'Let me check.' There were blisters on the skin. This time when I applied the cross there was no sizzling, nor was there another erection, though he said ouch again. He put his arm round me and we stayed like that, not speaking, until I said what I really fancied was the cocoa he'd promised me earlier — light-years ago, it seemed now.
'Me too,' he said. 'I'll do the bathroom in the morning.'
'She'll crumble in the daylight,' I said. 'No problem, never had a chance to toughen up, not like Violet. The older ones are trickier.'
I hadn't meant to be insensitive, but there was an acerbic edge to his voice as he said, 'Don't I know it.'
'Duncan…'
'Yes?'
'She said you'd know what to do.'
'Who said?'
'Lulu. She was told that you would know what to do when she got here. So what do you suppose that was all about?'
"Well, we all know what I did,' he said bitterly. 'I stuck it to her real good.'
'Maybe that's it.'
'What?'
I shook my head. 'Sorry.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'I should never have let her go.' He made a feeble joke about how he ended up murdering all his girlfriends. I laughed and said I trusted him not to murder me. 'Well you should be all right,' he said, 'since you're not my girlfriend.' Had I not been so exhausted, the remark would have stung almost as badly as the broken glass.
I fell asleep while he was in the kitchen preparing the cocoa, and woke later to find a mug of cold pale liquid stagnating on the floor. I stayed awake long enough to notice the other half of the bed was empty. Duncan was sitting in the wicker chair by the window, gazing out at the first streaks of daylight in the east. Before I drifted back to sleep, I thought I could hear him snuffling very softly to himself. But I might have been mistaken.
Chapter 6
It was nearly lunchtime when I woke up. Duncan had already popped out to buy the Sunday papers. We sat on the bed and went through them. Nothing, not the slightest hint of our story in any of them except the Sunday Sport, which had plastered the headline LONDON SHAKEN BY VAMPIRE EPIDEMIC across its front page, with a fuzzy reproduction of one of Dino's photographs dwarfed by a large colour shot of a busty blonde with fangs. 'Great,' I said. ' 'Now we'll never get anyone to take us seriously. What on earth possessed you to send the photos to the Sport?'
'I didn't,' Duncan said testily. 'I thought it was you.'
'Well, we're screwed now anyway,' I said, holding up the business section from one of the broadsheets. There was a big announcement at the top of the page, MULTIGLOM BID FOR ICI, and further down a photograph of two men shaking hands. One was fat and balding and horribly familiar; he was smiling at the camera and showing his teeth but this time there was nothing unorthodox about his dental work. Out loud I read, 'Under the new chairmanship of Mr Ferdinand Drax, the Multiglom takeover looks set to win additional support from the upper echelons of the business community.'
The whisper of a suspicion tiptoed into my mind. I riffled through the rest of the newspaper until I found the letters page and checked the address at the top. Readers were instructed to send their letters to Multiglom Tower. In all, we found three readers' letters pages with the same address.
'I think we may be too late with the newspapers,' I said.
The bathroom was a mess. Duncan had left the window wide open and drained the water away and the body in the bath now resembled the remains of a large Chinese takeaway regurgitated by a team of drunken rugby players. It smelled almost as bad, but at least it had decomposed so thoroughly there was nothing left to remind us of Lulu. This was just bad meat.
'What now?' I asked, one of my hands clamped over my nose to block out the stench. 'Can you just flush it down the plughole?'
Duncan made a face. 'I'll wait. It's coming apart quite nicely.' We had made an unspoken pact to refer to the corpse as 'it'. Vampires were things, not people, and it would have been dangerous for either of us to start thinking otherwise.
My head still ached, and there was a small soft lump on the temple where I'd banged it. I felt hungover and bloated and extremely depressed. It was past two when I finally summoned the willpower to get up and get dressed. Duncan said he'd put my red dress in the washing-machine because it was all trampled and stained, so I helped myself to the contents of Lulu's wardrobe. She wouldn't be needing them now.
I wondered what would happen between Duncan and me, now she was gone for good. Everything might have been perfect if it hadn't been for the hovering presence of Violet. But then again, if it hadn't been for Violet, Lulu would still have been with us, and I would still have been confined to the outskirts of Duncan's life. There were pros and cons whichever way you looked at it.
When I had dressed, I went into the living room and found him rooting through an expensive-looking handbag, black leather with lizard-skin trimming. 'Lulu's bag,' he said — quite unnecessarily, because I knew it wasn't mine.
I curled up on the sofa next to him. 'Anything interesting?'
'Make-up. Hairbrush. Filofax. Tissues. I don't know, I've never gone through a woman's bag before. I guess it's all the usual junk.'
'Let's look at the Filofax.' He handed it over and I went through it. The pockets were stuffed with old receipts, Lulu's driving licence, and credit cards. The diary section was almost blank, apart from the occasional bit of cryptic scrawclass="underline" dentist 2pm, Jack & Alicia, phone Katy. The latest entry was for the previous Tuesday, and it read, RM/Multiglom Tower/Malassus Warf 10am. 'Nothing we don't already know,' I said, handing it back and noticing that Duncan was half-sitting on a plain white envelope, trying so hard not to draw my attention to it that it became impossible to ignore. 'What's that?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'An invoice.'
'From the bag?'
'Of course not,' he said, sounding annoyed. 'It just came in the post.' He upended the bag and shook it so that various bits and pieces came tumbling out: hair grips, hand lotion, a packet of mints. When it was empty he held it out to me. 'You want this?'
'Sure,' I said. 'Thanks. It's really nice.' Then I told him I was going home, though I didn't tell him the reason — that I was dying for the bath I'd never had the night before. I waited for him to suggest I come back to see him later on, but he didn't. I then dropped a strong hint that he should come round to see me at my place, Krankzeits or no Krankzeits, but he didn't pick up on that either. 'So what are we going to do?' I asked finally. 'About Multiglom, I mean.'
'I guess I'll have to talk to her.'
'Talk to Violet? Are you mad?'
'It's me she's after. She's not interested in you.'
This was true, and. I couldn't work out why it should make me feel so aggrieved. He was almost making it sound as though I were irrelevant to the entire business.
'There's not much else we can do,' he said.
'We can do some serious damage. Put her out of the running.'
'We tried that before, and look where it got us. No, this has gone on long enough. It's time I faced up to her.'
'She'll kill you,' I said. But what really worried me was that I didn't think she would kill him at all. As soon as Duncan and Violet connected, it would all be over, one way or another. It was essential they be kept apart. 'Listen,' I said. 'Before you do anything rash… Tomorrow's the fourteenth, isn't it? Well, that's my appointment with Murasaki.'