Vampire "Unleashed" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 3) (14 page)

He handed the phone back.

“What does he want?” Cornel asked.

“He’s sending transport. He wants the family Popescu and the two of us over to the station.” He sighed and raised a hand to his furrowed brow. “I get the feeling I’m in trouble.”

----- X -----

“Corneliu, oh my goodness, Corneliu it’s good to see you.” Two hands reached for a clasped handshake. Manicured nails, a beautiful shirt, tie and suit. Impeccable hair. Lucian Noica was perfection. He was waiting in Lupescu’s office.

“Hello, Lucian.” Cornel shook hands tiredly and took a seat. Weariness flushed through him the moment he sat.

“The British are all over the McGovern leads you turned up. Have you spoken with them?”

“With who?” Cornel rubbed at his eyes.

“Scotland Yard. Have you spoken with Scotland Yard?”

He shook his head to say no. Behind them Lupescu and Ciprian entered the office. Ciprian walked with confidence. His back straight, his stride long.

“We need to take a statement from you,” Lupescu said to Cornel without any formal greeting. “But before that, just give me the quick version of what happened.”

“From where?”

“From how you ended up in Dumbravita.”

Cornel and Ciprian looked to one another. “Maybe I should answer that,” Ciprian said. “I had the Albanian’s under surveillance on my own time. Then last night they suddenly took off and headed West. I picked up Cornel and we followed. We lost them around Codlea and I realised they could be heading for Dumbravita, so we went to check it out just to be safe.”

Lupescu stared beady eyed at the young officer, shaking his head as though in disagreement. It was like he didn’t believe the story, but wanted to believe. “Fortuitous,” he said.

“Look, the question isn’t how we got to Dumbravita,” Cornel said, “it’s how the Albanians got there? That girl was supposed to be in safety but they found her. They discovered that McGovern bought a property here in Brasov and they went to her home in the early hours. I was with them. Popescu wasn’t there and they didn’t know where she was or even where to start looking, but somehow, within, what... twenty hours? In less than a day they had her precise location in a police safe house.” Cornel threw up his hands. “How is that possible? Who knew where she was?”

“Not many, it’s a short list. I was about to issue an arrest warrant and was looking forward to asking them in person how they found her, but Cojacaru thinks we should wait.”

Cornel nodded, “Yes. I agree... They’re close. They’ve turned up more information on McGovern in one day than the rest of us have in two years and I think they’ve got a plan to flush him out.”

“What plan?” Noica asked.

“The attack on Popescu had only one purpose; to take photographs. They’re shocking pictures. They stripped the girl half naked, cut her scalp to cover her in blood and put a gun in her mouth just to take a photo… Extreme behaviour... And they’ve got McGovern’s email address.”

Noica sat up straight and touched his fingertips to his temples. “Oh my goodness. They’re going to try and enrage him.”

Cornel nodded. “He has an obsession with Popescu.” To Lupescu he asked, “Do you know about his tattoo?”

“No?”

“Sublimation.” Noica took up the story. “When McGovern’s home was discovered in London we found his notes and a peculiar repetition of the word ‘sublimation’. It means to redirect bad thoughts and feelings and channel them towards something positive. Throughout his notes he had written the phrase, ‘Sublimation for Ildico.’ Whilst McGovern was still in the news, a London tattoo artist called the police saying a man fitting his description had the word ‘sublimation’ inked on his left inner forearm. The tattooist took a photograph of it. There was never any definitive link but the circumstances make it ninety nine percent it was him.”

“So he’s got a tattoo, so what?”

“He’s trying to get better,” Noica said. “In psychology we call this Metanoia, it’s where the psyche faces unbearable strain and breaks down, then tries to rebuild itself in a more adaptive way; but the rebuilding, the healing, needs to have something at its core, some kind of idea or value upon which to build. I believe McGovern has chosen this girl and he has had a reminder of his agenda tattooed on his arm.”

“He murdered Albanian gangsters,” Cornel added. “He ambushed and massacred them to steal their money and he did that so he could buy this girl a new home. She is his reason to be and I don’t think he’s going to sit still if he sees pictures of her covered in blood.”

Lupescu leaned back in his chair and took his eyes away from the conversation, visibly removing himself, going into thought. “They have attacked a police woman,” he said. “I can’t do nothing. I can’t not pick them up for this.”

“You can only pick them up if you can find them,” Cornel said. “Even if you have a statement from the victims, how are you supposed to identify who did it? I haven’t yet told you where to find them and neither has Ciprian. The only people who know who perpetrated the crime are the four of us in this room. We can sit on it, Ion. You have a choice, you can arrest them now for giving a policewoman a bash on the head, or you can give them some time and let them flush out a serial killer.”

“How much time?”

Cornel shrugged. “I think we have to play it by ear and see what develops… In the meantime, we need to decide what we do with Popescu? Where do we put her? How do we keep her safe? The obvious place is state protection but that is...”

“...Untrustworthy,” Lupescu interrupted.

“I’m thinking,” Cornel continued, “that perhaps you can take her, Lucian. Take her to your institute.”

Noica shuffled in his chair uneasily. “I can’t, I couldn’t take her, I’m… I’m not police, or… or…”

“This girl needs a place to stay and the Albanians found her when she was cared for by this very station. I guarantee you that state protection is unreliable at best. You’re not even on any maps, Lucian… and the only people who would know where she would be are the four people in this room… You’ve got a nursing staff who live in, right? You have accommodation?”

Noica went quiet. He didn’t agree to take her, but he didn’t disagree. An uncomfortable silence descended as they waited for him to speak.

“Look, take her for a few days at least. Give us a chance to find her somewhere safe. Can you do that… I know you can, but will you? Will you help?”

Noica rubbed at his chin, then his ear, then shuffled his weight in the chair. He didn’t answer, but as each second ticked by his possible list of excuses drew thinner until he had nothing else to ponder. “Yes,” he said sheepishly. “I’ll take her.”

PART IV

TWO WEEKS LATER

North of Bran, unseen to almost all, were the ruins of a deserted town. The buildings were derelict, broken hovels of stonework with dilapidated rooftops. There were a few small apartment blocks of three and four stories, stripped of their window frames and doors to render them uninhabitable. Then the buildings became piles of rubble from professional demolition. Piles of stones, now snow covered to turn the crushed masonry into rolling snowdrifts

It would be a place of desolate wilderness had there not been a cleared road through the town. A road that went from one area of nothing, to a more remote area of nothing. If you followed the road to its end you would find a building amongst the crook of a mountain ridge. It was well maintained, secretive, with blackened windows and imposing concrete. There was a car park under security cameras, but other than a handful of cars there was nothing to suggest there was anybody there.

If you got close enough there was a small brass plate by the doorbell labelled as ‘Institut de Cercetare Psychopathalogical’. The institute of Psychopathological Research, the workplace of Doctor Lucian Noica. It wasn’t listed on any maps, nor did it have an address. It had coordinates and a list of instructions on how to get there. Go north of Bran. Head towards nothingness. Keep going.

Paul McGovern had followed those instructions. He’d found them on the laptop of Detective Corneliu Latis. He’d watched this place for months. Almost every day he’d looked down from atop the mountain ridge. The hospital was circular and at its centre, in the courtyard, was an old church. Paul could look at that church all day. He’d even built a small hide so he could sit and stare at it. He was drawn to it like a moth to the light.

It was mid-morning and he’d been there since dawn. Feeling the place soak into him. Empowering him.

From the high vantage he could see for miles along the single road that approached the building and this morning he saw the familiar silver Mercedes of Lucian Noica. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said to himself. He knew the car well. He’d followed it carefully many times as he’d traced out Noica’s behaviour.

Paul came away from his observation point and trekked down onto the opposite side of the ridge to check his traps and found a squirrel hanging by a wire noose. Squirrels followed the same route in and out of their tree and once their tracks were identified the route could be snared. The little creature swayed from a low branch, its eyes squeezed out of its skull by the wire lasso.

The snow was powdery, a quirk of the weather and altitude that snow here didn’t stick. He kicked along the ground to find fallen branches and snapped fine kindling twigs from the trees. He assembled his collected wood into a teepee shape in an often used fire-pit. The wood was wet and frozen but he’d learned how to make fire in almost any circumstance. Today he made it easy on himself by using a hexamine fuel brick.

“Lunch, Ildico,” he said to the empty forest. “Squirrel for lunch.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and summoned the vision.

He opened them.

Ildico stood on the other side of the fire. She wore her white puffer coat. Today her hair was untied and falling over her shoulders. She stared into the flames and Paul watched the reflections of the fire in her eyes.

She didn’t say anything. She never said anything.

Paul rested the squirrel on a log and used a folding knife to cut off the head and front feet then pulled out each back leg to trim its rear claws, tossing the amputations into the fire. The tail swished as he stretched the legs out. He flipped the knife over to squeeze the point under the skin and cut along its belly, then peeled it back. It took strong hand wringing to tear the pelt from muscle but it came away as a single piece of soft fur which he held out to show Ildico. She was nearer now, she looked at the animal pelt and leaned a little closer to smell it. Paul turned his game over and cut through the abdomen and rib cage to expose the organs. This was the messy part. He got his fingertips inside the animal to break its matchstick ribs and snapped open the chest to pull out the entrails. The heart was the size of a kidney bean, the liver slightly larger; both were edible. They were delicacies.

He skewered his meat and rested it by the base of the fire to slow cook and stared out at the near endless vista of snow fields.

Ildico had vanished and he was alone again.

His mind wandered.

He’d done things that some people would describe as terrible, but this was where he would put it back together. This was his space to organise his thoughts and his feelings and he spent most of his time reading survival guides, learning to trap and live off the land in a bid to become self-sufficient.

There was a pride to it. Satisfaction. Ordinary men his own age couldn’t do what he was doing. They couldn’t survive out here. They couldn’t cut off the head of a squirrel. They couldn’t remain unmoved as its mouth fell open and its tongue hung loose and its little eyes bulged as it was squeezed. They would balk as the blood worked its way into the creases of their fingers, or when the animal’s fats worked under their fingernails. They would look away and wretch if forced to scoop out its entrails with bare hands.

Paul took the squirrel from the fire and tentatively bit away some flesh from the edge. It tasted sweet, somewhere between duck and lamb. Food had never been fresher, but what it really tasted of was accomplishment. This was his life now; and this is how it would stay until he was better.

----- X -----

It was dark inside the little stone hovel. The sunlight was blotted by the mountain ridge and there was only one tiny window to his room, but no matter what time of day or what weather condition, the wilderness was always stunning to behold.

It was difficult to understand what purpose his home could have been built for, perhaps that was why it was abandoned. It was on the opposite side of the ridge to Lucian Noica and his institute, but the buildings here had been razed in similar fashion. Some catastrophe must have engulfed the town for it to end up abandoned and demolished, but on this side of the ridge there were a handful of hovels in fair condition. Paul’s was a small, single room made from drystone. Perhaps it was a shed for farm tools, perhaps a small barn or farmers refuge. Whatever it was it had been abandoned decades ago. The wooden roof had decayed and rotted but Paul repaired it with a tarpaulin he’d found shielding a rusted plough. It was a strange blocky stone room on the edge of a field at the foot of a mountain. Perfect for a hermit needing space.

He struck a match to a hexamine brick for his portable stove. The hexamine looked like a small bar of soap and gave off a waxy, paraffin smell.

He scooped a little snow into a cup and put it on the stove, then laid back onto his bed of hay. He rested with one hand behind his head and closed his eyes to contemplate his love. He summoned the picture of himself laying soft kisses on her stomach. He focussed his imagination to blot out the smell of the hexamine, he willed away the dried hay and earthiness of the hovel so he could flood his senses with the scent of her skin. His imagination went further. He tasted the cheap essence of her hairspray on his lips, then caught a whiff of the plain soap she used. That smell set off his imagination with more vigour and he pictured her sitting in a bathtub by candle light, her wet hair was stuck to her back and shoulders. She scooped a handful of water, lifted it to her shoulder and let it run down her back.