‘What he says makes sense, I suppose. But I gather you’re still not convinced?’
‘I see the logic of the case against Brett, certainly. Trouble is, logic has never been my strong point.’
‘You agree with his girlfriend that he’s innocent?’
‘Look,’ Harry said after a moment’s pause. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell Ken. The night Nerys Horlock was killed, Brett saw Spendlove putting his arms round Andrea. I’m sure there was nothing in it as far as she was concerned. The man’s dick ruled his brain. But Brett wasn’t exactly relaxed about it.’
‘I see.’ Daniel grunted. ‘She’s a curious girl, that one.’
Harry glanced at Daniel. Something had been puzzling him; he might as well mention it. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you, she doesn’t seem to be your number one fan. When I told her this morning that I could hear you ringing the bell, she threw a wobbler. I didn’t get the chance to explain the connection between us before she banged the phone down. She probably still thinks you’re stalking me.’
‘Where does she live?’ Daniel asked suddenly.
‘I think Brett said she had a flat over a launderette in Fazakerley Street. Why do you ask?’
‘Why don’t we pay her a visit? I could put her mind at rest, let her see I’m nothing to be afraid of.’
‘If you want.’
Harry shifted in his seat. He felt sure Daniel was keeping something back, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be. There was so much about his half-brother that he needed to learn. Yet until they’d started talking about Andrea, he’d been beginning to relax in Daniel’s company. It would be an absurd flight of fancy to imagine he had anything to do with the crimes, simply because he had an abiding interest in vampires. Wouldn’t it?
Neither of them said anything else until they reached Fazakerley Street. The launderette was halfway down and Harry had to park on the kerb so as not to block the road completely. The door adjoining the launderette had a bell marked with Andrea’s surname. When he rang, she opened the door on a security chain. She was wearing a T-shirt which revealed white arms as thin as a child’s and impossibly tight jeans; both T-shirt and jeans were black. The vivid scarlet of her lipstick made a startling contrast with the pallor of her skin.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ She caught sight of Daniel, standing by the car and gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We’ve just come back from Birkenhead,’ Harry said in a briskly amiable tone. ‘We had a look at the scene of the crime and we were wondering if we could talk. By the way, I ought to introduce you two properly. You know already this is Daniel Roberts. What you don’t know is that he had a perfectly good reason for tracking me down. Would you believe, he’s my long-lost half-brother?’
Daniel stepped forward, a grim smile on his face. ‘It’s quite true. Thank you again for the help you gave me in finding Harry. I’m sorry if I scared you. I don’t realise sometimes what a gaunt and forbidding fellow I am. I suppose - I suppose I take my hobby too seriously.’
Harry became conscious of a current passing in the atmosphere between Daniel and Andrea. He found it impossible to analyse. It wasn’t a matter of antipathy, or even fear. Rather, he sensed, something unspoken that they shared in common. He felt excluded, and at the same time, tantalised.
‘Hobby?’ she asked, fiddling nervously with the buckle of the belt to her jeans.
Daniel nodded. ‘It’s a sensitive subject round Merseyside at the moment, but I’m writing a book about a ruthless vampire hunter.’
Andrea stared hard at him and made a small noise. Then she sank to the ground in a faint.
Harry turned to Daniel open-mouthed. ‘My God, you certainly have an effect on women.’
‘She’s not just any woman, Harry.’
Harry paused in the act of bending down to check that Andrea was all right. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Haven’t you realised? She’s a real vampire.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘When did you realise?’ Andrea Gibbs asked twenty minutes later.
The three of them were together in her chilly room. Its small cobwebbed windows were set high in the walls and seemed designed to let no daylight through. As Andrea had recovered from her fainting fit, Daniel had murmured words of solicitude. When she’d struggled back to her feet, she had been about to slam the door in his face but he had managed to persuade her that he meant no harm. To Harry, listening in bewilderment, he had seemed like a tolerant father using a load of mumbo-jumbo to cajole a fey child into good behaviour. Yet in the end she had consented to invite them in. After trudging up here, he’d decided that anyone who spent much time in such a grubby hole could be forgiven for sinking into a pit of depression.
At Daniel’s suggestion, she had directed him to where an old bottle of brandy was kept. Now she was lounging on a battered couch as she sipped from a glass with a chip in it. Harry was leaning against a sideboard that had been old-fashioned when John Lennon was a lad, rubbing his hands behind his back in a surreptitious effort to get warm. He could hear the rumble of the washing machines downstairs, the hum of traffic on the inner ring road in the distance. Daniel sat cross-legged on the threadbare rug at her feet, oblivious to the cold, not bothering to hide his fascination with her. He’d been describing his book, explaining his obsessive interest in Dracula and Van Helsing.
‘There was something about you, that first time,’ he said eagerly. He might have been describing a brief encounter with the love of his life. ‘I had other things on my mind, I’d been desperate to find the one blood relative I had in the world. Even so, I could tell you were different. When Harry told me a little more about you, I began to wonder again. I’ve read so much about real vampires, but I’ve never met one before. This is amazing. Truly amazing.’
‘You look baffled, Harry,’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘If you didn’t think I was certifiable before today, I suppose you’re convinced by now.’
‘I don’t get it,’ he admitted. ‘You’ll be telling me next that you’re terrified of crosses.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe in God, but that’s not unusual. I don’t have huge fangs, either. All that mock-Transylvanian crap I can do without. There isn’t a coffin in my bedroom, you can check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me. Bear in mind, vampires were around long before Bram Stoker. They’ve appeared in many cultures, going back into the mists of time.’
Daniel’s eyes shone like those of a doorstep evangelist who meets a fellow believer. ‘Lilith the Canaanite who sucked the blood of men in their sleep, the Empusae of ancient Greece who could transform themselves into beasts or salacious women at will. The Chinese, the native Americans, the Hindi, they all had stories which rang variations on the theme.’
‘You know your subject,’ she said softly.
Harry gritted his teeth. The two of them might have been talking a different language. He felt an obscure sense of disappointment that Daniel as well as the girl so plainly had a bee in his bonnet about all this stuff. He said roughly to Andrea. ‘And you? How did you get into all this? Refuge from the harsh realities of law college, was it?’
She curled herself up into a tiny ball. She wasn’t wearing shoes and he could see the outline of her ribs in the gap between her black top and her jeans. She could have passed for fifteen years old. ‘I suppose I always thought of myself as different. Even as a child. My mother was a single parent and she died when I was fourteen. An aunt and uncle brought me up after that, out of a sense of duty, nothing else. I was pretty sickly and I used to get depressed a lot as well. I read a lot and I became intellectually interested in the law. I decided I might as well make it my career. But at the same time there was something missing from my life.’
‘Yeah, a lot of lawyers think that,’ Harry muttered.
Daniel glared at him. ‘Go on, please, Andrea.’
‘I used to be told I was moody, temperamental, attention-seeking. When I went throug
h an anorexic phase just before I left home, my aunt’s remedy was to tell me to pull myself together. She complained that I never considered anyone but myself. I found it impossible to make proper friendships. When I got interested in boys - and I did get very interested, my experiences were disastrous. They never stayed around for long, they used to say I was too much for them. They seemed to be wiped out after we’d shared a couple of nights of passion.’
She was speaking rapidly, as if desperate to explain herself and afraid that soon her chance would be lost. Daniel was listening to every word she uttered, an intent expression on his face. ‘You needed to absorb their energy.’
‘I only began to learn about myself when I went to university,’ she said. ‘I was on my own at last, away from my aunt and uncle, but things were still difficult. I called in at an occult shop one day. I’d always been interested, never done much about it. I picked up a magazine which had an article about real vampires. As soon as I read it, I recognised it was describing me, the way I felt. Everything. I had a vampire soul.’
Daniel turned to Harry. ‘Real vampires are people who manipulate life force. It’s called pranic energy. They absorb it from other living things. Humans in particular. Many of them never drink blood at all. But they are intense, moody, sensitive to light. They drain people they are close to. Especially lovers. It’s not that they want to exploit others. They don’t have a choice.’
‘As the saying goes,’ Andrea said, ‘I am what I am.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Harry was experiencing an unexpected nostalgia for Juliet’s enthusiasm for the Tarot and Feng Shui. This stuff was in a different league of loopiness, made no more palatable by the way Daniel was lapping it up.
‘So many things suddenly made sense,’ Andrea said. ‘From the way I treated boyfriends to the fact that I felt more comfortable at night rather than during the day. I’ve always hated sunshine, people have said plenty of times how cold my skin is to the touch, even on a summer day. My aunt once called me a parasite, and though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, actually she wasn’t far wrong. As time has passed, I’ve tried to cultivate self-knowledge, learning to face the truth about myself.’
‘Yet you didn’t abandon the law,’ Daniel said. ‘Curious. There’s no subject more rational.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Harry murmured.
‘You’re right, Daniel,’ Andrea said, ignoring the interruption. ‘The idea of a game played by a set of coherent rules still appealed to me. At least it was something I could cling to whilst I tried to make sense of my own nature.’
‘And how did Brett take all this?’ Harry asked.
She faced him, her eyes wide. ‘We skirted round the subject. For us, it was a kind of taboo.’
‘So what do you imagine he reckons to all this - stuff about your vampire soul?’ The words sounded even more brusque than he had intended.
‘You don’t understand,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve always dreaded people reacting in just that kind of way. It’s a prejudice, don’t you see, a form of discrimination? I’ve been afraid of being thought mad or some sort of pervert, that’s why I’ve kept quiet over the years. Stayed in the closet, you might say. You’ve always struck me as a pretty tolerant guy, but I can see you’ve no time for what I’m saying. Brett was one of my bosses, remember. I could hardly confide in him.’
‘You could have done it when you first started seeing each other.’
‘I was afraid that telling him the whole truth would have ruined everything. I was sure he’d dump me and I couldn’t bear that. We were good together. At last I’d found someone who gave me everything I needed. I gave him something in return, too. Trouble was, he sensed I was different, even if he wasn’t quite sure how. Somehow we stayed together even after the firm fell apart and he had his breakdown, but at times he seemed terrified of me. I was desperate to confide in him, but I was afraid. It might have torn us apart. He wasn’t strong enough to cope. I just hoped that slowly - in his own time - he might put two and two together. And I think he began to do just that. But I wanted more. I wanted him to come to terms with my nature, accept me for what I am.’
‘Did he know that Carl Symons had sexually harassed you?’
She sat bolt upright. ‘How did you hear about that?’
‘You’d be surprised how word gets around. You complained to Nerys Horlock, didn’t you? Woman to woman.’
‘She made sure Symons laid off me,’ Andrea said, fidgeting with a bracelet, keeping her eyes away from him. ‘She knew I was a good lawyer, but she didn’t like me. If she hadn’t been a feminist, she’d probably have accused me of asking for it.’
‘Did you feel bitter about her attitude?’
‘What are you trying to say?’ she snapped. ‘I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at. She told me she’d had a quiet word with Symons and he didn’t bother me again. There was no need to involve Brett, things would only have become even messier. I didn’t murder Symons, either, by the way.’
Even while they had been talking, the room had darkened. Harry could see heavy clouds through the high windows; the forecast was for more rain. Andrea was like a slender shadow. He thought that if he tried to touch her, he might find nothing there.
‘Tell me about Rick Spendlove, then. You seemed on very good terms with him, the night of the seminar. Brett saw the two of you smooching. So did I.’
She bent her head. ‘Listen,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘Things had been going badly between Brett and me. I was in a job going nowhere, he didn’t have a penny to his name. He’d never told me that he’d lied about qualifying as a solicitor. I can’t blame him for that, considering the secret I kept from him. I wish he’d trusted me, though. At least I would have understood better, understood why he sometimes talked about ending it all.’
‘He threatened suicide?’
‘Can you wonder? He even took an overdose once. Not a big one, and he knew I was due to turn up within the hour and I’d be able to save him. But it was a sign of his desperation. Symons had ruined him and Nerys Horlock had stood by and let it happen, so that she could get on with making a success of her career in a firm all of her own. Meanwhile our relationship was falling apart. He was at his wit’s end. We both were.’
‘And Spendlove?’
‘I didn’t know him well, but it was obvious he thought he was God’s gift to the fair sex. He’d flirted with me. Then I went on a continuing education course put on by the Legal Group, to pick up enough training points to keep the Law Society happy. It took place in that new hotel on Lime Street. Rick bought me a couple of drinks in the bar and one thing led to another.’
‘I see.’
‘It meant nothing to either of us,’ she said fiercely. ‘I didn’t mean to be unfaithful, but I was hungry for affection. Brett hadn’t been - in the mood lately. I needed comfort. Rick Spendlove was there. That’s all there was to it. He was a strong man - but I think he found me frightening. I drained him. He’d never have dared admit it, of course, he had too much ego.’
‘That doesn’t explain…’
‘You’re thinking about that incident in Old Hall Street? It was a big mistake. Stupid. My fault as much as his. I wish it had never happened. Spendlove had had a couple of drinks. They gave him courage and he started to pester me. I admit I didn’t exactly push him away. He was good in bed, very good. Like I said, he was a strong man. But Brett had no need to be jealous, no need at all.’
‘People aren’t always logical about these things. He was afraid of losing you.’
‘Just because we had a row that evening, the evening Nerys died, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘Perhaps Brett didn’t see it that way.’
She jabbed her forefinger at him. ‘He didn’t kill Spendlove, I’m sure of it! Or either of the others. You’re as bad as the police, with your…’
‘Hold on. I agree with you, for what it’s worth.’
But she had already clambered to her feet. ‘I’m sick
of this! You come here, with your questions and your dirty insinuations. I’ve had enough of them. Would you go now?’
Harry glanced at Daniel, who gave an impatient nod. ‘I only…’
Her hands were on her hips. ‘Now, please.’
Daniel picked himself up from the floor and dusted his trousers. ‘Goodbye, Andrea. Thanks for talking. It’s been an experience, just talking to you.’
She turned to him. ‘I made a mistake, didn’t I? You’re the one who understands me. Harry hasn’t even tried.’
In a pub at Albert Dock, Harry said in a defensive tone, ‘You don’t really believe all that bullshit about real vampires, do you?’
They had lunched in near-silence. Harry’s head had kept throbbing. Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise after all that had happened lately. He felt tired and frustrated and a little afraid. Three lawyers were dead; for all he knew, he might be next. Peter Blackwell had died as well and the terrifying - surely ridiculous? - possibility still lurked in the recesses of his mind that Juliet might have had something to do with that. Of course, it was ludicrous as well as disloyal. As much the stuff of nightmares as Daniel’s barmy preoccupation with Count Dracula and his ilk. But however innocent Juliet might be, what future could the two of them have as a couple? It was only a question of time before Casper found out. Or, even more likely, before she tired of him.
The conversation with Andrea had left him confused and ill-tempered. He couldn’t help blaming Daniel for encouraging her in her fantasy. All that crap about energy imbalance, inverted circadian rhythms and reversal of behaviour patterns belonged in the columns of a cheap magazine, not in the real world.
‘She believes it,’ Daniel said, putting down his tankard of bitter. ‘That’s what really matters. But to answer your question, yes, I suppose I do. I believe that some people do have vampire souls.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. I thought I was gullible, but that takes the fucking biscuit!’
‘Calm down,’ Daniel said. ‘Please, calm down. There’s no need to lose your temper. I’m not saying they are fiends, not at all. Andrea Gibbs strikes me as deeply unhappy, afraid of what’s happening in her life and with her boyfriend. I feel sorry for both of them.’
First Cut is the Deepest (Harry Devlin) Page 27
