Descendant (21 page)

“No, detective. It never happened.”

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.

“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.”

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.