For Kate.
Finch walked on, following a winding path away from the lawns and through the trees, towards a dark, lopsided structure that looked like an old shed or gardener’s hut.
Finch opened the door with a creak, and stepped inside. For a few moments, Dec lost sight of him in the darkness and squinted to see. Then a soft glow of light filled the hut as Finch reappeared in the doorway holding a paraffin lantern.
Dec crouched behind a shrub and watched through the open door as Finch placed the lantern on a table before squatting down on the floor to pick something out of a cardboard box. It was some kind of package, wrapped up in paper like a bag of fish and chips. Dec watched breathlessly as the man carefully unwrapped it, dipped a hand inside and then brought his hand up to his mouth. Sure enough, he’d gone into the hut to eat.
Perfect, Dec thought. While the fucker was distracted, he’d sneak up on him and knock his brains out.
Dec moved closer.
Finch didn’t see him.
He moved a little closer.
Finch continued to eat, making little smacking sounds.
A few more steps. Dec raised the crucifix like an axe. His heart was thumping like crazy, and he had to fight to control his breathing.
Then he stopped.
And stared at the food in Finch’s hand, realising with a shock what it was that the man was munching on.
It wasn’t a piece of fish. It was a baby’s arm. Blue, mottled, severed above its dimpled little elbow. Finch was gnawing on the bone, sucking and slurping and groaning to himself in pleasure.
Dec didn’t even feel the crucifix slip from his fingers. The next thing he knew, he was running like hell away from the hut, sprinting across the grass. Which way was the wall? Which way? Twigs cracked and snapped underfoot and the leafless branches whipped his face as he stumbled along.
The sound of a voice stopped him dead in his tracks.
‘Hello, Declan.’
Very slowly, he turned.
He knew that voice.
She moved sinuously towards him. She was wearing a long white dress; it looked like a shroud in the darkness.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she said softly.
‘Kate?’ he gasped in astonishment. It was her…and it wasn’t.
He’d never seen her look this way before. The thin white material clung to every curve of her body as she stepped out into the patch of moonlight between the trees. He could see she was naked underneath.
‘But you’re dead.’
‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered to him. ‘My mother made it up, to keep us apart.’
She was beautiful. He couldn’t stop staring at her.
‘Kiss me, Declan,’ she said, and her lips parted
.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Ten miles from Dornoch, the Highlands of Scotland
10.41 p.m.
The Hayabusa’s trip meter read four hundred and thirty-five miles as Joel rode up the bumpy path through the trees. A fox darted away as his headlight cut through the overgrowth of thistles and brambles. Rounding the bend in the path, the semi-derelict cottage came into view up ahead. He fought the urge to turn the bike right around and ride back down the whole length of the country.
Joel parked the bike in what had once been the front yard, turned off the engine and peeled himself painfully out of the saddle, stiff and aching and frozen to the core from the long ride. But the chills running through his body weren’t only the effects of the cold. Just being here again had filled him with dread.
He lifted off his helmet and looked around. The last time he’d seen the cottage, it had stood in its own clearing. Now, after nearly twenty years of neglect, the woods had encroached on the building. The naked branches raked the roof and scraped against the walls to the sway of the cold wind. The whitewashed walls were thick with moss, and the ivy had grown over most of the windows. He stared for a long time at the front door, still splintered in half from where the vampire had smashed his way in all those years ago.
And as he stood there, memories flooding back to him, Joel thought about the strange, wonderful man who had been his grandfather.
The mystery of why Nicholas Solomon had suddenly, sometime during the mid-1970s, abandoned his respectable middle-class existence, left his wife for no apparent reason and disappeared virtually overnight to lead a reclusive life up here in the middle of nowhere had always been a contentious issue in the Solomon family.
Joel’s parents had brought him up to believe that his grandfather was selfish, obsessive, mad as a bag of snakes, someone for whom ‘eccentric’ was way too kind a word. ‘Crazy Nick’ was what they’d called him.
For years after his unexplained disappearance, the family had refused to have anything to do with him. Joel had been about five years old when his father had, for reasons that had never been discussed, decided to make contact with Crazy Nick again.
One of his early memories was of his father talking on the phone to a private detective he’d hired to track the old man down. Soon after that the family had tentatively made contact with him and paid their first visit to his Highland hideaway.
It hadn’t been a welcome one. Nicholas Solomon had seemed deeply unhappy about their presence, nervous and on edge and impatient for them to leave. His father had said the old man resented them — but young Joel had never believed that. It had seemed to him that he was the only one who could see the sadness in his grandfather’s eyes as they said their goodbyes. As the years passed and the visits to the isolated cottage became more frequent, Joel had always felt that the growing bond between him and his grandfather was the only thing holding the family together. He’d loved the old man dearly. Always would.
Technically, the abandoned cottage was Joel’s own property. The uncle and aunt who’d taken him in after the tragedy hadn’t wanted to know about the place, and it had passed to him when he’d turned eighteen. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, let alone renovate it for sale. Let it rot.
The broken door groaned loudly as he pushed it open and stepped inside, shining his torch into the entrance hall. Weeds had invaded the gaps between the stone tiles. The place smelled strongly of damp earth and rats and decay.
It smelled like a grave.
He walked into the mouldering shell that had been the living room, gazed for a few moments at the spot where his parents had lain dead. And the place he’d seen in a thousand nightmares…where he’d killed his grandfather. His right hand twitched. Even all these years later, he could still feel the impact of the blade up his arm as it sliced through flesh and bone.
He tore himself away from that spot, beginning to shiver badly now.
Remembering the flask of chicken soup he’d brought with him, he unslung his backpack. The soup was still warm, and he gulped two cups of it down gratefully.
He hated the thought of having to stay the night here, but the wind was building into a storm outside and he couldn’t face another single mile on the Suzuki. He screwed the half-empty Thermos shut and dug in his backpack for the firelighters, candles and matches he’d picked up in the eight-till-late shop near his house. By candlelight he dug the damp ash out of the fireplace and lit a couple of solid fuel firelighter cubes. After checking that the smoke was drawing up the chimney properly, he smashed a chair and used the wood to get a blaze going. When the warmth finally began to permeate the room, he stripped off his clammy leathers and changed into jeans and a thick
