Descendant

grubby net curtains. Then I came back and wrapped the curtains around the Screecher’s heads.

“What are you doing, you tosser?” the young man said, spitting to get the net curtain out of its mouth.

“Guy Fawkes’ Night just came early,” I told it.

“What?”

I took the holy oil out of my Kit, unstoppered it and poured it over their wrapped-up heads.

“Bloody hell, that burns!” the young man shouted, tossing its head violently from side to side. The girl didn’t say anything, but sucked in its breath because the oil hurt so much.

I took a box of Swan Vestas and struck one, holding it up in front of them so that they could see the flame.

“Now do you want to tell me where Duca is hiding?”

“You’re mad, you are!” the young man screamed. “I’m not going to tell you nothing!”

“The choice is yours, buddy. How about you, sweetheart, are you going to tell me where Duca is?”

“Go to hell,” the girl retorted, its voice muffled under the nets.

“In that case, you don’t leave me any alternative.” The match had burned right down to my fingers and I had to blow it out and take out another one.

At that moment, though, Jill came back into the living room. She looked wide-eyed at the two Screechers with the net curtains wrapped around their heads, but she didn’t ask me what I was doing. Instead, she said, “I’ve just spoken to Terence. He’s identified the car.”

“Well, that’s good news for these two. Comparatively speaking.”

Jill had written the car-owner’s address on the back of a laundry bill. “It belongs to Dr. Norman Watkins, the Laurels, Pampisford Road, South Croydon. He’s in general practice, but most of his patients are private.”

“So. I wonder what a strigoi mort is doing, driving his car around?”

“Terence is leaving now. He’s going to collect his car from Beddington Park, and then he’s coming over here with a van. He says that he shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

“That’s plenty of time. Do you want to take Bullet for a walk while I do the necessary?”

Jill said, “All right. Come on, Bullet.” But when she reached the door she hesitated. “Do you have to do this? I mean, is there really no other way?”

“Come on, Jill — you saw for yourself what these two jokers are capable of. And once they become strigoi mortii they’ll spread their infection like wildfire.”

“Can’t they be given a proper trial?”

“Jill — justice is a human right. These goddamn things are halfway to losing their humanity already.”

“Duca will drain your blood, even if we can’t,” said the gingery-haired girl. “I promise you that, you piece of shit. I promise both of you.”

“Watch your language,” I told it.

Smoke and Mirrors

Terence arrived just after 5:00 PM, followed closely by a dark blue Austin van. Jill and I were sitting on the low brick wall in front of the house, with the mid-August sun in our eyes.

The van was driven by a whippet-thin man in a brown boiler suit, with a sharp purple nose and hair that stuck up at the back of his head. His companion was big and silent, with a blue-shaved head and a scar under his nose where his harelip had been sewn up.

Without a word, the two of them opened the back doors of the van and carried two folded-up coal sacks into the house. Terence went in after them and came out almost immediately, looking queasy. “My God, ‘Jim.’ ”

“Nobody said that it was pleasant.”

“I know, but all the same.” He pressed his hand over his mouth and held it there for a while, his eyes watering. “My God. I wish I hadn’t had those sausages for lunch.”

Micky and Beryl hadn’t been easy to kill, especially since I was on my own, and I wasn’t nearly as young and as fit as I used to be during the war. The only way to kill them together was to force Beryl facedown onto the floor, with Micky on top of her, facing upward. Even though they were both restrained, they still twisted and fought and cursed, and I had to wedge their shoulders underneath the legs of a dining chair to keep them still. I hammered each nail directly into Micky’s eye sockets, and at nine inches they were just long enough to penetrate the back of Beryl’s skull, too, which was sufficient to numb her. Then I got out my saw and cut through their necks, leaving both of their heads in the kitchen sink.

The driver and his companion came shuffling out of the house, with one of the sacks swaying heavily between them. Terence winced and looked in the opposite direction. “What do you plan to do about Duca?” he asked.

“Go after it,” I told him. “But this isn’t something we can rush. Duca’s going to be a hell of a lot wilier than these two, and much more difficult to nail down. We need to do some reconnaissance first.”

“What’s your suggestion?”

“Well, it’s posing as a doctor, isn’t it? So let’s make a doctor’s appointment.”

Pampisford Road was a three-mile-long avenue that ran along the east side of Croydon Aerodrome. Most of its houses had been built in the mid-1930s — large detached residences hidden behind laurel hedges — but they weren’t as opulent as Jill’s parents’ house, and most of them weren’t nearly so well maintained. Their front gates were sagging on their hinges and their gardens were overgrown with weeds.

We parked on the grass verge about fifty yards away from the Laurels and walked the rest of the way, leaving Bullet in the car. On the gatepost there was a tarnished brass nameplate with the name Dr. Norman Watkins, FRCS, General Practitioner, engraved on it. Beyond the gate there was a shingled driveway, where Dr. Watkins’s Armstrong-Siddeley was parked. The house was pebbledashed and painted white, although the pebbledash was gray from years of weathering and there was a bright green streak of damp down one wall, where the guttering was broken.

I said, “You can see why Duca chose a practice like this. Dr. Watkins was running it single-handed, and from the looks of things, he was probably pretty old. He wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.”

“What’s the plan, then?” asked Terence. The windows of the house were black and curtainless, and the interior looked deeply forbidding, with dark antique furniture and mirrors on the walls. In the dining-room mirror, we could see ourselves standing in the driveway, our faces pale and distorted, like reflections in a lake.

“Why don’t you keep watch from the road?” I told Terence. “Jill and I will go in and try to see Duca.”

“You’re actually going to go in and talk to him?”

“It,” I corrected him. “Never forget that it’s an it. But, yes. We can make out that we’re just about to get married, and we need some information on birth control.”

Jill looked at me and gave me a nervous smile.

“Well,” I said, “we don’t want a whole lot of baby Falcons around, do we? Not just yet.”

“Do you need your Kit?” asked Terence.

I shook my head. “This is a recce, that’s all. But if you hear any gunfire, bring it in — and bring it in quick.”

Terence retreated to the sidewalk just outside the Laurels, standing behind the hedge and lighting a cigarette. Jill and I crunched over the shingle to the maroon-painted front door. There was another brass sign on it — polished, this time — which said KINDLY ENTER. I turned the doorknob and we went inside.

The house was stuffy, as if nobody had opened a window in a very long time, and there was an underlying smell of boiled fish. The hallway was tiled in a diamond pattern of black and white, with a hideous oak coat stand, and four or five dead flies lying on their backs on the windowsills.

A doorway to the left-hand side was open, and I could hear typing. I went in, and Jill followed me. A middle- aged woman in a pale green tailored suit was sitting very upright at a desk, her head slightly raised so that she could see through the lower half of her bifocal spectacles, pecking away at a huge black typewriter.

Opposite her stood a row of bentwood chairs, and a low table with a collection of dog-eared magazines on it — John Bull and the Illustrated London News and Horse & Hound.