Descendant

The Full SP

We sat in Charles Frith’s for the next three and a half hours, so that we could study all of the case files together — all the forensic evidence, all of the photographs, all of the witness statements. I wanted to see maps and reconstructions and transcripts of coroners’ court proceedings.

I insisted that we go right back to the very beginning, from the moment that a Thames dredger called the Mary Ellen had struck the propeller of that buried DC3. I didn’t tell Charles Frith or Terence that I knew who had died in it. I was afraid that I might catch myself unawares, and fill up with tears.

The wreckage had been discovered on April 11th. It had been raised out of the mud on May 15th by a combined team from the Air Ministry and the British Aeronautical Archeological Committee. It had been taken on a flatbed truck to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farn-borough for cleaning, research and possible restoration.

Because of the total secrecy that had surrounded Operation Paperclip, the disappearance of this plane and its cargo had never been officially reported. After the war it had mostly been forgotten, since the counterintelligence agents involved had gone back to civilian life, or retired, or died. Even when the plane’s excavation was widely shown on television, radio and newsreels — even a two-page spread in Life magazine — nobody in the CIC put two and two together and realized which plane it was, and what it had been carrying. That only happened when the pilots and their marine escort were formally identified — and by that time it was too late.

For me, the most poignant paragraphs came from HM Coroner Sir Philip Platt-Dickinson, at Southend-on-Sea. “The remains of five adult individuals were discovered in the wreckage. There was no soft tissue remaining, only bones, but judging from the positions in which they were found, all of them were instantly killed when the airplane struck the water at a speed that must have been well in excess of 200 mph, and was almost completely buried in the estuary mud.

“The pilot and his copilot were identified by their dog tags as officers in the United States Army Air Forces. The remains of two further individuals, both male, were identified as officers in the United States Marine Corps. The remains of the fifth individual, who was female, carried nothing at all that allowed me to make a positive identification, although the recovery team found a gold wedding ring and a rectangular gold wristwatch from Shreve and Company, which I am given to understand is a respected jewelry shop in San Francisco, California. Her dress and shoes were also of American origin.

“Animal remains were found close to the female individual and these were identified as being those of a bloodhound, probably six or seven years old.

“The American Embassy in London was notified of the exhumation of these individuals and their remains were duly removed for repatriation to the United States, where they could be formally identified, and given appropriate funeral rites.”

I sat in that MI6 office in London and in my mind’s eye I could see that rectangular gold wristwatch. I could even remember the day that my father had given it to my mother — their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in April 1941. We had drunk sweet white wine in the yard while cherry blossoms blew all around us like snow and my mother had sung Romanian doina.

“Who made doina?

The small mouth of a baby

Left asleep by his mother

Who found him singing the doina.”

The casket had been examined by an Air Ministry crash-investigation team led by Professor Roger Braithwaite, who was renowned worldwide for his expertise on unusual air accidents. Apparently it had been secured to the floor of the DC3 with webbing straps, but these had snapped on impact when the aircraft crashed. The casket had slid forward, smashing into the copilot’s seat and breaking his back.

Terence passed me a selection of black-and-white photographs. These showed the casket from four different angles, resting on a trestle in a large empty hangar, with several bespectacled men in laboratory coats standing around it. It appeared to be fashioned out of a thick lead alloy, beaten and welded by hand. It measured approximately nine feet long, three feet wide and two feet six inches deep. It weighed over 750 pounds.

When it was lifted out of the aircraft, the casket was tightly fastened with two lengths of braided silver wire, which formed a cross over the lid. At 6:45 on the evening of May 17th, Professor Braithwaite jotted in his notebook that he had decided to cut this wire and take the lid off the casket to see what was inside.

The next morning, May 18th, when RAE technicians opened up the hangar, they noticed that the casket appeared to be intact, but the silver wire had been neatly cut and was lying on the floor. There was no sign of Professor Braithwaite or his two assistants.

By 6:00 PM that day, Professor Braithwaite and his assistants had still failed to put in an appearance, and none of them were answering their home phone numbers. The security services were immediately notified, and a major search initiated. Watches were kept on all British ports and airports, and roadblocks set up in Hampshire and Surrey. Several houses were searched, including Professor Braithwaite’s holiday cottage in the Lake District.

Some days later, when the press made polite inquiries about Professor Braithwaite’s whereabouts, they were told that he had flown to the United States to undertake several weeks of “background research.” It’s hard to remember how trusting the press used to be in those days.

To date, though, neither Professor Braithwaite nor his assistants had been sighted anywhere, dead or alive, and there was no evidence to explain what might have happened to them.

Except, of course, the empty casket. The lid of the casket was still in place on the morning of May 18th, but investigators were able to lift it open without difficulty. Inside they found it to be lined with whitethorn wood, and thickly bedded with dried garlic flowers and wild roses. On one side lay an empty sack made of thin brown linen, like a torn-open shroud. There was a deep impression in the petals, as if somebody had been lying there, motionless, for a very long time.

“Didn’t anybody suspect what had happened, even then?” I asked Charles Frith. “Didn’t anybody think to ask what kind of creature could have been lying in a sealed casket for nearly thirteen years, without air, or food, or water?”

“Afraid not, old man. Security services are never very good at communicating with each other, at the best of times.”

“Somebody could have used their imagination.”

“Imagination?” Charles Frith blinked at me as if I had used a four-letter word. “Not a requirement for MI6, I’m sorry to say.”

The police reports on all of the recent killings were depressingly similar, and all of the photographs, too. Heaps of bodies with their clothes torn open, their abdomens sliced apart and their hearts pulled out from underneath their rib cages. Men, women and children — even toddlers, in little white socks. In the background, cheap floral wallpaper, decorated with loops and spatters of blood. Nobody had ever seen anybody entering the crime scenes. Nobody had ever seen anybody leave.

“We’re um — we’re quite certain that this is the work of — you know — strigoi?”

“No doubt about it. One strigoi mort and at least two strigoi vii, and they’re going to multiply fast.”

“More tea?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll go to my hotel, if that’s all right with you, and take a shower. I need to call my wife, too. Then I want to go to this house in Croydon and take a look at this birthday party. Terence, do you think you can arrange for our dog handler to meet us there? Say about three-thirty?”

“I don’t anticipate any problem with that, ‘Jim.’ I’ll give her a tinkle.”

I stood up and Charles Frith stood up, too. “Tremendously pleased to have you on board, Captain Falcon.”

“Well, me too, sir. I have a very personal interest in catching this particular Screecher.”

“Really?”

“It’s a long story, sir. I’ll report back to you later.”

“Ears. Good. Oh — but there’s one more thing. You’ve been issued with a side arm. Colt.45 automatic, I gather. It’s all been approved but I have to ask you to be very discreet with it. This is England, you know, not the Wild West.”

“Of course,” I told him.

“Ears,” he repeated.

On the way back along the corridor, I said to Terence, “He kept saying ‘ears.’ What did he mean by that?”

“Oh. that’s English upper-class for ‘yes.’ ”