Descendant

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