Descendant

Wheel of Ill Fortune

Terence came to pick me up at 9:30 the next morning. He smelled of cigarettes and fried bacon.

“Any movement from Duca?” I asked him as I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Not a dicky bird. If he did leave the house, he didn’t use his car.”

“Have you found us someplace we can use to trap it?”

“I believe so. It’s in an old newspaper office in South Croydon. The paper closed down about a year ago, and the building’s been empty ever since then. But there’s one room they used to use as a darkroom. No windows, double-sealed doors, and we can easily cover up the ventilator.”

“That sounds ideal. Did you find me a bed-and-breakfast?”

“Better than that, old man. You can come and stay with me. I live in Thornton Heath, and that’s only ten minutes away from here. It was my mother’s idea. She said you must be feeling homesick.”

“Well, that’s very thoughtful of your mother, but — ”

“Excellent, that’s settled, then! One of the chaps will bring your cases down, and you can borrow a clean shirt from me, until they arrive.”

Terence and his mother lived in a semidetached Victorian house in a long street of semidetached Victorian houses. Inside it was gloomy and narrow with very high ceilings. The furniture was reproduction rustic with tapestry upholstery, and there was a gilt-framed reproduction on the wall of The Haywain by John Constable, as well as decorative dinner plates and a selection of Spanish fans with sequins on them.

Terence’s mother was a small, flustered woman with very red cheeks and wild gray hair. She wore a cotton print frock with huge yellow flowers on it. “As soon as Terence told me you were looking for a B-and-B, I thought, the poor fellow can’t stay in a place like that. What he needs is his home comforts.”

“That’s very generous of you, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“Oh, please. Call me Dotty. I hope you like shepherd’s pie.”

Terence showed me up to my room. “It used to be my sister’s, before she moved out.” There was a dressing table with a pink frilly valance around it, and a dark mahogany closet, and a poster of Pat Boone on the wall, stuck with Scotch tape.

“Tell me when you want a bath, won’t you,” said Terence, “and I’ll put the immersion heater on. It only takes about an hour to heat up.”

I changed into a clean blue shirt and then Terence drove me to South Croydon, to the abandoned offices of the South Croydon Observer — a squarish three-story building of brown brick, right on the noisy main road. The same blue Austin van was parked outside, and when Terence parked behind it, the whippet-thin driver and his shaven-headed friend climbed out, and came toward us.

“Everything OK?” asked Terence.

“Yes, Mr. Mitchell. Want to come and have a look?”

The driver unlocked the double doors that led into the reception area. The parquet flooring was gritty with dust, and there were yellowing bundles of old newspapers stacked up against the walls. He led the way up the staircase to the second floor, and then along a corridor. The darkroom was right at the very end.

“What do you think?” Terence asked me, ushering me inside. The darkroom measured about ten feet by twelve. The walls and ceiling were painted entirely matt black, and not a chink of light showed anywhere. There was a ventilator grille over the sink, but the driver and his friend had screwed a rectangle of plywood over it.

I tugged the cord which turned the light on and off. “Looks ideal,” I nodded.

“It won’t be too small, will it? If Duca puts up a fight, there isn’t going to be very much elbow-room.”

“No, this is fine. The less space you give a Screecher to maneuver, the better.”

Terence chafed his hands together, nervously. “I can’t wait to get this over with, to tell you the truth.”

I slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right. Once you get in close, you won’t have time to be frightened, I promise you.”

We collected Jill and Bullet from Purley and drove up to Pampisford Road. Jill was unusually subdued. When I turned around in my seat to smile at her, she smiled back briefly but then she looked away. I wondered if she regretted what had happened between us last night. It was so hot that Bullet kept panting and licking his lips so that his warm slobber flew all around the inside of the car.

When we arrived, we parked close behind a gray Hillman saloon. Two plainclothes detectives were sitting in it, smoking and reading the Daily Mirror. One of them was fat and sweaty and the other was thin and drew in his cheeks when he smoked as if he were sucking on a lemon.

“All quiet on the Western Front,” said the fat one. “Some woman arrived about fifteen minutes ago, answering the description of the suspect’s receptionist, but so far that’s all.”

“You haven’t seen Duca at all?” I asked him.

“Not a sausage, sir.”

“OK, Terence,” I said. “Now it’s your turn to play patient.”

“Supposing Duca rumbles me?” asked Terence.

“It won’t. It’s so preoccupied with pretending to be a doctor that it won’t think that you’re pretending to be a patient.”

“All right, then. But if things start going pear-shaped — ”

“I’ll be right behind you, Terence, I swear to God.”

Terence walked across the shingle driveway and went in through the front door. We could see him talking to the receptionist, and nodding. Then he sidled up to the waiting-room window so that we could see him, and tapped his wristwatch, to indicate that Duca was making him wait. We saw him pick up a copy of Picture Post and sit down.

A pigeon started up a monotonous mating call from the chimney tops. “Are you OK?” I asked Jill. “You’ve been acting kind of pensive this morning, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I didn’t sleep much,” she said. “Oh — nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with us. I kept having horrible dreams, that’s all.”

“Goes with the job, I’m sorry to say. I used to have a nightmare almost every single night, during the war.”

“I dreamed about this man who was walking around with no head. I was sitting in the living room, at home, and he tapped on the windows, as if he wanted me to let him in. I was so frightened I thought my heart was going to stop. I woke up, but every time I went back to sleep I had the same dream.”

The thin detective said, “There you are, sir. He’s going in.”

Terence was standing up. The receptionist showed him out of the room and then she came back in again, alone.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s see how long Terence can keep Duca talking about his imaginary hay fever.”

I entered the front garden with Jill following close behind me. We ducked our heads low, so that we were out of the receptionist’s line of sight. Skirting around the laurel bushes, we went up to the front door and I gently pushed it open. Inside, I could hear the receptionist typing, but she was interrupted by the telephone ringing.

“Dr. Watkins’s surgery!” she shrilled, at the top of her voice. “No, madam, Dr. Watkins is on his holidays at the moment! No, I don’t know how long for, I’m only temporary! But if you need to see a doctor right away, Dr. Duca is standing in for him! Duca, that’s correct!”

While she was screaming into the receiver, Jill and I crept into the hall. “Let’s start by making a search upstairs,” I whispered. “Let’s hope that Duca leaves the wheel in its bedroom during the day.”

“If your foot’s really painful, you should come in!” said the receptionist. “The doctor is only here until half-past twelve, but I could fit you in at a quarter to!”

Luckily for us, the door to the waiting room was open only three or four inches, and while the receptionist was talking on the phone her back was half-turned, so we were able to make our way along the hall without her seeing us. As we reached the bottom of the stairs she banged down the receiver and started typing again.

“I’ll take the bedrooms on the right,” I told Jill. “You take the bedrooms on the left. If the wheel isn’t in plain sight, go through every single drawer, but make sure you close them afterward. Ideally, I don’t want Duca to find out that we’ve taken it until it starts to get dark.”

I was just about to climb the stairs when the door to Duca’s surgery suddenly opened, and Duca came out. He looked at us in surprise, and then smiled.

“Well, well! So you two lovebirds have decided!”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “We talked it over, and — ah — decided.”

Duca laid its hand on Jill’s shoulder. “In my opinion, my beautiful young lady, I think you have made the most sensible choice. I have always believed that a woman should be in charge of her own destiny, at least as far as her womb is concerned.”

Terence came out of the surgery, too. He gave me an apologetic grimace. Duca turned to him and said, “Your allergy doesn’t seem to me to be so bad, Mr. Mitchell. The prescription I have given you for antihistamine tablets should alleviate your symptoms. They will make you a little drowsy, so if you are thinking of driving a steam-roller, I suggest that you don’t.” It gave a sharp, humorless laugh.

“All right, Doctor,” said Terence. “Thanks very much.”

Duca turned back to Jill. “Now let me see what I can do to give your desirable young bride the protection she requires.”

This was a seriously horrible moment. It had been one thing to pretend that we were engaged, and listen to Duca’s lip-licking descriptions of various methods of contraception. But to allow it to give Jill an intimate examination, when both of us were fully aware that it wasn’t even human, was enough to bring me to the edge of panic.

“On second thought — maybe we’re being too hasty,” I suggested. “Maybe we should leave it for today and come back tomorrow.”

“I have no surgery tomorrow, I regret,” said Duca. “Tomorrow I have. other obligations.”

“In that case, maybe we should leave it till after we’re married.”

“Is something wrong, my dear sir?” asked Duca, and there was something very knowing in his tone of voice, something very arch. I wondered if he might have remembered who I looked like, and guessed why I was here.

“Wrong? No, of course there’s nothing wrong. It’s just that this is a very important decision and I don’t want us to rush into doing something that we both regret.”

“I don’t see why you are so concerned. If you find that you dislike this particular method of birth control, all you have to do is to stop using it. But look at you. You seem very agitated. You are perspiring. Perhaps something else is worrying you.”

“Of course not. It’s a very warm day, that’s all.”

But it was then that Jill said, “It’s all right. Why doesn’t Dr. Duca examine me, and you can wait outside?” At the same time, she lifted her eyes toward the upstairs landing, and I realized what she was trying to tell me. While Duca is busy measuring my cervix, you can go looking for the wheel.

I didn’t know what to say. I felt that I had lost control of the situation, and to my own surprise I also felt both protective and jealous. Jill was trying to prove herself to me, trying to show me that she was brave enough to be a Screecher-hunter. But the proof that she was offering me was the same proof that she had offered me last night, as proof that she was attracted to me.

Duca laid his arm around her shoulders. His fingernails were very long, and pale, and immaculately manicured. Jill said, “Don’t worry, darling, honestly. I’ll be quite all right.” The way she called me “darling” made me feel even worse.

“You’re absolutely sure about this?” I asked her.

She nodded. What could I say, without arousing Duca’s suspicions? “All right,” I said. “I’ll wait for you in the car.”

Duca ushered her into its surgery and closed the door. I said to Terence, “Go get my Kit. Stay right outside. If I shout out, come on in as fast as you can.”

“God,” said Terence, “you’re not going to let it —?”

“I don’t have any choice. Hurry!”

Terence went out of the front door, and I ran up the stairs as quietly and as quickly as I could. If the worn-out stair carpet and the dusty window ledges were anything to go by, Dr. Watkins lived alone. No woman would have kept a vase of dried honesty on the landing, so old that the leaves had turned skeletal.

First of all I opened the bedroom door on the left. A guest bedroom, quite small and smelling of damp. Next to it was a bathroom, with a large pale green bath that was streaked with rust. I went to the bedrooms on the right. A medium-sized room, which must have been a schoolboy’s room once upon a time, with athletics trophies on the windowsill and a single model Spitfire still hanging from the ceiling, thick with woolly dust.

In the master bedroom stood a large mahogany bed with a pink satin quilt. The quilt and the pillows had been so fastidiously arranged that I knew that Duca must be sleeping here. Or resting, anyhow. Screechers don’t sleep in the same way that humans do, and so of course they never dream. The nearest they ever get to dreaming is a reverie about their lost humanity, and the people who used to love them.

I found Duca’s wheel at once. It was hanging on a fine gold chain from the side of the mirror on the dressing table. On top of the dressing table stood several bottles of hair lotion and cologne, as well as a miniature portrait of a young woman in an oval frame. I picked it up and looked at it more closely. I could see why Duca was so attracted to Jill. This young woman looked more Slavic than Jill, but she had similar features, with high cheekbones and feline eyes. The name Anca was written on the bottom of the portrait, in faded mauve ink.

I lifted the wheel off the mirror and dropped it into my coat pocket. Then I left the master bedroom on tiptoes and started to make my way downstairs. The door to the surgery was still closed and the receptionist was still pecking away at her typewriter.

I was only a little more than halfway down, however, when the surgery door opened and Duca appeared, sleeking back its hair with both hands. It looked up and saw me and said, “Aha!” It didn’t look angry, or outraged. Instead, it looked triumphant, as if it had known all along what Jill and I were doing here.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was looking for the bathroom.”

Duca pointed to a door right behind me. It had a hand-lettered card pinned to it: Patients’ Toilet.

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t see that! I must think about getting myself some eyeglasses.”

Duca glanced upstairs and then it looked back at me. “I think perhaps you were looking for something else, not a bathroom.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

It held out its hand. “I think perhaps you have taken something that does not belong to you.”

“Still don’t know what you mean.”

“I am not a fool, Mr. Billings, or whatever your real name is. I recognized your Romanian ancestry the moment you walked into my surgery. You think that I cannot smell where you come from, by your blood?

It took a step toward me, still holding out its hand. “I can also sense what you have stolen from me, Mr. Billings. I think it would be wise of you to return it to me, now.”

“Terence!” I shouted. “Terence!”

The front door was flung wide and Terence appeared, carrying my Kit. Duca swung around and spat, “You too? You with your ridiculous allergy to timothy grass? I should have guessed!”

“Oh, bugger,” said Terence.

“Jill!” I called her. “Jill — are you OK?”

Duca turned around again and faced me. I could see how furious it was, by the way it kept wincing, but its voice was cold and utterly controlled. “So it was you, then, who caught my two protégés? I am going to kill you for that, my friend. I am going to kill both of you, with much pain.”

“Jill!” I yelled. I was getting worried about her now. “Terence — bring me the Kit!”

Terence came toward us, holding up the Kit in both hands as if he were quite prepared to smash Duca on the head with it. I hoped that he didn’t, because I didn’t want anything broken.

I reached behind me and tugged my gun out of my belt. I pointed it directly at Duca’s chest and said, “I’ve had to wait a long time for this, Duca.”

“You know me? You know who I am?”

“Oh, yes. I know who you are. I also know what you are.”

“That is very flattering. But if you know me so well, you will know that you have absolutely no chance of catching me.”

“Terence,” I said, “do you want to open the Kit for me?”

“What?” said Duca. “You really believe that I am going to stand here and allow you to work your ridiculous hocus-pocus on me?”

“Terence, open the Kit and take out the Bible. Open it up where the ribbon is.”

Terence flicked open the catches, but before he could lift out the Bible, Duca lunged at me, and snatched my wrist. I fired at point-blank range, right through his perfectly tailored vest and into his lungs. The bang was so loud that the receptionist shrieked and dropped her telephone.

Duca stared at me, still holding my wrist. The expression on its face was unreadable. That’s one of the things about Screechers: they’ve lived so long and they’ve seen so much that you can never really understand what they’re thinking.

There was a three-second pause, and then Duca coughed, so that blood sprayed out from between its lips, all over my right cheek and all over the front of my coat. Then it smiled and said, “I want you to give me back my wheel, Mr. Billings.”

I tried to raise my gun so that I could give it a head shot, but it was far too strong for me. I strained and strained, with my teeth gritted and my elbow juddering, but I couldn’t manage to lift my arm more than a couple of inches. Duca had almost managed to pry the gun out of my hand when Jill appeared in the surgery doorway, unbalanced and bewildered. “What’s happening?” she said. She looked as if she was walking away from a car accident. “What’s happened to me?”

Duca turned, and as it turned, Terence held up the Bible — open, like before, at Apocalipsa, the Book of Revelation.

“Dah!” Duca protested, raising its hand to shield its face. It wasn’t totally blinded by the scripture, the way that Micky and Beryl had been, but all the same it twisted its head from side to side to keep the dazzle out of its eyes, and it had to let go of my wrist.

“Jim!” said Jill, reaching out for me.

Duca made a grab for her arm, presumably to use her as a human shield, but I fired at it again. I missed it, and blew a large chunk of plaster out of the wall, but Duca must have decided that it had had enough. It disappeared out of the front door, so fast that it was nothing but a gray flicker, like a moth’s wings.

“Terence!” I shouted. “Don’t let it get away!”

We hurried out of the house. We looked left and right, and at first we couldn’t see Duca anywhere. But the thin detective pointed upward and called out, “There, sir! Right behind you! Gone up the wall like a bleeding ferret!”

Terence and I turned around. Duca was climbing the ivy-covered wall, so fast that it had already reached the bedroom windows. The ivy rustled and tore as it surged its way upward, and it looked as if it were swimming through it, like a man swimming up a waterfall, rather than climbing. I raised my gun to take a shot at it, but by the time I had steadied my hand it had already reached the guttering and disappeared over the roof.

I ran around to the side of the house, just in time to see Duca leaping on top of the garage, and then to the roof of the garage next door, and then it was gone. There was no point in going after it now.

“That was bloody rotten luck,” said Terence, as I came back round to the front of the house.

I reached into my pocket and took out the wheel. “Not entirely,” I said, swinging it from side to side. “Duca’s still going to come looking for this.”

“You found it? That’s terrific. But now Duca knows who we are, doesn’t it, and what sort of a game we’re playing? You don’t think it’s just going to walk into a trap?”

“Of course not. We’ll have to be a little more ingenious, that’s all.”

The thin detective came up to me, shaking his head. “Never seen anything like that, sir. Never.”

“Never seen anything like what, detective?”

“Oh. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Take your point. Never happened, sir, did it?”

“No, detective. It never happened.”