of him. ‘I’ve told you some of it. Grew up an only child with Mum and Granda in Edinburgh. Never met my dad. Came to London after Granda died. I lost my mum in a car accident while I was studying medicine. I graduated, looked for work, and joined the army. I got the bright idea that the infantry was a better use of my skills. GPs are ten a penny. A really good Combat Medical Technician can make a huge difference on the front line. I served in Africa and the Middle East. Things went horribly wrong in Helmand two years ago.’ He glanced down to his fingers, saw that they were clenched and made the effort to relax them again.
‘Honourable medical discharge because officially I’m a basket case if I’m around large quantities of blood. No use on the front line, not much better at a base. I came back to London eighteen months ago. I put a down payment on this place with what I inherited from Mum and Granda, and I’m paying the rest off as I can. Army pensions, lodgers, and whatever I can manage as a suburban GP. Trying to be useful instead of a useless wreck.’
His tone wavered. Honesty for honesty seemed to be his resolution.
‘I’m acutely aware that I’m completely fucked up. Everything went to shit in Helmand. Things happened, to me and to… to others, that I can’t undo. But I have to believe I can still choose to be who I want to be. Choose who I am. I don’t have to be a victim of what happened to me and the… the consequences of that. So I choose to be a doctor and help those who need it most. If people are going AWOL and nobody else cares, maybe I can help. I can be more than just this fucked-up ex-combat medic. If that’s all right.’
‘Fine by me,’ said Gabriel. He held out his hand and James, after a quizzical moment, shook it. ‘Partners,’ Gabriel said.
James smiled, hope brightening his blue eyes. ‘Partners.’
James and Gabriel had their first opportunity to work together that evening. No visitors came for Gabriel, but someone threw stones at his window. Downstairs, he found a note scrawled on a used envelope shoved under a stone by the back door.
James appeared at his side and they examined the message together. It read:
Hannah Chelsea Bridge £20
Gabriel turned the paper over and over in his hands. He sniffed the paper and grimaced.
‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said James with an amused but sympathetic smirk.
Gabriel pressed his lips together. ‘Hannah dosses in a place out the back of a strip of curry houses, and Daryl, the one who was kipping under the Chelsea Bridge, smelled a lot more of low tide. It’s where I went last night, looking for them. This,’ he waved the piece of paper, ‘isn’t Hannah’s handwriting and it smells like–’
‘Soot and grease,’ said James.
‘Right.’
‘Fished out of a dirty kitchen?’
‘Could be. It doesn’t seem right for Hannah.’ Gabriel frowned again. ‘Maybe she was simply using what was to hand. Oh well. I guess I’d better get to Chelsea Bridge.’
‘Want company?’
Gabriel glanced at James’s neat dress and highly polished shoes. ‘That’d be good, but you’ll need to change.’
An hour later – an hour of curled lips and wide berths from their fellow commuters – James and Gabriel had emerged by the river and were walking towards the bridge. Night had fallen and their disreputable get-up was less noticeable from a distance. Both wore sneakers, track pants, old shirts and tatty jackets. James was wearing a spare coat of Gabriel’s.
‘If we look like we washed up in the last tide, no-one will ask a thing,’ Gabriel had told him and, apart from trying to avoid them, nobody had paid them much attention.
‘The art of being invisible,’ Gabriel had said, ‘is merely three square meals, two showers and a roof over your head away.’
James tried not to be distracted by the fact that the jacket he wore, though tatty, smelled so distinctively of Gabriel. Keep yer heid, warned Granda’s voice. The jacket was threadbare but not dirty. It smelled faintly of perspiration and paint, a little of London exhaust fumes, a little more of the deodorant and shaving gel that Gabriel favoured and slightly more of Jammy Dodger. James pushed his hand into the left pocket and encountered crumbs. It made him smile.
The expression fell away, however, as the two of them arrived at the foot of the Chelsea Bridge and peered into the darkness.
That is, Gabriel peered. James could see perfectly well with his uncanny vision, and his whole mind and body were suddenly on high alert. He could see every stone and piece of detritus on the muddy ground. He could make out graffiti on the water-stained and algae-slick stonework of the bridge. He could smell a hundred things at once: ash and mud and murky water and the traffic exhaust and Gabriel’s aftershave, and he could taste things in the air too. He could hear insects humming above the low-tide water and waves slapping against a barge moored on the opposite bank, Gabriel’s breathing and the crumbling of cindered wood. He had an impression of an unidentifiable something, which made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, like in the war – the sense that something deadly was waiting just out of sight.
James was never sure if this prickling sense of awareness was the same as it had been on the battlefield. He explained his strangeness to people as PTSD, but his body didn’t produce adrenalin any more. His heart never varied from its sluggish, lazy lurch and his mostly unnecessary breathing was steady. Was the sense of danger an illusion borne of trauma, or his new senses registering danger before his brain could catch up?
James fell naturally into old army habits. Alert and unhurried, he cautiously approached the pile of ashes he saw heaped up against the stonework. The Thames tide was heading towards its 10 pm low ebb, but by morning these ashes would be washed clean by the high tide.
He didn’t need to approach the ashes. He could smell it, the burned meat. Horribly familiar from missions around Helmand, firefights with the Taliban. James wished he could pretend it was a stray animal, but his night vision clearly picked out the leg, the lined hands, the lumps that had once been torso and head. ‘Hold up, Gabriel,’ he said, wanting to keep Gabriel from the stench of it, ‘I think–’
‘Is it Hannah?’ Gabriel’s throat worked in a dry retch and he held still.
James hunched his shoulders, unhappy that Gabriel had understood what lay in the circle of greasy ashes. Greasy soot. The letter. God. ‘I’ll see.’
‘No, wait. We’ll call DI Bakare.’
James continued to approach the ashes as Gabriel made his phone call. He crouched and examined the remains, mentally reconstructing height and build. He could see a patch of pale, greying hair. The body’s frame was thin and poorly nourished, and the hand, curled into a rigid claw, appeared masculine.
‘It’s a man,’ he said to Gabriel. ‘Middle aged, I think. Didn’t you say Daryl was an older bloke?’ James picked up a broken coat hanger from the coarse ground and poked at the wrinkled hand. The hand was very pale and shrivelled.
James leaned in and inhaled. The body smelled human, and of course if it had been a vampire killed in this manner, the whole thing would be nothing but dust. But the bloodlessness was a worry. James studied the ground and inhaled deeply. He couldn’t see any blood. He couldn’t smell any blood.
Fucking
