Descendant

Keston turned out to be a large German shepherd with a shaggy coat and a black face. It was hot in the back of the police van, and he panted on the back of my neck all the way to Terence’s mother’s house.

“Keston’s a whiz at finding deserters,” said Tim. “One chap was hiding in an empty water tower, fifty feet above the ground. Keston sniffed him out, didn’t you, boy?”

Keston barked about two inches behind my head.

“You found him, didn’t you, boy? None of the other dogs could, but you did!”

Another bark. I turned to Tim and said, “No more compliments, OK? My head won’t take it.”

We parked outside Terence’s mother’s house. “Do you mind if I bring Keston in for a bowl of water?” asked Tim.

“You can bring him in for a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich for all I care.”

Tim was opening up the back of the van when I noticed that the front door of Terence’s mother’s house was open. I looked up and down the street. Although it wasn’t yet 9:00 AM, the morning was glaringly bright and very hot. There were only two other cars parked anywhere nearby, and a motorcycle with sidecar.

I approached the front door cautiously. Maybe I was overreacting. After all, the temperature was almost in the 70s already, and Mrs. Mitchell might have left her door open for a cooling draft. But the house was unusually silent. Mrs. Mitchell always kept her wireless on, humming along to Sound Track Serenade and Johnny Dun-can’s Song Bag.

“Mrs. Mitchell!” I called out. “Mrs. Mitchell!”

There was no answer. Tim was coming through the front gate now, with Keston.

“Everything OK?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure. Probably.”

But as I opened the front door a little wider, Keston started to whine and lower his head, like a dog who has been smacked on the nose for misbehavior.

“Mrs. Mitchell!”

I stepped into the narrow hallway. Tim tried to bring Keston in after me, but he scrabbled his claws on the path and refused to come into the house.

“Keston! Scent, boy! Come on, boy!”

Still Keston refused to come any further. Tim dragged at his leash, but he wouldn’t budge.

“He’s never acted up like this before, never.”

“Maybe there’s something here that he seriously doesn’t like the smell of.”

“Keston! Come along, lad! Keston!”

I took out my gun and cocked it. I had no more Last Supper bullets left, but I had reloaded with a clip of regular bullets, rubbed with garlic. Not nearly so effective at stopping a strigoi vii, but hopefully still enough to give me a few seconds’ advantage.

I went down the hallway and eased open the kitchen door. The green floral curtains were drawn, and the main overhead light was still burning. There was a single saucepan on top of the New World gas cooker, and the table was laid for one, with a place mat and a soup spoon.

Tim came up behind me. “Keston won’t budge. I’ve had to put him back in the van. I’m really sorry about this.”

“He’s been spooked, Tim. And I can’t say that I blame him. I’m spooked, too.”

We both listened. All I could hear was the droning of those hairy blue blowflies the British call bluebottles. Scores of bluebottles.

I stepped into the kitchen. I could smell vegetable soup, but I could also smell that distinctive rotten-chicken odor of dried human blood. At the far side of the kitchen there was a door with frosted-glass panels which led through to the scullery and then to the backyard. The frosted-glass panels were spattered with dark brown spots.

Tim said, “Oh, God.”

“How about going back to your van and calling George Goodhew for me?” I asked him.

“Somebody’s been killed here, haven’t they?”

“It sure smells like it. But if you don’t want to see it — look, I lost my last dog handler because she couldn’t take the sight of people with their insides hanging out.”

“Is that what you’re expecting to find?” Tim’s face was very pale, although his cheeks were still fiery.

“I don’t know. Let’s take a look, shall we?”

I opened up the scullery door. I had been prepared to see all kinds of horrors, but at first I couldn’t really understand what I was looking at. Tim made a retching noise and clamped his hand over his mouth. Then he hurried back through the kitchen and out into the hallway and I could hear him noisily vomiting in the front garden.

On the side wall of the scullery, in a grisly display of blasphemy and butchery, both Mrs. Mitchell and Terence had been nailed, completely naked and upside down, their feet together but their hands outspread.

Their heads had been sawn off, and underneath each of their gaping necks an enamel basin had been placed to catch their blood. A zinc bucket stood in the corner, and I could see a bloody tangle of gray hair in it, so I knew what had happened to their heads.

The scullery was thick with bluebottles, most of them crawling in and out of the blood-filled basins. In one of the basins there was a soup ladle. I could only guess that Duca had fed before he left.

I went through to the living room, just as Tim was coming back into the house.

“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “Thought I had a strong stomach.”

“Don’t worry about it. I think Keston had the right idea, staying outside.”

I looked around the living room. It would take a police forensics team to work out exactly what had happened here, but I could guess. Duca had forced Terence to drive him here to his mother’s house — the last place that we would have thought of looking for him. Then it had probably questioned him about our investigation — who I was, how much we knew, what we were going to do to hunt it down. After that, it had murdered both Terence and his mother and had fastened their bodies to the scullery wall in a deliberate mockery of Christ and Christianity.

While I waited for George Goodhew to arrive from MI6, I made a systematic search of the living room. I even got down on my knees and looked underneath the sofa, where I found dozens of dog-eared knitting patterns and three crumpled Mars Bars wrappers.

I opened drawers crammed with cut-out recipes from, Woman’s Weekly and stray buttons and cotton reels. In the right-hand corner of the room stood a semicircular telephone table, with a crochet tablecloth on it, and a framed photograph of Terence’s mother on her wedding day. The telephone receiver was off the hook. I picked it up and listened but it was dead. I jiggled the cradle a few times but it stayed dead. In those days, if you left your phone off the hook for long enough, they cut you off.

On the carpet underneath the table I found a crumpled piece of notepaper. Somebody had written on it SOTON QE = 1200, in blunt pencil, in shaky, childlike letters. On one side of the piece of paper there was a dark brown oval which looked very much like blood.

“Tim,” I said. “What do you make of this?”

Tim peered at it, and then handed it back. “Soton. that’s short for Southampton.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“Well. QE could mean the Queen Elizabeth, I suppose. She docks at Southampton. Twelve. I don’t know, that could mean a twelve o’clock sailing.”

“You mean Terence could have made a reservation to cross the Atlantic?”

“Yes, I suppose it could.”

I jiggled the cradle a few times and eventually an impatient voice said, “Operator?”

“Oh, yes. Hi. I was wondering if you could tell me the last number dialed on this phone.”

“Wait a minute, sir. I’ll have to check.”

A minute became two minutes and then five. At last the operator came back on the line and said, “Southampton seven-two-two-seven.”

“Can you tell me whose number that is?”

“It’s the new twenty-four-hour reservations office for the Cunard Shipping Line, sir.”

“And what time was that call made?”

“Seven minutes past two this morning, sir.”