‘I hope so,’ Stone said, ‘but honestly I have my doubts.’
‘But there has to be a ton of DNA evidence,’ she said, ‘bite marks, salvia…’
Stone shrugged, ‘and yet.’
‘Are you at least going to try?’ Khalida said.
‘Of course, we’re going to try,’ Stone said, ‘but I’ve seen very similar cases gain very little traction. Already, whether we can bring whoever did this to justice is out of our control. The chances are, those poor people,’ she jerked her cane in the rough direction of the basement, ‘are nobodies. I’ll put money on them being homeless. They’ll be addicts, or ill, or migrants who can’t speak English, and they’ll have no-one who can tearfully weep for them at a press appeal. In two weeks’ time there will be another major crime, our resources get stretched to breaking point and this case will start to decay.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘Horrible,’ Stone agreed, ‘but not unusual.’
Khalida took an angry drink of coffee, ‘how many cases do you see like this?’
‘Too many,’ Stone said, ‘last year we had six cases of cannibalism, and they’re only increasing.’
‘How does that happen?’ Khalida asked.
In the distance someone called for Stone.
‘We can’t talk about it here,’ she said. ‘But your surname rang a bell, so I did a little research. I don’t wish to pry into painful memories, but this isn’t the first time you’ve crossed something like what happened here before either, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’ Khalida said sharply.
‘I was impressed by your fight,’ Stone said, ‘on the night that the intruder came into your house. If he had been human then you would have killed him.’
‘If he had been human,’ Khalida said. ‘So you’re saying that he wasn’t?’
‘You saw him, you descripted him,’ Stone said. ‘That wasn’t a man high on drugs, that was a creature who wanted to eat that woman alive just as those people were eaten alive.’
‘Then what was he?’
‘A monster,’ Stone said, in the distance someone called for her again. ‘But we can’t talk about it here, come round to my house and I’ll explain everything.’
Chapter Three
Someone On The Inside
Three days later, Khalida parked the battered hatchback that she and Cain shared outside the redbrick and rather grand house which Poppy and Mitch Stone lived in on a gentle, leafy street in Ealing. An old Jeep sat in the driveway next to a shiny new black BMW; Khalida walked past them to get to the large, crimson door. She rang the doorbell and waited, glancing along the deserted road. It was a blindly bright, sunny day, with a sunlit glare only winter days had, catching on the frost.
Poppy, who had insisted that Khalida should ditch referring to her by her surname, opened the door in a sudden, sharp motion which made Khalida jump. Since it was the weekend, she was dressed slightly more casually than when Khalida had previously seen her, but her white jumper and slim black jeans looked expensive.
‘Glad you could make it,’ Poppy said, smiling, ‘we’re in my study. Shoes off if you don’t mind.’
Khalida kicked her boots off and followed Poppy though the house, absently wondering how rich she and her husband were. The inside was light and airy, with wide spaces and high ceilings. Floors were of polished dark wood, contrasting with the white walls. There were sleek, modern ornaments carefully placed in selective spaces. They didn’t seem to have any children, everything that Khalida could see screamed of a childless chic lifestyle.
‘It’s a lovely house,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
Stone’s study had a look of someone who had tried to maintain order against a jungle of office stationary but had given up and let nature reclaim the land. Cluttered bookshelves lined covered the walls with books thrown in on top of each other yet still in a rough alphabetical order. There was a large desk overrun with papers, books, heavy-packed folders, mugs, a tea set, and desk toys against several cork noticeboards loaded with papers which took up most of the remaining wall surface. Khalida tried to follow it, there were various articles from newspapers of murders, photocopied police reports. At the opposite end of the room to the desk there was a futon sofa where two other people sat.
‘Mitch and Leah,’ Poppy said, pointing to them. ‘Mitch is my husband; Leah is a friend.’
Mitch gave a friendly wave at Khalida. He was a lean, stocky man with wiry limbs, light brown skin, and dense black hair which was just beginning to whiten around his temples. He had a good-natured face, wide features, and his eyes a sparkling, icy blue. Boyishly handsome with a gentleman’s grace. Like his wife he was wearing clothing which looked expensive, blue woollen jumper and white trousers. Khalida could tell that he was the sort of man who’d always lived with money smoothing over every rough surface in life. ‘Please to meet you,’ he said, his accent was a clipped Welsh.
Khalida felt her smile falter for a second as she saw Leah. There was something off about her. It was impossible to guess her age; though she had a youthful air about her as she leant back on the futon. Her light hazel eyes had an oddly yellowish tinge to them and were surrounded by dark shadows and crow’s feet. The rest of her pale, white skin was worn and slightly lined, yet Khalida thought there was something deceiving about it. Her short, messy hair, which framed her pointed face, was dyed a shocking shade of platinum, though black roots had grown through, and her tracksuit did nothing to hide how bony she was.
‘Tea?’ Poppy offered, gesturing to the tea set perched on her desk. Fine china.
‘Please,’ Khalida said. There was silence as Poppy poured her a cup.
‘Milk and sugar? The milk is soya.’
‘Um, just a splash of milk and no sugar, please.’
Poppy handed her a cup of tea as well as tea for everyone else.
‘So,’ Khalida said, carefully balancing the cup on its saucer, ‘monsters?’
‘Yes,’ Poppy said. ‘Monsters, they exist.’
‘What sort of monsters are we talking about here?’ Khalida asked. ‘Like, actual Satanic demons or something like a werewolf?’
‘I like how you differentiate between the two,’ Mitch said.
‘What is the difference?’ Leah asked, speaking for the first time. Her voice was saturated in a thick London accent.
‘Well,’ Khalida said, ‘a werewolf is a monster who can’t help themselves and a demon is an entity of pure evil.’
‘Then I’d say these ones are closer to demons then werewolves,’ Mitch said.
‘Think vampires,’ Leah said, ‘because that’s what they are.’
‘Vampires…’ Khalida said, ‘are you kidding me?’
Poppy shrugged, ‘that’s what I thought at first, but if the shoe fits.’
‘They drink human blood and eat human flesh, sunlight hurts them, they can’t cross running water, holy water burns them and they’re pretty indestructible apart from a wooden stake to the heart,’ Leah said. ‘I don’t get why it’s so hard to just say vampire.’
‘Because it sounds stupid,’ Mitch said.
‘But it’s what they are.’
‘A vampire, they’re not scary anymore,’ Mitch said, ‘what’s a vampire going to do? A little nibble on your neck in the night, nothing more than a fucking blood donation, and they’re going to be really sexy doing it. It downplays how fucked up they are.’
‘It’s an accurate name for them,’ Leah said.
‘It sounds so goddamn diminutive,’ Mitch sighed.
‘So what?’ Leah snapped. ‘We didn’t come up with a new name for pirates just because we decided that they’d be a great custom for a kid to wear on Halloween rather then a hoard of terrorising criminals who’d rape you before throwing you overboard.’
‘Listen, if you look at the historical findings…’
‘Khalida, you saw those bodies from the warehouse,’ Poppy said, cutting across them both. ‘Demons, vampires, whatev
er…you know they’re dangerous. I told you that they weren’t the first cannibalised bodies that I’ve seen. Six cases of cannibalism with multiple victims yet surprisingly little traction in the media. No-one of those cases have been solved and no-one seems to give a fuck.’
‘Have you made any arrests?’ Khalida asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Poppy said, ‘based on nothing but circumstantial evidence and the vague hope that they’ll just confess to everything midway through the interview. You would have thought that the Met would have thrown everything they had into this, but the new policing reforms have meant trying to get anywhere is a bureaucratic nightmare.’ She took a sip of tea, ‘this shit show is enough to make Kafka blush.’
‘The point is, Khalida, there are monsters out there who will kill and eat and kill again and nothing is being done about it,’ Mitch said. ‘Nothing officially anyway.’
‘And you’re completely sure that these people are actually monsters…vampires...whatever…rather than just a human cannibal?’ Khalida asked.
Poppy rolled her eyes and snatched up a folder from the desk while Mitch smirked.
‘So,’ she said, opening the folder to reveal hordes of compiled photographs labelled with a mess of post-it notes and scribbled handwriting. ‘This,’ she said, pointed at a photocopied portrait of a man in ruffles and a buckled hat, ‘is Leopold Papon. He was a bit of a cunt. Here he is 1709, and again a century later. There’s a photograph of him a couple of decades later,’ she said, showing a black-and-white photo of the same guy in a sombre suit and top hat. ‘And again.’ Another black-and-white photograph, however the image was sharper and he was wearing a bowler hat instead of a top hat, the man sitting in a car, in a garden, holding an early mobile phone; a few selfies then flashed on the screen, before finally landing on a news article stating that he had been found dead. A smiley face had been drawn next to the clipping. ‘It’s the same person,’ Poppy said, ‘not a lookalike, the same person.’
‘Vampires don’t age,’ Leah said.
‘Did you kill him?’ Khalida asked.
‘I did,’ Mitch said. ‘Poppy hasn’t been able to hunt since the accident.’
‘A work-related car crash,’ Poppy said. ‘But that’s another way to tell whether a person is a human or a vampire since a normal human wouldn’t be hurt by our methods of hunting.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t be hurt by the holy water we use,’ Mitch said. ‘You could still do a bit of damage with the stakes though.’
‘Oh yeah, we keep our stakes really sharp,’ Poppy said. ‘But the holy water is great. It’s just normal water to humans, but similar to a very strong acid for vampires.’
‘What about stuff like garlic?’ Khalida asked.
‘Yeah, that works as well,’ Poppy said.
‘So do roses, mustard seeds, and running water, such as rivers and streams, which vampires find difficult to cross,’ Leah said.
‘Roses and mustard seeds?’ Khalida raised an eyebrow.
Leah shrugged, ‘it’s witchcraft, vampires are repelled by it.’
‘I’m looking into it,’ Mitch said. ‘I’m a historian.’
‘So, if our methods are followed correctly, it’s impossible for us to accidently kill a human,’ Poppy said. ‘We only kill vampires.’
‘And how many vampires have you killed?’ Khalida asked.
‘Sixteen as a group,’ Mitch said, ‘though now it’s only me who hunts.’
Khalida looked around the room, all eyes were on her. She took a sip of tea. ‘And, I’m assuming, you want me to hunt as well?’
‘Well, do you want to?’ Poppy asked. ‘You’ve seen what we’re up against, and you can hold your own in a fight.’
‘Sure, I want to,’ Khalida said, surprisingly herself by how readily she answered. ‘But what if we get caught? I mean, to the police it’ll look like we’ve just killed a regular human person.’
‘We’ve very careful,’ Poppy said, ‘I’m a detective so I know what the police will be looking for. I’ve even been part of an investigation in which I was killer. Most people are killed by people they know, and none of us have had any relation to the vampires we go after.’
‘I mean,’ Mitch said, ‘we’ve killed sixteen of them and we’re all still here. I’d say that we were pretty good at what we do.’
Poppy gave her an inquiring look, ‘how you hunted anything before? Or taken part in any combat sports?’
‘I’ve never hunted anything before,’ Khalida said. ‘Who even goes hunting aside from landowners anyway? But I love combat sports, I once came third in boxing at the national junior championships when I was sixteen, but I quit my club when I moved away for university. And I was on my uni’s rugby team. And as a kid I was in a ton of material arts classes, though I’m not sure how much of it stuck.’
‘That’s good,’ Poppy said, ‘you’re not afraid of a fight.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Khalida took a drink of tea, ‘so, how do I start?’
* * *
‘Jesus Christ, Kallie,’ Cain said, standing in the doorway of their bathroom, as she applied a final coat of lip-gloss. ‘This isn’t you.’
‘You never knew me as a fresher,’ she said, examining her reflection; dark, smoky eyeshadow, dark lipstick with sparkly lip gloss, darkened, thicker eyebrows, long, dark eyelashes, contour to give her round face some of the definition it usually lacked. She had hidden her long dark brown hair under a high-quality wig of chin-length whitish-blonde hair, whitened her copper brown skin with powder, and put in black contacts over her greyish brown eyes as her disguise. The eyes of someone familiar, but unknown, looked back at her; she looked so foreign to herself.
Her sister, Akmar, had loved makeup. With a pang, Khalida remembered when she was four, and the furious argument Akmar had had with their mother about the correct amount of makeup she ought to be wearing. The memories felt jarring and disconnected, but she remembered them both screaming at each other, then crying. She knew that Akmar had a secret red lipstick, which she only wore at night, and would flirt with her reflection and sneak out of their window to meet with her friends. It was a shame she had never known clubbing or selfies.
‘I can’t even imagine that this is something eighteen-year-old you would wear,’ Cain said.
Khalida studied her reflection, and gave her fake hair a toss, trying to look pert and feisty, ‘yeah, you’re right. This was never my scene. I look so hot though.’
She was wearing tight, black leather shorts with a front laced, a low-cut black, netted top and heavy boots which added height to her short though muscular frame.
‘Yeah,’ Cain said, staring at her, ‘as always you look very attractive, but this is madness. When was the last time you even went clubbing?’
‘Probably…never?’ she said. ‘Not since I turned twenty at least. Things aren’t going to be radically different from, what…six years ago?’
‘How do you know that he’s even going to be there?’ Cain asked.
‘He’s already bought a ticket for the club,’ Khalida said. ‘They had a promotion running from their Facebook page, which he signed up for, and which is on tonight.’
‘A vampire has Facebook?’ Cain said.
‘Yeah,’ Khalida said, as she turned to walk downstairs. ‘Under a fake name, but it’s definitely him. Leah tracked him down, she’s really good with computers.’
‘Did she also track down Frodo and Sam as well, or is that just too outlandish?’
‘Be serious, Cain.’
‘You have wooden stakes hidden in your handbag,’ he said. ‘Look, I don’t want to start an argument, and I will support any decision you decide to make, even if I’m left doubting your sanity, but this is putting me in an awkward situation here.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘But what if, God forbid, will happen if you’re caught by the police?’ Cain said, running a hand through his hair as he leant on the banister. ‘Or killed? What the hell am I supposed to do or say to that?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘claim ignorance. Say you didn’t know anything about this.’
‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I’m not a good liar, Khalida, and I don’t want to lose you to this.’
‘This is selfish of me,’ she said, as their doorbell rang, ‘I know that, but I don’t intend to get caught.’
Khalida opened the door to see Leah and Mitch, both of whom look radically different from the last time she had seen either of them. Mitch had ditched his preppy, yacht-owner look entirely and was wearing a faded band t-shirt, tattered black jeans, and piercings studded around his face. He had dyed the edges of his hair so that it was black all the way through and, like Khalida, he was wearing dark coloured contact lenses. Leah was standing with a somewhat bored expression on her face, and a strange glamour to her. She had styled her hair into a pixie cut and dyed it to a light ash blonde to cover her black roots. She wore dark, red lipstick, contrasting with black eyeshadow, a black latex skirt and vest top, and safety pin earrings.
‘Fuck, you look different,’ Leah said as they stepped through into the narrow hallway, a gust of cold air following them.
‘So do you,’ Khalida said.
Leah shrugged, examining her appearance in the hallway mirror, ‘it’s my sort of scene anyway. I’m surprised that Mitch could pull it off though.’
Mitch shrugged with his hands in his pockets, ‘I’m multifaceted.’
‘No Poppy then?’ Cain asked.
‘She can’t come because of her legs,’ Mitch said.
‘And she draws too much attention,’ Leah said. ‘It’s an alternative nightclub and no-one looking at her would ever believe she was into that.’
‘Yeah, she looks like an undercover cop,’ Mitch said. ‘Which, fun fact, she was for seven months.’
‘Was she successful?’ Cain asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘Yeah,’ Mitch said, ‘though it was white-collar crime, nothing glamourous.’
‘Unlike hunting vampires then?’ Cain said. ‘God, this is really happening.’
Khalida stood up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine.’
All Rotting Meat Page 4