Mother of Demons (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“So far,” Harry said, “there have been three bear attacks and one attack that appeared to be a gunshot wound, but was actually made by, McBride thinks now, an arrow. But lack of any kind of residue in the wound has him scratching his head. All he will say is that the holes are about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, and they pass through the entire body, piercing the heart.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “He told me the same thing. Frankly, Harry, I’m not sure what to do next. It’s been three days since the last attack and since then, nothing. I was expecting a bloodbath, but it just hasn’t worked out like that. The bear attacks were a fifty-year-old man from Dagenham who was walking his dog in the local park, a middle-aged woman from a caravan park in Clacton, and a vicar’s son from Billericay who was attacked in the back garden of the vicarage and had his face torn off and his chest ripped open.”

“What did Essex police do?”

“From what I picked up on the grapevine, they widened their search to the area involved and found nothing. They’ve called off the bear hunt after complaints from local shops and street traders that the police presence and closure of the forest were having an adverse effect on business. I saw on the news this morning that they’ve reopened the forest to the public.”

“Are they still freezing you out?”

“Oh yes. They think they can solve all this without the help from other areas. Bloody idiots! No fresh leads at your end?”

“No. Nothing. Alice seems to have dropped off the planet.”

“Well, she must be somewhere, doing something.”

“Yes, she must be. I phoned my doctor friend again, and she seems to think that Alice could be suffering from what she called ‘meth crash’. It happens when the body shuts down, unable to cope with the drug effects overwhelming it. It results in a long period of sleep for the person that can last one to three days. So it could be why she’s stopped killing.”

“Like a bear hibernating… But where do you think she could be? Also, where’s she getting the meth from now Markos is dead? She must have a supplier.”

“All questions that have been running through my mind…and I haven’t been able to answer one of them.”

“So we’re going to have to wait for her to make the next move.”

“It looks like it.”

“Bloody frustrating.”

“But good news for potential victims.”

“True.”

“How about that drink?”

“I was thinking about that too. Tonight?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Same time, same place. You bring the dominos.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I’ll do that. See you then.”

The line went dead on the sound of her laughter.

Violet was lying on the deeply cushioned couch in the sitting room of her Chelsea home, with her eyes closed.

The room was large, with a high ceiling and ochre-painted walls. The furniture was eclectic, collected from the many places she had traveled. Middle-Eastern carpets clashed with Moroccan wall hangings. Ethnic-styled furniture in s
heersham
and reclaimed oak gave the room a rustic, slightly African feel. A teak root mirror hung from the wall over an authentic cast-iron, art nouveau fireplace original to the house.

Candles covered every surface, and incense sticks smoldered in their hand-beaten brass holders, filling the room with the heady scent of sandalwood. The effect of the incense and candlelight combined to make her feel drowsy and allow her mind to drift—exactly the state she wanted to achieve.

She found it relatively easy to reach a trance state without resorting to drink and drugs; the teachings of a swami in Bengal had helped her harness her own astral body and allow it to roam free, while she lay there and absorbed all the images and sensations it experienced.

Now, as she relaxed, her breathing slow and rhythmic, she stretched out her thoughts, searching for her niece—searching for Alice, out there in the ether.

Once it been no problem connecting to her, but since Alice had started using drugs, Violet had found the pathways closed to her, and her niece’s mind an enigma shrouded in mystery and perplexity.

Today she prayed she would finally make a connection with her.

As she lay there, her eyelids fluttered and her eyeballs danced beneath them. Soon images were filling her head, sweeping her away to another place, another dimension.

She was in a field, a lush green space of verdant grass and crimson poppies. A roe deer traversed the space, stopping occasionally to chew the grass, before looking up with startled eyes and gamboling off to stop at another part of the field. In the distance she could hear the discordant baying of a pack of dogs, close by, lost somewhere in the trees beyond the field.

The scene shifted and she was walking through a forest of densely packed ash and elder, the forest floor beneath her a carpet of autumn-shed leaves and bark and twigs stripped and snapped from the surrounding trees. She sniffed the air and smelled something that reminded her of wet copper. Her prey was near, almost within touching distance. The odor of blood grew stronger as she picked her way through thickets of nettles and thorns, her legs protected by the thick brown fur that covered them.

She saw him then, sheltering close to a swathe of rhododendrons, his eyes frightened, sweat beading his body, his smell a palpable, cloying stench. On his arm was a crude image of Hecate’s wheel, drawn in ink, a labyrinth contained within an outer circle, and she knew without any doubt the he was the one.

She approached him, a low growl rumbling deep in her throat, the stink of his fear almost unbearable. She was a yard away from him and he was holding out his hands to protect himself, but they were nothing but a flimsy barrier, no match for her claws, claws that swooped through the air, rending and tearing, ripping the skin from his body, the flesh from his bones. Blood spurted from ruined, torn arteries and painted the trees a glorious crimson, dripping down the ragged bark and forming pools of scarlet liquid on the forest floor.

“Oh, dear Lord!”

Violet’s eyes snapped open and she jerked upright. The sensation she had just experienced bewildered her for a moment, but the clouds of confusion gradually parted and she started see the awful, horrible reality.

“Alice, my precious Alice. What have you become?” And then a searing pain coursed through her chest, and she clutched at it with desperate hands, willing it to pass, to leave her in peace, but the pain only increased, tightening like a metal strap around her heart and lungs. She gasped once and fell unconscious back on the couch, spittle dribbling from her lips as her skin slowly turned from pink to blue.

Jason let himself into the Chelsea house with his own key. He shut the door behind him and stood in the quarry-tiled hallway, calling her name. “Vi? Vi, it’s me. Where are you?”

There was no reply, but he sensed her presence in the sitting room, ran to the panel door and pulled it open. She had collapsed there, half on and half off of the couch. Her skin gradually turning bluish gray, cyanosis setting in as her body was starved of oxygen.

He yanked his phone from his pocket and called for an ambulance, then crouched down beside her and rested his fingers on her throat, feeling for a pulse. It was there, thin and weak, and close to, he could see her chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly. He stroked a lock of russet hair away from her face and held her close to his chest as tears started to trickle down his cheeks.

“Don’t you die on me, Violet Bulmer. Don’t you die on me, you silly cow.” Away in the distance he could hear the mournful wail of the ambulance approaching. “Soon,” he whispered, as he rocked her gently in his arms. “They’ll be here soon. And then you’ll be all right.”

After what seemed a lifetime, there was a single ring of the doorbell. He laid her gently back down on the couch and went to open the door to the paramedics.

“I’m thinking of handing in my papers,” Susan said.

“Leaving the force?” Harry said, surprise registering in his eyes.

“Pretty much.”

They were sitting in the same booth they had shared before at the Wellington. Paul Anka was crooning from the jukebox: “Diana”
.

“But why?” Harry said. “I had you pegged as a career copper.”

“Perhaps that’s why. So did I.” She sipped her spritzer. “Twenty-five years with the force and all I’ve achieved is detective inspector. It’s too late for me to climb any higher. I can quit on full pension.”

“What, and spend the rest of your life raising begonias and watching daytime TV?”

“I may have loftier ambitions than that. I used to picture myself on the Algarve, running a bar. Sun, sea and sangria.”

“Sangria’s Spanish. The Algarve’s Portugal.”

“Thanks for the geography lesson, but I knew that. They still serve sangria though.”

“Why now, Sue?”

“Truth be told, the Anton Markos case,” she said.

“I’m sure you’ve handled worse in the past.”

“It’s true, I have, and I don’t mind blowing my own trumpet here. I’ve handled them pretty damned well. That was why it was so galling to be booted off the case by that asshole Mackie. He’s paper pusher, a very highly paid one. He knows nothing about real detection. He couldn’t find his prick in a dark room if it didn’t have luminous paint on it.”

“And does it?”

“What?”

“Have luminous paint on it?”

She shuddered. “Pray to God I never have occasion to find out…but you know what I mean. Take Jake Bartlett. Married, two kids, still living in a police flat in Shoreditch, not pulling in a quarter of Mackie’s salary, and Jake’s ten times the copper than Mackie will ever be.”

“So it’s all down to pay grades and pecking orders. Is that why you want to quit?”

“I’m forty-five,” she said. “Married once, disastrously, no kids to look after me when I’m old and gray, working umpteen hours a day, going home and snatching a ready-meal, then going to bed to sleep for perhaps five hours before getting up and doing it all again. I feel like I’m living in a permanent loop of hard work for precious little reward.”

“Not even job satisfaction?”

“So, what, we catch the buggers, only for some mealy-mouthed, overpaid judge to let them off with a slapped wrist. I’m beginning to think, is it all worth it?”

“This is beginning to sound an awful lot like self-pity to me.” Harry said.

“Well, fuck you, Mr. Bailey,” she said, but her face broke into a smile. “Get me another drink, before I forget I’m a lady and smack you in the chops.”

He smiled back her, picked up her glass and took it to the bar for a refill.

As he was standing there, waiting for the barman to finish with another customer, his phone rang in his pocket.

When he got back to the booth, Susan said, “What is it, Harry? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“That was Jason on the phone. Vi Bulmer’s had a heart attack. They’ve taken her to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and put her on life support. I’m going to have to go over there.”

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

“Thanks, but no, I couldn’t put you out…”

She had her coat on before he had even finished the sentence.

“I’m happy to wait around as long as it takes. Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirty

They arrived at the hospital and found their way to the intensive care unit.

A nurse sat at a desk at the end of the corridor, surrounded by a bank of monitors where she could keep an ongoing check on her patients’ condition. Harry approached the desk. The nurse, a dark-haired girl with large, expressive eyes, looked up at him and smiled. “May I help you?” she said, an Irish lilt to her voice.

“I’m here for Violet Bulmer,” he said.

The nurse picked up a clipboard and consulted it. “IC5,” she said. “Just up there on the left.”

“Thank you,” Harry said.

“Just two visitors at the bedside,” the nurse said.

“It’s just the two of us.”

“Yes, but Ms. Bulmer already has one visitor.”

“It’s okay, Harry. I’ll wait here,” Susan said, and crossed to one of the two seats against the wall and sat down.

“There’s coffee there,” the nurse said to her, nodding to a silver vending machine farther along the corridor. Susan smiled her thanks. Harry walked along and found IC5.

He could see Vi through the large, square window. She lay on her back, her head propped up on a pillow, a clear oxygen mask covering her nose and mouth, and an array of wires snaking from different parts of her body, connected to a vital signs machine. Harry was hurled back in time eighteen months, when he had visited an ICU at a different hospital to see his boss and friend Crozier after Simon was attacked and left for dead on the Embankment, next the River Thames.

Another year and another friend, lying in a hospital bed, fighting for their life.

Jason sat at her bedside, looking ashen, his curly black hair awry, cheeks streaked with tears.

Harry entered the room. “How is she?” he said

Jason had his gaze fixed on Violet’s sallow face. “Not good,” he said. “The doctor said she’s had a major coronary. It was lucky I went round to her house when I did. Another half an hour or less and she would have died.”

Harry sat down on the other chair at the bedside. “Can she hear me?”

“She shows no sign that she can. I came with her in the ambulance, and she hasn’t acknowledged my presence yet. The doctor wants her kept quiet.”

“What’s the prognosis?”

“Too early to tell, but he did say that given her age and her condition, she should make a complete recovery.”

“I’ve never known her ill before. I know she was in hospital earlier in the year, from injuries sustained during your abortive investigation, but I’ve never known her
ill
.”

Jason chuckled. “No. Vi’s a tough old bird. Her energy levels put me to shame and she has fifteen years on me.”

“How did you two meet?” Harry said.

“She used to be a volunteer prison visitor, and she would come and see me in Wandsworth.”

Harry’s eyebrows rose slightly. “What were you in for? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I was a naughty boy back then. Nothing serious. Stealing cars, a spot of housebreaking. Nothing violent. Vi came to visit me once as part of her volunteer work, and kept coming back.”

Jason continued to stare at Violet, but behind his eyes, he’d drifted back in his mind. “She’d visit and we’d sit there and talk for hours. I told her about the psychic experiences I’d had since childhood, and she shared some of hers. We had a connection. She helped me out when I was released. My parents had chucked me out and I had nowhere to go. Vi let me stay at her house until I’d got myself back on my feet. I found a job in a pub, bar work, that came with a flat above the pub. I did that and lived there until she asked me to provide backup on a case she was working on. I quit the pub and I’ve worked for her off and on ever since. I suppose you could say she took me under her wing.”

“You two seem very close.”

“She means more to me than my own mother,” Jason said, and Harry saw the tears start to well again in his eyes.

Harry reached across the bed and laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “She’ll get over this, Jason. She’ll pull through.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “As I said, she’s a tough old bird.”

“Not so much of the old.”

They both turned to look at Vi, whose eyes were half-open and staring at them.

“Good to have you back, Vi,” Harry said.

Jason made a sound in his throat, somewhere between a cheer and a sob, and held on to her hand tightly.

“It’s all right, Jason. I’m not dead yet.” Her voice was weak, no more than a whispered croak, and he had to lean forward to hear her clearly. “It’ll take more than a heart attack to make me shuffle off this mortal coil,” she said, and gave a small laugh.

The Irish nurse bustled into the room. She had obviously been keeping a close eye on Violet’s progress. “If you gentlemen could wait outside,” she said and pulled a thermometer from her tunic and slipped it under Vi’s tongue.

“What do you think she was doing to bring this on?” Harry said when they got outside the room.

“When I got to the house, I found her in the sitting room. She had lit candles everywhere and incense sticks burning, so I should imagine she was roaming.”

“Roaming?”

“She has her own technique for freeing her astral self and letting it wander, searching for things and going to places that would be impossible to get to in her corporeal state.”

“What do you think she was searching for?” Harry said.

“I would have thought that was obvious. We still haven’t found Alice yet, and it’s been over three weeks since she went missing.”

“I wonder if she found her.”

“The fact that she’s lying there now in intensive care, wired up to a heart monitor and other things, I would say yes, she probably did. Or came close.”

“Shall I take you back to the Wellington, or do you want to go home?” Harry said as he and Susan drove out of the hospital car park.

“My car’s parked at Waterloo Road,” she said. “You can take me back there and—”

“Sorry the evening’s been such a bust,” Harry said, interrupting her.

“I was going to say, you can take me back to the station to pick up my car and then you can follow me back to my flat. You can come in for a nightcap.”

“But I don’t drink,” Harry said.

“Then I’ll make you coffee. Or is it cocoa for you geriatrics?”

“Cheeky cow,” Harry said with a smile.

Susan let them in to the flat. It was on the first floor of a purpose-built block on Swan Street. “Excuse the mess,” she said, leading him inside.

Harry looked around the cluttered lounge, at the stacks of magazines, piles of CDs and a desk that held an old iMac and piles of household bills and fliers for local takeouts. There was an open can of Red Bull next to the computer, sitting on a CD she was using as a coaster.

She moved a pile of official-looking papers from the seat of a brown, cloth-covered couch and dropped it on the floor.

“Take a seat and I’ll put the kettle on.” She walked out to a small kitchenette and Harry heard the kettle being filled. She put her head back through the doorway. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Harry said, pulled a copy of
Police
magazine stacked in a pile by the window, and flicked it open.

Susan came back into the living room a short while later, carrying two steaming mugs of coffee. “Black, no sugar,” she said. “Instant, I’m afraid. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s what I drink at home.”

She sat down next to him on the couch, leaned across and kissed him on the lips. Harry put his hand behind her head and pulled her closer. “I’ve never kissed a police officer before,” he said when they broke the embrace.

“How was it?” she said.

“Hmm. Arresting.”

“Oh, please.”

Their lovemaking ebbed and flowed, torrid and gentle in equal measure, but always passionate. Susan had a slender body, with firm breasts and a tight, flat stomach, and Harry took great pleasure exploring every inch of it with his hands and tongue. When he slid his hand down the smooth, flat expanse of her belly and through the neat bush of her pubic hair, she opened her legs slightly and moaned softly as his fingers probed the moistness.

“Not bad,” she said when they were spent. “For an old man.”

He slapped her playfully on the buttocks. “Not bad yourself,” he said and lay there looking up at the hairline cracks on the ceiling, listening as her breathing changed into something deeper and more rhythmic, and he realized she was asleep. He pulled the duvet up to cover her shoulders, then rolled over. He was asleep within seconds.

He awoke suddenly, disoriented, trying to grasp where he was, then felt Susan move slightly beside him and remembered. He slid his legs from the bed and padded across to the window.

It had rained and the road below was slick, reflecting the orange light from the overhead street lamps. Somewhere a cat yowled and another answered it. A dark van moved slowly along before turning the corner at the end and disappearing from view.

She was out there somewhere. Alice, the self-styled goddess, with a murderous streak. Lips brushed his neck. He hadn’t heard Susan rise and cross the floor to where he stood.

“Can’t sleep?” she said.

“I can’t switch my brain off,” he said “I drift off and have visions of Vi, in her hospital bed, with Alice standing over her holding a five-bladed knife, and then I wake up.|”

“Drink,” she said with a yawn. Her normally sleek bobbed hair was ruffled and astray, and she’d pulled on a tartan robe that was at least three times too large for her, swamping her slight frame. She looked younger, smaller and adorable.

“Do you have any tea? Coffee won’t help the insomnia.”

“Sure thing,” she said, pecked him on the lips and went out to the kitchen.

When she came back with the cups, he was still standing, gazing out through the window.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I owe it to Vi to find her niece.”

“You
have
tried. We all have.” She took her tea across to the bed and sat, crossing her legs under her and pulling her robe down to cover her knees. “I don’t see what else we can do. We have half the Met out there looking for her, and her photo’s been circulated to other forces throughout the country. I wouldn’t say it’s a full-scale manhunt, but it’s pretty damned close.”

“I appreciate all your help with this,” he said.

“No problem,” she said. “Come back to bed.”

He took one final look along the street and joined her on the bed, where they drank their tea and made love again, before falling asleep until the buzzing of Harry’s cell phone awakened them a few hours later.