Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (13 page)

But nowadays … I’d made him, so
he
would make me.

As Banks paused, Harry turned up his colar against a sudden squal of wind and drizzle. It had occurred to him that if anyone should see him sitting here on this slab and talking to himself, they’d think he was out of his mind and probably cal the police!

/ am
the police,
Banks reminded him, with an entirely immaterial, totally humourless grin that Harry sensed rather than saw.
And you probably
are
out of
your mind! Why didn’t you come to see me in daylight?

‘Because I wanted to get on with this,’ the Necroscope answered. ‘See, I’ve got problems of my own, and this should help me to forget about them. For a while, anyway.’

So talking to dead people is therapeutic, is it? …
But in the next moment, in a far more conciliatory tone:
What sort
of problems are we talking about, Harry? Bad ones?

‘Not desperate,’ Harry told him.
Not as bad as being dead, anyway!
Even though that last thought was ful of his usual compassion, stil it
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might sound flippant; and so Harry kept it to himself. And: ‘Go on with what you were telling me,’ he said.

When I left the pub I had a tail,
Banks went on. /
wasn’t sure about it then, but! am now. I mean, I’ve had lots of time to think things out, you
know? And that was when it all started to go weird on me. It was like … I don’t know … in a way it was pretty much like this, like talking to
you. It felt like - how can I explain it? - like I wasn’t alone … inside!

‘Inside?’

Inside my head.

‘You were talking to someone in your mind?’

(The shake of an incorporeal head).
No, not talking,
listening!
And not me, someone else. As if someone - a stranger - was
in
there! Sitting
there grinning to himself, in a comer of
my
mind, listening to me think and … watching me! That’s what it felt like, Harry: I just
knew /
was
being observed! It was a feeling that grew on me from then until… well, right to the bitter end. Weird, eh?

In his time Harry had come across weirder things; for the moment he would keep
those
to himself, too. But having listened carefully to all Banks had told him so far, it struck him that Darcy Clarke was probably right, and on both counts.

For one: he was already engrossed with the case, to such an extent he was sure it would divert his mind from the psychological pitfalls of constantly querying who or what or where
he
was. And two: it looked like this really was something he would have to follow through to the end, a job that only the Necroscope himself (but
himself,
Harry Keogh’s self) was qualified to handle.

And the more he listened to Jim Banks - and felt of his shock, his horror - the more convinced he would become …

That was how it started, and pretty much how it stayed,
Banks continued in a while.
It wasn’t with me all the time, only when I was
actually working on the case. But the closer I got, the more I was aware of its presence. Except it wasn’t an ‘if, it was a him! Someone as real
as you are, Harry, and as real as I… was.

‘You’re talking about a telepath,’ Harry told him. ‘A mentalist. Someone who can get into a man’s mind like that has got to be—’

—
A figment of his own imagination? Yeah, I know,
Banks stopped him short.
Or I thought I did.
But:

‘Not… necessarily,’ said Harry, thoughtfully. For the Necroscope remembered Boris Dragosani’s story: how the vampire Thibor Ferenczy, the old Thing in the ground, had invaded his mind in order to sway Dragosani to its will.

Also, he knew the mindspies of E-Branch were capable of just such mental eavesdropping. Telepathy was real, not just an idea out of fantasy or a figment of wild imagination. Why, his own thoughts on the subject, on this occasion, were a form of the selfsame talent; which was something else that Banks overheard, of course.

So I was right,
he’ said in a while.
Call it by some other fancy name if you like, but what you’re doing right now is the same sort of thing.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Harry answered, with a shake of his head. ‘As far as I know there are only two of us who can talk to the dead. The other one is … my son! The talent seems to have passed down to him from me. And plainly
we
are not spying on you! You
know
I’m here and you’re not obliged to talk to me or even suffer my presence. True telepathy, on the other hand, is mental communication between the living …’
And sometimes the undead?
Which was a thought he also kept back; pointless to further complicate matters.

‘Also,’ he went on, ‘telepathy doesn’t have to be intrusive; it can provide genuine two-way communication. I have certain friends who mindspy, yes - for the protection of society, our way of life, just as you through your work protected those same ideals - but the way these friends of mine describe their skills, they aren’t in any way this sinister thing that you experienced.’

No, because that
was
intrusive!
Banks declared emphatically.
And more than that, it was also frightening. If it hadn’t finished
when it did, the way it did -1 don’t know -1 think I might well have gone crazy.
Hah!
Instead I went… dead! But at first, 1 really was starting to
believe that I was suffering from some sort of persecution complex! I thought it was
al
in my head! I mean literally! It was only afterwards,
recently, that I saw it as something else.

‘As what, then?’

As … a distraction!
Banks answered.

‘Someone was deliberately crowding your mind, in order to distract you from your investigations? Is that what you’re saying?’

Like an irritating smokescreen, yes,
Banks was convinced.
But I fought it, pushed on, kept coming. And since he couldn’t
frighten
me of, finally he—

‘—
He killed you off.’

Yes. But even at the end he was helped by this telepathic trick of his. I mean, he
knew
when I was going to come for him, and where from! And so he beat me to
it…

‘So what did you find out about him? This fellow with the scorpion tattoo, I mean?’

Harry sensed Banks’s nod.
As I’d suspected, he had lots of previous. But all petty stuf. He’d done time up north, plenty of it, all short term. But
I did get something useful: Skippy was on a year’s probation, but they’d let him move down to London to take a job in his cousin’s garage in
the East End. Some sort of cock-eyed rehabilitation programme: see if giving him a decent job would straighten him out. I mean, Jesus, Harry!

This shifs ‘therapy’ was to do face-lifts on stolen cars!

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The paint under his fingernails?’ Harry lifted a querying eyebrow. ‘It was all coming together for you.’

Too true!

‘So what next?’

Next? Have a look inside that garage, what else? It was the bottom floor of a condemned municipal car park. The upper storeys had been
made safe, reduced to a towering metal skeleton, but the ground floor and basement had been converted into workshops,
inspection pits, paint bays and what have you. All the gear: your typical auto-repairs garage on a grand scale. I figured most of the work
would be legitimate, a front for the
real
earner: the conversion of stolen cars. But it would have to be a superfast turnaround.

Tea-leaf a posh motor, give it a quick face-lift, and ship it out. Ten to twelve hours maximum, most of it at night, after hours.

‘And did you check it out? And is that what got you …?’

…
No. I didn’t have time. Just
thinking
about doing it, and getting ready to set the thing up, is what got me killed! Because
he,
the gang’s

-what, mindspy? - wasn’t about to let it go that far. He was on me all the way, and it happened the night before I would have taken out a
search warrant.

‘And before you could let anyone else in on it… ” Harry was quiet but couldn’t keep a tone of censure - and of anger, at the waste of Jim Banks - out of his voice.

Banks accepted it. /
was out of line. I just wanted this one for myself, that’s all. Rivalry, like I told you. It would have been a
feather in my cap. But instead - it was something that felt like a pitchfork in my heart!

‘And that’s why there were no clues to your death - well, other than the ones you’ve given me. Because you chose to play it close to your chest?’

Right.
Banks was downcast. It was in his immaterial voice, and Harry could sense it wasn’t just because he’d paid the ultimate price for his errors. Banks was privy to his thoughts, of course, and at last released a sob that no one in the world but the Necroscope Harry Keogh could ever hear.
You pays your money and takes your chance, Harry.
But the voice in Harry’s mind was racked with … what, guilt?

‘Jim, don’t torture yourself,’ Harry told him. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong.’

And my family? My wife and kids? Were they guilty of something? But still they’re paying, Harry. And … and the others, and their families?

What about them? But no, I had to play the loner, ahvays the loner. I wouldn’t feel so bad if I’d paid for it the same way, on my own. But those
poor guys had to pay for it, too.
Because
of me!

‘Because of you? I don’t see it, Jim. You were only doing your job, and when you’d gone someone picked it up where you’d left off. You had nothing to do with—’

—
But I did! And now I ask myself over and over again, if they’d had

the
whole
story, would it have been different…?

The Necroscope shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, “if they’d had the whole story?” Your colleagues? But they didn’t have any of it, did they?”

Do the names Stevens and Jakes mean anything to you?
The dead man was somehow managing to keep himself under a semblance of control, but his anguish was lying just beneath the surface.

The other victims?’

Banks’s incorporeal nod.
Those two were the closest I had to friends on the force. I mean, I had friends, you understand, but those two were …

close. I asked them if they’d like to be in on it when I closed down the biggest auto-theft gang in London. And like a fool I told Derek Stevens,
who was closest of all, about the garage. And all the time
that
bastard thing was in my head, listening to everything!

Now Harry understood Banks’s stored-up grief. Not for himself but his friends. And he sensed the dead man’s nod of confirmation. /
told them too little too late. Just enough they’d be sure to try to square it for me after … after I…

But for the moment he couldn’t go on. So Harry finished it for him. ‘After you’d been murdered?’

Yes,
(a fading sob).

They’d investigate the garage without knowing how dangerous it was, and so put themselves in the firing line?’

Yes … God, yes!

‘And they wouldn’t know a thing about this mentalist, his telepathic trick, because you yourself hadn’t known. You said it yourself, Jim: that you thought you were going crazy.’

Don’t look for excuses for me, Harry.

‘I’m not, because you don’t need any. You were only trying to uphold the law, and so were they - and so will I.’ He was in now, like it or not. ‘Okay, Jim, you’ve given me enough to go on. A starting point, anyway. But now I need to feel it: your pain, your anger. I need to feel angry enough to want to put it right. Call it incentive, for want of a better word.’

The night it happened? How it happened? What I saw?

‘All of it, yes.’

Give me a moment,
Banks told him. And in a little while, in direct contact with the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind, he began to think it through, relive it exactly as he’d experienced it that night.

And Harry was with him all the way …

Banks’s place was a stone’s throw from Peckham High Street. It was nothing special: a tall, terraced house with a yard at the front, a balcony on the first floor, a small round window spying out from an attic room, and a vegetable patch at the back, crushed between neighbouring

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gardens. All of the houses in the terrace looked the same, with only slight variations of exterior decor. But the rooms were big and high-ceilinged, and there was plenty of space for the kids.

No space for Banks’s car, though; his garage was one of a dozen in a low, asbestos-roofed block of badly constructed concrete boxes at the end of the terrace. This made for a walk (or a run when it was raining) of a hundred yards after he’d locked up. And when the weather was
really
bad, as tonight, it pissed him off to have to go rushing into the house spraying droplets |ike a hosed-down dog.

These were some of the thoughts that occupied his mind as he switched off the motor, snatched his keys from the ignition, rammed the door open with his elbow and made a dash for the up-and-over garage door. And this was another: