Suzie and the Monsters (29 page)

I hold Cleo back from pouncing on him. ‘Go finish the other one, if you want,’ I tell her. ‘I know what I need to know.’

‘Okay,’ she says, and kisses me. ‘Thanks, Suzie.’ She crawls round to the big guy, who is still bleeding from the gunshot wound. He probably wouldn’t have regained consciousness anyway. Cleo tears his shirt open and sinks teeth into his chest near his heart, and the muscles in her throat are soon working away. But only a few mouthfuls, she’s already drunk enough to satisfy her hunger. She’s drinking purely for pleasure now. It makes me smile to see her like this, wild and beautiful, dangerous, a fitting partner for me. She pulls away and looks up at me with a monstrous grin, saying, ‘I could do this every night!’

*

We’re soaked in blood, and have a major crime scene to deal with. I check the gun. It’s a semi-automatic, and there are twelve rounds left. Helpful, but I need more.

I phone Alia. ‘I need a short length of hose, or flexi-pipe, and a bucket or something. And some matches. Soap and shampoo would be nice also.’

She says okay, and I tell her where we are. Cleo and I cuddle up in the front of the van, enjoying the night, and the afterglow of our feeding.

‘You didn’t drink very much,’ she says.

‘No. I want to be hungry tomorrow,’ I reply. ‘We’re a lot more dangerous when we’re hungry.’

‘I’m always hungry,’ she complains. ‘I mean, I was starving earlier, but even now part of me wants to go and see if any of them isn’t quite dead yet.’

‘They’re all dead, honey. Completely dead. And don’t worry, the hunger you feel now will fade with time. It will never disappear entirely, but it will get so you don’t really notice it.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘I don’t know about that. When you stop feeling hungry, the guilt really hits you.’

‘Hmm. That’s a shame. It’s fun not caring.’

‘Well, try not to enjoy it too much. You’re going to live with these memories for a very long time.’

After half an hour, Alia drives up. Her eyes go wide with awe at the sight of us, and she shakes her head in wonder when she peers into the back of the van. ‘Fucking hell,’ she say. ‘You girls sure know how to party.’

She hands us our tracksuits and the stuff I asked for. ‘Thanks, Alia. You’d best go home now. I’ll phone you tomorrow.’

‘You’d better. Bye, sweethearts!’ She startles Cleo by kissing her on the cheek, before ducking into her car and driving off.

‘What was that for?’ Cleo asks, touching her cheek, eyes following the receding taillights.

‘Let me ask you what you asked me... If you’re such a monster, why is it that Alia loves you?’

She thinks about this for a minute, then says, ‘Because it’s the human monsters she’s afraid of.’

I kiss Cleo’s other cheek. ‘Come on, my angel. Let’s get this over with.’

In the van again, I fire point blank at each puncture mark, hoping to conceal the vampiric evidence in a destruction of flesh. The shots are painfully loud inside, and probably also on the outside. We need to hurry. Using the flexi-pipe and bucket, I extract diesel from the tank, and splash it all round the van, front and back, walls and floor, over the bodies. I hate the taste of diesel in my mouth, the stink of it on my skin and in my hair. I won’t be wearing this wig again.

I let Cleo light the match and throw it into the van through the shattered passenger-side window, and then we run laughing to the river to clean up as best we can. By the time the police and firemen arrive, we’re already clean and dressed and making our way quietly downstream.

*

Andy has sent me a text with the address of Jenny’s new blog. There is one post.

‘My name is Jenny, I am twenty years old, and as of last night I belong to Mistress Suzie and Mistress Cleo. I am not a lesbian, or even bisexual. Until two weeks ago I don’t think I had ever had erotic thoughts about a woman. But this weekend Mistress Suzie and Mistress Cleo have played my body like a fiddle, making it scream with pain and sing with pleasure. I hate them for what they do to me, but I must confess that I am sitting here now writing these words one-handed, my other being busy below. Forgive me, sweet reader, for being so brief with my first post, but I must make a choice between this duty and the call of pleasure, and really that’s no choice at all...’

Monsters (Tuesday)

We sleep in and arrange with Alia to meet for brunch at Le Pain Quotidien. While we wait for her there, we drink tea and watch the human world beyond the glass. It’s a little like being at the zoo. There really should be a sign somewhere saying ‘Please do not feed the humans.’

‘So,’ Cleo says suddenly. ‘How did you lose your memory? You never finished the story.’

‘There was a young girl called Isabelle,’ I start. ‘Must have been about fourteen years old, training to be a nurse, helping the medics find and care for casualties of the Blitz. Searching the rubble one morning after a night of bombing, she found the body of a young woman, bloody and broken, shrapnel in legs, chest and head, and yet miraculously, impossibly alive. Not for long, of course. No one could survive such injuries. There wasn’t much point in treating the young woman, but they took her away on a stretcher anyway.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Cleo says. ‘A bomb dropped on you and you survived? Fuck!’

‘I don’t know that it actually fell on me. I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember waking at hospital and feeding on the comatose patients there, or running wildly into the night, clothes torn and bloody. Isabelle says there was no formal report made since no one wanted to believe it had happened. The war was quite enough to worry about. But she recognised me when we met years later at uni, and eventually found the courage to talk to me, and we got to be very good friends.’

‘And lovers?’

‘I told you — no.’

Cleo grins wickedly, and I kick her under the table.

A familiar figure in a charcoal suit emerges from the crowd, peering through the glass in search of us, and I wave cheerily. Her black curls, usually kept under strict martial law, are an explosion of freedom. From the excitement in her eyes, I know she’s remembering the way Cleo and I looked last night, and I’m tempted to ask whether Jamie got any sleep since Alia got home.

‘The Scold’s Bridle. What sick bastard would call a pub that?’ I ask Alia when she joins us. ‘Then again, what sick bastard would need a human trafficker for a partner?’

Alia pours herself some tea while she thinks. ‘Maybe it’s not just a pub,’ she replies. ‘Maybe it’s something more, a pub whose regulars find some amusement, perhaps, in the name.’

‘What is a scold’s bridle?’ Cleo asks.

‘Men like to believe that a woman’s role in life is to serve them,’ Alia tells her, ‘which of course is an attitude that no self-respecting woman should suffer. It is a cruel truth that the law, being made and administered so often by men, has often tolerated, even encouraged, some inhumane punishments for women who dare to disobey the men that supposedly own them.’

Alia’s eyes are bright with anger. My beautiful, broken Alia. I think if I dared to make her a vampire, she would become a vengeful fury, passionate and uncompromising, an implacable killer of men. I do know how she feels. I have been there myself, seduced by the dark side. The temptation is always there, the fury of Artemis in my heart, kept at bay only by the wisdom and irrepressible humour of my sweet Aphra.

‘The bridle is the punishment for those women who would dare to scold their men,’ Alia continues. ‘A cage around the scold’s head, an iron spike thrust between her lips. Laugh as she bleeds from her mouth! That will teach her.’

Her hands shake a little as she lifts the cup to her mouth and sips. ‘These traffickers, these men’ — such venom in her voice as she says that word — ‘have another use for women’s mouths, and have learned other ways to control them, with drugs and threats and brutality. They have devised systems of ruthless, efficient control that treat women like battery-farmed chicks, birds imprisoned in tiny cages, to be used and consumed for human pleasure. That’s all they are. Stock. To be beaten and abused until there’s no more value in them. There’s always plenty more fresh girls out there. Hell, you can buy them by the container load in Odessa, a job lot of sweet Ukrainian teenagers.’

I reach out and take her hands in mine, and wait calmly for the tension to ease from her muscles, the bitter twist in her lips to fade.

‘It sickens me to the core,’ she whispers. ‘This isn’t prostitution, it’s abduction and systematic dehumanisation. It’s a violation of the human spirit. And yet people still think of these girls as prostitutes. The government, for all its fine words and intentions, has reduced funding for the charities that aid and shelter escapees. The police don’t have the support they need to deal with it, and seem to be focused at the moment solely on clearing the traffickers away from the Olympic Village, rather than anything useful.’

‘No,’ I agree. ‘It’s really not prostitution. Prostitution, for all its problems, is a human thing.’

I phone Ian Wallace. ‘Tell me about The Scold’s Bridle.’

He’s silent for a few seconds, then asks, ‘Vicki Robins’ place? Is he your Vauxhall Vicki?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s small-time. Hold on a minute.’ The line goes quiet. A couple of minutes later he’s back. ‘Remember John Smith?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘The two photos you saw were both taken outside The Scold’s Bridle.’ I can’t remember anything about the background in those photos, only the faces of Kosta and John Smith. ‘Vicki’s gang is mostly into drugs and prostitution,’ Ian is saying. ‘By the way, I don’t suppose you were at Flower and Dean last night?’

‘Cleo and I went to the cinema last night.’

‘Uh huh.’ He doesn’t believe me. ‘There are rumours that Vicki’s running a brothel out of The Scold’s Bridle, but it’s all third-hand info, nothing we could act on.’

‘Well, I hear Valon and Vicki are best friends forever, and Kosta and John Smith outside Vicki’s place would seem to confirm that.’

‘It’s still only rumours, unless you feel like making an official statement.’

‘As you say, it’s all rumours. Idle gossip.’

‘I can probably arrange a raid, but there’s no real guarantee that the girls, assuming that there are girls there and that they’re victims of human trafficking, will be willing to press charges.’

‘I understand. Do me a favour and text me the address.’

‘Okay.’

‘Thanks.’ I end the call with a heavy sigh, looking glumly into the dark depths of Alia’s eyes. ‘It’s your call,’ I tell her. ‘Do we put our trust in the criminal justice system? Do we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?’

‘No, we take arms against this sea of troubles,’ she replies with naked ferocity.

‘And by opposing end them,’ Cleo finishes with a laugh.

‘Very well,’ I say. ‘But I don’t think I can do this one alone, it’s too dangerous.’ Which it is, but not quite in the way they think I mean. With so many people involved, it’s difficult to control the situation, even with my quick wits and hypnotic eyes. More than one rumour of vampires has been started by a massacre with me at the centre, a gang of men taking advantage of a harmless innocent young girl only to pay dearly for their presumption of superiority.

‘I’ll help,’ Cleo says quickly, but I keep my eyes fixed on Alia’s until she nods. I asked a lot of her last night, and now I’m asking for more.

‘Thank you,’ I say. My phone chirps. Ian has sent the address. ‘Well, let’s not waste time. I don’t know what Ian will do, if anything, but I bet Vicki’s wondering what happened to the men he sent to pick us up last night. It’s best we act before he discovers they’re dead.’

*

The Scold’s Bridle is in a side street off Coldharbour. Both sides of the street are terraced houses, the pub standing slightly proud and looking architecturally out of place. The houses on the side opposite the pub have their doors and windows bricked up to keep squatters out until the demolition, which was scheduled to happen two years ago according to the faded public notices tied to the railings. Many of the houses on the side of the pub are also boarded or bricked up, including the windows on the two above-ground floors of the pub itself which are covered with rain-damaged chipboard. Those houses which are still inhabited have steel doors, and bars over the windows, usually with curtains drawn or newspaper taped to the glass. It is without question a depressing place.

The name of the pub has lost a few letters and now says ‘The old Brid e’ which seems unlikely to be accidental damage. It’s not a welcoming place, but does seem popular with single gentlemen, by which I mean men arriving alone and looking around nervously before entering. Sitting across from the place in Alia’s car we observe a few men arriving and a few others leaving, always by themselves. Tuesday, almost noon, and the place is open for business. I shouldn’t really be surprised — I’ve done many lap dances at this time of day. The club’s a much healthier and happier place than this though.

I can never understand how it is possible for certain men to so completely objectify women and the very act of sex itself that it reduces to obscenity. For me sex should be about mutual pleasure, preferably — but not necessarily — blended with love and romance. It’s true that I don’t always live up to this ideal, but all my ideals are powerless in the face of my vampiric lust for blood and sex. The uninhibited pursuit of personal pleasure has led to some fantastic experiences, but to far more unbearably, painfully shameful memories. Yet good, bad, right, wrong, it all means something. The day I stop feeling is the day I become, truly become, a monster.

These men coming and going, so to speak, don’t look like monsters. They’re not rich, they’re not well-groomed, they’re not really anything. I don’t know what to make of them. There’s nothing to be gained from studying them. There are also no indications that the pub is a brothel or that a gang of pimps and dealers hang out here.

But I don’t feel like sitting out here all day. I want to get this over with. ‘Okay, girls,’ I say, ‘here’s how we’re going to play it. I’m going in there to see what I can find out. If I’m not outside again in an hour, phone Ian and Ricky and tell them I’m being held against my will. Do not — let me repeat, do not — come charging in to try and help me. Let the police come riding to my rescue.’