Descendant

London, 1957

They had reserved me a sleeping berth on the TWA flight to London so that I would be rested and ready to start work as soon as I arrived, but shortly after I dozed off I started having terrifying nightmares. The droning of the airliner’s turboprop engines gradually turned into the noise of a huge, dark factory crammed with strange machines for crushing people’s bones, and I found myself running past dripping pipes and greasy electric cables, with a dark figure running just ahead of me. I knew that I was supposed to catch up with this figure, but I was frightened to run too fast, in case I did.

After less than four hours, however, it began to grow light, and the flight attendant brought me a cup of coffee. “Are you all right, sir?” she smiled. “You were shouting in your sleep.” She had very blue eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“Oh, yes? What was I shouting?”

“I don’t know. Something about teachers, I think. You were telling them to get off you.”

“Teachers? If only.”

It was surprisingly hot when we landed in England, well over eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless. As I came down the steps of the plane, I was greeted by a young man with wavy Brylcreemed hair and sunglasses. The only concession he had made to the heat was to take off his tweed coat and hang it over his arm, and roll up his shirtsleeves.

“Captain Falcon? How do you do, I’m Terence Mitchell.”

“How are you?” I asked him, and shook his hand, which was soft and sweaty.

“Hope you had a comfortable flight, sir?”

“Well, it was certainly a darn sight faster than the last time I did it.”

“They’ll be bringing in jets next year, and that’ll make it even quicker. Six hours to New York, or so I believe. Amazing when you think it takes six days by boat. This way, sir. I’ve got a car waiting outside.”

I hadn’t been back to England since the end of the war, but it hadn’t changed much. The same flat smell of English cigarettes and body odor. The same dinky little cars and red double-decker buses. The same clipped accents, as if everybody had been to elocution school.

“Don’t worry about your things,” said Terence. “I’ve arranged to have them sent straight round to your hotel.”

A beige Humber Hawk was parked by the curb outside the terminal, with a uniformed bobby standing beside it. The bobby gave Terence a nod as we approached, and strolled off. Terence opened the door for me and then climbed in himself. “Gasper?” he said, taking out a box of Player’s cigarettes.

“No thanks. I gave up two years ago. Had a cough I couldn’t get rid of.”

“You won’t mind if I do?”

We drove out of the terminal and along the Great West Road toward the center of the city.

“Good book?” asked Terence, nodding at the blue-bound volume I had brought to read on the flight.

“Comparative Folk Mythologies of Dobrudja,” I told him, holding it up.

“Oh. I’m more of a Nevile Shute man myself.”

It always surprised me how green London was. The narrow streets were bursting with trees, and every little front yard had its bushes and its neatly trimmed hedge. Among the rows of houses stood the tranquil spires of Victorian churches, which gave the suburbs the appearance of order and respectability and enduring faith.

“Very nasty business this, sir,” said Terence, with his cigarette waggling between his lips. “Seven more fatalities yesterday morning, in Croydon.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ all the time, really. Jim will be fine.”

“Right-oh. Jim it is.” He pronounced it as though it had inverted commas. He looked ridiculously young to be an SIS operative, but he was probably the same age as I was when I was hunting the strigoi during the war. He was pale and round-shouldered, and he reminded me of one of those young English pilots you see clustered around Spitfires in wartime photographs, all smiling and most of them doomed to be incinerated alive before their twenty-first birthdays.

“How are you managing to keep this out of the news?” I asked him.

“It’s been jolly difficult, to tell you the truth. Fortunately there’s been some Korean influenza going around, so most of the time we can blame it on that.”

“These seven. in where did you say?”

“Croydon. It’s a borough, about ten miles south of London. Not the most attractive spot on earth. Pretty grotty, as a matter of fact.”

“Were they all in the same room when they were killed?”

“Yes, apart from one lad. They found his body upstairs. Only eleven years old. Very nasty business. They all belonged to the same family, except for one of them, an elderly lady who was a friend of theirs. It was a birthday party. Shocking. There was blood all over the food.”

“You haven’t touched anything?”

“The bodies have been taken away, but that’s all. Everything else is just as we found it.”

“OK. but I’ll need to take a look at the bodies, later.”

We were coming into West Kensington now, past the Natural History Museum and the Brompton Oratory, and the traffic was beginning to build up. As we reached Harrods store in Knightsbridge, Terence tossed his cigarette out of the window and took out a fresh one, tapping it on the steering wheel to tamp down the loose tobacco. “The first murders were on the 23rd of May, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. Eleven men and two women at a business conference.”

“I read the police reports. I saw the photographs, too. Property developers, weren’t they?”

“Estate agents. It was a total fluke that we found out who might have killed them.”

“Oh, yes?”

“One of our senior chaps just happened to be round at Scotland Yard for some security powwow when the news about the murders first came in. Look at that bloody cyclist! He must have a death wish!” He leaned out of the window and shouted, “Nutcase!”

“Go on,” I told him.

“Oh, yes. As luck would have it, our chap used to liaise with US counterintelligence during the war, and he remembered that your people always wanted to be urgently notified of any mass killings, especially if the victims had their hearts cut out, or the blood drained out of them. At the time, your people never actually told him why they wanted to be notified, or what it was all about, and our chap still had no idea what it was all about, but he thought, ‘Hallo! Mass killing — people with all the blood drained out of them,’ and he got on to your people anyway. Your people came back to us in less than twenty-four hours, and they came round to HQ and gave us the full SP. I must say I find it really fascinating, in a grisly sort of way. But it isn’t exactly easy to believe, is it? You know — vampires.” He bared his teeth and gave a bad imitation of a Bela Lugosi “ho-ho-ho!”

“Let me tell you, Terence,” I said, “you need to believe.” I probably sounded too serious and pontificating, but I was very tired. “If you think that Russian spies are dangerous, you don’t know what dangerous is. The strigoi are the most vicious creatures you are ever going to meet in your entire life.”

We drove around Hyde Park Corner, with its massive stone arch and its triumphant statue of Winged Victory. Then we made our way down the Mall and past Buckingham Palace. A troop of Horse Guards jingled their way down the center of the road, their helmets sparkling in the sunlight. The last time I had been in London it had been grim and gray and badly bombed, but this was like driving through a brightly colored picture-postcard.

After another fifteen minutes of sitting in traffic around Trafalgar Square and up Ludgate Hill, we arrived at MI6 headquarters in the City. It was a large ugly office building with a soot-streaked facade and plastic Venetian blinds in a nasty shade of olive green. Terence parked his Humber around the back, and led the way in.

“You’re fully cleared, right up to level one,” said Terence, clipping an identity tag on to my shirt pocket. I peered down at it. I don’t know where my photograph had come from, but my eyes were half-closed and I looked as if my mouth was stuffed with cheeseburger.

The building was very warm and stuffy and smelled of floor-polish. Three or four plain-looking women passed us in the corridor and they all said “Hillo!” with that funny little English yelp.

We went up to the top floor. Terence said, “It’s supposed to stay warm until Sunday, but I can’t see it myself. You know what they say about the English summer — three hot days followed by a thunderstorm.”

He knocked at the walnut-paneled door marked Director of Operations (SIS), and we walked into a large office with a panoramic view of the City and the River Thames. I could see Tower Bridge, and London Bridge, and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Everything was hazy with summer heat, so that it looked like an impressionist painting, except for the constant sparkling of traffic.

As we entered, a tall, heavily built man in a gray suit rose up from behind an enormous desk, like a whale coming up for air. He had a large elaborately chiseled nose and deep-set eyes, and short shiny chestnut-colored hair, which I could imagine him polishing every morning with a matching pair of brushes.

“Aha! You’re the, ah, Screecher fellow,” he said. He spoke in a hesitant drawl, with the sides of his mouth turned down as if he found the whole business of talking to be rather a damn bore. He reached across his desk and gave me a crushing handshake. “Charles Frith. So gratified that you could get here so promptly. Good flight?”

“Great, thanks. I never flew over the Pole before.”

“Really?” he said, as if I had admitted that I had never ridden to hounds. “This is all turning out to be very unpleasant indeed, so we’re ah. Glad of any help that you can give us.”

“How many have been killed altogether?”

Charles Frith blinked at me. “Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea? I usually have one around now. Or coffee? I think we can run to some instant.”

“Tea’s fine.” During the war, the British seemed to spend more time brewing up tea than they did fighting the Germans. It was usually strong and astringent and tooth-achingly sweet, but I had developed a taste for it myself.

“Ninety-seven fatalities so far,” said Terence. “That’s including yesterday’s figure.”

“Any eyewitness statements?”

“One or two people have said that they heard things. At the Selsdon Park Hotel, there were several reports of screaming in the middle of the night. But the screaming didn’t last very long, apparently, and the witnesses thought it was somebody throwing a party. Well, I mean, it could have been, for all we know.”

Charles Frith said, “I talked to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner yesterday evening, and unfortunately he can give us very little to go on. The police found footprints made by some very narrow shoes, but no identifiable fingerprints, and no fibers to speak of. In several cases there was no obvious means of entry and ah. The premises were secured from the inside, making access virtually impossible. To a human assailant, in any case.”

We all sat down around Charles Frith’s desk. All he had in front of him was a leather blotter, three telephones — one black, one green and one red — and a framed photograph of a grinning blonde woman with a gap between her front teeth.

“I expect CIC told you that the strigoi are capable of entering a room through the thinnest of apertures,” I told him. “They rarely leave much in the way of fingerprints or footprints, but they do leave a very distinctive smell, which is why we use dogs to hunt them down.”

“We’ve arranged for a tracker dog. And ah. Somebody to handle him.”

“OK, that’s excellent. The sooner I meet him the better.”

“Her, as matter of fact,” Terence corrected me.