Drac is Back is back

What follows is another extract from my current WiP, Drac is Back. It’s about Dracula returning and terrorising a British seaside town. In this chapter, a local detective is beginning to believe the seafront clairvoyant who has been warning of Dracula for over a month.

DI Tuck could feel Madam Del Finer vibrating in the passenger seat as they passed the Welcome to Scratford-on-sea sign.

‘So are you fully mute now, or . . .’ Tuck began. He glanced over at Del Finer, who stared straight ahead, her one good arm wrapped around herself, mouth clamped shut. Tuck sighed. ‘Looks like it.’

That was going to make things difficult. Dr Chang told him she hadn’t spoken since the night Tuck brought her back to hospital. If Del Finer was to help him, he’d need something more than charades.

‘Can you nod your head?’

Madam Del Finer let out a long breath, then nodded.

‘Well, that’s something. So what you said about the whole, you know, vampire thing?’

Madam Del Finer nodded, her eyes gently closing.

‘Do you think that if someone was bitten, then died of an unrelated issue, they could,’ Tuck gesticulated with his spare hand as he turned onto Prince Road. ‘come back? Like, literally walk out of a mortuary?’

Tuck felt ridiculous saying these things. He was always a sceptic. It was one of the reasons Wendy got fed up with him and kicked him out that time. She was into crystals and chakras. Looking back on it, perhaps Tuck could have kept his reservations to himself and not called her collection ‘so much bollocks.’ But the more he thought about this stuff, the more plausible it became. And he desperately wanted it not to be true.

Madam Del Finer took a sharp breath and whispered, ‘It can’t be.’

‘Oh, that’s got your attention?’ said Tuck with a sour chuckle. ‘Well, the corpse of a homeless fellow with bite marks on his neck has gone missing from the county mortuary and I’m beginning to think he waltzed out of there like something out of that Michael Jackson song.’

‘This is bad,’ Madam Del Finer said.

‘Thriller, actually.’ Tuck pulled away at the lights and swung right towards the front. Ahead of them, the sludgy sea churned around the stranded smugglers’ ship. ‘Now I know you have ‘the gift’.’ He made rabbit ears with his spare hand. ‘So I was wondering if you had some kind of line to this vampire fella. Can you pinpoint where he is with those spidey senses of yours?’

‘I won’t.’ By now her voice was loud and strident.

Tuck ran a hand through his hair, then pulled over into a loading only space outside a kebab shop.

‘What do you mean? You’ve been ranting and raving about trying to stop this guy and now you’re going Switzerland on him?’

Madam Del Finer ran a crooked finger down the condensation on her window. ‘You won’t beat him.’

Tuck laughed. ‘Don’t underestimate me, Sharon. Remember Craig Shenstone? Scratford’s answer to Pablo Escobar, he was. I took him down, no problem.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Del Finer. ‘This isn’t a criminal you can arrest. It is a beast which cannot be contained by a prison.’

Tap, tap, tap.

The keys on Tuck’s window made both of them start. Tuck turned and saw a rotund mullet-sporting man glaring at him, arms folded. Tuck wound down his window.

‘Yes?’

‘Have you seen where you’ve parked?’ the puce-faced man grunted.

Tuck recognised him now. He was Kevin, proprietor of Kevin’s Kebabs. He’d stopped in for more than one regrettable late-night dinner after a stressful shift and found Kevin’s welcome as warm as his tepid pittas. He used to take out adverts on the local community radio station, Breeze FM, with the jingle ‘Kevin’s is a place on earth’ to the tune of that Belinda Carlisle song, which Tuck always found particularly moronic.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said, have you seen where you’ve parked?’

Tuck laughed and gave Madam Del Finer a conspiratorial glance. She didn’t return it.

‘Of course I’ve seen where I’ve parked,’ he said. ‘You think I pulled up with my eyes closed?’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Kevin. ‘Now move it before I put a brick through the windscreen.’

Tuck grumbled as he pulled his badge out of his pocket and flashed it out of the window. ‘This is official police business , now sling your hook before I tell Belinda Carlisle what you’ve done to her song.’

Kevin squinted at the figure next to him. ‘Hang about, ain’t that the clairvoyant from the sea front?’

‘Yes, and I’m sure she sees a Taser in your future if you don’t clear off,’ said Tuck, winding up his window.

Tuck popped a Rennie into his mouth and shook his head. ‘Days like this I wished I was a mechanic like my dad.’

‘It came to me,’ said Madam Del Finer, the words escaping like water from a hose.

‘What?’

‘The thing, the beast. That night you brought me back, it came to my window.’

‘What?’ said Tuck. ‘How did it know where to find you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Del Finer. ‘But it did.’

Tuck opened his phone and hit record. He knew he should have been taking a statement from her, but he wanted to keep it off the record for as long as possible. ‘Come on, then. Tell me everything.’