At that moment, Mrs. Foxley appeared, in an orange silk robe. “Who is it, dear? What’s going on?”
“Hi there, Mrs. Foxley,” I said. “I’m sorry that Jill is feeling so low. I was wondering if I could borrow Bullet for a few hours.”
Mrs. Foxley looked dubious. “You could try, I suppose.”
I hunkered down on the front doormat and held out my hand. “Here, Bullet. Good boy, Bullet. How about coming out to play with your Uncle Jim?”
I stroked his ears and he seemed to like that. “Do you have a leash?” I asked Mrs. Foxley.
She went to the hall closet and came back with Bullet’s leash. “Here, boy,” I said, soothingly. “Let’s go walkies, shall we?”
I started to clip the leash on to his collar, but Bullet immediately snarled and twisted his head round and his teeth crunched into the fleshy part of my thumb. I toppled back, knocking over all of the Foxleys’ empty milk bottles.
“Oh, I am so sorry!” said Mrs. Foxley, coming outside to help me up.
“You’re a wicked dog!” snapped Mr. Foxley, slapping Bullet’s nose. “What are you? You’re a very wicked dog!”
I stood up, holding my bleeding hand. The bite wasn’t too deep, but it damn well hurt. “Hey, it’s not Bullet’s fault. Poor mutt hardly knows me. I’ll just have to call for another dog handler, that’s all. Can I use your phone?”
Just as I was about to go inside, the cabbie came up, carrying my Kit. “Sorry, mate. I can’t wait any longer. It’s me mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary tonight. If I turn up late for that, I’ll get all kinds of grief from ’er indoors.”
“It’s all right,” said Mr. Foxley. “You can borrow Jill’s car. It’s the least we can do. I’ll get the keys for you.”
I called MI6 again. Charles Frith had left the office, but his deputy George Goodhew said that he would arrange for a dog handler to meet me in South Croydon as soon as he possibly could. I prayed that it wasn’t Skipper and that pompous Stanley Kellogg.
I was anxious to see Jill. I wanted to find out what Duca had done to her, if anything. Her doctor might have believed that she was suffering from “Korean Flu” but I knew damned well that there was no such illness. It could have been nothing more serious than stress. After all, I had left her in Duca’s surgery for only a matter of minutes. But she had been very disoriented when she came out, and I would have liked to check her out.
There was no time. I had to get after Duca without delay, and in any case Mr. and Mrs. Foxley seemed to be keen for me to leave. I didn’t blame them. Since I had first arrived on their doorstep, I had brought them nothing but trouble.
It was past 9:30 PM now. I tried to think where Duca might have gone. It must have infected at least a dozen strigoi vii, so maybe it had taken refuge in one of their homes. Once I had a man-trailing dog, I would have a much better chance of hunting these Screechers down. But it also occurred to me that many of Duca’s recent victims were likely to have been patients of Dr. Norman Watkins. Once Duca had installed itself as Dr. Watkins’s “locum,” it wouldn’t have had to go out searching for new people to infect. Every day, unsuspecting victims would have come to the Laurels expecting medical treatment, and it would have been simplicity itself for Duca to taint their blood with an injection of its own blood, or simply give them an oral dose of cough linctus blended with its own saliva.
I drove to the Laurels. There were still two bobbies standing outside, with cigarettes cupped behind their backs, and a line of marker tape was fluttering across the gates. I parked outside and showed the officers my MI6 pass.
“I need to take a quick look inside.”
“Rather you than me, squire. I reckon it’s haunted, that house.”
“Haunted?”
“We thought we saw somebody looking out of that upstairs window.”
“When was that?”
“About nine o’clock, just before it got dark. We went inside and made a search. Cupboards, under the beds, everywhere.”
“Not a sausage,” said the other officer, emphatically.
“Well, maybe you’re right, and it is haunted,” I told them. “On the other hand, reflections can play some pretty funny tricks.”
I went into the house, switched on the lights and headed straight for the receptionist’s office. The police and MI6 had obviously searched it, because all of the drawers of the filing cabinet had been left open, and the pictures taken down from the walls. Two of the chairs were tilted over and magazines were scattered all over the floor.
I found what I wanted almost at once, but then of course the police and MI6 hadn’t been specifically looking for it. The receptionist’s diary was still lying open on her desk, and the name and address of every patient who had visited “Dr. Duca” was meticulously listed, along with the time of their consultation. Once my new dog handler had arrived, we could visit every one of these patients, starting with the earliest, and it wouldn’t take us too long to sniff out any Screechers.
I closed the diary, tucked it under my arm, and I was about to leave the office when I thought I heard a creaking noise upstairs. It wasn’t like somebody walking across floorboards — it was more like hinges, followed by a complicated click. There was something else, too: a noticeable change in atmospheric pressure, as if a window had been opened, and a draft was blowing in.
I went out into the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. I was sure that I heard more creaking, and then a shuffling sound. The police officers hadn’t been mistaken. There was somebody in the house. I listened and listened, but I didn’t hear anything else. I had the impression that whoever it was, they were listening to me, too.
I waited a few moments longer, and then I went outside to Jill’s car. I opened my Kit and put the receptionist’s diary inside it, along with all the other artifacts I needed for hunting Screechers.
“Everything all right, sir?” one of the bobbies asked me.
I gave him a thumbs-up but I didn’t say anything. The less that anybody else knew what was really going on, the better.
Back in the house, I laid my Kit on the receptionist’s desk and unfastened the clips. I took out my Screecher compass and opened the cover. Immediately, the needle swung around and pointed, shivering, toward the stairs. Its response was so quick and so positive that I knew there must be more than one Screecher in the house.
I could guess what had happened. Once they were infected with the Screecher virus, several strigoi vii had been forced to leave their homes, or had left voluntarily because they didn’t want to be tempted to kill their loved ones or their neighbors. I had seen this happen many times before, during World War Two. They had gathered together in a nest, close to the strigoi mort who had infected them.
Judging by the way my compass needle was trembling, Duca’s nest of living Screechers was here, someplace upstairs, in this house.
I took out my Bible and my whip, coiling my whip loosely around my waist. Before I attempted to destroy the Screechers, I had to find out how many there were, and where they were. And this wasn’t wartime. I couldn’t throw in a hand grenade and attack them while they were still stunned and maimed and disabled.
I went to the foot of the stairs again and looked up. The house was silent again, and the second-floor landing was in darkness. I tried the light switch but the bulb had burned out, or the Screechers had removed it.
Holding my gun in my right hand and my Bible in my left, I carefully mounted the stairs. They creaked, so I stopped every two or three stairs and stood totally still, in case the Screechers had heard me. Somewhere in the distance a plane was droning.