Descendant

Hunt for the Dead

Charles Frith was furious. He paced around his office, throwing up his arms from time to time as if he were singing the finale to a grand opera.

“You don’t know what it took to cover this up! Seventeen dead people in a 403 bus! A woman and a boy disemboweled in a public park! This is worse than the Buster Crabb business!”

The red phone rang and Charles Frith picked it up. “What?” he barked, even louder than Bullet. Then, “Oh, sorry, Home Secretary.”

I leaned close to Terence and said, “Buster Crabb business?” As far as I knew, Buster Crabb was a movie actor with big muscles. I think I’d seen him in some third-rate Western.

“Buster Crabb was a Royal Navy diver,” said Terence, hoarsely. It was obvious from the way he was talking out of the side of his mouth that “the Buster Crabb business” had been a serious embarrassment. “They found his body in Chichester harbor, early last year. No hands, and his head fell off when they tried to lift him out of the water.”

“Hey, yes,” I nodded. “I think I read about that. It was that time that Khrushchev visited England, wasn’t it, and they thought this guy had been secretly diving under Khrushchev’s ship?”

“That’s right,” said Terence, uncomfortably.

“That was MI6?”

“Perhaps. Possibly. But you certainly didn’t hear it from me.”

Charles Frith banged the phone down. “It’s the Daily Mail again. They’ve got hold of this bloody idiotic idea that MI6 has been secretly running some kind of mad-scientist experiment, turning our agents into sociopathic assassins, and that some of them have escaped. ‘Human Killing Machines on the Loose.’ Sir David’s frothing at the mouth.”

“Sir David’s always frothing at the mouth,” said Terence.

“I just want to know what the devil we do now,” said Charles Frith. “I mean, what’s the plan, Jim? I thought we were going to track these buggers down and exterminate them before the press or the public got wind of what was going on. That’s what I promised Sir David, anyway, and if we can’t do it I need to know now.”

“It might be an idea to let the Mail run with their story about ‘killing machines,’ ” Terence suggested. “We can always prove them wrong later. and it’s better than telling them that South London is infested with Screechers.”

“Forget about the press relations,” I told him. “Press relations won’t mean anything if we can’t locate the strigoi mort.”

“You’re talking about this fellow Duca?”

“It’s not a fellow, sir,” I insisted. “It’s a thing. We have to find it, and destroy it, and we have to do it real quick. Duca’s been infecting people much faster than I expected. You only have to do the math.”

I turned Charles Frith’s blotter around and jotted on it with my mechanical pencil. “Seventeen people contain one hundred seventy pints of blood, but the human stomach only has the capacity to swallow four pints at a time. Obviously Duca didn’t know in advance how many passengers were going to be riding on that bus, and even if there were more than he and his fellow Screechers needed, it still would have been necessary for him to kill them all. But if they did need seventeen people, we could be talking about forty-two Screechers here.”

“Oh my God,” said Charles Frith. “This is out of control already, isn’t it?”

“If you have forty-two Screechers in the South London suburbs and all of them are looking for eight or nine pints of fresh human blood three times in every twenty-four hours. then, yes, this is out of control.”

The green phone rang. Charles Frith picked it up and bellowed, “What?”

He listened for a moment, and then he said, “No, Commissioner. Absolutely not, Commissioner. I’m sorry, Commissioner, not a chance. No. And a very good day to you, too.”

He slammed the receiver down and said, “Sir Kenneth Bloody McLean. They should demote that man back to constable. No — cloakroom attendant.”

He sat down in his big leather armchair and swung from side to side, breathing like a man who had eaten a large lunch, smoked a cigar and then run up eight flights of stairs. Eventually, he said, “What’s it going to take to find this Duca fellow? Thing, I mean?”

I drew a few more lines on Charles Frith’s blotter. “When I was hunting down Screechers after D-Day, it was a totally different ballgame. We were attached to an advancing army, which was driving the Screechers ahead of us. But here — well, this is South London, in peacetime. We can’t go from street to street, searching every house. We can’t ask the Royal Engineers to blow up buildings for us if we suspect that a couple of Screechers are hiding in the attic.”

“So what can we do?”

“We’ll have to use a combination of plain old-fashioned police work, plus some inspired deduction, plus — well — something else.”

“Something else?” asked Charles Frith, suspiciously, raising one brambly eyebrow.

“I guess you’d probably call it sorcery or the occult.”

“You mean Dennis Wheatley kind of stuff? The Devil Rides Out? Dear God, I can just hear myself explaining this to Sir David.”

“I hope you won’t have to, sir. But let’s make a start. From what happened today, it’s pretty clear that Duca has found himself an automobile. We need to check any reports of stolen vehicles in that part of South London over the past six weeks, but we also need to ask the public if they have seen a neighbor’s automobile — not stolen but being regularly driven by somebody unfamiliar.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Strigoi mortii aren’t half-rotten and sick-looking like strigoi vii. They look perfectly normal. In fact they usually look better than normal. But they’re dead, and dead people find it difficult to rent or buy property, because — well, they’re dead. So they have a habit of killing other people and taking over their lives — their homes, their property, even their clothes — and usually they’re clever enough to do it without arousing suspicion.”

“So how do we get the public to help us?”

“I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth. Maybe some kind of announcement in the newspapers.”

“I’ve got it,” said Terence. “We could tell the press that we’ve had an intelligence report from Washington. They suspect that a KGB spy has moved into a flat or a house in South London, and that he might be driving the car belonging to the previous occupier. We could give out a special telephone number for the public to call. We could even offer a reward.”

Charles Frith pulled a disapproving face. In his opinion, newspapers were only good for wrapping up cod and chips. But Terence’s idea was actually a pretty good one. We were right in the depths of the Cold War, and every day the press was full of scaremongering stories about Soviet spies living among us, leading what appeared to be commonplace lives (and as we later discovered, they actually were).

“Very well,” Charles Frith told Terence, “why don’t you scribble something down on paper and see if you can have it on my desk by five o’clock? I’ll talk to Sir Kenneth bloody McLean and see if he can get his beat chaps to start asking questions about people driving cars that they shouldn’t be. What are you going to do, Jim?”

I looked at my watch, the gold Breitling that Louise had given me on our wedding day. “I have some persuading to do.”