Vampire Wake (Kiera Hudson Series #2) (4 page)

“I see,” said Evans, sitting slowly into an armchair by the door. “So what happens now? There has been no real harm done, don’t you think? Mrs. Lovelace has her ring back.”

“Thanks to me and my colleague over there,” I snapped. “If Mrs. Lovelace had not contacted me then your hope was that she would believe that she had misplaced the ring. Then what? The following month when you were short of money – would you have helped yourself to her pension money – taken a few notes from her purse when she had her back turned?”

“No!” Evans said, his voice wobbling again as if on the verge of more tears. “I swear. You have to believe me.”

“Why should I take the word of a man that would stoop so low as to take something so precious from an elderly woman such as Mrs. Lovelace?” I scowled.

“Please don’t arrest me!” he begged, sitting on the edge of his seat. “Please don’t make this official.”

Looking at Evans, I could see that his face had drained of all colour and he seemed almost near to collapse. Standing, I crossed the room to him. Looking down at him I said, “You disgust me Evans, but I do believe that you lost your head that day in the garden. You saw the ring and believed you saw a way out of your problems. I believe that you have led a previously good life and it is not my wish to destroy what has, up until this point, been an unblemished life. If my colleague were to arrest you, it would only harm the very people you so foolishly believed you could protect – your wife and children. But my main concern is with my client, Mrs. Lovelace. She could well do without the trauma of having to provide a statement to the police, and perhaps take the stand in court. But would be the realisation that you – someone she speaks so highly of and believes to be her friend – could steal her most precious possession, which would destroy her. I have no wish to break that poor woman’s heart, when it is still healing from the death of her husband. Therefore, I will not be taking this matter any further.”

Dropping from the armchair, and clasping hold of my trousers, Evans sobbed. “Thank you! Thank you.” Kicking him free, I dragged him to his feet and grabbed him by his dirty overalls. Unable to make eye contact with me, Evans said, “How can I ever thank you enough?”

“There is still the matter of the pawnbroker – he is still five hundred pounds out of pocket thanks to you. You will repay him the money. I will be calling him in the next day or two to see that you have. And you are never to go back to Mrs. Lovelace’s home again. That is a customer you have now lost and by the sounds of it, you need as many as you can get.”

“I promise,” Evans snivelled. “I promise.”

Releasing him, I shoved him towards the door and said, “Now get out of here!”

With his shoulders slumped forward and his head cast down, Evans skulked from my room. From behind me, I could hear the sound of clapping. Turning, I saw Sparky, still seated in the armchair and slapping his hands together. Smiling at me, he said, “I’ve got to give it to you Hudson – you’re a class act.”

“It was nothing,” I said, crossing back to my chair.

“I could see how you followed each step of the case, but how did you know his website and home address? You only had his telephone number.”

“That was easy. It’s written down the side of the van that he arrived in.” Then smiling to myself, I looked out of the window.

I returned the ring to Mrs. Lovelace that evening. Once again, I went back to the flowerbed beneath her kitchen window, and making out that it had been there all along, I handed it to her. Slipping it back onto her finger, she wept with relief at having her wedding ring again.

“Whatever your fee, young lady, it would never be enough,” she sobbed. “How much do I owe you?”

Taking her by the arm and leading her back inside, I told her she owed me nothing. In the following days, I hired another gardener for Mrs. Lovelace, giving him my bank account details so he could charge me directly for his labour.

“She’s is to have the prettiest garden in Havensfield,” I told him.

I reached the newsagents just as it was closing.

“I didn’t think you were coming today,” the paperboy said, as he opened the door to me.

“I got delayed, Jack,” I said.

“Want a copy of each?” he asked, taking the pile of newspapers from the counter.

“As always,” I smiled.

“What I can’t figure out,” the young lad said, “is how come you need so many newspapers every day. They all pretty much say the same old thing.”

“I don’t have a social life,” I said, taking the papers from him.

“Fancy going on a date then, Kiera?” he said, trying to make his offer sound like a joke.

“Maybe in a couple of years,” I winked at him and left the shop. Taking one of the papers, I rolled the others up and tucked them under my arm. Then looking at the headline splashed in thick black letters across the newspaper, my heart almost stopped.

Passenger plane crashes over Atlantic Ocean!

Then, just like so many times before, those bright lights began to flash behind my eyes. And in those bright lights I could see an airline pilot screaming into his headpiece, “
Mayday! Mayday! They are trying to breach the cockpit!”

As quickly as they had come, those blinding images had gone, leaving me feeling punch-drunk and dazed. Then I heard the pitter-patter sound of raindrops splashing down onto the newspaper in my hands. Looking down at the headline, expecting to see black ink running across the page, I was startled to see that it wasn’t rain that had dripped onto it, but crimson-coloured tears from my eye.

Chapter Three

Placing the newspapers on the table along with all the other cuttings and clippings I’d amassed over the weeks, I went to my poky bathroom and ran a sink full of water. Cupping my hands, I splashed some of it onto my face, and wiped away the red streak that ran from the corner of my left eye and down my cheek. Some of it had splashed onto my top, and pulling it off, I threw it into the wash basket.

The dizziness that I felt after these episodes had begun to fade, and I was left with a dull thud throbbing away behind my temple. Rolling my head from side to side on my neck, I rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers and went to my bedroom. Pulling a clean top from the wardrobe, I pulled it on. Sitting in my favourite seat by the window, I eased myself into it and turned on the T.V. I would go through the newspapers once my head had cleared. It had become my nightly habit of sitting in my armchair, the news playing on the T.V in the background, and methodically going through every newspaper looking for stories, anything that might lead me to Luke, Potter, and Murphy. With scissors in hand, I would cut out anything of interest and pin them to the living room wall. There were so many cuttings now attached to the walls, that if you stepped back and at a glance, the room looked as if it had been decorated with newspaper. Faces of the missing and murder victims stared back at me. Sparky said that it freaked him out just a little and he once asked me why they were there. I told him that I was fascinated by serious crime, and that I was writing a study on offender profiling. If Doctor Keats had ever made a house call, then my chances of ever returning back to the force would’ve been something close to zero. But I didn’t have to worry about Keats anymore and she didn’t have to worry about me – if she ever had.

The T.V. flashed images of the ocean. Rescue boats were racing towards what looked like the fragmented and broken pieces of an airliner. Cushion seats floated on the waves, along with yellow-coloured life jackets. The strap line running across the bottom of the screen read:

Air Atlantis Flight 281 crashes into sea 80 miles off the coast of Ireland. All 232 passengers and 12 crew feared to be dead.

Leaning forward in my chair, I turned up the volume to hear the reporter speaking over the images being played out on the screen.

“The investigation is still ongoing,” the reporter said. “The cause of the crash is yet to be formally determined. A statement by the BEA says that the last verbal contact was made with the aircraft at 11:52 hours BST. It is unclear what was said during that last transmission.”

Slumping back into my chair, I could hear the sound of that voice inside my head. It wasn’t like I was hearing with my ears, but like a distant radio signal hissing and spitting inside my mind. Over and over I could hear a voice screaming,
“They’ve breached the cabin…they’ve breached the cabin!”

Was the voice I could hear that of the pilot from the plane that crashed into the sea? It couldn’t be. Why would it be? And who had breached the cabin? But as I sat and tried to make sense of the changes that were taking hold of me, the buzzer on my door hummed, waking me from my thoughts. Placing the newspapers on the floor and turning down the volume on the T.V., I got up from my chair and peered out of the window and down at the street below. It was starting to get dark outside. The long shadow of someone standing at the door stretched up the street like a deep crack in the pavement. The buzzer sounded again.

Pressing the intercom button, I spoke into it.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Kiera Hudson?” the voice asked, and it was female.

“Yes,” I said back, wondering who it could be.

“I was hoping I could speak with you,” the voice crackled through the intercom.

Peering over my shoulder at my room, the piles of old newspapers scattered across the floor and stacked beside my chair, and the news cuttings covering the walls, I turned back and said, “This isn’t a good time for me at the moment. Couldn’t you come back -”

“You’ve been recommended to me,” the voice cut in. “I’ve heard you’re good at…how can I put it? Solving little problems?”

“Erm,” I stammered.

“Please, Ms. Hudson,” the voice came again. “I’ve travelled a great distance to ask for your help.”

Releasing the latch, I spoke into the intercom and said, “Okay, come on up.”

Hurrying around the room, I kicked some of the scattered newspapers under the chair and sofa, and scraped my hair into a ponytail. Before I’d even had the chance of finishing my hair, there was a woman standing in my open doorway. Closing the door behind her, she stepped in.

Glancing at all the hundreds of newspaper cuttings, she said, “Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Hudson.”

Knocking a pile of newspapers from an armchair, I ushered her towards it. “Please call me Kiera,” I smiled. “Ms. Hudson makes me sound so old.”

“Of course,” the woman smiled back, not taking her eyes from me, “Someone so young and pretty but with a knowledge way past her years.”

“I’m sorry?” I said sitting back in my chair.

‘I’ve heard very good things about you, Kiera,” she said, smoothing out her trousers with her hands and then pulling down the cuffs of her suit jacket. The woman was dressed all in black, apart from the grey-coloured blouse that I could see beneath her jacket. But that was all I could
see
– I mean unlike Doctor Keats – this woman gave nothing away. I guessed she was in her early to mid-forties, her skin was pale and in great condition. She had thick auburn hair that flowed onto her shoulders. Her eyes were clear blue and she wore little-to-no make-up, apart from a crimson lipstick she had daubed her full lips with. The woman wore no jewellery – no rings, necklaces, or bracelets.

“Can I get you something?” I asked her. “A cup of tea or…”

“No, thank you,” the woman smiled. “Let me introduce myself. I am Lady Hunt – but I’m happy for you to call me Elizabeth. I find titles so stuffy, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I said, wondering what it was that she could possibly want me to help her with.

“My husband, Lord Hunt, is the owner of Raven Industries. I don’t know if you have ever heard of them?”

Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not sure that I have. What’s the purpose of his company?”

“It has something to do with renewable genetics,” she said. “I don’t claim to really have understood what it was that Michael did, but maybe I should have taken more of an interest.”

“Did?” I asked.

“Michael…how can I put this? Went missing a few months ago,” she started to explain. “He had gone on a business trip to New York and hasn’t been seen since.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her.

“That’s very kind of you, but I have been left with somewhat of a dilemma,” she said, and stared straight at me. “Since Michael’s disappearance, I have been left to manage the business and as I’ve explained, I know very little about it. There is a meeting of shareholders in New York two days from now which I must attend.”

“I’m sorry, but is it the disappearance of your husband you want me to investigate?” I asked, somewhat confused. “I know very little about business and even less about the complexities of renewable genetics.”

Covering her mouth to stifle a giggle, Lady Hunt looked at me and said, “Oh no Kiera, I’ve employed someone else to investigate Michael’s disappearance. That’s not the problem I require your services for.”

“What then?” I asked her with a frown.

“My sixteen-year-old daughter, Kayla, she’s the problem,” the woman said.

“In what way?” I asked, wondering where this was heading.

Standing, the woman went to the window and looked out. Without looking at me she said, “How can I describe Kayla? Apart from being exceptionally beautiful, she is also very bright,” then turning to face me she said, “and also out of control.”

“In what way?” I asked her, wondering if this wasn’t going to be a
my-daughter’s-mixed-up-in-drugs-and-I-don’t-like-the-guy-she-hangs-out-with
kind of problem.

“You have to understand, Kiera, that my husband and I have always given our daughter the very best – the very best of everything,” she said. “No money has been spared. She has gone to the best private schools; she’s had the best of holidays, the best of everything.”

What about attention and love?
I wondered but didn’t dare say this.

“But over the last few years, she has become wayward – rebelled against me and her father. Much to her father’s shame, Kayla has been expelled from every school we have sent her to. Even when Michael offered to pay double the tuition fees to keep her at one school, the headmaster refused, stating that it wasn’t the money – it was for the wellbeing of the other students and the sanity of the staff, which was his main concern. The headmaster went on to explain that Kayla’s behaviour had become so disruptive, that several parents had taken their child out of the school and he had a list of several other parents that were threatening to take their children elsewhere if Kayla was not removed. Finally, Kayla had built such a reputation for herself that no school – however much money we offered – would take her. Eventually, she became home-tutored and to my last count we have been through seven teachers in the last year.”