‘Then what?’
‘Then she wasn’t there but the hopping thing came after me — didn’t attack me, just kept hopping behind me with a squelching sound each time it hit the ground.’
‘Can you describe the woman?’
‘Quite pretty, blonde, about five foot six. Her clothes were damp and smelly.’
‘What was she wearing?’
‘Some kind of western outfit. Cowboy boots.’
‘Do you mind if I take a swab from your mouth and your neck?’ I said.
‘What for?’ he said.
‘You never know,’ I said. Afterward I took his address and phone number and gave him my card. ‘Let me know if you remember anything else,’ I said. ‘Any time of the day or night.’ I sent the samples off to the lab and that was it for Monday evening. When I got home I took my shoes off, put my feet up, drank some whisky, and listened to Alison Krauss and the Cox family. I fell asleep in my chair and dreamt that Rose Harland was waiting for me on the far-side bank of Jordan. ‘I’ll be waiting, drawing pictures in the sand,’ she sang, ‘and when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout. And come running through the shallow waters, reaching for your hand.’ I could still see her face as I woke up, then it faded and I went to bed. As I was drifting off to sleep I heard myself say, ‘Definitely not a mouse turd.’
1 February 2004. Scotland Yard e-mailed me a photo sent by Ralph Darling of Witheridge in Devon. He’d written to say that his sister Rachael had gone to London last November in a depressed state of mind and he hadn’t heard from her since. He was worried about her and he wanted to know if there was any news of her. A living face in a photograph looks quite different to a dead one but when I had the Devon photo side by side with ours I was pretty sure it was a match. So that was her name, Rachael Darling. I rang up Ralph Darling and he came in to identify the body of his sister.
He was a very large man in corduroy trousers and a reefer jacket. I’m six feet tall and he was half a head taller and broad. He had big hands, rough and red, and he smelled of cows. ‘It never goes away,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an organic dairy farm outside Witheridge.’
Rachael was in the mortuary at St Hubert’s Hospital. I took her brother there and sat him down in the little waiting room while I went through to talk to Morton Taylor, the technician. Taylor consulted his clipboard and wheeled a trolley over to the banks of refrigerated body trays. He raised the trolley bed up to No. 12 and slid Rachael Darling’s tray on to it. Then he transferred her to another trolley with a blue floral-print skirt, put a pillow under her head and a blanket over her, and wheeled her into the chapel of rest where the lighting is subdued so the paleness of death won’t be too startling and the atmosphere seems hushed by virtue of a large wooden cross on a stand. I always expect a recording of non-denominational organ music, ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ or whatever and I’m always thankful for its absence.
At this point I brought Ralph Darling in. He came over to the bier, looked down at her, sobbed and covered his face with his hands. After a few moments he took his hands away. ‘That’s her,’ he said, and clenched his fists. ‘She looks so pale, like a ghost. How’d she die?’
‘We can’t know for certain,’ I said.
‘I think you do know. Don’t play games with me.’
‘All right, but you won’t like it.’
‘Go on, Inspector.’
‘All the blood was drained out of her body,’ I said.
He was becoming very angry, I thought he was going to hit me and he was about two stone heavier than I was. ‘How?’ he said. ‘Who did it?’
I pointed to the wound in her neck.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Is this some kind of horrible joke?
Are you telling me there are vampires in London?’
‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He stood there shaking his head for a while. ‘Could I have a look at her flat?’ he said.
I took him round to Beak Street. On the way there I said, ‘Was she married?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Anyone in her life, a boyfriend?’
‘No, why are you asking?’
‘When a case is still unsolved like this I try to find out as much as I can,’ I said. When we got to the flat I removed the police tapes from the door, and we went inside. He stood there taking in the goneness of his sister. London silences always have the background of London traffic. ‘Could I be alone in here for a few minutes?’ he said.
‘Certainly, I’ll wait for you outside.’
After about ten minutes he came out. ‘Do you think you’ll find whoever did this?’ he said.
‘We have a suspect that we want to talk to,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I can tell you just now.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ We shook hands and he walked away slowly.
30 Dr Wilbur Flood
31 January 2004. I was coming through Cecil Court early in the morning on my way to the lab when I heard a woman singing with a down-home accent:
Tweedle-O-Twill, puffin’ on corn silk,
Tweedle-O-Twill, whittlin’ wood,
Settin’ there wishin’ he could go fishin’
Over the hill, Tweedle-O-Twill.
That’s a Gene Autry song, and the last time I heard it was back in Tennessee about thirty years ago. My daddy used to sing it when he was working on his old Ford pickup.
She was sitting in a doorway with a man slumped against her. I noticed that she was wearing cowboy boots. She didn’t look homeless and neither did the man. I stopped in front of them and she said, ‘Howdy.’
‘Howdy,’ I said. ‘Been having a late night?’
‘I been saving the last dance for you,’ she said.‘Whyn’t you come a little closer, honey.’
It’s hard to say no to a good-looking woman even if she seems a little the worse for wear. ‘Won’t your friend mind?’ I said.
‘It don’t make no never-mind to him,’ she said. ‘He’s dead to the world.’ She reached up and pulled me down to her and gave me a big wet slobbery kiss with her tongue half-way down my throat. She tasted like my high-school friend Barbara-Ann Hopper only ten times worse. Oh my God, I thought — a toad-sucker in London! Then she was trying to bite my neck but I got loose and backed away as fast as I could. Everything was going round and round with the ground sometimes tilting up and sometimes down while out of the corner of my eye I saw some great big hopping thing coming after me. I sprinted down Cecil Court, dodged through the traffic in St Martin’s Lane with the thing close behind, made a sharp right towards the Coliseum, then left and left again and so on trying to lose it but when I reached the lab it was still hot on my heels. Once I got inside I phoned the police while the hopping thing did its best to come through the wall. Scared? I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind so I just kind of closed one eye and farted and hoped for better times. It took about an hour and a whole lot of black coffee before the thing left off thumping and squelching and went back to wherever it lives.
When PC Plod got to Cecil Court Miss Tweedle-O-Twill was long gone but her friend was still there. He was dead to the world all right, stone dead with all the blood sucked out of him.
31 Medical Examiner Harrison Burke
31 January 2004. When Wilbur had drunk nine or ten cups of black coffee and was more or less back to normal we looked at the lab report on Walter Dixon. Wilbur, who’s from Tennessee, said, ‘I don’t need this report to tell me that what we got here is a toad-sucker,’
‘A what?’ I said.