I didn’t know what to say. I felt that I had lost control of the situation, and to my own surprise I also felt both protective and jealous. Jill was trying to prove herself to me, trying to show me that she was brave enough to be a Screecher-hunter. But the proof that she was offering me was the same proof that she had offered me last night, as proof that she was attracted to me.
Duca laid his arm around her shoulders. His finger-nails were very long, and pale, and immaculately manicured. Jill said, “Don’t worry, darling, honestly. I’ll be quite all right.” The way she called me “darling” made me feel even worse.
“You’re absolutely sure about this?” I asked her.
She nodded. What could I say, without arousing Duca’s suspicions? “All right,” I said. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”
Duca ushered her into its surgery and closed the door. I said to Terence, “Go get my Kit. Stay right outside. If I shout out, come on in as fast as you can.”
“God,” said Terence, “you’re not going to let it—?”
“I don’t have any choice. Hurry!”
Terence went out of the front door, and I ran up the stairs as quietly and as quickly as I could. If the worn-out stair carpet and the dusty window ledges were anything to go by, Dr. Watkins lived alone. No woman would have kept a vase of dried honesty on the landing, so old that the leaves had turned skeletal.
First of all I opened the bedroom door on the left. A guest bedroom, quite small and smelling of damp. Next to it was a bathroom, with a large pale green bath that was streaked with rust. I went to the bedrooms on the right. A medium-sized room, which must have been a schoolboy’s room once upon a time, with athletics trophies on the windowsill and a single model Spitfire still hanging from the ceiling, thick with woolly dust.
In the master bedroom stood a large mahogany bed with a pink satin quilt. The quilt and the pillows had been so fastidiously arranged that I knew that Duca must be sleeping here. Or resting, anyhow. Screechers don’t sleep in the same way that humans do, and so of course they never dream. The nearest they ever get to dreaming is a reverie about their lost humanity, and the people who used to love them.
I found Duca’s wheel at once. It was hanging on a fine gold chain from the side of the mirror on the dressing table. On top of the dressing table stood several bottles of hair lotion and cologne, as well as a miniature portrait of a young woman in an oval frame. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. I could see why Duca was so attracted to Jill. This young woman looked more Slavic than Jill, but she had similar features, with high cheekbones and feline eyes. The name Anca was written on the bottom of the portrait, in faded mauve ink.
I lifted the wheel off the mirror and dropped it into my coat pocket. Then I left the master bedroom on tiptoes and started to make my way downstairs. The door to the surgery was still closed and the receptionist was still pecking away at her typewriter.
I was only a little more than halfway down, however, when the surgery door opened and Duca appeared, sleeking back its hair with both hands. It looked up and saw me and said, “Aha!” It didn’t look angry, or outraged. Instead, it looked triumphant, as if it had known all along what Jill and I were doing here.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was looking for the bathroom.”
Duca pointed to a door right behind me. It had a hand-lettered card pinned to it: Patients’ Toilet.
“Oh, sorry! I didn’t see that! I must think about getting myself some eyeglasses.”
Duca glanced upstairs and then it looked back at me. “I think perhaps you were looking for something else, not a bathroom.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
It held out its hand. “I think perhaps you have taken something that does not belong to you.”
“Still don’t know what you mean.”
“I am not a fool, Mr. Billings, or whatever your real name is. I recognized your Romanian ancestry the moment you walked into my surgery. You think that I cannot smell where you come from, by your blood?
It took a step toward me, still holding out its hand. “I can also sense what you have stolen from me, Mr. Billings. I think it would be wise of you to return it to me, now.”
“Terence!” I shouted. “Terence!”
The front door was flung wide and Terence appeared, carrying my Kit. Duca swung around and spat, “You too? You with your ridiculous allergy to timothy grass? I should have guessed!”
“Oh, bugger,” said Terence.
“Jill!” I called her. “Jill—are you OK?”
Duca turned around again and faced me. I could see how furious it was, by the way it kept wincing, but its voice was cold and utterly controlled. “So it was you, then, who caught my two protégés? I am going to kill you for that, my friend. I am going to kill both of you, with much pain.”
“Jill!” I yelled. I was getting worried about her now. “Terence—bring me the Kit!”
Terence came toward us, holding up the Kit in both hands as if he were quite prepared to smash Duca on the head with it. I hoped that he didn’t, because I didn’t want anything broken.
I reached behind me and tugged my gun out of my belt. I pointed it directly at Duca’s chest and said, “I’ve had to wait a long time for this, Duca.”
“You know me? You know who I am?”
“Oh, yes. I know who you are. I also know what you are.”
“That is very flattering. But if you know me so well, you will know that you have absolutely no chance of catching me.”
“Terence,” I said, “do you want to open the Kit for me?”
“What?” said Duca. “You really believe that I am going to stand here and allow you to work your ridiculous hocus-pocus on me?”
“Terence, open the Kit and take out the Bible. Open it up where the ribbon is.”
Terence flicked open the catches, but before he could lift out the Bible, Duca lunged at me, and snatched my wrist. I fired at point-blank range, right through his perfectly tailored vest and into his lungs. The bang was so loud that the receptionist shrieked and dropped her telephone.
Duca stared at me, still holding my wrist. The expression on its face was unreadable. That’s one of the things about Screechers: they’ve lived so long and they’ve seen so much that you can never really understand what they’re thinking.
There was a three-second pause, and then Duca coughed, so that blood sprayed out from between its lips, all over my right cheek and all over the front of my coat. Then it smiled and said, “I want you to give me back my wheel, Mr. Billings.”
I tried to raise my gun so that I could give it a head shot, but it was far too strong for me. I strained and strained, with my teeth gritted and my elbow juddering, but I couldn’t manage to lift my arm more than a couple of inches. Duca had almost managed to pry the gun out of my hand when Jill appeared in the surgery doorway, unbalanced and bewildered. “What’s happening?” she said. She looked as if she was walking away from a car accident. “What’s happened to me?”
Duca turned, and as it turned, Terence held up the Bible—open, like before, at Apocalipsa, the Book of Revelation.
“Dah!” Duca protested, raising its hand to shield its face. It wasn’t totally blinded by the scripture, the way that Micky and Beryl had been, but all the same it twisted its head from side to side to keep the dazzle out of its eyes, and it had to let go of my wrist.
“Jim!” said Jill, reaching out for me.
Duca made a grab for her arm, presumably to use her as a human shield, but I fired at it again. I missed it, and blew a large chunk of plaster out of the wall, but Duca must have decided that it had had enough. It disappeared out of the front door, so fast that it was nothing but a gray flicker, like a moth’s wings.
“Terence!” I shouted. “Don’t let it get away!”
We hurried out of the house. We looked left and right, and at first we couldn’t see Duca anywhere. But the thin detective pointed upward and called out, “There, sir! Right behind you! Gone up the wall l
ike a bleeding ferret!”
Terence and I turned around. Duca was climbing the ivy-covered wall, so fast that it had already reached the bedroom windows. The ivy rustled and tore as it surged its way upward, and it looked as if it were swimming through it, like a man swimming up a waterfall, rather than climbing. I raised my gun to take a shot at it, but by the time I had steadied my hand it had already reached the guttering and disappeared over the roof.
I ran around to the side of the house, just in time to see Duca leaping on top of the garage, and then to the roof of the garage next door, and then it was gone. There was no point in going after it now.
“That was bloody rotten luck,” said Terence, as I came back round to the front of the house.
I reached into my pocket and took out the wheel. “Not entirely,” I said, swinging it from side to side. “Duca’s still going to come looking for this.”
“You found it? That’s terrific. But now Duca knows who we are, doesn’t it, and what sort of a game we’re playing? You don’t think it’s just going to walk into a trap?”
“Of course not. We’ll have to be a little more ingenious, that’s all.”
The thin detective came up to me, shaking his head. “Never seen anything like that, sir. Never.”
“Never seen anything like what, detective?”
“Oh. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Take your point. Never happened, sir, did it?”
“No, detective. It never happened.”
Field of Blood
I went back into the house to look for Jill. I found her sitting in the waiting room, with the receptionist leaning over her, offering her a glass of water.
“Your poor fiancée’s had a very nasty turn,” said the receptionist. “Mind you, I’m all in a tither myself.”
Jill was pale and trembling and there was perspiration on her upper lip, as if she were running a temperature. Her pupils were dilated, too, and she didn’t seem to be able to focus properly.
“Jill? Are you OK?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know what happened to me. Duca told me to lie on the couch. He said, ‘Lie on the couch, my dear,’ and that’s all I can remember.”
“It didn’t inject you with anything, did it?”
She frowned down at her arms. “I don’t think so. I can’t feel anything. I just feel so strange, as if I’ve been asleep.”
Terence came in. “I think we’d better get Jill home,” I said. “I don’t know what Duca did to her, but she’s not feeling too good.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” said the receptionist. “Why were you shooting at Dr. Duca? What am I supposed to do now?”
“I guess you’ll have to start looking for another job.”
We drove Jill back to her parents’ house in Purley and helped her out of the car.
“Jill! What’s happened to her? What’s wrong?” demanded her mother, as we brought her in through the front door.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Foxley, we simply don’t know. It could be delayed shock from yesterday. It could be the heat.”
“I should call the doctor.”
“Not just yet, if you don’t mind. Give her some time to rest first.”
Bullet clearly sensed that something was different about Jill because he stayed very close, nuzzling at her and whining in the back of his throat. Jill lay on the couch in the living room and covered her eyes with her hand.
“Do you have a headache?” I asked her.
“No, not really. I feel feverish, that’s all. Hot and cold, like when you have flu.”
“Maybe it is flu,” said Terence. “There’s a lot of it going about. I mean, that’s why we—” He remembered at the last moment that Mrs. Foxley knew nothing about Operation Korean Flu, and finished his sentence with a meaningless flap of his hand.
Mrs. Foxley said, “I’ll bring you some Aspro, Jill. Would you like a cold drink?”
I used Mrs. Foxley’s phone to call Charles Frith at MI6. I explained that Duca had found out who we were, but we had taken its wheel and it was sure to come looking for it. I also asked that he send a forensic team down to search the Laurels from attic to basement, and the garden, too.
Charles Frith said, “Very well. But we really need to wrap this business up, old man, and as soon as possible. The press have been chasing the minister all day, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to keep it under wraps for very much longer.”
“I can’t make any promises, sir, but Duca’s going to want its wheel back, and if I know anything about Screechers, it’s going to be looking for revenge.”
I didn’t tell him about Jill, because I wanted to see how quickly she would recover, but I was seriously beginning to think that I would have to ask him for a substitute dog handler.
Ten minutes later, when I returned to the living room, Jill was asleep, with her mother sitting close beside her. I leaned over to make sure that she was still breathing, and then I lifted her eyelid with my thumb. She was staring at nothing at all, and her pupil was fixed, which told me that she wasn’t dreaming.
“Is she going to be all right?” asked her mother.
“I’m pretty sure of it. But call me if you notice any change in her condition.”
Terence and I drove back to the South Croydon Observer building. The morning had started sunny but a heavy bank of bronze-colored clouds had slowly rolled over from the southwest, and now it was gloomy and humid. I felt that I could hardly breathe.
“Any ideas what Duca might have done to her?” asked Terence.
“I’m not sure. Dead Screechers have a way of draining their victims’ resistance, so that they don’t struggle, even when the Screecher is actually cutting them open. Their victims know that they’re being killed, but they feel so lethargic that they can’t do anything to stop it. In Romania they call it the Weakness.”
“It doesn’t look as if Duca’s hurt her, though, does it?”
“I hope not. I think Duca sensed that I was upstairs, and that interrupted it. God, I blame myself. I should never have let her go in there.”
“What else could you do?”
“I could have gone straight in there and cut its god-damned head off.”
“Without your Kit? It would have cut yours off, first.”
Terence was parking outside the former newspaper office when his radio-telephone crackled, and a brusque woman’s voice said, “Control to Three-Four-Zero. Control to Three-Four-Zero. Position, please, Three-Four-Zero.”
“Three-Four-Zero,” said Terence. “South Croydon Observer. We’ll be here for the rest of the day.”
“Can you go immediately to Chalmer’s Boys’ School in Haling Park? Three-Three-Nine will meet you there. There’s been another incident.”
“What kind of an incident?”
“Operation Korean Flu.”
“Ask her when it happened,” I told him.
“Control? Do we know when this incident occurred?”
There was a lengthy pause, and then the woman’s voice said, “It was logged about two hours ago, apparently. A few minutes past eleven.”
“Thank you, Control,” said Terence. “Roger and out.” Then he looked at me and said, “Bloody hell. It’s happened again.”
“You know what this means, don’t you? Duca couldn’t have done this. Two hours ago Duca was still at the Laurels.”
“You mean we’ve got ourselves another dead Screecher, apart from Duca?”
“There has to be. One of the live Screechers must have transformed already. If they’re transforming as quickly as this, there could be dozens of them by now. Damn it, we really need a dog right now.”
“I’ll get on to Control, see if they can fix us up with one.”
“OK . . . but don’t tell them what’s happened to Jill yet. Tell them—tell them that Bullet’s eaten something that’s upset his stomach.”
Terence raised an eyebrow, but didn’t make any comment. He may have appeared to be puppyish, with all his talk of cricket and Nevile
Shute stories and collecting cigarette cards, but he was perceptive and very discreet. Whatever a chap did, a chap’s own business was a chap’s own business, especially when it came to women.
We turned into Haling Park Road and drove up a steep curving hill toward the entrance of Chalmer’s Boys’ School. Chalmer’s looked more like a cathedral than a school, a large redbrick building built in 1930s Gothic, complete with stained-glass windows and flying buttresses. A green copper weathervane surmounted the roof, in the shape of Time, carrying his scythe over his shoulder.
The courtyard in front of the school was crowded with shiny black Wolseley police cars and ambulances. I could see some reporters and photographers, too, but they were being kept well back by police officers.
As we parked, one of the young MI6 agents who had met us outside the birthday-party massacre came hurrying over to meet us. His linen sport coat was crumpled and his red necktie was askew.
“I don’t know how the hell we’re going to keep the lid on this one,” he said.
We climbed out of the car. “What’s happened?”
“Follow me.” He led us between the ambulances and around the side of the school. “The school is closed for the holidays at the moment, but they were holding a friendly seven-a-side cricket practice . . . First Eleven versus Old Chalmerians.”
At the rear of the school buildings there was at least an acre of wooded copse, with beech trees and oak trees and horse chestnuts. The young agent took us through the shadows and the bracken to the other side, where there were five bright green sports fields. On three of the fields, red-and-white-painted rugby posts had already been erected in preparation for the fall term, but the farthest field was still being used as a cricket pitch.
Three ambulances were parked on the grass, and two more police cars, and there were police photographers taking pictures, and forensic scientists in brown lab coats, and coroner’s assistants, and over a dozen police officers. Even from a quarter-mile away, I could see bodies lying on the grass. The bodies were red and white, too.
We crossed the fields. My old friend Inspector Ruddock was there, pacing backward and forward and bristling his mustache.
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