Descendant

Death on a Double-Decker

I slept badly that night — as badly as I used to sleep during the war.

The Strand Palace had no air-conditioning and the endless knock-knock-knock of taxi and bus engines seemed to penetrate right through my pillows. I had a nightmare in which I couldn’t find my way out of Haling Grove Park and the old woman with the white face and the green sunglasses was sliding after me as if she were on wheels.

I took a tepid bath around 7:00 AM and then I went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ordered a “full English” — bacon, sausages, fried eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. Everything was cold and lying in congealed grease and I could only conclude that I must have been hungrier during the war, or younger and less discriminating. The coffee tasted like weak beef stock.

While I pushed my food around my plate, I read the Daily Express. Cairo radio had incited Arabs to rise up against the British and sabotage the RAF Venom jets at Sharja airfield, where they were being used against rebel forces in Muscat and Oman. Pan Am had announced that they were beginning trans-Polar flights to London from the West Coast, flying time about eighteen hours. A British doctor had been killed by the polio epidemic in the British Midlands because he had vaccinated all of his patients but hadn’t thought to vaccinate himself.

In spite of the warm weather, British roads were unusually empty because “motorists feared bonnet-to-tail snarls in traffic.”

Not a word about mass killings in Croydon or Selsdon or anywhere else. Not a word about strigoi. On television that night were Sir Lancelot, Criss Cross Quiz and Gun Law.

The waiter came over and looked at my plate. “Not to your liking, sir?”

“No, it was great. Just a little too much.”

“Perhaps you’d care for something else, sir? Porridge, perhaps?”

“No, thanks.” I had seen the porridge and it looked like badly poured concrete.

I was crossing the lobby on the way back to my room when the receptionist called me. “Captain Falcon, sir — you have a telephone call!”

I went into the phone booth at the side of the lobby. It was Terence calling me. “We’ve had another one, ‘Jim,’ really bad this time. I can’t tell you anything over the blower but I’m coming to collect you in fifteen minutes. It’s South London again.”

“OK.” I could see my eyes in the small mirror at the back of the telephone booth. They looked expressionless, as if they didn’t belong to anybody at all.

We drove to Wallington, another suburb on the far side of Croydon Aerodrome, a wide grassy field which — up until the war — had been London’s principal airport. Wallington was avenue after avenue of 1930s semidetached houses, with white-painted pebbledash walls and monkey-puzzle trees in their front gardens. Bank-clerk land.

Terence was wearing the same shirt and green necktie that he had been wearing the day before. He smoked even more furiously than ever, and it was obvious that he was very nervous and upset. “Seventeen killed, that’s what they told me.”

“Seventeen? Jesus.”

This time, a whole avenue had been cordoned off by police. Two bobbies stopped us and made a meal of checking our identity cards. “You’re an American, sir?” asked one of them, peering at me as if he had never seen a real live American before, and was wondering why I wasn’t wearing a Stetson hat and a bolo necktie.

Eventually, they let us through and we drove about a half-mile to the end of the avenue. Here we found more police, as well as two fire trucks and five ambulances. I could see Charles Frith, wearing an immaculate light-gray suit, talking to a senior police inspector. This must be really serious, if Charles Frith had actually ventured out of his office.

The avenue was crossed by a low, green-painted railroad bridge. A green double-decker bus was wedged under the bridge, so that the front half of its roof had been ripped backward. Six or seven policemen were erecting high canvas screens around the bus, while two firefighters were up on the bridge, lowering a tarpaulin over the top of it.

“Ah, Jim,” said Charles Frith, as I approached him. “This is Inspector Ruddock, Metropolitan Police. Inspector, this is our American friend, Captain James Falcon.”

Inspector Ruddock was a stocky man with a scarlet face that looked as if it were just about to explode. He had pale blue eyes with colorless eyelashes, like a pig’s. He eyed me up and down and said nothing at all.

“This happened at about six thirty this morning,” said Charles Frith. “The bus comes down Demesne Road here but I’m told that it usually turns off at Chesterfield Avenue, which is ah — the second side road just back there. This morning it kept straight on and as you can see. Tremendous bang apparently. Residents came out to see if they could help but ah — no survivors, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’d better take a look,” I told him.

Inspector Ruddock said, “I’m not happy about that, sir. Not until my men have finished their job. Don’t want any evidence buggered up.”

“No need to worry about that, Inspector,” said Charles Frith, in his urbane drawl. “Captain Falcon here is a very experienced investigator who specializes in this sort of business.”

“All the same, sir, I’d — ”

Charles Frith gave him the coldest possible smile, and said, “Carry on, Jim.”

Inside the bus, I breathed in a strong smell of blood and fat, like a butcher’s shop, but it was far less nauseating than the house in Croydon, because the passengers were freshly killed. All the same, it was stifling in there, especially now that it was draped in a heavy tarpaulin, and the windows were speckled with flies.

Two forensic scientists in white lab coats and rubber gloves were dusting for fingerprints and taking photographs, watched over by a sweating detective in a badly fitting brown suit. The detective looked at me with deep suspicion when I climbed on to the platform. I held up my identity card and said, “Captain James Falcon, from the CIC. I’m temporarily seconded to MI6.”

The detective frowned at my card and said, “MI6?” He was sandy-haired and freckly and put me in mind of Spencer Tracy, if Spencer Tracy had been six inches taller. “What’s this got to do with MI6?”

“Can’t answer that one, I’m afraid. What do you think happened here?”

“I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”

“Believe me, you’re supposed to tell me.”

Inspector Ruddock dragged aside the tarpaulin and said, irascibly, “We’re cooperating with the US intelligence services, Johnson. Whatever Captain Falcon wants to know, just tell him, will you?”

He disappeared, and Johnson blinked at me in dismay.

“Sorry,” I said. In the brief time that I had stayed in Britain during the war, I had learned that “sorry” was the key word that would get you out of any kind of awkward situation. Somebody steps on your foot? You say “sorry” and they say “sorry” and you say “sorry” again and that’s the end of it, unless one of you feels it necessary to say “sorry” a third time.

“Well, come on, then,” said Johnson. “We’ve got eleven stabbing victims on the lower deck, five upstairs and then there’s the driver.”

“The driver was stabbed, too?”

“No, he died of chest injuries when the bus hit the bridge.”

He led the way down the aisle. Our shoes made sticky noises because the floor was varnished with blood. Most of the passengers were sitting upright, as if they were still waiting to be carried to their destinations. There were eight men, most of whom looked like factory workers on their way to start an early shift, and two women with their hair tied up in scarves. Office cleaners, more than likely.

The bus conductor was lying sideways on one of the bench seats at the back of the bus. His hands were covered in blood as if he had been struggling to defend himself against an assailant who was wielding a very sharp knife. In fact three fingers of his right hand were almost completely severed, and were dangling on thin shreds of skin.

Every one of the passengers had been stabbed in the lower part of the stomach, and then the knife pulled upward until it met the breastbone. Since they were all still sitting in their seats, it was clear that they had been attacked very rapidly, before they had time to react. That spelled strigoi mort to me. A strigoi mort could flicker through a busload of people like this and kill all of them in a matter of seconds. The passengers’ pants and skirts were soaked in blood, and several of them had little heaps of glistening pink intestines in their laps.

“Can’t think why the poor sods didn’t put up any kind of a fight,” said Johnson.

I didn’t say anything, but leaned forward and examined the stomach wound of one of the cleaners. Whatever had been used to slice her open, it must have been wickedly sharp, because it had cut clean through her thick white elasticated girdle. She was looking at me with a suspicious expression, as if she were just about to speak to me.

“Do you have any idea who might have done this?” Johnson asked me.

“Oh, yes,” I nodded.

“But you’re not going to share it with me?”

“No.”

“Well, I must say that this is all bally frustrating.”

“Sorry. Maybe your boss will fill you in, later.”

I climbed up the steep curving stairs at the back of the bus, on to the top deck. It was the same story here, except that two of the passengers sitting right at the front of the bus had been crushed under the railroad bridge. Their mutilated heads lay on the seat behind them, one of them still wearing a wiry brown toupee, like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I ducked down under the roof of the bus to check their bodies. Both had been gutted, like everybody else. One of them had been cut so wide open that his entire digestive system was hanging from the edge of his seat — bowels, stomach and liver, in a glutinous cascade that was crawling with flies.

On the other side of the bus, however, I saw the body of a young boy, no more than five or six years old. He was wearing a school uniform — a blue blazer with a badge on the pocket, and gray flannel shorts, and gray woolen socks, and brown Clark’s sandals. His head had been compressed against the side of the bus window, so that his eyes were bulging out and his skull was oval. But what interested me more than anything else was that — unlike everybody else on the bus — he hadn’t been stabbed. He was dead, but his stomach was intact.

Johnson came up the stairs and said, “Everything all right?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“But you still can’t tell me who did this? Or why? It really would help me an awful lot if you could give me an inkling.”

I knew who had done it. There wasn’t any doubt. I knew why they had done it, too. An early-morning bus full of dozy shift-workers must have looked like a mobile feast to Duca and his strigoi vii. I guessed that they had planned to take it someplace secluded and drink the blood of everybody on board. At 5:30 in the morning, there would have been few people around to disturb them.

I went downstairs again and took another look around. Then I climbed off the bus and walked around to the driver’s cab. The driver was a balding man in his early fifties, with a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear. He was slumped forward over his steering wheel with his eyes closed, as if he had simply nodded off. The sliding door to his cab was marked with seven or eight fresh scratches, some of which had gone right through the red paint to the bare aluminum underneath. It looked as if a Screecher had tried to get into the cab, stabbing at the door in frustration.

I was still examining the cab when Jill arrived, with Bullet. Today she was wearing a yellow blouse and natural-colored slacks, and no makeup. She had probably had to come down here at very short notice, as I had.

“Good morning,” she said, in a hushed voice, looking at the bus.

“Not for these folks.”

“They told me seventeen. It’s dreadful.”

“Yes. But the Screechers didn’t get the chance to do what they wanted to do.”

“What was that?”

“I’m pretty sure that they were trying to commandeer the bus so that they could take the passengers someplace and drink them dry. But it looks like the driver saw what was happening inside his bus and panicked.” I pointed up at the railroad bridge. “I don’t think he did this deliberately. He was probably trying to go for some help.”

“Wait a minute. they were trying to commandeer the bus? You mean Screechers can drive?”

“Of course they can. Screechers are no different than they were before they were infected. They can drive, they can use telephones, they can do anything. The strigoi virus affects people’s bodies and it snuffs out their soul, but it doesn’t affect their memory, or their intellect, or any of their practical skills.”

“I didn’t realize. I mean, when you think of vampires you can’t help thinking medieval, can you? You know, castles and horse-drawn carriages and things like that.”

“Why don’t you let Bullet here take a sniff around the bus? There’s some officious detective called Johnson in there, but don’t let him bother you.”

“OK. I’ll call for help if he starts being too bossy.”

One of the bobbies lifted the tarpaulin for her. Bullet jumped on to the bus and she followed him. “Pretty girl,” the bobby remarked, as I walked past him. I didn’t say anything. I was married to Louise, and I had always thought of myself as faithful. But I was surprised how pleased I had been when Jill had turned up.

I rejoined Charles Frith and Terence.

“Got everything you need?” said Charles Frith, peering at his wristwatch. “I must get back to Town by twelve thirty. Lunch with the minister, for my sins.”

“Jill — Miss Foxley — she’s seeing if she can pick up a trail.”

“Do we know exactly what went on here?”

“Attempted hijack, most likely”

“ ‘Hijack,’ eh?” Charles Frith seemed to like the American sound of that. “ ‘Hijack.’ Mm. Well, keep me informed.”

Inspector Ruddock came over, looking hot and cross. “There’s some press boys wanting to know what’s happened. And they say they’d like some pictures, too.”

“Tell them that somebody on the bus was infected with the Korean flu, and collapsed. The driver tried to take the bus to the nearest hospital and misjudged the low bridge. Everybody else on the bus has been quarantined, just to be on the safe side. You’ll give them have a fuller statement later.”

“Oh, I will, will I?” said Inspector Ruddock, aggressively. “And what will I tell them then?”

Charles Frith patted the silver pips on his shoulder. “I’ll let you know after lunch. Now I really must dash. Can’t keep the minister waiting.”