Anno Dracula Dracula Cha Cha Cha (53 page)

The students were polite. Dixon made sure they stayed out of the incident room which was papered with pictures of Carol and Laura, alive and dead. DeBoys politely asked if they could leave before dawn. Bellaver had no reason to keep them around. The Super disapproved of the general public taking action in such cases but had to thank them for thinking fast. Kate knew they’d saved her life. Nezumi had slipped away and no one mentioned her; not even Craven of the shattered knee, who didn’t want to admit he’d been nobbled by a schoolgirl.

‘Besides poor Julian, the worst thing about this is the distraction,’ said Dixon. ‘An open and shut case which is going to get a lot of ink. The papers will be all over it. By tomorrow, the public will be against us and for them. In the meantime, whoever killed those girls is free and liable to do it again. We have to waste time on these monkeys. They’re stopping us catching the vampire murderer.’

‘The murderer is their wet dream, though,’ she said. ‘As long as he’s out there, killing innocent warm women, then
all
vampires are monsters, fit only to be staked. He’s the best recruiting sergeant the Circle of Light could have.’

Could there be a tie-up between the killer and Van Helsing? Croft and he had been on the same faculty, after all.

All the interrogations ended at five a.m.

Kate glanced along the windows and saw the interviewers standing, gathering their notes, and leaving. Their subjects remained seated. Uniformed constables came into the room to take breakfast orders.

Only in England… commit a murder, and have your pick of tea and jam or marmalade on your toast.

‘Hello hello,’ said Dixon, ‘what’s going on here then?’

It took a moment for Kate to register what he’d seen. In Craven’s room, a WPC jammed a chair under the door-handle. Donna Rogers. She’d either not gone home when ordered or snuck back when everyone was busy.

Kate had a track-and-zoom moment.

Rogers turned. Craven gave her an insolent smirk. He quite fancied himself with the ladies.

Then he noticed the WPC was a vampire and shut off the come-on.

Donna Rogers’ mouth grew to four times its usual size. Lamprey-teeth projected. She drooled bloody spittle. Her eyes were red marbles.

Craven looked to the mirror with the beginnings of panic. He rattled the chain that fixed him to the table. Uncuffed while answering questions, Regan had shackled him after the interview was wound up. Was that procedure? People were going to ask. Rogers tore Craven’s chair out from under him. He fell with a bump, chin against table. That drew blood. Rogers wiped a smear off his face and licked it with a long, liver-coloured tongue.

The murderer was crying for his mummy now. So loud Kate thought the woman might hear him from outside the nick.

The door shook. Bellaver’s voice sounded through it.

Kate made a fist and smashed the mirror. Blood scent caught in her nostrils.

‘Donna, no,’ she said.

Rogers, realising she was out of time, picked Craven up and took a bite out of his neck which exposed bone, severed arteries and scraped away meat. She chewed and swallowed and let gore gush into her maw.

Dammit, Kate’s fangs sharpened.

The chair under the doorknob dislodged. Bellaver and Regan rushed into the room and restrained Rogers.

Craven fell, dead. Kate saw it as if in slow motion. Gobbets of blood went everywhere. His wrist was still fixed to the table. His head flopped back, loose. His neck was nearly bitten through.

In sudden death, the boy’s eyes showed expression — pure terror. Then nothing. Until Rogers bit him, Peter Craven hadn’t really bought all the vampire-hating stuff Van Helsing poured into him. He just wanted to be like his mate Hawkins, hard and feared. He wanted to earn his cross and be part of the gang.

Finally, Donna Rogers had put the fear of vampires in him.

‘Well done, love,’ said Bellaver, sarcastically. ‘Know how difficult it’s going to be to clean up this mess?’

Rogers’ face was back to its normal configuration, but everything below her eyes was painted with blood.

She spat out meat and gristle.

12

W
ord got out to the press. Mrs Craven’s story was worth more now her precious boy was not just a vampire slayer but a vampire victim. Fullalove had a note smuggled into the station, offering Kate a column in the
Gazette
if she’d write up the killing. If she took him up on it, she’d never get access to B Division again. However, judging from Bellaver’s face after a phone call from the Home Secretary, there might not be a B Division after this hash.

The story had changed and not in any useful way.

Vampires were monsters. Julian Griffin’s death wouldn’t get an inch under the racing results. Donna Rogers and Peter Craven would be on the front page for weeks.

‘Bellaver,’ Kate called, getting his attention, ‘give Craven’s mug shot to the papers.’

‘Why on Earth should we do that?’ he asked.

‘The only other photos of him will come from his mum. He’ll be in school uniform. He’ll be the naughty, cheeky lad who sits at the back of the class. At least the picture you took last night makes him look like a murdering thug.’

‘If our press officers thought like you, they’d run the Yard.’

‘It’ll come,’ she said.

The Super took her advice. He also ordered Dixon to find ‘couply’ snaps of Donna Rogers and Julian Griffin from before they turned to release to the press. Though policy was to discourage relationships between officers serving in the same unit and he wasn’t supposed to know they were going out. Things were escalating. Griffin for Laura and Carol. Craven for Griffin.

Someone had to put Rogers under arrest, for form’s sake.

During the hub-bub, Sergeant Lynch clocked off and Kate’s old playmate Tom Choley showed up bright and early. He couldn’t stop smiling as he went through the formalities of booking Rogers. The WPC hadn’t wiped her face. She looked like an Apache squaw after scalping the Cavalry troop who massacred her village. Handcuffs hung loose on her thin wrists. Jasper Lakin gave her his card.

Choley had scared up a Shooter’s Hill plod to escort Rogers down to the holding cells. Kate caught the ice glint in her eye.

‘Unless the bars are silver, you’re putting her within reach of the rest of Van Helsing’s mob,’ she warned Bellaver. ‘She’ll be out of her cell and in theirs in seconds.’

The Super thumped his forehead.

‘Damn, Katie… are you the only one here thinking?’

Bellaver had Dixon take Rogers away from the local woodentops.

‘Give her a wash and haul her back to Holborn.’

Dixon fetched a wet towel and dabbed the blood off Rogers’ face like a Bank Holiday mum cleaning a mucky lad with the spit-wet corner of a hankie. She didn’t resist.

‘Neither of you are to talk to the reptiles outside,’ said Bellaver. ‘Rogers, you are ordered not to say you’ve been arrested. You’re just another plonk, savvy?’

Plonk. Person of limited or no knowledge. Prejudiced male officers called policewomen plonks. She’d never heard Bellaver use the word before.

Rogers nodded. She felt no guilt over murder, but her Super’s disapproval stung. Bellaver had hopes for Donna Rogers.
Had
had hopes.

Dixon took out the key to take her cuffs off. She broke them before he could get to the lock and gave him the pieces.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Bellaver asked, incensed.

Rogers was sobered. It was all crashing in on the woman now. She hadn’t thought past the killing. Which made her just like Peter Craven.

Dixon and Rogers left through the front doors, despite Choley’s protests about Rogers being a Shooter’s Hill catch not B Division’s. With the sun up, Rogers had to roll down her veil.

Kate looked through the open doors as Dixon and Rogers went into the harsh light. The reporters were baying.

On the steps, Rogers’ sleeve was tugged by Mrs Craven.

‘When can I see my lad, miss?’

Rogers laughed in Mrs Craven’s face.

Mrs Craven screamed and tore away the veil. Rogers’ red eyes shrank in the dazzle of sunlight and her face steamed. A monster being dragged to the stake.

Cameras went off. Rogers had better pray she didn’t show up in photographs. She was not displaying the ideal front page face.

The police station was in chaos. The shift change made things worse. Everyone had heard different versions of the night’s events.

Choley was putting in multiple complaints about the vampire invasion. After this shambles, he’d be listened to.

Breach of the peace, grievous bodily harm and accessory to murder charges still had to be laid against Van Helsing’s Circle of Light. Now that booking Craven for the murder of a police officer would be problematic, his mates’ crimes risked being viewed as high-spirited misdemeanours. As Bellaver said, ‘Who
doesn’t
want to set fire to a long-haired guitar player?’

Then, Norman Pilcher of the Drug Squad arrived, with his best hippie-kicking size elevens on, fired up to raid St Bartolph’s. When told circumstances had intervened and that little adventure would have to be postponed, he was gutted. He threatened to make complaints. Bellaver laughed and told him to queue up behind Sergeant Choley and every other bugger in London.

‘You can’t let these addicts win,’ said Pilcher. ‘Or society falls, mark my words. Look at her…’

Pilcher meant Kate. His nostrils twitched, like a bloodhound’s.

‘This is a police station and she’s “on” something. Out with it, “flower-child”? What’s your “bag”?’

‘Sunshine, man,’ she said, flashing the peace sign. ‘Sunshine.’

13

R
aiding Shooter’s Hill Lost Property again, Kate acquired a tatty floral parasol which meant she could go out in the prenoonday sun.

Her car was parked at St Bartolph’s.

She avoided conversation with any of her colleagues in the press and set off on foot.

As was embarrassingly obvious, her
red thirst
was more than rising. She’d seen so much blood — vampire and human — spilled last night that her need was as sharp as her teeth.

In a newsagents, she bought three half-pints in 9d cardboard Tetra-Paks. The shop kept vampire stock in the chill cabinet with the milk and fizzy pop, which meant a frustrating wait for breakfast to warm up enough to be drinkable. Cold blood was like an electric shock to the fangs and gave her brain-freeze. So as not to seem too obsessively bloodthirsty, she also bought an Aztec bar and tinted clip-ons for her foraged glasses.

The papers were out, but she was too depressed to want to read their coverage of the night’s grief. As she fondled a Tetra-Pak to warm the contents, she lingered by the rack outside the shop and took in headlines. Early editions led with the policeman killed on campus, implying a student riot. The mid-morning papers came in with the story of Craven and Rogers. A warm teenager killed by a vampire policewoman while in custody.

She bit off the corner of the tetrahedonal carton and sucked.

The newsagent’s boy, who was restocking the paper rack, looked alarmed. He also looked
delicious.

She squeezed the Tetra-Pak and gulped down blood.

It came from cows, but Unigate did something to make it taste human. Cheap stuff had a vaguely sweet aftertaste, from the anticoagulants put in to make it keep. When in funds, she’d sometimes treat herself to Gold Top at ten bob a half-pint. It was milked from human donors (‘fresh from the neck’).

By the time she was back at St Bartolph’s, she’d glutted herself and was almost floating.

A lone policeman, Fred Regent, guarded last night’s scorched, bloody battlefield. He had his helmet on but was in shirtsleeves. Some hippy-dippy had braided together a necklace of buttercups and daisies and hung it around his neck.

She told him he could have to wait to be relieved. Bellaver might have forgotten he was stuck here.

‘I’m not surprised, Katie,’ he said. ‘I heard what happened with Donna.’

She gave Fred her Aztec bar out of pity. He told her she had a little smear around her mouth.

She warned him not to accept funny cigarettes and found her Mini in the car park. Students favoured Mini Coopers, Mini Mokes and Mini Vans. Her plain red car stood out amid psychedelic paint jobs, artificial eyelashes for headlamps and made-up vampire coats of arms. A Volkswagen bug covered with staring x-ray eyes had ‘the BOPMOBILE’ written on its bonnet.