed to have some ring of truth to it, Fergal wasn’t permitted to depart this plane. Not yet anyway. Not until I’d figured out how he’d really wound up on the Heath and made the perpetrator pay for it. Until then he was stuck here, trapped between this world and the next, degenerating day by day. I had to work fast. It wouldn’t be long before Fergal became a wailing phantom, no more human than a bitter wind.
No. I wasn’t about to let that happen.
If what the flash-fried vampire had told me was true—and I had every reason to believe that it was—I needed to uncover the identity of this midnight caller and make him answer for what he’d done. Whatever that was. I still had no clue why he’d set Fergal up as the murderer of some random skinhead.
So, what to do now? My first thought was to go back to my office and take stock of the situation, except chances were the avenging angel would be cooling his heels there waiting for me to drop by. If he’d done his homework he’d know all of my favourite haunts, which meant no more visits to Frosty and no more drop-ins on Jazz Hands. The last one was particularly annoying as I really wanted to have a chat with her about that dud grenade she’d palmed me off with. For someone so concerned for my safety, she had a bloody funny way of showing it.
Keeping clear of that do-gooder angel meant staying on the move and avoiding my usual hangouts, but that didn’t mean my whole support structure was out of bounds. To solve this case I’d need information, equipment, muscle maybe. They wouldn’t come easy now, but just because I was being hunted, didn’t mean I couldn’t call upon help every once in awhile. After all, I wouldn’t save Fergal alone. Pulling this off was going to require a team effort.
‘Here,’ whispered DCI Stronge, sliding a manilla envelope across the table.
We were sat in a booth at a backstreet dive bar called The Black Heart. The Heart, as it was more commonly known to its patrons, was my kind of hole: a none more black boozer that played Sabbath and Maiden loud enough to make your teeth rattle. The place appealed to a select crowd, and its corners were dank to the point of being stygian, making it the perfect spot for a private conversation. I’d chosen The Heart as our rendezvous spot for this reason, and because I’d only been there once before, a long time ago, back when I was still drawing breath.
‘Could you open it up for me?’ I said, looking down at the envelope.
‘Oh right, yeah,’ replied Stronge.
Being mostly intangible, fine motor skills aren’t exactly my strong suit; something Stronge had a habit of forgetting. It was understandable. To someone with The Sight, I looked about as solid as anyone else in the establishment. To anyone else, Stronge was just a woman sat on her own muttering to herself, a not uncommon sight in Camden.
She checked we weren’t being watched and spread the contents of the envelope out in front of me. I peered at the documents, inspecting them under the dim light of an upside-down neon crucifix. Among them were copies of identity records, mug shots, and a rap sheet thicker than a preacher’s bible. They pertained to the second dead body discovered on the Heath. The skinhead.
‘His name’s Viktor Abdulov,’ said Stronge. ‘A.K.A. Valery Popov, A.K.A. Mikhail Sokolov. It wasn’t easy coming by an ID; it took Interpol to provide the match.’
‘You’ve been busy,’ I replied. I scanned Viktor’s list of known associates. ‘Says here he’s mobbed up.’
‘Was mobbed up,’ Stronge corrected. ‘He cut ties with the Bratva when he fled Moscow and came here.’
‘Any idea why he jumped ship?’
‘Nothing on record.’
‘What else do we know about the guy?’ I asked, pointing at one of Viktor’s e
ight-by-ten glossies.
‘Only that he was ripe for a clobbering,’ replied Stronge. ‘According to the Russian authorities he did jail time back home; multiple stretches for GBH and murder. There’s some kidnapping and sexual assault in there too. No one's going to mourn this guy.’
That certainly fit my theory as to why his ghost was absent from the crime scene. Any one of those items on his rap sheet would put his soul on a slippy slide to Hell.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘aren’t you going to ask me what I’ve been up to?’
Stronge sighed. ‘Go on then, what have you been up to?’
‘Funny you should ask. I just single-handedly beat the crap out of two vampires. Don’t like to brag about it though.’
I told Stronge about my quest to find Fergal’s ghost, and how it had led me to the bloodsuckers and their tale of a door-knocking corpse collector.
‘Jesus,’ she blurted, raking a hand through her bob. ‘So, what now? Where do we go from here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but when I’ve figured it out I’ll let you know.’
I was about to say my goodbyes when a bloke the size of Meatloaf squeezed into my side of the booth and right into my lap. Like, literally into my lap. Being ethereal and half his size, he managed to take up the space I was occupying and more besides, blotting me out completely.
‘Can I get you a snakebite, darling?’ he slurred at Stronge, totally oblivious to my presence.
Some people really have no manners.
11
Having watched DCI Stronge rebuff Meatloaf’s unwelcome advances (the aftermath of which makes me cross my legs just thinking about it) I headed out to decide what I was going to do next. My meeting with Stronge had ended up posing more problems than solutions. I needed answers, but I wasn’t going to find them on Stronge’s side of the law. To get the real nitty gritty I’d need to take a walk on the wild side. To kick in some doors and shake down some scumbags. And if ever there was a scumbag in this town, it was Camden’s own kingpin of crime, Vic Lords.
Vic knew the borough’s seedy underbelly like no one else. If there was something rotten going on in these parts he almost certainly had a hand in it, and if he didn’t, he’d know the man who did. No one got up to mischief in Vic’s manor without his say so. He was Mr Big. Numero Uno. Top of the arsehole pyramid.
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