Darkness Dominates - Chapter 4

Catherine kept Marcus waiting nearly four-fifths of an hour before turning up at his home. He’d used that duration to get her back to the dining room and kitchen, which was at the back of his property. The instant she knocked at his door, Marcus came into the downstairs corridor. He ushered her into the room nearest the front of the house.

“This better be worth me coming over here, Marcus!”

“She’s in the dining room, Cathy”

“Who is?”

Within a minute, she received her answer. Catherine let herself follow him into the dining room. When she was in the centre of the room, she turned to where Marcus was stood, frowning heavily.

“You’ve brought me to see Jade? Is that your idea of an urgent matter you couldn’t mention over the phone?”

“Look closer”

“I’m happier viewing her from here, thank you very much” she said crabbily.

Marcus realised he had to get to the point swiftly. Padding it out was putting Ms Henfield into a frame of mind that would certainly see her walk out.

“I turned her.”

This made Catherine’s mood frostier. Her expression was attributable to the face of a head teacher who had been alerted to rumours of a relationship between a teacher and a pupil. Marcus’ confession was on an equal plane with that hypothetical offence.

“You did what?”

The delay in the reaction wasn’t surprising to him. Catherine, for as long he’d known her, studied any utterance she found unpalatable to work out how angry she should be.

“I turned her!” said Marcus with a dollop more conviction.

“May I ask the fuck why?”

Marcus was now angry too. He couldn’t believe that Catherine needed to ask that. From where he stood, it ought to have been more obvious and he suddenly felt there was some kind of an elitist attitude to Jade in play here.

“Because she’s my girlfriend, because you messed around with the police enquiry, and because I didn’t want her to die”

Catherine was unafraid of Marcus’ sudden eruption. Male anger was something she had grown accustomed to. Violence was also a part of it, but she remained fearless in the face of that also.

“People die, Marcus”

“We don’t!”

“We do, but we don’t call it death! You know that just as well as I do, so quit pretending you keep forgetting that! That ruse is always transparent.”

Her back-up comment shot out of her mouth too fast for Dr Cartwright to block it with one of his own.

“Have you conveniently forgotten that I possess the legendary Stafford Sword?”

“You remind me every time I bring up the topic of mortality.”

“And you never listen, not properly.”

“You don’t give me cause to. She’s right about you being a snob!”

“I can’t help that, Marcus! Before I became immortal, I was brought up in an environment where class superiority mattered!”

She tried not to make it sound like an excuse for her disdainful attitude towards working class people, but it had that ring to it, regardless. Marcus was no idiot when it came to identifying that specific prejudice, and the endeavour was even easier for him when Catherine attempted to deny she had a problem with Jade’s background and upbringing.

“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

Catherine digested the inner-meaning behind the verbal shot Marcus made across her bows. Neither of them consciously treated the conversation as a battle, but it did have that confrontational element which made it heated.

“Don’t get too confident you did the right thing yet – there’s still the matter of her ageing process being permanently suspended. The people she spends the most time with are going to notice; and then of course there’s her family.”

This round was going to Catherine. Marcus hadn’t even thought about this at all while he was swapping Jade’s mode of existence for the one he’d had since 1806. Overlooking this reality didn’t make him think he was wrong to save her the only way he knew how.

“She’ll adjust, just like we did.”

“Christ, your memory is so short-term! You’ve managed to conveniently forget the part where you and I spent ninety-odd years trying to come to terms with what we became.”

Instinctively, Marcus knew Catherine was right on this matter. He had to win his approval of his split-second decision from her by means of an alternate route. This he saw in the news about the murder of Kara Howarth’s parents and how she had gone AWOL, and made the announcement of it with a harsher momentum. It was a personal form of attack, but he deemed it necessary as it appeared to show that Catherine taking over DCI Oliver’s investigation was a mistake.

“It is far from being an error on my part, Marcus – this development was expected – and it gives further weight to the need to assassinate Frank. He has building up a herd. Arden is very clear on that practice being prohibited. Having more than three of our kind in one group is a recipe for disaster! They would consider themselves unstoppable: that’s why the Home Secretary wants us to hunt individually. The nesting instinct hails from tribal societies: do you honestly want that attitude to re-manifest itself? Our species can be vicious but this will amplify that.”

Catherine’s daytime job had made her the queen of convincing arguments inside the dynamics of hers and Marcus’ friendship. She had just unloaded another one.

“What’s going to happen to her once you’ve put the Home Secretary in the picture about her ‘ascension’?”

“I really wish you wouldn’t keep using that word, Marcus. Arden will have to evaluate her, as he did with me and with you. Granted, it’s been the procedure since he stumbled upon our kind back in 1989 when he was a backbencher.”

“That’s not fair, Cathy!”

“Life, even the immortal variety, isn’t fair.”

Here was the one truth nobody liked to accept. Catherine’s experience of people could safely take into account the events that became history over a period of two centuries. What it told her was that a person’s life was balanced out by their successes and failures. This was behind her issuing the pearl of wisdom that applied to everyone. She wanted him to see that his decision had brought forth consequences and hard choices. It settled his defiant certainty he had done the right thing, but only as far as the method he used to save her. The endeavour itself he didn’t regret – nor would anyone placed in that position.

“She is one of us now.”

“Can I tell her?”

“What good do you think that will do?”

“If you want her to be scrutinised by Arden, she’ll need to know the truth.”

“You misunderstood my question, Marcus: it is up to me to inform her about what you’ve changed her into.”

“That’s the bureaucrat in you talking. She’s my girlfriend. That entitles me to be the one to break it to her.”

“And what will you say to her? She’ll freak out as soon as it becomes apparent she can’t age and requires human blood from now on.”

“That’s my problem, Catherine!”

“You’re right, Marcus, it is! Mine, however, is keeping an eye on the situation Frank is creating. Now that all six of these missing schoolgirls have been made immortal, their herd mentality will make them wilder and more dangerous than if they were hunting alone. Arden wants this situation contained, and that’s going to take all of my time, so I don’t have any to currently deal with this. I will let you do the talking.”

This was referential to Catherine offering up a short burst of acceptance of Marcus’ decision. She knew she didn’t know her way round the emotional territory Jade and her friend shared equally.

“You’ve got over nine hours, maybe less, to work out how you’re going to deliver this bombshell to her – I wish you luck with that!”

There was no further elaboration on what steps Catherine would take to deal with Kara’s ascension. She was not going to allow it to be any of Marcus’ business.

Dr Cartwright didn’t step in to have the last word. He had to concern himself with the responsibility of saying something to Jade he knew she was not going to believe that speedily. There was no shortage of ways to hammer that incredible piece of news, but Marcus was taking care of just what he could say without stumbling over words he couldn’t string together properly. This required thought that could be seen as rehearsal for the speech he’d been given back near the start of the nineteenth century.

 

A few minutes after all 24-hour clocks reached midnight, Kara walked into Belle Amour’s photography studio with the air of someone who’d received a summons to come here. The fringes of a memory chronicling the time Paul was informed of his compulsory juror duty circulated around Miss Howarth’s head. Her invitation was purely psychological. There was no E-mail involved nor any card sent through the post: she’d awoken into eternal life with an inexplicable need for her to be here. The owner of this fashion agency studied her physique as she made an entrance. Her hazel brown locks were flowing freely. Frank never agreed with females having their hair tied up at the back; he was all for the Rapunzel effect. Already dotted about this room were Fiona, Holly, Jenna, Rhona and Ashley. The dresses they had were a lot more voluptuous: dark shades of bright colours were the outcome of a deliberate decision Frank had made. Their hair colourations ranged from brown to platinum blonde. Rhona was the odd one out in this respect: she had a mop of gingery red hair. All five of the older teenage girls had fixed the stares into one combined glance – and it was aimed at Kara. Without consciously understanding what she was invisibly listening to, she responded to the stare with a subtle smile. The facial action was immediately reciprocated by the others. Frank moved up behind her. She felt the touch of his hands on her shoulders, but they had yet to caress them. This ought to have been weird for her, but the sensation danced on the edge of all things familiar to Kara. When the palms of his hands did launch into stroking the upper halves of her arms, she closed her eyes. Something about his touch made her more suggestible to whatever inner passions were being unlocked. With the absence of rhyme or reason, Kara’s hands reached into the inside of her T-shirt. There was no bra there. She had no memory of anyone taking it off her body, but didn’t care that she had amnesia over this fact. It felt undeniably freeing. In the next moment, her hands developed a will of their own. All of her fingers moved like the legs of a spider. They reached out to various spots beneath where her hands had been crawling around a moment ago, but the direction they were going in changed dramatically and they dived down to the middle of her torso. A hypnotic sexual curiosity was determining where they were heading to. She didn’t actually seem to possess any control over it, but from Kara’s orgasmic facial expression, it was pointedly clear that she was cool about letting herself be a slave to it. When Mr George’s fingers slipped away from her skin, they began tweaking at the points that hastened the removal of what she’d been wearing when Jade had found her. Both Frank and Kara deferred from talking as she slipped out of the clothes soiled by the fatal attack on her parents – a direct result of her ascent into immortality.

When they were all off her body, together with her shoes, the dress was slid onto her over her head and the majority of the dark green material descended until a portion of the hem flopped over her bare feet. “It’s taller than you are” Frank said about the dress in a playful tone. “Do you want me to shorten it?”

His suggestion was awash with conspiratorial niceties, which unintentionally sounded a little perverse. Kara gently stroked the right hip area of the dress before stating whether she wanted the height altered.

“No, its fine as it is.”

“Take your place with the others, Kara” said Mr George. “I want to take a few group photos.”

Miss Howarth willingly made her way over to the wall the other five young women were stood up against. A handful of men in matching dark blue T-shirts entered, carrying lights to correctly illuminate the photo shoot style set-up. They assembled them the way they always did when a magazine editor was after particular images that fitted into the kind of photo spread he or she had in mind. Not one of the men viewed what they were doing as having any other purpose than the usual goal. Frank cornered one of them in a friendly manner.

“Can you send the photographer in?”

He nodded. Valuing his job too much, he didn’t ask any questions. He was on his way to find him when the photographer walked in. There was a great deal of tenderness in how he held the tripod. The strap attached to the camera was slung comfortably around his neck. Afraid of some unfixable damage being caused to it, he often kept it separate from the apparatus that held it up securely and maintained the necessary balance. He wasn’t really part of Frank’s staff: the photographer was freelance.

“How do you want them to pose?”

“Let them all find their own rhythm, Steve.”

“That won’t work for me. Not on a midnight shoot”

“It will for me – just get on with it.”

Steve had doubts this was professionally possible. His line usually only permitted fixed scenarios that brought the best out of his photo shoots, but he was authentically surprised to see the six girls live up to his work-related expectations. Their poses were symbiotic: each turn to the left or the right dovetailed expertly to counteract the individual positions they held while the camera captured them. They subconsciously emulated the poses models like Natalia Vodianova and Suki Waterhouse adopted for each shot; even pouting to make the images more intense. He did seven altogether, and the digitally-stored images he captured went beyond his highest standards.

“Tell me, are they telepathically tuned to my ‘snapper’?” Steve asked his employer, as he was detaching the camera from the top of his tripod.

“No, they’re not.”

He didn’t unload any further curiosity on Frank as to how their movement produced first-class photos. The retention of professional methods was something he never failed to empathise with. His only priorities that connected with his line of work involved when and how he got his wage; lesser considerations were disposable.

“Give your camera and your tripod to my PA, and then come back in here, so we can discuss your bonus payment for this last-minute job” said Mr George.

Steve said “sure” and took himself into the office behind the wall that was the sole location of the photo shoot. Frank’s personal assistant was blonde and beautiful, and the photographer was confident enough to flirt without sounding like he was acutely embarrassed.

“Nice visuals” he said, looking both at the framed pictures lined precisely above her head and the accidentally undone top button on her shirt. His dad had told him during his eighteenth birthday that this was one of the first sights a man on the lookout for a girlfriend was guaranteed to identify. She played along with him, but didn’t give him any impression she was interested in him that way. When he ran out of flirtatious remarks, he asked her a more straightforward question as he handed her the two principal tools of his trade.

“How long have you worked here?”

“A fair bit!”

“Can’t have been that long since you were taken on” pointed out Steve. “You look the age of someone who recently left university.”

“I do, don’t I.”

“You sure do” he replied, mistaking the PA’s comment as her flirting back.

“A special kind of cream” she said.

“Come again?”

“It’s how my skin looks great.”

He knew he hadn’t asked just how she’d achieved her excellent complexion.  It took a shrug of his shoulders to leave it at that. Another of the black T-shirted workers entered her office and told him Mr George needed him back in the photo studio.

“You wanted to talk about my wage.”

Unknown to Steve, the six models he’d photographed were circling the space behind him. They started pawing him – gently at first, but it shortly shifted into molestation. Able to make some sort of a guess as to how old they were individually, he found it rather creepy.

“Yeah, okay...enough already! Save it for the next photo shoot!”

“They’re getting into the spirit of things” said Mr George.

“Some of these girls look a little young to be eighteen.”

“That’s because they’re sixteen.”

There was a manufactured sleaziness in Frank’s voice. It made Steve suspicious of the real intent behind the photographs that were being taken.

 “What’s your deal? Are you some kind of pimp?”

The query was the most direct he’d ever come out with. His fury at realising just what he’d stumbled onto built up as he thought about the consequences for him. It heralded the first occasion he’d said something to his employer that was accusatory. Yet, in spite of the danger of him getting the sack, he went further with his question.

“Or are you a nonce?”

Frank prevented himself from looking like the assumption bothered him. It wasn’t the type of reply to give the person asking it the impression his accusation was baseless.

“I reckon that’s what this is about – you’re a fucking nonce! Those parents were right about you...you’re a perv!”

His Manchester accent thickened as his venomous assertion his employer was a sexual predator continued. Mr George remained unmoved and unresponsive all through Steve’s righteously-motivated but hateful rants.

“I’m getting my equipment and then I’m fucking well going to the police – nonce!”

He managed to bare his teeth as he said what he thought his boss was. No wage payment was going to act as a way of changing Steve’s mind about reporting him. The photographer had a clear-cut intolerance to men who abused women in the same age group as the girls surrounding him. He made his first step towards getting out of here and never coming back, but the former schoolgirls, who had once occupied a mortal existence, tightened the circle they had formed. Kara started the ball rolling and pushed Steve towards Jenna, who then propelled him to Holly. The momentum of pushing the photographer around the inside of the circle grew fiercer as they pushed him away. Four minutes later, he was enveloped by mild claustrophobia. Steve was suddenly as vulnerable as a child in the middle of a circle of schoolyard bullies, laughing as he found it harder to break free. The immortal teenage girls found Steve’s predicament amusing too. They were the cats and he was the mouse. His legs partially gave way and the tops of his kneecaps bumped into one another. He thrust his left arm to the floor, so the hand attached to it could stop him tumbling fully to the floor. It was no good, unfortunately. One final push from Holly caused him to end up fully at their feet.

In a state of panic he never believed he would feel, Steve asked “What do you want with me?” The question was more for the girls themselves than for his boss, but Mr George answered it on their behalf.

“Giving you your payment and their reward”

Frank abruptly glanced at each of the dozen girls in turn. Steve’s runaway adrenaline surge was smelled by them, and they exhibited their two carnivorous teeth. He yelled at them to let him go, but their hunger overruled their senses. They all jumped onto him and the noise that went hand-in-hand with skin being penetrated was at its loudest. All six of the young ladies were now like tiger cubs feasting on the meal their parents had laid before them. Mr George casually walked out of the photo studio, leaving Steve to be drained dry by his marauding killers.

 

DCI Oliver gruffly lifted an inch of the yellow police tape barrier up high enough to duck under without bending down too much. He walked straight through the front door of Mr & Mrs Howarth’s home, avoiding staring back at the civilians nearby, in case he was nudged into giving a filthy look. Stewart didn’t stop walking until he was at the back of the house. Angela was the first one to say “good morning”, but for the DCI, it was anything but. He’d left his own home without resolving a mild row he and his wife had gotten into. Strangely, the core incident that set it off was nothing more than a missing packet of batteries.

“Any news on sightings of Kara Howarth, Korrell”

“None sir”

“What about the racket their next door neighbours heard?”

“They heard it, but didn’t see it. Most of the curtains were closed, upstairs and down: they would’ve only seen silhouettes.”

“Good thing too, Korrell – I need that fact to validate this being a burglary gone by, even though it isn’t.”

He used a pause in what he was thinking to marinate his latest verbal show of discontent over Catherine’s interference. It was undercooked and badly-worded, so he needed the chance for it to blend together more firmly.

“It’s fucking come to something when, far from solving crimes, you have to invent one to keep the wheels of bureaucracy turning!”

Angela suspended her agreement with her boss’ gripe. She wanted to remain objective, so she could use that virtue to help find Kara.

“Is DC Pryce around?”

“Jade’s not in yet. Her bloke, Marcus, said she was feeling rough.”

“Feeling rough or feeling rough, Korrell”

“Feeling rough, sir” said Angela, pointing Stewart’s mind in the direction in the second definition of Jade’s remark.

“How many glasses of plonk did she have, Detective Sergeant?”

“Marcus didn’t say, boss!”

“No need to protect her, Korrell – I’m not going to tear strips off her, even though I do feel like that presently.”

DCI Oliver didn’t make the tail-end of that announcement personal. His bad mood was symptomatic of a broad set of grievances that his enquiry into the murder of Paul and Kaye. Jade’s notable absence from the crime scene was the tip of the iceberg.

“Do you want me to call her?”

“You can if you want to, but I don’t think we’ll achieve much detective work here today. The forensic team will probably get more answers than we’re likely to.”

Stewart’s reply was hardly a yes, but she felt it couldn’t do any harm to see if DC Pryce could make it into work. She selected Jade’s number but it went to voice mail by the second ring.

“Shit, Jade! Try and wake the fuck up if you can!”

Angela didn’t want to be sore at her colleague, but she had pegged Jade down as being a woman who wouldn’t throw out professionalism for the sake of a lie in. Now she was forming the opinion that her friend would, she felt let down, and Korrell did have a reputation for holding grudges that could last for a week, maximum.

“No luck, Korrell?”

“Nope, I’ll fill her in when she does surface – that is if I don’t end up slapping her first.”

That half was not meant for DCI Oliver to listen into. It was her personal foray into hating what she viewed as Jade’s selfishness.

“Do another sweep of the upstairs rooms, Detective Sergeant, in particular her bedroom!”

“I’m on it, sir!”

“While you’re there, check Kara’s laptop again: there might be another E-mail from that bitch Ms Henfield or Frank George.”

“I thought we couldn’t step into that case.”

“We can’t, but right now I feel like doing something to piss her off!”

Just for that moment, Stewart had shaken off his necessity for professionalism. He was enjoying the chance to be a man child before resuming an adult outlook on the job he had to do. Angela saw her golden opportunity to tip her boss back towards being his common self.

“Remember what you told me about letting the job get to you, sir?”

There was no need for the rest of that tale to be told. The gist was immediate and gatherable.

“You think we should accept the Chief Constable’s orders, Korrell?”

“I’m afraid I do, sir. This isn’t you.”

“You’re right, it isn’t.”

“I’ll check some of the houses further down the street. Maybe they heard the noise coming from Mr & Mrs Howarth’s place.”

“No, you won’t, Korrell! I may’ve been a little childish about what Ms Henfield did to my investigation, but I was serious about taking an early lunch.”

“Thank you, sir”

“I will want you back at the office by two this afternoon – no later, otherwise I will regret my generosity.

Back in the front garden, Angela ducked under the distinctive yellow tape, denying any constable the chance to lift it up above her head for her. She stopped off to talk to DC Matthews before obeying one of the orders issued by DCI Oliver she found it easy to.

 

A few minutes after midday, Jade was awoken by her right foot slipping off the couch she’d been sleeping on. She tried standing up but her left leg was plagued by pins and needles. Sliding it sporadically back and forth did the trick and she could feel the circulation getting going. She was able to rebalance her whole body on the 2^nd attempt. Walking about was an even simpler stage to accomplish. By looking into a tall mirror at one of the room’s tight corners, Jade saw she was still in the dress she’d worn to the restaurant. Carrying two mugs of hot coffee, Marcus entered the room. She was more grateful to see a beverage heading her way than the man in charge of bringing it over to her. She took it and rewarded him with a less than warm and fuzzy thank you.

“Am I being sent to Coventry, Jade?”

“No, you’d enjoy it there too much!”

She sat back on the sofa and stared at something boring to empty her mind of whispers, telling her to look him in the eye. Her voice of reason was not being allowed back in the room whilst she was having her first coffee of the day. It was bound to persuade her to be forgiving about last night, and she was sailing too far from any inclination to live and let live.

“I know you hate me right now, but we need to talk tonight.”

“Talk to Catherine: she’s bound to be more appealing company than I am!”

“This is serious: you might not remember, but I had to do something I haven’t done in a long time.”

“I already know what that something is – you pissed on your girlfriend’s feelings! Who was the last girl you did that to?”

“That is not what I mean!”

“Right now, I don’t care what you mean, Marcus! I want to drink my coffee in peace, so fuck off!”

In a fresh bid to get her into this conversation more enthusiastically, Marcus snatched DC Pryce’s coffee away from her. He put it somewhere it wouldn’t be accidentally knocked over and sat himself directly on the left half of the couch. She tried to relocate to another part of the living room, but Marcus pulled her back onto the sofa.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Making you listen to me!”

The emergence of his manliness plunged Jade into a short period of silence. It was doubly forceful as she’d known it to be.

“Okay, you’re serious about talking to me! I get that from you going Stallone on me – so let’s talk!

“There are things about me that...” He faltered in his explanation for a second, but picked it up again when he glanced at where Harris had stabbed her last night. “...you’ll find it impossible to believe.”

“Try me, Marcus” she said, unsure of where he was going with what he’d begun saying.

“There is no way to ease you into this, Jade – last night, you were fatally stabbed!”

Automatically, Jade pulled up the top she had on and felt around the entirety of her chest and stomach. She looked up at Marcus, dumbfounded and irritated.

“I can’t have been – there’s no scar and sign of any cut! What is this really about?”

Her jumping to this conclusion wasn’t a strange reaction. Jade was going on what her eyes were telling her, and they certainly couldn’t support the notion that she had received a serious flesh wound. The optical evidence argued fervently against it having a ring of truth. Marcus injected more gravitas and kept it free from coming across as pretentious, so what he was about to tell her could be believed. He knew how tall an order it was, though, and tried to work into saying it from a sideways on angle.

“There’s a reason why you have no memory of it.”

“Go on, Marcus – please tell me so I can get out of here as quick as I can.”

He swallowed hard, a habit he reverted to when he was having great difficulty getting the words out. Marcus’ eyeballs moved from left to right and back again three times over. He was about to make his big reveal to her, when Jade felt the vibration coming from her mobile whilst it rang, and she removed it from the pocket it had been stored in, answering it in a rush.

“Can you phone me back a little later – I’m in the middle of something?”

“No, Jade, I won’t phone you back a little later! Meet me at Sanderson’s Sandwich Emporium in one hour!”

DS Korrell halted the phone call at that precise point. She gave DC Pryce food for thought by making the conversation this short. Jade opted to adhere to Angela’s sour ultimatum. Marcus, in her opinion, was taking too long to get to the point he was trying to make, and a better use of her time had suddenly fallen into her lap.

“Tell me later over the phone, Marcus! That was Angela wanting to see me. She sounds miffed!”

“Come back over to my house around seven this evening!”

“Can’t do that, Marcus”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Can’t – I’ve been drafted into the Hot Fuzz pub quiz team tonight!”

“Try to get out of it! What I have to tell you is life-changing!”

“Give over being a drama queen – it doesn’t fucking well suit you.”

“Please Jade; say you’re ill or something!”

“Oh sod off, Marcus! I’m doing no such thing! I’m going to The Tiger & Swan’s pub quiz – end of!”

She searched for her shoes, which Marcus had removed last night. Jade found them under a coffee table and put them on as she made her breakaway from the interior of the living room. Marcus commenced pursuing DC Pryce, leading him into the corridor at the front of his house. When she was close to the front door, Jade tripped on a portion of her dress’s hem, but her head missed the door as she tumbled cack-handily onto the carpet. The fibres smelled strange to her and she got to her feet to escape the peculiar odour.

“When’s the last time you had the carpet cleaned?”

He could not understand the relevance of the question, but Marcus showed his gracious side by offering up the reply “Last week”.

“Doesn’t smell like it to me!”

“What time does the pub quiz finish?”

Marcus hadn’t asked the question with much subtlety. Jade briskly leaped upon the hidden agenda.

“Call me tomorrow morning! I might be in a better mood to talk to you by then.”

“But don’t hold my breath?”

“I have breakfast after eight – ring me after then.”

She didn’t wait for Marcus to throw one more parting comment. Jade was through the front door whilst he was inserting that instruction into the list of things he had to remember today.

 

The front entrance to the sandwich shop Angela included in her telephone summons had the old-fashioned mechanism that rang a bell. It tinkled loudly when Jade walked in there. The cafe area was towards the rear of the premises: the front half allocated its space to three self-service counters. Within them were the separate ingredients for whatever type of sandwich, roll or baguette the customer wanted. There was variety, but it was conditional on the lunches being served cold. A black foldaway sign outside had the words “No Hot Food Served Here” written on it in green chalk, so that nobody entering would ask for that kind of lunch. Jade passed through a gap in the middle self-service counter with a plate carrying a ham and egg baguette on it. She waved to Angela when she spotted the table she was waiting for her at, but Korrell merely pushed the chair across from where she sitting out with her foot. The unspoken beckon was what Jade would have to be satisfied with for now.

“How drunk did you get last night, Jade?”

“Hi, Jade, how are you? I’m fine, Angela, except for my double date going tits up and Marcus proving he has more loyalty to Catherine than he has for me. I can’t really complain!” said DC Pryce, annoyed that Korrell couldn’t even manage a hello. She got that Angela was pissed off at her big time, but it was still a kick in the teeth that one of her closest friends couldn’t take time out to offer he a greeting. She wasn’t after ultra-politeness; she just hoped for some basic courtesy.

“Kara Howarth’s mum and dad were killed last night and their daughter went missing again, probably abducted, and all you can go on about your own fucking problems! God, that’s not the actions of a police officer, but those of a teenage girl with a lot of attitude!”

Angela didn’t mince words here. She wanted her to face up to how much she’d cheesed off her colleague, but Pryce had only honed in on the first segment of the heated outburst.

“They’ve been killed? How were they killed?”

“Someone slashed their chests. They both bled out in minutes. Neither of them stood a chance!”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here then.”

“You’re going to have to prove that.”

“Does this mean closer supervision from you?”

“No, it means you come in and leave more or less when I tell you. The DCI will back me on this.”

Angela bit into her bap, and a slice of tomato was dislodged from the layer of lettuce inside it. The left-hand quarter of her plate caught it, but some of what was in the centre leaked out and left an orangey stain on the serviette below it. Jade recognised this as being the result of angry eating. Pryce was less fierce in how she devoured her baguette and munched it moderately.

“I know he will.”

Jade absorbed that this was the proverbial bad day, or days. She’d had a much better one nearly two days ago, and she could use that to get her through what was passing for a day right now.

“Right Jade, you can start to make it up to me by reading this!”

DS Korrell fished out a thick book from a blue cotton recyclable bag, containing more than 200 pages, and she dropped it gently onto the table, on the right-hand side of the table. The plate on which Jade’s baguette was laid surprisingly didn’t bounce from the impact.

“What’s this, Angela?”

“Your homework for tonight, Jade – that’s what it is!”

Jade glanced at the cover. She read the title of the book aloud.

“Compendium of Cinema Facts & Figures”

“Typical mid-Seventies book title.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From Donnie’s mum: she got it as a Xmas present when she was fourteen.”

“So, I’m to be answering the film questions!”

“Film & TV questions – I suggested it to DCI Oliver as a punishment for your absence from work this morning.”

“I can think of worse ways to be given a slap on the wrist.”

A lock of Jade’s hair was accidentally inserted into her left ear as she carried on eating her lunch. She gently brushed it out, displacing a speck of wax that had been building up in the process. Using one of the corners of her serviette, DC Pryce wiped it off the fingertip it had landed on, so it wouldn’t get onto what remained of her savoury baguette. It was then she caught Angela looking hard at her hair.

“Do I have dandruff again?”

“No, far from it – it’s really shiny! How many times did you shampoo it?”

“I didn’t. I never had time to get myself washed this morning. I was too busy listening to Marcus going on about something important he had to tell me.”

“And did he tell you?”

“No, you rang up, giving me the third degree, so I came straight here. I told him he can tell me what this important thing is tomorrow. I’ll bet you any money, it won’t be, though!”

“You really sound pissed at him, Jade.”

Angela’s observation was the signal she needed to move away from talking about Marcus for a spell. She then jumped into immersing herself in all chat concerning this evening’s pub quiz. Jade turned to the contents page to help her navigate through the book quickly. The final chapter showed the publication’s age. Since it hailed from the 1970s, the book only chronicled facts relating to movies that hit cinemas months before it was released to bookstores.

“I need something newer, Angela. This is thirty years out of date. The person who wrote the questions will be asking about films from the last few years!”

DC Pryce shut the book and pushed it back over to Angela.

“Something newer it is then, Jade.”

“We could always use the internet.”

“The landlord’s developed a sixth sense about contestants who use it the day before. Our team will be sussed out in a heartbeat. We’re better off buying a movie facts book from this century.”

Looking at the display on her mobile, Jade determined what time they had left to wander round a bookshop. She turned it round and held it up so that Angela could see for herself whether she could get it done before she was to be back at her desk.

“I’m due back at 2pm – we’ve got over an hour. That’s plenty of time.”

“How far are we away from Waterstones?”

She retracted her mind back a step to accommodate Angela’s evaluation about how long they could wander around the high street for/

“Hang on! Did you say you’re due back at 2pm?”

“I did, yeah.”

“So, you’re making up your own lunchtime duration too!”

“The boss said it was okay.”

“Shitting hell...did he have a personality transplant?”

“Nope – it pains me to say it, but I have Catherine Henfield to thank for me getting a long lunch break.”

Jade chose not to investigate what Angela meant by that. She didn’t want to face another situation where Catherine was painted as the golden girl.

“I’ve got to say, Jade, your hair is far better looking now than it’s ever been for as long I’ve known you!”

Korrell’s judgement tweaked DC Pryce out of thinking about either Cathy or the pub quiz. She gently stroked both sides of her hair.

“That’s weird! My hair’s never been this healthy!”

Her exclamation was the only outward sign that Jade felt it was a strange thing to happen. Within a moment, she was back talking about the pub quiz.

“What’s the prize the teams are vying for?”

“The landlord’s keeping that to himself, Jade.”

“God, it’s not going to be another fast food voucher is it!”

“We can only guess!”

Keen to be back before DCI Oliver’s deadline, the two of them surged through the rest of their midday snacks. Leaving the odd morsel and countless crumbs behind on their plates, Angela and Jade went to pay for what they’d eaten. They went halves on the total cost, so neither one wasted time for rummaging around for spare change.

There was a seven-minute walk from where they were to where they were headed. Jade found herself in regular amazement at the size of this bookstore, every time she paid a visit. Angela looked for the store directory and spotted it attached next to a separate cardboard stand. It was filled with various copies of the same book. The stand was decorated by the hardback’s cover illustrations, widened out to incorporate some of the pictures on the rear of the book too. These were the standard structures for the novels that had found their way onto bestseller lists. Jade’s interest in the books on sale jumped from shelf-to-shelf, and from table-to-table, where the most popular literary choices, as determined by the customers, were situated. Her eyes were doing the bulk of the leaping.

“What we’re after is on the second floor” said Angela.

Korrell and Pryce at first headed to the foot of the staircase, but opted for the lift. Angela knew how it easy it was to lose track of time when browsing, and harked back to being more mindful of how quick this excursion into this store had to be. Her calculation wasn’t quite up to scratch, however. A man who had started climbing the stairs at the same moment they’d boarded the lift was on the 2^nd floor before they were.

“Go for anything that looks like it’s a proper film compendium” suggested Angela rigorously.

Jade looked around the ‘Film & TV’ section and saw a pair of books that met the requirements DS Korrell had been forced to make up on the spot. Angela kept looking at the time on her mobile phone as Jade looked a counter that had staff behind it.

“We’ve got less than a quarter of an hour left, Jade” said Angela, eager to get back to work.

Hurriedly, DC Pryce let herself make a snap decision on which one to buy. She raced from there to one of the counters where staff were stood behind and entered the shortest queue. Once the price printed on the inside leaf of the hardback had been paid, Angela and Jade almost sprinted down the staircase, finding out just how quicker this method of reaching the 2^nd floor would’ve been. The ground floor had decreased its quota of customers since they’d been upstairs. A few mums out with youngsters who weren’t even the right age for toddler’s groups were looking at the section dedicated to picture books. The way Korrell and Pryce left the building was not crowded and there was no dodging other people who might be standing in twos and threes. Less than five minutes later, they were out of there.

 

15 minutes later in Mr George’s swanky residence, five of the six young women, now dressed in revealing tops and snug-fitting trousers, made themselves comfortable on the two sofas adjacent to one another. Kara took the large easy chair that looked onto both couches as if to proclaim herself as top dog in this group of teenage girls. There were no exchanged looks that solidified Miss Howarth in this position, but it was early days. All of them were acclimatising to their new existence and they weren’t yet aware just how different their lives were to those lived by normal people. Kara slid her feet out of her shoes and manoeuvred herself round so that her legs could lean on the right hand arm of the easy chair she’d selected. A wafer thin smear of Steve’s blood was still evident on Miss Howarth’s lower lip, and it was almost dry. None of her attempts to lick it off with her tongue were working. She got off the chair and went to fetch a piece of toilet roll to wipe it away more effectively. Mr George had given the new posse of female immortals the tour of his house when they first passed through his front door, so they were already past being knowledgeable of their interior surroundings.

“Shame we had to kill that bloke who took photo of us” said Holly “He was well fit, I reckon!”

Holly’s sharing her only regret about her first ‘feast’ with the others was her way of cutting through the silence currently lingering around. She was more of a talker than a thinker. This trait of hers was a remnant of how she commonly interacted with her fellow schoolgirls. Being free with speech could rub others up the wrong way, but the girls who’d been her friends put up with her talking too much. The absence of anyone creating a conversation was doing her head in, and Holly was still waiting for another one of the girls seated side-by-side to follow her lead. Although she had a tendency that was almost the polar opposite to Holly’s, Jenna stepped out of her comfort zone to be the one to keep the conversation’s momentum going.

“His jaw was way too firm” said Jenna. “The rounder the better”

Her opinion of Steve’s looks sounded rude, but she discovered that she didn’t care if she’d accidentally used innuendo. Jenna’s life was no longer conventional, and the rules governing this social conformity were suddenly unimportant. Jumping in after Miss Scott’s contribution was Ashley Malcolm.

“Double chins are so sexy” she said.

It was such an out there thing to say that the other girls couldn’t help reacting to it. Leading the charge of incredulity was Fiona Lawson.

“No way, Ashley – that’s totes gross! One chin is enough!”

Ashley wasn’t fazed by the murmur of agreement the others had for her statement being too weird and making no sense. The things that turned her on and the remainder that didn’t weren’t part of the genetic link between them. She was free to decide about those for herself.

“I think his arse was the best bit of him” said Rhona Greene nonchalantly.

There was no embarrassment in her voice as the words burst forth. Even when she was a pupil of the school she and the rest attended, she was continually labelled “the queen of the inappropriate”: more so by her teachers. One of them, Mr Gore, judged her as a girl who was sexually advanced by a year. It made boys see her as easy, which worried the teachers. They didn’t want a single female student to get a reputation that laid them open to accusations of being promiscuous. Rhona’s interest in the modelling world came from having no inhibitions about flaunting her looks and her body. She’d lost them when she was 12. This was a development that heightened the anxieties her family already had about her burgeoning sexuality. One of the five uncles from her mum’s side of the family was evangelical in his Christian beliefs and values. He was disturbed the most by his niece’s attitude to sex. However, he was so zealous and self-righteous that very few family members, even his wife and three daughters, listened to him. Whatever preachy views he had, the wider circle of Miss Greene’s relatives seldom got to hear them repeated.

“Where’s Kara? I thought she was just getting some bog roll” said Fiona.

“I’ll check” said Holly.

The second she was vacating the couch on the right-hand side of the living room, Jenna took advantage of the extra space there now was. She bounced her backside on it a couple of times to test how comfy it was. She did a poor impression of the announcer on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ calling out the first names of each of the judges. She replaced Craig’s name with hers.

“Jenna: Ten!”

TV shows and films that ordinary people like hadn’t left the sphere of what the six girls thought and talked about. What they’d been transformed into hadn’t blotted out the elements of their old lives.

Holly was thinking about her favourite programme, ‘The 100’, at the moment as she made her way up to the bathroom. She kept pasting her face onto the major female characters in the show, one-by-one, as she ascended every heavily carpeted step. When she got to the shut door, she knocked twice and called out the name of the bathroom’s present occupant.

“Hang on” called out Kara.

The bathroom’s interior took up a fifth of the 1^st floor. The toilet was in line with the shower room doors, and Kara had been studying the modern style of the shower’s design. It was space-age, but the futuristic ring to it had come from the mind of someone around in the Eighties who had a crack at imagining what this household appliance would look like fifty years on. The trouble was the prediction had the decade’s design aesthetic and it dated too quickly to meet how showers looked in the 21^st century. It had become retro before it was deemed futuristic. Kara understood this and was getting bored staring at it. Nevertheless, this boredom was relaxing her bowels, aiding her lavatory business. It eclipsed her surprise that she could excrete. The fiction about vampires she had read had put into her mind that they didn’t need to go to the loo. Doing her ablutions also cast aside the residual drops of guilt over taking the lives of her parents to sustain hers. One more lot of excrement emerged unseen and there was a tiny splash. The upward shoot of water from the U-bind wet the back of her thighs. She stood up and wiped her bottom. The paper she’d separated from the rest of the roll was absorbent and she found it was just as effective as drying her posterior as cleaning it.

“I’m kind of done” she said to Holly, before flushing the chain. “You can come in: it’s nothing you haven’t seen before!”

“I’m cool” Holly said back to Kara through the door.

“Suit yourself”

As she pulled up her shiny trousers, Miss Howarth looked down at her feet. They were now shapely without appearing too bony. She felt every inch of them, one after the other, from the toes to the heel and then to the ankle. When Kara’s impromptu examination was over, she placed the soles of her feet onto the softness of the toilet mat. It stretched around the front of the lavatory bowl, so that no loose urine dribbled onto the carpeting underneath. The zip was fluid in its upward motion, but the trouser button was a little trickier. It required three attempts before her fingers mastered manoeuvring it through the slot in the fabric.

“Yay, done it”

The blood on her bottom lip hadn’t completely vanished, but Kara was gladder about that than when she entered the bathroom. She was coming round to the idea that having some physical memento of her new hunting instinct was a method of adjusting to eternal life. The changes accompanying them were slowly dissecting the memory from two nights ago of her thwarted bid for freedom, and she could only remember two aspects of it. Soon, Kara wouldn’t even recall these fragments. Holly, whom she was following downstairs, was going through the same mental sensation, and proceeded to pick up on the other four having the same experience inside their heads. It wasn’t telepathy but it felt like that. When Holly and Kara were back in the king-size living room, the conversation started by Miss Ambridge was in full swing, and voiced points of view were merging and overlapping – the core of any lively debate.