The Radleys (17 page)

However, for a while support for Wil among fel ow bloodsuckers did remain strong, and none had caved in to police pressure to finish him off. His blood-minding talents were legendary, and his insightful studies of the vampire poets Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (published on the black market by Christabel Press), were wel received among members of the Sheridan Society.

After he resigned from his post at Manchester University, however, his behavior became increasingly hard to defend. He was kil ing more and more on the streets of Manchester. And while a lot of these kil s made simple additions to the missing persons register, the sheer quantity was alarming.

It seemed that something was going wrong in Wil ’s psyche.

Of course, most practicing vampires drain the life from an unblood once in a while, but most make sure they have a careful balance between kil s and the safer consumption of vampire blood.

After al , in terms of quality the taste of vampire blood is general y more satisfying, more complex, and bolder in its flavor, than that of a normal, unconverted human being. And the most delicious blood of al , the pinot rouge every blood lover knows is the best on offer, is the blood taken from someone’s veins the moment after conversion.

But Wil didn’t seem to have any interest in converting. Indeed, the rumor went that Wil had only ever converted one person in his entire life and for whatever reason couldn’t bring himself to convert any more. He stil drank standard vampire blood, however. In fact, he was drinking bottles and bottles of the stuff, alongside sucking on the neck of his on-off girlfriend, Isobel Child.

Yet his thirst was becoming insatiable. He would go out on a night and take a bite of anyone he fancied, vampire or otherwise. Without a regular day job, he could sleep longer and have more energy to do what and go where he wanted. But it wasn’t a question of energy. Wil ’s reckless behavior—his indifference to being caught on camera midkil , for instance—was seen by many to be a manifest symptom of a self-destructive frame of mind.

If anything happens to him,
people were saying,
it will be his own fault.

However, despite mounting police pressure, most members of the Sheridan Society believed he would be protected by them because Isobel Child held him in such affection. After al , Isobel was very popular within the community, and her brother was none other than Otto Child, overseer of the list.

This was the list of untouchables—practicing murderous blood addicts whom the police couldn’t touch without losing al trust and correspondence with the society, and therefore with the vampire community en masse.

Of course, no vampire-related death had ever resulted in an official trial, let alone a conviction.

There had been cover-ups for the greater public good since the earliest conception of the police force. Yet action had been taken even then. Traditional y, such action had been carried out by those few police officers trained in the precise and advanced crossbow skil s needed to exterminate the bloodsuckers. Vampires simply disappeared off the map. But the zero tolerance approach had only succeeded in rapidly increasing conversion rates, and the police began to fear an expansive and very public battle.

Therefore the police offered a carrot alongside the stick: protection to certain vampires provided they abide by specific rules. Of course, there was an ethical dilemma to al this regulation. After al , by working with the Sheridan Society, the police were in effect rewarding the most notorious and bloodthirsty vampires, while abstainers and more moderate neck nibblers were left unprotected. But the police logic was that by granting immunity to some of the most depraved, they were able to exert an influence on them and curb some of their activities.

And this meant a legitimate kil ing was one that wasn’t caught on camera, that didn’t involve a body turning up anywhere, and that involved a victim who was unlikely either to gain the sympathy of tabloid newspaper editors or arouse too many questions among the tax-paying masses.

Prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless, failed asylum seekers, and bipolar outpatients were safely on the menu. Wives of CID officers, speed-daters, and even wage-slave checkout girls were not.

The trouble was, although a longtime member of the Sheridan Society, Wil had never fol owed these rules. He couldn’t mold his lusts to fit a social y acceptable, police-endorsed framework. But it was the sheer sloppiness of his most recent kil ings that had put extra pressure on the Sheridan Society.

Fifteen days ago Greater Manchester Police’s deputy commissioner, Alison Glenny, received a phone cal while briefing a new UPU recruit. The cal was from a man whose familiar, cold, tired whisper told her that Wil Radley was off the list.

“I thought he was a good friend,” said Alison, staring out of her sixth-floor Chester House window at the rush hour traffic, the cars sliding and stopping like beads on an abacus. “A friend of your sister, at least.”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

Alison had noted a bitterness in his voice. She knew there was little loyalty among vampires, but she was stil taken aback by his evident contempt for Wil . “Okay, Otto, I just thought—”

He cut her off. “Trust me, no one cares about Wil Radley anymore.”

Sunday

D
on’t ever hint at your past to your unblood friends and neighbors or advertise the
dangerous thrill of vampirism to anyone beyond those who already know.

The Abstainer’s Handbook
(second edition), p. 29

Freaks

It is perfectly possible to live next door to a family of vampires and not have the slightest clue that the people you cal your neighbors might secretly want to suck the blood from your veins.

This is especial y likely if half the members of said family haven’t realized this themselves. And while it is true that none of the occupants of 19 Orchard Lane had ful y grasped who they were living next door to, there were certain discordant notes which had been struck over the years that had made the Felts wonder.

There was the time, for instance, when Helen had painted Lorna’s portrait—a nude, on Lorna’s insistence—and had needed to rush out of the room only seconds after helping Lorna unclasp her bra with a “So sorry, Lorna, I have a terribly weak bladder sometimes.”

There was another time at the Felts’ barbecue when Mark returned to the kitchen to find Peter avoiding the sports-themed conversations of his neighbors by sucking on a raw piece of prime fil et steak in the kitchen—“Oh God, sorry, it isn’t cooked. How sil y of me!”

And months before Peter choked on Lorna’s garlic-infused Thai salad, the Felts had made the mistake of bringing their new dog, Nutmeg, around to meet the folks at number seventeen only for said dog to career away from the biscuit Clara was offering and crash headfirst into the patio doors. (“She’l be al right,” said Peter, with doctorly authority, as everyone crouched around the red setter lying on the carpet. “It’s only a mild concussion.”) There were the smal things too.

Why, for instance, did the Radleys always have their blinds closed on sunny days? Why, for another instance, could Peter never be cajoled into joining Bishopthorpe Cricket Club or even into going with Mark and his friends for a nice round of golf? And why, when the Radleys’ garden was only a third of the size of the Felts’ vast, regularly mown lawn, did Peter and Helen feel the need to hire a gardener?

Mark’s suspicions might always have been a little stronger than his wife’s, but they stil didn’t amount to much more than thinking the Radleys were slightly odd. And he put this down to the fact that they used to live in London and that they probably voted Liberal Democrat and went to the theater a lot to see things that weren’t musicals.

Only his son, Toby, had an active distrust of the Radleys and always grumbled to Mark every time he mentioned them. “They’re freaks,” he always said, but would never expand on the reasons behind his prejudice. Mark just put it down to Lorna’s theory that his son wasn’t able to trust anyone since he and Toby’s mother divorced five years ago. (Mark had caught his then wife in bed with her yoga instructor, and although Mark hadn’t been too upset—he’d already started having an affair with Lorna and had been seeking a way out of his marriage—the eleven-year-old Toby had responded to the news of his parents’ separation by peeing repeatedly against his bedroom wal .)

But this Sunday morning, Mark’s doubts begin to solidify. While Lorna walks her dog, he eats his breakfast leaning against the cold polished granite of the breakfast bar. Halfway through his toast and lime marmalade, he overhears his son get the phone.

“What? . . . Stil ? . . . No, I’ve no idea . . . He went off after a girl. Clara Radley . . . I don’t know, he probably fancied her or something . . . Yes, I’m sorry . . . Okay, Mrs. Harper . . . Yes, I’l let you know . . .”

After a while, the phone cal ends.

“Toby? What was that about?”

Toby enters the room. While he is built like a man, his face is stil that of a petulant little boy.

“Harper’s gone missing.”

Mark tries to think. Is Harper someone he should know? There were so many names you had to keep up with.

“
Stuart
,” Toby clarifies sternly. “You know, Stuart Harper. My
best friend
.”

Ah yes
, thinks Mark,
that monosyllabic brute with the huge hands
.

“What do you mean
missing
?”

“Missing. He hasn’t come home since Friday night. His mum wasn’t too worried yesterday because he sometimes goes off to his gran’s in Thirsk without tel ing her.”

“But he’s not at his gran’s house?”

“No, he’s nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“No one knows where he is.”

“You mentioned something about Clara Radley.”

“She was the last person to see him.”

Mark recal s Friday night and dinner at the Radleys’. The abrupt end to the evening. Clara.

Teenage stuff.
And Helen’s face as she gave him that information.

“The very last person?”

“Yeah, she’l know something.”

They hear Lorna come back in with the dog. Toby heads back upstairs, as he often does when his stepmother appears. But he sees them at the same time as Mark does, standing behind Lorna. A young man and young woman in uniform.

“It’s the police,” says Lorna, trying her best to offer Toby a look of maternal concern. “They want to talk to you.”

“Hel o,” says the young male officer. “I’m PC Henshaw. This is PC Langford. We’re just here to ask your son a few routine questions.”

Game Over

“Dad? Da-ad?”

Eve scans the room but her father is nowhere to be seen.

The TV is on but no one is watching.

There is a woman on the screen pressing a plug-in air freshener to release a shower of animated flowers into her living room.

It is a quarter past nine on a Sunday morning.

Her father doesn’t go to church. He hasn’t gone running since her mother died. So where is he?

She doesn’t real y care except on a point of principle. He is al owed to go out without announcing the fact, so why isn’t she?

Feeling justified to do so, she leaves the flat and walks through the vil age toward Orchard Lane.

Outside the newsagent, two men are talking in hushed and serious voices: “They haven’t seen him since Friday night apparently” is al she manages to catch as she passes by.

When she reaches Orchard Lane, she has every intention of heading straight to Clara’s house, but then she sees a few things that change her mind. The first thing is the police car, parked midway between numbers seventeen and nineteen, opposite an old camper van on the other side of the street. Toby is out on his doorstep as two uniformed police officers leave his house. Eve, dappled in shade and half-hidden by overgrown bushes, sees him point toward Clara’s house.