“For a SHADE officer? Oh, yes. The younger vampires, the kids, you see, they really troubled Leary. She always hesitated over dusting them. She’d say they weren’t to blame for their condition. To which I’d say that most Sunless weren’t, and she shouldn’t let what they looked like when they were turned colour her judgement over what they had become since. It’s hard, though, I appreciate that. I’ve perhaps been known to think twice before dusting a kid. I’ve even...” He paused, then carried on. “These particular children, though, they showed her no mercy, once they’d overpowered her. They feasted fast and hard. There wasn’t a drop of blood left in her. Should be grateful for that, I suppose. At least she wasn’t turned and I didn’t have to hunt her down and dust her.”
“Would you have done that?”
“I’d have made it my mission. I wouldn’t have stopped, I wouldn’t have slept, until I’d put her out of her misery. As it was, I took it upon myself to carry out the beheading. Dr Wing kept the body on ice in the morgue for me until I was well enough to go in. Out of courtesy. Leary obviously wasn’t coming back, but a post mortem neutralisation had to happen anyway. Standard procedure. Macarthur said she wanted to do it, but I insisted. I couldn’t see why anyone else should have the right. I was Leary’s partner. We had a bit of a set-to over that, Macarthur and I, but I won in the end. The Commodore backed down, once she realised I wasn’t going to. I think I may even have threatened resignation if I didn’t get my way.”
“You still feel guilty over Leary’s death.” Father Dixon pitched the remark carefully as both statement and query. He already had a clear notion of the answer.
“Of course. If I’d been with her, it never would have happened.”
“It was bad timing, rotten luck, but you must see, John, that it had nothing to do with you. Regret’s a reasonable thing to feel, under the circumstances. But don’t mistake it for guilt. You were seriously ill. What, you should have risen from your sickbed and gone in to work that night? You could barely move.”
“But why was I ill?”
“Something to do with germs? I’m a vicar, not a doctor.”
“It’s almost as if... as if...”
“...God arranged the whole thing?”
Redlaw nodded numbly.
Father Dixon pshawed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, my friend, but I’ve never heard such complete and utter bobbins in all my life. God hit you with a rash and a fever, then had a bunch of vampires murder Róisín? Why? To prove what point? To make you miserable? To plunge you into despair?”
“He moves—you may have heard this, Father—in mysterious ways.”
“Too right, He does. But He’s not vindictive, He’s not a psycho, He’s not some divine Mafia don. The God I worship isn’t, at any rate.”
“He’s omnipotent. He could have prevented Leary’s death.”
“Maybe. But that obviously wasn’t in His plan.”
“But torturing me is?”
“Oh, John!” Father Dixon’s exasperated cry resounded to the rafters. “How egotistical are you? God’s got it in for you specially, that’s what you’re telling me? He’s decided John Redlaw needs taking down a peg or two? One of His staunchest admirers, His biggest fans, deserves a good smiting? It doesn’t make sense.”
“He did it to Job, didn’t he?”
“Yes, and He’s allowed any number of martyrs to be put to death, horribly, on His behalf. Not to mention you-know-who, His own son, what’s the guy’s name again? It’s on the tip of my tongue. Jesus... Jesus somebody. I’ll get it in a moment. That one who had the fun day being crucified. Him.” He jerked a thumb towards the reredos. “John, God isn’t trying to hurt you. Don’t be childish.”
“What is He trying to do, then? What does He want from me?”
“That’s for you to work out for yourself.”
“Come off it, that’s a total copout.”
Father Dixon could only shrug. “Way it works, I’m afraid. No easy answers. No multiple-choice tick-the-box. Just the long, arduous process of sifting through the contradictions and the inconsistencies and the sometimes outright absurdities to find some kind of truth. Takes most people a lifetime.”
“You’ve managed it, though,” said Redlaw.
“Oh, no. Don’t be under that illusion. I grapple with my faith on a daily basis. Sometimes I get so depressed about it all—the suffering in the world, the countless prayers that go unanswered, God’s apparent indifference to the human condition—that I feel like jacking it all in. I want to tear off the dog collar and go and live like a hermit in a croft in the Hebrides. But you know what keeps me going? What reminds me that there probably is a supreme deity and He’s watching out for us? You’ll like this.”
“I will?”
“Sunless.”
“What?”
“The fact that there are Sunless.”
Redlaw was flummoxed. “’Lesses prove the existence of God? You’re going to have to explain that one, Father.”
“Think about it,” said Father Dixon. “Vampires. Supernatural beings. They’re immortal—as long as they steer clear of you chaps. They have abilities that some might call superhuman, godlike even. They skulk in the dark, forbidden the light. They’re compelled to leech off the living, to drink blood, kind of an anti-Eucharist. They’re dead but they mimic life. What are they, looked at like that, but a parody of God? His warped reflection. The negative to His positive. We infer the shape of Him by the shadows the Sunless create. They provide the outline, leaving a blank for us to fill in. He made them, John, just as He made the Devil, in order to show us Himself. Unholy and blasphemous as they are, vampires are the clearest evidence we have that God is real and wants us to know it. Do you see that? Often I’m asked by a parishioner why doesn’t God ever just give us a sign, something concrete and undeniable, so that we can be sure, one hundred per cent, that He’s there. I reply: He already has. Go to an SRA and look. There’s your sign.”
Father Dixon slapped both hands on the communion rail with all the satisfaction of a barrister who has just conclusively proved his case and exonerated his client.
“Now, any more silly questions, Captain Redlaw? Or can we all go back to our appointed tasks as defenders of faith and vessels of the divine will?”
“I suspect,” Redlaw said evenly, “that we can.”
“Then I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Now go forth, be fruitful, and make the streets safe for people with a pulse.”
The consolation of absolution was, like the interior of St Erasmus’s, cold. But, like St Erasmus’s, it was also solid and uplifting.
Redlaw drove.
Two phone calls zigzagged simultaneously through the network.
One was from Nigel Hutchings to Nathaniel Lambourne, on a private mobile number that very few employees in the Dependable Chemicals family of firms had access to.
The other was from Father Dixon to his old boss, Commodore Macarthur, on the direct line to the latter’s office at SHADE HQ.
Both calls pertained to recent conversations with Redlaw.
Hutchings’s was plaintive and anxious. It sought reassurance. It got it.
Father Dixon’s was probing and solicitous. It did not breach the seal of the confessional. It merely conveyed a general apprehension about Redlaw’s mental wellbeing.
Hutchings complained to Lambourne.
Father Dixon compared notes with Macarthur.
Lambourne, when he had convinced the site supervisor that interest from a SHADE officer was nothing to lose sleep over, sat in quiet contemplation for several minutes. He looked unruffled, but a muscle at the base of his jaw kept writhing under the skin.
Macarthur, when she had told Father Dixon his concerns were duly noted, thanked him for voicing them, and set down the receiver, also sat thinking. The creases at the corners of her eyes deepened, as though she were pained by a memory, or a presentiment, or both. They smoothed again a
s she reminded herself that Redlaw was a SHADE officer of the highest calibre. His first and only allegiance was to the Night Brigade. That, surely, would save him.
Then her phone rang again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Over the course of the night, there was a spate of bloodlust riots all across England.
Birmingham saw the worst of it. Sunless ran amok in all six of the SRAs in that city. BovPlas trucks were attacked, their drivers besieged in their cabs. Fatalities hit double figures.
In Bristol, the trouble didn’t stay confined to the Residential Area in Eastville. Blood-drenched vampires spilled over the fence, onto the streets. The city’s full complement of SHADE officers was deployed to herd them back where they belonged. Sunless who refused to co-operate were summarily dusted.
Leeds saw a breakout, too. There, however, a posse of civilians joined the Night Brigade in re-containing the vampires. The help wasn’t asked for, or officially endorsed, but the beleaguered SHADE officers weren’t ungrateful.
The Sussex coastal town of Hastings also saw citizens taking up arms against the Sunless. No actual riot occurred in that once genteel, now run-down seaside resort, but the place did boast a sizeable contingent of Stokers, who commanded general sympathy and support among the populace. The town’s pier, which had been condemned as an unsafe structure due to storm damage and closed to the public, had been put to use as the local SRA. The Stokers set fire to it with petrol bombs, and half of Hastings turned out during the small hours to watch it burn and the vampires along with it. All along the promenade and on the balconies of the Regency seafront buildings, fascinated, gleeful faces were lit up by flames, and cheers went up as the century-old pier crumbled section by section and collapsed into the sea. Fire crews arrived suspiciously late—too late to do anything about the blaze except ensure that none of the bystanders were hurt.
In Oxford, on the notorious Blackbird Leys estate, a similar sort of pre-emptive action was taken against neighbourhood Sunless, although it met with less success. A gang of youths followed the BovPlas delivery truck into the SRA and set about the waiting residents with improvised weapons. It soon dawned on the kids that they ought to have done their homework properly. Their stakes were lengths of sharpened dowel and chair-back spindle, but none was made of ash wood. What began as a concerted effort to give the vamps what-for, ended as a rout. The carnage was appalling. Teenagers, even a few twelve-year-olds, ran screaming from the enraged vampires. None of the young invaders made it back to the gate and safety. Many sobbed and cried for their mothers as fangs tore chunks out of their flesh and mouths sucked greedily at the blood that welled from the wounds.
At SRAs in Coventry, in Milton Keynes, in Bradford, in Stevenage, in Middlesbrough, in Stoke-on-Trent, the story was much the same. It seemed as though virtually every vampire in the land was in the grip of blood madness, helpless to do anything but obey their savage thirst.
Redlaw stood in front of an electrical goods shop window, watching the soundless televisions within. All were tuned to the same twenty-four-hour news channel. Reporters in various locations spoke to the camera, wide-eyed, hunched anxiously as if expecting to be attacked from behind at any moment. Captions scrolled along the bottom of the screens, tickertaping the latest statistics—the tally of the dead, the number of SRAs affected—and soundbites from politicians. Maurice Wax: “No cause for alarm. Stay in your homes. Take reasonable precautions.” Giles Slocock: “Blame lies with government’s lamentable failure to grasp Sunless nettle.” These were interspersed with texted-in contributions from viewers, which ranged from “gr8er understanding is called 4” to “stake em all.”
So far, London itself had been surprisingly incident-free. Redlaw had been monitoring the verbal traffic on the SHADE band on his patrol car’s shortwave. There’d been a few minor flare-ups here and there in London SRAs out of his jurisdiction, and none at all on his patch, the north-east quadrant of the capital. He was feeling oddly useless, like the reserve player on a team looking on from the touchline, willing but unable to take part in the game.
He was almost relieved when Macarthur called.
“Marm. At a loose end. What can I do?”
“Get me to a desert island,” said Macarthur. “Anywhere without phones. Mine’s been ringing off the hook all night. And don’t even get me started on the emails. I think my inbox just exploded. Everyone wants a piece of me and there’s not enough to go round.”
“London’s been keeping its nose relatively clean, though. Commodore Choudhury up in the Midlands, him I could understand having a hard time tonight, but you?”
“That’s just it. Everybody’s badgering me to do something, but if it’s not happening in London, how am I supposed to help? Wax has been the biggest pain in the behind. He’s all but told me he’ll have to sack me if I can’t keep a lid on this. ‘We’ll be looking to collect a major scalp, and I shan’t be afraid to wield the tomahawk.’ His exact words. He even hinted he and the PM have some kind of contingency plan they’re considering, which, if they are, it’s news to me.”
“The army?”
“Could be. Hope not. Anyway, my problem, not yours. No need to be burdening you with it. I don’t deserve the commodoreship if my shoulders aren’t broad enough to bear the weight.”
“I don’t mind, marm.”
“Yes, but still. How’s the hornets’ nest kicking coming along?”
“It’s ongoing. Nothing to report yet, but at least I haven’t been stung.”
“I still think you’re wasting your time.”
“I still think not.”
“But you’re at a loose end right now?”
He eyed the televisions. “Nothing I can’t tear myself away from.”
“Then I have a little job for you. The Isle of Dogs. Reports of possible Sunless activity there. Could be a rogue nest.”
Redlaw stifled a groan. “And when it turns out to be a wild goose chase...?”
“If it does,” Macarthur said, “you file a comprehensive statement to that effect. After you’ve investigated thoroughly. Didn’t we discuss this? I’m not having you skimp on the meat-and-potatoes stuff, John.”
“There are bigger things going on.”
“Not at this precise moment.”
“Send a sergeant. Send Khalid.”
“Actually, I thought about him, but he’s off tonight.”
“Send him anyway.”
“You’re close to being insolent, Captain Redlaw.”
Even over the phone Macarthur’s anger was palpable. Redlaw could easily picture the thundercloud in her face, the lightning in her eyes. Her military background was coming to the fore again. Chain of command was important, and everyone needed to know their place on it.
“You have been given a direct order,” she said. “You damn well obey. Otherwise, you can come back to HQ and everyone can watch as I take your badge and Cindermaker off you and strip you of your rank and kick you out on your ear. Don’t think that’s an empty threat, either. I’m reaching the end of my rope with you. You’d be advised to remember who you are and what you get paid to do.”
Macarthur continued in the same vein for another couple of minutes. At the end, Redlaw felt as though he’d been flayed alive, and the prospect of unearthing a Sunless nest seemed positively pleasant by comparison. Which, he could only assume, had been the Commodore’s intention all along.
New met old on the Isle of Dogs, and it was an awkward encounter. Sky-raping towers of commerce glittered to the north. Docklands conversions twinkled smugly along the riverbank. In between lay decayed wharves, disused printworks, and tangles of back-to-back tenements which had been young in Dickens’s day and not much jollier then. The areas City money had touched were pristine and clean, but this effect did not extend to the inner reaches of the Isle, which remained historically grubby and undesired and looked all the more so when bathed in the cold radiance given off by the surrounding developments. So near, yet so far. There could not be a starker
illustration of the ineffectiveness of trickle-down economics than this.
Sat-nav led Redlaw to the address Macarthur had given him, an abandoned unit on a trading estate overshadowed by the elevated track of the Docklands Light Railway. He checked the building’s perimeter first. No sign of a break-in, but vampires were sneaky that way. They knew better than to leave visible evidence of forced entry. Also, premises like this often had skylights, easily accessible to Sunless if not to humans.
Indeed, that was how suspicion had fallen on this place, according to Macarthur. Someone on a train had glimpsed a figure lurking on the unit’s roof. It had been dark and the train had been going fast, so the witness couldn’t be certain that the figure was a Sunless, but the balance of probabilities suggested it was. Why else would anybody be up there at night? Burglary? An opportunist burglar would be more likely to take a ground-level approach, and a professional burglar wouldn’t bother with the unit at all.
There was a large rolling door for vehicle access, a smaller personnel door beside it. Both were padlocked securely. Round the back there was a flight of fire escape steps leading up to an emergency door, hinged to open outwards. Redlaw found a length of rebar among the weeds and detritus at the rear of the building and used it as a crowbar to pry the door open. He tried to work as softly as possible, but the odd splintery crack and creak was unavoidable. If there were vampires inside, their sharp ears might well pick this up. Alerting them was a risk he would have to take. Couldn’t be helped.
Into the building he went, Cindermaker drawn, night vision goggles in place. He passed through a series of back rooms, trying doors, peering into stripped-bare office spaces and empty supply cupboards. Nothing. No trace of Sunless. None of their spoor. No faeces. No animal remains—bones or shrivelled corpses—that spoke of the undead trying to lead a clandestine existence, denying themselves humans as food and subsisting on dogs, cats and whatever other small mammals they could find.
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