Like This, for Ever (18 page)

‘This place is freaking me out,’ said Hatty in a low whisper when they were close enough. ‘Why’s it have to be so dark?’

‘It’s private land, so the Council don’t put in streetlights,’ said Barney. ‘And we’re a long way from the road. Just watch what you’re doing. If you fall in here we might not be able to get you out again.’

Sam responded to that sensible piece of advice by leaning out over the guardrail and looking down.

‘Now what?’ said Harvey, as Jorge arrived.

‘Now we climb aboard and break a window,’ said Jorge. ‘I’ll do it, then I’ll help Hatty climb through. Only the two of us should go on board because if we make a noise, it’ll be easier for us to hide. You lot stay here till we’re in.’

‘This boat’s empty,’ said Barney, indicating the one they were standing on. ‘Let’s get down into the cockpit. And I’m coming with you. We may not have to break a window. I’ll try the hatches.’

As Harvey, Sam and Lloyd stepped into the cockpit of the larger boat, Hatty took hold of the boat rail and swung herself up. The yellow boat didn’t register the extra weight. Jorge followed and the boat rocked gently. Then Barney was on board, following Hatty across the cabin roof towards one of the main hatches. She dropped on to all fours on one side of it, he did the same on the other.

In spite of his misgivings, Barney had to admire the way she could move so lightly, making no sound at all. Following her lead, he slid his fingers under the edge of the hatch and pulled gently. The hatch moved two inches and they heard music from below. Hatty peered inside and froze. Barney looked, too. And didn’t believe what he was seeing. A sharp nudge on his shoulder brought his attention back to Hatty. She was frowning at him, signalling urgently with her eyes. She wanted him to help her lower the hatch.

But, I mean, what … ?

Sharp gesticulation on Hatty’s part and Barney pulled himself together. Between them, they lowered the hatch, just as gently as they’d lifted it. Signalling to Jorge to follow, Hatty stepped off the roof, over the rail and back on to the middle boat. Barney followed slowly.

‘What?’ hissed Harvey.

‘There was someone on board,’ replied Hatty.

Everyone looked at Barney, who could do nothing but shake his head.

‘What did you see?’ asked Jorge.

‘A bloke,’ said Hatty. ‘Just the back of him. Couldn’t see his face, not even his head. Just a blue and yellow sweatshirt.’

A blue and yellow sweatshirt that Barney knew well.

‘Did he see you?’ Jorge asked.

‘No, I don’t think he even heard us, there was music playing. And he was leaning into some sort of cupboard.’

‘You sure that’s your boat?’ asked Lloyd.

Barney nodded. Of course he was sure, he’d discussed it with his dad just that afternoon.

‘What if it’s … you know … him?’ said Sam.

‘Who?’ said Lloyd.

‘The vampire,’ hissed Sam, hardly audible.

The vampire was the killer. Sam thought the man on the boat was the killer.

‘In a blue and yellow sweatshirt?’ said Jorge.

‘What was that?’ asked Hatty, looking round.

‘I heard it too,’ said Lloyd.

‘Someone threw a stone in the water,’ said Jorge, looking round the group. ‘Come on, own up.’

‘We heard something before,’ said Sam, who seemed to have forgotten he’d been talking too much to hear anything. ‘Me and Barney and Harvey. Like a bird or an animal in the water.’

‘Shush!’

Splash, splash.

The children fell silent. No one seemed to know what to do next. Then Harvey stepped a little closer to the boat’s edge. Leaning forward, he raised the torch and shone it down. A second later, he gave a strangled scream, the torch fell to the deck and he was running away from the others, round the front of the boat, slipping on the damp deck.

‘Harvey!’ yelled Jorge, giving chase.

Making far too much noise, but hardly knowing what else to do, the others followed, on to the big houseboat and then over to the ladder. Jorge and Harvey were already up and out of sight. Hatty put her foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

‘He’s pissing about,’ said Sam, who didn’t look sure.

‘You lot! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ On the next boat along, a man on deck was shining a torch towards them. ‘Get back here, now!’

The children scrambled up the ladder, Barney the last to leave the boat. Halfway up, he turned back. Two men were visible now, shining torches around, checking to make sure their boats hadn’t been damaged, angry, but not enough to give chase along wet decks in the dark.

Then there was movement on Barney’s boat and in the light from the cabin he could see the man in the companionway, watching the commotion but staying out of sight of just about everyone but him. The man in the familiar blue and yellow sweatshirt who’d scared Hatty away. It hadn’t been a mistake, a cruel trick of the light. The man on the boat was his father.

‘Barney, come on!’

The others had run in the wrong direction, not back to the large yard gates, but towards the very tip of the Creek’s backwater. They were huddled in the shelter of the massive steel pilings that supported the A2009. Jorge, unusually protective, had his arm round his younger brother. They were very close to the water and the tide was coming in fast now.

Had anyone else seen his dad?

Barney reached the group and turned back to the boats. The men who’d come up to investigate had gone back below. The yellow yacht was in darkness once more.

‘What happened, Harvey?’ asked Lloyd.

‘There was someone in the water.’

The children pressed closer together, turning instinctively to face the black river.

‘I think we should go home now,’ said Jorge.

‘What sort of someone?’ asked Sam.

Harvey shook his head. ‘Too dark,’ he said. ‘I just saw, like, an arm coming out of the water.’ He raised his right arm in a swimming motion. ‘You know, like when you’re doing the crawl. And then I saw eyes looking at me. Big eyes like a fish, only a massive fish.’

‘I’m out of here,’ said Sam, not moving.

‘Harvey, it was probably just an animal,’ said Lloyd. ‘An otter or something.’

‘A bloody otter,’ said Jorge. ‘Since when did you get otters in the middle of London?’

Barney had never seen Jorge scared before. He was trying hard to hide it, but couldn’t quite keep his eyes from staring, his mouth from clenching up tight. The hand still round his younger brother’s shoulders was trembling.

‘I’m just saying,’ said Lloyd.

They couldn’t have recognized, even noticed, his dad. One of them would have said something. ‘It could have been someone swimming,’ said Barney. ‘People do, in summer. My dad won’t let me, he says it’s too dirty, but some people do.’

Just talking about his dad felt wrong, as though the others might make the connection between the words coming out of his mouth and the man on the boat.

‘It’s nearly ten o’clock at night,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who’d be swimming at ten o’clock? In February?’

‘In the rain,’ added Hatty. ‘I’d really like to get away from the river.’

Barney only had to look at everyone’s faces to know they all agreed with Hatty.

‘I’m going to ring my dad,’ said Sam.

‘If you ring your dad, we’ll all get murdered,’ said Jorge. ‘Come on. Lloyd was probably right, it probably was just an otter. Or a badger. Or a walrus.’

‘Or a hippo,’ said Hatty, who was starting to smile again.

The group made their way back to the yard, heading for the gates.

‘A hippo called Hatty.’ Jorge gave Hatty a tiny nudge on the shoulder.

‘What you sayin’?’ She pushed him back, a bit harder.

‘Or a crocodile,’ said Lloyd.

‘Or a mermaid,’ said Hatty.

Splash, splash.

‘Oh God, no,’ whimpered Sam, as the children stopped in their tracks. Jorge raised his torch and directed it on to the river. Oily blackness, the slow flow of water coming in from the Thames, gentle ripples, as though something had disturbed the surface not seconds earlier. Then, just out of reach of the torch beam, movement that they all saw.

‘There!’

‘Jorge, there!’

Four torch beams fixed on one point. Nothing in the black water. Stillness. Tension that Barney thought would make one of them scream any second. Then all five screamed as the creature hurled itself out of the water at them. A child, like them, but nothing like them. This child was dead. This child was covered in a waxy, sticky substance that looked as though it had leaked out of him. His body had been half eaten by river creatures. His eye sockets stared black and empty and his tongue-less mouth gaped open as if he was screaming too. He rose out of the river, lurched towards them and then collapsed face-down on the bank.

Barney didn’t think he would ever stop running.

With his long sharp nails he opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound so that I must either suffocate or swallow … some of the … Oh my god … my god. What have I done?

LACEY CLOSED HER
Kindle. Jesus, she’d forgotten what a creepy book
Dracula
was. A phantom that gained power from the blood of its prey, that grew stronger with every fresh victim it claimed. It was a truly horrible thought. And now people were being led to believe there was a real one running around South London. It was no wonder they were getting twitchy.

She got up off the sofa and stretched. There was noise in the street outside, people gathered just above her window. Lacey walked across and pulled the curtains apart an inch. Kids – one of whom looked like Barney – and something was up. They were edgy, nervous; waiting for Barney to open the front door, they kept glancing down the street. She was half tempted to go out, make sure they were OK, then they filed into the house and the door slammed shut.

Over at her desk, her laptop was still open and Lacey soon found the Missing Boys page. Honestly, the drivel people were prepared to post was endless. And she wasn’t the only one to have rediscovered
Dracula
that weekend. The page had any number of posts linking passages in the book with some aspect of the murders. Most of the connections seemed pretty spurious.

A number of the posts were from self-proclaimed vampires, all of them with glamorous names. Others, rejecting outlandish and sensationalist labels, talked about the very real condition of being obsessed by the sight of their own blood.

I can’t explain my need for blood. I think about it all the time, craving the smell, the sight, the taste of it. It’s like a secret I share with myself. And my sharp knife, I suppose. LOL.

It’s like a scream building up inside me. When it gets to the point where I have to let go, I cut. Just those first few droplets of blood oozing up through my skin are enough to make me feel better. Sometimes I don’t even have to taste it, although I always do.

It’s getting harder and harder to hide what I do from my mum. She’s getting suspicious about me sneaking rubbish (bloodstained tissues I daren’t let her see) out of the house. And she’s always trying to sneak a look at my arms. I’m ahead of her there, though. I cut my legs now.

Some of my scars have got infected. They hurt and they look awful, but I can’t see a doctor because he’ll know what I’ve been doing.

Nutters! Stupid, self-obsessed fruitcakes. Lacey logged off and closed the laptop. Nearly eleven o’clock. God, was she ever going to start sleeping again? It didn’t seem to matter how much she wore out her body, her mind wouldn’t shut down. Was it even her mind anyway? This burning feeling in her chest didn’t have anything to do with intellect.

Like a scream building up inside me.

Lacey pushed up the sleeve of her sweater. The scar, running vertically the length of her wrist, was nearly four inches long. It had been itching a lot lately; sometimes in the mornings it looked pink and sore and she suspected she’d been scratching it in the night.

Without realizing, she’d walked into the kitchen. The breadknife was on the worktop. She’d used it earlier to cut bread for toast. It was probably the sharpest knife she had. She picked it up, realizing, possibly for the first time, how comfortable knives felt, how well they seemed to fit in the hand. There were smears on the blade, and crumbs left over from the bread. She should wash it, really. If you were going to cut yourself, it should be with a clean knife. She reached out to turn on the tap and hold the knife in the water, while the saner, smaller part of her yelled,
Lacey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?

The sound of the text message made her jump, as though she’d been caught in the act of something shameful. She dropped the knife in the sink and found her phone. She didn’t recognize the number. And yet she could count on the fingers of one hand how many people had her private number.

The words of the text didn’t register for a second, but then – good God, was this some kind of sick joke?

Body of Tyler King found at Deptford Creek, Theatre Arm Marina. Enter through lock-up yard. Come now.

‘SHE’S GOING,’ SAID
Barney, from his position by the window. ‘Careful now,’ he warned as the other children pressed closer. ‘If she looks up she’ll see us.’

In the dark sitting-room of Barney’s house, six children watched Lacey pull the collar of her jacket up and set off down the street. Her car was parked about forty feet away on the opposite side of the road. As she beeped open the door, she looked up and down the street and, for a second, seemed to stare directly at them.

‘Nobody move,’ Jorge whispered. ‘She won’t see us if we stay still.’

If Lacey had seen them, she gave no sign. She got into her car, reversed a few inches then drove away. The children left the window and went back to the circle on the carpet they’d instinctively formed ten minutes earlier.

After seeing the thing that had leaped out of the river at them, they’d fled the yard, jumping on their bikes and speeding off, dangerously reckless on the main road, only stopping when they got to Barney’s. They’d piled inside and Barney, with support from Jorge, had persuaded the others not to dial 999. Jorge had made hot chocolate, Barney had found a packet of KitKats, and the gang had huddled low and close, and talked about what they were going to do.