Chapter Five

Abbie stared around the flat. ‘It’s even smaller than I remembered.’

My sister thought I should have bought my own place by now, somewhere to put the collection of art originals and antique furniture that I also should have but didn’t. She regarded my sharing a flat as some kind of attempt to hold on to my youth – as though Rachel and I held wild, drug-fuelled orgies every weekend and spent weeknights piercing one another’s bodies or tattooing outlandish symbols on our thighs. On quiet evenings, i.e., all of them, I laughed quite a lot about this. ‘It’s nice,’ I said, defensively. ‘It’s handy for work.’

‘But it’s not yours though, is it? Doesn’t it belong to Rachel? Don’t you ever want to have your own place, properly yours? There’s a nice cottage in Farndale. Reasonably cheap. Needs work, but it could be lovely.’

Abbie is fourteen years older than me and sometimes she behaves more like my mother than my mother does.

‘We were thinking of moving up north,’ my dad, balancing a cup and saucer on his knee and with Jasper comfortably occupying the central portion of his lap, waved a hand, ‘maybe getting a croft on the islands. You could come with us, Jessie. Try a change of career.’

‘And what if Rachel gets married? You’ll have to move out then, and Mum and Dad won’t have room for you, and you can’t come to me – I suppose you could always rent somewhere in the suburbs.’

‘The Orkneys are very beautiful, I’ve always thought.’ Dad carried on his parallel, and not quite continuous, conversation. ‘Bit chilly, but the grazing’s good, apparently.’

Nice. Abbie, much as I love her, have always loved her, tends to plan her life out in ten-year segments, which drives me mad. And, I noticed, she’d got Rach married off but never contemplated that it might be me settling down. And Dad was always trying to get me to do something other than Liaison work, but even by his standards, moving to the Orkneys was a bit extreme. I ignored both of them and pretended to dust a shelf, a move they would both have seen through at once, since dust and I had a complicated, and slightly symbiotic, relationship.

My mother came in from the kitchen, carrying a plate of Battenberg. I noticed, with a sudden shock, that she was looking old. Her face was more lined than it had been last time I’d seen her, her hair more wispy and she was stooping. I’d been a ‘last-chance’ baby, born when my mother was forty-three and my Dad forty-eight, so I’d been used to her being the oldest mum in the playground, but she’d always worn her years lightly. Although her hair had started going grey before I was born she’d kept it pinned up so the white hairs didn’t show, then later she’d started dyeing it strange colours, meeting me from school with purple hair or electric blue – just to see my face. Now, however, it was completely white. My heart squeezed.

‘Mum.’ I shuffled up on the sofa to make room for her. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit tired.’

‘We’ve lambed forty ewes this spring, it takes it out of an old body. You ask your dad about it. It was his bright idea to buy in some Jacobs, and they’re stroppy old buggers at the best of times.’ She settled back against the cushions and fiddled in the sleeve of her cardigan for a handkerchief. ‘But I’m all right really.’

I looked up, and met Abbie’s eyes. She has our parents’ eyes, bright blue like cornflowers, although Mum and Dad’s have faded a little over the years to a bleached version of their former glories; I’m the odd one out with my orange-brown pair. ‘Different milkman,’ Mum always used to say when people remarked; apparently I was the spitting image of her grandfather. Only without the pipe-and-whisky habit and the inexplicable fixation with Bakelite that I’d heard about from Dad.

Abbs was giving me a ‘tight-mouthed’ look, as if something was my fault. When the parents had left to go and watch their film, I cornered her. ‘So? What’s been going on?’

‘Nothing.’ Abbie coaxed her large frame into a particularly unflattering tweed coat. ‘I’d better go, I promised to drop in on some friends while I’m in town and then give the parents a lift home after the film. I’m on duty in the morning.’

‘You’re not going until you tell me what’s up with Mum and Dad! They both look worn out, and you’ve been doing bum face at me over their heads all evening.’

‘They’re worried about you! Can’t you see that? At the moment all they seem to talk about is you; getting you away from York, wondering if they can persuade you to leave your job. All this wrestling with vampires stuff, they are absolutely terrified that something is going to happen to you!’ She sounded bitter, with reason. Our parents had never worried that much about her. But then, they’d never had to. She spent her spare time helping around the smallholding and working at the local Cats’ Protection League; was large, unfashionable and, if it hadn’t been for her twelve-year marriage to the deceased Andrew, a born spinster.

I was always described as the young, flighty one, but I think my parents’ definitions could use some work. Thirty-one is barely young and working for the council is kind of the antithesis of flightiness. ‘I’m perfectly safe! Honestly, Abbs, you can tell them, I know my job looks weird but it’s about as dangerous as giving out parking tickets, and about as interesting.’ Carefully not even thinking about Harry and Eleanor and this afternoon’s high strangeness, I patted the tweedy arm. ‘Abbs, I like what I do. I’m good at what I do. It’s not a patch on what you do, of course, but it’s me.’

In my back pocket my mobile rang.

‘Well, as long as you’re careful.’

‘I don’t really need to be careful, Abbs, honestly, my job is bagging and tagging and watching a computer screen. The newspapers like to blow everything out of proportion and make the Otherworlders sound exotic and dangerous but really they’re as interested in keeping everything running smoothly as we are. No-one wants …’ I stopped. Abbie remembered the Troubles. I didn’t need to remind her of how it had been. ‘Honestly,’ I repeated. Then I flipped open my phone and Liam’s breathless voice spoke, louder than necessary.

‘You’d better get down here, Jessie. We’ve got a live one, and they reckon they need you.’

I gave a kind of apologetic grin at my sister. ‘Where are the Hunters, Liam? This is their call, surely?’

‘They’re there, but they reckon the detectors are going insane, what with all the Otherworld activity, so they need a reliable person and, guess what, your name came up.’

‘What do they expect me to do, alphabetise something to death?’ I muttered.

‘They can’t see what’s coming at them, that was the message I got. Well, the actual message was ‘Ahhhhh, fuck, what the fuck … can’t tell … get help,’ but you see what I mean.’

‘And?’

‘And you’re the nearest person that can tell a vampire from one of the Hunters up for the Run. Someone gets downed, it had better be an Otherworlder otherwise things are going to get messy, so … guess it’s you, Jessie.’

Sweat broke out on the palms of my hands. ‘That sounds like a posh name for bait.’

‘Jessie, the place is swarming with Hunters. Plus, you know how to handle yourself. You went on the self-defence courses, didn’t you?’

I had, but only because I thought they would be full of blokes. All fourteen of us girls who’d signed up had thought the same. ‘Yes, but administering a groin-kick to a padded-up ex-rugby player isn’t the same as fighting something that wants to fight back.’

‘It’s double time, evening rates.’

‘Wow. And suddenly I’m interested.’ I still owed Rach last month’s rent. Liaison came way down the list of priorities when it came to pay rises and I swear we were still being paid at 1988 levels. ‘What is it, a vamp gone rogue?’ That wasn’t too scary; all I’d have to do was point the Hunters at the right body. I could be home in time for Shameless. ‘Where and when?’

‘It’s in the Museum Gardens, you know? Near the river?’

As I struggled into my jacket, Abbie gave me a surprising hug. ‘Take care, sis,’ she said, squeezing rather tightly. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to you.’

‘Not as much as I don’t,’ I said, squeezing back. ‘Tell Mum and Dad everything is OK. Tell them, oh, I’m fine, work is fine, you can even tell them that I’ve met a nice man if you like. I haven’t, obvs, but it should keep them quiet for a bit.’

We smiled at each other, a sisterly smile of complicity, then she left to go visiting and I left to go detecting.