I looked at Jill and gave her the slightest shake of my head. She looked back at me, wide-eyed. Don’t say a word about Screechers.
“Odd,” said George. “You haven’t had any earlier reports of any missing persons in this area, have we?”
“Not that I know of,” I told him. “But take that piece of skin back to your laboratory, would you, and preserve it? We might need it for evidence later.”
George said, “What’s going on here? I really get the feeling that we’re being kept in the dark.”
“Yes, you are. And for a very good reason.”
George took out his pipe again. “It’s not very helpful, you know, when they keep us in the dark. Hard to know what we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“You’re looking for anything that doesn’t seem to be natural. Like that piece of skin.”
“Hmm,” said George, frowning around the clearing as if he had lost something important.
Bullet picked up the Screechers’ trail almost immediately, and began to trot ahead of us with his nose down. He led us to the edge of the park, and out into the suburban streets again, heading back in the direction of Croydon Aerodrome. Every now and then we found spots of blood on the sidewalk, which indicated that the ginger-headed girl must have been pretty seriously wounded.
Jill said, “Another thing — I always thought that vampires could only come out at night.”
“You’re thinking about the nosferatu, like Dracula, and all the vampires you see in the movies.”
“The strigoi are different?”
“They have some similarities, but they’re more like distant cousins. The thing is, the strigoi were isolated for hundreds of years in the forests and mountains and small village communities in Romania, and because of that they became very inbred, and they developed different strengths and different weaknesses. They can walk around in sunlight, which the nosferatu can’t do, and they can eat normal food. And, like I say, there’s even a legend that female Screechers can even conceive.”
“How can a dead woman give birth to a live baby?”
“Search me. How can a dead woman walk around at all? But when a strigoi vii becomes a strigoi mort, there’s a radical change in its body chemistry. It becomes — I don’t know, like liquid mercury, and smoke. It can walk on ceilings and it can pass through a gap only an inch wide, which is why the people in Romania always close their windows at night, even in the summer.”
“Here, look,” said Jill. Bullet had reached a red mailbox at the corner of the street — what the British call a pillar box. The female Screecher must have leaned against it for a while, because there were splatters of blood on the asphalt pavement all around it, and a smear of blood on the white enamel plaque which gave the times of mail collections.
“I hope she hasn’t gone too much farther,” I said. We had already walked over a mile and a half, and we were close to the perimeter of the aerodrome.
But Bullet turned around and barked at us, and so we continued.
We climbed a grassy hill next to the main airfield, where young children were flying kites and kicking footballs. From here, we could see all the way across Croydon, with its Victorian town hall tower, and even as far as the City of London, and the dome of St. Paul’s. It could have been idyllic, “Earth has not anything to show more fair,” if we hadn’t been following that dogged black Labrador on the trail of strigoi.
As we crossed the grass, Jill said to me, “I was wondering how you started chasing Screechers. It’s rather a funny choice of career, don’t you think?”
“Hey — I’m not a professional Screecher-chaser. My real job is giving cultural advice to businessmen. You know, if American executives want to know how they should behave when they sell their products in Belgium, say, or Greece, or India, I tell them what the protocol is. In India, for instance, nobody ever says no. You want something they don’t have, they always tell you tomorrow.”
“So why Screechers?”
“My mother’s fault, most of all. She was Romanian. She told me all about the strigoi when I was little, and when I went to college I did a whole lot of research into them. Without really meaning to I became something of an international expert.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about my mother just now. I didn’t want Jill to know how intent I was on hunting down Duca, and destroying it, and why. In any case, anger was unprofessional. Anger could lead to fatal mistakes.
Bullet led us across the field and back into crowded residential streets. Soon I found that we were walking down a street that I recognized. It was the same street where the birthday-party massacre had taken place. We passed the same house and the same Victorian church, and soon we were back on the busy main road, just opposite the Red Deer pub. I would have given £5 for a beer right then, even a warm one, but of course the pub’s doors were closed.
We passed a small parade of shops, a barber’s and a chemist’s and a sweetshop. Outside the sweetshop there was a color poster for The Curse of Frankenstein, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, showing next week at the Regal Cinema.
“I can’t stand horror films,” said Jill, and then she looked at me with a self-deprecating smile. “I’m really not very good for this job, am I?”
“Jill — nobody’s good for this job, believe me, but some poor sucker has to do it. You’re doing fine.”
Jill bent down to take hold of Bullet’s collar and we crossed the main road. On the other side, the streets were even narrower and the houses were smaller and closer together — orange-brick Victorian terraces with black slate roofs. We walked up a short steep hill into Bynes Road, which backed on to the main London to Brighton railroad line. We were only halfway up the road when — just above the rooftops — a Pullman express train flew past, with its distinctive brown-and-cream carriages, and pink table lamps shining in every window. Whoosh, bang, a decompression of air, and it was gone.
“That was the Brighton Belle,” said Jill. “London to Brighton in sixty minutes flat, and a good lunch, too.”
“Well — we’ll have to do that one day, you and me, when this is all over. And paddle in the sea.”
“Yes,” she said, “that would be lovely.”
Bullet continued to sniff his way along the sidewalk, but then I said, “Grab his collar, Jill! Look.”
About a hundred yards farther up the street, a glossy black Armstrong-Siddeley saloon was parked. Apart from a ten-year-old Morris and a motorcycle, it was the only vehicle in the street, and it was far more expensive than anything that the people round here could have afforded — well over $4,000 new, I would have guessed.
Bullet whined and strained, but Jill pulled him back across the street, and we took shelter in the doorway of a small laundry on the corner. The woman behind the counter looked at us oddly, but didn’t come to ask us why two grown people and a dog were playing hide-and-go-seek in the front of her shop.
We waited over ten minutes, and then the front door of the house opened. After a further pause, a tall gray-haired man in a gray suit appeared. He was too far away for me to be able to see his face clearly, but he had a very upright bearing, and he was carrying a cane. He opened the garden gate, and as he did so he turned back to the house, as if he were saying something to the occupant. Then he climbed into the Armstrong-Siddeley and drove off.
Bullet made another strangled noise, as if he were disappointed that the man had gone. “I’ll bet money that was Duca,” I said.