“Afraid not, old man. Security services are never very good at communicating with each other, at the best of times.”
“Somebody could have used their imagination.”
“Imagination?” Charles Frith blinked at me as if I had used a four-letter word. “Not a requirement for MI6, I’m sorry to say.”
The police reports on all of the recent killings were depressingly similar, and all of the photographs, too. Heaps of bodies with their clothes torn open, their abdomens sliced apart and their hearts pulled out from underneath their rib cages. Men, women and children—even toddlers, in little white socks. In the background, cheap floral wallpaper, decorated with loops and spatters of blood. Nobody had ever seen anybody entering the crime scenes. Nobody had ever seen anybody leave.
“We’re um—we’re quite certain that this is the work of—you know—
strigoi
?”
“No doubt about it. One
strigoi mort
and at least two
strigoi vii
, and they’re going to multiply fast.”
“More tea?”
“No thanks. I think I’ll go to my hotel, if that’s all right with you, and take a shower. I need to call my wife, too. Then I want to go to this house in Croydon and take a look at this birthday party. Terence, do you think you can arrange for our dog handler to meet us there? Say about three-thirty?”
“I don’t anticipate any problem with that, ‘Jim.’ I’ll give her a tinkle.”
I stood up and Charles Frith stood up, too. “Tremendously pleased to have you on board, Captain Falcon.”
“Well, me too, sir. I have a very personal interest in catching this particular Screecher.”
“Really?”
“It’s a long story, sir. I’ll report back to you later.”
“Ears. Good. Oh—but there’s one more thing. You’ve been issued with a side arm. Colt .45 automatic, I gather. It’s all been approved but I have to ask you to be very discreet with it. This
is
England, you know, not the Wild West.”
“Of course,” I told him.
“Ears,” he repeated.
On the way back along the corridor, I said to Terence, “He kept saying ‘ears.’ What did he mean by that?”
“Oh . . . that’s English upper-class for ‘yes.’ ”
For my first night in England, the SIS had booked me a room at the Strand Palace Hotel. It was comfortable in a well-worn, shabby way, although the traffic was so noisy that I had to close my window, and the furniture reeked of cigarettes. I booked a transatlantic call to Louise, and tried to take a shower. The showerhead gurgled, and sneezed, and then dribbled. I took a shallow bath instead.
I was lucky. It could take hours before a call to the States came through, but the operator rang me back after only twenty minutes. Louise answered, and although she sounded quite close, I kept hearing an echo, so that she said everything twice.
“I’m going to the Marriotts’ this evening. They’re having a cookout they’re having a cookout.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Are you going to see your sister this weekend?”
“I don’t know, it depends if Dick’s coming home if Dick’s coming home.”
“Listen, I have to go, but I love you.”
“Be careful, Jimmy, won’t you please won’t you please?”
“I’ll be careful.” I hadn’t been allowed to tell her what
I was doing here in England—only that it was connected with my work for the intelligence services during the war. But Louise wasn’t the kind of woman to be easily fooled. She had stood in the bedroom doorway watching me pack as intently as if she were making an 8mm home movie in her head—a home movie that she could play back later, in her mind’s eye, if I never came back to her.
I had known Louise since college. We had dated once or twice, and had a good time together, but Louise was always much more serious than I was. She liked string quartets and art galleries and live theater, while I preferred beer and swing music and W. C. Fields movies. Not that I wasn’t academic. You couldn’t help being academic, with a father like mine. But I wasn’t a
sensitive
academic. I didn’t carry a lily around, and I didn’t lisp.
As it happened, though, Louise and I met up again in 1949, at a friend’s party in North Beach, and I invited her to Mill Valley for the day. We were both different people by then. She had been through a violent marriage and lost a baby. I had been chasing
strigoi
in Europe. We saw qualities in each other that we hadn’t been able to appreciate when we were younger. In Louise, I saw thoughtfulness, and a deep appreciation for the value of human life, but an unexpected willingness to have fun, too. I don’t exactly know what she saw in me, but I always tried to be kind to her, and protective, and I even pretended to like her cheese and macaroni.
Terence called for me at 2:30
PM
and we drove to Croydon. Terence was right, Croydon was “pretty grotty”—a densely overcrowded suburb with mile after mile of Victorian and Edwardian shops and pubs, interspersed
with sorry-looking semidetached houses and filling stations and used-car lots. The sky was beginning to cloud over, although the heat was still unbearable. Terence was steadily perspiring in his coat and necktie, but he didn’t make any attempt to take them off.
We reached an ugly red-brick pub called the Red Deer, where the main road divided. Terence took a right up a steep, narrow street lined with scabby-looking plane trees. We passed a huge Victorian church, faced with flint, and then pulled up outside a large three-story house. There were two men standing around outside the front gate, smoking. Terence said, “Couple of our chaps. Couldn’t have the constabulary here, somebody might ask awkward questions.”
I climbed out of the car and looked up at the house. It was massive and clumsily proportioned, built of the same shiny red brick as the pub we had passed, with a gabled roof and window frames painted bright blue. The front garden sloped up from the street, and was crowded with laurel bushes. The soil was so chalky here that the flowerbeds were strewn with big white lumps of limestone.
Terence introduced me to his “chaps.” Like Terence, they both seemed to be far too young to be MI6 operatives, like two schoolboys. One of them said, “Don’t know what the latest score is, by any chance?”
“Last I heard, Evans took four wickets for sixty-four.”
“Crikey. I thought he’d broken his finger.”
“Our dog handler not here yet?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be too long. Do you want to take a quick shufti inside?”
“Sure, why not?”
One of the chaps led the way up the steps to the front
door, which was propped open with a dog-eared telephone directory. Six pint-bottles of lumpy-looking milk stood on the doorstep, the family’s last delivery. I followed the chap into a high, airless hallway, which had a wide staircase on the left-hand side.
“House was shared, you see,” the chap told me. “Mister and missus and three children lived on the ground floor, while the grandparents lived upstairs.”
Although the house was detached, it stood only six feet from the house next door and the windows were all glazed with yellow and green glass, so the hallway was deeply gloomy, like an aquarium. On the wall hung a damp-spotted print of a miserable-looking maiden, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
“Window cleaner looked in and saw the bodies,” said Terence. “Otherwise, who knows, it might have been weeks.”
We went through to the dining room, which was thick with the smell of decaying food and human blood, and noisy with the buzzing of hundreds of flies. Dark brown woolen drapes had been drawn across the bay window, but enough sunlight penetrated the room for me to be able to see what had happened here.
The dining chairs had been set back against the walls, presumably so that the family could stand around the dining table and help themselves to the buffet. Plates and cutlery were scattered on the mustard-yellow carpet, as well as trodden-in sandwiches and cakes. On the sideboard stood bottles of Scotch whiskey and Gordon’s gin and Emva Cream sweet sherry, as well as six or seven bottles of light ale and Mackeson’s stout. I was reminded that the British liked their beer warm.
The words H
APPY
B
IRTHDAY
J
ACKIE
had been cut out of colored paper and stuck on to the mirror.
“Difficult to tell how the buggers got in,” said Terence. “Back door was locked, and all of the main windows were closed.”
I stepped carefully across the dining room and drew back the drapes. Three of the small upper windows were open. Even a child would have found it impossible to climb through them, but a
strigoi mort
could slide through the narrowest of gaps. Once inside, he would have opened the front door for any
strigoi vii
who might have accompanied him. It wasn’t easy to tell how many
strigoi
had been here, because there was so much blood and so much mess, but they usually went out feeding in threes.
I looked back at the dining table. All the food had been splashed with dark brown blood—the birthday cake, the sausage rolls, the mashed-sardine sandwiches—and now flies were crawling all over it so that the whole table looked as if it were rippling.
I went to the door. There were bloodstained fingerprints on either side of the doorjamb. “You say that one of the bodies was found upstairs?”
“Eleven-year-old boy, yes.”
“See these fingerprints? My guess is, the kid was trying to escape, and somebody blocked the doorway to stop the Screechers from going after him. Unsuccessfully, of course. Because, look.”
I pointed to some smudges of blood on the wallpaper. They ran diagonally up the wall, each one higher than the next, until they reached the ceiling. I stepped back into the hallway and looked up. The smudges continued
across the ceiling toward the staircase, and up the sloping ceiling above the stairs, too.
“Footprints,” I said. “The boy tried to get away and one of the
strigoi
chased him.”
“On the
ceiling
?” said Terence. He looked at the chap and the chap raised his eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks, but didn’t say anything.
“You have to understand what we’re up against here,” I told him.
The other chap came in from outside. “Your dog handler’s here,” he told us. “Bit of all right, as a matter of fact.”
I went out on to the porch—not only to greet my dog handler but to breathe some fresh air. During the war I had grown pretty much inured to the ripe stench of cut-open human beings, but over the past twelve years I had forgotten how sickening it was, and how it seemed to cling to your clothes and your hair for hours afterward. You could even taste it in your mouth when you were eating.
The dog handler had parked her pale green Hillman Minx estate car next to Terence’s Humber, and was opening the back doors so that her dog could jump out. The dog came up the path first, a glossy black Labrador with a crimson tongue, panting furiously in the heat. The dog handler followed, and the other chap hadn’t been exaggerating—she was “a bit of all right.”
She was very slim, with dark shiny hair cut into a bob. She looked as if she might have had some Burmese or Siamese blood in her, because she had high cheekbones and dark feline eyes. She was wearing a white short-sleeved blouse with the collar turned up, and she was very large-breasted. I don’t know what it is about white blouses and big breasts that does it for me, but for a split
second I felt a rush of blood to the head, as if I were fifteen years old again.
Her waist was cinched in with a large silver-buckled belt, and she wore a navy pencil skirt that came down just below the knee.
“Hallo,” she smiled. She had a clear, upper-middle-class accent, and she spoke as if she were reading the BBC news. “You must be Captain—
Falco
, is it?”
“Falcon. With an ‘n.’ Like peregrine falcon. But call me Jim.”
“All right. I’m Jill Foxley, from the Metropolitan Police dog section at Keston.”
“Great to meet you, Jill Foxley. And your dog, too. What does he answer to?”
“His proper name is Willowyck Gruff but his working name is Bullet.”
“Bullet, I like that. Hey, Bullet! How are you doing, boy?”
Bullet turned to me and gave a single contemptuous bark.
“Hey! I think he likes me already.”
Jill said, “I’m sorry. He’s very loyal, once he gets to know people. But he’s been trained to be suspicious of strangers.”
“Well, that’s what we need, suspicious. In fact we need
very
suspicious. You’ve been briefed about this job, I hope? I mean, you know what you and me and Bullet here are supposed to be looking for.”
“Yes. They gave me a general idea. They said that if I needed to know anything more, I should ask you about it. Apparently you’re the world’s greatest expert.”
“And? What do you think?”
She pulled a face. “I’m not at all sure. At first I thought they were having me on toast. But I’ve always liked unusual work. Bullet and I spent the last six months tracking down heroin smugglers in Limehouse. That was fascinating. You know, all that Chinese culture and everything.”
“You understand what these Screechers are, don’t you?”
“Well, yes.” She seemed embarrassed. “Vampires, sort of.”
“Exactly. We’re not dealing with human beings here. They don’t have a soul and they don’t have a conscience. They don’t have any compunction about killing anybody of any age, with no warning at all.”
“Like wild animals, then, really?”
“Unh-hunh. They’re not like animals. They’re intelligent, and they’re so damn quick you can’t even see them, and they won’t give you any second chances.”
“I understand.” She had an alluring way of tilting her head sideways and looking at me out of the corner of her eyes.
“Well,” I said, trying to sound brusque and professional, “you’d better bring Bullet inside. You’ve visited a homicide scene before? It’s not too salubrious in there.” The language I was using, I was starting to sound quite British. I would probably start saying “constabulary” next, instead of “cops.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jill. “I’ve been called to quite a few murders. The last one was a husband who beat his wife and their seven-year-old daughter to death with a hammer, and then cut his own throat with a bread knife. That was quite yucky.”