Eat the Poor (Galbraith & Pole Book 2), page 1
EAT THE POOR
Tom Williams
The right of Tom Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This story is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 Tom Williams
All rights reserved.
Dedication
To my beloved,
Tammy G,
who has spent far too much time in the Palace of Westminster
but has somehow emerged with her sanity intact.
Disclaimer
All the places in this story are real places except for the parliamentary constituency of Richmond East, which doesn’t exist. It stands to reason that the MP for Richmond East, Christopher Garold, doesn’t exist either. Like all the people in this story, he is entirely a creation of my warped imagination.
‘Serene Selene’ is also fictional, although there are real businesses that provide the same service.
The historical figures that Pole mentions meeting are, by contrast, definitely real people, though whether any had dealings with vampires is something you will have to decide for yourself.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: Something in the darkness
CHAPTER 2: Galbraith meets an old colleague
CHAPTER 3: Galbraith and Pole take a walk
CHAPTER 4: The Member of Parliament for East Richmond
CHAPTER 5: Galbraith views a body
CHAPTER 6: In which our heroes investigate a fourth killing
CHAPTER 7: In which Garold believes
CHAPTER 8: In which Galbraith enjoys an omelette
CHAPTER 9: In which Garold seeks professional help
CHAPTER 10: In which there is a fifth killing
CHAPTER 11: In which Garold takes a train
CHAPTER 12: In which our heroes watch TV
CHAPTER 13: In which Garold returns to Pimlico
CHAPTER 14: In which Galbraith also returns to Pimlico
CHAPTER 15: In the werewolf’s lair
CHAPTER 16: Old-fashioned police work
CHAPTER 17: In which Garold has a good lunch and a bad afternoon
CHAPTER 18: Unparliamentary behaviour
CHAPTER 19: In which Garold finds a new life
CHAPTER 20: Case closed
CHAPTER 1: Something in the darkness
People have always been afraid of the dark. It’s a natural fear. You can never be quite sure what’s out there.
Nowadays, in cities there is always some light, giving an illusion of safety. It is, though, only an illusion. The light only makes the shadows deeper. And in those shadows there is more to see than most people imagine.
There are foxes slipping silently between the houses and, rather less silently, upending dustbins in their search for scraps. In graveyards, badgers burrow below the monuments, leaving weeping angels tilted at crazy angles. Somehow navigating their way between impenetrable fences and the brick walls of suburban estates, the last of a once flourishing population of hedgehogs search out beetles and slugs. They can sense the coming of autumn and they are anxiously feeding themselves up ahead of their months of hibernation. Cats, too, are on the hunt and the tiny mouse corpses that will be presented to ungrateful humans in the morning gives a clue as to the number of rodents scooting along railway tracks, scurrying under garden sheds or busy foraging flowerbeds or overgrown lawns. In London you are, they say, never more than six feet from a rat. Exaggerated as the claim is, at night you are probably closer to a rat than you might wish to be. And hush! Can you hear, when the late-night traffic noise falls away, there is the hoot of an owl?
For all that the night is filled with creatures large and small going about their secret business, the most obvious denizens of the darkness are human. There are cleaners going home long after offices have closed or coming in to work long before they open for the day; policemen and security guards; men and women who work in what is called the night-time economy by those who do not want to enquire too closely as to what exactly the night-time economy includes; drivers of the night buses; Uber drivers. A few are rich – traders dealing with exchanges the other side of the world, wheeler-dealers whose wheeling and dealing knows no office hours. Most though are poor: the invisible toilers of the night, unacknowledged by those who live and work by day.
They walk quickly, heads down, anxious to get home. They don’t notice the foxes and the badgers. If they stopped and listened, they might hear rustling in the undergrowth. There are shrubs and bushes, little patches of wilderness all over this city. Is it a shrew? A vole?
No one hears the squeak as a tiny life is snuffed out by something bigger, with larger teeth.
People should pay more attention. It’s not just the mice that fall victim to killers in the night. There are those who prey on the humans too. Other humans: the muggers and the pimps, usually almost as poor as those they prey on. The rich don’t have to prowl the streets to rob the poor: they can do that from their offices by daylight.
But there are some figures out there, slipping through the shadows, who are not poor and who are driven by a need for something more precious to them than money. For hundreds of years they have lived among us, hiding in plain sight. Nowadays they have ways to meet their needs without killing, but the urge to prowl at night is strong. You may not see them, but they are definitely there: lords (and ladies) of the night. They call themselves the Others. If you ever think of them, you have another name. You call them vampires.
But now there are rumours among the Others: tales of something barely glimpsed; something that moves in darkness like them; something that is not human.
The Others have never felt their mastery of the night to be challenged before, but this is something new. They do not know what it is, cannot be absolutely sure it is a real thing. But they are scared.
And if there is something out there that scares them, it should terrify you.
CHAPTER 2: Galbraith meets an old colleague
Chief Inspector John Galbraith felt older than he used to be, which shouldn’t have surprised him because, obviously, he was. Perhaps he noticed it more these days because of his experiences investigating the murder of Lord Christopher Penrith. That was when he had first come in contact with the Others and there is nothing like spending time with a creature that will live hundreds of years to make you conscious of your own mortality. The whole ‘not going out in daylight’ thing was a nuisance, he knew, but the effective immortality that their condition conferred seemed to be quite a significant benefit.
That morning he had looked at himself in the mirror and felt more than ever conscious of his age. His hair was definitely greying and his shirt was depressingly tight. The tango classes that he had taken in the aftermath of the Penrith affair had been neglected after an initial burst of enthusiasm and he never had got round to taking out gym membership. Now Superintendent Bailey had him spending more time at his desk and less time on the streets fighting crime. The world, he felt, was trying to tell him that he was getting past it.
He put down the crime report he had been reading and looked across the office to where Sergeant Green was industriously typing away at his computer. When Galbraith had started with the police, computers had been few and far between and reports had been laboriously produced on old-school typewriters. He was, he thought, a dinosaur, increasingly out of touch with the demands of modern policing and hence, as is the way of institutional life, ready to be promoted into the higher ranks of the force.
That was Superintendent Bailey's view, anyway. Bailey was so convinced that Galbraith should be looking for promotion that had insisted that his Inspector start attending the sort of meetings that would, in Bailey’s words, “give you some more experience of the joys that await you once you get your promotion.” His Superintendent, Galbraith thought, tended to over-use irony as a substitute for humour.
He took another look at the Bailey’s latest idea for his career development. He had found the note on his desk when he arrived. He had thought himself ahead of the rest of his shift – even the young and enthusiastic Sgt Green – but Bailey had been there even earlier, working his way through the mountain of paperwork that always littered his desk. Galbraith was to spend the next morning at a meeting of what was cheerfully referred to as the Alphabet Committee. Some Scotland Yard genius with time on his hands had come up with the title Advise, Benchmark and Co-ordinate District Efforts. “It’s basically a chance to compare notes across police districts,” Bailey had explained when Galbraith called into his office in a doomed attempt to duck out of the chore. “Too often we miss crimes that cross district boundaries, so now everybody gets together once a month to let each other know if there are any strange goings-on that their neighbours should be aware of. You’ll be representing us on the West London group.”
“We don’t care what’s happening in East London?”
“Hardly. Bunch of crooks down the East End.” Bailey gave a snort to communicate that his remark was humorous. "No, there's a sort of super committee that coordinates all the coordinating committees somewhere in the bowels of Scotland Yard. I always think of it as Flippin' Gasbags Harrumphing Indefinitely.”
‘Flipping’ was about as close as Bailey ever came to swearing, but his contempt for the higher echelons
“So it’s a waste of a morning.”
Bailey lifted his eyes from the mound of paper. “Not necessarily. Sometimes you learn something useful. In any case, it will do you good to get to know some of the other senior officers better. After all, you can't stay here forever.”
Galbraith supposed he couldn’t. Even since he’d met Pole, the Other who had helped locate Lord Penrith’s killer, there had been Covid, a war in Ukraine, a couple of major terrorist incidents and a general election which had returned the government with a majority so narrow that protestors had been happy to make that the pretext for a week of riots. The world moved on. Sgt Green was certainly ready to move on with it. He would be going for his Inspector’s exam soon and then Galbraith would be trying to break in a new sergeant.
He'd been doing this too long, working his way through the same routines, watching the same crooks in the same courts as they were sent down yet again. He was in a rut. Perhaps it was time to bite the bullet and go for a Superintendent’s post: sit behind a desk and politic with Deputy Assistant Commissioners: a quiet life for his twilight years in the Force.
Galbraith sighed and reached for a file he had been desperately trying to ignore: Crime statistics in Earls Court. He started to make some notes. If he was going to spend the next morning at the Alphabet Committee, he might as well at least try to find something intelligent to say.
* * *
The meeting was at Hendon – the wrong side of the North Circular Road and wildly inconvenient for most of the people attending from West London police districts. Scotland Yard would have been more sensible from the point of view of travel, but Scotland Yard was the preserve of the Great and the Good and sending chief inspectors and superintendents out to the Police College at Hendon was an easy way for the Powers That Be to remind them of their place in things.
Galbraith arrived early. It had been years since he had any reason to go to the College, so he had allowed extra time to find the place. When he got there his mood had been lifted by the smell of real coffee – a definite improvement on the instant from the machine at Earls Court. There were Danish pastries set out for the early arrivals too. Galbraith thought about the image he had faced in the mirror and his promise to himself to lose some weight. Then he looked again at the pastries. As ever, he turned to Shakespeare for an answer.
“How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!”
Fair enough. There’s the means to break his resolution. Consider the resolution broken. He took a healthy bite from a Cinnamon Swirl and dabbed the sugar from his lips with the back of one finger. He began to think it might not be such a bad morning after all.
As people started to drift in, Galbraith took his pastry over towards the window, looking out on the grey October day as he chewed. There was a black van driving towards the building, the glass of its windows darkened. There seemed something almost sinister about it. He watched it drawing nearer and was about to go back to his coffee when he saw it turn sharply into a ramp that led down beneath the building. It must, he thought be somebody senior enough to have snaffled a prime parking spot: certainly no one humble enough to be mixing with the officers on the Alphabet Committee. He turned to look at the others now clustered around the last of the Danish pastries. He recognised a few of the faces but there was nobody that he knew personally. This was not the sort of meeting that would attract honest thief-takers and, for all that Bailey was convinced that it was an opportunity to network, those who had turned up seemed to be talking only to those they already knew. Galbraith did wonder about looking at the attendee list to see if there was anyone with whom he might have anything in common, but there was no attendee list. No sign-in sheets come to that. It was the way these things always are. The police are very good at explaining the importance of controlling access to offices when they do the crime prevention talks, but internal security at Hendon was terrible.
People were beginning to take their seats. The meeting was about to begin when the door opened again and a familiar figure stepped in.
At least, Galbraith thought it was familiar. It was difficult to be sure. Pole – if it was Pole – was wearing a hat, sunglasses, and a scarf. It was indoors on a relatively mild October day. Of course it was Pole.
Galbraith seemed to be the only person to have recognised him. It was not that surprising, he supposed. Pole was hardly one to make small talk at police socials.
The vampire took a seat as far from the windows as he could get and Galbraith hurried to get the seat next to him.
“I take it that was you arriving in the black van.”
Pole turned his head towards Galbraith and nodded. With the scarf and the sunglasses, Galbraith had no idea of his expression.
“Section S arranged transport that met my …” he hesitated. “My needs.”
“It’s quite a grey day and we’re in a north facing room. You could probably lose the sunglasses.”
Pole took them off and, having confirmed that there was, indeed, not a great deal of natural light in the conference room, he shed the hat and scarf too.
"Sorry. I'm not quite myself – it's been a long night."
Galbraith wondered what could have been keeping the vampire so busy. He knew that Pole was not afraid of hard work, but his rather patrician style meant he avoided ever being seen to be making any excessive effort. Before he could ask, though, the meeting started.
It was, on the whole, not nearly as bad as Galbraith had feared. There were some statistical analyses that suggested the areas where there was most knife crime was shifting: good news for some in the audience, rather more worrying for others. What had been dismissed as a couple of incidents of indecent exposure near Uxbridge turned out to be echoed in several other districts. It didn’t take a master detective to recognise one prolific offender working his way along the Piccadilly line. Notes were compared and the Transport Police were to be brought in. Galbraith thought that there was a fair chance the man would be caught before too long.
A couple of gangs of street robbers had relocated from one London borough to another and the officer who had dealt with them in the past would brief the new team. A confidence trickster in Hounslow had developed a nice line conning the elderly by representing himself as a gas engineer (“There’s been a report of a gas leak on these premises and I have to cut off your supply”) before recommending a mate who “repaired” the fault, turned the supply back on and pocketed £100 for his trouble. The superintendent from Hounslow – a weary soul in a bad suit but with an impressive red moustache that rivalled Frank Zappa – was anxious to get the word out. “It’s bound to be copied elsewhere, so spread the news through Neighbourhood Watch and we’ll try to get local press coverage too.”
Much of the morning, though, was spent on trivia. Anything really important was already pretty well-known across the whole force, so they mainly talked about stolen bicycles, graffiti, general vandalism, and dog attacks.
Galbraith was pretty well asleep by the time they got to dog attacks, but he jerked back to alertness as he realised that Pole was sitting bolt upright (even more upright than normal) and hanging on every word.
There had been a death in Roehampton: somebody sleeping rough in the area had been found dead with wounds that suggested an animal attack. The superintendent from Lavender Hill – miles away but Galbraith wearily accepted that nowadays you couldn’t expect anything as old-fashioned as a local police station – wanted to know if any other districts were reporting dog attacks. “Frankly,” he said, “if we can definitely tie this to a dog, we can put it on the back burner as far as investigations go. At the moment we have it down as a possible murder and you know what a pain that is.”
There was nodding around the table. Everybody there was all too aware of the cost of keeping a team on a murder hunt. If it could be shuffled off as an accidental death, or even an unlawful killing, everybody would be happy.
