Like This, for Ever

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘Dad, do we still have Granddad’s boat?’

  His dad spun on the spot, wooden spoon still in hand. ‘What on earth made you ask about that?’ he asked.

  Barney shrugged. ‘Some kids were talking about boats today. I just remembered. We haven’t been for a while, have we?’

  His dad turned back to the hob. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s not much fun in winter, is it?’

  ‘We should go and check, though,’ said Barney. ‘Just to make sure it’s alright and not leaking again or anything.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  His dad spoke slowly, as though explaining something difficult. ‘One or other of the neighbours would have let me know if there’d been any trouble.’

  ‘Do you keep the key safe?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. It’s on my keyring with my car and house keys.’

  No, this was not going well at all. And since when had his dad got so blinking organized?

  ‘By the way,’ said his dad, over his shoulder again, ‘the kitchen knives are getting blunt again. Want to sharpen them for me?’

  19

  LACEY SPENT A long time in the shower. Only when the water was starting to cool did she step out. Seven o’clock on a Friday evening. Less than a year ago, Fridays were the nights she went out, when she dressed carefully, drove across London and spent the evening around the Camden Stables Market. She’d liked to think of it as her hunting ground. A place where no one knew her, where so many people gathered you never saw the same faces from one week to the next. She’d take her time, spot her target, make sure he was alone before moving in. She’d had her stock-lines, some funny, some a bit weird; getting the initial conversation going was always the hard part. After that, no problem. Only rarely did she have to cut her losses and move on.

  A few months ago, her life had consisted of hard work during the day, and casual, uncomplicated sex on Friday evenings. Now, she couldn’t work and the very thought of sex was revolting. She hadn’t had much in her life, and now she’d lost what little there’d been. How on earth was she going to get through the next—

  No, don’t think about the future. Just concentrate on getting through another Friday evening.

  She pulled on her robe and walked through into the living space with its small galley kitchen. For the first time, it struck her that her flat was too plain, too white, too cold. The minimum of furniture, nothing decorative, nothing that was really hers. Nothing in the fridge either – a perfectly normal state of affairs these days. Somehow supermarkets were just too much of an effort.

  The Wandsworth Road was busy, people in cars driving home from work, buses offloading, early-evening drinkers making their way to and from the pubs and bars. The Chinese restaurant was quiet, though, she could see through the glass. It was the sort of place that didn’t normally fill till later. The door made a chinging sound and Trevor, the middle-aged Chinese owner with the northern accent, appeared a second later.

  ‘Alright, Lacey?’ Over the last few months she’d become something of a regular.

  ‘How you doing, Trev?’

  ‘Not so bad. Usual?’

  ‘Please.’

  The restaurant was almost empty. A table of students. A couple of men eating alone. In the furthest booth, half hidden by the intricately carved screen, sat a man with his back to Lacey, a man she knew immediately, with broad shoulders and short dark hair. Joesbury.

  He wasn’t alone. Directly opposite him sat a child. A boy, around nine or ten years old, with short, dark hair that grew vertically up from his forehead and a heart-shaped face. It was the eyes that gave him away, though. Large and oval-shaped, and even from a distance she could see they were the exact shade of turquoise blue as his father’s. This was Huck. Joesbury had invited her out to dinner this evening. He’d wanted her to meet his son.

  Lacey pedalled hard, heading for the river, away from the traffic, hardly aware of how she’d made the decision not to go home, only knowing that four walls around her right now might make her scream.

  Trevor would have heard the door chimes as she’d left. All the same, she’d go back later and pay, when she could be sure the two Joesburys had gone. She’d make up some excuse about feeling ill or an urgent phone call. She couldn’t fall out with Trevor. What would she eat?

  She rode beneath the underpass, garish with graffiti, where kids were gliding around on skateboards and roller blades, weaving in and out of each other like a strange street-ballet.

  Huck? Such a funny name for a child. Why would he call his son Huck? The hair and the eyes had been Joesbury’s but the face was nothing like his dad’s. The boy’s face had been pretty with small features and very fair skin. His mother’s face. Joesbury had fallen in love, married and had a child with a woman whom Lacey had never even thought about before. A woman who would be slim with dark hair and a delicate, heart-shaped face.

  Even in the dark, even in the cold, the embankment was busy with pedestrians. Everywhere around her the life of the city was going on. People were crossing the Millennium Bridge, travelling up and down the river on passenger ferries, crossing the water on trains; on the north bank the traffic flow seemed endless. Everywhere around her people moved with a sense of purpose. They knew where they were going and why. No one else looked lost.

  The wind seemed to be coming directly from the east tonight, hurling its way up the river, almost throwing her off balance. Lacey tucked her head down and pressed on. Her muscles were trembling, the way they always did when she’d exercised too much, or not eaten enough. Or both.

  And she had that feeling again, that sense of a scream building inside. Of something churning and pressing, trying to get out. When it came over her, all she could do was run, or swim, or cycle, or pound the punchbag in her shed until she was too exhausted to think about what it was she couldn’t possibly let come to the surface.

  Cycling too fast, but unable to slow down, Lacey passed through an avenue of small trees, their bare branches strung with blue and white fairy lights. Huck had been wearing a blue football shirt with white stripes on the shoulders. What did that make him? A Chelsea supporter? She knew so little about London football clubs. What on earth would she have talked to a nine-year-old boy about?

  She was leaving the busiest part of the river behind. Once past Tower Bridge, the lights and colour started to fade quickly. Pleasure craft rarely came this far downstream. The tide was high but going out. When she cycled past boats moored in the water she could see it pulling against them, trying to tug them out to sea. Not so very long ago she’d found herself in the Thames. Twice. The first time hadn’t been intentional, she’d been pulled in, had narrowly escaped drowning. A couple of weeks after that she’d jumped in to try to rescue a young illegal immigrant. The first time had been terrifying, but the will to live, to keep fighting, had taken her by surprise. The second time, though, it had been oddly soothing, as though the river had tried to scare her again and failed. Now there was something about its black, swirling depths that looked almost inviting.

  The police notice caught her eye and she stopped before she had time to think about whether it was a good idea. The yellow, laminated card referred to an incident several weeks ago and asked for eye-witnesses to contact a central London telephone number. This had to be where one of the boys’ bodies had been found.

  She closed her eyes and could picture her old colleagues, who’d almost become her friends, making their way around the crime scene, working as fast as they could before the tide came in and stole it from them. She could see their faces, white and drawn as the small corpse was taken away. She could feel their anger, their growing sense of helplessness.

  The river below the embankment wall was dappled black and silver like the battered shield of a medieval knight, and it seemed to be the only thing she could see clearly. If she looked up for a second, everything lost its focus. Colours became blurred, like lights she’d looked at too long. Edges disappea
red, as though her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘You alright, love?’

  ‘Dozy cow, she’s going to fall in.’

  A hand on her shoulder. Two curious, half-afraid faces staring at her. She’d left her bike behind and was standing on the steps that led down to the river. Below her black water swirled and eddied. The two men stepped back, letting her move away from the top step. Both were looking searchingly into her eyes.

  ‘You want to be careful, love,’ said the man who’d touched her, the less judgemental of the two, the one who didn’t yet have her down as a drug-addled loon. ‘Fall in here and you’re a goner.’

  Lacey smiled and knew she’d lost him too. ‘Well, you know what they say,’ she said. ‘Third time lucky.’

  20

  ‘I SEE THEM in my dreams, you know. The dead boys.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes, every one.’

  ‘What are they doing when you dream about them?’

  ‘They watch me. Sometimes I dream I’m walking through the room, the one they all died in, and they’re all in there, not buried or taken away or anything but still there, watching me.’

  ‘Do they ever talk to you?’

  The patient lurched forward, startling her. ‘How can they talk? Their throats are gaping open. Some of their heads are practically hanging off. Do you have any idea what a kid looks like when his throat has been sliced open? Well, do you?’

  ‘I think you need to take it easy. No, stay in your chair. Take a second or two, just get your breath back.’ The psychiatrist’s eyes strayed to the panic button. ‘Just concentrate on your breathing. OK, well done. Would you like to carry on? OK, good. So they just watch you. And what do you do?’

  ‘I look at the patterns.’

  ‘The patterns?’

  ‘On the walls, the patterns on the walls and ceiling and floors made by the blood. It’s a bit like – I’ll tell you what it’s like – it’s like when you go to a school and all the kids’ pictures have been put on the walls for you to look at and you wander round, pretending to be interested and muttering nice things like, “Oh that’s a good one, I like the way he used the colour blue in this one.” Well, that’s what I do. I walk round the room and I look at the patterns each boy made when the blood came out of him and I smile and say, “Yes that’s good, well done.” Like it’s artwork and they’re in a show and they’re proud. And the weird thing is, it is interesting, the patterns that blood makes. They’re like snowflakes, blood spatters, every one is different. Amazing thing, blood. Did I mention that? Sometimes I think I’ll never get tired of looking at blood.’

  21

  Saturday 16 February

  FOR ONCE, WHEN the phone rang, Dana didn’t wake up instantly. She’d been up late the night before, combing the internet for cases of female serial killers, or killers who’d fixated on pre-adolescent boys. By the time she realized someone was calling her, she knew it had been ringing for a while. Her landline. Mark. She picked up and saw the clock at the same time. Nearly ten. Christ, she was supposed to be at Heathrow in an hour.

  ‘Hi, you watching TV?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Turn it on.’

  Mark waited while she ran downstairs, found the TV remote and took it off standby. ‘ITV1,’ Mark told her. Somewhere in his flat, she could hear Huck singing.

  The channel flicked on to the usual mid-morning news and current affairs programme. The two presenters, one male, one female, were sitting on the blue sofa along with a well-dressed man in his late forties with swept-back red hair and an unusually pale face.

  ‘For those who have just joined us,’ the male presenter was saying, ‘our guest in the studio this morning is clinical psychologist Dr Bartholomew Hunt. We’re talking about the serial killer who has taken four young lives in just six weeks and who, in spite of huge resources pumped into their operations, the Metropolitan Police seem to be no closer to finding.’

  The red-haired man was nodding in the way people only ever did when they knew they were being observed.

  ‘Now, if I’ve got this right, Dr Hunt,’ the presenter went on, ‘these young victims all died from extensive blood loss.’

  ‘Massive blood loss following the severing of the carotid artery,’ replied Hunt. ‘The bodies were, quite literally, drained of blood.’

  ‘Jesus,’ whispered Dana. ‘The parents could be watching this.’

  ‘More importantly than that,’ the red-haired man went on, ‘wound patterns on at least one of the victims – it wouldn’t be proper to say which one – indicate that the carotid artery was cut several times before death, each time allowing some blood to be lost before clotting began.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Dana dropped to the sofa, landing on its edge.

  ‘You’ve got a mole, sweetheart,’ said Mark.

  On the screen, Hunt and the presenter were still talking. ‘And this is the point at which some viewers may struggle to deal with the implications of what you’re telling us,’ said the presenter, ‘but you believe this blood loss is particularly significant.’

  ‘The Metropolitan Police are working under the erroneous assumption that the severing of the carotid artery is simply the means of death,’ said Hunt. ‘It isn’t. It’s the motive for abducting the boys in the first place.’

  The presenter blinked. ‘He takes them because he wants their blood?’

  ‘Absolutely. What we’re dealing with here is a case of Renfield’s Syndrome, an unnatural obsession with blood, particularly with the drinking of blood. People with this condition crave the taste of blood in their mouths. It’s also known as Clinical Vampirism.’

  Dana’s mobile was ringing. She leaned over to see who was calling and realized she wasn’t going to make it to the airport. Helen, her long-term partner who worked in Scotland, would have to make her own way across the city. ‘Weaver’s on the other line,’ she told Mark.

  ‘You know where I am.’ The line went dead.

  ‘I’m just watching it now, Sir,’ Dana told her boss, a second later. She was on her feet again, pacing across the rug, her eyes never leaving the TV.

  ‘Vampires? What the hell’s going on, Dana?’

  ‘Give me a minute, Sir.’

  ‘This condition is a lot more common than people realize,’ Hunt was saying. ‘Try Googling “obsession with blood” and you’ll be awash with evidence of people who crave the smell and taste of blood.’

  ‘We did do that, actually, when we knew you were coming in,’ said the presenter. ‘And it’s certainly true. But these people are invariably talking about self-harming. They cut themselves, and the sight of the blood, often the taste of it, too, seems to bring them some sort of odd relief.’

  ‘Oh, these are very sick people, make no mistake about it,’ replied Hunt, as Dana could hear Weaver’s breathing down the phone line. ‘But cutting and tasting their own blood is just the start. Quite often they move on.’

  ‘To cutting others?’ asked the female presenter, who had the raised eyebrows and pursed lips of someone exhibiting physical revulsion. ‘Just to be clear, are you saying the police should be looking for a vampire?’

  Hunt shook his head, gave a rueful little smile. ‘I’m not talking about someone who sleeps in a coffin and turns into a bat at will,’ he said. ‘What we’re dealing with here is an unusual but all too real clinical condition. There are many documented cases of serial killers who have committed acts of vampirism on their victims. Richard Trenton Chase, an American serial killer in the 1970s, was one of the more notorious cases.’

  ‘Jesus, Dana, where the hell has this come from?’ demanded Weaver, unable to keep quiet any longer.

  ‘Chase was a very dangerous man,’ Hunt was saying. ‘As a teenager, he killed rabbits and ate them raw, sometimes putting their entrails into the blender to make a drink. He caught birds to kill and eat them, other small animals too. Then, as these people often do, he moved on to drinking human blood. He killed and cannibalized six people b
efore he was caught.’

  ‘Have you shared your theories with the police?’ asked the female presenter.

  ‘Bloody good question,’ muttered Weaver down the line.

  ‘From the studio I’m travelling to Lewisham police station to offer my services to the Major Investigation Team,’ said Hunt, checking the buttons on his jacket as though ready to get up there and then. ‘Let’s hope that together we can catch this maniac before another boy is taken and murdered.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be pleased to have you on board,’ said the presenter. ‘They certainly seem to have been at a loss so far.’

  22

  DANA LOOKED ROUND the room. What she was about to say shouldn’t be easy. Trouble was, she was so bloody angry, it wasn’t going to be any effort at all.

  ‘When I find out who released the information about the repeated cut marks on Jason Barlow’s throat, I will wipe the floor with him,’ she said. ‘If I find out it’s a serving officer, I will have him on traffic till he claims his long-service medal. If he works for an associated organization, which we are supposed to be able to trust, I will make it my personal mission to end his career. And, ladies, the fact that I’m using the male gender for convenience does not let any of you off the hook. Now, does anyone in this room have a problem with what I’ve just said?’

  There were twelve people present, including herself, Detective Superintendent Weaver and the criminal profiler, Susan Richmond. One of them was the middle-aged civilian woman employed to input data on to HOLMES. The rest were detectives, people she’d trusted.