Descendant

Inspector Ruddock was standing in front of a large map of South London, drinking very strong tea from a Coronation mug. This time he didn’t even say how irritated he was to see me. He simply grunted and lifted his mug toward the map.

“We’ve had one sighting outside the Swan and Sugar Loaf public house and another at West Croydon station. Not confirmed, mind you, but it looks as if your Duca might be trying to make his way to Central London.

“He was seen in the backseat of a brown Ford Consul, with another man driving. The other man could be Mr. Terence Mitchell, although we can’t confirm that either.”

“How soon can I get a dog?” I asked him.

“A dog’s not much good for following a car.”

“I need a dog, Inspector. If I have a dog, I can track down all of the people that Duca has infected, and if I can find them, I can find Duca. They know where it is.”

George Goodhew arrived, looking tired and hot and harassed. He was a short, podgy young man, with a wave of thinning blond hair, and he always wore his suspenders too tight, so that his pants flapped around his ankles. He was only thirty-three, but he had been appointed Deputy Director of MI6 because he had graduated from Birmingham University. The government were trying to look egalitarian, while at the same time quietly trying to dismantle the Oxbridge elite who had dominated the British security services for so many years.

“Bloody hell,” said George, when I told him what had happened at the Laurels. “So now we’ve got how many Screechers on the loose?”

“Ten, maybe a dozen. It wasn’t easy to count. But this could be the chance we’ve been waiting for. Now that we’ve smoked them out of their nest, they’ll have to go to ground someplace, and my guess is that most of them will make their way back home, to their original addresses. Which I believe I may have, in Dr. Watkins’s appointments book.”

George checked his wristwatch. “Your dog handler shouldn’t be long. He comes highly recommended, from RAF Brize Norton. I must say, though, you’ll have your work cut out for you.”

The search for Duca and Terence went on throughout the night, until it began to grow light. The Daily Express had got wind of the fact that dozens of police were combing the streets of South London, but they were told that a Soviet spy had escaped from custody at Padding-ton Green, and police suspected that he might be seeking refuge with his former contacts in Norbury.

At a quarter of eight, my dog handler still hadn’t arrived, and I was hungry, sweaty and exhausted. I decided to go back to Thornton Heath for a bath and a change of clothes and a couple of hours’ sleep. I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to tell Terence’s mother, but she was used to him not coming home for days on end, and I doubted if she would even ask me where he was.

I was just about to leave when George held up his telephone receiver and said, “Call for you, Captain Falcon. Dr. Shulman. The switchboard passed her through from MI6.”

“Thanks,” I said, and took the phone from him.

“Captain Falcon?” said Dr. Shulman, making no attempt to conceal her impatience. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday evening.”

“Yes, Doctor, I know. I’ve been kind of. tied up.”

“I carried out the tests that you suggested. I think you may be on to something quite significant.”

“Go on.”

“Out of the total number of known victims since these attacks began, which is now one hundred and twenty- seven, only forty-eight had their hearts removed and any blood drained from their circulatory system. That’s less than thirty-eight percent. A very high proportion of these forty-eight were noticeably older than the remaining seventy-nine — twenty-five years old and upward.”

“Which led you to conclude what, exactly?”

“It was the blood that told us the story. We took samples from every single victim and analyzed them exhaustively. We found considerable variations in the proportions of red and white corpuscles, as well as other indicators such as urea and salts and proteins. However none of these variations seemed to bear any relation to whether a victim had been drained of blood or not.

“There was only one consistently common factor which was shared by the victims who had been killed but not drained of blood. They had all recently been vaccinated against polio.”

“Polio?”

“Well, I expect you know that there’s been an epidemic of polio, especially in London and the Midlands. Scores of people have been killed or paralyzed. The Health Ministry have been vaccinating schoolchildren in their hundreds.”

“I’ve been reading about that, yes.”

“They sent six hundred doses to Coventry, and they’re desperately trying to get more.”

“That’s the Salk vaccine, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. They inject children with the dead polio virus, but it immunizes them against the live polio virus.”

I felt an extraordinary surge of emotion — almost triumph. It all made sense to me now. The Screechers hadn’t been killing such large numbers of people because they were wantonly sadistic — or because they were trying to silence any witnesses, as Inspector Ruddock had believed. They had been desperately trying to find victims whose blood didn’t yet contain the new vaccine against poliomyelitis.

They didn’t dare to drink the blood of anybody who had been vaccinated, and it was easy to understand why. The Salk vaccine was made of dead polio viruses. Dead polio viruses didn’t affect humans. But when a strigoi vii was transformed into a strigoi mort, all of the dead and dying cells in its body were revived. Not only revived, but enhanced so much that the strigoi mort became immortal. So if it had polio viruses in its bloodstream, the viruses would be revived, too. The strigoi mort might be immortal, but it would be totally paralyzed.

“Dr. Shulman,” I said, “you’re an angel. You’ve made my day.”

“Well, I think you must be some kind of an angel, too, Captain Falcon. We certainly wouldn’t have thought of making comparative blood tests if it hadn’t been for you.”

I put down the phone. George said, “Has something happened?”

“Yes, George, I believe it has. I believe we’ve found the way to wipe out these goddamned Screechers for good and all.”

“You mean it? You really mean it? That’s a bloody relief.”

I was just about to leave the operations center when a young man in a blue RAF uniform appeared, with his cap tucked under his arm.

“I’m looking for Captain Falcon.”

“That’s me. You must be the dog handler I asked for.”

“That’s right, sir. Warrant Officer Tim Headley, sir. Keston’s outside in my van.”

W/O Headley was a serious-looking young man with very thick eyebrows and very blue eyes and very red cheeks. His hair stuck up in a sprig at the back as if he were about six years old, and he had been sleeping on it.

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Warrant Officer Headley. I’ll call you Tim and you can call me Jim.”

“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.”

“Listen, Tim, I have to go back to my diggings right now to change my clothes and take a bath, but then we’ll be ready for action. I have a list of addresses for Keston to go sniffing around, and I’m pretty confident that we’ve found a way of dealing with the characters we’re likely to find there. How much have you been briefed?”

Tim’s cheeks flushed even redder. “I’ve got a rough idea of what’s going on, sir. I’ve been told to keep it very hush-hush.”

“Do you know what it is we’re going after?”

“I was told some pretty odd types.”

“ ‘Some pretty odd types?’ ” I hesitated, wondering if I ought to tell him more. But then I said, “Yes, OK. ‘Pretty odd types.’ I guess that just about sums them up.”

Tim drove me to Thornton Heath in his RAF Police van. I felt as if I had gone through fifteen rounds with Rocky Marciano — bruised, exhausted, with a thumping headache. But Dr. Shulman’s discovery had got my adrenaline going and I couldn’t wait to start hunting down Screechers.