‘Because extraordinary claims require firm evidence. And in this case there’s no evidence whatsoever. I’m sorry.’
‘Thanks for taking a look anyway,’ said Vijay.
Liz sighed. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ she said. ‘Let me know if anything else happens at school.’
‘Ain’t no way I’m going back to school,’ said Drake. ‘Not with a psycho-killer headmaster on the loose.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Manor Road, South London
Chris Crohn was naturally slim – Seth called him skinny – but he wasn’t fit. His tech support job at the school didn’t require him to be, and sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen all day didn’t give him much opportunity to exercise. Not that he wanted to. He had never seen the point. He didn’t go running, had never lifted weights, and had no knowledge of martial arts. But all that would have to change. The apocalypse was coming and Chris planned to meet it head on.
His werewolf tracking app had flagged the area around Manor Road Secondary School as a danger zone, and Chris was starting to feel nervous walking to school and back. He found himself glancing over his shoulder whenever he left the safety of his tiny apartment, searching for the tell-tale signs of an unusually large dog, or sharp teeth in a stranger’s smile. So far he had noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
At school too, he checked out the teachers and students, peering at them suspiciously, looking for odd behaviour. After all, it was Mr Leigh the Geography teacher who had tried to eat those kids a few weeks back. The Headmaster, Mr Canning, in particular was acting very strangely. Chris had spent an uncomfortable ten minutes in the Headmaster’s office on Friday afternoon, installing a new inkjet printer while the Head looked on wolfishly, licking his lips, a peculiar yellow gleam in his eyes. Chris had never completed a job quite so quickly.
The important thing was to be ready for when he eventually encountered a real werewolf. And that meant getting fit. He placed an online order for a set of weights and a home gym kit with next-day delivery. He downloaded some books with titles like Muscle Boosting for Men and Get Ripped Fast and speed-read them cover to cover before going to bed. According to the books, to have any chance of surviving the apocalypse he would need to increase his muscle mass from his current twenty-five percent of total body weight to at least fifty percent.
On Saturday morning he got up early and went for a run around the block before taking a shower. According to his smartphone, he’d covered a distance of just over half a mile. It had left him exhausted. Tomorrow, he would run a mile. The next day, a mile and a half. He would have to improve quickly. There wasn’t much time.
The home gym kit arrived after breakfast and he unpacked it, followed the assembly instructions and installed it in his kitchen. The gym equipment left no room for accessing the sink, but building muscle mattered more than washing dishes now. He would just have to eat his food straight out of its packaging.
Later that morning he went along to the local martial arts centre and enquired about classes.
The instructor looked at him dubiously. ‘Have you tried anything like this before?’
‘No, but I’m a quick learner,’ said Chris. ‘I intend to train hard and read as much as I can between classes.’
‘Which classes are you interested in?’ asked the instructor. ‘We run courses in Judo, Karate, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Taekwon-Do.’
‘All of them,’ replied Chris, staring hard at the man through his thick lenses. ‘I need to do them all. Can I start today?’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Clapham Common, South London
In the seven years PC Liz Bailey had served as a police officer she had never known such a demanding time. The police were under intense pressure both to capture the creature known as the Beast of Clapham Common and also to apprehend the serial killer dubbed the Ripper. More brutal murders had taken place, and the police were scratching their heads to find a link between the victims, other than the manner of their death.
Liz felt personally connected to both cases. She had seen the Beast for herself, the night it attacked Dave Morgan, and she would have liked nothing better than to track the monster down. Frustratingly, there had been no further sightings of the creature since the night of the attack. Some of her colleagues joked that the whole business had been mere hysteria, but Liz knew otherwise.
Dave Morgan wasn’t getting any better. She’d visited him again in hospital a few days previously and had been alarmed to see how weak he’d become. He’d been barely conscious and hadn’t responded to anything she’d said. His eyes had flickered open once, and they’d been unmistakably and chillingly yellow, just like the animal that had bitten him.
As for the Ripper, she couldn’t stop thinking about the story Vijay and Drake had told her. Mr Canning ate Ash. The boys believed it, even though it seemed preposterous. She had checked the missing persons file every morning, hoping for good news, but Ash had still not shown up. She was sick with worry. If the Headmaster really was the Ripper, she needed to tell someone urgently. But no body had been found, unlike the mutilated corpses that the Ripper had left in full view ready to be discovered. More mangled remains had been discovered in parks and by the side of roads, and in each case no attempt had been made to hide the body. Even if Liz took Vijay and Drake at their word, the story they told didn’t match the broader pattern. She had made discreet enquiries and discovered that Mr Canning had been in school at the times the various Ripper victims had been murdered, so that seemed to rule him out as a suspect.
The police were still searching for James Beaumont in connection with the murder of the Catholic priest. Apparently the mild-mannered, polite teenager was their top suspect. James, who’d also had yellow eyes, and who had saved those children from being eaten by Mr Leigh, the Geography teacher at Manor Road school.
Connections … they were everywhere, almost physically tangible, but confusing and contradictory. None of them fitted neatly together. She was driving herself mad turning the facts over and over in her mind.
‘You’re very quiet this evening,’ said her new partner, PC Dean Arnold. A big man with an almost bald head shaped like a bullet, Dean was a man of few words. It was strange for him to be calling Liz quiet. Usually he moaned that she talked too much.
They were driving along the edge of Clapham Common, looking out for signs of large animals, or anything out of the ordinary. Unlike the night she and Dave Morgan had encountered the Beast, there was no moon visible, just heavy cloud and light rain. So far they’d seen nothing unusual.
‘Just concentrating on my job,’ said Liz, looking out at the dark street.
‘Yeah? Want to talk to me about it?’ Dean scratched at the short, wiry hair that crawled over the sides of his head.
Liz sighed. Dean was no fool. He knew she had something on her mind. ‘Suppose you had a hunch that someone was guilty of a crime, but you had no evidence that any crime had even been committed? In fact, the whole story was totally implausible? And you’d been given the idea in the first place by a couple of kids who would never make reliable witnesses in a court of law? What would you do?’
‘Hypothetically, right?’
‘Hypothetically,’ agreed Liz.
‘Yet, despite the lack of evidence, and the total implausibility of the story, and the absence of reliable witnesses, you had a feeling in your gut, right?’
‘Right.’
Dean was quick to reply. ‘I’d tell someone I could trust the reasons for my hunch and see what they thought.’
‘Hmm.’ It seemed sound advice, and Dean was a man who would tell it to you straight. It would do Liz a lot of good to get it off her chest. And yet she feared what he might say.
‘Well, are you going to tell me about it, or shall we play more guessing games?’ Dean signalled a left turn, following the road that cut across the western corner of the Common.
So Liz told him, about the wolf that had bitten Dave Morgan, about Mr Leigh biting J
ames, about the yellow eyes, and what Vijay and Drake had said about Ash being eaten. She felt stupid saying it out loud, yet Dean listened carefully and took his time before he gave his reply.
Eventually he said, ‘So, here’s what I think. These two boys were in trouble at school, they were frightened of the Headmaster, and they’d heard some stories on the news about a serial killer and some half-eaten bodies turning up. They ran off, and then invented a story to cover it.’
Liz had told herself the same thing enough times, but hearing it from Dean felt like a betrayal. ‘But the other boy, Ash, really has gone missing.’
‘So he ran off too, big deal. I reckon if you want to find Ash, you just need to bring these other two in for questioning, and they’ll tell you where he’s hiding quick enough.’
He was probably right, of course. Kids like Ash went missing all the time. Ninety-nine percent of them were found safely. And yet … ‘What about the yellow eyes?’ she asked, bracing herself for Dean’s response.
‘Liz, if you value your career prospects, you’ll say no more about yellow eyes, not to anyone. You’re starting to sound like a bloody nutcase.’
‘Gee, thanks,’ said Liz. ‘I’m glad I told my story to someone so open and sympathetic.’
‘Well, what I always say is, if you don’t want to be called a nutcase, don’t talk like one.’
‘Don’t you say the nicest things?’ said Liz. ‘I can’t wait until Dave Morgan comes back to work. I never thought I’d miss that grumpy bastard.’ She said the words lightly, but they disguised a lump that had appeared in her throat.
‘How is Dave?’ asked Dean, his voice softer. ‘Have you been to see him again?’
‘Not for a couple of days. He slipped back into unconsciousness. They’ve moved him off the High Dependency Unit and back into Intensive Care. They said the infection’s getting worse.’
‘Poor sod,’ said Dean.
Liz felt her eyes sting with tears. ‘I’m scared, Dean. I don’t think he’s going to make it. The nurse I spoke to reckoned he had a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through.’
‘Hey girl, don’t give up hope. Fifty-fifty – that’s even odds. I’d bet on that. Dave’s a tough guy. Isn’t he always telling us how tough he is?’
Liz managed a tiny smile at that. ‘Yeah. He certainly is.’
‘You watch. I bet he’ll be out of that hospital bed and back on his feet in no time. Then you won’t have to put up with me anymore.’
‘Right,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll be glad of that.’
They cruised along in silence for a while, the road deserted on this cold, damp night. Hardly surprising. No right-minded folk would be here on a night like this, especially with news of the Beast and the Ripper splashed across all the front pages. A light rain fell steadily, the car’s wiper blades sweeping the drops away, only for more to fall in their place. The Common itself was completely dark. If the Beast was out there lurking in the bushes, or running across its muddy grass, they would never spot it. The search seemed hopeless.
Up ahead, the soft glow of a streetlamp picked out a figure crouching low. ‘Slow the car,’ said Liz. Something was wrong.
Dean slowed the car to a crawl. As they drew closer, a second figure became visible, lying on the pavement. The first person was crouching over the prone body.
Dean stopped the car about twenty feet from the scene. ‘Christ,’ he muttered. ‘What’s this?’
They both knew what it was though. ‘The Ripper,’ said Liz, almost too afraid to say the word.
Dazzled by the bright beam of the car’s headlights, the crouching figure looked up. It was a man, stooped low like an animal, squatting down on his legs, holding some dark object in his hands. He raised one hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the headlights.
The second figure lay completely still. Another man, Liz guessed, his arms splayed out, his clothing torn to shreds, exposing his upper body to the elements. Where his chest should have been, a dark red cavity stared back at Liz, stripped of its vital organs, blood pooled on the ground around the body. The first man huddled over the corpse like a ghoul, and now Liz recognized the object he held in his bloody hands. A human heart.
‘Oh, crap,’ swore Dean. He called the station on his radio, giving a brief summary of the situation, and requesting immediate backup.
The man by the roadside hadn’t moved, except to shield his eyes from the dazzling headlights. In fact, he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the arrival of the police car. He continued to chew his bloody mouthful unhurriedly. Liz waited, her hand gripping the door handle, ready to spring.
The car’s headlights picked out the man clearly in their twin beams. Liz peered at him through the drizzle on the windscreen, struggling for recognition. The man was dressed in jeans and a dark cotton shirt. His feet were bare. His face was youthful but weather-beaten and browned. He looked like a wild man, his long black hair slick with blood and rain and plastered to the side of his face. More blood dribbled down his straggly beard and soaked into his shirt. Yellow eyes shone brightly under the glare of the headlights.
Liz breathed a deep sigh of relief. It wasn’t Mr Canning, the Headmaster. She had already studied his photo on the school’s website. This man looked nothing like him, thank God.
The crouching man shuffled out of the white beam of the headlights, moving slowly sideways on all fours. His features dimmed until he was no more than a silhouette under the streetlamp, only his eyes still shining in the darkness. He still gripped the heart in his teeth, and seemed in no hurry to leave the scene.
‘The bastard looks like he just doesn’t care,’ said Dean. ‘What should we do? Wait for assistance, or make a move? I don’t want to risk losing him.’
The man squatted down on the wet pavement again, his eyes fixed on the patrol car, chewing hungrily at his gruesome meal.
‘I’m damned if I’m going to sit here and watch him do that,’ said Liz. ‘Let’s take him.’
‘Right,’ agreed Dean, reaching for his Taser.
Liz gripped her baton. ‘I’ll take his left flank, you go right. On the count of three …’
They flung open the doors and rushed the man together.
He reacted instantly, spitting out the remains of his feast and jumping backward away from the circle of light that ringed the streetlamp.
Liz rushed forward, but the man darted to her right, moving quickly toward the darkness of the Common.
‘He’s mine!’ yelled Dean, diving into the undergrowth to follow him.
‘I’m right behind you!’ shouted Liz.
She ran as quickly as she could, but her short legs weren’t the fastest in the force. Dean sprinted ahead leaving Liz behind. She stopped for a moment to assess the situation. They were near the northwestern edge of the Common, and the man wouldn’t be able to run far before he reached the main road that bounded it. If she headed along the edge of the Common, there was a chance she could cut him off.
She set off in the direction of the road, her progress hampered by the slippery mud of the track and the darkness of the night. It was never truly dark anywhere in the city, but away from the roads, and with thick cloud shielding the moon, visibility was very limited.
She tripped over a branch and went sprawling into the cold wet mud. Dammit. She crawled to her knees, feeling freezing water soak into her trousers, and pushed herself back to her feet. She could see the lights from the road up ahead.
When she reached it, she saw no sign of Dean or the fugitive. The pavement was empty of pedestrians at this time of night, with just a few cars driving along the road itself. A high brick wall ran along the other side of the road, with big houses beyond. Sodium streetlamps cast an orange glow over the area. In this ordinary urban setting, it hardly seemed possible that a man-eating killer was on the loose. She jogged along the edge of the Common, straining her eyes for signs of movement. Beyond the roadside, she could see nothing but trees and bushes.
A noise off to her left was her
first warning that someone was coming.
The killer burst out of the darkness, arms and legs pumping furiously. A look of desperate madness filled his eyes and he ran like a man possessed, straight toward her. Dean followed, struggling to keep pace.
The man seemed unaware of Liz’s presence. She crouched low and braced herself for impact. The man careered straight into her, heedless of where he was going.
She grappled his legs, bringing him down in a tackle. His momentum carried him forward, but she held on tight, rolling with him across the concrete.
The man let out a wild roar like a beast, snarling and gnashing his white teeth. He lashed out at her with his hand, and Liz felt sharp fingernails rake her arm. The man’s nails were like claws, overgrown and twisted. They dug into her flesh but she clung on doggedly.
Dean lumbered into view, Taser in hand, approaching from the muddy field of the Common. ‘Keep hold of him!’ he bellowed.
Liz tightened her hold on the man’s legs, but a mania gripped him. He thrashed his limbs and rolled over and over like a lunatic, a shrill scream escaping from his lips. He broke free just before Dean arrived, and leapt to his feet in an instant.
Liz pushed herself up and saw him sprint across the road, dodging one moving car and sliding across the front of another as it sped toward him. Both cars slammed on their brakes and shuddered to a halt in the road. Dean dashed across, weaving between them.
The man reached the other side of the road and ran up the vertical side of the wall, his bare toes somehow finding purchase in the mortared joints between the bricks. He barely slowed as he climbed the ten-foot wall, and sprang lightly atop it.
Liz watched amazed as he sprinted along the top of the wall for some distance before jumping down on the other side and vanishing. She shook her head in disbelief. Response cars were converging on the scene from all sides, tearing the night apart with sirens and flashing lights, but it was already too late. They would never catch him. Not if he could move like that.
Lycanthropic (Book 1): Wolf Blood Page 13
