Still Bleeding Read online

  On the opposite wall, there were two cheap pine storage units: just open frames nailed together. At the bottom, the old wooden crate we'd kept our toys in as children. Beside that, red tinsel poked out from the top of a battered cardboard box. I recognised that too. It was the decorations my brother and I had unwrapped every December - knelt down together on the carpet - and then back up again after Christmas, always in the same old pieces of newspaper. On the shelves above, there were items that obviously belonged exclusively to James. And then, right at the top, boxes of Sarah's belongings.

  Looking at the shelves, they gave a clear snapshot of my brother's life. They reminded me of the layers and sediments you'd see in a cliff face. It would take most of the day to go through it all, and I doubted I'd find anything of immediate interest in there - nothing but a few nasty surprises, anyway, especially from the lower shelves. Memories leaping out like Jack-in-the-Boxes.

  I sat down in a swivel-chair.

  The computer was an obvious place to start, I supposed, but when I switched it on I hit a password request screen. My fingers hovered uncertainly above the keyboard - and then relaxed. I had no idea, and couldn't even begin to guess, so there was no point wasting time. I turned the machine off and eyed the shelf above me instead.

  At the end, there were four books, all the same colour. Crime Scenes, it said on each of the spines. Volumes one to four. I plucked the end one down, opened it, and flicked through it a little idly. Unpleasantly, it was just page after page of crime scene photographs, most of them in black and white. There were old police cars parked up, their headlights illuminating bodies in the road, with officers squatting down beside them. White sheets lay on the ground like fallen ghosts, with dead arms reaching out from underneath.

  It was hard to tell whether these were related to her work at the newspaper, or the fascination she'd always had with death. Had this been a professional interest, or a personal one?

  I replaced the book.

  Next along, there was one on forensics. Then a medical textbook. Both were thick and detailed, and came complete with graphic colour photographs throughout.

  I frowned, putting them back.

  Sarah, Sarah, Sarah… Then I moved onto the folders.

  The first lever-arch file contained press clippings of her newspaper articles, each one slipped carefully and proudly into a clear-plastic sleeve. They were in chronological order. Her first ever by-line, from nearly four years ago, was right at the front; I flipped to the back and found the most recent, a short sidebar clipping, dated early February.

  POLICE DENY INTERNET LINK TO

  MURDERED GIRL

  by Sarah Pepper

  Today, a police spokesman ruled out the suggestion that photographs of murder victim Jane Slater had been published on the Internet.

  The local woman's body was discovered on Monday. She had been missing since November of last year.

  Claims have been made that a photograph of the crime scene, including an image of Ms Slater's body, appeared online. However, police have been unable to substantiate this.

  'These are serious allegations and they have been fully investigated,' a source told this newspaper. 'We have found no evidence to support these claims, but will continue to look into the matter as and when new evidence comes to light.'

  Ms Slater's murder is believed to be connected to the deaths of three other local women. Police have faced mounting criticism over their handling of the investigation.

  She'd written it roughly four months ago. After that, she'd either published nothing at all, or else hadn't been bothered enough to keep it. Perhaps whatever caused her and James to withdraw over that period had affected her work as well.

  I put the file back and took down the next one. This was labelled 'Research' and it was, again, full of plastic sleeves. The first contained a single printed photograph. But as I realised what I was looking at, something in my chest tightened up.

  Fucking bell, Sarah.

  The picture showed a skinny, deeply tanned teenage boy wearing denim shorts and an orange T-shirt. Except that it had taken me a moment to understand that, because the boy's body was lying in dry mud at the edge of a dirt road, and it appeared to have been bent backwards, completely in half, so that the base of his skull rested against the calloused edge of his bare heels.

  I could tell it was a real human being, but, for a second, my mind refused to accept it. Jesus. Whatever accident he'd been in… except there was rope tying his neck to his ankles, so it wasn't the result of an accident at all. Someone had done that to him. There was an inset photo in the top corner: clearly an autopsy shot. It showed the boy's face covered with sore, tender razor cuts crossing the skin.

  On the front of the plastic sleeve, Sarah had stuck a small, printed label:

  [03/03/08. Az: SMD(i) - email]

  I turned to the next sleeve. The label was slightly different:

  [03/03/08. A3: TS(i) - email]

  Inside, there was another photograph. This one showed what appeared to be a concrete playground, with a low grey building behind it. A headless male body was draped over a swing, with its orange trousers scrunched down at the ankles. The man's head was on the ground a few metres away. It looked like it had fallen from the sky.

  But there was also a second sheet of paper in this sleeve. I slipped it out, more cautiously than I probably needed to. It was a newspaper article, printed off the Internet, and the headline read:

  TWELVE DEAD IN PRISON RIOT

  Equally cautiously, I slid it back in.

  And then turned my head quickly. The landing was empty.

  But the small study seemed very quiet, all of a sudden, while the house beyond was now more ominous than when I'd arrived, as though someone had quietly opened the front door and was now standing motionless in the hallway below.

  I'd locked the door, of course: the images were just unnerving me. It felt like something had started buzzing next to my heart.

  I quickly checked the side of the folder again: 'Research'.

  Research for what?

  I picked down the folder containing her newspaper articles, and re-read that final one she'd kept:

  Claims have been made that a photograph of the crime scene, including an image of Ms Slater's body, appeared online.

  Early February.

  And the first sleeve in the research folder was dated early March, which meant she'd started collecting the photographs a few weeks after that article had been published. But I didn't see any obvious connection between that and the material she'd been gathering. If it wasn't research for work, what was it for?

  I supposed the answer was obvious, just a little unpalatable. If it wasn't professional then it must have been personal. The image of Sarah's face returned to me, but different this time: not the woman she'd become, but the little girl I'd always been able to see below the surface. The one who insisted that death was a monster, that it had to be faced down and confronted.

  However, police have been unable to substantiate this.

  Perhaps she'd investigated the allegations about Jane Slater herself - maybe tried to corroborate them by visiting somewhere online, and instead of finding the pictures she'd been looking for, she'd found these. Not relevant for the story, maybe. But I thought they would be relevant for Sarah.

  [03/03/08. A3: TS(i) - email]

  The labels looked a hell of a lot like interview details. Like she'd sought out the people who'd posted these images and got in touch with them.

  Sarah…

  If this was what had occupied her time over the last few months, it felt like it partly explained the bad taste the house had in its mouth. No wonder the atmosphere here had soured and died. I could imagine her pursuing this, and I could also imagine the rift it would have opened between the pair of them. Her obsession would have become a wedge, driven deeper and deeper into their relationship until it finally cracked apart.

  I worked my way through the rest of the folder.

  N
ot all of the photographs were as distressing as the first two, but they were all stark images of dead bodies, and there was something horrific and unreal about each and every one of them. I found myself shaking my head, feeling almost guilty to be looking. With each turn of the page, the room around me seemed to be slowly filling up with ghosts.

  And then I reached the final sleeve. It was one of the least graphic shots in the entire folder, but for a moment I could hardly even breathe.

  The label read: [20/04/08. Ai: CE(i) - f2f]

  Oh God.

  The labels had started at 'A2', and the numbers, letters and dates had increased from there. So this sleeve should have been at the beginning of the folder. It was the image she must have found first, the one that caught her attention and started her off, but she'd left the interview itself to the very end. Because even Sarah had needed to work herself up to face some things.

  It was an innocuous shot, compared to the others she'd collected. The quality was grainy and poor, and it was difficult to make out much detail as the subject was some distance away. At the top of the photo, there was a small black silhouette of a woman standing on an over-pass, behind waist-high concrete railings. Below the bridge, right at the bottom of the frame, a blur of traffic.

  The woman's hair was caught in time, half blown-out to the side by the wind, and her face was in darkness. But I didn't need to see that to know it was Marie.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  The depths of people's insanity never ceased to amaze Kearney. It wasn't the things they were driven to do, so much as the reasons that lay behind them. The intensity of the whirlpool that madness could whip up in a person's head.

  Thomas Wells was a case in point. When he'd been picked up that morning, they'd found the interior of his car decked out with curtains. Rebecca Wingate's handbag was in the glove compartment. Three litres of blood had been bottled up in the boot. There was a chilled thermos flask on the passenger seat.

  And yet that, in itself, was not what Kearney found astonishing about this man. Inevitably, the vampirism angle had been raised from the very beginning of the investigation. He and Todd had even spent a night at an underground fetish club on precisely those grounds, where Kearney, taken aback by the unexpected normality of the people, had been strangely beguiled.

  So it didn't shock him that Thomas Wells thought he was a vampire. It was the absolute conviction the man had. This morning, Wells had lost control of his vehicle and bumped an oncoming car, causing the curtains to come down, and, immediately, he'd gone down with them. The sunlight didn't really hurt him, of course, but his own personal myth had become so real to him that it had over-ridden his sense of self- preservation.

  It wouldn't have been surprising to find the man slept in a coffin. But they hadn't found one at his house, and, despite the surge of hope Kearney had felt at the news, they hadn't found Rebecca Wingate either. He'd almost spoken to Simon Wingate upon learning of Wells's arrest, but was glad that he'd held back. That surge of hope had long since faded. It had been replaced by pressure. A feeling of urgency that he was having to fight to keep in check. She was out there somewhere. Almost within reach now, but not quite.

  'Do you remember him?' Todd said.

  They were walking down the thin corridor to the interview room. Kearney was forced close to the wall. Todd Dennis was a large man. When he breathed, it often sounded like he was grunting, and conversation escaped him in puffs. But the man could march. Every time they encountered a water-cooler, Kearney had to dodge behind slightly.

  'Yes,' he said.

  'The press are going to have a field day.'

  Kearney nodded. They'd interviewed Thomas Wells about eighteen months ago. Back then, he worked the night-shift at the local abattoir. They'd spoken to him there, and then a second time here at the department. And for a couple of days, they'd liked him for it. Wells had seemed nervous and slightly off-kilter with the world - something not right about him - and his story was inconsistent enough to set alarms ringing, albeit quietly. But they had no hard evidence against him, and also a large stumbling block that had put him in the clear.

  'I remember his prints didn't match,' Kearney said.

  Each of the three bodies discovered so far had yielded little in the way of forensic evidence. The only thing that remained was obvious and deliberate: the print of an index finger, pressed against the centre of the victim's forehead. After a tense few hours' wait, they'd learned that finger did not belong to Thomas Wells.

  'Yeah,' Todd said. 'We know what that means.'

  'He's got an accomplice.'

  'Yep. A plague of vampires.'

  Todd said it as though he'd encountered such a thing in the past, and it had always proved troublesome. They stopped outside the door and he smiled grimly.

  'This isn't over yet, Paul. Not by a long way.'

  Kearney thought of Simon Wingate, still sitting downstairs in reception, waiting for news. The sense of urgency was stronger now. The feeling that time was running out.

  He fought it down.

  'Yes,' he said. 'I know.'

  Interview Room One.

  The black carpet on the floor was brand new and spotlessly clean; the walls were the colour of fresh milk. In the centre, there was a stainless-steel table, smeared with a distorted reflection of Thomas Wells's down-turned face. His pale forearms were resting either side of it, and he was staring down between them, presenting Kearney with his pitch-black widow's peak: a pronounced crew-cut 'M' resting above a wide, implacable face.

  Behind him, the window was covered with dark blinds.

  They clicked gently in the slight breeze.

  Todd had already started the camera and done the preliminaries. Now, he was settled back in his seat, resting his hands on his belly and staring across the sheen of metal at their suspect. Kearney could tell his partner was impatient because he was chewing his lip, making his moustache roll."

  By mutual agreement, Kearney did most of the interviews and interrogations. It was an empathy thing. Whatever you felt inside, you rarely got results in a situation like this by being angry, and they both knew Kearney was far better at being understanding and sympathetic. In fact, other cops often drafted him in to talk to victims, simply because he was so good at it.

  For the most part, Todd limited himself to silent, judgemental stares and a vague sense of threat. His own area of expertise.

  Kearney leaned forward.

  'So. Thomas. We meet again, eh?'

  Wells looked up at him. His face was wide, but the features on it were too small. It was like looking down at isolated outposts in a desert, from a height where you couldn't tell if they were occupied any more. But Kearney thought he saw at least a flicker of recognition there. A breeze shifting the sands.

  'Do you remember us?'

  Wells said nothing.

  'Are you comfortable?'

  Nothing.

  'Have you got everything you need?'

  'Yes,' he said. 'Right here.'

  His voice was soft and quiet.

  'Sorry?' Kearney said.

  'I've got them with me right here. That's all I need.'

  It took Kearney a moment to understand.

  'You mean the women, Thomas?'

  Wells nodded once. 'The seed makes the tree,' he said. 'The tree makes the apple. The apple makes the flesh.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'They're a part of me now. I'm made from them.'

  Silence hovered in the air. Kearney felt something inside him slip a little. He thought again about that thermos flask, and realised Wells was talking about consuming a part of the women. Absorbing them into himself.

  'I think I understand, Thomas.'

  'Like meat.' Wells nodded again. 'Meat for the soul.'

  And then, very slowly, he bared his teeth. Kearney forced himself not to respond at all. A moment later, perhaps bored by the apparent lack of reaction, Wells closed his mouth.

  'Because the soul is
in the blood.'

  Kearney said, 'Of course.'

  'That's why.' Wells looked suddenly disappointed. 'You told me you wanted to understand.'

  What? But then Kearney thought back. It was exactly the kind of thing he might have tried in one of the previous interviews: talk to me; I want to understand. Perhaps to coax some kind of confession out of him - or maybe just because it was true. Kearney needs a reason.

  And so he had it now. The soul is in the blood.

  'Thank you,' he said.

  Wells nodded once, graciously. You're welcome.

  It occurred to Kearney then just how much the man had changed since they'd last met. Back then, Wells hadn't been remotely like this. If anything, he'd been scared and confused. Flinching. Unable to look them in the eye. Now, he had come to believe utterly in his own power.

  'Thomas-'

  Wells interrupted him. 'But I didn't kill them.'

  Kearney hesitated. From the fingerprints on the victims, they knew Wells hadn't acted alone.

  'Who did, then?'

  'Nobody. Aren't you listening? They're alive in me now.'

  So he was still on that track. Despite a moment's frustration, Kearney found himself drawn in slightly. His gaze began flicking over Wells's body. They're alive in me now. The most terrible thing was that there was some truth to that. Wells hadn't taken the women's souls, of course, but molecules belonging to them had been absorbed into this man's body, literally becoming part of his flesh. In one sense, by consuming them, he really had imprisoned them inside him. -

  How far would Wells run with the idea, Kearney wondered. If he thought the women really were alive in him, he might be prepared to 'listen' to one of them. Perhaps they could get him to reveal the location of the victims they hadn't found.

  Kearney said, 'And what are they doing?'

  Wells just smiled.

  'Is Rebecca Wingate in there?'

  Wells said, 'The blood weakens the body. But it strengthens the spirit. It's better to have a powerful soul, though, surely?' Then he frowned, suddenly unsure of himself, and looked down at the table. 'Everything's a trade-off, though. And it's better to be strong, isn't it? Yes. It has to be.'