Free Dire Straits by Helen Harper Page B

wanting rival Families to see what new blood, so to speak, is available. But I’ve heard that it’s also because often recruits don’t survive the initial turning process.
    This is a dream come true for insurance. If no one can prove that you’ve been turned, then no one can prove that you haven’t – so the insurers don’t have to pay up. Of course this only works in the absence of a body but if, for example, you bumped into a Kakos daemon and were in possession of a premium policy, there would be no body left as evidence and no one would receive the money. The insurance company would send out a standard letter informing the real family that in all likelihood the victim voluntarily went vamp and no money would be paid out. All due regrets and blah blah blah.
    There are other tribers besides Kakos daemons who are also impressively circumspect with the leftovers of their attacks. Considering that the vast majority are of the ‘live and let live’ variety, however, I had strong suspicions that the company paid some less savoury tribers (and probably humans too) to dispose of many corpses of people who died from natural causes. I could never prove it. They were – and indeed still are – far too clever to leave a trail. But when I worked there, there was an incredible number of people whose bodies were never recovered and whose policies were cancelled as a result.
    It was my job to investigate cases where the bodies were missing. I was green, which is probably why I’d been recruited in the first place. The insurance company could put its hand on its heart and say their investigators had done the best job they could but had discovered no evidence to prove it hadn’t been a voluntary vampire recruitment. It didn’t help that there was a bonus for investigators who didn’t find any evidence to disprove voluntary turning.
    I didn’t last long at the company. To be frank, almost any job would have been better than depriving normal, hard-working families of the insurance payouts they deserved. God knows, they already had enough to deal with once their loved one was dead without being screwed by the company. I’ve come across other insurers since that have been far more honourable. But the guys I worked for were bastards.
    Things came to a head with Alice Goldman. She disappeared when she was seven and a half years old, snatched in broad daylight half a mile from her house. It was all over the news. For a time, people assumed it was a straightforward abduction and that sooner or later she’d be ransomed then released, or her mutilated body would be found in a ditch by some traumatised dogwalker. But her body was never discovered. About two weeks after her disappearance, her discarded clothes were found in a bin, soaked in as much blood as a seven year old can have. The blood was a match for hers.
    After months of grieving, the Goldman family pulled themselves together and put in a claim. Unfortunately for me – but perhaps fortunately for them – I was the investigator. I was given strict instructions from on high to deal with the case as ‘quickly and quietly’ as possible. I knew what that meant: spend a day or two looking for evidence then, in its absence, put in a standard report stating it was possible she’d voluntarily applied to the vampires. Even if the Families’ own laws didn’t prevent them from recruiting anyone who was under twenty-one, little Alice Goldman’s biggest concern was whether Barbie would find her lost shoe, not whether she’d live to be two or three hundred years old.
    It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was going to find evidence to prove she’d not gone to the vampires and shove it under the insurance bigwigs’ noses then force them to pay that family what they deserved. Why I thought I’d succeed in finding out what happened to her when half the British police force couldn’t, I have no idea. But I wasn’t going to let the Goldmans get that standard fucking