By Midnight

by Mia James

  She looked up at herself in the mirror. The look of fear was definitely there now. Because it made sense. Why had she assumed there was anyone else lurking in the bushes when she had gone to help the fox? Yes, she’d seen those sinister eyes in the undergrowth, but that could have been Gabriel. It had all happened so fast, she wasn’t sure of anything any more. And that would explain the rest, too. He had waited to see if she would pass his name to the police and when she hadn’t, he had found her at the party and - Oh no! Had he taken her into the cemetery that night to kill her? She ran through it all in her head. Think, dammit, think! He had stood behind her in the Circle of Lebanon and she had thought he was going to kiss her, but maybe he’d had other plans. Had she spoilt them by turning around? And then she had mentioned her dad and he had rushed her out of there. He must have realised that her dad was on to something and decided to wait. Had she led her father’s killer straight to him?

  She shook her head. It was all too much. Her breathing was coming in sobs now and her heart was hammering. How could I have been so blind?

  And then he had lured her out of the house in middle of the night, asking her to go for a walk down to the Heath. What if I had gone? And then the final piece of the jigsaw dropped in. Gabriel would have seen that she wasn’t in Philosophy class that morning, he would have known Mr Sheldon would keep her back after school. In fact, she had seen him there, watching the road to make sure. Igave him the opportunity to kill my dad!

  She jumped as she heard hammering on the door.

  ‘April? Are you okay in there? Listen, I’m coming in,’ said Reece, opening the door a crack and peering around. April grabbed a handful of paper towels and wiped her face hurriedly. She couldn’t tell Reece about Gabriel, not now. No, she needed evidence first, real evidence.

  ‘I’m okay, I’m fine,’ she said quickly. ‘Maybe it was the lasagne.’

  ‘It wasn’t me talking about that night in Swain’s Lane—’

  ‘No, no, just a stomach bug, I should think. There’s always something nasty going around.’

  Reece looked at her long and hard. Then he just nodded. ‘You’re right about that,’ he said. ‘Come on, I’d better get you home.’

  The house was quiet when she got in.

  ‘Mum?’

  April walked into the kitchen. Her mother’s coat and bag were there, plus an empty wine glass with lipstick on the rim.

  ‘Mum? Are you here?’

  She tiptoed up the creaky stairs and along the corridor, opening her parents’ bedroom door a crack to peek through. As she had expected, April found her mother sprawled out face down on the bedspread, ‘star-shaped’ as Fiona used to say. It wasn’t much of a surprise; April had suspected that Silvia’s long days in bed were due to a combination of wine and sleeping pills. She couldn’t really blame her, there were times when April would rather blot it all out too; but not now. Now April wanted to be wide awake. She didn’t want distractions, she didn’t want to be cocooned from the pain, she wanted to face it all head-on, because more than anything she wanted to know the truth, however hard it was to bear. Gabriel as the killer - could it really be true? It made her physically ill to think about it, but it was time to stop thinking and start acting. She needed to work out why Gabriel had killed her father: did he know something about him? Had Gabriel come here looking for something? Perhaps something her father had uncovered? Either way, she needed evidence to back up her growing suspicions. And where better to start looking than right here? The scene of the crime, her mind taunted her. The place where he died.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ she whispered and walked back down the stairs, grasped the handle of the study door and pushed. And there was … nothing. April let her breath out slowly as she sat down on the corner of the desk. Aside from the conspicuous absence of the rug that had covered most of the floor, you wouldn’t have known anything had happened here. That was precisely what was making her knees feel weak; in removing signs of the struggle, they had also removed all traces of her father. The study was neat and tidy, even the chair had been placed carefully back under the desk. She looked in the drawers: empty. There wasn’t even a coffee cup or a half-read newspaper to show that anyone had ever been here. She ran a hand over the wooden surface of the desk, trying to feel some trace of him, some warmth left by his fingertips.

  ‘I miss you, Dad,’ she whispered, ‘I miss you so much.’

  She didn’t know she was crying until she saw the tears drop onto the leather seat. It came over her in an unbidden wave, swallowing her up. ‘Why did you leave us?’ she moaned, gulping in air. She had lost the one strong, reliable thing in her life and he had been taken from her by the only other man she’d ever felt anything for. It was horrible. Horrible.

  ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair …’ She fell to her knees, almost hugging the chair. She wanted to be strong and full of purpose, but she was just a little girl and she didn’t know what to do. ‘What do I do?’ she whispered. ‘You always knew what to do.’ She stayed like that, her back bent, head twisted to the side, letting it all flow out, and after a while the storm of tears passed; her breathing slowed and her body stopped shaking. So wrapped up in her grief had she been that she hadn’t realised what she was looking at. Under the desk, at the back, she could see a tiny bit of sky blue. Frowning, she crawled further into the knee well for a closer look. There was a narrow gap in the woodwork between the back panel of the desk and the drawers and something was jammed in between them. She felt around with her fingers but it wouldn’t budge. She shuffled back out and found a pencil in a pot on a shelf, then ducked back down. Using the pencil to wiggle the object, she slowly worked it out. Her heart leapt: it was the notebook she had pilfered from this very desk the night of Isabelle’s death.

  Eagerly, she sat back in the chair and flicked through the book. This is it, she thought, this is what I need. Her heart was racing now. The last time she had leafed through the book she had been annoyed by her dad’s spidery handwriting and opaque references, but now they looked like lifelines, bright breadcrumbs to lead her along the path.

  ‘1674—1886?’ read one entry; ‘Churchyard Bottom/Coldfall Woods’ read another. At the top of another page was what looked like a book title: Infernal Wickedness, Kingsley-Davis, 1903, with the note ‘nests?’

  Her eyes opened wide. Nests! That was one of the words on the Post-it she’d thrown at him that last morning. Her fingers tightened on the pages, almost frightened the notebook would fly away. This was exactly what she needed; if not a road map, exactly, then at least a handful of possible places where she could follow in her father’s footsteps. Of course, she knew she should probably go straight after Gabriel, but that could be dangerous to say the least and, besides, he was hardly going to break down and confess without some evidence to confront him with. No, this book was a sign. It was a piece of her father. It had his thoughts and his passion caught for ever between its covers. And he had obviously hidden it. Had he wanted her to find it here? She clasped it to her chest and whispered, ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘April?’

  She froze. Oh God, Mum’s awake, she thought, jumping out of the chair and stuffing the notebook into her pocket.

  ‘April? Is that you?’

  Silvia was calling from the top of the stairs, her voice thick with sleep. April silently closed the study door and padded to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ said her mother grumpily. ‘I thought I heard a burglar.’

  ‘Just going out,’ she said, taking her coat from the end of the banister and pulling it on. ‘You want anything?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  April thought for a moment. ‘The bookshop. I need to do some research. Homework,’ she added quickly.

  Silvia scratched her messy hair. ‘God, you’re just like your father,’ she said groggily. ‘Be back for supper, I’ll order pizza or something.’

  April had almost made it to the doo
r before her mother called her back.

  ‘Oh, and darling? Could you pick me up some more wine? Say it’s for me, they know me at the off-licence.’

  I bet they do, thought April.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The little bell tinkled as April pushed through the door. Mr Gill looked at her with puffy, slightly pink eyes; she was fairly sure the ringing bell had woken him. In fact, she had a strange sense that the bell’s chimes didn’t just wake the shop’s proprietor, they woke the whole shop: when the door was closed, time stopped entirely.

  ‘Back so soon?’ said Mr Gill suspiciously, setting his glasses on his nose. ‘How can I help you today?’

  ‘Well, I was wondering if you had some sort of index or inventory of the books you have here?’

  Mr Gill clucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Oh no, no need for that. They are all stored up here,’ he said, pointing to the wiry white tufts of hair on the side of his head.

  ‘Then could you tell me if you have this book?’ she asked, opening the notebook and pointing to the entry. ‘Infernal Wickedness by Kingsley-Davis?’

  The old man peered at the note. ‘Hmm … well, we did have a copy. Rather popular, that one. But I think the young lady bought it only the other day.’

  ‘Young lady? Who would that be?’

  ‘Oh, a charming young thing. Shiny hair. No, no, now I think about it, she didn’t buy it in the end. Yes, I think we may still have it. Shall we have a look?’

  With some effort Mr Gill rose from his chair and gestured towards an alcove at the back of the shop, lifting the velvet rope that closed it off from the rest of the shop. April found herself climbing a wooden spiral staircase to the first floor, almost identical to the ground floor only crowded with even more books. Mr Gill followed her slowly then immediately began scanning the shelves at close range, tilting his head to read the worn leather spines through his tiny spectacles, tutting and muttering his way along the rows.

  ‘Ah, now here we are,’ said Mr Gill triumphantly, taking down a slim volume. It had a battered blue binding and faded gilt lettering. He handed it to April reverently.

  ‘Very rare, that one. Never seen another copy, actually, and plenty of people have been looking, let me tell you.’

  ‘Could I … ?’ asked April, gesturing to a chair by the window.

  ‘Oh, by all means, by all means,’ said Mr Gill, tottering towards the stairs. ‘I’ve plenty to get on with, rushed off my feet as you can see.’

  When he was gone, she eagerly opened the book and began to read the foreword.

  It is my unhappy duty to inform the reader, within these pages, of a true horror hiding in our very backyards. This is not an historical terror such as a young boy may thrill over while reading of dead kings and queens, but a very real present-day threat which may, if not handled with the proper vigour and dispatch, even undermine the already shaky foundations of our civilisation. It is not a disease that the wealthy classes can avoid with indoorplumbing and rich food, nor is it something education and breeding will unseat, for it is as present behind the doors of the finest houses in the land as it is in the dark streets of Clerkenwell and Bow. My dearly cherished hope is that, by setting these facts down in type, I can expose these fiends and rid our land of them once and for all. Please, dear reader, heed my words, for if this plague is allowed to spread, all that we hold dear will surely unravel.

  J. Kingsley-Davis, St James, 1903

  As she read the words, April felt herself shiver. It wasn’t the comically dire warnings of the author, it was the fact that they were so similar in sentiment to the snippet of the introduction her father had written for his new book.

  It was almost uncanny - unless, of course, he had read this obscure tome himself, but then Mr Gill had said it was super-rare, hadn’t he? Still, her father was a journalist, he could find things that other people couldn’t. She quickly turned back to the index page to look at the chapter headings. ‘Chapter One - The Vampyre, A History’, ‘Chapter Two - Arrival On Sovereign Soil’, ‘Chapter Three -The Nests Are Feathered’, ‘Chapter Four-The Servants Are Recruited’. It was obviously a history of the myth, but presented as historical fact. In any case, it would be useful in April’s investigation. She flipped back to the front page to see how much it cost and almost fell off her chair. ‘Three hundred and thirty pounds?’ she gasped. How could any book be worth that? You can get anything off the Internet for nothing these days - why would you bother with these dusty old things?

  But then again, she had never found any information as focused and concise as this on the Internet. Certainly, everything she’d found written about the Highgate Vampire on the net was confused and a bit hysterical. That’s probably because vampires are made up, April reminded herself. It’s not as if they’re in the Natural History Museum.

  Sadly, April headed back down the spiral stairs to Mr Gill and put the book on his desk.

  ‘Changed your mind?’ he asked, peering over his glasses.

  ‘More that I can’t afford a book like that,’ she said. ‘It’s a shame, because it’s exactly what I need.’

  ‘That’s what the other girl said,’ mused Mr Gill vaguely.

  ‘Who was this other girl?’

  ‘Oh, came in a while ago, asking for the Kingsley-Davis, said she couldn’t afford it either. People don’t appreciate the value of rare books any more, you see. Sometimes the books you find on these shelves are the last remaining copy of a masterpiece that took decades to complete and contains vital information that might otherwise have been lost.’ The old man paused for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. ‘Of course, many of them are utter rubbish,’ he added.

  ‘Well, thank you for letting me see it—’

  ‘Isabelle,’ said Mr Gill.

  April looked up sharply. The shopkeeper was bent over a large ledger on his desk.

  ‘Isabelle Davis, that was her name,’ he said. ‘I wrote it down in case a cheaper copy came in, although, as I told her, that’s most unlikely. Yes, I remembered it because of the name. Apparently she and the author were distantly related.’

  ‘Could it have been the same Isabelle Davis who was killed in the cemetery?’

  Mr Gill’s rheumy eyes opened wider. ‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘I read about it of course, a terrible business, but you never think of it happening to someone you’ve spoken to, do you? My word, the poor girl.’

  April could feel the hairs standing up on her neck. ‘Thank you, Mr Gill.’

  She turned towards the door and pulled the handle.

  ‘Of course, if you’re not too busy, I could always give you a precis of the book,’ he said, picking it up and waving it at her. ‘I read it after she’d left. Very interesting, actually. Especially in the light of the, uh, murder.’

  ‘Oh, that would be fantastic.’

  ‘Well, sit yourself down over there and let’s see what I remember, but not before I’ve put the kettle on, mmm?’ he said, reaching for an ancient plastic jug. ‘I’m sure you’d like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said April. ‘Yes I would, very much.’

  Chapter Twenty- Five

  The gate clanged and a squeal rang around the square. Fiona was out of the taxi almost before it had stopped, throwing her arms around April and squeezing.

  ‘Stop, Fee,’ she moaned, half-coughing, half-laughing. ‘You’re going to suffocate me.’

  ‘I’m just so glad to see you,’ said Fiona, after they’d paid the bemused cabbie and lugged her case back to the house. ‘I wish it was in better circumstances, of course. How are you?’

  April almost laughed at her friend’s dour expression; Fiona looked even more pale and gloomy than April. It didn’t help of course that Fee was wearing her funeral garb of a black silk dress, long black gloves and a black pillbox hat with a veil, presumably the one she had bought to mourn Alix Graves’ passing. Fitting her proud Scots heritage, Fiona had wavy red hair and creamy white skin, but her pretty face was more washed out than usual
today. Fee always took an almost method-acting approach to choosing the right look for the right occasion, reflected April; she’d hit it spot on for the funeral.

  ‘I’m okay,’ said April sadly. ‘It’s better when I’m busy. I wish you’d let me come to meet you at the station.’

  Fiona shrugged. ‘I thought you’d have more important things to do today.’

  April nodded. If it had been a normal day, she would much rather have been doing more digging into her Dad’s death, especially with all the strange stuff she’d discovered in Mr Gill’s shop the previous day. But then, if it had been a normal day, her Dad wouldn’t be lying in a coffin at the undertaker’s waiting to be taken to the church.

  ‘I guess I should be helping Mum with stuff for the wake,’ said April, ‘but I’d rather spend time with you than hang around with her, fussing over the vol-au-vents.’