Descendant

“It was your mother, Captain. Maricica Falcon, nee Loveinescu.”

“My mother? What the hell are you talking about? My mother died of a heart attack at home in California.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, no she didn’t. When you were being trained to hunt strigoi, you told your instructors that you learned most of your basic information about vampires from your mother. The counterintelligence detachment sent some people to talk to her, and they found out that she knew almost as much about the strigoi as you did. Not only that, she had some practical knowledge, too. Like, how to seal strigoi mortii into lead caskets, in such a way that they couldn’t escape.”

I was stunned. My mother had been sent to capture Duca? I had never thought that she believed in the strigoi. In fact, she had always said that they were only stories, to frighten naughty children into behaving themselves.

I thought of my father, sitting on the veranda, his eyes glistening with tears. “She had a problem with her heart,” he had told me, hoarsely. “And now I have a problem with mine.” He must have known what had happened to her, and yet he had never said a word. He had even emptied her ashes into the sea at Bodega Bay, which used to be one of her favorite places. Except that they couldn’t have been her ashes at all.

London, 1957

They had reserved me a sleeping berth on the TWA flight to London so that I would be rested and ready to start work as soon as I arrived, but shortly after I dozed off I started having terrifying nightmares. The droning of the airliner’s turboprop engines gradually turned into the noise of a huge, dark factory crammed with strange machines for crushing people’s bones, and I found myself running past dripping pipes and greasy electric cables, with a dark figure running just ahead of me. I knew that I was supposed to catch up with this figure, but I was frightened to run too fast, in case I did.

After less than four hours, however, it began to grow light, and the flight attendant brought me a cup of coffee. “Are you all right, sir?” she smiled. “You were shouting in your sleep.” She had very blue eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“Oh, yes? What was I shouting?”

“I don’t know. Something about teachers, I think. You were telling them to get off you.”

“Teachers? If only.”

It was surprisingly hot when we landed in England, well over eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless. As I came down the steps of the plane, I was greeted by a young man with wavy Brylcreemed hair and sunglasses. The only concession he had made to the heat was to take off his tweed coat and hang it over his arm, and roll up his shirtsleeves.

“Captain Falcon? How do you do, I’m Terence Mitchell.”

“How are you?” I asked him, and shook his hand, which was soft and sweaty.

“Hope you had a comfortable flight, sir?”

“Well, it was certainly a darn sight faster than the last time I did it.”

“They’ll be bringing in jets next year, and that’ll make it even quicker. Six hours to New York, or so I believe. Amazing when you think it takes six days by boat. This way, sir. I’ve got a car waiting outside.”

I hadn’t been back to England since the end of the war, but it hadn’t changed much. The same flat smell of English cigarettes and body odor. The same dinky little cars and red double-decker buses. The same clipped accents, as if everybody had been to elocution school.

“Don’t worry about your things,” said Terence. “I’ve arranged to have them sent straight round to your hotel.”

A beige Humber Hawk was parked by the curb outside the terminal, with a uniformed bobby standing beside it. The bobby gave Terence a nod as we approached, and strolled off. Terence opened the door for me and then climbed in himself. “Gasper?” he said, taking out a box of Player’s cigarettes.

“No thanks. I gave up two years ago. Had a cough I couldn’t get rid of.”

“You won’t mind if I do?”

We drove out of the terminal and along the Great West Road toward the center of the city.

“Good book?” asked Terence, nodding at the blue-bound volume I had brought to read on the flight.

“Comparative Folk Mythologies of Dobrudja,” I told him, holding it up.

“Oh. I’m more of a Nevile Shute man myself.”

It always surprised me how green London was. The narrow streets were bursting with trees, and every little front yard had its bushes and its neatly trimmed hedge. Among the rows of houses stood the tranquil spires of Victorian churches, which gave the suburbs the appearance of order and respectability and enduring faith.

“Very nasty business this, sir,” said Terence, with his cigarette waggling between his lips. “Seven more fatalities yesterday morning, in Croydon.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ all the time, really. Jim will be fine.”

“Right-oh. Jim it is.” He pronounced it as though it had inverted commas. He looked ridiculously young to be an SIS operative, but he was probably the same age as I was when I was hunting the strigoi during the war. He was pale and round-shouldered, and he reminded me of one of those young English pilots you see clustered around Spitfires in wartime photographs, all smiling and most of them doomed to be incinerated alive before their twenty-first birthdays.

“How are you managing to keep this out of the news?” I asked him.

“It’s been jolly difficult, to tell you the truth. Fortunately there’s been some Korean influenza going around, so most of the time we can blame it on that.”

“These seven. in where did you say?”

“Croydon. It’s a borough, about ten miles south of London. Not the most attractive spot on earth. Pretty grotty, as a matter of fact.”

“Were they all in the same room when they were killed?”

“Yes, apart from one lad. They found his body upstairs. Only eleven years old. Very nasty business. They all belonged to the same family, except for one of them, an elderly lady who was a friend of theirs. It was a birthday party. Shocking. There was blood all over the food.”

“You haven’t touched anything?”

“The bodies have been taken away, but that’s all. Everything else is just as we found it.”

“OK. but I’ll need to take a look at the bodies, later.”

We were coming into West Kensington now, past the Natural History Museum and the Brompton Oratory, and the traffic was beginning to build up. As we reached Harrods store in Knightsbridge, Terence tossed his cigarette out of the window and took out a fresh one, tapping it on the steering wheel to tamp down the loose tobacco. “The first murders were on the 23rd of May, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. Eleven men and two women at a business conference.”

“I read the police reports. I saw the photographs, too. Property developers, weren’t they?”

“Estate agents. It was a total fluke that we found out who might have killed them.”

“Oh, yes?”

“One of our senior chaps just happened to be round at Scotland Yard for some security powwow when the news about the murders first came in. Look at that bloody cyclist! He must have a death wish!” He leaned out of the window and shouted, “Nutcase!”

“Go on,” I told him.

“Oh, yes. As luck would have it, our chap used to liaise with US counterintelligence during the war, and he remembered that your people always wanted to be urgently notified of any mass killings, especially if the victims had their hearts cut out, or the blood drained out of them. At the time, your people never actually told him why they wanted to be notified, or what it was all about, and our chap still had no idea what it was all about, but he thought, ‘Hallo! Mass killing — people with all the blood drained out of them,’ and he got on to your