1941. We had drunk sweet white wine in the yard while cherry blossoms blew all around us like snow and my mother had sung Romanian
“
The casket had been examined by an Air Ministry crash-investigation team led by Professor Roger Braithwaite, who was renowned worldwide for his expertise on unusual air accidents. Apparently it had been secured to the floor of the DC3 with webbing straps, but these had snapped on impact when the aircraft crashed. The casket had slid forward, smashing into the copilot’s seat and breaking his back.
Terence passed me a selection of black-and-white photographs. These showed the casket from four different angles, resting on a trestle in a large empty hangar, with several bespectacled men in laboratory coats standing around it. It appeared to be fashioned out of a thick lead alloy, beaten and welded by hand. It measured approximately nine feet long, three feet wide and two feet six inches deep. It weighed over 750 pounds.
When it was lifted out of the aircraft, the casket was tightly fastened with two lengths of braided silver wire, which formed a cross over the lid. At 6:45 on the evening of May 17th, Professor Braithwaite jotted in his notebook that he had decided to cut this wire and take the lid off the casket to see what was inside.
The next morning, May 18th, when RAE technicians opened up the hangar, they noticed that the casket appeared to be intact, but the silver wire had been neatly cut and was lying on the floor. There was no sign of Professor Braithwaite or his two assistants.
By 6:00 PM that day, Professor Braithwaite and his assistants had still failed to put in an appearance, and none of them were answering their home phone numbers. The security services were immediately notified, and a major search initiated. Watches were kept on all British ports and airports, and roadblocks set up in Hampshire and Surrey. Several houses were searched, including Professor Braithwaite’s holiday cottage in the Lake District.
Some days later, when the press made polite inquiries about Professor Braithwaite’s whereabouts, they were told that he had flown to the United States to undertake several weeks of “background research.” It’s hard to remember how trusting the press used to be in those days.
To date, though, neither Professor Braithwaite nor his assistants had been sighted anywhere, dead or alive, and there was no evidence to explain what might have happened to them.
Except, of course, the empty casket. The lid of the casket was still in place on the morning of May 18th, but investigators were able to lift it open without difficulty. Inside they found it to be lined with whitethorn wood, and thickly bedded with dried garlic flowers and wild roses. On one side lay an empty sack made of thin brown linen, like a torn-open shroud. There was a deep impression in the petals, as if somebody had been lying there, motionless, for a very long time.
“Didn’t anybody suspect what had happened, even then?” I asked Charles Frith. “Didn’t anybody think to ask what kind of creature could have been lying in a sealed casket for nearly thirteen years, without air, or food, or water?”
“Afraid not, old man. Security services are never very good at communicating with each other, at the best of times.”
“Somebody could have used their imagination.”
“Imagination?” Charles Frith blinked at me as if I had used a four-letter word. “Not a requirement for MI6, I’m sorry to say.”
The police reports on all of the recent killings were depressingly similar, and all of the photographs, too. Heaps of bodies with their clothes torn open, their abdomens sliced apart and their hearts pulled out from underneath their rib cages. Men, women and children — even toddlers, in little white socks. In the background, cheap floral wallpaper, decorated with loops and spatters of blood. Nobody had ever seen anybody entering the crime scenes. Nobody had ever seen anybody leave.
“We’re um — we’re quite certain that this is the work of — you know —
“No doubt about it. One
“More tea?”
“No thanks. I think I’ll go to my hotel, if that’s all right with you, and take a shower. I need to call my wife, too. Then I want to go to this house in Croydon and take a look at this birthday party. Terence, do you think you can arrange for our dog handler to meet us there? Say about three-thirty?”
“I don’t anticipate any problem with that, ‘Jim.’ I’ll give her a tinkle.”
I stood up and Charles Frith stood up, too. “Tremendously pleased to have you on board, Captain Falcon.”
“Well, me too, sir. I have a very personal interest in catching this particular Screecher.”
“Really?”
“It’s a long story, sir. I’ll report back to you later.”
“Ears. Good. Oh — but there’s one more thing. You’ve been issued with a side arm. Colt.45 automatic, I gather. It’s all been approved but I have to ask you to be very discreet with it. This
“Of course,” I told him.
“Ears,” he repeated.
On the way back along the corridor, I said to Terence, “He kept saying ‘ears.’ What did he mean by that?”
“Oh. that’s English upper-class for ‘yes.’ ”
House of Flies
For my first night in England, the SIS had booked me a room at the Strand Palace Hotel. It was comfortable in a well-worn, shabby way, although the traffic was so noisy that I had to close my window, and the furniture reeked of cigarettes. I booked a transatlantic call to Louise, and tried to take a shower. The showerhead gurgled, and sneezed, and then dribbled. I took a shallow bath instead.
I was lucky. It could take hours before a call to the States came through, but the operator rang me back after only twenty minutes. Louise answered, and although she sounded quite close, I kept hearing an echo, so that she said everything twice.
“I’m going to the Marriotts’ this evening. They’re having a cookout they’re having a cookout.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Are you going to see your sister this weekend?”
“I don’t know, it depends if Dick’s coming home if Dick’s coming home.”
“Listen, I have to go, but I love you.”
“Be careful, Jimmy, won’t you please won’t you please?”
“I’ll be careful.” I hadn’t been allowed to tell her what I was doing here in England — only that it was connected with my work for the intelligence services during the war. But Louise wasn’t the kind of woman to be easily fooled. She had stood in the bedroom doorway watching me pack as intently as if she were making an 8mm home movie in her head — a home movie that she could play back later, in her mind’s eye, if I never came back to her.
I had known Louise since college. We had dated once or twice, and had a good time together, but Louise was always much more serious than I was. She liked string quartets and art galleries and live theater, while I preferred beer and swing music and W. C. Fields movies. Not that I wasn’t academic. You couldn’t help being academic, with a father like mine. But I wasn’t a
