The Lamia Hunt

Chapter Seventeen: An Eventful Journey

06:05 08/03/2015

The plan to recapture Lucille Taite was a stupid one, and Claire knew it. Without any definite leads, their only hope was to revisit the locations related to Fidèle, and try and collect information from them. As if that was going to be any use.
However, it was all they could do, and they couldn't do nothing.

Their first destination was Port Lennings, where Lucille had spent the first ten years of her life. In Southern Cornwall, it was easier to reach than the other locations they'd be visiting.
They had taken an early train, the station still enveloped in dark and mist when they left, the lights of the station soon blurring into insignificance.
She and Jones set themselves up on either side of a four-person table, and Claire hefted the briefcase of Fidèle's documents onto it.
"Shall we get started reading?" she said. "Just go halves?"
Jones shrugged.
"Do we have to just now? I mean, you know it'll be better if we're actually awake when-"
"Fine," she snapped, shoving half of the pile towards him. "You take these ones."
"But..." His voice trailed off as she lifted another file out of the briefcase and opened it.
It was mostly empty, belonging to one of the children who'd been abducted in Port Lennings. A 'missing' poster, on it a photo of a boy grinning widely, mud spattered over his face. There was another photo, too, one taken by the Praedatori of a vacant corpse with a stake through its chest, lying sprawled on a concrete floor. 
She closed the file, and put it on the seat next to her. It wasn't going to be useful.
Jones, despite his protestation, was also flipping through a file, raising his eyebrows and gazing occasionally out of the window. 
She glared at him, and, hoping that he hadn't noticed, took another file. Praedatori personnel, this time. Phillips, his name was. According to this, he'd been an exceptional hunter. She read through the documents, but found nothing interesting there. Nothing that would help her capture Fidèle, at any rate. Precious little with regards to his death, too; no photos, and no clear description. It didn't matter, though. 
Included in the file were a few notes on Fidèle's first lair, but nothing major. For the most part, it was records of other cases he'd worked on, and she sighed as she skimmed through them. It was depressing, really; here he was, dead, and all she knew about him was what had been written in the Praedatori's reports. All anyone knew about him, most likely. The memory of him was always fading, would continue to fade, until nobody remembered him, and they'd only have the documents left.
Pity.
She placed the file on top of that of the dead child, and moved onto the next. Another of Fidèle's victims.
The first sheet in the folder was a photo of the girl, slumped against a wall. Intestines spilled out of her belly, and had been strewn over the floor in loops.
Claire gulped, and stared out at the fields, which were just beginning to feel the sun. They were normal fields, utterly commonplace and unremarkable; the same fields that commuters looked at every day, and felt nothing for. She felt nothing for them, either, but there was something in them that she enjoyed; something about the steady rhythm of the train on the tracks, and the boring green fields that flashed by the window without variation.
She shut the file, and put it on top of the pile, selecting another, which she opened, not reading. She could feel the train slowing, and smiled as it pulled into a country station, upon which loomed black-clad office workers bound for London. 
The doors hissed open, and in they poured, finding their places to sit, or stand. They, too, were average; nothing about them was worth commenting upon. It was pleasant, however, to watch them, or not watch, but see them moving across her vision like clumsy ghosts, all courteous and kind to one another, but without any real feeling to match.
They settled down, and the train jerked back into motion.
Their journey was beginning again.
She turned back to the file, and skim read the first page. This was it: Fidèle's file. The file at the centre of all this. The first page was a letter, from the Société des Mains Blanches, asking the Praedatori for aid. Apparently, they had been too short staffed to deal with the threat. 
She didn't read all of it; she'd find nothing new, and the English was poor. The Société had really known nothing about what Fidèle was capable of, and the letter reflected that all too well.
Exhaling impatiently, she flipped over to the next page. A report on the first Praedatori mission to slay him. It had been handwritten, but the ink was blotted and blurred at intervals, as if by drops of liquid. At the bottom was signed, jerkily, 'Poppy Jordan'.
She shivered.
They'd really done that. They'd made the sole survivor relive her comrades' deaths, fill them out in an official document.
Her eyes wavered on the text, and she tried to read it, but Jones stopped her.
"Hey, Clairy-fairy,"
She glanced at him, raising her eyebrows.
"What?"
"Look at this?" He lifted a file from his lap, handing it to her. It was open on a photo of a young woman in her late teens or early twenties, dead. Only her face was visible, framed by pale brown hair, but she was clearly dead. Her eyes were open, a shade between grey and blue, but lifeless, glassy. Her left cheek had been crushed inwards, and was heavily bruised. "She look familiar?"
Claire shook her head.
"Is this?" She didn't think Lucy had described her to her, but she knew somehow that it had to be her. Annabelle.
"Yup. But just wait a moment." He paused, and lifted another file next to it, open to a photo of Lucille, the most recent they had. She was scowling slightly, the tips of her fangs visible between her lips. 
He put it next to that of the dead woman. "See?"
She shrugged.
"What am I supposed to be seeing?"
He rolled his eyes.
"Come on, you can't say that you don't see it. Look." He traced a finger around the line of Annabelle's chin in the photo. "That's distinctive; look at that curved jawline."
"What the hell, Jones? Don't play around; just tell me straight what the fuck you're talking about."
"You really-" His words hung unfinished in the air, as if he didn't know where they'd been going, either. "Actually, you're right. I don't need to tell you the particulars. But even you've got to admit that they look similar."
Claire's eyes flicked between the two photos. She would have been lying if she said she knew what he was talking about. Sure, the two of them didn't look completely different, but lots of people looked the same, and these two didn't, or not really, at any rate. 
She raised her eyebrows at Jones.
"You think they were - related?"
He nodded.
"Well, actually, I'm pretty damn sure they were. It'd be stranger if they weren't."
Claire wasn't sure whether she agreed with him on that or not.
"But, then, that changes-"
"It just gives us something else to think about, until we know for sure."
"You what?"
He grinned.
"Looks like you've been skim reading. If you hadn't been, you would've known that Theodore Taite called for backup on the night he died before he went out hunting. There were a few hunters in the area, and they managed to get there in time - not to save anyone, of course, but to get what they needed: both of their bodies back to the morgue in Principia."
"So you're saying-" Claire wasn't sure what she'd done to deserve this, but it sounded like a bloody miracle.
"We've got DNA from both of them." Jones laughed, gleefully. "I'll call now, see if we can get a test done."
Claire nodded.
"I'll do it; you'd best keep on looking through these. It looks as if you pay more attention than I do, for once."
He raised his eyebrows.
"Was that a compliment?"
She didn't respond, digging in her pocket for her phone.
Jones laughed, and picked up a file, letting it fall open on his lap with a soft thud. 

#

"Hey, Lu." A sleepy voice crackled and snapped at the other end of the line, and Claire sighed with relief. She hadn't expected Frankie to be awake yet.
Frankie was the head of the labs at Tabulae. Formality would have dictated that Claire call her by her last name, but then, this was Tabulae, and Frankie was the epitome of Tabulae informality. Even Claire had succumbed to it by now, which was saying something.
"Hey, Frankie," she said, leaning back in her seat. "I was wondering if you'd be able to do a maternity test for me?"
"For the case you're doing?"
"Yeah, yeah, course."
"And I've got samples to work from?"
"Think so."
Frankie laughed, the sound jarring and fake through the tinny speakers.
"I think I need something more concrete than a maybe, Lu. Who's it for?"
"Uh..." Claire paused, thinking. "You can work with a skeleton, right?"
"Uh-huh. It'd help if I actually had the skeleton to work with, though. Just give me the names, and I'll do the rest."
Claire swallowed, glancing at Jones, who raised his eyebrows, and turned back to the file he was reading.
"Well," Claire said. "I'd like you to test if Annabelle is-"
"Annabelle got a last name?"
"No, sorry. But you should be able to-"
"No, it's fine. Take me a while to find, but it'll be cool. Who's the other person you want to test?"
"Lucille Taite."
There was more laughter from the other end of the line.
"You mean Lucille Taite as in the Lucille Taite you let escape? Tabulae's up in arms about her."
Claire grunted loudly, and there was a stunned silence from Frankie.
Jones, too, looked up, and, saying nothing, took the phone from her.
"Yo, Frankster," he said. "What'd you say? Looks like Clairy-fairy's about to cry."
Claire didn't hear the response, and glared out of the window, trying her best to drown out Jones's voice as he continued,
"No, it's just a hunch." He leant back in his seat. "Worth checking out, though." He picked up another file, nudging Claire with it and mouthing, "come on" before continuing the conversation on the phone. "Oh God, twisted doesn't begin to describe it. I mean, how old would she have been - talk about-"
"What are you doing," hissed Claire, still looking out of the window. The town they had been passing through was gone, replaced with dull countryside. "This is meant to be confidential."
"Jeez, give me a break, will you?" Then, to Frankie. "Sorry; looks as if I've got to go." He lifted the phone away from his ear, hanging up and handing it back to her. "It was rude of you to interrupt my conversation."
Claire shrugged.
"It was rude of her to-"
"You're never going to live that down." He spoke flatly. "You might as not get so worked up about it.
"Worked up? Is that what you think?"
"Well, yeah." He let the file he was holding fall onto the table. "You're really overreacting-"
"You weren't there! You don't know how-"
"You felt like shit." Again, his words were flat. "You were being accused, called names. It made you mad. You made a bad decision. Que sera sera."
She nodded. It didn't seem like Jones to say something like that, and say it like he meant it.
Noticing her gaze, he shrugged, smiling. "You're not the only one, Clairy-fairy."
"Don't call me that."
He rolled his eyes.
"Everybody fucks up, Claire. You just happened to fuck up big time, and people are talking about it. Can't blame 'em."
"Thanks. That helped tons."
"Don't be sarcastic; it doesn't suit you." He paused, and added, "And neither does blonde hair, for that matter. Why'd you dye it?"
Claire didn't answer.
"Why were you discussing the mission with Frankie?"
He shrugged.
"Turns out she did a project on it - on the original case, that is - when she was in training. You know the one I'm talking about, right?"
Claire nodded. In their second to last year of pre-split training, all Praedatori had to do a research project on a previous mission, and rewrite the reports to give a presentation on it. She and Jones had fought about it at the time, having chosen the same mission to research.
"Even so," she said. "That doesn't mean-"
"Whatever." He picked up the folder again.
Claire slapped it out of his hands.
"Not whatever. You can't just go telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry about-"
"I wasn't. I was just-"
"You were discussing the mission with someone who was in no way involved and-"
"She was familiar with the case. It wasn't as if-"
"Just stop talking about it with people who aren't involved."
Jones made to respond, but was interrupted by a announcement buzzing over their heads, a bland feminine voice jittering between words as usual.
Now arriving at Port Lennings. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.
"Come on," said Claire. "Let's go."
"This isn't over, you know."
She glared at him, knocking a gathering of files into place.
"I know," she replied. "It's only just begun."