Descendant Page 11

  “Hydrogen sulphide?”

  “That’s the principal gas given off when human beings start to decompose.”

  “Golly,” said Terence. “That makes it sound almost scientific, doesn’t it?”

  I stared at him. Almost scientific, my rear end. He was talking about a theological tracking device invented and constructed by some of the leading intellects of the seventeenth century. I didn’t argue about it, though. I had a job to do, and very little time to do it in.

  Gradually, nervily, the needle began to settle down, although it was still twitching from side to side. Whatever it had picked up, it was still quite a long way off, and the needle couldn’t seem to make up its mind exactly which way it wanted to point. To me, that meant that it had probably picked up more than one Screecher, and was dithering between the two, as Bullet was. Distance: maybe a half-mile. Direction: diagonally northeast across the park, across an avenue of poplars, and then a bright green playing field.

  “Go on, boy,” said Jill. Bullet circled around for a while, sniffing and snorting and sneezing as if he had a head cold. Then, without warning, he tore off across the playing field.

  “Bullet, slow down, boy! Bullet!”

  Jill ran after him and I jogged after Jill, my metal Kit banging painfully against my knees. Terence had gone back to his car and was slowly driving toward us up the avenue of poplars, even though motor vehicles weren’t allowed inside the park. I could see two uniformed park-keepers in the distance, staring at him, although they were too far away to make out the expressions on their faces.

  “Bullet!” shouted Jill.

  Bullet crossed the playing field to the other side, and ran into a copse of horse-chestnut trees. At this time of the year the trees were dark green and heavy with pink blossom, and the ground beneath them was deeply shadowed. Jill disappeared into the gloom and I followed her. Bullet started barking again and this time he wouldn’t stop.

  I had almost caught up with Jill now. Together, we burst into a clearing among the trees, and there was Bullet, barking and snarling and running from side to side.

  “Oh God,” said Jill.

  Standing in the middle of the clearing were four people. A young man with short, scruffed-up hair and a pale, bruised-looking face, wearing a torn sport coat and badly stained gray-flannel pants. A girl with gingery curls, as pale and bruised as the boy. She was plump, about seventeen years old, and she was wearing a white summer dress with red-and-gray cats printed on it, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, but the front of her dress was flooded with dark maroon blood.

  The young man was standing behind a round-faced middle-aged woman with permanent-waved hair. The woman’s flowerpot hat had been knocked askew and she was panting hysterically. Not surprising: the young man had one arm around her neck and he was holding a long wide-bladed kitchen knife right in front of her face.

  The gingery-haired girl was holding the wrist of a skinny young boy, aged about eight or nine, who was so frightened that he had wet his khaki shorts and could barely stand up. The girl was holding a kitchen knife, too, and repeatedly prodded the boy in the chest and the shoulders with the point. The boy kept whining “Ow!—Ow!—Ow!—Ow!”

  I reached behind my back and lifted my Colt .45 out of its holster. I held it up in both hands, cocked it, and took two steps closer.

  “You don’t need me to tell you what to do,” I announced. “I’m going to give you till three and then I’m going to kill you.”

  The young man looked at the gingery-haired girl and then he looked back at me. “Bugger off,” he told me.

  “Not a hope, pal. You heard what I said. I’m giving you a count of three and then I’m going to kill you. One.”

  “I thought I said bugger off,” the young man challenged me.

  “You did. But I think you were under the misapprehension that even if I shot you, I couldn’t kill you. You’re a Screecher, after all, a strigoi vii, and as such you think you’re immortal.”

  The young man frowned. “What do you know about it, you tosser?”

  “I know very much more than you do, pal, if my old friend Duca is running true to form.”

  The young man lowered his arm so that the point of his kitchen knife was digging into the woman’s blouse, just above her waistband. A small spot of bright scarlet blood appeared among the pattern of lime-green leaves. The woman whimpered and started to cry, and helplessly opened and closed her hands.

  The young man said, “I don’t know who you are, mate, and to be honest with you I don’t give a monkey’s. But if you don’t sling your hook right now I’m going to get the right hump and do this poor old bag right in front of you.”

  “Two,” I told him. “And for your information, the bullets in this gun were cast from the melted-down goblets that were used by Christ’s disciples at the Last Supper. Not only that, they’ve been plated with pure silver and rubbed with garlic from the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.”

  “You’re having a bubble, mate.”

  “You want to try me?”

  “Beryl!” said the young man, half-turning toward the girl.

  I took another step forward. I had never been Roy Rogers, but at this distance I could have blown at least half of the young man’s face off without too much risk of hitting the middle-aged woman.

  “Three,” I warned him.

  At that moment, the girl swung her elbow back and stabbed the little boy in the middle of his stomach. The blow was so forceful that I could hear the chop! as the blade went in. Without any hesitation, the girl whipped the knife upward so that he was cut open from his belt to his chest. The little boy let out a horrible high-pitched scream like a run-over cat. Then he fell backward on to last autumn’s leaves.

  I fired once and hit the girl in the shoulder. The bang of a .45 is absolutely deafening, and disorienting, too. I fired again and hit her in the side. Lumps of red flesh flew off her hip, and she rolled over backward and sideways, just behind the boy. She tried to get up so I shot her again, blowing off her left kneecap.

  “Jim!” screamed Jill.

  I swung around, pointing my pistol at the young man. But I was too late. He had already thrust his knife into the middle-aged woman’s stomach, right up to the hilt, and her blood was running down his wrist and staining her skirt. She was staring at me in pain and shock and for some reason I couldn’t help noticing the large brown mole on her upper lip, as if she had suffered that blemish all her life, only to die like this.

  I aimed at the young man’s head, but he ducked down behind her. I tried to dodge to the side, but he swung her around, as if he were dancing with her, with the knife still buried in her stomach. No matter which way I tried to get a clear shot at him, he kept her between us.

  “Terence!” I yelled. I needed someone to outflank this young Screecher, and hit him from the side. “Terence, where are you for Christ’s sake!”

  It was then that I turned to Jill. She was standing under the trees, her eyes wide, holding on to Bullet’s collar.

  “Jill! Set Bullet on him! Jill, he’s going to kill her!”

  But it was too late. The Screecher yanked his knife upward and the woman’s intestines piled out on to the ground, unravelling themselves like yards and yards of overcooked cannelloni. The Screecher turned and ran away through the woods, and he was running so fast that all I could see was a brief gray shadow and a flurry of leaves. There was no point in wasting a Last Supper bullet on him.

  I turned around. The gingery-haired girl had gone as well.

  “Did you see which way she went?” I asked Jill.

  “We have to call for an ambulance,” she told me. Her voice was jerky and erratic and she was trembling uncontrollably.

  I gripped her arms and shook her. “Did you see which way she went? The redhead? Send Bullet after her!”

  “They’re going to die,” said Jill. She tried to turn around and stumble away but I wouldn’t let her.

  “Listen, Jill, they’re
probably dead already. Terence will call an ambulance. You and me, we have to go after the Screechers. That’s what we’re here for.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t send Bullet after those people. I can’t. I can’t do this any more. I didn’t realize.”

  “Jill, for Christ’s sake pull yourself together. We have to get after them now!”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t do this any more. I thought I could but I can’t.”

  I let her go. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t let Bullet run after the Screechers on his own, and he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.

  I walked over to the little boy. His arms and legs were sprawled as if he were jumping into the air, but he would never jump again. He was white-faced and dead. The woman moaned and I crossed over to see how she was. Her intestines were stuck all over with leaves and twigs and she was staring at them in despair.

  “Pray for me,” she whispered.

  I nodded. “Every morning, from now on, until the day that I die. I promise you.”

  “You’re a strange bloke,” she said.

  I didn’t answer her. What can you answer, when a dying woman says that to you?

  Hunt for the Dead

  Charles Frith was furious. He paced around his office, throwing up his arms from time to time as if he were singing the finale to a grand opera.

  “You don’t know what it took to cover this up! Seventeen dead people in a 403 bus! A woman and a boy disemboweled in a public park! This is worse than the Buster Crabb business!”

  The red phone rang and Charles Frith picked it up. “What?” he barked, even louder than Bullet. Then, “Oh, sorry, Home Secretary.”

  I leaned close to Terence and said, “Buster Crabb business?” As far as I knew, Buster Crabb was a movie actor with big muscles. I think I’d seen him in some third-rate Western.

  “Buster Crabb was a Royal Navy diver,” said Terence, hoarsely. It was obvious from the way he was talking out of the side of his mouth that “the Buster Crabb business” had been a serious embarrassment. “They found his body in Chichester harbor, early last year. No hands, and his head fell off when they tried to lift him out of the water.”

  “Hey, yes,” I nodded. “I think I read about that. It was that time that Khrushchev visited England, wasn’t it, and they thought this guy had been secretly diving under Khrushchev’s ship?”

  “That’s right,” said Terence, uncomfortably.

  “That was MI6?”

  “Perhaps. Possibly. But you certainly didn’t hear it from me.”

  Charles Frith banged the phone down. “It’s the Daily Mail again. They’ve got hold of this bloody idiotic idea that MI6 has been secretly running some kind of mad-scientist experiment, turning our agents into sociopathic assassins, and that some of them have escaped. ‘Human Killing Machines on the Loose.’ Sir David’s frothing at the mouth.”

  “Sir David’s always frothing at the mouth,” said Terence.

  “I just want to know what the devil we do now,” said Charles Frith. “I mean, what’s the plan, Jim? I thought we were going to track these buggers down and exterminate them before the press or the public got wind of what was going on. That’s what I promised Sir David, anyway, and if we can’t do it I need to know now.”

  “It might be an idea to let the Mail run with their story about ‘killing machines,’ ” Terence suggested. “We can always prove them wrong later . . . and it’s better than telling them that South London is infested with Screechers.”

  “Forget about the press relations,” I told him. “Press relations won’t mean anything if we can’t locate the strigoi mort.”

  “You’re talking about this fellow Duca?”

  “It’s not a fellow, sir,” I insisted. “It’s a thing. We have to find it, and destroy it, and we have to do it real quick. Duca’s been infecting people much faster than I expected. You only have to do the math.”

  I turned Charles Frith’s blotter around and jotted on it with my mechanical pencil. “Seventeen people contain one hundred seventy pints of blood, but the human stomach only has the capacity to swallow four pints at a time. Obviously Duca didn’t know in advance how many passengers were going to be riding on that bus, and even if there were more than he and his fellow Screechers needed, it still would have been necessary for him to kill them all. But if they did need seventeen people, we could be talking about forty-two Screechers here.”

  “Oh my God,” said Charles Frith. “This is out of control already, isn’t it?”

  “If you have forty-two Screechers in the South London suburbs and all of them are looking for eight or nine pints of fresh human blood three times in every twenty-four hours . . . then, yes, this is out of control.”

  The green phone rang. Charles Frith picked it up and bellowed, “What?”

  He listened for a moment, and then he said, “No, Commissioner. Absolutely not, Commissioner. I’m sorry, Commissioner, not a chance. No. And a very good day to you, too.”

  He slammed the receiver down and said, “Sir Kenneth Bloody McLean. They should demote that man back to constable. No—cloakroom attendant.”

  He sat down in his big leather armchair and swung from side to side, breathing like a man who had eaten a large lunch, smoked a cigar and then run up eight flights of stairs. Eventually, he said, “What’s it going to take to find this Duca fellow? Thing, I mean?”

  I drew a few more lines on Charles Frith’s blotter. “When I was hunting down Screechers after D-Day, it was a totally different ballgame. We were attached to an advancing army, which was driving the Screechers ahead of us. But here—well, this is South London, in peacetime. We can’t go from street to street, searching every house. We can’t ask the Royal Engineers to blow up buildings for us if we suspect that a couple of Screechers are hiding in the attic.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “We’ll have to use a combination of plain old-fashioned police work, plus some inspired deduction, plus—well—something else.”

  “Something else?” asked Charles Frith, suspiciously, raising one brambly eyebrow.

  “I guess you’d probably call it sorcery or the occult.”

  “You mean Dennis Wheatley kind of stuff? The Devil Rides Out? Dear God, I can just hear myself explaining this to Sir David.”

  “I hope you won’t have to, sir. But let’s make a start. From what happened today, it’s pretty clear that Duca has found himself an automobile. We need to check any reports of stolen vehicles in that part of South London over the past six weeks, but we also need to ask the public if they have seen a neighbor’s automobile—not stolen but being regularly driven by somebody unfamiliar.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Strigoi mortii aren’t half-rotten and sick-looking like strigoi vii. They look perfectly normal. In fact they usually look better than normal. But they’re dead, and dead people find it difficult to rent or buy property, because—well, they’re dead. So they have a habit of killing other people and taking over their lives—their homes, their property, even their clothes—and usually they’re clever enough to do it without arousing suspicion.”

  “So how do we get the public to help us?”

  “I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth. Maybe some kind of announcement in the newspapers.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Terence. “We could tell the press that we’ve had an intelligence report from Washington. They suspect that a KGB spy has moved into a flat or a house in South London, and that he might be driving the car belonging to the previous occupier. We could give out a special telephone number for the public to call. We could even offer a reward.”

  Charles Frith pulled a disapproving face. In his opinion, newspapers were only good for wrapping up cod and chips. But Terence’s idea was actually a pretty good one. We were right in the depths of the Cold War, and every day the press was full of scaremongering stories about Soviet spies living among us, leading what appeared to be commonplace lives (and as we l
ater discovered, they actually were).

  “Very well,” Charles Frith told Terence, “why don’t you scribble something down on paper and see if you can have it on my desk by five o’clock? I’ll talk to Sir Kenneth bloody McLean and see if he can get his beat chaps to start asking questions about people driving cars that they shouldn’t be. What are you going to do, Jim?”

  I looked at my watch, the gold Breitling that Louise had given me on our wedding day. “I have some persuading to do.”

  Tea for Two

  Terence let me borrow his Humber and I drove back over Chelsea Bridge toward the south suburbs. The sky was deep blue and streaked with mares’ tails, and it was so warm that I drove with all the windows open and my cow’s lick blowing. The river Thames sparkled in the sunlight like smashed mirrors.

  I drove through the built-up center of Croydon at an overheated crawl. I hadn’t driven a manual shift for over ten years, so I kept stalling, and kangaroo-jumping, and it took me over an hour to get to Purley. By the time I turned into Combe Road, my shirt was sticking to the leather seat and I was so thirsty that I could have drunk blood.

  Purley was a prosperous suburb with huge 1930s houses concealed behind high beech hedges. Shining new Rovers were parked in every graveled driveway, and I could see tennis courts and gardeners clipping rose bushes and well-dressed children running around in Aertex shirts and white socks and sandals. There was a tranquil air of summer heat and confidence and money.

  I found “The Starlings” at the end of Combe Road, an enormous mock-Tudor house with glittering ivy all down one wall and pigeons warbling on the roof. I steered the Humber into the drive and parked outside the garages. A middle-aged man in a droopy cotton sun hat was clipping the edges of the front lawn, not that they looked as if they needed clipping. The lawn itself was so perfectly kept that it looked unreal, and striped like a pair of green silk pajamas.