A selection of half-formed retorts to Packard’s insinuation that she was a just a charity case occurred to her when she spoke the man’s name, but she drove them away by telling herself that though Packard had clearly meant to insult her, he had probably just done so as part of a game he was playing with her. This idea led Amanda to consider what Packard had meant by his comments about Mary O’Hare, but before she got anywhere on this track of thought, she saw something large moving through the car park out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head abruptly to look out over the rain covered tarmac, which was illuminated with a grim orange glow, but she was not quick enough to see what it was that had distracted her.
A little reluctantly, Amanda retrieved her umbrella from the back seat of her car and stepped out into the rain before making her way over to the small wood that had been the object of her stake-out.
Not far beyond the first line of trees, it became apparent to Amanda that she could no longer find her way by the light emanating from the car park behind her alone. Once again, she used the LED on her phone to reveal what was before her, only to reveal a clearing not so far from where she stood. She made her way into the open space and looked around at a clump of dirty blankets, the remains of an extinct fire and a pile of dead animals in various states of decay. What she saw suggested she was in the right place to find Milch, but also undermined her desire to meet the man.
To drown out her internal voice’s insistence that she should just run back to her car, Amanda sat herself down on a damp tree stump situated near the centre of the clearing. By doing so, she noticed that although she could still hear drips of water falling through the leaves of the trees around her, she could no longer detect the sound of the rain hitting her umbrella. She closed her eyes and, for a fleeting moment, the sound of the continued descent of the fallen rain through the trees enabled her to forget about what she was and why she had travelled to Radcliff.
“You shouldn’t be here!”
Amanda stood and turned all in one motion and ended up stepping on the bones and bodies of the creatures Milch had gathered to stave off his hunger. At the edge of the clearing, only six or seven feet away, she saw him standing with a torch in one hand and the kicking, bloodied body of a rabbit in the other. When she did not answer, he just grunted and turned his attention to the rabbit, first placing the torch between his teeth, then breaking the creature’s neck.
Milch chucked the now limp form of the rabbit so that it landed on some of the other animals he had killed, just in front of Amanda. He then removed the torch from his mouth and shone it directly into his own face.
“Have you come to gawp?” said Milch in a rough voice that carried more than a hint of a German accent. “Well take a good look, then get lost.”
For a further few seconds, Milch kept the light on his face, revealing not only his hard expression but also his receding hair of dark brown curls, uneven beard, bulbous nose and clear, ice-blue eyes. Amanda was surprised by the sight of the man, but it was not his strange features or the man’s imposing height and build that affected her so. Instead, it was the absence of the effects of his diet. Indeed, Milch seemed to not be suffering from any of the side-effects she expected to see in a vampire avoiding the drinking of human blood.
“You’re not running away,” continued Milch as he took the light away from his face. “So, I guess you must be one of them. Why else would you be here?”
“I’ve come from the school,” Amanda finally managed to say.
“That’s no concern of mine,” said Milch, before walking past her to get to the pile of sodden, dirty blankets, which he kicked aside to reveal a blue tarpaulin. He then peeled back the blue sheet, sat down on the dry patch the tarpaulin had protected from the rain, planted his torch in the ground and, finally, surprised Amanda again by removing a laptop from a previously concealed rucksack.
“I don’t really want to disturb you.”
“Then don’t!”
“But,” continued Amanda, determined to go on, “I’ve come from the school to find out if you can tell me anything about the attack: the vampire attack, that happened here about a week ago.”
Milch placed his warming up laptop to one side and fixed his piercing eyes on Amanda to communicate to her that she was clearly wasting his time.
“This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t know anything about the attack. Happy now? Now, can you leave me alone?”
“Please, Mr Milch,” said Amanda, who interpreted Milch’s lack of a physical response to her presence as reason enough to carry on. “I just want to discover who carried out the attack. I mean, I assume if you want to avoid drinking people’s blood, you would want to try to help us catch someone who would kill for such a thing.”
Milch grumbled something and returned his attention to his laptop.
“Okay, even if you don’t know anything directly about the attack, can you tell me about the other vampires in town? Anything could help.”
“Look, Miss whoever you
