shoulder as if she were scared that someone might be eavesdropping, she lent in towards me and whispered, “From the vampires,” and her breath smelt stale and warm against my face.
Looking straight back at her, I said, “I don’t believe in vampires.”
“That’s what the others said when I tried to warn them,” she hushed and snatched another quick look over her shoulder.
“Who?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“The other ones,” she sighed, starting to sound inpatient. “The other police officers who came here before you.”
Looking into her milky-grey eyes I asked, “Do you know what happened to them?”
“They -” she started but was cut dead by a gruff sounding voice from the other side of the room.
“That’s enough, mother!” the voice said, and I looked up to see a fat balding man come waddling into the dining area. He wore a red chequered shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a white apron that was smeared with old food and drink. His cheeks were flushed red and his forehead glistened with sweat.
“The girl has a right to know!” the old woman barked at him.
“There’s nothing for her to know!” her son snapped back. Then crossing towards the table with the bottles of holy water and crucifixes, he added, “and how many times have I told you to get rid of all this bloody nonsense?”
“You keep a civil tongue in your head, Roland,” the old woman hissed. “This is still my Inn – it ain’t yours yet.”
“But you’re scaring away all the customers,” he told her, his jowls wobbling.
“It ain’t me that’s scarring ‘em off,” she snapped at him. “It’s those things – those creatures!”
Roland saw me staring at both of them as they argued in front of me. With a fake smile stretched across his face, and wiping his meaty hands on his apron, he came towards me and said, “I’m sorry about mother – don’t be put off by what she says.”
Munching on the last of the toast, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry about me, I’m not easily spooked.”
Hearing this, the old woman hobbled towards me and leaning into my face she gasped, “You will be.”
Taking his mother by the arm, he escorted her from the room and back into the kitchen. Within moments, he had returned and came to clear away my empty plate and mug.
“So what is all this stuff about vampires?” I asked him.
“Just stories,” he said, without looking at me. “Okay, the town has had more than its fair share of strange goings on – but I don’t agree with all this scaremongering. It was good for business at first. People came from all over to visit the town, believing it to be infested with vampires. We did the Inn up as you can see, and we even did a roaring trade in those little crosses and bottles of water – but it was just a laugh – you know to attract the tourists,” he told me.
“So what went wrong?” I asked him.
“More and more murders started to happen. People started to go missing and then there was the grave robbing,” he said, wringing his hands together.
“Grave robbing?”
“Yeah, but it was more than that,” he said and his voice dropped to a whisper. “The bodies of those poor murdered souls were being dug up and stolen.”
“By whom?” I asked him.
“Greedy freaks – that’s who,” he spat. “The whole thing just started to get out of hand. People were making a lot of money – me included – off the back of the rumours being spread about the vampires. But people got bored or scared of The Ragged Cove, and just stopped coming. The guest houses started to empty, the restaurants had no bookings, and the High Street became deserted. So the incidents just got more and more bizarre, and I reckon it was all down to some of the locals, hoping that they could entice people back by strange evil-doings and stories. Everybody likes a good scare, don’t they?”
“I guess,” I said. “But digging up the bodies of murder victims seems a bit extreme.”
“Not if you’ve got mouths to feed and a business to keep going,” he said. “Folk will do the strangest of things to survive.”
“But what about these murders?” I asked him, interested to see what his view was. Like me, he hadn’t been hooked on the whole vampire thing.
“Undoubtedly there is a murderer in our midst,” he said, and again his voice had dropped to a whisper. “But I reckon