Vampire Shift - By Tim O'Rourke Page 0,8

lock. Hearing it click, I pushed the door open and shut it behind me. The room was in darkness, so I ran my fingers blindly along the wall in search of the light switch. Finding it, I flipped it on, and the room lit up with a dim bulb that hung from the centre of the ceiling. I looked around my new home and understood why none of the other recruits had stayed a full year in this place.

There was a narrow-looking bed wedged in the far corner, an old fashioned looking wardrobe, and a desk with a lamp. The carpet looked threadbare, and the walls were a dingy grey colour. There was a small bathroom, which had a toilet and bath. I didn’t know how much headquarters were paying the old woman downstairs, but whatever it was, they were being ripped off.

Placing my case onto the bed, I went to the bathroom and ran myself a bath. While it was running, I unpacked my stuff and hung it in the wardrobe. When I was all fixed up, I got undressed and climbed into the hot water. Closing my eyes, I lent my head back against the rim of the bath. I thought about everything that had happened since arriving at The Ragged Cove and my mind soon wandered to Luke Bishop. Out of everyone that I had met so far, he seemed the nicest. He had a kind and honest way about him, and I was grateful that he took my side over that of Potter, who seemed like a real prick. Loved himself, too, by the way he was acting all cocky. Sergeant Murphy, I was still to make up my mind about. He seemed set in his ways and I guessed he didn’t want some young cop coming in and telling him how to run things. But I wasn’t trying to do that. I didn’t care that he wanted to lounge around the police station all night in his slippers, smoking a pipe. But what did trouble me was his apparent disregard for properly investigating a crime scene. And not any old crime scene. That was the murder of an eight-year-old child and he was letting that idiot Potter smoke and trample all over it.

If only they’d taken the time to study it then they would have seen the things that I had. It wasn’t magic – the clues were there if you looked for them. I’d always been like that. My father had called it my ‘gift’ – but it wasn’t really – I just had a knack of noticing things that others seemed unable to see. I saw stuff that other people missed. But it wasn’t magic and it wasn’t a ‘gift’, I called it ‘seeing’.

But what about Luke? What could I see about him? Nothing. He was like a blank sheet of paper. Apart from his obvious good looks and incredible smile, it was the fact that he was a mystery that I found so attractive.

Sinking beneath the hot water, images of the Blake boy lying dead with his throat ripped out rippled across the front of my mind. There were two things that troubled me. My father had often told me that you could tell a lot from a crime scene by the pattern of blood left behind. But that was the problem – there was very little blood for such a gaping wound. The brachiocephalic artery had been ripped apart and I remembered my father telling me once how he had worked on a murder where the victim had had their throat cut. Their life blood had pumped away through the wound in that particular artery.

How then had there been so little blood at the murder scene of the Blake boy? Where had all the blood gone? It was almost as if it had been siphoned off. And what about the lack of footprints leading to and from the scene? I didn’t buy Murphy’s theory about the ground being too dry for any prints to be left. If prints could be lifted from carpets and lino floors, they could be seen in earth – however dry. But how had the killers got to the scene? The only clue was the hole made in the trees above, where the branches had been broken and smashed. It was almost as if someone or something had entered the crime scene from above. But that would be impossible, right?

As I tried to examine these theories inside