I went down the hallway and eased open the kitchen door. The green floral curtains were drawn, and the main overhead light was still burning. There was a single saucepan on top of the New World gas cooker, and the table was laid for one, with a place mat and a soup spoon.
Tim came up behind me. “Keston won’t budge. I’ve had to put him back in the van. I’m really sorry about this.”
“He’s been spooked, Tim. And I can’t say that I blame him. I’m spooked, too.”
We both listened. All I could hear was the droning of
those hairy blue blowflies the British call bluebottles. Scores of bluebottles.
I stepped into the kitchen. I could smell vegetable soup, but I could also smell that distinctive rotten-chicken odor of dried human blood. At the far side of the kitchen there was a door with frosted-glass panels which led through to the scullery and then to the backyard. The frosted-glass panels were spattered with dark brown spots.
Tim said, “Oh, God.”
“How about going back to your van and calling George Goodhew for me?” I asked him.
“Somebody’s been killed here, haven’t they?”
“It sure smells like it. But if you don’t want to see it—look, I lost my last dog handler because she couldn’t take the sight of people with their insides hanging out.”
“Is that what you’re expecting to find?” Tim’s face was very pale, although his cheeks were still fiery.
“I don’t know. Let’s take a look, shall we?”
I opened up the scullery door. I had been prepared to see all kinds of horrors, but at first I couldn’t really understand what I was looking at. Tim made a retching noise and clamped his hand over his mouth. Then he hurried back through the kitchen and out into the hallway and I could hear him noisily vomiting in the front garden.
On the side wall of the scullery, in a grisly display of blasphemy and butchery, both Mrs. Mitchell and Terence had been nailed, completely naked and upside down, their feet together but their hands outspread.
Their heads had been sawn off, and underneath each of their gaping necks an enamel basin had been placed to catch their blood. A zinc bucket stood in the corner,
and I could see a bloody tangle of gray hair in it, so I knew what had happened to their heads.
The scullery was thick with bluebottles, most of them crawling in and out of the blood-filled basins. In one of the basins there was a soup ladle. I could only guess that Duca had fed before he left.
I went through to the living room, just as Tim was coming back into the house.
“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “Thought I had a strong stomach.”
“Don’t worry about it. I think Keston had the right idea, staying outside.”
I looked around the living room. It would take a police forensics team to work out exactly what had happened here, but I could guess. Duca had forced Terence to drive him here to his mother’s house—the last place that we would have thought of looking for him. Then it had probably questioned him about our investigation—who I was, how much we knew, what we were going to do to hunt it down. After that, it had murdered both Terence and his mother and had fastened their bodies to the scullery wall in a deliberate mockery of Christ and Christianity.
While I waited for George Goodhew to arrive from MI6, I made a systematic search of the living room. I even got down on my knees and looked underneath the sofa, where I found dozens of dog-eared knitting patterns and three crumpled Mars Bars wrappers.
I opened drawers crammed with cut-out recipes from,
Woman’s Weekly
and stray buttons and cotton reels. In the right-hand corner of the room stood a semicircular telephone table, with a crochet tablecloth on it, and a
framed photograph of Terence’s mother on her wedding day. The telephone receiver was off the hook. I picked it up and listened but it was dead. I jiggled the cradle a few times but it stayed dead. In those days, if you left your phone off the hook for long enough, they cut you off.
On the carpet underneath the table I found a crumpled piece of notepaper. Somebody had written on it
SOTON QE
= 1200, in blunt pencil, in shaky, childlike letters. On one side of the piece of paper there was a dark brown oval which looked very much like blood.
“Tim,” I said. “What do you make of this?”
Tim peered at it, and then handed it back. “Soton . . . that’s short for Southampton.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“Well . . . QE could mean the
Queen Elizabeth
, I suppose. She docks at Southampton. Twelve . . . I don’t know, that could mean a twelve o’clock sailing.”
“You mean Terence could have made a reservation to cross the Atlantic?”
“Yes, I suppose it could.”
I jiggled the cradle a few times and eventually an impatient voice said, “Operator?”
“Oh, yes. Hi. I was wondering if you could tell me the last number dialed on this phone.”
“Wait a minute, sir. I’ll have to check.”
A minute became two minutes and then five. At last the operator came back on the line and said, “Southampton seven-two-two-seven.”
“Can you tell me whose number that is?”
“It’s the new twenty-four-hour reservations office for the Cunard Shipping Line, sir.”
“And what time was that call made?”
“Seven minutes past two this morning, sir.”
Tim looked at his watch. “I really think Keston is going to need a bit of a walk now, sir. He’s had his breakfast, he always has to stretch his legs afterward, if you know what I mean.”
“Do you think he’s going to be OK? I really need a dog right now.”
“To be honest with you, sir, he’s looking a bit dicky.”
“This thing I’m after—I think it’s trying to leave the country.”
“Sorry, sir.
Thing
?”
“The thing that killed those two people in there.”
Tim looked perplexed. “Whatever it is, sir, I don’t think that Keston will go after it. I’ve never seen him like this before. Well, only once. Out in Suez, somebody put him off the scent with lion manure.”
I rang the Cunard Line reservations number. After another lengthy wait, I was answered by a chippy young girl. “Somebody made a reservation on a Cunard ship at about ten after two this morning,” I told her. “This is an urgent security matter. I need to know who it was, and what ship they’re booked on.”
She wouldn’t tell me, of course, so in the end I had to talk to her supervisor, and her supervisor had to call MI6 to verify my credentials. This wasted another fifteen minutes, and meanwhile Duca was putting ever-increasing miles between it and me.
At last, the supervisor came back to tell me that Mr. Terence Mitchell had telephoned to book a cabin on the
Queen Elizabeth
bound for New York via Cherbourg, sailing at noon today.
George Goodhew arrived just as I was leaving the house. His gray Rover was closely followed by three other cars and a plain navy-blue van. A dozen young men in suits climbed out of the cars, and two Home Office pathologists climbed out of the van.
“I think that Duca’s trying to get out of the country,” I said. “It forced Terence to make a booking for it on the
Queen Elizabeth
.”
“Yes, but hold on. Duca hasn’t got a passport, has he—or
it
, I mean. They won’t let it on board without a passport.”
“It won’t need a passport, George. It can move so fast they won’t even see it. It can slide through a gap that’s half an inch wide.”
“All the same, I can alert the police and customs at Southampton. And we can hold the sailing if necessary.”
“Well, OK. But tell the police, don’t try to detain it. It can rip them apart as soon as look at them, and we don’t want any more casualties. I have to get down there, with my Kit.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“That’s great, thanks.”
Tim came up, with Keston trotting behind him on his leash. “How is he?” I asked him. “That
Queen Elizabeth
’s a hell of a big boat. I could really use a good dog.”
“I’m sorry sir. I don’t think he’s going to be up to it.”
I looked down at Keston and I had to admit to myself that I had never seen a dog look so cowed. His head was lowered and he couldn’t stop trembling, as if he was suffering from hypothermia. “All right, Tim,” I told him. “I’ll just have to find another man-trailer, that’s all.”
I picked up my Kit and put it on the backseat of George’s Rover. We left Terence’s mother’s house just as the Home Office pathologists were walking in with their brown overalls and their cameras and their forensic equipment, and headed south through Croydon town center. George managed to change gear and smoke and talk on his radio-telephone all at the same time, blasting his horn impatiently at anybody who slowed him down.
“Cunard won’t postpone the sailing,” he said, as we came closer to Purley. “Charles Frith doesn’t want to postpone it, either. It’ll attract too much publicity. The Foreign Secretary’s on board, as well as Loretta Young, and some Russian bigwigs, too.”
“In that case, we’ll have to make sure we get to Southampton before she sails.”
I directed him to the Foxleys’ house. He parked in the driveway with the engine running while I went to the front door and rang the doorbell.
Mya Foxley answered, almost at once. Her hair was fraying and she looked as if she hadn’t slept.
“Mrs. Foxley, I know Jill isn’t feeling too good, but I really have to talk to her.”
“I’m sorry, she isn’t here.”
“she’s not here? She hasn’t had to go to hospital?”
“No, no. A man came round to call for her, about two hours ago. She said that he was something to do with the police, and she would have to go with him. She even packed an overnight bag.”
At that moment, Bullet appeared, his crimson tongue hanging out in the heat. He looked up at me and wuffed.
“Jill was on police business and she didn’t take Bullet? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know. She asked me to take care of him, that’s all.”
“This man who called for her . . . what did he look like?”
Mya Foxley frowned. “He was very tall, with his hair brushed back.”
“Did you notice the color of his eyes?”
She shook her head.
“Would you say that he was good-looking? Handsome?”
“Oh, yes. He would stand out in a crowd. And very well dressed, too. A dark suit, and a dark silk tie.”
“Mrs. Foxley—Mya—this man had nothing to do with the police. If he’s the man I think he is, he’s taken Jill against her will. He’s abducted her.”
“But I don’t understand. She seemed quite happy to go with him. He didn’t say anything to threaten her.”
“That’s what makes him so dangerous. Listen—do you think that Bullet might come with me, and help me find her?”
Mrs. Foxley looked down at Bullet dubiously. “I don’t know—you’ve seen for yourself that he is a dog who obeys only his owner. That was the way he had to be trained.”
I bent over and held my hand out. Bullet sniffed at my fingertips, and growled in the back of his throat.
“Bullet,” I said, “we have to go find Jill. Do you understand that, boy? We have to go find Jill.”
Bullet barked, and his tail slapped wildly from side to side.
“Mrs. Foxley, would you bring me Bullet’s leash, please? I think he realizes what I want him to do.”
Mya Foxley went inside, and while she did so I tugged Bullet’s ears and rubbed his throat and he didn’t seem to mind at all. At least he didn’t try to take another chunk of flesh out of my thumb.
“Let’s go find Jill, boy, yes? Let’s go find that mistress of yours!”
Bullet grew more and more excited, and when I clipped his leash on his collar, he immediately ran out across the driveway, dragging me after him. He was a hell of a lot stronger than I had anticipated, and he seemed to be even more determined to find Jill than I was.
“I’ll call you!” I shouted back to Mya Foxley.
As we turned on to the main London to Brighton road, I had a sudden thought.
“George—can you take me to Dr. Watkins’s house?”
“We’re going to be pretty pushed for time, old man.”
“How long will it take us to reach Southampton?”
“It’s about sixty-five miles. If I really step on it, we should make it in an hour.”
“OK . . . but I really need to go the Laurels first.”
I directed him to Pampisford Road, and he slewed to a halt on the grass verge outside the Laurels. The two bobbies on duty recognized me, and they saluted and said
“Morning, sir!” and let me through without any trouble. Inside the house, I went directly to Dr. Watkins’s surgery and opened up his fridge.
Inside, there were dozens of bottles of various vaccines—smallpox, diphtheria, yellow fever. On the middle shelf, on the right-hand side, there were a dozen bottles of Salk anti-poliomyelitis vaccine, with their distinctive red caps. I grabbed a handful and put them in my coat pocket. Then I went to the stainless-steel trolley beside the examination couch and took two 5cc syringes.
Bullet barked excitedly as I returned to the car, and we pulled away from the Laurels with the Rover’s rear end sliding sideways in the grass.
I checked my watch. It was ten minutes of eleven already.
“Don’t worry,” said George. “If I keep my foot flat on the floor, we should get there in time.”
“OK, then,” I told him. “Try not to kill us, that’s all I ask.”
The sky began to grow increasingly thundery as we sped southwestward through Surrey and Hampshire. The clouds rolled in so quickly they looked like a speeded-up film, and by the time we reached the town of Havant, huge warm drops of rain had begun to patter on to the windshield of George’s Rover.
I had never been frightened by anybody’s driving before, not even during World War Two, when I was driven in a Jeep between Brussels and Nijmegen by a stogie-chewing marine sergeant who had drunk a bottle and a half of Napoleon brandy. But George drove so furiously
that I found myself gripping the door handle to keep myself from sliding from one side of my seat to the other, and constantly jamming my foot on an imaginary brake pedal.
He hardly ever dropped below 50 mph. He drove the wrong way along dual carriageways. He even drove right over the middle of a traffic circle, leaving parallel tire-tracks in the grass. He ran countless red lights and blasted his horn at anybody who looked as if they might slow him down. All this time he smoked one cigarette after another, lighting a fresh one from the burned-down butt of the last.