Descendant

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.

Bynes Road

We drove Bullet back to Beddington Park. The woods where the middle-aged woman and the little boy had been killed were already screened off with ten-foot-high sacking, and signs saying Metropolitan Police No Entry. I took the Kit out of the trunk of the car, and then we showed our identity cards to three sweating bobbies in shirtsleeves, who allowed us in.

Inspector Ruddock was still there, looking even closer to detonation than before. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “What the devil do you want?”

“We’re going to be following any trail that the perpetrators may have left behind them.”

“About bloody time. I wanted to get the dogs out hours ago, but believe it or not I was countermanded.” He pronounced “countermanded” as if it were one of the most disgusting words in the English language, like “mucus.”

“Yes, sir, I know,” I said, trying to calm him down, but that only made his eyes bulge and his nostrils flare even more widely. I have to say, though, that I loved apoplectic Englishmen like him, especially if they were on my side. They were like hand grenades with the pin out, morning till night.

Jill let Bullet off the leash and he scampered off through the woods. I gave Inspector Ruddock a halfhearted salute, and then I followed Bullet and Jill, carrying my Kit.

“Madness,” I heard Inspector Ruddock protesting. “Bloody lunacy, the whole bloody thing.”

In the clearing, we found two forensic scientists from the Metropolitan Police Laboratory at Hendon, still raking through the leaves and taking photographs.

“OK if we play through?” I asked them.

One of them stood up and took out a pipe. “Actually, old boy, we’ve just about finished here. No footprints, but plenty of blood samples. If you catch the blighters, we should be able to match them for you.”

He lit up his pipe, and he was sucking at it furiously when his companion came over, holding up his tweezers.

“George — have a dekko at this.” I thought he was showing us a leaf at first: a curled-up shred of something pale and wobbly, with turquoise-tinged edges.

George took out his pipe and peered at it. “Human skin,” he said, almost at once. I suddenly thought of the shots that I had fired at the ginger-haired girl, and the lumps of flesh that had sprayed out of her arm.

“That’s green,” said Jill.

“Of course, which tells us that the owner of this particular piece of skin must have been dead for at least twenty-four hours.”

I looked at Jill and gave her the slightest shake of my head. She looked back at me, wide-eyed. Don’t say a word about Screechers.

“Odd,” said George. “You haven’t had any earlier reports of any missing persons in this area, have we?”

“Not that I know of,” I told him. “But take that piece of skin back to your laboratory, would you, and preserve it? We might need it for evidence later.”

George said, “What’s going on here? I really get the feeling that we’re being kept in the dark.”

“Yes, you are. And for a very good reason.”

George took out his pipe again. “It’s not very helpful, you know, when they keep us in the dark. Hard to know what we’re supposed to be looking for.”

“You’re looking for anything that doesn’t seem to be natural. Like that piece of skin.”

“Hmm,” said George, frowning around the clearing as if he had lost something important.

Bullet picked up the Screechers’ trail almost immediately, and began to trot ahead of us with his nose down. He led us to the edge of the park, and out into the suburban streets again, heading back in the direction of Croydon Aerodrome. Every now and then we found spots of blood on the sidewalk, which indicated that the ginger-headed girl must have been pretty seriously wounded.

Jill said, “Another thing — I always thought that vampires could only come out at night.”

“You’re thinking about the nosferatu, like Dracula, and all the vampires you see in the movies.”

“The strigoi are different?”

“They have some similarities, but they’re more like distant cousins. The thing is, the strigoi were isolated for hundreds of years in the forests and mountains and small village communities in Romania, and because of that they became very inbred, and they developed different strengths and different weaknesses. They can walk around in sunlight, which the nosferatu can’t do, and they can eat normal food. And, like I say, there’s even a legend that female Screechers can even conceive.”

“How can a dead woman give birth to a live baby?”

“Search me. How can a dead woman walk around at all? But when a strigoi vii becomes a strigoi mort, there’s a radical change in its body chemistry. It becomes — I don’t know, like liquid mercury, and smoke. It can walk on ceilings and it can pass through a gap only an inch wide, which is why the people in Romania always close their windows at night, even in the summer.”

“Here, look,” said Jill. Bullet had reached a red mailbox at the corner of the street — what the British call a pillar box. The female Screecher must have leaned against it for a while, because there were splatters of blood on the asphalt pavement all around it, and a smear of blood on the white enamel plaque which gave the times of mail collections.

“I hope she hasn’t gone too much farther,” I said. We had already walked over a mile and a half, and we were close to the perimeter of the aerodrome.

But Bullet turned around and barked at us, and so we continued.

We climbed a grassy hill next to the main airfield, where young children were flying kites and kicking footballs. From here, we could see all the way across Croydon, with its Victorian town hall tower, and even as far as the City of London, and the dome of St. Paul’s. It could have been idyllic, “Earth has not anything to show more fair,” if we hadn’t been following that dogged black Labrador on the trail of strigoi.

As we crossed the grass, Jill said to me, “I was wondering how you started chasing Screechers. It’s rather a funny choice of career, don’t you think?”

“Hey — I’m not a professional Screecher-chaser. My real job is giving cultural advice to businessmen. You know, if American executives want to know how they should behave when they sell their products in Belgium, say, or Greece, or India, I tell them what the protocol is. In India, for instance, nobody ever says no. You want something they don’t have, they always tell you tomorrow.”

“So why Screechers?”

“My mother’s fault, most of all. She was Romanian. She told me all about the strigoi when I was little, and when I went to college I did a whole lot of research into