“Captain Falcon!” he barked, as we approached. “I was rather hoping that you and I wouldn’t be seeing each other again.” He was trying to be fierce but I could tell that he was badly upset. Anybody with any human feelings would have been distressed. The cricket pitch was strewn with nearly twenty bodies, all of them wearing white cricket flannels. Half of them were men in their twenties and thirties. The other half were boys of sixteen and seventeen.
Two bloodstained cricket bats lay on the grass, and the wickets were splayed at an angle, as if both players had been bowled out.
“God Almighty,” said Terence, and he actually took a staggering step backward, as if somebody had pushed him.
We slowly walked around the cricket pitch. All of the victims had been stabbed in the stomach, and their white shirts were crimson with blood. A few of them had their hearts bulging out of their chests, like gory fists. They looked so youthful and innocent, especially the schoolboys, and for the first time since World War Two I felt myself close to tears. Not only tears of pity, but tears of fury. I hated those goddamned Screechers. I hated their moral filthiness, and their cruelty. I knew that Terence was right, and that if I had attacked Duca at the Laurels without my Kit, it probably would have beheaded me on the spot. But right then, walking around the glistening bloodstained grass of that cricket pitch, between those bodies, I bitterly wished that I had tried.
“How could anybody do this?” said Terence, shaking his head. “I mean, honestly, how could they?”
As I looked at the bodies, though, something began to dawn on me. Even though all of the players had been killed, only a few of them looked as if their chest cavities had been opened up. To make absolutely sure, I walked around the cricket pitch a second time, and peered closely at every body. All twenty of them had been sliced open, yes, and some of them lay with their intestines coiled on the grass beside them. But only five of them had had their chests pulled wide open, and their hearts dragged out.
I turned round to say something to Terence, but Terence was standing a long way off, by one of the sight screens, smoking a cigarette. I can’t say that I blamed him.
I walked over to one of the forensic pathologists, a plain fortyish woman with very red lipstick. Her coppery hair was fastened in a tight French pleat, like the coil of an electric motor. She was standing beside one of the older victims, making notes on a clipboard.
I introduced myself, and held up my security pass, although she didn’t bother to look at it.
“This poor guy here, he had his aorta cut, right?”
“That’s right. He probably lost twenty-five percent of his blood.”
“That’s around two and a half pints, correct?”
She nodded, and carried on making notes.
“These others who had their hearts cut out . . . would you say that they lost roughly the same amount of blood?”
“I can’t make an accurate assessment until we get them back to the mortuary, but I would say so, yes—give or take a few pints.”
So only five victims had been drained of any blood, and only two to two and a half pints each. Simple math indicated that they had been attacked by no more than four or five Screechers—or even as few as three, if they were particularly thirsty. Terrifying as the Screecher infection still was, maybe I had been wildly overestimating how rapidly it was spreading.
But why had the Screechers felt it necessary to attack so many people? If there had been only three of them, and they had wanted no more than four pints each, they would have needed to kill only two people, not twenty.
Not only that, out of the five victims who had been drained of blood, four of them were Old Chalmerians. I would have thought that the Screechers would have had a taste for the youngest blood they could find, yet they had pulled out the heart of only one of the school’s First Eleven.
“Can I talk to you again later?” I asked the coppery-haired pathologist.
“Of course. Here’s my telephone number. You can always leave a message for me, and I’ll get back to you.”
She handed me a card with Rosemary Shulman, MD, FRCPath printed on it.
Inspector Ruddock came up to us, blowing his nose on a large white handkerchief. “Any ideas, then?”
“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But I’m beginning to think that only three Screechers did this. They usually go out in threes—two living Screechers and one dead one. The question is, why did they need to kill two entire cricket teams just for a few pints of blood?”
“Off their bloody rockers, if you ask me. Mental cases.”
“Screechers are lots of things, but they’re not mad. They killed all of these people for a reason.”
“They were witnesses, weren’t they?” said Inspector Ruddock, as if he were talking to a very slow child. “That’s why they killed all of those people on the 403. They were witnesses.”
“But why attack so many people when you don’t need their blood and so many of them are going to be able to identify you, unless you slaughter everybody in sight? It doesn’t make any sense. Why not attack a young couple walking home at night, or a couple of cyclists in a country lane? Nobody would see you do it, and so you wouldn’t need a wholesale massacre to cover it up.”
“I told you,” said Inspector Ruddock. “Mental cases. Lunatics. They do it for the thrill of it, that’s all.”
Black Trap
We spent the rest of the afternoon at Chalmer’s School. Charles Frith pulled some strings with Scotland Yard and at 3:30 PM a dog and a trainer arrived. The dog was a German shepherd called Skipper and his trainer was an ex-military policeman called Stanley Kellogg.
Skipper was far from being an ideal dog for Screecher-trailing. The scent of Screechers made his fur bristle and he was very reluctant to follow it, keening and barking and trotting around in circles. Sergeant Kellogg wasn’t much more help. He was boneheaded and pedantic and he repeatedly made it clear that he strongly objected to taking orders from an American attached to MI6.
“This isn’t an easy one for me, sir, as you can probably appreciate. I have been instructed to look for persons or objects about which I have been told absolutely nothing except that I am going to be told absolutely nothing.”
“This isn’t personal, Sergeant,” I said. “It’s just that we didn’t have time to get you the necessary security clearance. I’m sure that you and Skipper have all the necessary skills to do us proud.”
“With respect, sir, whatever persons or objects that Skipper is supposed to be trailing, the scent of them is causing him considerable apprehension, and since Skipper and me is so closely bonded, I would very much appreciate some idea of what they is or are.”
“Sergeant, what they are is irrelevant. All you need to know is that they have murdered twenty people on a cricket field and we have to track them down before they murder anybody else.”
The bodies had been removed now, but Skipper was quick to pick up the scent, as much as it unsettled him. Although it was only midafternoon, the sky was dark maroon, as if the clouds had been soaked in blood. I could see lightning over Croydon Aerodrome. We followed Skipper across the playing fields to the far side of Chalmer’s School, which bordered on to a suburban street. The Screechers had obviously entered the school from this direction, climbing over the green iron railings.
Skipper led us along the street to a quiet dead end street, or “cul-de-sac.” There, the trail ended. The Screechers must have arrived here by car—parked, and then walked to the school playing fields.
“Sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Kellogg, with undisguised smugness. “Think your persons or objects have been spirited away.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll call for you again if I need you.”
“Let’s hope not, sir.”
I raised an eyebrow, but he quickly added, “Wouldn’t want to see any more fatalities, sir, would we?”
I walked back to the school. I found Dr. Rosemary Shulman in the parking lot, beside a dark blue Home Office van, packin
g up her medical bag and her notes and taking off her lab coat.
“Who’s going to be carrying out the autopsies?” I asked her.
“Well, I am, in conjunction with the Croydon coroner.”
“Did you deal with any of the previous killings?”
“All except the first ones, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. I was on holiday then.”
“Have they all been the same—with only a small proportion of the victims with their hearts pulled out?”
“No, they haven’t, as a matter of fact. Each incident has been very different. In one case we had a family of five killed in a caravan in Warlingham, and four out of five of them were exsanguinated. But in another case, in Streatham, seven were killed at a Boy Scout get-together but only two were exsanguinated.”
“Those victims who weren’t exsanguinated,” I asked her. “Did they have anything in common? I was looking at the victims here, and it occurred to me that whoever did this, they mostly cut the hearts out of the older people.”
Dr. Shulman folded her lab coat neatly and tucked into the back of her van. “I can’t be sure without checking my records, but it’s worth looking into, isn’t it? The only victim in the caravan killing who wasn’t exsanguinated was a girl of eleven. Everybody else in the family was older—older brother, parents, uncle and aunt, cousin.”
“OK . . . that’s interesting. Can you go through the figures for me, with a particular focus on age? Also, can you look for any other distinctions between the victims who were drained of blood and the victims who weren’t. Such as—I don’t know—blood type, or medical history, or ethnic background?”
“Of course. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.”
“Even if you don’t find anything, can you still let me know?”
“Naturally,” said Dr. Shulman, and climbed into her van, and drove off.
It was past 6:00 PM by the time Terence and I had finished at Chalmer’s School, so we drove back to his mother’s house for supper. We sat at the kitchen table and she served us shepherd’s pie with carrots and cauliflower. I had never eaten shepherd’s pie before—ground lamb topped with mashed potato—but I was hungry and I think I enjoyed it. At least Mrs. Mitchell seasoned her meat with plenty of salt and pepper and Lea & Perrins sauce. Apart from Mya Foxley’s Burmese curry, most of the food that I had been served since I had arrived in England had been very inferior quality and almost tasteless. You wouldn’t have believed that the war had been over for twelve years.
While Terence went upstairs to visit the bathroom, I helped his mother by drying the plates.
“He’s a good boy, my Terence,” she said. “Very thoughtful. Always brings me a bunch of flowers on pay day.”
“I’m glad to hear it. A young man should always respect his mother.”
“How about your mother, Jim? Do you get to see much of her?”
“My mother passed away before the end of the war.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. She must have been quite young.”
“Forty-eight, but she didn’t look it. She was Romanian. Dark-haired, very beautiful. I can still remember the songs she used to sing me. In Romania they call them doina. They have sad doina and happy doina and love doina and doina for singing your kids to sleep.”
“You miss her,” said Terence’s mother.
“Yes. I never had the chance to say good-bye to her. Not the way I wanted to.”
I thought of my father and I standing on the dock at Bodega Bay, letting those light gray ashes run between our fingers into the sea, and they weren’t even hers. For all I know, my father had dug them out of the living room hearth, and they were nobody’s.
Terence and I drove back to the South Croydon Observer building. We unlocked the front doors and let ourselves in. We had checked every single office before we left it, making sure that the doors and windows were all closed tight. I hadn’t wanted to come back here to find that Duca had slid in through some inch-wide aperture, and was waiting for us.
Our footsteps echoed along the corridor as we made our way to the darkroom. I was carrying a flashlight but I didn’t switch it on. There was a faint orange glow from the main road outside and that was enough for us to find our way upstairs. The darker the building was, the more difficult it was going to be for Duca to be able to see where we were.
There was a loud bang. Terence had collided with a metal filing cabinet that had been left abandoned in the corridor. “Are you OK?” I asked him.
“Fine. Stubbed my toe, that’s all.”
“You’re sure you’re up to this?”
“Bit apprehensive, if you must know.” He paused, and then he said, “I was in the Eve Club last year, in Mayfair. A lot of security people go there—MI5, MI6, Soviet agents, all sorts. I was spotted by this East German agent and I had to hide in the ladies’ for two hours. He would have shot me, no questions asked, if he could have found me.”
He gave a self-deprecating snort. “I thought I was scared then.”
I opened the darkroom door, and switched on my flashlight. “Try to keep your nerve, Terence, OK? When you’re dealing with Screechers, the last thing you need to do is to show them that you’re frightened. They latch on to fear, the same way a shark will go after your leg if you’re bleeding.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
We entered the darkroom and took a quick look around. It still smelled faintly of photographic developer.
“So what exactly are we going to do when Duca gets here?” Terence asked me. “If Duca gets here.”
“Oh—it’ll get here, don’t you worry about that.” I hunkered down and opened up my Kit. “When it does, I want you to open up the Bible, just like you did before, but I want you to do something else, too. I want you to hold up this silver mirror, right in front of Duca’s face, so that it has no choice but to look at it.”
“All right, then. What will that do?”
“It will show Duca what it really looks like. It’s pure silver and it was blessed by Pope Urban VIII, so it can only reflect purity and truth. Did you ever read The Picture of Dorian Gray?”
“No . . . but I saw the film. George Sanders, wasn’t it?”
“Oscar Wilde based that novel on stories that he was told about the strigoi. Dorian Gray’s portrait grew older while Dorian Gray himself stayed young and handsome, just like a strigoi mort. You wait until Duca sees its true face in the mirror. I promise you, its own image will stop it dead in its tracks. Or undead in its tracks.”
I took out my whip, my hammer and my nails, and my surgical saw, and I laid them out on the darkroom drain-board. “That’s when we slam the door shut and do the rest of the business.”
“But it’ll be totally dark, won’t it?”
“Not entirely.” To give Terence a demonstration, I took out the screwtop lid from a pickle jar. I had cut a thin three-inch slit in the center of it and then painted it matt black. It screwed tight over the top of my flashlight, so that only a faint glimmer managed to escape. Terence and I could only just make out each other’s outlines, and the dark glitter of each other’s eyes. Duca didn’t have its Screecher wheel so it was going to be 99.9 percent blind.
“So . . . how long do you think we’ll have to wait?” asked Terence, checking his watch.
“Who knows? But I don’t think it’s going to be very long. From my experience, Screechers have better noses than bloodhounds. They can smell what you had for yesterday’s breakfast. In Holland, I’ve known them go through hospitals, drinking the blood of everybody in sight, except for the patients on morphine, because morphine affects their sense of balance.”
Terence said, “How do you do this? This Screecher-hunting. Bloody hell, I couldn’t do it.”
I shrugged. It was too complicated to explain.
We waited for over an hour. Terence took out his cigarettes but I shook my head. “Let’s keep the air clear, shall we?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m trying to give them up, anyway. Too expensive. Two and fourpenc
e for twenty, these days.”
“Maybe you should try gum,” I suggested.
“Does that really work? But you’ll never guess what I saw the other day. A chewing-gum machine. You put in a penny and turn the handle and you get a packet of Beech-Nut chewing gum.”
“Miraculous.”
Terence glanced at me. “You’re twitting me, aren’t you? You’ve got all those automats in America.”
Right then, we heard a door banging, somewhere downstairs. Then a metallic squeak, and another bang. I lifted out my gun and cocked it.
Terence said, “Do you think that’s Duca?”
“I don’t know. It could be. Ssh.”
We strained our ears, but all we could hear for the next few minutes was the swooshing noise of traffic from the main road. Then I thought I heard a faint scrabbling noise, like a caged animal scratching at chicken wire.
“Want me to take a look?” asked Terence.
I heard the noise again. It certainly wasn’t footsteps. Terence eased open the darkroom door and peered out into the corridor—right, and then left.
“I can’t see anybody. Perhaps it was squirrels, or rats.”
Outside, a police car sped past, with its bell urgently ringing. Then silence again.
“No, nobody there,” said Terence.
He was just about to close the door when there was a sharp pattering sound, quite loud, and approaching us very quickly. I looked out into the corridor and for a split second I still couldn’t see anybody there. But then I looked up and saw that Duca was hurrying rapidly toward us on its hands and knees. It was crawling along the ceiling, upside down, so that each of the conical glass lampshades started to sway as it came rushing past them.
I stepped back into the darkroom and pulled Terence after me, by his shoulder.
“It’s on the ceiling!” said Terence.
“Hold up the mirror!” I told him. “As soon as it comes through the door!”
At the same time I holstered my gun and picked up my silver bullwhip. I gripped the handle in my right hand and the clawlike tip in my left.
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