Anne Billson - Suckers

'I can't .' I stared at the egg, and it stared back, unblinking.

'Nonsense,' he said briskly, shovelling a dripping slice of fried bread on to the plate. 'Eat up. We have a busy day ahead of us.'

'We have?'

He sat down next to me and poured a generous slug of brandy into his mug of tea. 'Want a pick-me-up?'

I shook my head and pushed the food around my plate with my fork, leaving a trail of coagulating grease and dark speckled bits. It reminded me of the places I used to go to with Grauman.

Duncan explained he still had some printing to do if we were to have enough copies of the photographs to hand around. In the meantime, I should set out some of our suspicions in a letter. He frowned. 'I don't know. Vampires sound a bit far-fetched, don't you think?'

'We can play down the paranormal side and pump up the conspiracy angle. Maybe we can tie it in with AIDS. Blood sucking spreads diseases.'

'Don't give too much away. Let them phone for the juicy details.'

'Hang on a bit,' I said slowly. 'Let me get this straight. You think we should give them your telephone number? You think we should give them our names and addresses? ' I was thinking of Patricia Rice.

'Why not?'

He took a lot of persuading, but eventually I convinced him we should preserve our anonymity. 'Even with Jack's mag?' he asked. I hadn't made up my mind about that, but since Jack's magazine was a weekly and we'd missed the deadline, the decision could be postponed for another few days.

There was one other factor we hadn't considered. We considered it now. Once all this stuff about Violet came out, someone was bound to start digging around in her past. They might find more than they bargained for. They might find… us . It may not have been murder, but some people were going to have trouble understanding that.'

'If only she hadn't moved when Dino pressed the shutter,' Duncan said. 'Then we would have had proof that Violet Westron is alive and well and living in… where is it? Molasses Wharf?'

I struggled through breakfast and half a dozen cups of tea and eventually felt human enough to sit down at a typewriter and compose the letter. It went like this:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We feel you may be interested in the enclosed photographs showing a gathering of executives from the well-known Multiglom corporation. As you can see, these people hold orgies in which the participants wear plastic fangs. We have stumbled across important data which suggests these activities are not quite as harmless as they appear.

Some of these people are involved in sadomasochistic pursuits which include biting and the shedding of blood — blood which is not necessarily that of consenting adults but frequently extracted from the veins of innocent children and teenage runaways who have been lured into a career of vice and licentiousness. In these days of viruses communicable via exchange of body fluids, we would suggest that such behaviour is at best irresponsible, at worst a danger to public health.

We also have reason to believe there are bogus social workers involved, as well as at least one prominent Tory MP. Perhaps you might care to investigate further, starting with Rose Murasaki, editor of Bellini magazine, which is based in Multiglom Tower at Molasses Wharf. This is not, repeat not, a crank letter.

Yours sincerely,

Concerned of Kensington.

PS. The man who took these photographs has since gone mad and set fire to a building.

I was pleased with this, but especially proud of the bogus social worker angle. I popped out to the local newsagents to make Xerox copies. It was raining again, so Duncan lent me one of Lulu's raincoats. It was see-through pink plastic and I felt a bit like a walking condom, but there weren't enough people around to point at me and laugh. The wind picked up sheets of wet newsprint and whirled them through the air, but I didn't mind the rubbish any more. I felt pretty good. After all these years, Duncan and I were together again. He had cooked me breakfast. We were working towards a common goal. And it was fun . I was hoping like mad that Lulu wouldn't suddenly come back and spoil the party.

As Duncan had predicted, the rest of that day was hard work. We had decided to address our hot little envelopes to the respective news desks, but Fleet Street was a thing of the past; now all the newspaper offices were scattered around, everywhere from Battersea to Wapping, and though we split the workload into two it took the best part of an afternoon to deliver them by hand. I parted with my last envelope just as darkness was falling. Night-time made me nervous, especially in the vicinity of the East End, so I caught a cab and headed straight back to Duncan's. He made fettucini with mushroom sauce, and we ate it in front of the television. We drank two bottles of white wine and half a bottle of brandy and then we went to bed. For the first time in my life, I felt like half of a couple. It was a comfortable feeling, and I liked it. I had waited long enough.

Next day, Duncan had to set off early for a fashion shoot. He pecked me on the cheek, just like a husband going off to the office. Alone in the flat, I took the opportunity to poke around, but didn't find much I hadn't uncovered a couple of months earlier, when he and Lulu had gone off to Barbados and left me with a set of keys so I could water the plants.

Around lunchtime I strolled home, stopping off at the newsagents to buy a load of papers and magazines. There was no sign of Dino's photographs in any of them, but it was early days. Give them time, I thought. They would undoubtedly want to do some investigating of their own. Then it would be a case of sit back and watch the fireworks.

I settled down to a spot of work — a completely spurious account of what teenagers thought about violence on TV — when the Krankzeits came in from one of their shopping expeditions and slammed the front door so hard that my unfinished Visible Woman leapt from her shelf on to the floor, where her detachable foetus detached itself, and her liver and kidneys fell out through the gap. My neighbours thundered up the stairs in what I took to be hob-nailed boots, then there was a double-barrelled crash as they flung open the door to their flat and let it slam behind them.

Much later, at about seven o'clock, they had a major argument. I could hear him calling her a 'fucking stupid cow' and her calling him a 'fucking stupid Nazi'. This was unusual; normally they yelled terms of endearment at each other. The crash-bang-wallop went on for so long I wondered if he were knocking her around. I hoped so, though I also hoped she would be giving as good as she got. In the best of all possible worlds, they would be beating each other to a pulp.

Unfortunately, Christine Krankzeit stormed out of the flat before it got that far. She pounded down the stairs so heavily that my crucifixes were still vibrating five minutes later. I thought I could hear her sobbing, so I peeped through my curtains, hoping to see Gunter storm down after her and start some sort of ruckus in the street. But he didn't. A little later on I peeped out again and saw her standing perfectly still on the pavement outside, her face tilted upward and her gaze fixed on the floor above. Her skin had taken on a greenish cast in the lamplight, which was strange, because the street lighting was orange. I blinked, and saw that it wasn't Christine at all, it was Patricia Rice.

I blinked again. How could I have been so stupid? Of course it was Christine. Who else could it have been? But she was staring up at the front of the building with an otherworldly expression on her face. I shuddered and drew the curtains tightly to shut out the sight. Half an hour later, when I forced myself to look again, she was gone. But I made sure my front door was double-locked.