Dire Straits (7 page)

‘A private chatroom. People contact me directly through that.’ He shrugs. ‘I used to contact them the old-fashioned way and write codes in birthday cards, that kind of thing, but it became too much hassle. Everyone prefers the internet these days.’ He sounds miffed, as if it’s a personal affront.

I gently manoeuvre him back to the real topic of the conversation. ‘What’s her name? The client’s?’

‘I only ever knew her via her avatar, Lucy.’

Just like Mina’s friend in the book
Dracula
, I realise. The one who enjoyed ensnaring men while human but who then turned vampire. Appropriate. ‘Lucy could still be a man,’ I point out.

‘Nah. I know how women write. This was definitely a woman.’

I’m not sure I can trust him on this but I’m prepared to let it go for now. ‘Why would anyone want you dead?’

‘I don’t know. I’m a good boy.’ He blinks at me innocently.

‘A good boy who deals in dodgy under-the-counter magic and who was almost drained of all his blood.’

He juts out his bottom lip. ‘It must be the spell.’

‘How long do the effects last?’

‘Please. I’m a professional. They’re permanent. Cast this baby and, believe me, you ain’t having any more babies.’

I’m startled. ‘You mean you don’t just deal? You created the spell?’

‘Of course. There’s no other spell like it,’ he says, but then his face falls. ‘Yeah, they tried to kill me for the spell.’

Perhaps. But that doesn’t explain why they – whoever ‘they’ are – also tried to set me up for his murder. Or why they succeeded in murdering pretty much everyone in my company. Or what would make Tam involved. It all seems so sordid and very, very petty.

I remember something Tam once said to me about sex and money. I’d only just joined Dire Straits and I’d expressed my frustration about the lack of variety in the assignments I was given. He laughed and said that in the end there was never any variation, that cases always boiled to either one or both of two things: sex and money. I certainly have the sex element here but that seems unimportant. From what O’Shea has told me, it seems as if this has more to do with power. And power equals money. I need to start with that and track down his original client.

‘How much were you being paid?’ I ask.

Before O’Shea can answer, a phone starts to ring. The pair of us jump. I get to my feet and look for the source of the sound, eventually discovering an old-fashioned Mickey Mouse phone to the side of the sofa.

‘You don’t know where your own phone is in your own flat?’

‘It’s not my damn flat,’ I snap and lift the receiver.

‘It’s me.’

I’m relieved. ‘Excellent timing.’

‘Your flat’s fine. It’s being watched but it’s not been obviously turned over.’

I nod. That makes sense. It would be far too suspicious if the prime suspect in a murder had her flat robbed on the same day. The theft of my handcuffs was clearly done surreptitiously. I really hate the idea of someone rooting around my things. I think of my underwear drawer and shudder.

‘You have only three more nights at Markmore.’

‘That’s fine.’ I’ll either be in the morgue by then or I’ll have sorted out an alternative of my own. ‘There’s something else I need you to do.’

‘I’ve got homework.’

‘It’s four o’clock in the morning!’

‘So?’

The vagaries of teenagers. ‘This won’t take long,’ I say, hoping I sound persuasive.

There’s a heavy sigh. ‘Okay. What?’

‘Find someone called Lucy.’

I pick the phone up, annoyed at the short cable as I try to stretch it across the room, and hold the receiver to O’Shea’s ear.

‘You’re going to tell the person on the end of this phone how to access your private chatroom,’ I tell him.

‘Who’s on the end of this phone?’

‘Just tell them.’

Chapter Seven: Hacker

I first met Rogu3 three years ago, long before I’d heard of Dire Straits. He was eleven years old then, making him fourteen now. I’m terrified of what he’ll be like when he finally matures into an adult.

I was working as an insurance fraud investigator at the time for one of those large faceless companies whose bottom line is always about profit. It was a truly awful job and I hated every minute of it. They were often happy to pay out small amounts as they felt that gave them an ‘honest face’. When it came to larger sums of money, however, it was an entirely different story.

The organisation dealt mainly in life insurance. The basic package covered accidental death, such as car crashes, as well as dying as a result of long-term (although never pre-existing) conditions. The premium package included a much wider range, such as death by triber. It also provided a payout in the event that your loved one was inadvertently transformed into a vampire. They called this ‘implicit passing’ – the bigwigs at the company loved their euphemisms. Customers signed up for the premium package in droves. At the time, I suspected it was down to some carefully planted articles in the media about helpless victims who were turned while out shopping or at the park with their kids. It was all nonsense, of course. Each of the vampire Families only recruits new members once or twice a decade, depending on their attrition rates. And there is never any shortage of volunteers or ‘vampettes’ as the human hangers-on are known. No Family would be so crass as to randomly turn someone who was doing nothing more than going about their daily business.

Cleverly, the premium policies were considered null and void if someone voluntarily turned themselves over to the bloodguzzlers. So say you were dying a long and drawn out death of cancer, and you happened to luck into a Family recruitment drive and were chosen to be turned, then your loved ones received nothing. If you chose to die quietly, they got a semi-generous payout. I understand why so many tried so hard to achieve the alternative. Few succeeded. With such a large pool to choose from, the Families can afford to be choosy. There are plenty of people lining up who aren’t sick; they want to be vampires because of a spine-chilling blood lust or a desire for a longer life.

Where the insurance company’s genius really paid off, however, was that once you were recruited into a Family, you disappeared. Contrary to popular myth, it’s only new vampires who are vulnerable to the sun’s glare. To protect them from daylight, and keep them away from the general public because they can’t control their desire to drink blood, new recruits are often not seen for years after their transformation. Even when they’re finally allowed to make contact with their loved ones, few choose to do so, preferring to remain immersed in the new life they’ve chosen for themselves. Vampires are notoriously loyal and the Families are tight-lipped about whether someone has been accepted or not. Part of that is down to their own politics, and not wanting rival Families to see what new blood, so to speak, is available. But I’ve heard that it’s also because often recruits don’t survive the initial turning process.

This is a dream come true for insurance. If no one can prove that you’ve been turned, then no one can prove that you haven’t – so the insurers don’t have to pay up. Of course this only works in the absence of a body but if, for example, you bumped into a Kakos daemon and were in possession of a premium policy, there would be no body left as evidence and no one would receive the money. The insurance company would send out a standard letter informing the real family that in all likelihood the victim voluntarily went vamp and no money would be paid out. All due regrets and blah blah blah.

There are other tribers besides Kakos daemons who are also impressively circumspect with the leftovers of their attacks. Considering that the vast majority are of the ‘live and let live’ variety, however, I had strong suspicions that the company paid some less savoury tribers (and probably humans too) to dispose of many corpses of people who died from natural causes. I could never prove it. They were – and indeed still are – far too clever to leave a trail. But when I worked there, there was an incredible number of people whose bodies were never recovered and whose policies were cancelled as a result.

It was my job to investigate cases where the bodies were missing. I was green, which is probably why I’d been recruited in the first place. The insurance company could put its hand on its heart and say their investigators had done the best job they could but had discovered no evidence to prove it hadn’t been a voluntary vampire recruitment. It didn’t help that there was a bonus for investigators who
didn’t
find any evidence to disprove voluntary turning.

I didn’t last long at the company. To be frank, almost any job would have been better than depriving normal, hard-working families of the insurance payouts they deserved. God knows, they already had enough to deal with once their loved one was dead without being screwed by the company. I’ve come across other insurers since that have been far more honourable. But the guys I worked for were bastards.

Things came to a head with Alice Goldman. She disappeared when she was seven and a half years old, snatched in broad daylight half a mile from her house. It was all over the news. For a time, people assumed it was a straightforward abduction and that sooner or later she’d be ransomed then released, or her mutilated body would be found in a ditch by some traumatised dogwalker. But her body was never discovered. About two weeks after her disappearance, her discarded clothes were found in a bin, soaked in as much blood as a seven year old can have. The blood was a match for hers.

After months of grieving, the Goldman family pulled themselves together and put in a claim. Unfortunately for me – but perhaps fortunately for them – I was the investigator. I was given strict instructions from on high to deal with the case as ‘quickly and quietly’ as possible. I knew what that meant: spend a day or two looking for evidence then, in its absence, put in a standard report stating it was possible she’d voluntarily applied to the vampires. Even if the Families’ own laws didn’t prevent them from recruiting anyone who was under twenty-one, little Alice Goldman’s biggest concern was whether Barbie would find her lost shoe, not whether she’d live to be two or three hundred years old.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was going to find evidence to prove she’d not gone to the vampires and shove it under the insurance bigwigs’ noses then force them to pay that family what they deserved. Why I thought I’d succeed in finding out what happened to her when half the British police force couldn’t, I have no idea. But I wasn’t going to let the Goldmans get that standard fucking response letter.

I spent a day tramping around Alice’s former neighbourhood and knocking on doors, trying to find anyone who knew anything useful. People were polite but they were exhausted. The police had covered the area and spoken to everyone more than once. So had the journalists. The residents had had enough. After several hours, I sat down on the edge of a pavement, utterly defeated.

My gloom was interrupted by a small high-pitched voice. ‘Are you here for Alice?’

When I turned round, I saw a scruffy little boy holding a skateboard and looking down at me.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘You won’t find her.’

‘I know.’ To this day I don’t know why I continued talking to him. I guess I just needed someone to be on my side, even if it was a kid. ‘But I need to find something that’ll prove she didn’t give herself up to one of the Families.’

‘The bloodguzzlers? That’s stupid. Everyone knows they don’t take kids.’

Yeah, I thought sadly, everyone
does
know that. But it doesn’t matter.

‘You’re not police,’ he said, assessing me.

‘No. I work for an insurance company.’

He sat down beside me, carefully propping up his board. He kept touching it as we talked, as if he needed to check it was still there.

‘They won’t pay, will they?’ he said, understanding more than I would have given him credit for.

‘No. No, they won’t.’

A group of kids on bikes passed us. A few of them yelled obscenities at my new companion. He ignored them. ‘I can go speak to them if you want. Stop them from bothering you,’ I said.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘They don’t bother me. They’re just a bunch of losers.’

I dug into my pockets, found a crumpled pack of chewing gum and held it out to him. ‘Want one?’

He suddenly grinned at me. ‘Sure.’ He shoved the gum into his mouth and chewed furiously. ‘I can help you.’

I’m not sure if it was because of his chewing or because I was surprised by his words, but I had to ask him to repeat what he’d said said.

‘I can help you. I can get you the evidence you need.’

Of course I didn’t believe him. But rather than hurt his feelings, I tried a different tack. ‘Why would you do that?’

He shrugged. ‘Cause you seem nice. And Alice was my friend. She came round sometimes when her mum was working.’

He stood up, picked up his skateboard and started to walk away. When he was several feet in front of me, he turned. ‘Well, are you coming or not?’

I came. I’m sure it was highly inappropriate, following a child back to his house and going into his garage alone with him, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

His garage didn’t contain a car or a lawnmower or half-dried-up tins of paint like most people’s. This kid’s garage was covered wall to ceiling in flashing state-of-the-art computers. I stared, open-mouthed.

‘I built most of this myself,’ the boy said proudly, closing the heavy door and plunging us into near darkness. ‘I started out with an old system of my dad’s then went from there.’

This was a nice neighbourhood but it didn’t seem like the kind of place where the inhabitants had this kind of money to throw around. I felt as though I’d inadvertently walked into the Batcave.

‘How do you pay for all this?’ I asked suspiciously. If all this stuff turned out to belong to his father who worked for some government division, then I could get myself into a lot of trouble just by seeing it.

He gave me a cheeky wink. ‘I’ve got skills. And don’t worry – my parents never come in here.’

I wasn’t sure whether to feel reassured or nervous at that comment. He pointed at a dusty chair well away from the gleaming screens.

‘Sit there,’ he instructed.

I did as I was told. He turned his back on me and began tapping furiously into one of several keyboards. He didn’t even bother to sit down. All I could see on the screens were lines of undulating green code.

‘How many Families are there?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got the Medicis, Montserrat, Stuart and Bancroft.’

For a moment, I was so taken aback I couldn’t think. ‘Er…’ I stuttered. ‘There are five.’

He snapped his fingers. ‘Gully!’ His hands flew over the keys and he started to mutter to himself. ‘Damn. The Montserrat system is well defended.’

I blinked rapidly. ‘Are you hacking into the Families’ computers?’

‘Yeah. Cool, huh? Those bloodguzzlers should learn a bit more about the modern age and protect themselves. The Stuart firewall is a piece of shit.’

‘ Don’t swear,’ I said automatically, realising I still didn’t know his name, ‘I’m not sure this a good idea. If they find out…’

‘Relax, lady. I’ve covered my tracks.’

I bristled slightly at being called ‘lady’ by a kid. ‘You shouldn’t mess with the vampires,’ I said sternly. ‘Even though you’re young, they’ll still be pissed off when they find you.’

He spun on his heel and faced me, then reached behind without looking and pressed a single key, all the while grinning and sticking out his tongue. ‘Too late!’ he sang out.

‘What? What do you mean too late?’

‘The Families have each just emailed the police in order to help them with their enquiries. They’ve never recruited anyone under the age of twenty-one. They have nothing to do with the abduction of Alice Goldman. Anyone who suggests otherwise, even by implication, will meet their wrath.’

My jaw dropped.

His grin widened. ‘I like that word
wrath
. I used it in a story in school last week. The teacher almost wet her knickers in delight.’

‘The vampires don’t involve themselves in human matters. They’d never contact the police.’

‘Except they just did.’

In a corner of the garage, a small red light began to flash and an alarm sounded. I leapt up out of my chair, half expecting a crew of vampires to burst in. The kid just scowled. ‘Mum and Dad are home. You’d better go.’

‘Um…’

He threw me a tiny piece of card. It was shiny and gold with ROGU3 embossed on it. ‘These are my details. Like I said, Alice was my friend so this is a freebie. If you need me again, though, and you’re willing to pay, then I can help you out in the future.’ He looked wistfully at the now-darkened computer screens. ‘There’s a lot of more up-to-date equipment I’d like to get.’

I stared down at the card then back at him.

‘Rogu3?’

He looked at me as if as I had about three brain cells to rub together. ‘It’s not Rogu-three. It’s Rogue. Now, I really have to go. They don’t like it when I spend too much time in here.’