Severed

Slowly, ever so slowly, I look inside.

He's been strapped with masking tape to a chair facing the door, his head slumped forward so that I can't pick out his features. The chair belongs to a dressing table covered in bottles of perfume and other feminine accoutrements, all of which appear to be untouched. There are no signs of a struggle. He's dressed in pale linen trousers and a peach-coloured, short-sleeved shirt that's heavily bloodstained. On his feet are the kind of expensive tasselled loafers so beloved of certain middle-aged men who always seem to wear them without socks, as this man is doing. He has thick-set, hairy arms, a fat belly, and thinning hair. Straight away, I know this is Eddie Cosick. And there is little doubt that he too is dead.

I'm too late again. It seems that wherever I turn, I run into brick walls. Cosick is the end of the trail for me. I have nowhere else to go.

I step inside and see that this is the master bedroom, a huge room done out tastefully in various pastel shades. A pine-coloured stereo unit sitting on top of an antique chest of drawers was the source of Huey Lewis's greatest hits.

I stop in front of the body and lift the head up by the hair. The shock hits me hard. Someone has really gone to town on Eddie Cosick. The top half of his right ear is missing where it's been sliced away – and the hair surrounding it is sticky with congealing blood. But this pales into insignificance when compared to the sight of his right eyeball, still attached to a thick thread of muscle tissue, which hangs down bulbous and glassy over his cheek. I'm reminded of my own situation in the brothel only a few hours earlier, and know full well that this could have been me.

But it's not that which is keeping me frozen to the spot as I stare down at the ravaged face. It's the fact that I recognize him.

It's been a long time, and in the intervening period he's lost some of his hair and added a fair amount of weight, but even after what's been done to his face, there's no mistake. This is the man I used to know as Colonel Stanic back in Bosnia, a commander of the local Serb militia based near us in the east of the country. I only ever came face to face with him twice, while accompanying our senior officers to meetings with him and his people, and we never spoke. Occasionally I saw him pass in a convoy of open-top jeeps while I was out on patrol, and I remember that even though his forces were meant to be hostile to our presence, he had this habit of standing up in his vehicle and saluting us, as if he had to prove that he was a proper soldier.

His presence here is no coincidence, I'm sure of that. Yet I still don't know what it's got to do with me. I was just one of several hundred troops who operated in his little fiefdom many years ago. He wouldn't remember me from Adam.

It looks like methodical work, so whoever was torturing him wanted information, and was prepared to take him apart step by step in the pursuit of answers. There's a deep cut about three-quarters of an inch long just beneath his left eye, where it appears his torturer was about to make an effort to gouge out this one too. Finger-like tears of blood have run down from the wound and stained his cheek. I wonder if this is about the briefcase. Was someone trying to get him to reveal its location? Incredibly, the evidence suggests he was holding out even after they'd taken out his eye.

I let go of his head and take a step back, focusing my attention on the peach-coloured shirt. A long, thin blood trail runs down its side from a darker spot further up. Cause of death is a single stab wound to the heart. Blood is still bubbling from the spot, which means that the fatal blow was delivered recently. Very recently.

I can hear movement behind me. Lucas is coming into the room.

And in that one split second everything comes together and I realize that I've been set up again. Whoever killed these three men was expecting me to come here. And only two people in the world could possibly have known I was coming. One was Alannah. The other was Lucas.

But Alannah didn't know I had Eddie Cosick's address.

Which leaves my best friend. The man whose life I saved. Who served with me in Bosnia, and who also came into contact with the man who changed his name to Eddie Cosick. Who knows all about the scars on my back. Who seems to have plenty of money for a lowly PI dealing with divorce cases and the occasional missing person. Who wasn't expecting my visit this afternoon. Who had no choice but to pretend to help me when I turned up out of the blue, but who has in fact provided me with very little that I can usefully use. I knew about Iain Ferrie anyway, and it was only a matter of time before I got his full name. And the finger… The finger could so easily have been a plant to throw me off the scent.

I feel an ominous sense of dread as I realize that Lucas has now supplied me with a gun containing no ammunition, while his is almost certainly loaded.

There's movement behind my back and I swing round fast as a fresh injection of adrenalin courses through me.

Lucas is standing in the doorway, his Walther PPK pointed straight at me.

33

He stares at me for what feels like an eternity, then his gun arm wobbles and the PPK drops to the floor, hitting the thick carpet with barely a noise. His mouth opens, but only blood comes out, a thick rivulet that runs down his chin. He stumbles, and I see that he's clutching his side with one hand, and that his shirt's wet.

'Oh Jesus.'

He bangs into the wall, bounces off it, and falls to his knees. Horrified, I watch as my friend of close to twenty years rolls over onto his side and begins to convulse. His right foot lashes out like a whip and hits the door with a bang.

This is the moment the spell's broken and the realization finally hits me that the Vampire is here right now, possibly only feet away. He has a knife, I have an unloaded gun. He's extremely proficient with his weapon, mine is useful only as a blunt instrument.

But I'm not going to stand here waiting to die.

Turning the Browning round in my hand so that I can use it as a bludgeon, I run forward, jumping over Lucas, and do a diving roll onto the balcony, sliding along the carpet on my back, weapon held ready to throw, until the banister stops my momentum.

There's no-one here. Not in front or behind. The balcony's empty.

I remember Ferrie's words. He's invisible, like something out of a nightmare.

I jump up, trying to ignore the sight of Lucas's twitching, and kick open the adjacent door. I count to two and do another rolling dive inside, hurtling along the carpet before jumping up again, the gun held in my right hand like a tomahawk. I know I'm taking a huge risk, but rage and frustration drive me on. This is my last chance to confront the bastard who's eluded me all day.

The room, though, is dark and empty. An unmade bed faces an open bay window that lets in the faint sounds of normality from the outside world: the low hum of traffic; the sound of a piano playing in the jazz concert in the park. Such a huge contrast to the nightmarish charnelhouse I'm in now.

I retrace my steps, coming back out onto the balcony. Lucas is barely moving. I run over to the door on the other side of the room to where Eddie Cosick still sits. The killer must have been behind one of these two doors. There is no other way he would have been able to ambush Lucas, not in the few seconds he had. Lucas was good, too. A bit out of practice, but still not the kind of guy to have been surprised easily.

I kick open the door. Another darkened room, the window open at the far end.

Then I stop dead. Something is playing a tune in my pocket. It's not the phone Lucas gave me earlier; that's now on vibrate. I suddenly realize that I'm still carrying the mobile my blackmailer gave me, and I haven't turned the damn thing off. I rummage around in my front right pocket, pull out the phone, and the tinny noise of the 'Funeral March' fills the silence. The screen says 'Anonymous Call'. I almost don't answer, but in the end my curiosity's too great.