Chapter Thirty-Five
Caro wasn’t looking
too healthy. Her face was white, her eyes red and sunken and she
squinted and winced at the morning sunshine.
‘You look like
death,’ said April as she sat down next to her on a bench in the
deserted playground where they wouldn’t be overheard.
‘Well, I feel like
death too,’ said Caro, putting on a pair of sunglasses and pulling
her coat tighter around her body. ‘I think I’ve got a two-day
hangover. I couldn’t even get out of bed yesterday, had to get my
mum to ring the school. What happened in that club anyway? All I
remember is a throbbing red room and loads of fit boys in a
booth.’
‘That must have been
after I left,’ said April with a smile. ‘What boys were
these?’
‘No, really - there
were loads of gorgeous boys all wanting to talk to me and buy me
drinks, then the next thing I remember is your Mister-bloody-Darcy
turning up, scaring them all off and telling me it’s time to go
home. I mean, where’s the fun in that?’
‘Gabriel took you
home?’ asked April, failing to hide the jealous note in her
voice.
‘More like a
kidnapping, actually, almost got me in a head-lock to drag me out
of the club. Then he spent the whole journey home quizzing me about
what Ben and Davina had been saying to me. I tell you, considering
he’s their friend, he doesn’t seem to like them much.’
‘Well, that’s sort of
why I dragged you out here. I’ve got something to tell you about
him.’
‘Oh God, April,’ said
Caro. ‘You’re not—’
‘No, I am not
pregnant!’ said April indignantly. ‘I can’t believe you’d even
think that,’ she added in a quieter voice. ‘Besides which, I might
be naive, but I do know you have to have sex in order to get
pregnant. I’ve only known him two weeks, Caro!’
‘Sorry, brain’s not
engaged today,’ said Caro, waving a hand.
‘Well, try,’ said
April seriously, ‘because this is important. I don’t know who I can
trust any more but I’ll go mad if I don’t tell someone. So please
tell me I can trust you.’
Caro sat up straight
and lifted her sunglasses. ‘What? Yes, of course,’ she said,
dismayed. ‘Of course you can trust me. Why would you even ask
that?’
April shrugged
sheepishly. ‘Well, you looked as if you were getting on very well
with Davina and Benjamin in the club.’
‘So? I’d had about a
gazillion cocktails!’ she said. ‘And they knew some totally fit
boys. End of story. Anyway, why would that mean you couldn’t trust
me?’
April looked at her.
‘Because Davina and Benjamin are vampires.’
‘I beg your
pardon?’
April took a deep
breath and started from the beginning. She told Caro about finding
her dad’s notebook, then visiting Mr Gill and the Kingsley-Davis
book. She told her about the nests and the Vampire Regent. Then she
told her about the night in Covent Garden and the chase along the
Embankment.
‘No way,’ whispered
Caro, her eyes wide. ‘You stabbed
him?’
Finally she told her
about Gabriel finding the mark and the Furies.
‘Wow!’ said Caro,
staring off into the distance. ‘That’s … that’s mad.’
April waited for the
questions and the mickey-taking and the suggestion she visit a
shrink, but Caro remained silent, just staring back at the
school.
‘Well, this isn’t the
reaction I was expecting,’ said April with a nervous
laugh.
‘Hey, you’re
preaching to the choir here, remember,’ said Caro. ‘I told you we
were surrounded by vampires the first day you were at
school.’
‘Yes, but I thought
you were talking figuratively. Like they were sucking the life out
of you or something, not actual real-life
bloodsuckers.’
‘Well, that too. But
the thing about this place? I’ve been trying to get to the bottom
of that for years. I’m pleased that I’m so goddamn clever,
honestly, I’m just a bit too sick to do cartwheels right
now.’
April looked at her.
She had been expecting laughter or derision or at the very least
some whooping and ‘I told you so’s. She was disappointed and a
little annoyed that Caro was so calm. After all, she was telling
her that they were surrounded by the undead. To most people, this
would be big news.
‘Don’t you think this
is weird?’ she asked with irritation.
‘Of course it’s weird,’ said Caro soothingly, ‘but
you’re missing the big picture, honey. Three people have been
killed within a few hundred metres of each other in the space of
less than a month, but there’s been weird stuff happening here for
ages. Something is wrong in Highgate and very wrong at Ravenwood. I
know it’s hard for you to get your head around, with it all
happening so fast and, well, so horribly close to home, but some of
us here - those who have been paying attention, anyway - have been
living with this for years. You coming here and giving it a name, a
proper explanation, it just confirms what I’ve suspected for a long
time.’
‘And what’s that?’
asked April.
Caro took off her
sunglasses, and her eyes were terribly sad. ‘That we’re surrounded
by evil.’
Fortified by strong
coffee and two fizzy vitamin tablets, Caro was feeling more human
by lunchtime. She and April had gone to the library to research the
final days of Alix Graves on side-by-side Internet
terminals.
‘It’s amazing what
you can find, isn’t it?’ said April, staring at the screen. ‘If
you’re a celebrity, it’s like you’re constantly under surveillance. You can find out where he went
shopping, who he was meeting, everything.’
‘I can even tell you what he had for lunch,’ said Caro,
swivelling her screen towards April. ‘Have a look at
this.’
It was a website called ‘Celebstalking.com’
which had a headline reading ‘Grave Danger’. April
read:
If you are what you eat, then drop-dead gorgeous singer Alix Graves is a heart attack waiting to happen. Spies in Soho yesterday spotted him coming out of Rancho Diablo, the Texas steak joint. Further investigation revealed that the Belarus frontman had gorged himself on a full rack of ribs followed by a very rare T-bone steak, all washed down with ‘three or four’ beers. Watch out, Alix, you’ll be growing horns. Or love-handles!
‘God, it must be
awful having people following you everywhere,’ said
April.
‘Well, it’s lucky for
us they did,’ said Caro.
‘Morning,
ladies!’
They both turned to
see Simon saunter in. He looked as fresh as Caro looked wrecked:
hair perfectly combed across his forehead, casually dressed in a
navy jumper and jeans with a silk scarf at his neck. He looked like
he’d stepped off the back page of GQ.
Caro and April
exchanged a ‘what-the-hell?’ glance.
‘Well, isn’t this all
very exciting?’ said Simon. ‘I get a mysterious text in the middle
of double Maths asking me to come to the library, and now I get
here to find two gorgeous girls beavering away. What
gives?’
‘We were just
wondering if you wanted to look at some pictures of Alix
Graves?’
Simon pulled a face.
‘Not really. Seems a bit passé, if you know what I
mean.’
‘I thought you loved
Belarus?’ said Caro, narrowing her eyes.
‘Did, past tense,’ he
said airily, heading back out. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Want to meet
for lunch with the girls?’
‘What was that all
about?’ said April when he had gone. ‘I thought he loved dissecting
Alix’s outfits and stuff?’
Caro had a frown line
between her eyes. ‘Did you see what he was wearing? And who are
“the girls”? I thought we were his girls.’
‘You don’t think he’s
talking about the Faces, do you?’
Caro nodded. ‘I think
we should keep our investigations to ourselves for the moment,’ she
said.
April watched her
friend form the corner of her eye as she got up and walked over to
the printer. She was obviously upset by Simon’s behaviour, but she
just as obviously didn’t want April to know about it. Caro picked
up a sheet of paper and handed it to April.
‘Have a look at
this,’ she said. It was a double-page spread from a German tabloid,
published two days after Alix’s death. The photos from the news
story were of the outside of his house, showing an ambulance behind
a police cordon as his body was brought out on a
stretcher.
‘Basically, the story
says that Alix was having a big party on the night of his death,’
said Caro. ‘The Europeans aren’t so hot on libel and all that as we
Brits are so they can be as sensationalist as they like, and
they’re saying this party was a big goth orgy. Candles, incense,
drugs, booze and ladies of the night - the other kind, of course -
every decadent cliché you can think of.’
‘Wow,’ said April.
‘But then I guess they can say anything now he’s dead, can’t
they?’
‘Exactly. It’s not
terribly reliable stuff, especially when they go on to suggest his
death was some drugs-and-sex experiment gone wrong. Personally, I
got the feeling it was a lot more violent than that. Anyway, that’s
not what I was looking at. Check out the big photo on the
right.’
April’s heart jumped.
Alix Graves was stripped to the waist, looking moody and pouting at
the camera. But it wasn’t the singer’s magnificent pecs April was
staring at.
‘See anything that
looks familiar?’ Caro asked.
She did. There was a
tattoo on his right shoulder in the shape of a star, the exact same
shape as the one on her head. April jumped up and rushed into the
library toilets. Leaning in to the mirror, she scraped her hair
back. It’s the same! It’s the same! she
thought as Caro came in behind her.
‘Oh, Caro, what does
it mean? Was Alix part of this? Was he killed because he knew about
the myth?’
‘I’m sorry, honey, I
wish I knew,’ said Caro. ‘Maybe they were trying to turn him, maybe
he wanted out, who knows? But that isn’t all. Ten days before the
so-called Goth Orgy, he had a meeting at Transparent
Media.’
‘How do you
know?’
‘Because of this.’
She handed April another page. It was a copy of a news story from
the music industry newspaper Music
Week. The picture showed Alix Graves shaking hands with a
man in a suit, with a caption reading ‘Graves plans to change the
way Transparent sells music to the consumer’.
April looked up.
‘So?’
Caro smiled. ‘So
Transparent Media is registered as a subsidiary of Agropharm. And
who’s the chairman of Agropharm?’
April gasped. ‘Of
course! Nicholas Osbourne.’
Caro
nodded.
‘Davina’s
daddy.’