Like This, for Ever

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ said Anderson quickly. A couple of the others were shaking their heads. Richmond looked nervous but she met Dana’s eye continually.

  ‘I understand where you’re coming from, Dana, but it’s not necessarily someone on the force,’ said Weaver. ‘Could be someone at the mortuary, one of the SOCOs at the scene.’

  ‘I’ll be talking to Kaytes,’ said Dana. ‘But I think we can rule out SOCOs. The repeated cuts just weren’t visible at the scene. They wouldn’t have known.’

  Weaver nodded, looking troubled. He knew as well as she did that a mole would seriously undermine the work of the investigation. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘What about this vampire business?’

  All eyes turned to the profiler.

  ‘Renfield’s Syndrome is a recognized psychiatric condition,’ said Richmond. ‘But it’s very rare. On the TV this morning, Dr Hunt gave quite the opposite impression, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of practising psychiatrists have never heard of it. I’ve spent the last hour trawling the internet, printing off every published article I can find and there isn’t much.’

  She opened the blue file on the desk in front of her and took out several sheets of paper, website pages that she’d printed off. Several members of the assembled MIT glanced over; no one moved to pick one up.

  ‘What is it again?’ asked Anderson, who was picking at a loose piece of skin just below his right ear. ‘What that Hunt geezer called it?’

  ‘Renfield’s Syndrome.’

  ‘And it means an obsession with drinking blood?’

  Richmond nodded. Around the room, people were shooting uncomfortable glances at each other. Dana could feel Weaver stiffening at her side. ‘Human blood?’ he asked.

  ‘Ultimately, yes, but not exclusively,’ said Richmond. ‘People who have this condition experience a craving for blood that gets out of control. It’s believed that it stems from the idea that blood has life-giving powers. It makes you stronger, more potent, live longer, that’s the general idea.’

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had black pudding for breakfast,’ said Anderson.

  ‘The term was coined by a psychiatrist called Richard Noll,’ said Richmond. ‘He named it after a character in this book.’ From her bag, she took a paperback with a black cover and handed it to the nearest person, Stenning.

  ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula?’ he said.

  ‘Stoker’s Renfield is a character in an asylum,’ said Richmond. ‘He’s insane and he’s obsessed with consuming other creatures. He eats every insect he can get his hands on and spends his days trying to capture birds. He begs his doctor to get him a kitten so he can eat that, too.’

  Weaver’s nostrils twitched. Without turning his head, he reached out towards Stenning for the paperback.

  ‘According to Noll,’ said Richmond, ‘the condition begins with a key event in childhood in which an injury involving blood, or the swallowing of blood, is seen as exciting. The child will then experience a growing interest in blood. He’ll be fascinated by roadkill, he might enjoy licking his own wounds and scratches.’

  ‘We all do that,’ said Weaver, looking up from reading the cover blurb.

  ‘Yes, but for most people it’s an instinctive reaction, we’re trying to soothe the wound and keep it clean. These people are enjoying the taste, and the sensation of blood in their mouths. As they get older, they’re likely to start inflicting wounds on themselves, so that they can swallow blood. This stage is known as auto-vampirism. They start with self-induced cuts and scrapes and eventually learn how to open major blood vessels.’

  She paused, giving the team time to take it all in.

  ‘The next documented stage is called zoophagia,’ she went on. ‘That means eating living creatures and drinking their blood. When the child reaches puberty, he or she starts to associate the swallowing of blood with sexual arousal. After that, the next stage is clinical vampirism in its true form, acquiring and drinking the blood of living human beings. Sometimes the blood is stolen, from hospitals and laboratories, quite often it’s consensual. It’s often linked with consensual sex. But in the more extreme manifestations, the sexual activity and the vampirism may not be consensual.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything about this before?’ Weaver, as Dana had expected, was running low on patience. She’d learned some time ago that his calm exterior wasn’t necessarily a reflection of what was going on inside. He was surprisingly short-tempered for such a still man.

  ‘Please bear with me,’ said Richmond. ‘On the one hand, I can see where Hunt is coming from with this. When children are taken by strangers and found dead, the natural assumption is that they’ve been the victim of a paedophile.’

  ‘But there’s no evidence of sexual abuse on any of the boys,’ said Dana.

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Richmond. ‘So we look at what else he might want from them, and there is no doubt that he is taking their blood.’

  Across the room the phone rang. Anderson answered it.

  ‘God, the bloody media will have a field day when we admit we’re looking for a vampire,’ said Weaver.

  ‘Boss,’ Anderson called to Dana. ‘Dr Hunt is downstairs, with a posse of reporters, demanding to speak to the officer in charge of the investigation.’

  Weaver met Dana’s eyes. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked her quietly.

  ‘Have someone put him in an interview room,’ said Dana. ‘Alone. The reporters stay outside until we call a press conference.’

  Anderson looked troubled. ‘OK. Then what?’

  ‘Then nothing. When we’re done here, Pete can go down and talk to him.’

  Anderson put the phone back to his mouth, then thought better of it. ‘Boss, perhaps I should go …’ he began.

  ‘I will not dignify that pillock by sending a senior member of my team to talk to him,’ snapped Dana, before turning to Stenning. ‘When you go down, Pete – and please don’t hurry – I want to know where he’s been getting his information from and I want to know where he was the evenings all four boys a) disappeared and b) were found. That’s six occasions I want accounted for, and don’t just take his word for it. I want alibis.’

  ‘Dana …’ Now Weaver was looking troubled.

  ‘Sir, if this so-called professional had had to face three sets of parents and tell them their ten-year-olds weren’t going to grow up, ever, he might have had some qualms about adding to their pain on national bloody television.’

  If an attention-seeking pin were in the room, this would have been a good time for it to drop.

  ‘Right,’ said Weaver. ‘Anything else you can tell us, Susan?’

  ‘Well, as I was saying, although I can see where Hunt’s coming from, on the other hand, too many things just don’t add up for me,’ said Richmond.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘People with Renfield’s Syndrome are overwhelmingly male,’ said Richmond. ‘But there are no documented cases at all of men with the condition attacking children. They attack other adults, women most commonly, but other men too.’

  Overwhelmingly male? Dana could sense Anderson and Stenning looking her way, wondering if she was going to air her killer-is-a-woman theory.

  ‘What about this Richard Chase bloke?’ asked Stenning, who’d been reading one of the case notes. ‘He killed a kid.’

  ‘Richard Chase was a very disturbed young man,’ said Richmond, ‘but his problems were almost certainly due to drug abuse and failed medication. He was quite possibly schizophrenic. He killed six people, but with only one of them did he commit cannibalism and drink blood. I’m not saying the condition doesn’t exist, just that because of its sensational nature, it’s assumed an importance way beyond what it deserves.’

  A woman with the condition would need to select victims she could overpower more easily, thought Dana. Could she ask if there was any history of women having Renfield’s Syndrome?

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Weaver.

  ‘Yes, the sheer amount of blood we’re talking a
bout. People with this condition crave the taste of blood in their mouths. They don’t drink it like milk because they can’t. The body would reject it. You’d most likely vomit it up. If you managed to keep it down, you’d be looking at serious organ damage. Each of these boys lost around three litres of blood. No one could drink that amount of blood and live.’

  ‘No one human,’ quipped one of the younger detectives as Weaver stood up to leave the room. ‘Word outside, Dana, please,’ he said.

  In the corridor he turned to face her. ‘Everything OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Apart from four dead children, a hysterical media reaction and a mole on the team? Yes, Sir, everything’s fine.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve not seen you this uptight before,’ he said. ‘If you want to stay on this case, you’re going to have to calm down.’

  23

  ‘COME ON, BOYS, watch your positions! Sam, who are you marking?’

  Barney took a quick glance around. You did not want Mr Green yelling at you on the pitch unless it was something like ‘Well-played’ or ‘Nice work’. The ball went across the pitch towards the opposition’s number 8, who had a clear shot. Barney raced across, got to the ball first and cleared it.

  ‘Lovely, Barney,’ called a female voice. Barney turned to see his form teacher, Mrs Green, on the touchline, not too far away from his dad.

  ‘Well played, Barney,’ called Mr Green. ‘Now come on, keep the pressure on!’

  Heading into the wind, Barney’s team followed the ball up the pitch. Huck Joesbury got possession and Barney dropped back, watching the patterns form again. When he was really in the zone, he could predict, sometimes two or three passes ahead, where the ball was going to go. This morning, though, he was having trouble focusing. The wind was a problem, for one thing. The pitch was surrounded by high lime trees and when the wind blew hard, the swaying and dancing patterns the branches made above his head were distracting.

  Huck had lost the ball, it sailed away from him in a fountain of mud droplets and then went hurtling back down the pitch. Nobody was playing well today.

  To make matters worse, Barney couldn’t stop thinking about the trip to Deptford Creek that night. The Creek was dangerous, especially for kids who didn’t understand about tides and who couldn’t stop themselves messing about. But he couldn’t pull out now. The others would be relying on him to find the murder sites, maybe even clues the police had overlooked, and he hadn’t even found the key to his granddad’s boat yet. His dad, normally rubbish at hiding things, had surprised him for once.

  ‘Barney, what planet are you on?’

  And that was his second telling-off. He’d get dropped from the team if he wasn’t careful. The wind though! It found its way under shirts, up the legs of shorts, right through his ears and into his head. Broken twigs were scurrying across the pitch like small rodents, catching around studs, crackling underfoot.

  One of the opposition’s better players, a small blond boy, was racing towards the goal. Sam, the right-back, ran to tackle him and got nutmegged. It was all up to Barney now. Over the blond boy’s shoulder Barney could see Huck’s dad, clutching a coffee cup from Costa. Barney wondered what he’d say if he found out that he, Barney, lived right next door to the woman whose flat he sat outside so often.

  ‘Barney, that’s yours! Oh boys, come on!’

  Blondie had dodged to the right. A second later the ball was in the bottom left corner of the net.

  ‘Where was my defence?’ called the keeper, glaring at Barney as the whistle for half-time blew. They were one-nil down.

  ‘Why do you think Mrs Green comes to watch every week?’ said Sam, as he and Barney jogged back to join Mr Green and the other boys. ‘It’s not as though she has a kid on the team.’

  ‘We can pull it back, lads,’ said Mr Green, as Sam and Barney joined the others. ‘We had most of the possession. Have a drink, then we’ll have a chat.’

  ‘Well done, Barney,’ said Mrs Green, who was standing next to his dad now. ‘Will you hand the biscuits round?’

  ‘Other team first,’ reminded his dad, as Barney opened the tin. Double chocolate chip. His favourite. An adult hand reached over his shoulder and helped itself. Barney recognized Mr Green’s aftershave.

  ‘He’s doing well,’ he said to Barney’s dad, as the other hand patted Barney on the shoulder. ‘When he concentrates, his positioning is superb. We just need to work on his ball skills.’

  His face glowing, Barney set off with the biscuit tin, just as Harvey came jogging over. He’d arrived late, hurrying up with his mum and brother just minutes before kick-off, and they’d had no chance to talk before the match.

  ‘Any of you see the news this morning?’ Harvey asked. Barney and Sam shook their heads.

  ‘This bloke was on, right? And he was saying whoever killed those boys, Joshua and Jason, drank their blood. It was a vampire.’

  Sam looked startled, then laughed nervously. ‘There’s no such thing as vampires,’ he said.

  The half-finished biscuit in Barney’s hand fell to the ground. He’d known, immediately, that the adults were different that morning. They’d leaned closer together when they spoke, lowered their voices, given odd, furtive glances around to make sure they weren’t being overheard. There’d been something discussed that morning that they hadn’t wanted the kids to know about. Saliva was building in his mouth.

  ‘Straight up, he was a proper doctor and everything,’ said Harvey. ‘He said it was a condition, I can’t remember what he called it, but Jorge seemed to know what he was talking about.’

  ‘Renfield,’ said Jorge, who’d approached the boys without them seeing him and who obviously had a match himself later because he, too, was wearing football kit. ‘People who have Renfield’s Syndrome are obsessed with blood. Angelina Jolie has it. Any biscuits going spare?’

  Barney handed the tin to Jorge.

  ‘She does not!’ Sam was keen on Angelina.

  ‘She does, it was on Facebook this morning. People have known about it for years. When she was married to her last husband – not Brad Pitt, someone else – she used to carry his blood around her neck in a little bottle.’

  ‘And do what, take sips when she got a bit thirsty?’

  Barney took a deep breath. If they didn’t stop talking about blood soon, he’d have to leave.

  ‘No, dorko. I don’t think she drank it. But it’s still well weird. Would you want to carry someone’s blood around your neck?’

  ‘What’s it called again?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Renfield’s Syndrome. It’s got something to do with a book about Dracula,’ said Jorge.

  Barney swallowed hard. ‘My dad has a copy,’ he said. ‘It’s by a man called Bram Stoker. He caught me reading it once – I was just flicking through looking for the scary bits and he told me off. Said it was a work of great literature, not a manga comic.’

  The others were all watching him, wanting more.

  ‘Well, it’s supposed to be the first vampire story,’ Barney said. ‘All the other stuff – you know, Twilight, First Blood, Buffy, those old films you see sometimes – they all started with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.’

  ‘So why’s it not called Dracula Syndrome?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Well, that would just sound stupid,’ said Jorge.

  ‘And it’s straight up? These kids had their blood drained out of them so someone could drink it?’

  As Jorge shrugged, Barney turned away. The adults were all gathered in small groups, talking quietly; even his dad and Mrs Green seemed deep in conversation. Only Jorge and Harvey’s mum stood alone, wrapped in her cream padded jacket, her short blonde hair spiked upwards, ignoring the other adults. She was watching the children, her sons in particular. Barney caught her eye and looked down.

  ‘There’s something they didn’t want to tell us,’ he said. ‘They’re more worried now than they were before. I’m not sure they’re going to let us go out tonight.’

  ‘We can’t cancel now,’
said Sam. ‘We’ll never be able to set it up again. I’ve lost count of what parent thinks who’s where.’

  ‘And doing what,’ added Harvey.

  ‘With who,’ said Jorge. All three of them laughed. Barney didn’t quite manage to join in.

  ‘There’s us four, Lloyd and Hatty. Six of us. Can six sleep on your boat, Barney?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘We’ve got to get on it first,’ said Barney. ‘Boat windows are small. I’m not sure even Hatty will get through. I think we need a backup plan.’

  ‘The back-up plan is that we all come back to our house,’ said Jorge. ‘Mum’s working all night and Nan is always comatose by nine o’clock. We could have the entire football team sleeping over and she wouldn’t know.’

  ‘What if your mum comes home early?’

  ‘Barney Boy,’ said Jorge, giving him a pat on the shoulder, ‘sometimes you just got to wing it.’

  24

  ‘NO LESS THAN five of the online nationals are running the vampire story, as well as several of the big regionals; we’ve had over a dozen requests for an interview from the media on this subject specifically and Bram Stoker’s Dracula is currently climbing up the Amazon chart,’ said Anderson as he and Dana approached the incident room. ‘My younger, hipper colleagues inform me that the social networking sites are talking about nothing else. Suddenly it’s cool to be undead.’

  ‘OK,’ said Dana, raising her voice to get the attention of the room and walking to the front. ‘I want to knock this vampire business on the head once and for all. Then at least we can say we considered it fully. I’ve asked Gayle to do some research on known cases of so-called vampirism. What have you got for us, Gayle?’

  Gayle Mizon stood, brushed biscuit crumbs off her skirt and came to join Dana at the front. ‘Right, two cases this decade of note,’ she began. ‘Both in 2002. First, a young Scottish man, Allan Menzies, who became obsessed by vampires after seeing a film called Queen of the Damned.’

  ‘That the one based on an Anne Rice book?’ asked Tom Barrett. As heads turned to him, he shrugged. ‘I had a girlfriend who loved that sort of stuff,’ he said.