Uprising

Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_756b41c3-4208-5281-9a9d-b4fc6d6420cf)

St Aldates Police Station

12.39 p.m.

The ham and cheese baguette sat untouched on Joel’s desk. He’d peeled half the cellophane wrapping off it ten minutes ago, before realising that the hollow, gnawing feeling at the pit of his stomach wasn’t hunger. He couldn’t eat a bite.

He’d been sitting staring blankly at his lunch ever since; but what he was seeing in front of him wasn’t an uneaten sandwich. It was the pale face and dark-ringed eyes of a badly frightened young guy in a hospital ward, locked in a mental battle against himself. His brain tearing itself in two, striving yet dreading to believe the impossible. The only thing more terrifying than the fear that you were going crazy was the fear that the nightmare was for real.

Joel knew that. He’d been through it before, and he was fighting desperately not to start feeling that way again now. It was as if he were suddenly viewing the world through a distorting lens. Reality had shifted gears, sidestepped into a parallel dimension where the normal parameters of logic and rationality had been blown away. He was standing on the brink of the abyss, looking down.

He shoved the sandwich out of the way and snatched up his phone. Dan Cleland was Joel’s closest contact at the forensic lab. Joel asked him if there was any way they could speed up the tests on the Maddon samples.

‘That depends on what you mean by speed up.’

‘Today?’

‘Hmmm. Pushing it.’

‘It’s pretty important, Dan.’

Cleland sighed. ‘Okay, because it’s you. Leave it with me, and I’ll get back to you by the end of the afternoon.’

Joel felt better after the call. If Dec Maddon’s pills turned out to be ecstasy and the blood sample tested positive for the drug, then maybe he could breathe again. Maybe the world would return to normal. Maybe the vampires inside his head would go slinking back into the world of the imagination where they belonged, and bad dreams would remain just dreams.

Maybe.

Joel lobbed the ham and cheese baguette into his waste bin and reached for his coffee. It was cold.

The Jag was blasting down the outside lane of the motorway at just a shade under ninety, heading in towards London, as Alex talked to Harry Rumble on her phone. He listened quietly as she ran through the account of her morning. There was just one thing she left out.

‘What I don’t get,’ Rumble said after she’d finished, ‘is why a detective inspector, someone high up, a guy up to his eyeballs day to day in serious crime, even in a hick town like Oxford, would go out of his way like that to talk to some kid on a petty drugs charge who’s raving on about stuff no humans would take seriously.’

‘That’s because he believes the story, Harry.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I could smell his fear. I saw the look in his eyes. I don’t think he wants to admit it to himself yet. He’s holding back. But trust me. He believes.’

Rumble thought for a moment. ‘He believes, even though he has nothing to go on but the testimony of a kid who might very well have dreamed the whole thing up on drugs? Then he’s either highly impressionable—’

‘Which he isn’t,’ Alex cut in. ‘He’s young, around thirty. If he’s made DI by then, it means he’s ambitious and determined and he’s no idiot. Guys like him don’t do impressionable. There’s another reason.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.

When the call was over, she gripped the steering wheel and pressed a little harder on the gas, felt the surge of the Jaguar’s engine as the needle flirted with the hundred mark. Her acute senses could make out every minute detail of the rushing tarmac, computing speed and distance to a degree of accuracy that a fighter pilot could only dream of. She was completely in control, completely zoned in. Of course she was: she was a vampire.

So why was her heart fluttering like this?

That was the part she hadn’t told Harry.

As she drove, all she could think about was Joel Solomon. And she knew the reason why.

Chapter Seventeen (#ulink_7179c9cc-eacb-5205-98ab-c8e3d260e7fa)

Joel was on his way over to the machine to get himself a fresh cup of warm coffee when he spotted Carter steaming the other way down the corridor with a phalanx of uniformed officers in his wake. He was built like a bear and when he was moving fast, like he was now, the world simply parted to make way for him or it got knocked flat on its back.

Superintendent Sam Carter was thirteen years older than Joel, and they’d been friends for ten of those years, ever since Joel had joined up with Thames Valley. Joel knew him pretty well – well enough to know that behind the gruff exterior was a guy who burst into tears at the mere sound of Dolly Parton’s voice, especially when he was drunk, which wasn’t unusual for him. And well enough to know that when he had the grim look on his face that he was wearing now, something extremely serious was up.

‘What’s happening?’ Joel asked as Carter swept past. It was like trying to catch a ride on a moving train.

‘You want to know? Come with me.’

Carter filled Joel in as the squad car sped out of Oxford and headed south towards Sonning Eye.

‘Member of the public found her half an hour ago. Or a piece of her, at any rate. Hell of a mess. The divers are still fishing bits out of the river.’

‘Do we know who she is?’

‘Not a clue.’ Carter looked at him. ‘You look like shit, Solomon.’

‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.’ And Joel was beginning to feel it.

The scene was already milling with personnel and vehicles by the time they got there. A quarter-mile stretch of river had been cordoned off with police barrier tape. Extra officers were being drafted in from across the county to keep back the crowd of locals that was quickly growing as word spread of the grisly find. Inflatable launches burbled up and down the river carrying frogmen and recovery equipment. As Joel followed Carter across the grassy bank towards the riverside, he could see a lot of very sick expressions on the officers’ faces. Away in the trees, where he thought nobody could see him, a young rookie constable was heaving his guts out.

The police pathologist at the scene was Jack Brier. Mutilated corpses were his stock in trade, but even he looked a little greyer than Joel had ever seen him before. He was crouched over a bodybag in the grass, pulling off a pair of surgical gloves as Joel crossed the inner cordon and walked over to him. A couple of police photographers had just finished up and were packing away their equipment.

‘Hell of a thing,’ Brier muttered to Joel and Carter. ‘Have you had lunch? Then don’t look.’

Joel stared down at the thing in the bodybag.

Brier chuckled at the expression on his face. ‘Told you. She’s seen better days, that’s for sure. We’ve recovered the head, most of the trunk, the left arm and what’s left of the right leg. The rest could have floated down into Berkshire by now.’

‘What did this?’ Carter asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Brier shrugged. ‘Hard to tell, until we get her on the slab and have a poke around inside. If this was Alaska, I’d say a grizzly had taken a bite out of her.’ He gave a dark grin. ‘But this isn’t Alaska.’

‘Jesus,’ Carter mumbled. He’d seen enough. He looked away, watching the divers and visibly trying to control his emotions.

‘The strangest thing is,’ Brier went on. ‘I mean, I can’t be sure just yet, but look how little lividity there is. And she’s still fresh, too. Not been in the water more than six, seven hours tops. Cut a long story short, it looks to me like this young lady has been completely exsanguinated, even before she was dissected.’

‘In English,’ Carter said.

Joel answered for Brier. ‘He’s saying something drained her blood.’

‘Drained her blood,’ Carter repeated flatly.