Descendant

Tea for Two

Terence let me borrow his Humber and I drove back over Chelsea Bridge toward the south suburbs. The sky was deep blue and streaked with mares’ tails, and it was so warm that I drove with all the windows open and my cow’s lick blowing. The river Thames sparkled in the sunlight like smashed mirrors.

I drove through the built-up center of Croydon at an overheated crawl. I hadn’t driven a manual shift for over ten years, so I kept stalling, and kangaroo-jumping, and it took me over an hour to get to Purley. By the time I turned into Combe Road, my shirt was sticking to the leather seat and I was so thirsty that I could have drunk blood.

Purley was a prosperous suburb with huge 1930s houses concealed behind high beech hedges. Shining new Rovers were parked in every graveled driveway, and I could see tennis courts and gardeners clipping rose bushes and well-dressed children running around in Aertex shirts and white socks and sandals. There was a tranquil air of summer heat and confidence and money.

I found “The Starlings” at the end of Combe Road, an enormous mock-Tudor house with glittering ivy all down one wall and pigeons warbling on the roof. I steered the Humber into the drive and parked outside the garages. A middle-aged man in a droopy cotton sun hat was clipping the edges of the front lawn, not that they looked as if they needed clipping. The lawn itself was so perfectly kept that it looked unreal, and striped like a pair of green silk pajamas.

I climbed out of the car and walked up to him, shielding my eyes with my upraised arm.

“I’m looking for Jill,” I told him.

“Oh, yes?”

“My name’s Jim Falcon. Captain James Falcon, actually. Jill and I have been working together.”

“Yes, I know about that. Well, as much as I’m allowed to. I’m her father.”

He climbed up over the herbaceous border on to the driveway. He had a squarish, pugnacious face, and a prickly gray mustache.

“Is Jill home?” I asked him. “I really need to talk to her.”

“I don’t know if that’s a very good idea, Captain Falcon. Jill came home in a state of considerable distress and we had to call the family doctor to give her a sedative.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She hasn’t told us what happened, and of course we haven’t been pressing her to tell us, because we’re aware that it’s extremely hush-hush. But if it’s going to have this kind of an effect on her. well, we’re her family. We have to put her personal well-being first, before her work.”

“Yes, sir, I can understand how you feel. I know Jill’s extremely shocked and I’m sorry about that. But this investigation we’re working on is critical. We’re talking about people’s lives here, sir. Maybe hundreds of people’s lives. Maybe even more.”

“Well, I’m really not sure.”

I paused for a moment, and then I said, “Sir — you saw action during the war, I guess?”

“Yes, of course. I was out in Burma.”

“You saw plenty of things that shocked and distressed you, I’ll bet. You saw people killed.”

He blinked at me. “Captain Falcon — are you trying to tell me what I think you’re trying to tell me?”

I nodded. “What Jill and I have been doing together — it’s just as important as what we did during the war. In some ways, even more so, because nobody’s prepared for it.”

“Something to do with the bloody Russians, I suppose?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you. But I need her, sir. I need her expertise. I need Bullet. The situation’s getting more and more desperate by the day and she has to pull herself together.”

“I can’t say I’m altogether happy about it.”

“Look at it this way, sir. Jill also has to realize that her entire career could be in jeopardy. I covered up for her this afternoon. I told my boss that she took Bullet to Croydon to follow up some new trails we found. But if she won’t get back on the job they’ll probably have to demote her, or even sack her.”

Her father lowered his head so that I couldn’t see his face under the brim of his sun hat. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Jill was lying on a flowery chintz sofa in the drawing room. Bullet was lying on the rug next to her, panting.

“I thought you’d come, sooner or later,” she said, wanly. “Turned out to be sooner.”

Her eyes were swollen and there was a feverish pink flush on her cheeks. She had pulled her hair back with a pale blue Alice band, which made her look even younger, like a sixth-former from some upper-class English girls’ school. She was wearing a white cotton robe, although her legs were covered by a silky throw with fringes.

I looked around the room. Traditional, yet expensive, with Staffordshire figures of shepherdesses on the mantelpiece, and oil paintings of galleons at sea. Through the French windows I could see a York-stone patio with cast-iron garden furniture, and beyond, to a tennis court, where a twentyish couple were shouting and laughing as they knocked the ball backward and forward over the net.

A clock discreetly chimed two.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Better, thanks. A little woozy. The doctor gave me something to calm me down.”

“Are you going to be coming back? Or is this your way of saying you quit?”

She looked up at me and I could tell that she didn’t really know what to say. “I’ve seen dead bodies, of course. It’s part of the job. But I’ve never seen anybody killed before. Not right in front of me.”

“So that’s it. You quit.”

At that moment, the drawing-room door opened and a middle-aged woman appeared, wearing an orange silk dress. She had the flat, pretty face of a Burmese, and there was no question where Jill had inherited her exotic looks from. She came forward and held out her hand.

“Mya Foxley. I’m Jill’s mother.”

“Jim Falcon. Good to meet you.”

“Is everything all right, Mr. Falcon? We were very worried when Jill came home in such a state.”

I gave her a tight, noncommittal smile. “I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have bothered you but Jill’s doing some very important work for us.”

“And?”

“And I just came to remind her how important.”

“I see.” Mrs. Foxley looked uneasy. I don’t know if she was expecting me to explain myself any further, but when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to, she said, “Would you like some tea?”

Jill and I talked for nearly an hour. Her mother brought in a plateful of Scottish shortbread called petticoat tails and I ate about seven of them. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.

I tried not to push Jill too hard. Instead, I encouraged her to think about what she had seen, and why it had shocked her so much. From my own experience during the war, I knew that people can be much more distressed by tiny poignancies than by major tragedies. The baby’s shoe, lying in the ruins.

Jill said, “What I can’t get out of my head — that strigoi who killed the little boy — she was a girl. It never occurred to me that you could have female Screechers, too.”

I put down my teacup. “Sure you can. They’re called striogaica. In some ways, they’re supposed to be even more powerful than the male strigoi. According to the folk stories, they can turn your butter rancid, stop your cows from giving milk, ruin your harvest — even ruin your marriage.”

“They sound horrendous. That one we saw, she was horrendous.”

“Well, she was still alive and physically decomposing, which didn’t make her very attractive. But once they’re dead — or undead, rather — the striogaica are supposed to be very alluring. Some of the stories even say that they can fall in love with human men, and have children who are half human and half strigoi. They’re still just as dangerous, of course — they still need fresh human blood, so you wouldn’t want them living in your neighborhood.”

Jill said, “I couldn’t help thinking — what if that happened to me? I think that was what I was afraid of, more than anything else.”

“First of all, that’s not going to happen to you, because Duca is not going to catch you unawares, the way it did with those poor people. Second of all, if it did, I would immediately know what had happened to you, and I would hammer nails into your eyes, cut your head off and bury your body in consecrated ground. So you’d have nothing to worry about.”

For the first time that afternoon, Jill actually smiled. She reached out her hand to me and touched my shirtsleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve really let you down, haven’t I?”

“Your stiff upper lip went a little floppy, that’s all. I came around to starch it for you.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I think we need to take Bullet back to the park, and follow any trail that the Screechers left behind them. I very much doubt that they would have gone straight back to the place where Duca’s hiding, but if we can find out where they’re holed up — they’re bound to make contact with him before too long.”

“All right, then. Just give me ten minutes to get dressed.”

She stood up. I hadn’t realized how short she was, without her shoes. “I’ll wait for you,” I said, and nodded toward the tea tray. “I’ll — uh — take care of these cookies.”

As she left, her mother came back in, and gave me that look that only mothers can give you, when you’re taking their daughters away.