Free Dire Straits by Helen Harper Page A

around my things. I think of my underwear drawer and shudder.
    ‘You have only three more nights at Markmore.’
    ‘That’s fine.’ I’ll either be in the morgue by then or I’ll have sorted out an alternative of my own. ‘There’s something else I need you to do.’
    ‘I’ve got homework.’
    ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning!’
    ‘So?’
    The vagaries of teenagers. ‘This won’t take long,’ I say, hoping I sound persuasive.
    There’s a heavy sigh. ‘Okay. What?’
    ‘Find someone called Lucy.’
    I pick the phone up, annoyed at the short cable as I try to stretch it across the room, and hold the receiver to O’Shea’s ear.
    ‘You’re going to tell the person on the end of this phone how to access your private chatroom,’ I tell him.
    ‘Who’s on the end of this phone?’
    ‘Just tell them.’
     
     
     

 
    Chapter Seven: Hacker
     
    I first met Rogu3 three years ago, long before I’d heard of Dire Straits. He was eleven years old then, making him fourteen now. I’m terrified of what he’ll be like when he finally matures into an adult.
    I was working as an insurance fraud investigator at the time for one of those large faceless companies whose bottom line is always about profit. It was a truly awful job and I hated every minute of it. They were often happy to pay out small amounts as they felt that gave them an ‘honest face’. When it came to larger sums of money, however, it was an entirely different story.
    The organisation dealt mainly in life insurance. The basic package covered accidental death, such as car crashes, as well as dying as a result of long-term (although never pre-existing) conditions. The premium package included a much wider range, such as death by triber. It also provided a payout in the event that your loved one was inadvertently transformed into a vampire. They called this ‘implicit passing’ – the bigwigs at the company loved their euphemisms. Customers signed up for the premium package in droves. At the time, I suspected it was down to some carefully planted articles in the media about helpless victims who were turned while out shopping or at the park with their kids. It was all nonsense, of course. Each of the vampire Families only recruits new members once or twice a decade, depending on their attrition rates. And there is never any shortage of volunteers or ‘vampettes’ as the human hangers-on are known. No Family would be so crass as to randomly turn someone who was doing nothing more than going about their daily business.
    Cleverly, the premium policies were considered null and void if someone voluntarily turned themselves over to the bloodguzzlers. So say you were dying a long and drawn out death of cancer, and you happened to luck into a Family recruitment drive and were chosen to be turned, then your loved ones received nothing. If you chose to die quietly, they got a semi-generous payout. I understand why so many tried so hard to achieve the alternative. Few succeeded. With such a large pool to choose from, the Families can afford to be choosy. There are plenty of people lining up who aren’t sick; they want to be vampires because of a spine-chilling blood lust or a desire for a longer life.
    Where the insurance company’s genius really paid off, however, was that once you were recruited into a Family, you disappeared. Contrary to popular myth, it’s only new vampires who are vulnerable to the sun’s glare. To protect them from daylight, and keep them away from the general public because they can’t control their desire to drink blood, new recruits are often not seen for years after their transformation. Even when they’re finally allowed to make contact with their loved ones, few choose to do so, preferring to remain immersed in the new life they’ve chosen for themselves. Vampires are notoriously loyal and the Families are tight-lipped about whether someone has been accepted or not. Part of that is down to their own politics, and not