The Radleys (29 page)

“Clara’s at school at the moment,” she says.

“I’m not here to speak with your daughter.”

“I thought you said this was about Clara.”

Alison nods. “I want to speak
about
her, not
to
her, Mrs. Radley.”

A couple of hours ago, Helen had come home to watch the news but had seen nothing on it about the boy’s body being discovered. She had felt relieved. Maybe her friends in the book group had got it wrong. Al relief disappears with Alison’s next statement.

“Stuart Harper’s body has been found,” Alison says, staring at Helen with unintimidated, testing eyes. “We know your daughter kil ed him.”

Helen’s mouth opens and closes but nothing comes out of it. Her throat is dry and her palms are suddenly pinpricked with sweat.

“What? Clara? Kil ed somebody? Don’t be so . . . that’s so . . .”

“Unbelievable?”

“Wel , yes.”

“Mrs. Radley, we know what she did and how she did it. Al the evidence is there on the boy’s body.”

Helen tries to console herself with the idea that Alison is bluffing. After al , how can al the evidence be there? They haven’t taken a swab from Clara for a DNA sample.
We know what she
did and how she did it
. No, she doesn’t mean that. This doesn’t look like a woman who would readily believe in vampires, or that a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl could kil a boy with her teeth.

“I’m sorry,” says Helen, “but I very much think you’re mistaken.”

Alison raises her eyebrows, as if this is something she’d been expecting Helen to say. “No, Mrs.

Radley. Be assured that al roads lead to your daughter. She’s in very serious trouble.”

Unable to think clearly, with so many panic signals flooding her brain, Helen stands up. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’l just be a moment. I have to just go and do something.”

Before she is even out of the room, she hears Alison’s question.

“Where are you going?”

Helen stops, staring down at her own faint shadow on the carpet. “I can hear the washing machine. It’s beeping.”

“No, it’s not, Mrs. Radley. Now, please, I assure you it’s in your best interest to come and sit back down. I have a proposition for you.”

Helen carries on walking, defying the deputy commissioner. Al she needs is Wil . He can blood-mind her and make everything go away.

“Mrs. Radley? Please, come back.”

But she is already out of the house, walking toward the camper van. For the second time in two days she is thankful Wil is here; maybe the threat he represents to her is less than the threats he can stop. The threats to her daughter, to her family, to everything.

She knocks on his van door. “Wil ?”

There’s no answer.

She hears the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Alison Glenny is walking toward her, calm and unsquinting despite the bright light. She could probably stare at the sun and not even blink.

“Wil ? Please. I need you. Please.”

She knocks again. An urgent
tap-tap-tap
, which again is met by silence. She thinks about opening the door, as she knows Wil never bothers with locks, but she doesn’t get the chance.

“Wel , Mrs. Radley, this is a funny place to keep your washing machine.”

Helen manages a smile. “No, it’s just . . . my brother-in-law is a lawyer. He could give me some legal advice.” She looks at the camper van, realizes she has never seen a less likely vehicle for a member of the legal profession. “I mean, he trained in law. He’s been . . . traveling.”

Alison is almost smiling, or as close as she ever gets. “A lawyer. That’s interesting.”

“Yes. I would feel more comfortable talking to you if he were here.”

“I bet you would. But he’s at the pub.”

Helen is thrown by this. “The pub? How do you—”

“I know your brother-in-law,” says Alison, “and as far as I’m aware, he’s not a lawyer.”

“Look—,” says Helen, glancing up Orchard Lane. The shadows of tree trunks stripe the tarmac like an endless zebra crossing. “Look . . . look . . .”

“And we know al about his blood minding, Mrs. Radley.”

“What?” Helen feels dizzy.

Alison comes close to her and lowers her voice in tone and volume. “I know you are trying to be a good person, Mrs. Radley. I know you haven’t crossed the line in a very long time. You care about your family, I understand that. But your daughter has kil ed someone.”

Helen’s fear becomes anger. For a moment, she forgets where she is and whom she is talking to. “It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. The boy, he was pinning her down. He was attacking her and she didn’t even know what she was doing.”

“I’m sorry, Helen, but I’m sure you used to hear about what happened to known vampires.”

Again, Helen pictures her daughter with a crossbow through her heart.

Alison continues. “But things have evolved somewhat, since the eighties and nineties. We have a more intel igent approach. If you want to save your daughter’s life, you can do it. I head up the Unnamed Predator Unit. And that means I’m in charge of finding solutions within the community, negotiating.”

The community. Helen realizes that in Alison’s eyes she is the same as every other bloodsucker in England. “A deal?”

“I’m not diminishing what your daughter did to that boy, but to be perfectly honest with you, Mrs.

Radley, my work depends a lot on statistics. Vampires who kil one person in a lifetime are not as serious as those who kil twice a week. I know for a layperson this probably seems a bit utilitarian and unpoetic, but this is a tricky situation ethical y and turning it into simple numbers makes it easier. And there is a way for you to help turn your daughter’s one kil into a zero. In the eyes of the police, that is.”

Helen senses she is being thrown some kind of rope here, but wonders what Alison has in mind. “Look, al I care about is Clara. I’l do anything to protect her. My family is everything to me.”

Alison studies her a while, calculating something. “Now, in terms of this numbers game, there is a vampire we real y would like to see removed from the streets of Manchester. Wel , the streets of anywhere, to be honest. He is a monster. He is a serial kil er whose victims number in the hundreds, if not thousands.”

Helen begins to see where this is going. “What do you want me to do?”

“Wel , if you want to make sure Stuart Harper wil always just be another missing person, you only have one real option.”

“What is it?”

“We need you to kil Wil Radley.” Helen closes her eyes and in the red-tinged darkness she hears the rest of Alison’s hushed proposition. “So long as your daughter continues to abstain, she wil be safe. But we wil need absolute physical confirmation that your brother-in-law is dead.”

Helen tries to think straight. “Why me? I mean, can’t someone else? Can’t Peter help me?”

Alison shakes her head. “No. And you can’t get him involved. We don’t want you to tel anyone about this. It’s about numbers again, Mrs. Radley. One is safer than two. If you tel your husband, there wil be serious consequences. We can’t sanction brothers kil ing brothers.”

“You don’t understand. This is—”

Alison is nodding her head. “Oh, and one more detail. We know about your relationship with Wil Radley.”

“What?”

Alison nods. “We know you had a ‘thing’ with him. And so wil your husband, if you don’t accept this proposition.”

Helen is raw with shame. “No.”

“That’s the deal, Mrs. Radley. And we’l have people watching the whole time. Any attempt to bend the rules or to find some other way out of this wil fail, I assure you.”

“When? I mean, when do I . . .”

Helen hears a slow intake of breath. “You have until midnight.”

Midnight.

“Tonight?”

By the time Helen opens her eyes, Chief Superintendent Alison Glenny is walking away, in and out of the shadows, as she heads up Orchard Lane. Helen watches her get into a car, where an overweight man sits in the passenger seat.

The breeze carries untranslatable warnings. Helen looks at the camper van, where her life changed al those years ago. It is like staring at a grave, though she isn’t yet sure precisely who or what she is mourning.

Repression Is in Our Veins

When Eve tels her, on the bus home, that she has decided to go on a date with Rowan, Clara doesn’t know what to say. And her friend is obviously confused by the weird silence because Clara has been putting good words in for her brother ever since Eve got here.

“Come on, Raddles, I thought you wanted me to give him a chance,” says Eve, staring intently at her.

A chance. A chance for what?

“Yeah,” says Clara, staring out the window as they pass rol ing green fields, “I did. It’s just—”

“Just what?”

Clara catches the honeyed scent of her blood. She can resist her; maybe Rowan can too. “Just nothing. Forget it.”

“Okay,” says Eve, used to Clara’s increasingly erratic behavior. “It’s forgotten.”

Later, walking home from the bus stop, Clara tel s her brother she thinks it’s a mistake.

“I’l be okay. I’m going to ask Wil for some more blood before I go out. I’l take it with me. In my bag. If I get a craving, I’l just take a swig. It’l be fine. Trust me.”

Fantasy World.

“Here Comes the Sun.”

Featureless dummies in disco wigs.

The Hungry Gannet. Meats laid out in the refrigerator.

Clara’s stomach rumbles.

“What, so you finished that whole bottle he gave you?” she asks her brother.

“It wasn’t a ful bottle. Anyway, what’s your point?”

“The point is Wil is going today.
Going
. Like, forever. And taking his bottles of blood with him.

So, we’l stil be left with these cravings and no blood. What’l we do?”

“We’l control ourselves, like we always did.”

“It’s different now, though. We know what it’s like. We can’t undo it. It’s like trying to uninvent fire or something.”

Rowan considers this, as they walk past their dad’s clinic. “We could just go for vampire blood.

There must be a way of getting hold of it. And ethical y it’s probably better than eating pork. You know, no death is involved.”

“But what if that’s not enough. What if we crave someone and . . . I mean, what if tonight you’re with Eve and—”

Clara is annoying Rowan. “I can control myself. Look, for God’s sake. Look at everyone.

Everyone represses everything. Do you think any of these ‘normal’ human beings real y do exactly what they want to do al the time? ’Course not. It’s just the same. We’re middle-class and we’re British. Repression is in our veins.”

“Wel , I don’t know if I’m good at it,” says Clara, thinking about the other day in Topshop.

They walk in silence for a bit. Turn down Orchard Lane. They duck under the flowers of a laburnum tree and Clara knows that her brother wants to say something else. He lowers his voice to a volume that can’t filter through the wal s of the houses around them.

“What happened with Harper . . . it wasn’t a normal situation. You can’t regret it. Any girl with fangs at her disposal would’ve done the same.”

“But I’ve been a complete tool al weekend,” says Clara.

“Look, you went from absolutely nothing to a hel of a lot of blood. There’s probably a middle ground. And now you’re only feeling like this because the effects are wearing off . . . And anyway, it was
Harper’s
blood. We should go for nice people. Charity workers. We could go for
her.
’

He nods his head at the woman col ecting envelopes for Save the Children, who is standing outside the door to number nine. Clara doesn’t find this funny. Twenty-four hours ago, Rowan would never have said this. But then, twenty-four hours ago she probably wouldn’t have been offended.

“Joke,” says Rowan.

“You should real y work on your sense of humor,” she tel s him. But as she says it she remembers Harper’s hand over her mouth and the fear she felt in that moment before everything had changed and power had tilted her way.

No, Rowan is right.
She can’t regret it, no matter how hard she tries.

Then She Smiles a Devilish Smile

Peter walks home, buoyant and happy, floating on the aftereffects of Lorna’s blood.

He is actual y so happy he is humming, although at first he isn’t conscious of the tune. Then he realizes he is humming along to the Hemo Goblins’ one and only song. He remembers the solitary gig they played, at a youth club in Crawley. They managed to extend the set to three songs, by adding a couple of covers in there—“Anarchy in the UK” and “Paint It Black,” which they retitled

“Paint It Red” for the purposes of the evening. That had been the night they’d first seen Chantal Feuil ade, pogoing along at the front of the twelve-strong crowd in her Joy Division T-shirt and her Alps-fresh, translucent skin.

Good times
, he can’t help but think.
Yes, good times.

Of course, he had been selfish back in those days, but maybe a little bit of selfishness is needed to make the world what it is. He once read a book by an unblood scientist which posited the theory that selfishness is an essential biological trait of every living creature and that every apparently philanthropic act on earth ultimately has a selfish root.

Beauty is selfish. Love is selfish. Blood is selfish.

And this is the thought he has with him as he passes through the yel ow laburnum flowers without ducking, like he usual y does. Then he sees the vivacious, selfish Lorna heading out to walk her annoying, selfish dog.

“Lorna!’ he says, loud and jubilant.

She stops, confused.

“Hel o.”

“Lorna, I’ve been thinking,” he says, with more manic confidence than he was hoping for. “I like jazz. I like it a great deal in fact. You know, Miles Davis. Charlie the Birdman. That sort of stuff. It’s just . . .
wow
. It’s total y free, isn’t it? It doesn’t stick to a tune just for the sake of it. It just breaks out, improvises, does what it wants . . . doesn’t it?”