by Tim Ellis
Echo appeared. ‘Get you another drink, Rodney?’
‘Mmmm! Yes please.’
She returned with a clinking glass of water. ‘Do you want me to put the ice cube down your trousers this time?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘One of the other girls saw what you did.’
His face glowed like the sun. ‘I had a good reason for doing it.’
‘I expect you do.’ She sat down in the booth next to him, scooped an ice cube out of the glass and slid it into his boxers as if she’d been on an advanced training course and it was a normal part of her waitress duties. ‘Things are beginning to get quieter now. I’ll take a break soon, and you can tell me why you’re storing ice cubes in your boxers.’
***
Simon Kilborn lived at 17 Nylands Avenue in Richmond, so she descended into the underground again and caught the train from Westminster to Kew Gardens on the District Line.
During the journey she waded through his emails, phone records and meeting schedules and found what she was looking for. These idiots thought they were so clever hiding their secrets in plain sight, They thought that nobody would ever guess what they were doing. Well, it didn’t take a genius to find the pattern.
Kilborn contacted Michael O’Dwyer after his meeting with Myers. O’Dwyer was a Civil Servant in the Department for Education. Was he in charge of the Druid Council?
Sitting outside Kilborn’s house she discovered that Kilborn wasn’t married, but he did like young boys, and regularly visited Thailand on holiday via a number of other destinations such as Croatia, Iceland, Mali . . . but he always ended up in Thailand at the Sunshine Hotel in Central Bangkok, and seemed to charge a large amount each time to room service.
She thought she’d have to do a lot more work than she actually did, but Kilborn had made it easy for her. Besides having a hidden folder chock full of illegal pornographic pictures and videos, he also had a stack of documents in another folder identifying who the Druid Council were. Oh, it wasn’t obvious, she had to find the patterns, but the one thing Lucy Neilson wasn’t – was stupid. Patterns were like porridge for her brain.
Kilborn had used codes and abbreviations that disguised the names and government departments of the Druid Council, but she soon unravelled them. The council had a member holding down a senior position in twenty ministerial departments. Yes, she was sure that these were the people who were secretly running the country. The government changed every five years, but the Druid Council stayed where they were. They ensured continuity, and when government Ministers didn’t listen to the advice given, they were removed from office by whatever means the Druid Council had at their disposal.
Well, it was time to remove the Druid Council from office. Maybe her father would have to kill a few of the squeaky clean ones, but most people had secrets. The higher a person climbed, the more secrets they had. Via a server in Thailand, which she thought was rather appropriate, she sent the details of Kilborn’s regular trips to the Sunshine Hotel to the Head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), together with a link to the hidden folder on Kilborn’s home computer.
One down, nineteen to go.
Her laptop was fine for odd jobs, but finding out the secrets of nineteen people in a short space of time would take more computing power than a Macbook Air running on battery power. She needed to deploy the big guns – her powerful networked computer at home. And to do that she needed to go home.
She emailed her father. In the body of the email she told him what she’d already done and what she was planning to do, and then she attached the list of Druid Council members. She didn’t mention that she was going home – he didn’t need to know that.
At the tube station, she caught the train to Ealing Broadway. She was tired. It wasn’t quite rush hour, so there were still seats available. She grabbed a seat facing the platform and closed her eyes. When was the last time she’d had any sleep? Had she ever slept? Wasn’t one always open? Except with Quigg. He made her feel safe. She especially liked it when he slept with her and wrapped his arms around her. Yes, she needed him to do that tonight.
‘There’s no time for sleeping,’ a man’s voice said.
Her stomach performed the perfect back flip. She opened her eyes and saw a man with dark-rimmed glasses dressed in a blue business suit who she guessed was her father. ‘I wish you’d stop fucking doing that. In fact, how is it even possible you can do that? Are you following me? And if you are following me, who’s doing the other work?
‘Hello, Lucy. How are you?’
‘Much better when you’re not stalking me.’
‘I received your email.’
‘Already? I only just sent it.’
‘That’s what mobile phones are for.’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘So, you’re going to hang them out to dry?’
‘That’s the plan. You might have to eradicate a few of the cockroaches, but I’ll let you know. What about . . . ?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll find Jared Deakes. And I have a couple of old friends helping me out with the other work.’
‘You haven’t found him yet?’
‘I will. It’s just a matter of time now.’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘What about Billy?’
‘I know where they’re keeping him. He’ll be all right. As far as my boss is concerned I’m back on board and doing what I’m being paid to do. Are you going somewhere?’
‘No.’
‘So Ealing Broadway is nowhere?’
‘That’s what they say.’
‘If you changed to the Central Line at Ealing Broadway you could travel to Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘There’s no reason for me to go to Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘Except - isn’t that where you live?’
‘I might have lived there in the distant past, but I definitely don’t live there anymore.’ Her plan was to lie low until it got dark, and then go home. There were two bodyguards in the house providing protection, and Quigg would be there.
‘Be careful, Lucy.’
‘I’m always careful.’
The train pulled into Acton Town and then he was gone. She didn’t even see him leave.
She decided to wait until later to travel to Shepherd’s Bush. She’d never been to Ealing Broadway before, so she traipsed up to street level. Even nowhere must have a place she could get a coffee, access free wifi and charge up her computer battery.
***
The first stop on the shortest route between two points that Dwyer had calculated was Father Giuseppe de Angeli who had carried out an exorcism in Highgate Cemetery.
The Inspectors’ chart was driving him insane. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. Of course he thought about the damned chart. He wanted to be the best Inspector in Hammersmith Police Station, but how was that even possible when he didn’t even know what categories he was judged on. He had to devise a plan. Sitting back and waiting to become a non-person wasn’t an option anymore. He would have to take control of his own destiny and talk to Norma Gipson – the Met weightlifting champion. Just as long as the conversation was conducted in a public space with a sturdy table between them there shouldn’t be any danger involved.
‘I don’t see why we’re still going to see him,’ Dwyer said as they drove straight up the A400 towards Highgate. ‘We know the murderer isn’t a vampire, and we know the exorcism didn’t work. In fact, as I recall, the ghostly sightings and animal deaths increased.’
‘You’re so negative, Dwyer.’
‘Well, why are we going to see him?’
‘Do you want to be a dejected Constable pounding the streets of Hammersmith again?’
‘There’s no likelihood of that.’
‘There’s every likelihood of that if we go into an interview with AC Scott-Simpson unprepared.’
‘We have the DVD, we have Mrs Lucifer, we have . . .’
‘. . . Nothing. You might think we know everything about t
he murder, but we don’t. For instance, we don’t know what made the marks on her neck. We have no idea what type of poison killed her, or where it came from. We don’t know where she was murdered, all we have is a secondary crime scene. We have no idea where the missing four pints of her blood disappeared to. Also, we have no idea who murdered her.’
‘We know exactly who the murderer was – AC Scott-Simpson?’
‘As the Chief said, we have a grainy DVD of him having sex with our victim and then leaving the LC Club three minutes after her. We have a witness who can place his car at the victim’s address approximately fifteen minutes prior to her murder. That same witness describes a man entering her building, them both leaving and the victim getting into the AC’s car.’
‘There you are then.’
‘What we don’t have is any link between Scott-Simpson and the murder . . .’
‘Maybe we should send Perkins and his minions round to the AC’s house, and impound his car . . .’
‘And you think that if the AC did murder the woman he’s stupid enough to leave evidence lying around waiting for us to scoop it up?’
‘People are careless, they make mistakes . . .’
‘People, not senior police officers with a mountain of experience. Here’s a scenario for you: “Yes, I admit to having sex with the victim. Yes, I followed her home. Yes, I persuaded her to get into my car and accompany me . . .’
‘She left without her handbag?’
‘That means nothing. So, where was I? Oh yes . . . We had an argument, she forced me to stop the car so that she could get out. I said I’d take her back to her house, but she wasn’t having any of it. I stopped the car, she got out and the last time I saw her alive was in my rear view mirror walking back towards her house.’
‘A likely story, Assistant Commissioner.’
‘Do you have any evidence to support another scenario, Constable Dwyer?’
‘I’m a Detective Sergeant, Sir.’
‘No, no. You were a DS. Now, you’re a Constable who’s been transferred to a little godforsaken place called Yorkshire. A DS would have made sure they had every scrap of evidence to support a charge of murder before embarrassing a senior police officer and the Metropolitan Police Service by dragging me down here with my solicitor – whose fee will be deducted from your paltry Constable’s wages by the way – and subjecting me to the ignominy of your questionable interview technique. Instead, you have nothing, zilch, nada. You should have listened to DI Quigg when you had the chance.’
‘We could make him talk.’
‘Torture?’
Her lip curled upwards and a glint appeared in her eyes. ‘I never did like Scott-Simpson. Too up his own arse for my liking.’
‘Is there anybody you do like, Dwyer?’
‘No, not really.’
Father Giuseppe de Angeli was still a practising priest at St Francis of Assisi RC Church on Bouverie Road in Highgate. He was ninety-one years old, had patches of wispy grey hair, liver spots and walked stooped over with the help of a gnarled stick boasting gargoyles carved into the polished wood.
‘Yes, I carried out the exorcism,’ the priest said.
They were sitting on the wooden pews in the fourth and fifth rows of the seventeenth century stone church. There were a few sinners near the back of the church hoping to squeeze onto the last cable car to Heaven, but mostly it was empty.
‘It didn’t work though, did it?’ Dwyer said.
‘I take it you’re a non-believer, Sergeant?’
‘Let’s just say that I’m not convinced by the evidence.’
‘Belief in the Lord is about faith.’
‘Then I have no faith in the evidence.’
‘I see. Well, I can tell you that the reason it wasn’t as successful as it might have been was because I didn’t have authority from Rome to conduct the exorcism.’
‘No authority?’
‘Priests can’t simply carry out exorcisms whenever they feel like it, you know. No, they have to submit a written request to Rome. Exorcisms are performed in the name of Jesus Christ. The Pope himself has to authorise every formal exorcism. Unfortunately, the pontiff didn’t sign off on my request. I thought I’d provided a totally convincing argument as to why the exorcism should be undertaken, but His Eminence wasn’t convinced. Personally, I blame Cardinal Barbarin – he never did like me. I’m sure he influenced the pontifex in some way.’
‘But you conducted it anyway?’
‘Absolutely not. I conducted the exorcism in the mistaken belief that Pope Paul VI would authorise my request – he didn’t. As such, I unwittingly conducted an illegal exorcism, and here I am.’
‘What, they punished you?’
‘Instead of a Cardinal pottering about in the glorious grottos and vaults of the Vatican City, I’m a humble priest in a cold and draughty church in Highgate. Purgatory has a well-trodden path.’
‘But you’re convinced that the lack of authorisation is the reason the exorcism didn’t work?’
‘Most definitely. I was seduced by Satan himself. I succumbed far too easily to his cajolery. I harboured sinful desires. I see that now. I wanted to emulate that priest in The Exorcist. Pride had wormed its way into my soul. I was lost even before I began.’
‘Did you believe that a vampire existed at the time?’
‘Yes. There was far too much that couldn’t be explained. In fact, the increased activity following the failed exorcism convinced me even more that we were dealing with supernatural forces.’
Quigg interrupted. ‘Why do you think there’s been no reported vampire activity for at least forty years?’
‘They’re biding their time. They know we know they’re there. They’re in no rush. They’re immortal. They have time on their side. Forty years is a mere drop in the ocean to Satan’s lackeys.’
‘You know about the dead woman found in the cemetery on Monday morning?’
‘Of course. I may be decrepit, but I’m not senile just yet. I know exactly why you’re here.’
‘And you’re convinced that the vampires have woken up?’
‘Aren’t you?’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘What do you think, Dwyer?’
‘About?’
‘The possibility that we’re being overrun by vampires?’
‘Absolute fucking rubbish.’
‘That seems to be that then.’
They were on their way to speak to Doctor Thomas San Romani – vampire hunter – although he didn’t do much hunting of vampires from his chair in the care home. Much like Father di Angeli, he was old and decrepit. And although the care home staff said that he still had his mental faculties during the day, at night he seemed to be in a life and death battle with the forces of evil for his very soul.
‘You want to know about vampires?’ San Romani said. The spacious room he was living in had a six-inch cross hanging on each of the four walls; cloves of garlic draped over the top of the windows and door; bells dangling on pieces of string criss-crossing the room like tripwires; and a mixture of rice and salt on all the windowsills and the floor of the bathroom.
‘We’d specifically like to know about the Highgate Vampire,’ Dwyer said.
‘You’re not television reporters, are you?’
‘Police,’ she said, holding out her warrant card.
He squinted at the small print. ‘Have they established a vampire section in the police now? It was one of the recommendations in my bestselling book.’
‘We’re here about the murder of a young woman in Highgate Cemetery.’
‘Murder! Is that what they’re calling it these days? In my day we used to call the victims food, or a sacrifice. So, a young woman has been exsanguinated in Highgate?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was wondering when it would happen again. Was the woman pretty?’
Dwyer’s lip creased upwards. ‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘They always are, Sergeant. He likes pretty women. I
t all started in 1448, you see . . . Oh, not here in Highgate – in Wallachia, what they now call Romania. Vlad III came to power. He was a member of the House of Draculesti, hence the anglicised Dracula, which means son of the dragon. Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula was rooted in fact, you know. Vlad the Impaler – as they called him after his purported death – used to impale his enemies on stakes. Impalement was his preferred method of execution. He was excessively cruel and liked to roast the enemy’s children and feed them to their mothers; and cut off women’s breasts and feed them to their husbands.’
‘This is all very interesting . . .’ Dwyer started to say.
San Romani adjusted the blanket over his knees. ‘People are so impatient these days . . . You might have seen a woodcut in the main administrative building at the cemetery illustrating the visit of Basarab 1V, the King of Wallachia . . .
Quigg nodded. ‘I remember it.’
‘Well, what you don’t know is that Basarab IV was the illegitimate son of Vlad the Impaler.’
‘This is all ancient history,’ Dwyer scoffed.
‘But relevant,’ San Romani shot back at her. ‘You see, that visit by Basarab IV was to bring his father’s body here.’
‘Here?’ Quigg said. ‘Why here?’
‘Vlad was a member of the Order of the Dragon, which was founded to defend the cross and fight the enemies of Christianity in Eastern Europe. During the Ottoman Turk wars, Vlad impaled and lined the roads with at least a hundred thousand of them. As you can imagine, the Ottomans didn’t particularly like him very much, and threatened to eradicate his name from history by digging up his grave and scattering his mortal remains to the four corners of the earth. When the Ottomans threatened to invade Wallachia again, Basarab IV brought his father’s body to England by boat where it was interred in a tomb in Highgate Cemetery under a false name.’