Changeling Dark Moon Read online

  ‘You might as well make me one of those as well,’ Charles said from the hallway. He walked up to stand behind Alexa. ‘Looks like we’re not going to get any more sleep today so we might as well have a decent cup of tea. I’ll rustle us up a good breakfast.’

  Trey’s definition of a good breakfast did not consist of anything as seemingly inedible as pickled herrings and a hard bread that he would have labelled as stale and consigned to the bin. Instead, he contented himself with a bowl of muesli and a soft-boiled egg. Showering after breakfast also revealed another delightful feature of this land of rock and ice, the water had a strong and distinct smell of sulphur, leaving him with the feeling that, despite dousing himself with almost a third of a bottle of shower gel, he was going to emerge smelling worse than when he had first got in.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, he found Tom in jittery mode again, looking at his watch every ten minutes or so and pacing between the kitchen and the front room to peer out of the window that looked over the driveway. After about an hour, a small van pulled up outside the house, and Tom opened the front door to greet the driver on the doorstep.

  ‘Jon, nice to see you.’ Tom called as the man approached the house. They shook hands, and Trey guessed that this must have been the man who had picked Hjelmar up the day before. ‘I hope you managed to get hold of the equipment that I requested?’

  The tall newcomer inclined his head to one side and pursed his lips. When he spoke it was with a strong Nordic accent. ‘You know how to set a fellow a task, Tom. This kit was extremely difficult to acquire. I had to call in some pretty huge favours.’

  ‘Did you get it or not?’

  ‘I got it. I’ll need a hand to carry it out of the van.’

  Trey watched as the two men went down to the van and opened the back doors. They returned with a huge wooden crate that must have been at least four feet in length. They placed it on the floor inside the hall and Jon went to fetch a canvas rucksack that he put next to the crate.

  ‘When you’ve finished whatever business you have here, Tom, I’d be very interested to know how this thing performs,’ the Icelander said with a nod towards the large wooden box.

  ‘When I’ve finished here, Jon, I’ll let you have it and you can see for yourself. How’s that?’

  The tall thin man seemed extremely happy with this proposal and gave Tom a small salute as he left the building.

  Trey studied the Irishman and grinned. ‘You look like a kid that’s come downstairs early on Christmas morning to see all his presents stacked up beneath the tree. Aren’t you going to open it?’

  ‘Go and fetch me a claw hammer from the toolbox inside the back door, Trey. We’ll crack this baby open and see what we’ve got, shall we?’

  Trey stood back and looked at the weapon housed on a small stand inside the box. It was about the length of his arm and was khaki in colour, with sections made of a dull black metal. At the front was an absurdly large barrel that Trey guessed would quite happily accommodate a chicken egg. Behind this was a short, fat cylinder, whose shape and positioning reminded Trey of the ones that you see on the revolvers used in old westerns – the kind that the cowboy slowly turns round to check that he has loaded it correctly – except that this one was huge and hung under the weapon like some bizarre udder. Behind all of this were the trigger mechanism and a short shoulder butt.

  ‘What is that?’ Trey asked, staring at the thing in horror.

  Tom stepped forward and picked the weapon up, grasping it by the stubby handle towards the front of the weapon and pulling it up to his shoulder in one swift movement. ‘This, my friend, is an M32 MGL-140, or a multi-shot 40mm grenade launcher to the likes of you and me. In addition,’ he said, stooping down and fishing in the canvas bag that Jon had placed next to the crate to pull out a fat, stubby shell that he held up between his thumb and forefinger, ‘these are thermobaric grenades. What do you think?’

  Trey looked at his friend as if he had suddenly gone stark, staring mad. ‘Thermobaric?’ he said in a small voice. ‘They disperse a fine, flammable mist into the air, which, being under-oxidized, ignites to create a huge fireball that’s impossible to escape. Everything in the proximity of the detonation is burned – inside and out. Nasty,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘And if that doesn’t kill you, the pressure wave will.’ He bent down and replaced the small grenade in the bag before straightening back up and treating Trey to one of his best lopsided grins. ‘I hope to God that I don’t have to resort to it. I’ve never used one before, but then I’ve never faced a disappearing tower and a vampire lord’s zombie army before. But if I do, anything in range is going to burn. And everything – even werewolves and vampires – can be killed with fire.’

  Trey was still standing looking at his friend in open-mouthed disbelief. He shook his head slowly and looked between the Irishman’s solemn features and the killing machine that he was now holding upright. ‘Remind me never to get on your bad side, Tom,’ he said, and went to see what Alexa and Charles were up to.

  Martin and Philippa spent most of the day lying in the hot sunshine that streamed down on to the white sands of the villa’s private beach. Martin had come out at his daughter’s insistence. He had told her that he didn’t feel too well and wanted to lie down in his bedroom, but she wasn’t about to let that happen.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Philippa chided. ‘Some sunshine is what you need, Dad. Come outside and let the sea air work its magic on you. You’ll feel back to your old self in no time.’

  He had joined her on the beach, trying to appear as normal as possible while listening out for the phone to ring in the villa. As the day wore on he became more and more edgy until it was as much as he could do not to scream out loud. Eventually he’d gone for a long swim in the sea, allowing the action of the waves and the solitude that the ocean provided to soothe some of his anxieties away. He was a good swimmer and despite his slight build could trawl along effortlessly in his local pool, racking up at least a hundred lengths in a session. He found that he was able to think while swimming, the rhythmic sound of his own breathing lulling him into a state that he guessed might be something akin to meditation. After an hour or so he had emerged from the sea and flopped down on to a sunlounger in the shade. Lying there, with his book in his hands, it was not long before the sharp teeth of rising panic were nibbling into him again.

  Eventually he became aware that Philippa had sat up and was looking at him, her eyes obscured by the large black sunglasses that she had purchased at the airport before leaving the UK.

  ‘Not very good?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ Martin said with a start.

  ‘The book. I assume from the fact that you have been staring at the same page for the entire morning that it isn’t exactly a gripping read.’ She inclined her head to one side. ‘Are you all right, Dad? You seem extremely twitchy. Is something worrying you?’

  ‘No … I’m fine. I’m just enjoying the sunshine. I’m not really reading. Just … thinking.’ This last was true. He had done nothing but think since overhearing that conversation this morning, and no matter how many times he turned it over in his mind he always came up with the same conclusion – she was planning to kill him and leave his body on an island as part of a trip that she had arranged for this very evening. If the place was as deserted as she had suggested, they probably wouldn’t find his body for months. He imagined his dead body lying in some quiet and secluded part of a beach, the crabs crawling over his cold flesh as they feasted on him and—

  He shook his head again. He needed to stop this madness. Because that is what it was – madness. He was being ridiculous. Philippa wasn’t capable of such a thing. Sure she’d told him countless times in the last few years how much she hated him and wished he was dead – but murder? No. She was just a stroppy teenager. He’d got this all wrong. All wrong. Why would Philippa want him dead? Why?

  Unless the thing sitting next to him now wasn’t Philippa at all.

  He remembered the
telephone conversation that he’d had with Tom O’Callahan that morning.

  His mind racing, he reached down and took a sip of water from a bottle. He considered how she might be planning to do it, running through the options. He didn’t think that she would risk any personal injury by trying to throttle him or attack him in some physical way. He briefly toyed with the idea that she might have someone on the island, an accomplice that she had arranged to do the dirty work for her, but he dismissed this almost as quickly as he had imagined it – she simply had not had time to set something like that up – she’d had no idea that they were coming on this trip until the previous day. No, she was going to do for him herself, and he thought that it was possible that she intended to kill him with the food that she had asked Mrs Beauchamp to prepare for their ‘midnight feast’. That was why she had gone into town this morning on the pretext of booking the boat. To buy rat poison or something like that. Yes, rat poison would do it.

  He replayed the telephone conversation. ‘ … there is a very good chance that only one of us will be coming back …’

  He had expected Mr O’Callahan to laugh at him when he had suggested to him that his daughter might be trying to kill him. Instead, the grave Irishman had listened to Martin’s recounting of the telephone conversation and after a long silence had asked him if his daughter had been behaving strangely in any way.

  A cold shudder had slithered its way down Martin’s spine at the way that his employer had posed this question. ‘Yes,’ he’d replied. ‘She’s actually being nice to me. That might not sound remarkable, but if you knew how she was before and how she is now, it’s as if she’s a different person. It’s like she’s possessed or something.’

  There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello?’ Martin had said.

  ‘Martin, does your daughter know what you do for a living?’ Mr O’Callahan had asked.

  ‘Good Lord, no. Mr Charron was extremely explicit about that during my final interview. It was one of the conditions that were made very clear to me – nobody was to know what the data that I analysed related to, regardless of who they were.’

  Martin thought about the way that his boss had looked at him when he had stressed this point. Lucien Charron’s eyes had bored into him in a way that had made Martin think that he was staring straight into the depths of his soul. Just remembering that moment had sent a shudder through him again.

  ‘Philippa believes that I work for an insurance company,’ he had told Tom. ‘Besides, if she ever found out that I work for a company that investigates paranormal activities, she’d never let me hear the last of it. It would simply be yet another weapon in her arsenal of abuse that she could use to humiliate me when we had an argument.’ He heard the bitterness in his own voice and considered once more why he had let his daughter make his life so utterly miserable for all of these years. ‘Mr O’Callahan, does this have anything to do with the work? Is there a chance that my daughter is under the spell of someone or something that is making her behave like this?’

  ‘I don’t know, Martin. You did the right thing in calling me. I’m going to get one of our people to go over to your house and have a little look around. In the meantime, don’t go on that boat trip this evening. Make out that you are ill or something. I don’t care what you have to do, but you just sit tight until you hear from me.’ He’d paused on the other end of the line and Martin had thought he’d gone when he added, ‘I don’t know what it is, but something’s up.’

  ‘OK, Mr O’Callahan.’

  ‘And, Martin, for heaven’s sake, don’t mention to anyone why we sent you over there in the first place. If that should get out, we’re all in the smelly stuff up to our armpits.’

  ‘I would never do such a thing. You and Mr Charron can rely upon me, sir.’

  Martin had hung up then; the adrenalin coursing through him caused his muscles to heat up and the blood to rush around his system at a speed that did not sit well in the hot tropical temperatures of the Seychelles. He closed his eyes and tried to hold back the tears. If he had endangered his daughter because of his work, he would never forgive himself. If that was the case, he’d be better off dead. He had to help her in some way. He had to stop her from doing anything terrible and get back his daughter again. He actually managed to smile at this thought – for years he had hoped that his daughter would change, that she would find a way to break free of the hatred and anger that seemed to fill her for no good reason. And now she had. She seemed happy and carefree and loving. And murderous.

  And now here he was, sitting beneath a thatched sunshade in a tropical paradise with the sea lapping at the shore in front of him, wondering what Mr O’Callahan expected to find in his house and trying to come up with a bulletproof excuse for why he would not be going on the boat trip that she had planned for them that evening.

  He glanced at his watch and put his book down. He looked around at the things he had brought out to the beach with him from the house. He checked over and again, lifting towels and crouching down to look under the sunlounger, but he failed to find the item that he was searching for.

  ‘Have you seen my mobile phone?’ he eventually asked his daughter when it was clear that it was not going to turn up.

  ‘No. You had it on you earlier when you came out.’ She sat up then, a reproachful look on her face, ‘Oh, Dad, please don’t tell me that you went into the sea with it still in your shorts pocket.’

  He was certain that he hadn’t. But the look on her face suggested that the phone may have ended up in the sea anyhow.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said slowly. ‘Never mind, I’ll just use the phone in the house.’ He stood up and tried not to let her see the anxiety that was beginning to grow within him again.

  ‘They’re not working,’ Philippa said casually, returning her attention to the word-search puzzle that she was doing. ‘What do you mean, not working?’

  ‘I was going to call Gemma and let her know how beautiful it is here,’ she said without looking up. ‘I couldn’t even get a dial tone. The phones are all out.’

  Martin looked towards the house for a second before returning his attention to his daughter. ‘Is Mrs Beauchamp getting them fixed?’ he asked.

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ his daughter said. ‘I gave her the day off today. I thought it would be nice for us to be totally alone so that we can relax properly without her popping out every hour or so to ask if we wanted anything.’

  ‘What about our picnic food? I thought that you were going to get her to put that together for us.’

  ‘I’ve decided to do that myself. That way I can be certain that I include all your favourites.’

  Martin looked out at the sea as it lazily rolled up against the sandy slope of the beach. His breathing quickened until he was panting like a small lapdog. This, and the heat beating down on his head, made the vision at the edge of his eyes fizz slightly and he sat down again, realizing that he was in danger of passing out if he did not. He reached out and gripped the glass of pineapple juice that Philippa had fetched him earlier. Ignoring the shaking of his hand, he brought the vessel up to his lips. He was about to take a long gulp when he stopped, looking down at the yellow liquid in the tall glass. He placed it back down on table. Rat poison. All he could think of was rat poison.

  He stood up and slipped his Birkenstock sandals on.

  ‘I’m going to go for a walk,’ he said. ‘Get a change of scenery for a little while.’ The villa was set in the middle of nowhere and he hadn’t seen a neighbour for miles when they had arrived in the small hours of the morning. However, he hoped that if he walked far enough he might be able to find a shop with a payphone that he would be able to use to call the UK. He turned to go, swatting at a fly that at that moment had taken a sudden and keen interest in him, buzzing annoyingly around his face and ignoring his attempts to wave it away.

  ‘That sounds like a lovely idea,’ his daughter said from behind him, getting up and pushing her own fe
et into a pair of flip-flops. ‘I’ll come with you. I could do with stretching my legs as well.’

  Martin smiled and nodded his head. He turned away again so that she would not see the disappointment on his face. He had the strange feeling that wherever he chose to go and whatever he chose to do, he would not be allowed to be alone.

  ‘Yes, I know that Mr Ellington was with them the whole time,’ Tom said into the receiver, ‘but I still want somebody to go over to the house and have a look round. I have a funny feeling about this whole thing and I’d rather err on the side of caution right now.’ There was a pause, and Tom looked up to see Trey standing in the doorway, chewing on something. ‘Yes, it might well be that all of this is in his head, but Martin sounded pretty shaken up when I spoke to him today and I want it looked into.’

  Tom listened to the person on the other end of the line for a few moments, nodding his head at whatever was being said. ‘That’s grand. Thank you, and keep in touch even if you don’t find anything.’

  ‘More trouble?’ Trey asked between mouthfuls of tuna sandwich.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Tom looked down at the phone. ‘But our friend Mr Tipsbury called me this morning from the company villa in the Seychelles and is convinced that his daughter is planning to kill him.’

  ‘Blimey. What’s up? Doesn’t she like the pool, or was their flight delayed?’

  ‘This is no joke, Trey. Something is up. Martin is the only person who knows we’re here and what we are here for. If he is worried, there is probably a very good reason. Never underestimate that gut feeling that people get when something’s not right. There’s something else … something that he said that’s put the fear of Christ into me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that she was like a different person. As if she had been possessed.’

  Trey stared at the Irishman – the tuna suddenly didn’t taste so good. ‘What are you going to do?’