“So what happens to you?”
“In the end, you can’t stand it any longer and you go looking for the strigoi mort who first infected you. You drink more of its blood, which poisons you, and so you in your turn become a strigoi mort. Very good-looking, an idealized version of yourself. But utterly dead, and unable to rest, forever.”
Bullet came up to Jill and let out another bark. His tail was beating furiously against the table leg.
“He’s picked up the scent. He wants to go after it.”
“In that case, we’ll let him, shall we?”
“Of course. I hope you’re fit.”
“Are you kidding me? I swim, I play tennis. I paint fences. Painting fences. you’d be surprised what good exercise that is.”
Bullet was already heading for the door. Jill looked at me and shrugged, and so we followed him.
I went to the car and heaved out the battered metal case containing my Kit. “I think we have a trail,” I told Terence.
“Oh.” He didn’t look very pleased about it. It was one thing to talk about strigoi. Hunting them was something else altogether.
Bullet made his way out of the house and up the street, with Jill and Terence and me trying to keep up with him. Unlike Frank, he didn’t turn back once to see if we were following. At the top of the hill we reached a small public park called Haling Grove. There was a brick-and-concrete air-raid shelter by the front gates, which could have made a good hiding place for strigoi, but its doorway was sealed with corrugated iron, and its ventilation holes had all been bricked up.
We walked through the shadow of some horse-chestnut trees until we reached an open space. The park was strangely deserted, even though it was such a hot day, in the middle of the summer vacation period. In those days, the British didn’t fly to Spain or France or Florida during the summer. They couldn’t afford to. They went to the seaside for a week, and then they spent the rest of the time at home, tending their gardens or building shelves.
The park was probably no more than three or four acres, surrounded by mature oaks and beech trees. Bullet loped across the bright green grass ahead of us. On the other side of the grass stood a large stained-oak summerhouse with a dark thatched roof, where an elderly woman sat, wearing a black dress and tiny green sunglasses. She was so white-faced that I could have believed she was dead.
“They would have been long gone by now, wouldn’t they?” panted Terence. Perspiration was trickling down the sides of his cheeks.
“Oh for sure. This will probably come to nothing. But if we can pick up more than one trail, we can begin to work out where they’re hiding themselves.”
“Triangulation,” said Jill. She must have been much fitter than Terence or me, because she wasn’t out of breath at all, and she looked as cool as a Pimm’s No. 1.
Bullet had passed the summerhouse, and now he was standing beside a wide flowerbed planted with dahlias. Along the back of the flowerbed ran a brick wall, over eighteen feet high, which looked as if it marked the park’s southern boundary. Bullet sniffed at the soil and barked three or four times.
“Go on, Bullet!” Jill told him. “Follow up, boy!”
Bullet crossed the flowerbed and went up to the wall. He turned around for the first time and looked at us in frustration.
“Clever,” I said. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they climbed the wall and ran along the top of it.”
“There’s a door farther along,” said Terence. “We could check the other side, couldn’t we?”
The door was half-open, and led through to an overgrown area of old glasshouses and abandoned wheelbarrows and compost heaps. Jill guided Bullet along the length of the wall, sniffing at it, but it seemed as if I was right, and the strigoi had made their way along the top of it. Even if we could have lifted him up there, there was no way that Bullet could have balanced along the coping to follow their scent. About three hundred yards away, the wall passed under the branches of several large oak trees, and it was my guess that the strigoi had used them to climb down from the wall and escape into the street nearby.
We spent a half-hour crisscrossing the street and the park’s pathways, but Bullet had lost the scent completely. Jill gave him a handful of black-and-red dog biscuits, patted him on the head and said, “Well done, Bullet. Never mind.” Bullet ate his biscuits with a crackling sound like gunfire and I had never seen a dog look so furious. Jill said, “He’s very annoyed. He hardly ever loses a trail.”
“We’ll get them,” I told her. “Screechers have to come out and feed, and that’s their greatest weakness.” I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Jesus, it’s hot. Anybody feel like a drink?”
Terence looked at his watch. “It isn’t opening time for another two and a half hours. But there’s a sweetshop on the corner, down at the bottom of the road. I could get you a bottle of Tizer.”
I hadn’t realized that British pubs were closed all afternoon, until 6:00 PM. And so it was that I was driven back into central London, drinking this fizzy bright orange cordial out of a heavy glass bottle, feeling sweaty and tired and more than a little sick.
Death on a Double-Decker
I slept badly that night — as badly as I used to sleep during the war.
The Strand Palace had no air-conditioning and the endless knock-knock-knock of taxi and bus engines seemed to penetrate right through my pillows. I had a nightmare in which I couldn’t find my way out of Haling Grove Park and the old woman with the white face and the green sunglasses was sliding after me as if she were on wheels.
I took a tepid bath around 7:00 AM and then I went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ordered a “full English” — bacon, sausages, fried eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. Everything was cold and lying in congealed grease and I could only conclude that I must have been hungrier during the war, or younger and less discriminating. The coffee tasted like weak beef stock.
While I pushed my food around my plate, I read the Daily Express. Cairo radio had incited Arabs to rise up against the British and sabotage the RAF Venom jets at Sharja airfield, where they were being used against rebel forces in Muscat and Oman. Pan Am had announced that they were beginning trans-Polar flights to London from the West Coast, flying time about eighteen hours. A British doctor had been killed by the polio epidemic in the British Midlands because he had vaccinated all of his patients but hadn’t thought to vaccinate himself.
In spite of the warm weather, British roads were unusually empty because “motorists feared bonnet-to-tail snarls in traffic.”
Not a word about mass killings in Croydon or Selsdon or anywhere else. Not a word about strigoi. On television that night were Sir Lancelot, Criss Cross Quiz and Gun Law.
The waiter came over and looked at my plate. “Not to your liking, sir?”
“No, it was great. Just a little too much.”
“Perhaps you’d care for something else, sir? Porridge, perhaps?”
“No, thanks.” I had seen the porridge and it looked like badly poured concrete.
I was crossing the lobby on the way back to my room when the receptionist called me. “Captain Falcon, sir — you have a telephone call!”
I went into the phone booth at the side of the lobby. It was Terence calling me. “We’ve had another one, ‘Jim,’ really bad this time. I can’t tell you anything over the blower but I’m coming to collect you in fifteen minutes. It’s South London again.”