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 HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACKIE 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.”
Bullet
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.”
“Quite yucky? Yes, I guess it must have been.”
Out of her navy blue pocketbook, Jill pulled a strip of brownish fabric about the length of a woman’s scarf. She held it up against Bullet’s snout so that he could sniff it and lick it. “This is a piece of the linen shroud they found in the casket,” she explained. “If the same Screecher has been here, then Bullet will be able to tell.”
“Good for Bullet. Let’s take a look, shall we?”
I led her through the hallway into the dining room, with Bullet trotting obediently beside her. I think she was determined not to show that she was nauseated, but as soon as she entered the door she clamped her hand over her mouth and couldn’t stop herself from letting out a high, cackling retch. “Oh my God, it’s disgusting.”
“Do you want to go back outside?”
She shook her head. “I can manage, thanks. It’s the flies, more than anything else. I can’t stand flies.”
“Join the club. But this is fairly typical of a Screecher attack. The strigoi mort gains entry first—in this case I’m guessing that it came through one of the skylights here. It probably came in so fast that nobody saw it—or, if they did, it would have looked like nothing more than a dark blur, whizzing through the room. It would have opened the front door and let in its companions, and then the three of them would have come back in here and had themselves a feast.”
Bullet was snuffling around the carpet, occasionally licking it with his thick crimson tongue.
“How many victims were there?” asked Jill.
“Seven. The Screechers would have sliced their stomachs open first, and cut the Achilles tendons in their heels so that they couldn’t get away. Then they would have gone from one to the other, cutting them open even wider, pulling out their hearts, and drinking their blood directly from their aortas.”
“That’s so horrible.”
“Yes, it is. But if you and I don’t stop them, the Screechers are going to multiply. I don’t know how much they told you when they briefed you, but there are two kinds of Screechers—the infected ones who are still alive, the strigoi vii—and the dead ones, the strigoi mortii.”
“I didn’t completely understand that when they briefed us. The strigoi mortii—they’re really dead? I mean dead dead?”
“Dead in the sense that they’re not human any more, and never will be. They can be nostalgic, for sure, in a very selfish way. They can shed tears for their lost humanity. They can even have relationships with humans. You’d never know if you passed a strigoi mort in the street, except that they usually look unnaturally flawless. Perfect skin, perfect teeth. It’s just that they have no soul.”
“They said that the dead ones spread the infection.”
“That’s right . . . by sharing their blood or other bodily fluids with human beings who attract them. They call it ‘the Embrace’ or ‘the Witch’s Kiss.’ ”
“There must be a cure for it, surely?”
I shook my head. “Once you’ve caught the infection, that’s it. You have a raging thirst for blood and you can never get enough of it. It’s like being a drug addict, only a thousand times worse.”
“So what happens to you?”
“In the end, you can’t stand it any longer and you go looking for the strigoi mort who first infected you. You drink more of its blood, which poisons you, and so you in your turn become a strigoi mort. Very good-looking, an idealized version of yourself. But utterly dead, and unable to rest, forever.”
Bullet came up to Jill and let out another bark. His tail was beating furiously against the table leg.
“He’s picked up the scent. He wants to go after it.”
“In that case, we’ll let him, shall we?”
“Of course. I hope you’re fit.”
“Are you kidding me? I swim, I play tennis. I paint fences. Painting fences . . . you’d be surprised what good exercise that is.”
Bullet was already heading for the door. Jill looked at me and shrugged, and so we followed him.
I went to the car and heaved out the battered metal case containing my Kit. “I think we have a trail,” I told Terence.
“Oh.” He didn’t look very pleased about it. It was one thing to talk about strigoi. Hunting them was something else altogether.
Bullet made his way out of the house and up the street, with Jill and Terence and me trying to keep up with him. Unlike Frank, he didn’t turn back once to see if we were following. At the top of the hill we reached a small public park called Haling Grove. There was a brick-and-concrete air-raid shelter by the front gates, which could have made a good hiding place for strigoi, but its doorway was sealed with corrugated iron, and its ventilation holes had all been bricked up.
We walked through the shadow of some horse-chestnut trees until we reached an open space. The park was strangely deserted, even though it was such a hot day, in the middle of the summer vacation period. In those days, the British didn’t fly to Spain or France or Florida during the summer. They couldn’t afford to. They went to the seaside for a week, and then they spent the rest of the time at home, tending their gardens or building shelves.
The park was probably no more than three or four acres, surrounded by mature oaks and beech trees. Bullet loped across the bright green grass ahead of us. On the other side of the grass stood a large stained-oak summerhouse with a dark thatched roof, where an elderly woman sat, wearing a black dress and tiny green sunglasses. She was so white-faced that I could have believed she was dead.
“They would have been long gone by now, wouldn’t they?” panted Terence. Perspiration was trickling down the sides of his cheeks.
“Oh for sure. This will probably come to nothing. But if we can pick up more than one trail, we can begin to work out where they’re hiding themselves.”
“Triangulation,” said Jill. She must have been much fitter than Terence or me, because she wasn’t out of breath at all, and she looked as cool as a Pimm’s No. 1.
Bullet had passed the summerhouse, and now he was standing beside a wide flowerbed planted with dahlias. Along the back of the flowerbed ran a brick wall, over eighteen feet high, which looked as if it marked the park’s southern boundary. Bullet sniffed at the soil and barked three or four times.
“Go on, Bullet!” Jill told him. “Follow up, boy!”
Bullet crossed the flowerbed and went up to the wall. He turned around for the first time and looked at us in frustration.
“Clever,” I said. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they climbed the wall and ran along the top of it.”
“There’s a door farther along,” said Terence. “We could check the other side, couldn’t we?”
The door was half-open, and led through to an overgrown area of old glasshouses and abandoned wheelbarrows and compost heaps. Jill guided Bullet along the length of the wall, sniffing at it, but it seemed as if I was right, and the strigoi had made their way along the top of it. Even if we could have lifted him up there, there was no way that Bullet could have balanced along the coping to follow their scent. About three hundred yards away, the wall passed under the branches of several large oak trees, and it was my guess that the strigoi had used them to climb down from the wall and escape into the street nearby.
We spent a half-hour crisscrossing the street and the park’s pathways, but Bullet had lost the scent completely. Jill gave him a handful of black-and-red dog biscuits, patted him on
the head and said, “Well done, Bullet. Never mind.” Bullet ate his biscuits with a crackling sound like gunfire and I had never seen a dog look so furious. Jill said, “He’s very annoyed. He hardly ever loses a trail.”
“We’ll get them,” I told her. “Screechers have to come out and feed, and that’s their greatest weakness.” I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Jesus, it’s hot. Anybody feel like a drink?”
Terence looked at his watch. “It isn’t opening time for another two and a half hours. But there’s a sweetshop on the corner, down at the bottom of the road. I could get you a bottle of Tizer.”
I hadn’t realized that British pubs were closed all afternoon, until 6:00 PM. And so it was that I was driven back into central London, drinking this fizzy bright orange cordial out of a heavy glass bottle, feeling sweaty and tired and more than a little sick.
Death on a Double-Decker
I slept badly that night—as badly as I used to sleep during the war.
The Strand Palace had no air-conditioning and the endless knock-knock-knock of taxi and bus engines seemed to penetrate right through my pillows. I had a nightmare in which I couldn’t find my way out of Haling Grove Park and the old woman with the white face and the green sunglasses was sliding after me as if she were on wheels.
I took a tepid bath around 7:00 AM and then I went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ordered a “full English”—bacon, sausages, fried eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. Everything was cold and lying in congealed grease and I could only conclude that I must have been hungrier during the war, or younger and less discriminating. The coffee tasted like weak beef stock.
While I pushed my food around my plate, I read the Daily Express. Cairo radio had incited Arabs to rise up against the British and sabotage the RAF Venom jets at Sharja airfield, where they were being used against rebel forces in Muscat and Oman. Pan Am had announced that they were beginning trans-Polar flights to London from the West Coast, flying time about eighteen hours. A British doctor had been killed by the polio epidemic in the British Midlands because he had vaccinated all of his patients but hadn’t thought to vaccinate himself.
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