Descendant

pulled out the heart of only one of the school’s First Eleven.

“Can I talk to you again later?” I asked the coppery-haired pathologist.

“Of course. Here’s my telephone number. You can always leave a message for me, and I’ll get back to you.”

She handed me a card with Rosemary Shulman, MD, FRCPath printed on it.

Inspector Ruddock came up to us, blowing his nose on a large white handkerchief. “Any ideas, then?”

“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But I’m beginning to think that only three Screechers did this. They usually go out in threes — two living Screechers and one dead one. The question is, why did they need to kill two entire cricket teams just for a few pints of blood?”

“Off their bloody rockers, if you ask me. Mental cases.”

“Screechers are lots of things, but they’re not mad. They killed all of these people for a reason.”

“They were witnesses, weren’t they?” said Inspector Ruddock, as if he were talking to a very slow child. “That’s why they killed all of those people on the 403. They were witnesses.”

“But why attack so many people when you don’t need their blood and so many of them are going to be able to identify you, unless you slaughter everybody in sight? It doesn’t make any sense. Why not attack a young couple walking home at night, or a couple of cyclists in a country lane? Nobody would see you do it, and so you wouldn’t need a wholesale massacre to cover it up.”

“I told you,” said Inspector Ruddock. “Mental cases. Lunatics. They do it for the thrill of it, that’s all.”

Black Trap

We spent the rest of the afternoon at Chalmer’s School. Charles Frith pulled some strings with Scotland Yard and at 3:30 PM a dog and a trainer arrived. The dog was a German shepherd called Skipper and his trainer was an ex-military policeman called Stanley Kellogg.

Skipper was far from being an ideal dog for Screecher-trailing. The scent of Screechers made his fur bristle and he was very reluctant to follow it, keening and barking and trotting around in circles. Sergeant Kellogg wasn’t much more help. He was boneheaded and pedantic and he repeatedly made it clear that he strongly objected to taking orders from an American attached to MI6.

“This isn’t an easy one for me, sir, as you can probably appreciate. I have been instructed to look for persons or objects about which I have been told absolutely nothing except that I am going to be told absolutely nothing.”

“This isn’t personal, Sergeant,” I said. “It’s just that we didn’t have time to get you the necessary security clearance. I’m sure that you and Skipper have all the necessary skills to do us proud.”

“With respect, sir, whatever persons or objects that Skipper is supposed to be trailing, the scent of them is causing him considerable apprehension, and since Skipper and me is so closely bonded, I would very much appreciate some idea of what they is or are.”

“Sergeant, what they are is irrelevant. All you need to know is that they have murdered twenty people on a cricket field and we have to track them down before they murder anybody else.”

The bodies had been removed now, but Skipper was quick to pick up the scent, as much as it unsettled him. Although it was only midafternoon, the sky was dark maroon, as if the clouds had been soaked in blood. I could see lightning over Croydon Aerodrome. We followed Skipper across the playing fields to the far side of Chalmer’s School, which bordered on to a suburban street. The Screechers had obviously entered the school from this direction, climbing over the green iron railings.

Skipper led us along the street to a quiet dead end street, or “cul-de-sac.” There, the trail ended. The Screechers must have arrived here by car — parked, and then walked to the school playing fields.

“Sorry, sir,” said Sergeant Kellogg, with undisguised smugness. “Think your persons or objects have been spirited away.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll call for you again if I need you.”

“Let’s hope not, sir.”

I raised an eyebrow, but he quickly added, “Wouldn’t want to see any more fatalities, sir, would we?”

I walked back to the school. I found Dr. Rosemary Shulman in the parking lot, beside a dark blue Home Office van, packing up her medical bag and her notes and taking off her lab coat.

“Who’s going to be carrying out the autopsies?” I asked her.

“Well, I am, in conjunction with the Croydon coroner.”

“Did you deal with any of the previous killings?”

“All except the first ones, at the Selsdon Park Hotel. I was on holiday then.”

“Have they all been the same — with only a small proportion of the victims with their hearts pulled out?”

“No, they haven’t, as a matter of fact. Each incident has been very different. In one case we had a family of five killed in a caravan in Warlingham, and four out of five of them were exsanguinated. But in another case, in Streatham, seven were killed at a Boy Scout get-together but only two were exsanguinated.”

“Those victims who weren’t exsanguinated,” I asked her. “Did they have anything in common? I was looking at the victims here, and it occurred to me that whoever did this, they mostly cut the hearts out of the older people.”

Dr. Shulman folded her lab coat neatly and tucked into the back of her van. “I can’t be sure without checking my records, but it’s worth looking into, isn’t it? The only victim in the caravan killing who wasn’t exsanguinated was a girl of eleven. Everybody else in the family was older — older brother, parents, uncle and aunt, cousin.”

“OK. that’s interesting. Can you go through the figures for me, with a particular focus on age? Also, can you look for any other distinctions between the victims who were drained of blood and the victims who weren’t. Such as — I don’t know — blood type, or medical history, or ethnic background?”

“Of course. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can.”

“Even if you don’t find anything, can you still let me know?”

“Naturally,” said Dr. Shulman, and climbed into her van, and drove off.

It was past 6:00 PM by the time Terence and I had finished at Chalmer’s School, so we drove back to his mother’s house for supper. We sat at the kitchen table and she served us shepherd’s pie with carrots and cauliflower. I had never eaten shepherd’s pie before — ground lamb topped with mashed potato — but I was hungry and I think I enjoyed it. At least Mrs. Mitchell seasoned her meat with plenty of salt and pepper and Lea & Perrins sauce. Apart from Mya Foxley’s Burmese curry, most of the food that I had been served since I had arrived in England had been very inferior quality and almost tasteless. You wouldn’t have believed that the war had been over for twelve years.

While Terence went upstairs to visit the bathroom, I helped his mother by drying the plates.

“He’s a good boy, my Terence,” she said. “Very thoughtful. Always brings me a bunch of flowers on pay day.”

“I’m glad to hear it. A young man should always respect his mother.”

“How about your mother, Jim? Do you get to see much of her?”

“My mother passed away before the end of the war.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. She must have been quite young.”

“Forty-eight, but she didn’t look it. She was Romanian. Dark-haired, very beautiful. I can still remember the songs she used to sing me. In Romania they call them doina. They have sad doina and happy doina and love doina and doina for singing your kids to sleep.”

“You miss her,” said Terence’s mother.

“Yes. I never had the chance to say good-bye to her. Not the way I wanted to.”

I thought of my father and I standing on the dock at Bodega Bay, letting those light gray ashes run between our fingers into the sea, and they weren’t even hers. For all I know, my father had dug them out of the living room hearth, and they were nobody’s.