LITMIR.BIZ

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hand. “Because this was in his mouth,” he said, softly, and held a crumpled ball of paper out to Jamie. He took it from the doctor’s fingers, unfolded it, took one look at it, and then his world seemed to fall out from beneath him.

      He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. All he could do was stare.

      In his hand was a bloody Polaroid photograph of his mother, clearly terrified but equally clearly alive, lying on a concrete floor with a brick wall behind her, staring up at the camera with a look of hopeless misery on her face.

      Fury exploded through him, burning everything in its path, flooding him to the tips of his fingertips. He grabbed the metal table, let loose a primal scream of pure anger, and flung it against the wall with all his strength.

      Morris yelled and covered his eyes as wickedly sharp instruments flew in every direction. The doctor leapt away from the impact, turning his back and dropping into a crouch with his hands laced behind his head. Frankenstein lunged forward and wrapped the bellowing teenager up, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him off the ground. Paul Turner didn’t even flinch; he just watched, the ghost of a smile playing across his lips as the table hit the wall.

      “Where is she?” Jamie yelled, the cords in his neck straining as he struggled in the monster’s grip. “Where is my mother?”

      “We don’t know,” Frankenstein answered, his mouth close to the boy’s ear. “We don’t know, I’m sorry. Calm down, Jamie, we’ll find her. I promise we’ll find her.”

      His voice had lowered to a whisper and he was rocking Jamie from side to side, holding him like an infant. Gently, he set him down on the tiled floor and slowly released his grip. Jamie pushed himself free immediately and spun round to face Frankenstein, his face red, his eyes blazing. But there was no second explosion.

      “The lab is analysing the photo now,” said Morris. “But the preliminary results are that there are no clues to a location. I’m sorry.”

      “She’s my mother,” said Jamie, his eyes fixed on Frankenstein. “Do you understand?”

      “No,” said Frankenstein, simply. “I don’t. I can’t. I never had one. But there was a man who I have come to think of as my father. So I can imagine.”

      “I don’t know if you can,” said Jamie. He regretted it instantly, although the giant man showed no offence; he just looked down at Jamie with his huge, asymmetrical grey eyes, his face expressionless. Morris broke the tension.

      “Where was he found?” he asked, nodding towards the man on the trolley.

      “On the road,” answered Turner. “About three miles from the gate, hung in one of the trees. A patrol found him at 0600. Says he wasn’t there at 0550.”

      A shiver ran through Jamie.

       Three miles. There were vampires three miles from here, maybe the ones who did that to his chest. While I was asleep.

      He pushed the thought aside.

      “We need to find my mother,” he said, as calmly as he was able. “This won’t happen to anyone else if we do.”

      He looked up at Frankenstein.

      “Where do we start?”

      Chapter 20

      THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS, PART I

      NEW YORK, USA30^TH DECEMBER 1928

      John Carpenter stood on the prow of the RMS Majestic as the great liner steamed slowly into Upper New York Bay. It was just after nine o’clock, and dark; a pale covering of cloud hung low in the night sky, from which heavy flakes of snow were steadily falling.

      To the starboard the high walls of Fort Hamilton were lined with soldiers, who clapped and cheered and waved their caps in the air as the Majestic passed. She was the largest ship in the world, more than nine football fields long with eight storeys of blazing light above her enormous hull, and her arrival was an occasion, even in a city as used to the spectacular as New York.

      Carpenter pulled his overcoat tight around his shoulders and lit one of the Turkish cigarettes his wife had packed for him, curling his hand over it to protect it from the snow. It was settling on the damp deck and in his hair, and it was getting cold, the night air crisp and still, punctuated by snatches of music and laughter from below decks. Dinner was being served in the ballroom below the funnels, but Carpenter wasn’t hungry. He was impatient to leave the ship, and he would eat once he had done so.

      He had wanted for nothing on the crossing from Southampton; his state room was almost obscenely opulent, the stewards and staff as attentive as anyone could ask for, the days brimming with agreeable diversions and pastimes. Despite this, he had spent most of his time in the small library at the rear of the quarterdeck, studying the man he was pursuing.

       He’s not a man. Not any more. Remember that.

      Carpenter breathed perfumed smoke into the night. High above him the ship’s horn sounded, deafeningly loud in the still winter air. He looked to the northeast, where the towering lights of Manhattan shone a watery yellow through the falling snow. Checking the watch Olivia had given him before he departed, he saw that the Majestic was going to arrive more than two hours early.

      A good start.

      He pitched the half-smoked cigarette over the rail and walked back along the promenade deck, quickening his pace as the skyscrapers of New York loomed behind him.

      Carpenter was first to leave the ship, having packed his trunk long before the Majestic sighted land. He walked down the gangplank, which had been covered in a rapidly dampening red carpet, nodded curtly to the tuxedo-clad steward, and stepped on to American soil.

      The heels of his boots crunched the settling snow as he walked along Pier 59 towards the White Star terminal. His passport and papers safely stamped, he pushed through the murmuring throng of waiting relatives and photographers and out on to the West Side Highway.

      “John Carpenter?”

      The voice hailed him from the corner of West Thirty-Fourth Street. Through the falling snow he could make out the shape of a man in a dark overcoat and hat, shifting his weight rapidly from one foot to the other, perhaps impatiently, perhaps in an attempt to stave off the rapidly plummeting temperature.

      “Who enquires?” Carpenter replied. As he spoke, he slipped his right hand into his coat pocket and gripped the wooden stake he had placed there before he disembarked.

      The man who stepped from the shadows was a short, rotund fellow in his mid-forties, wearing a brown tweed suit and a red and white polka dot bow tie. Above this garish neckwear was an alcohol-rouged face that beamed with benevolence, eyes twinkling beneath wildly bushy eyebrows, flanking a squat tomato nose that, in turn, nestled above an impressively wide moustache. The man wore a dark brown trilby, and he smiled broadly as Carpenter approached.

      “It is you,” he said, sounding relieved. “John Carpenter. You look exactly like your photograph.”

      “I say again,” Carpenter replied, his voice flat and even, “who enquires?”

      “Why, I’m Willis, Mr Carpenter. Bertrand Willis. I was given to believe you were expecting me, so I must confess I find myself—”

      “Credentials,” said Carpenter. “Slowly,” he added, as the man moved his hands to his pockets.

      Willis drew a leather billfold from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, and held it out to Carpenter, who lifted it carefully from the man’s fingers and flipped it open.

      Inside were three documents; the first was a passport in the name of Bertrand Willis, of Saddle River, New Jersey; the second was a telegram containing Carpenter’s travel itinerary and likeness; the third was a memorandum from the Attorney General of the State of New York, authorising Willis to take whatever measures he deemed appropriate to assist a

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