Skipper was far from being an ideal dog for Screecher-trailing. The scent of Screechers made his fur bristle and he was very reluctant to follow it, keening and barking and trotting around in circles. Sergeant Kellogg wasn’t much more help. He was boneheaded and pedantic and he repeatedly made it clear that he strongly objected to taking orders from an American attached to MI6.
“This isn’t an easy one for me, sir, as you can probably appreciate. I have been instructed to look for persons or objects about which I have been told absolutely nothing except that I am going to be told absolutely nothing.”
“This isn’t personal, Sergeant,” I said. “It’s just that we didn’t have time to get you the necessary security clearance. I’m sure that you and Skipper have all the necessary skills to do us proud.”
“With respect, sir, whatever persons or objects that
Skipper is supposed to be trailing, the scent of them is causing him considerable apprehension, and since Skipper and me is so closely bonded, I would very much appreciate some idea of what they is or are.”
“Sergeant, what they are is irrelevant. All you need to know is that they have murdered twenty people on a cricket field and we have to track them down before they murder anybody else.”
The bodies had been removed now, but Skipper was quick to pick up the scent, as much as it unsettled him. Although it was only midafternoon, the sky was dark maroon, as if the clouds had been soaked in blood. I could see lightning over Croydon Aerodrome. We followed Skipper across the playing fields to the far side of Chalmer’s School, which bordered on to a suburban street. The Screechers had obviously entered the school from this direction, climbing over the green iron railings.
Skipper led us along the street to a quiet dead end street, or “cul-de-sac.” There, the trail ended. The Screechers must have arrived here by car—parked, and then walked to the school playing fields.
“Sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Kellogg, with undisguised smugness. “Think your persons or objects have been spirited away.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll call for you again if I need you.”
“Let’s hope not, sir.”
I raised an eyebrow, but he quickly added, “Wouldn’t want to see any more fatalities, sir, would we?”
I walked back to the school. I found Dr. Rosemary Shulman in the parking lot, beside a dark blue Home
Office van, packing up her medical bag and her notes and taking off her lab coat.
“Who’s going to be carrying out the autopsies?” I asked her.
“Well, I am, in conjunction with the Croydon coroner.”
“Did you deal with any of the previous killings?”
“All except the first ones, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. I was on holiday then.”
“Have they all been the same—with only a small proportion of the victims with their hearts pulled out?”
“No, they haven’t, as a matter of fact. Each incident has been very different. In one case we had a family of five killed in a caravan in Warlingham, and four out of five of them were exsanguinated. But in another case, in Streatham, seven were killed at a Boy Scout get-together but only two were exsanguinated.”
“Those victims who
weren’t
exsanguinated,” I asked her. “Did they have anything in common? I was looking at the victims here, and it occurred to me that whoever did this, they mostly cut the hearts out of the older people.”
Dr. Shulman folded her lab coat neatly and tucked into the back of her van. “I can’t be sure without checking my records, but it’s worth looking into, isn’t it? The only victim in the caravan killing who wasn’t exsanguinated was a girl of eleven. Everybody else in the family was older—older brother, parents, uncle and aunt, cousin.”
“OK . . . that’s interesting. Can you go through the figures for me, with a particular focus on age? Also, can you look for any other distinctions between the victims who were drained of blood and the victims who weren’t. Such as—I don’t know—blood type, or medical history, or ethnic background?”
“Of course. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.”
“Even if you don’t find anything, can you still let me know?”
“Naturally,” said Dr. Shulman, and climbed into her van, and drove off.
It was past 6:00
PM
by the time Terence and I had finished at Chalmer’s School, so we drove back to his mother’s house for supper. We sat at the kitchen table and she served us shepherd’s pie with carrots and cauliflower. I had never eaten shepherd’s pie before—ground lamb topped with mashed potato—but I was hungry and I think I enjoyed it. At least Mrs. Mitchell seasoned her meat with plenty of salt and pepper and Lea & Perrins sauce. Apart from Mya Foxley’s Burmese curry, most of the food that I had been served since I had arrived in England had been very inferior quality and almost tasteless. You wouldn’t have believed that the war had been over for twelve years.
While Terence went upstairs to visit the bathroom, I helped his mother by drying the plates.
“He’s a good boy, my Terence,” she said. “Very thoughtful. Always brings me a bunch of flowers on pay day.”
“I’m glad to hear it. A young man should always respect his mother.”
“How about your mother, Jim? Do you get to see much of her?”
“My mother passed away before the end of the war.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. She must have been quite young.”
“Forty-eight, but she didn’t look it. She was Romanian. Dark-haired, very beautiful. I can still remember the songs she used to sing me. In Romania they call
them
doina
. They have sad
doina
and happy
doina
and love
doina
and
doina
for singing your kids to sleep.”
“You miss her,” said Terence’s mother.
“Yes. I never had the chance to say good-bye to her. Not the way I wanted to.”
I thought of my father and I standing on the dock at Bodega Bay, letting those light gray ashes run between our fingers into the sea, and they weren’t even hers. For all I know, my father had dug them out of the living room hearth, and they were nobody’s.
Terence and I drove back to the
South Croydon Observer
building. We unlocked the front doors and let ourselves in. We had checked every single office before we left it, making sure that the doors and windows were all closed tight. I hadn’t wanted to come back here to find that Duca had slid in through some inch-wide aperture, and was waiting for us.
Our footsteps echoed along the corridor as we made our way to the darkroom. I was carrying a flashlight but I didn’t switch it on. There was a faint orange glow from the main road outside and that was enough for us to find our way upstairs. The darker the building was, the more difficult it was going to be for Duca to be able to see where we were.
There was a loud bang. Terence had collided with a metal filing cabinet that had been left abandoned in the corridor. “Are you OK?” I asked him.
“Fine. Stubbed my toe, that’s all.”
“You’re sure you’re up to this?”
“Bit apprehensive, if you must know.” He paused, and then he said, “I was in the Eve Club last year, in Mayfair.
A lot of security people go there—MI5, MI6, Soviet agents, all sorts. I was spotted by this East German agent and I had to hide in the ladies’ for two hours. He would have shot me, no questions asked, if he could have found me.”
He gave a self-deprecating snort. “I thought I was scared
then
.”
I opened the darkroom door, and switched on my flashlight. “Try to keep your nerve, Terence, OK? When you’re dealing with Screechers, the last thing you need to do is to show them that you’re frightened. They latch on to fear, the same way a shark will go after your leg if you’re bleeding.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
We entered the darkroom and took a quick look around. It still smelled faintly of photographic developer.
“So what exactly are we going to do when Duca gets here?” Terence asked me. “
If
Duca gets here.”
“Oh—it’ll get here, don’t you worry about that.” I hunkered down and opened up my Kit. “When it does, I want you to open up the Bible, just like you did before, but I want you to do something else, too. I want you to hold up this silver mirror, right in front of Duca’s face, so that it has no choice but to look at it.”
“All right, then. What will that do?”
“It will show Duca what it really looks like. It’s pure silver and it was blessed by Pope Urban VIII, so it can only reflect purity and truth. Did you ever read
The Picture of Dorian Gray?
”
“No . . . but I saw the film. George Sanders, wasn’t it?”
“Oscar Wilde based that novel on stories that he was
told about the
strigoi
. Dorian Gray’s portrait grew older while Dorian Gray himself stayed young and handsome, just like a
strigoi mort
. You wait until Duca sees its true face in the mirror. I promise you, its own image will stop it dead in its tracks. Or
un
dead in its tracks.”
I took out my whip, my hammer and my nails, and my surgical saw, and I laid them out on the darkroom drain-board. “That’s when we slam the door shut and do the rest of the business.”
“But it’ll be totally dark, won’t it?”
“Not entirely.” To give Terence a demonstration, I took out the screwtop lid from a pickle jar. I had cut a thin three-inch slit in the center of it and then painted it matt black. It screwed tight over the top of my flashlight, so that only a faint glimmer managed to escape. Terence and I could only just make out each other’s outlines, and the dark glitter of each other’s eyes. Duca didn’t have its Screecher wheel so it was going to be 99.9 percent blind.
“So . . . how long do you think we’ll have to wait?” asked Terence, checking his watch.
“Who knows? But I don’t think it’s going to be very long. From my experience, Screechers have better noses than bloodhounds. They can smell what you had for yesterday’s breakfast. In Holland, I’ve known them go through hospitals, drinking the blood of everybody in sight, except for the patients on morphine, because morphine affects their sense of balance.”
Terence said, “How do you
do
this? This Screecher-hunting. Bloody hell, I couldn’t do it.”
I shrugged. It was too complicated to explain.
We waited for over an hour. Terence took out his
cigarettes but I shook my head. “Let’s keep the air clear, shall we?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m trying to give them up, anyway. Too expensive. Two and fourpence for twenty, these days.”
“Maybe you should try gum,” I suggested.
“Does that really work? But you’ll never guess what I saw the other day. A chewing-gum machine. You put in a penny and turn the handle and you get a packet of Beech-Nut chewing gum.”
“Miraculous.”
Terence glanced at me. “You’re twitting me, aren’t you? You’ve got all those automats in America.”
Right then, we heard a door banging, somewhere downstairs. Then a metallic squeak, and another bang. I lifted out my gun and cocked it.
Terence said, “Do you think that’s Duca?”
“I don’t know. It could be. Ssh.”
We strained our ears, but all we could hear for the next few minutes was the swooshing noise of traffic from the main road. Then I thought I heard a faint scrabbling noise, like a caged animal scratching at chicken wire.
“Want me to take a look?” asked Terence.
I heard the noise again. It certainly wasn’t footsteps. Terence eased open the darkroom door and peered out into the corridor—right, and then left.
“I can’t see anybody. Perhaps it was squirrels, or rats.”
Outside, a police car sped past, with its bell urgently ringing. Then silence again.
“No, nobody there,” said Terence.
He was just about to close the door when there was a sharp pattering sound, quite loud, and approaching us very quickly. I looked out into the corridor and for a
split second I still couldn’t see anybody there. But then I looked up and saw that Duca was hurrying rapidly toward us on its hands and knees. It was crawling along the ceiling, upside down, so that each of the conical glass lampshades started to sway as it came rushing past them.
I stepped back into the darkroom and pulled Terence after me, by his shoulder.
“
It’s on the ceiling!
” said Terence.
“Hold up the mirror!” I told him. “As soon as it comes through the door!”
At the same time I holstered my gun and picked up my silver bullwhip. I gripped the handle in my right hand and the clawlike tip in my left.
There was a last flurry of scrabbling and we saw Duca climb headfirst down the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. It unfolded itself like a great gray praying mantis, until it was standing up straight. It fastidiously brushed the ceiling dust from its sleeves—its green eyes staring at us with unblinking fury. Its spine was straight, its handsome head was tilted slightly backward, its lips were scarlet, like a bloody razor cut. It was slightly out of breath, which lent it a false humanity that for some reason made it all the more frightening.
“So here you are,” it announced. “I have come to recover what is rightfully mine.”
“Well, my friend,” I told it. “You can certainly try.”
“You have stolen it from me and I want it back.”
“Oh, really? Haven’t you forgotten what
you’ve
been stealing? You’ve been stealing the lives of innocent men and women, and children, too, for centuries, fellow, and I’ve come here to stop you stealing any more.”
“You are a pathetic fool. You cannot stand in the way of fate.”
“You don’t think so? I’ve exterminated more
strigoi mortii
than you can count on the fingers of three hands, my friend, and now it’s your turn.”
He stepped forward, with his left hand held out. “I will give you the chance to return my possession. If you refuse, then I will take it anyway, and I will unravel your viscera all the way along this corridor.”
“How do you know I have it? This possession of yours?”
Duca looked at me with derision. “Because it is mine, and it sings out to me, like all of my possessions, animate or inanimate.”
It held its hand to its chest, and of course it was right. I was wearing the wheel around my neck.