Her eyes were swollen and there was a feverish pink flush on her cheeks. She had pulled her hair back with a pale blue Alice band, which made her look even younger, like a sixth-former from some upper-class English girls’ school. She was wearing a white cotton robe, although her legs were covered by a silky throw with fringes.
I looked around the room. Traditional, yet expensive, with Staffordshire figures of shepherdesses on the mantelpiece, and oil paintings of galleons at sea. Through the French windows I could see a York-stone patio with cast-iron garden furniture, and beyond, to a tennis court, where a twentyish couple were shouting and laughing as they knocked the ball backward and forward over the net.
A clock discreetly chimed two.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Better, thanks. A little woozy. The doctor gave me something to calm me down.”
“Are you going to be coming back? Or is this your way of saying you quit?”
She looked up at me and I could tell that she didn’t really know what to say. “I’ve seen dead bodies, of course. It’s part of the job. But I’ve never seen anybody killed before. Not right in front of me.”
“So that’s it. You quit.”
At that moment, the drawing-room door opened and a middle-aged woman appeared, wearing an orange silk dress. She had the flat, pretty face of a Burmese, and there was no question where Jill had inherited her exotic looks from. She came forward and held out her hand.
“Mya Foxley. I’m Jill’s mother.”
“Jim Falcon. Good to meet you.”
“Is everything all right, Mr. Falcon? We were very worried when Jill came home in such a state.”
I gave her a tight, noncommittal smile. “I know. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have bothered you but Jill’s doing some very important work for us.”
“And?”
“And I just came to remind her how important.”
“I see.” Mrs. Foxley looked uneasy. I don’t know if she was expecting me to explain myself any further, but when it was obvious that I wasn’t going to, she said, “Would you like some tea?”
Jill and I talked for nearly an hour. Her mother brought in a plateful of Scottish shortbread called petticoat tails and I ate about seven of them. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.
I tried not to push Jill too hard. Instead, I encouraged her to think about what she had seen, and why it had shocked her so much. From my own experience during the war, I knew that people can be much more distressed by tiny poignancies than by major tragedies. The baby’s shoe, lying in the ruins.
Jill said, “What I can’t get out of my head — that strigoi who killed the little boy — she was a girl. It never occurred to me that you could have female Screechers, too.”
I put down my teacup. “Sure you can. They’re called striogaica. In some ways, they’re supposed to be even more powerful than the male strigoi. According to the folk stories, they can turn your butter rancid, stop your cows from giving milk, ruin your harvest — even ruin your marriage.”
“They sound horrendous. That one we saw, she was horrendous.”
“Well, she was still alive and physically decomposing, which didn’t make her very attractive. But once they’re dead — or undead, rather — the striogaica are supposed to be very alluring. Some of the stories even say that they can fall in love with human men, and have children who are half human and half strigoi. They’re still just as dangerous, of course — they still need fresh human blood, so you wouldn’t want them living in your neighborhood.”
Jill said, “I couldn’t help thinking — what if that happened to me? I think that was what I was afraid of, more than anything else.”
“First of all, that’s not going to happen to you, because Duca is not going to catch you unawares, the way it did with those poor people. Second of all, if it did, I would immediately know what had happened to you, and I would hammer nails into your eyes, cut your head off and bury your body in consecrated ground. So you’d have nothing to worry about.”
For the first time that afternoon, Jill actually smiled. She reached out her hand to me and touched my shirtsleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve really let you down, haven’t I?”
“Your stiff upper lip went a little floppy, that’s all. I came around to starch it for you.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I think we need to take Bullet back to the park, and follow any trail that the Screechers left behind them. I very much doubt that they would have gone straight back to the place where Duca’s hiding, but if we can find out where they’re holed up — they’re bound to make contact with him before too long.”
“All right, then. Just give me ten minutes to get dressed.”
She stood up. I hadn’t realized how short she was, without her shoes. “I’ll wait for you,” I said, and nodded toward the tea tray. “I’ll — uh — take care of these cookies.”
As she left, her mother came back in, and gave me that look that only mothers can give you, when you’re taking their daughters away.
Bynes Road
We drove Bullet back to Beddington Park. The woods where the middle-aged woman and the little boy had been killed were already screened off with ten-foot-high sacking, and signs saying Metropolitan Police No Entry. I took the Kit out of the trunk of the car, and then we showed our identity cards to three sweating bobbies in shirtsleeves, who allowed us in.
Inspector Ruddock was still there, looking even closer to detonation than before. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “What the devil do you want?”
“We’re going to be following any trail that the perpetrators may have left behind them.”
“About bloody time. I wanted to get the dogs out hours ago, but believe it or not I was countermanded.” He pronounced “countermanded” as if it were one of the most disgusting words in the English language, like “mucus.”
“Yes, sir, I know,” I said, trying to calm him down, but that only made his eyes bulge and his nostrils flare even more widely. I have to say, though, that I loved apoplectic Englishmen like him, especially if they were on my side. They were like hand grenades with the pin out, morning till night.
Jill let Bullet off the leash and he scampered off through the woods. I gave Inspector Ruddock a halfhearted salute, and then I followed Bullet and Jill, carrying my Kit.
“Madness,” I heard Inspector Ruddock protesting. “Bloody lunacy, the whole bloody thing.”
In the clearing, we found two forensic scientists from the Metropolitan Police Laboratory at Hendon, still raking through the leaves and taking photographs.
“OK if we play through?” I asked them.
One of them stood up and took out a pipe. “Actually, old boy, we’ve just about finished here. No footprints, but plenty of blood samples. If you catch the blighters, we should be able to match them for you.”
He lit up his pipe, and he was sucking at it furiously when his companion came over, holding up his tweezers.
“George — have a dekko at this.” I thought he was showing us a leaf at first: a curled-up shred of something pale and wobbly, with turquoise-tinged edges.
George took out his pipe and peered at it. “Human skin,” he said, almost at once. I suddenly thought of the shots that I had fired at the ginger-haired girl, and the lumps of flesh that had sprayed out of her arm.
“That’s green,” said Jill.
“Of course, which tells us that the owner of this particular piece of skin must have been dead for at least twenty-four hours.”