This had to be the coldest night since spring began, a reminder that, although gone, winter was never far in these parts. The sky was deep and clear, scores of stars winking down at Kasper Dahl as he ran up the beach, the ice glaze over the wet sand crunching under his feet, his breath coming out in fast, visible puffs. The crunch was so crisp it could make the soundtrack to a breakfast cereal ad but breakfast was the last thing on Kasper’s mind. Kasper was running.
A few hundred yards from the end of the beach, in the slim triangle where the North Sea met the Baltic Sea, Kasper stopped and looked around. A crack that could have come from someone stepping over a dry twig or from Kasper’s imagination made him whimper and peer harder in the darkness.
“Hello?” he whispered hoarsely, regretting the words the moment they were out. He was alone on one of the hottest tourist spots in Jutland in the middle of the night, in April. There was no one else here, no one but the man who Kasper had seen in town two hours ago and who had basically led him here. Yes, he had done just that, Kasper told himself, thinking back to how he had tried to get as far from that man as possible and had somehow ended up here, on the deserted freezing beach.
Straining his eyes and ears Kasper stood still for a moment and when no answer came from the darkness he relaxed.
“Stupid idiot,” he told himself and tossed his sweaty hair back off his forehead.
“I wouldn’t be so harsh,” said a voice so smooth it wrapped itself around Kasper like a blanket. A moment later its owner came into Kasper’s view and smiled – or at least his lips stretched though there was no hint of mirth in the expression. “In fact, it was quite smart of you to come this way. How did you know this was my favourite place?”
“Your favourite place to do what?” Kasper asked with a voice as shaky as his legs had suddenly become for no discernible reason. The other man was taller than Kasper but he was thinner than Kasper, too, and didn’t look particularly strong.
Kasper could probably take him on if it came to that even though he hadn’t been in a fight since the sixth grade. Yet the man’s presence here made all the hairs on Kasper’s body stand on end. His skin itched. He needed to scratch. And he had no idea why he’d asked the question he’d just asked.
The other man’s presumable smile grew.
“What a good question,” he said and stepped closer to Kasper. “It’s a secret but I’ll tell you. Grenen Beach is my favourite place to eat.”
“Wh—”
“Sadly, you won’t survive it, at least not with your factory settings, which is a pity. Kind of,” the man said with a wink and moved.
The movement was so swift Kasper’s blink felt like it lasted a century. At the beginning of that century, the stranger stood a couple of feet from Kasper. At the end of the century, he had his arms around Kasper and was leaning in as though eager for a kiss.
“But I’m not…” Kasper managed before two hot needles jabbed the side of his neck. Almost immediately, Kasper began to feel lighter on his feet, lighter and lighter until he was no longer sure he stood on the ground at all.
His body slumped in the man’s arms as Kasper blacked out. The man raised his head and licked his lips before baring his teeth and plunging them into his wrist. A moment later the wrist was stuck to Kasper’s mouth. It didn’t stay there long. While the unconscious man remained unconscious, the other man assumed the appearance of one deep in thought for a few seconds, after which he pulled his wrist back and gently let Kasper’s body fold on the ground. For a split second, as he wiped his wrist on his black jeans, the man’s face twitched into a wince – the kind you have no time to suppress when a chronic injury flares up out of nowhere. Then he leaned over the body and started patting Kasper’s pockets.
A shadow further back on the beach moved. Another figure emerged from the darkness and walked up to the man who finished with the pockets quickly and had put a cigarette in his mouth, currently trying to light it.
“You have a real knack for this,” the newcomer said and cupped his palms around the flame of the lighter. The first man inhaled deeply. “I’m thinking of offering you a salaried position.”
The first man glanced at the newcomer before blowing out a cloud of smoke that the wind tore and scattered.
“No, thank you. I like freelancing.”
The newcomer’s wide mouth split into a momentary smile but his pale eyes remained unamused.
“As long as you only freelance for me,” he said. “Let’s get him home.”
The first man took a drag on his cigarette, picked up Kasper’s still body and hauled it over his shoulder. Glancing at the sea, he threw his cigarette on the sand where the wind picked it up and transformed it into a miniature inferno of furious red and orange, and followed the other man into the darkness.
“So how many more will you be needing?” the first man asked.
This time the smile reached the other man’s eyes.
“You’ll never stop trying, will you?”
“Trying what?”
The man laughed.
“Come on, Peter. I may be old but I’m not senile yet. When I decide to take you into my full confidence you’ll be the first to know.”
Fros turned the key in the ignition and leaned back in her seat. It was smaller than the seat of the monstrous Escalade she had recently parted with and it did not smell of leather, luxury and ostentation. That was exactly why she had bought the tiny Mazda. She’d grown sick with the smell of the Escalade and she hadn’t picked it for herself, anyway. It was Peter’s car and it was high time she forgot about Peter.
As Fros stepped on the street, locked the car and started towards her house, two things happened at once. The point of her boot caught on a crack in the street and she tripped, and a double dose of annoyance and frustration with a dash of impatience assaulted her nose. It came from the house in the company of a strong smell of paint.
“Of course it’s your money but as someone who respects both money and people I have to tell you this is a scam of the highest order.”
“I made ten thousand in two hours, pal. How is this a scam?”
“It’s a scam because now you’ll get bolder, gamble more and you’ll lose it.”
“Oh, come on. You’re just jealous. Ten thousand in two hours, Tal!”
“Jealous? Of you and crypto? Please.”
The two men were so deep in their conversation neither heard Fros open the door. Not that she made too much noise of it. There was a new lock on the door and the key turned smoothly in it, almost soundlessly. Fros set her bag on the floor and continued to the kitchen where the voices and the smells were coming from.
“I really have no other explanation,” said Tony – accountant and, apparently, weekend house painter – throwing his hands in the air in resignation. One of them was full of a paint roller.
“Hello, boys.” Fros watched as they both startled, which in Tony’s case meant he almost lost his balance on the ladder that stood by the fridge wall. “Do I want to ask where the actual painters are?”
“How was your holiday?” Tal – new business partner and something like a blood relative in a certain non-genetic sense – asked after the briefest of glances at Tony. The men’s smells changed. A wave of relief came from Tal, sweet and earthy, while Tony’s frustration evolved into guilt, mixed with hope so tightly that for a second Fros thought they were a new smell.
“Productive,” she said and lit a cigarette before stepping into the kitchen. The floor was covered with plastic foil and so were the fridge and the cupboards. The fridge was moved away from the wall, half of which shone with the pale yellow of young corn while the rest was a dull white. The wall beside Tal was almost all yellow. Fros glanced from one man to the other and waited.
“We sent the painters away,” Tony blurted out. He was still perched on the ladder, his self-preservation instinct keeping him there even though his conscious mind couldn’t see Fros as danger. “Believe me, Fros, we had to. The head man smelled of beer when he came, at eight in the morning, and I’m sure his assistant was on drugs, wasn’t he, Tal? So erratic. Where did you even find these people?”
“Online,” Fros said and openly examined the walls. It had taken her two days and the help of Tom Evans – Fang in Fang detective, occasional vigilante killer, and confidante – to find the worst possible repairs men. But judging by the fact these two had clearly spent a few hours in a room doing something of substance, it had been worth it.
“We still have a lot of work but it’s coming along nicely, I thought,” Tony said urgently. “There was no time to look for another crew so Tal and I decided to do it ourselves. We don’t expect any payment, by the way,” he added with a nervous snort of laughter.
“How productive?” Tal asked, his eyes pinned on Fros. He wasn’t half as nervous as Tony but he smelled worried and a little hopeful.
“Well, I met the wife of the owner of a restaurant chain and she said she would be only too happy to tell her husband about the services we offer. Apparently, he’s had some trouble with competitors,” Fros said and walked over to the sink to toss the ashes of her cigarette in it. They sizzled. “And I also met a senior commodity analyst from Barclays who said his boss may have work for us soon although he did not elaborate on what kind of work that would be.”
She had also caused the disappearance of two large-scale scammers involved in at least three so-called suicides, who had successfully avoided running into Interpol but had not been so successful in avoiding her. In fact they hadn’t even tried, when she had recognised them in the lobby of her hotel in St. Moritz. She had eaten well that night when they had asked her out for dinner, all the better for smelling what they had planned to do to her after dinner. No one else but her knew how delicious conscious, purposeful cruelty was. No one in the whole world. The thought brought with it a whiff of sadness, so Fros flung it away from her mind.
“Like I said,” she puffed out with a billow of smoke. “Very productive.”
“That’s great, at this rate we’ll need to hire more people,” Tony said. “And we can raise salaries, too. Happier employees, lower taxes, I always say.” Relief was now coming off him like sweat in a sauna.
“Or you can set some money aside, just in case,” Tal said. The spark of hope Fros had seen before in his eyes was gone.
“We do have money set aside. Julianne and I have made contingency plans for every occasion.”
“Just don’t dabble in cryptocurrency with company funds,” Tal said and pointed at the wall with his roller, ignoring Tony’s offended gape. “We should get back to it before the paint dries. This wall definitely needs another coating. You should’ve painted earlier, Fros.”
“I didn’t have time,” Fros said and put out her cigarette in the sink before throwing it in the garbage bin. She turned on the water to rinse the ashes, their sharp and bitter smell burning her sinuses, clearing them of the emotional load of the room. “I’ll go unpack.”
The men resumed their bickering and its noise followed Fros up the stairs and into her room. When she closed the door silence fell like a heavy, stifling blanket that made her heart beat faster, anxious. She unzipped her bag and took out the few items of clothing and her bag of toiletries. Setting them on the bed, Fros stared at her bathing suit, the two semi-formal dresses she used to lure her prey in when necessary, and the two sets of jeans and sweaters. She picked up a pair of rolled socks and stared at that, too.
Ten minutes later Fros dragged her bag downstairs and set it by the front door.
“Guys,” she called and walked over to the kitchen pausing to lick her suddenly dry lips. “I’m off again. When you’re done here make sure you’ve locked, okay?”
She stopped at the door but Tal had already fixed her with his most suspicious glare.
“Don’t you have a business to run?” he asked.
“You just got back,” Tony pointed out, his confusion suffusing the air.
“Tal, you, Tom and Jules are doing an excellent job of that and now we’ve got Tony to help, too,” Fros said and nodded to the sweaty member of the painter duo. A former client and a brilliant accountant if Jules was to be trusted, Anthony Kircher was now deputy CFO at Fang in Fang Ltd. and Jules was no longer complaining she was working too much. Tal, on the other hand, was still getting used to the competition.
“I had a busy year, you both know that. So I don’t see why I can’t take another holiday. That’s what successful business owners do, don’t they?” She grinned. Her face hurt.
Tal was still glaring and his smell remained suspicious, as if Fros needed another sign that he knew very well she was lying. This was none of her concern. Her concern was to be able to breathe, which she couldn’t do in the silence of her room.
“But you just got back.” Tony tried again, his hesitant tone coupled with the smell of uncertainty as though he was unsure how exactly to talk to his new boss. This was refreshingly different from Tal’s chronic suspicions and, most of all, his undying hope. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course it’s all right,” Fros said, glancing at Tal to make sure he won’t challenge that unless he wanted bigger problems than her travels.
“Okay then,” Tony said with a grin that was only a little bit reluctant. “You have a nice time and by the time you come back you’ll also have a new kitchen. When are you coming back?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” This time she avoided looking in any direction close to Tal. She could already feel his glare all too sharply. The hope she could smell with a bad on her head. The room smelled like the beach during algae season.
“Will you at least be kind enough to tell us where you’re off to this time?” Tal asked. He was using his formal tone, the tone he used when he was way out on the other side of pissed off. “In case something happens and your battery dies, you know.”
“Romania,” she said, turning and looking him straight in the eye. Neither blinked for a couple of long seconds and then Tal turned back to the wall he was painting.
“Have fun,” he said. The relief radiating from him almost drowned Fros.
She got as far as the curb before her phone rang and Fros caught herself waiting for it to do that. As if she was waiting for someone to stop her.
“Rubbish,” she muttered as she unlocked the car and picked up the phone. “What is it?”
“A double murder,” Tom said promptly. “Family. Their daughter is missing. She’s five.”
Fros lowered the travel bag she’d lifted to the open trunk.
“Well, I’m sure you can—”
“No,” Tom said with a voice Fros had not heard before from him. It was the voice of someone who had taken a lot of crap over a short period of time and was now at capacity. “I can’t deal with this alone, not this time. The woman’s father is here and wants to speak to you.”
Fros gritted her teeth and kicked the nearest tyre. It didn’t make her feel better.
“Okay, I’m on my way.”
The man sitting in the visitor’s chair in Fros’s office looked shrivelled although the eyes he turned on her when she came in were not those of such an old man. He smelled about sixty but looked eighty. Tragedy tended to do this to people.
“Mr. Mehta,” she said and offered him a hand he took slowly but shook steadily. “I’m Euphrosyne. How can I help you?”
“Somebody killed my daughter,” said Vikram Mehta, owner of a pharmacy chain that had allowed him to give all his three children private education followed by university and financial security for life. Jules had handed Fros the file with their new client’s biography the moment she’d stepped into the office. A self-made man and proud of it. All three children with successful careers. And now there were two.
The murdered daughter, Vinita, was a senior executive at a PR company, which Fros found to be an annoying coincidence after a year earlier she’d found the body of a PR firm owner dead in the brand new conference room of Fang in Fang. Either there were too many PR companies in London or she kept running into them.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Fros said and sat in her chair. The faux leather squeaked comfortably around her.
“The police are working on the case but I don’t expect results from them,” Mehta said and leaned forward, immediately shedding a decade or so from his appearance. “I will expect results from you.”
“What do the police say?” Fros asked, almost drawing back into her chair. When she’d come in, the room had smelled dusty and heavy with the man’s grief but now this smell had changed. Now he had the sharp, fresh resin smell of someone with a purpose. Someone who could barely contain his anticipation.
“They say it was a robbery that had gone wrong.” He scoffed. “Robbers shoot their victims, they don’t—” He paused and nodded to himself. “They don’t cut their throats.”
The bodies of Vinita and Alok Damani had been found in the kitchen, both with their throats slit, no signs of any struggle and no sign of their five-year-old daughter, Meena. That had also been in the file Jules had given to Fros, courtesy of Tom’s old connections in the Met and the fact Fros had what Jules called a fan club among the police force, to her acute annoyance.
“Before we go on, if we decide to take this case I will need you to be completely honest with me,” Fros said. Clients hiding embarrassing or dangerous details topped the mental list of problems Fros encountered in her job and she had decided to act pre-emptively. “If you hide things from me I won’t be able to do my job.”
“I understand,” Mehta said and nodded. “I’m afraid I don’t know much but what I know I already told the police and I will tell you.”
Neither of the victims had any known enemies. Neither had addictions or financial problems, at least none that Vinita’s father knew about. Her siblings were upstanding citizens as well, as was Alok’s younger brother, Shankar, although Mehta didn’t seem to like him. When he mentioned the man, his smell took on a tint of disgust.
“I don’t know who might want to hurt them,” Mehta said with a final shrug. “But I know it wasn’t a robbery,” he said.
“How do you know that?” Fros asked gently.
The man shook his head before turning on her a look so full of despair she almost winced.
“It just doesn’t make sense.”
Half an hour later Fros accompanies the grieving father to the exit and promised to call him soon.
“I will send you the keys to the house by the end of the day,” Mehta said before they parted.
As she watched him go through the glass doors, Fros thought about the travel bag that was still in the trunk of her pert little car. She could still go to Romania, see the mountains, visit a few mediaeval fortresses, maybe even the famed Dracula castle and if she had the time, perhaps she might ask around about people disappearing or turning up without a drop of blood in their bodies. The chances of finding anything out this way were slim but Fros was hopeful because the alternative to this was despair and she wasn’t having that. Forgetting about Peter was not going well.
She could let Tom and the others handle the case. Tom hadn’t had the urge to play a vigilante recently, if Jules was to be believed, and even if she wasn’t, because she was the man’s girlfriend, after all, Fros could detect the lie in her smell.
Between Jules and Tom, and now Tony, Fang in Fang would be in good hands while its president searched for the firm’s co-founder who had been missing for two months now, after helping her and the others avert an epidemic of rabies. The details of how exactly they had done this – how Peter had done it – were rather hazy, which Fros kept telling herself was the primary reason of her searching for him. She wanted answers.
She hadn’t found them in Denmark, which should have been obvious since the lead Fros followed featured a mysterious individual by the name of Mads of whom Peter had said was probably Danish. First of all, it turned out there were thousands of men named Mads in Denmark. Second of all, Fros had not got even the slightest whiff of vampire presence in the parts of the country she visited, which was all parts. Denmark was tiny. But it would have been too easy to find Peter on the first try, she should’ve known that. Yet after she failed to find him in Norway, Sweden, and the German-speaking parts of Europe, the inevitable conclusion was that clearly, she had been looking in the wrong places. Or she was really bad at finding people.
“So, are we taking the case?” Jules had sneaked up to her unnoticed and unsmelled. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
It was heartbreaking. So was her own life, with an insane woman for a mother and a disappearing… She didn’t even know what Peter was to her to date. She could either look for the five-year-old girl, assuming she was still alive, or delegate this task and look for Peter, whose chances of being alive, albeit conditionally, were better than the girl’s if Fros was being honest. The decision was easy to make.
“We’re taking the case,” she said and barely suppressed an eyeroll at herself. “I’ll go to the house as soon as the keys arrive. Tell Tom.”