“Come on — they’re only a bunch of women and old geezers!”
“Listen to me — do you want to have your goddamned heart cut out? Because that’s what they’ll do to you!”
The officers hesitated. “Let’s go, guys!” I shouted at them — and, confused, they followed me. We all scrambled into their unmarked Wolseley and slammed the doors. The officer in the driving seat immediately reached for the radio, but I said, “Let’s get out of here first, OK?”
The Screechers were already running out of the front door and across the shingled driveway. The officer suddenly realized that they were intent on coming after us and doing us serious harm, even if they were women and middle-aged men. Three or four of them reached the car and started to beat their fists on the windows and pull at the door handles, and it was then that the officer started up the engine and jammed his foot on the gas pedal. We roared off the grass verge and bounced on to the roadway, with the Screechers still banging on the roof and trying to mount up on to the running board.
A mile up the road, the officer slowed down, although he kept looking nervously in his rearview mirror.
“What the hell were they?” said his fellow officer, turning around in the passenger seat.
“What the hell were what?”
“Those people. Normal people can’t crawl across the ceiling. Jesus Christ.”
I was dabbing at my forehead with my handkerchief. The cut extended all the way from my hairline to the side of my left eye, but fortunately it wasn’t very deep.
“We never saw any people, crawling on the ceiling or otherwise.”
“But — ”
“Official Secrets Act, OK? Now, can you patch me through to George Goodhew at MI6? He needs to know what hasn’t happened.”
Blasphemy
The two police officers drove me to Croydon Police Station, a monumental redbrick Victorian building in the center of town. Just as we climbed out of the car the Town Hall clock struck twelve midnight, but the air was still humid and warm, and moths still swarmed around the blue police-station lamps. We walked along corridors with shiny brown tiles and highly polished linoleum floors and the whole building echoed like a public swimming bath.
I found Inspector Ruddock in the main operations center. The room had high vaulted ceilings but it was badly lit and hazy with cigarette smoke. Fifteen or sixteen young officers were sitting at rows of desks, wearing headsets with trumpet-shaped Bakelite speakers.
Inspector Ruddock was standing in front of a large map of South London, drinking very strong tea from a Coronation mug. This time he didn’t even say how irritated he was to see me. He simply grunted and lifted his mug toward the map.
“We’ve had one sighting outside the Swan and Sugar Loaf public house and another at West Croydon station. Not confirmed, mind you, but it looks as if your Duca might be trying to make his way to Central London.
“He was seen in the backseat of a brown Ford Consul, with another man driving. The other man could be Mr. Terence Mitchell, although we can’t confirm that either.”
“How soon can I get a dog?” I asked him.
“A dog’s not much good for following a car.”
“I need a dog, Inspector. If I have a dog, I can track down all of the people that Duca has infected, and if I can find them, I can find Duca. They know where it is.”
George Goodhew arrived, looking tired and hot and harassed. He was a short, podgy young man, with a wave of thinning blond hair, and he always wore his suspenders too tight, so that his pants flapped around his ankles. He was only thirty-three, but he had been appointed Deputy Director of MI6 because he had graduated from Birmingham University. The government were trying to look egalitarian, while at the same time quietly trying to dismantle the Oxbridge elite who had dominated the British security services for so many years.
“Bloody hell,” said George, when I told him what had happened at the Laurels. “So now we’ve got how many Screechers on the loose?”
“Ten, maybe a dozen. It wasn’t easy to count. But this could be the chance we’ve been waiting for. Now that we’ve smoked them out of their nest, they’ll have to go to ground someplace, and my guess is that most of them will make their way back home, to their original addresses. Which I believe I may have, in Dr. Watkins’s appointments book.”
George checked his wristwatch. “Your dog handler shouldn’t be long. He comes highly recommended, from RAF Brize Norton. I must say, though, you’ll have your work cut out for you.”
The search for Duca and Terence went on throughout the night, until it began to grow light. The Daily Express had got wind of the fact that dozens of police were combing the streets of South London, but they were told that a Soviet spy had escaped from custody at Padding-ton Green, and police suspected that he might be seeking refuge with his former contacts in Norbury.
At a quarter of eight, my dog handler still hadn’t arrived, and I was hungry, sweaty and exhausted. I decided to go back to Thornton Heath for a bath and a change of clothes and a couple of hours’ sleep. I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to tell Terence’s mother, but she was used to him not coming home for days on end, and I doubted if she would even ask me where he was.
I was just about to leave when George held up his telephone receiver and said, “Call for you, Captain Falcon. Dr. Shulman. The switchboard passed her through from MI6.”
“Thanks,” I said, and took the phone from him.
“Captain Falcon?” said Dr. Shulman, making no attempt to conceal her impatience. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since yesterday evening.”
“Yes, Doctor, I know. I’ve been kind of. tied up.”
“I carried out the tests that you suggested. I think you may be on to something quite significant.”
“Go on.”
“Out of the total number of known victims since these attacks began, which is now one hundred and twenty-seven, only forty-eight had their hearts removed and any blood drained from their circulatory system. That’s less than thirty-eight percent. A very high proportion of these forty-eight were noticeably older than the remaining seventy-nine — twenty-five years old and upward.”
“Which led you to conclude what, exactly?”
“It was the blood that told us the story. We took samples from every single victim and analyzed them exhaustively. We found considerable variations in the proportions of red and white corpuscles, as well as other indicators such as urea and salts and proteins. However none of these variations seemed to bear any relation to whether a victim had been drained of blood or not.
“There was only one consistently common factor which was shared by the victims who had been killed but not drained of blood. They had all recently been vaccinated against polio.”
“Polio?”
“Well, I expect you know that there’s been an epidemic of polio, especially in London and the Midlands. Scores of people have been killed or paralyzed. The Health Ministry have been vaccinating schoolchildren in their hundreds.”
“I’ve been reading about that, yes.”
“They sent six hundred doses to Coventry, and they’re desperately trying to get more.”
“That’s the Salk vaccine, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. They inject children with the dead polio virus, but it immunizes them against the live polio virus.”
I felt an extraordinary surge of emotion — almost triumph. It all made sense to me now. The Screechers hadn’t been killing such large numbers of people because they were wantonly sadistic — or because they were trying to silence any witnesses, as Inspector Ruddock had believed. They had been desperately trying to find victims whose blood didn’t yet contain the new vaccine against poliomyelitis.