I suddenly felt very tired and very alone. I had tried to book a telephone call to Louise after dinner, but after forty-five minutes the international operator had come back to say that there was no chance of my being able to talk to the United States until the early hours of the morning. I had thought about trying to call my father, too. It was his sixty-first birthday in a week’s time. But I wasn’t sure how I was going to talk to him, now that I knew that he hadn’t told me the truth about my mother’s death. I very much doubted that the counterintelligence people in Washington had given him the full details of how she had died, but he must have known that she was on some kind of secret mission.
My eyes started to close. When I opened them again, my watch said ten after midnight and I was still lying on the bed with the bedside light on, with the book open in front of me. I rolled over and put the book aside, and I was just about to turn off the light when I heard floorboards creaking outside my door. Immediately, I pulled my gun out from under my pillow, pointed it directly at the center of the door and cocked it.
Screechers aren’t easily deceived, especially the dead ones, some of whom are twenty or even thirty generations old. If Duca had managed to remember who I looked like, then the chances were that it had worked out why I was here, and why I had paid it a visit.
There was a cautious knock. “Jim? It’s Jill. Are you still awake?”
I swung myself off the bed, went to the door and opened it. Jill was standing out in the corridor wearing a short white baby-doll nightdress.
“Are you OK?” I asked her.
“Not really. I was wondering if we could talk for a bit.”
I peered out on to the landing. “What about your parents? I don’t want to ruffle any feathers here.”
“Oh, they’re dead to the world. They always go to bed early, and you saw how much whiskey Daddy puts away.”
“Maybe it could wait till the morning?”
“I won’t be able to sleep.”
“OK, then.” I opened the door wider and it was then that she saw my gun.
Her eyes widened. “What’s that for? You don’t think that Duca might follow us?”
“Never underestimate a Screecher, sweetheart.”
She came into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I suppose you think I’m being hysterical.”
“Why should I think that?”
“They gave me this assignment because I had so much experience with murders, and I accepted it because I thought I was pretty hard-boiled. But hunting these Screechers—I didn’t expect anything like this. Not only do we see them murdering people, right in front of our eyes. We have to murder them.”
“That’s right,” I said, sitting down close to her. “That just about sums up the noble sport of Screecher-hunting. Are you trying to tell me that you want out?”
“No. No. I don’t know. It’s partly you that’s making me feel so confused. I find it so hard to reconcile who you are with what you’re capable of doing. I don’t understand you at all.”
“Do you think that’s necessary? To understand me, I mean? So long as you know that I’m on your side. So long as you’re confident that I’m never going to let you down.”
She looked directly into my eyes. She was incredibly beautiful, even down to the small pattern of moles on her left cheek. She smelled so good, too, fragrant and soapy like Cusson’s Imperial Leather. The bedside light shone through the layers of nylon net that made up her nightdress, and I could just make out the darker tinge of her nipples.
“I’ve never felt like this before,” she said. “Not about anyone.”
“I’m just a garden-variety academic, Jill. There’s nothing special about me. I got involved in Screecher-hunting by accident, more than design. You know that.”
“Yes, but you couldn’t do it, could you, if you didn’t have that special quality in you?”
“What special quality? Stupidity?”
“No,” she said. “Cruelty.”
She reached up her hand and touched my face. I thought about Louise but this was something very different. This was something dreamlike, something that was taking place on the other side of the mirror. Jill opened her lips and kissed me, and I kissed her back, our tongues touching and licking each other as if we were trying to discover what kind of people we were through our sense of taste, the way that Bullet did.
She loosened the tie of my bathrobe, and reached inside, running her fingers down my sides, so that I shivered. Her fingernails were very long, and when she ran them down my back the soft scratching was incredibly arousing. I could feel myself rising, and then there was no turning back.
Jill raised both of her arms like a ballerina and I drew the baby-doll nightdress up over her head. Her breasts were rounded and heavy, and they performed a complicated double-bounce when her nightdress came off. Her nipples were dark crimson, with very wide areolas, and as I rolled them between my fingers they knurled and crinkled and stood up erect.
“I don’t have any rubbers,” I told her.
“What?”
“I don’t have any protection.”
She pressed her forehead against mine and laughed. “ ‘Rubbers’ are Wellington boots. Well, they are in England.”
“That doesn’t help. I don’t have any Wellington boots, either.”
She kissed me and kissed me and kissed me again. Then she opened up my bathrobe and took hold of me and squeezed me hard, digging her nails into me as if she wanted to prove that she could be cruel, too.
She lay back on the bed. The hair between her legs was fine and dark, like Burmese silk. I climbed on top of her and all the time she kept her eyes open, staring up at me, trying to read the expressions on my face. I made love to her very slowly, because I had the feeling that this would be the first and only time, and I wanted it to last as long as possible.
As I rose up and down, she drew her fingernails across my shoulders. “You’re so lean,” she said. “All muscle and bone and sinew. Like a greyhound.”
She smiled all the time we were making love, as if she were harboring some secret. Her breasts swayed in a gentle, undulating rhythm, and her hips rose to meet me with every thrust so that I penetrated deeper and deeper. At last I began to feel that tightening sensation between my thighs and I knew that I couldn’t hold off much longer. “I’m afraid it’s going to have to be coitus interruptus,” I told her.
“Oh, no! Dr. Duca doesn’t approve of it! He says it’s messy.”
“It’ll be a darn sight messier if I knock you up.”
I took myself out of her and climaxed. The warm drops fell in a pattern across her stomach. Outside, rain began to patter on the roof.
She said, “Do you think, when this is all over, and you’ve gone back to America, that you’ll remember me?”
“Are you kidding me? I’ll remember you for the rest of my life.”
She sat up and kissed me. “I know you will. Because I’m never going to let you forget me. Ever.”
Wheel of Ill Fortune
Terence came to pick me up at 9:30 the next morning. He smelled of cigarettes and fried bacon.
“Any movement from Duca?” I asked him as I climbed into the passenger seat.
“Not a dicky bird. If he did leave the house, he didn’t use his car.”
“Have you found us someplace we can use to trap it?”
“I believe so. It’s in an old newspaper office in South Croydon. The paper closed down about a year ago, and the building’s been empty ever since then. But there’s one room they used to use as a darkroom. No windows, double-sealed doors, and we can easily cover up the ventilator.”
“That sounds ideal. Did you find me a bed-and-breakfast?”
“Better than that, old man. You can come and stay with me. I live in Thornton Heath, and that’s only ten minutes away from here. It was my mother’s idea. She said you must be feeling homesick.”
“Well, that’s very thoughtful of your mother, but—”
“
Excellent, that’s settled, then! One of the chaps will bring your cases down, and you can borrow a clean shirt from me, until they arrive.”
Terence and his mother lived in a semidetached Victorian house in a long street of semidetached Victorian houses. Inside it was gloomy and narrow with very high ceilings. The furniture was reproduction rustic with tapestry upholstery, and there was a gilt-framed reproduction on the wall of The Haywain by John Constable, as well as decorative dinner plates and a selection of Spanish fans with sequins on them.
Terence’s mother was a small, flustered woman with very red cheeks and wild gray hair. She wore a cotton print frock with huge yellow flowers on it. “As soon as Terence told me you were looking for a B-and-B, I thought, the poor fellow can’t stay in a place like that. What he needs is his home comforts.”
“That’s very generous of you, Mrs. Mitchell.”
“Oh, please. Call me Dotty. I hope you like shepherd’s pie.”
Terence showed me up to my room. “It used to be my sister’s, before she moved out.” There was a dressing table with a pink frilly valance around it, and a dark mahogany closet, and a poster of Pat Boone on the wall, stuck with Scotch tape.
“Tell me when you want a bath, won’t you,” said Terence, “and I’ll put the immersion heater on. It only takes about an hour to heat up.”
I changed into a clean blue shirt and then Terence drove me to South Croydon, to the abandoned offices of the South Croydon Observer—a squarish three-story building of brown brick, right on the noisy main road. The same blue Austin van was parked outside, and when Terence parked behind it, the whippet-thin driver and his shaven-headed friend climbed out, and came toward us.
“Everything OK?” asked Terence.
“Yes, Mr. Mitchell. Want to come and have a look?”
The driver unlocked the double doors that led into the reception area. The parquet flooring was gritty with dust, and there were yellowing bundles of old newspapers stacked up against the walls. He led the way up the staircase to the second floor, and then along a corridor. The darkroom was right at the very end.
“What do you think?” Terence asked me, ushering me inside. The darkroom measured about ten feet by twelve. The walls and ceiling were painted entirely matt black, and not a chink of light showed anywhere. There was a ventilator grille over the sink, but the driver and his friend had screwed a rectangle of plywood over it.
I tugged the cord which turned the light on and off. “Looks ideal,” I nodded.
“It won’t be too small, will it? If Duca puts up a fight, there isn’t going to be very much elbow-room.”
“No, this is fine. The less space you give a Screecher to maneuver, the better.”
Terence chafed his hands together, nervously. “I can’t wait to get this over with, to tell you the truth.”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right. Once you get in close, you won’t have time to be frightened, I promise you.”
We collected Jill and Bullet from Purley and drove up to Pampisford Road. Jill was unusually subdued. When I turned around in my seat to smile at her, she smiled back briefly but then she looked away. I wondered if she regretted what had happened between us last night. It was so hot that Bullet kept panting and licking his lips so that his warm slobber flew all around the inside of the car.
When we arrived, we parked close behind a gray Hillman saloon. Two plainclothes detectives were sitting in it, smoking and reading the Daily Mirror. One of them was fat and sweaty and the other was thin and drew in his cheeks when he smoked as if he were sucking on a lemon.
“All quiet on the Western Front,” said the fat one. “Some woman arrived about fifteen minutes ago, answering the description of the suspect’s receptionist, but so far that’s all.”
“You haven’t seen Duca at all?” I asked him.
“Not a sausage, sir.”
“OK, Terence,” I said. “Now it’s your turn to play patient.”
“Supposing Duca rumbles me?” asked Terence.
“It won’t. It’s so preoccupied with pretending to be a doctor that it won’t think that you’re pretending to be a patient.”
“All right, then. But if things start going pear-shaped—”
“I’ll be right behind you, Terence, I swear to God.”
Terence walked across the shingle driveway and went in through the front door. We could see him talking to the receptionist, and nodding. Then he sidled up to the waiting-room window so that we could see him, and tapped his wristwatch, to indicate that Duca was making him wait. We saw him pick up a copy of Picture Post and sit down.
A pigeon started up a monotonous mating call from the chimney tops. “Are you OK?” I asked Jill. “You’ve been acting kind of pensive this morning, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I didn’t sleep much,” she said. “Oh—nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with us. I kept having horrible dreams, that’s all.”
“Goes with the job, I’m sorry to say. I used to have a nightmare almost every single night, during the war.”
“I dreamed about this man who was walking around with no head. I was sitting in the living room, at home, and he tapped on the windows, as if he wanted me to let him in. I was so frightened I thought my heart was going to stop. I woke up, but every time I went back to sleep I had the same dream.”
The thin detective said, “There you are, sir. He’s going in.”
Terence was standing up. The receptionist showed him out of the room and then she came back in again, alone.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s see how long Terence can keep Duca talking about his imaginary hay fever.”
I entered the front garden with Jill following close behind me. We ducked our heads low, so that we were out of the receptionist’s line of sight. Skirting around the laurel bushes, we went up to the front door and I gently pushed it open. Inside, I could hear the receptionist typing, but she was interrupted by the telephone ringing.
“Dr. Watkins’s surgery!” she shrilled, at the top of her voice. “No, madam, Dr. Watkins is on his holidays at the moment! No, I don’t know how long for, I’m only temporary! But if you need to see a doctor right away, Dr. Duca is standing in for him! Duca, that’s correct!”
While she was screaming into the receiver, Jill and I crept into the hall. “Let’s start by making a search upstairs,” I whispered. “Let’s hope that Duca leaves the wheel in its bedroom during the day.”
“If your foot’s really painful, you should come in!” said the receptionist. “The doctor is only here until half-past twelve, but I could fit you in at a quarter to!”
Luckily for us, the door to the waiting room was open only three or four inches, and while the receptionist was talking on the phone her back was half-turned, so we were able to make our way along the hall without her seeing us. As we reached the bottom of the stairs she banged down the receiver and started typing again.
“I’ll take the bedrooms on the right,” I told Jill. “You take the bedrooms on the left. If the wheel isn’t in plain sight, go through every single drawer, but make sure you close them afterward. Ideally, I don’t want Duca to find out that we’ve taken it until it starts to get dark.”
I was just about to climb the stairs when the door to Duca’s surgery suddenly opened, and Duca came out. He looked at us in surprise, and then smiled.
“Well, well! So you two lovebirds have decided!”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “We talked it over, and—ah—decided.”
Duca laid its hand on Jill’s shoulder. “In my opinion, my beautiful young lady, I think you have made the most sensible choice. I have always believed that a woman should be in charge of her own destiny, at least as far as her womb is concerned.”
Terence came out of the surgery, too. He gave me an apologetic grimace. Duca turned to him and said, “Your allergy doesn’t seem to me to be so bad, Mr. Mitchell. The prescription I have given you for antihistamine tablets should alleviate your symptoms. They wi
ll make you a little drowsy, so if you are thinking of driving a steam-roller, I suggest that you don’t.” It gave a sharp, humorless laugh.
“All right, Doctor,” said Terence. “Thanks very much.”
Duca turned back to Jill. “Now let me see what I can do to give your desirable young bride the protection she requires.”
This was a seriously horrible moment. It had been one thing to pretend that we were engaged, and listen to Duca’s lip-licking descriptions of various methods of contraception. But to allow it to give Jill an intimate examination, when both of us were fully aware that it wasn’t even human, was enough to bring me to the edge of panic.
“On second thought—maybe we’re being too hasty,” I suggested. “Maybe we should leave it for today and come back tomorrow.”
“I have no surgery tomorrow, I regret,” said Duca. “Tomorrow I have . . . other obligations.”
“In that case, maybe we should leave it till after we’re married.”
“Is something wrong, my dear sir?” asked Duca, and there was something very knowing in his tone of voice, something very arch. I wondered if he might have remembered who I looked like, and guessed why I was here.
“Wrong? No, of course there’s nothing wrong. It’s just that this is a very important decision and I don’t want us to rush into doing something that we both regret.”
“I don’t see why you are so concerned. If you find that you dislike this particular method of birth control, all you have to do is to stop using it. But look at you. You seem very agitated. You are perspiring. Perhaps something else is worrying you.”
“Of course not. It’s a very warm day, that’s all.”
But it was then that Jill said, “It’s all right. Why doesn’t Dr. Duca examine me, and you can wait outside?” At the same time, she lifted her eyes toward the upstairs landing, and I realized what she was trying to tell me. While Duca is busy measuring my cervix, you can go looking for the wheel.
Descendant Page 15