back at Greg. ‘Who’s the guy?’ he rasped out of the corner of his mouth. ‘New boyfriend?’
‘New partner, Rudi. I mean professional partner.’
‘Since when did you ever—’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘He looks like a dork,’ Rudi muttered.
‘Leave him alone, okay?’
Rudi led them along a passage and through a door that said ‘manager’, into an enormous room done out in purple velvet and leopardskin upholstery. ‘Come in, come in. Take a seat.’ He motioned at a couple of armchairs.
‘I see you’ve been doing some filing,’ Alex said. The chairs were covered in heaps of documents. Rudi strutted over and swiped them away, creating a blizzard of paper. ‘Fuckin’ bills. Fuck ‘em anyway.’ He threw himself onto a giant red sofa shaped like a pair of lips and put his silver toe-capped boots up on the coffee table in front of him. ‘Jeez, it’s good ta see you again, Alex. What’ll ya have?’
‘Something with a bit of body to it,’ she said, settling into one of the leopardskin armchairs. Greg did the same.
‘How ‘bout you, soldier boy?’
Greg looked stunned. ‘That obvious?’
‘Like anyone would actually want their hair cut like a fuckin’ shoe brush.’ Rudi laughed as he reached behind him and jabbed an intercom on the wall. ‘Daisy, three Red Juice Specials, right now.’
‘Red Juice Specials?’ Greg asked uneasily.
‘Speciality of the maison,’ Rudi said. He winked at Alex. ‘From the guy’s neck to your sweet lips, darlin’.’
Daisy came wobbling into the office in fishnet stockings and high heels, carrying a tray with three tall glasses of thick frothy red juice, iced, with cocktail umbrellas in.
Greg stared at them and turned pale.
‘Fucksamatter with him?’ Rudi said.
‘Greg’s new to our ways,’ Alex said.
Rudi beamed. ‘Knew it. Not juicin’ yet, huh, boy? Whaddaya, squeamish?’
‘Shooting the enemy from a distance, even using a knife in close quarter battle, isn’t quite the same as sinking your teeth in and drinking their blood,’ Greg muttered, still gazing uneasily at the drinks.
‘Relax, you ain’t gonna kill anyone, tough guy,’ Rudi rasped. ‘You get yourself a juicy piece of ass — ‘scuse my French, Alex — you bite her right here in the neck, you use the Vambloc after. Kills the infection, she don’t remember a thing and the holes heal up so fast, by the time she wakes up you can’t even see ‘em.’ He roared with laughter. ‘You’re gonna love it, being a vampire. Man, once you get the taste for it, the buzz, the feel of the juice, still warm, flowin’ down your throat…ain’t a fuckin’ feeling in the world like it.’
Alex sipped her Red Juice Special. The blood was fresh. ‘Anyway, Rudi, we didn’t come here to discuss the ethics of vampire nutrition. You said you had something for me.’
Rudi nodded. ‘Yeah, well, there’s something goin’ on, sure as shit. I been hearing stuff. You remember Paulie Lomax, big guy, looks like a turkey?’
‘Four-finger Paulie.’
‘That’s the guy. Know the rathouse pub down at the docks where he likes to drink?’
Alex nodded. ‘Makes the Slaughtered Lamb look like Maxim’s.’
‘Well, Paulie Lomax told me that he and this buddy of his called Vinnie were down there one night last week when they got talking to these sailors. Guys couldn’t speak hardly a word of English, but Paulie and Vinnie get the feeling they’re seriously fuckin’ freaked out about something. After a while they get it out of them that they were on a ship that came in from Eastern Europe someplace. Hardly any cargo on board, just these crates. You wanna know the weirdest? No paperwork. Customs let
‘em right through. Could have been fuckin’ cocaine, guns, plutonium. But it wasn’t.
Whatever it was, it put the shits up ‘em. Half the crew got sick.’
‘Sick how?’
‘Some kinda fever. But this was no ordinary fever. Guys were getting nightmares, talking about getting visited in the night in their bunks. And getting sicker every night.
Had these puncture wounds on their necks. Right here. Ship’s doc said it was mosquito bites. I mean, mosquitoes in fuckin’ fur coats?’
‘Go on,’ Alex said, frowning.
‘From what Paulie and Vinnie could make out, a chopper came and took the cargo away before they even got to port. Now the ship’s still in the docks. Captain wants to head home, but two of the crew are missing and the rest won’t get back on board ‘cause they say the ship’s cursed.’
‘Missing?’ Greg said.
‘Gone. And you know which crew members it was? The ones who were sickest from the bites. One minute they’re lying raving in bed, next they’ve upped and walked.
Sounds like you know what.’
Alex said, ‘I think I need to talk to these sailors.’
Rudi smiled. ‘Beat you to it. Paulie told Vinnie to tell ‘em that there’s this woman who deals with this kind of shit, a real expert. They wanna meet you, tonight, at the dock. Said they found something.’
‘Found what?’
Rudi shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, sounds like a heavy deal.’ He plucked a slip of paper out of his shirt and handed it to her. ‘RV’s all set up. Details are on here.’
Alex studied the paper. There was just the ship’s name, the number of the dock, and the time. ‘Midnight tonight,’ she read out loud.
‘I think it’s gonna be worth your while,’ Rudi said. ‘Now let’s go eat. My Brasato al Barolo don’t wait for nobody.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lavender Close, Wallingford
Joel’s grandfather had always told him that even though vampires could theoretically come out of their lairs any time after dark, they preferred to wait until later in the evening when the humans were quiet and restful. And when they didn’t kill their victims outright, they always returned for more.
‘You must have totally lost it, Solomon,’ Joel muttered to himself. For an instant it hit him how completely mad this was. Here he was, lurking behind the garden shed in the back of a nice middle-class suburban property at half past ten at night. Spaced out from lack of sleep, pins and needles crippling his legs after almost an hour of crouching there, and his nose beginning to run from the chill, damp air.
Thinking about vampires.
Suddenly, the whole thing seemed so absurd to him that he wanted to leave.
What if somebody caught him here? A Detective Inspector, hanging about like a pervert in the dark, peering up at a seventeen-year-old girl’s bedroom window. Not the best PR
for the Thames Valley force, and certainly not an ideal career prospect for him.
But still he lingered there, fighting back the doubts, willing himself to endure the cramps and the cold.
He wished his grandfather were here with him. Joel had been thinking about him a lot recently. And here he was, following in his footsteps after all these years. Or trying to. The old man might have known what to do. Joel wasn’t sure he had the first idea.
By quarter to eleven, the downstairs lights in the neighbouring houses were beginning to go off, and the upstairs lights were coming on. Curtains were being drawn, blurred figures were moving about behind the frosted glass of bathroom windows.
Showers showering, teeth being brushed, the respectable middle-class inhabitants of Lavender Close pulling
