The Last Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko Page A

press?’
    I felt encouraged. I had gone straight to the right conclusions after all.
    â€˜I don’t think any more intervention will be required from us,’ I said. ‘Murder is evil, but let people fight their own evil themselves. It’s a pity about the boy, of course, but …’
    Foma nodded once or twice and took another sip of beer. Then he said:
    â€˜Yes, a pity about the boy … But Anton, what are we going to do about the bite?’
    â€˜What bite?’
    Foma leaned forward across the table and whispered:
    â€˜It wasn’t a knife wound on Victor’s neck, Anton. There’s absolutely no doubt that the marks were left by a vampire’s fangs. Now, that’s an unfortunate problem, isn’t it?’
    I felt my ears burning.
    â€˜Is that definite?’
    â€˜Ab-so-lute-ly. Just how would a hit man know so much about the way a vampire’s fang is structured and how it works? The lateral grooves, the tapping point, Dracula’s fissure, the corkscrew twist on entry …’
    By this time my entire face was blazing red. I could see the classroom where I had once been taught, and my teacher Polina Vasilievna with her pointer, and the huge rubber model on the desk: a pointed, twisted object like a corkscrew and a white fibreglass board with black letters: ‘Vampire’s right canine (operational) tooth. Model, scale 25:1.’ It had been a working model at one stage: when a button was pressed it had elongated and begun to rotate. But the electric motor had burnt out long ago, and nobody had taken the trouble to repair it, so the fang was permanently frozen in a position between concealed and operational.
    â€˜I was too hasty with my conclusions,’ I admitted. ‘It’s my fault, Mr Lermont.’
    â€˜It’s nobody’s fault, you simply didn’t want any Others to be involved,’ Foma said generously. ‘If you’d familiarised yourself with the results of the autopsy, you’d have realised that your version was wrong. So now what do you say?’
    â€˜If the vampire was very hungry and he sucked the man dry’ – I frowned – ‘he could have puked up afterwards. But not all the blood. Were there any traces of anaesthetic serum in the water?’
    â€˜No, there weren’t,’ Foma said, with a nod of approval. ‘But then, that doesn’t mean anything, the vampire could have been in such a hurry that he didn’t bother with the anaesthetic.’
    â€˜He could have been,’ I agreed. ‘So either he puked or he bit and then held the victim until he bled out. But what for?’
    â€˜To confuse us all and mislead the investigation.’
    â€˜That doesn’t make any sense,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Why confuse things? Why leave the marks of a vampire’s bite and drain away the blood? They’re very careful with it, they wouldn’t just pour it away. Our vampires even have a saying for novices: “Blood spilt on the ground is mother’s milk wasted”.’
    â€˜You can always find a way to make sense of anything,’ Foma declared didactically. ‘For example – the killer vampire needed to make us suspect a young, hungry vampire. So he bit the boy but he didn’t drink, just poured the blood away, hoping that it wouldn’t be found. Or the vampire was hungry, but as soon as he bit he realised what he’d done and decided to pour the blood away, to create the impression of falsified evidence …’
    Completely carried away now, I fluttered my hands in the air, as if I was talking to Gesar.
    â€˜Oh, come on, Bo— Foma! You can come up with lots of theories, but I’ve never met a hungry vampire who would leave the blood once he had his fangs in. This argument isn’t getting us anywhere. What’s far more important is why the boy was killed. Was he a random victim? Then we really do have to look for a