(Pep Comics 002, 1940)
Like the Mayfair Monster before him, the Terror of Rocky Pool is interrupted mid-murder by Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard. Just like last time, his trusty stick has little effect, though instead of breaking over a head of iron it meets no resistance at all. Unlike last time, Bentley is too late to save the victim, who swiftly bleeds to death from a too-small wound. Bentley is informed that the culprit is the Terror of Rocky Pool and that it makes its vampiric lair at the bottom of that same body of water.
A subsequent interview with the victim's family introduces a couple of suspects: his adoptive cousin Joan Edmunds and biological cousin John Blake, who are in love, even though Joan was the victim's fiance. They only marry cousins in Little Rockham it seems. Also the victim's uncle, a kindly man who raises leeches as a hobby and Joan as his daughter. Can't be him, obviously.
After a few vampire chases and a lot of yelling, Bentley gets to the bottom of things and it's even more unsavoury than all of the cousin-marrying and cousin-cuckolding. It turns out that kindly Uncle Blake was the Terror all along, using in order, a local superstition, anticoagulant leech saliva and an underwater tunnel from the pool to his house in order to kill one nephew and attempt to frame the other because he was in love with his own adopted daughter. We truly are dealing with the most depraved depths of supercrime here.
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