Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (24 page)

Plainly Darcy didn’t know what to say. ‘You’re our greatest asset - or you were.’

‘I’m just a man,’ Harry answered, and meant it. ‘And anyway, the Branch has enough going for it.’

‘But… lock, stock and barrel?’

Harry shrugged. That doesn’t amount to much. Nothing, in fact. What’s in that wardrobe in my room can stay for now. Maybe I’ll pick it up sometime.’

That’s not what I meant. No contact?’

‘Only if you find my wife and child. But in any case, I’ll probably find them first.’ Suppressing a yawn but stretching a little, the Necroscope grimaced as he felt a scab break on his thigh under new bandages. His expression was wry as he looked at his hands, which were also bandaged.

‘You should have had stitches,’ Darcy was concerned.

‘I
hate
stitches!’ Harry answered. ‘Not to mention scars! This way if I’m lucky there’ll be no scars.’

‘So where will you go? And when? Not tonight, surely?’

There’s my flat in Hartlepool, which could use some tidying up before I sell. It’s been empty for well over a year. And my inheritance up in Bonnyrig, that big old house. I think I’d probably like the solitude, and I would be that much closer to my Ma. As for when: what’s wrong with tonight?’

‘Look,’ Darcy said, suddenly anxious, ‘we’re both tired. You especially. You look all in! And we don’t see things right

- nobody

does - when we’re, tired. Spend the night here; have breakfast with me in the morning; make up your mind then.’

Harry shrugged again. ‘It’s made up,’ he answered. ‘On the other hand, you’re right and I am tired. Okay, tomorrow is soon enough … ”

Darcy looked pleased, said, ‘And you’ll stay in touch - I mean, when you’re settled?’

Harry sighed. ‘If you promise not to bother me … maybe. But let’s have it understood right here and now - I’m through with E-Branch, Darcy. It isn’t me. I wouldn’t have time for the Branch anyway, no time for anything, until I know about Brenda and little Harry.’

Darcy nodded. ‘Very well…’ And then, on an afterthought: ‘What will I tell the police?’

‘Eh?’

They found two bodies in that burned-out van. One was our werewolf, yes, but the other …? They’re bound to identify him, you know. And then there’s the one inside the garage, shot dead … but with a crossbow?’

‘Let’s deal with George Jakes first,’ Harry answered. The big question is going to be: how did George get out of a Fulham mortuary into a burned out van in the East End, right?’

‘You’re the last one who saw him, er, in designated situ, as it were. If we have to put a name on all of this - I mean, we won’t, but if we had to—’

‘It would be mine, yes … ” Harry gave it a few seconds of thought, and said, Tell them that A.C. Jamieson was an obeah man from Haiti. They should be able to prove that easily enough. He must have stolen Jakes’s body so that he could use it to put some kind of hex on the police. As for why he chose to commit suicide: who knows? He was a madman, after all. Also, tell them to look for a shrivelled or melted wolf-mask, and a claw glove. Then they’ll have all they need.’

‘More than they need,’ Darcy agreed. That garage was full of class motors, most of them knocked off!’

‘As for the one inside the garage, “Skippy” … maybe that was Jamieson’s work, too. Sure he was a madman, but mad like a fox!

Killing Skippy, he was covering his tracks. Simple … ”

‘And the murder weapon?’

They won’t find it,’ Harry shook his head.

‘Something you haven’t told me?’

‘Something I might look into, eventually.’

‘Well, then,’ said Darcy, nodding thoughtfully, ‘it seems we’ve covered just about everything.’ Then the faint half-smile that had almost made it onto his face turned to a frown. ‘Still, I’m glad Jakes didn’t leave anyone behind.

Family, I mean.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Harry answered. ‘It would be hard to explain, right? But don’t go worrying about Jakes, Darcy. I have it on

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pretty good authority that he doesn’t feel sorry for himself, just glad that he got his man, albeit after the fact.’

Thinking about it, Darcy’s face went pale. He remembered the Bodescu case, Hartlepool on the northeast coast, and the teeming dead coming up out of their graves. But for the fact that he - what,
liked
the Necroscope? trusted him? knew there was no menace in him? - he supposed by now his guardian-angel talent would be howling for him to run the fuck away from the man!

‘It just doesn’t bear thinking about,’ he said, quietly.

‘Well, if you must,’ the Necroscope told him, ‘then think of it this way: Jakes was only doing what he’d always done in life, and what he did best. He considers himself fortunate to have had another crack at it, and to have done it well. I say we should all be so lucky …’

‘All I know,’ Darcy answered, ‘is that when I’m dead and gone, all I will want to do is lie
very
still!’

‘Yes, but that’s for now,’ Harry told him without emphasis, but with a strange light in those eyes that knew so much.

Darcy was scarcely listening to or looking at him, which was probably as well, but was still considering recent events. The dead thief and murderer in the garage, for instance. Harry was right: so far the police hadn’t found the murder weapon - but they did have the actual instrument of death, the short, hardwood bolt. They had spoken to him about that, and it was worth mentioning at least.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to say anything else, Harry?’ he said. ‘About this crossbow thing, maybe? I mean, a crossbow is in any case an odd sort of weapon. But forensic are looking at it and they’re puzzled by the fluke, the arrowhead.’

This was something new. Harry cocked an eyebrow. ‘So what about it?’

Darcy shrugged. ‘It’s a steel arrowhead, as you’d expect. But silver-plated? You kill werewolves with silver, don’t you?’

Harry was good at hiding his thoughts, his emotions, and this time his surprise. And coming to him as an extra surprise, it seemed he was getting good at telling lies, or half-truths, too! Never to the dead … but to the living? ‘I didn’t know what I was going up against,’ he said. ‘Oh, sure,
we
had decided that this was the work of a … what, a lycanthrope? Some kind of lunatic? But what if we were wrong? There
are
strange things in the world, as we know only too well.’

Darcy nodded. ‘You did kill him, then? Hence the missing weapon?’

The Necroscope looked away, finally muttered, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ But now it was definitely something he would have to look into … eventually.

He stood up a little unsteadily, and said, ‘I seem to be more tired than I thought - yet how am I supposed to sleep? I have a lot on my mind, going round and round. Sometimes I can’t remember a time when I

didn’t have! A pity we can’t just switch ourselves off, like machines.’

Darcy gave a smal start, as if he’d just remembered something, and said, ‘But we can! What, do you think that as head of this bloody outfit I leave sleep to chance? God, I’d
never
get any!’

Harry looked at Darcy as he opened a desk drawer, took out a smal botle, stood up and went to a water dispenser. ‘Do you have any alergies?’ He dropped a single white pill in a glass and filed it with water. The tablet dissolved in a moment.

‘No,’ Harry shook his head. ‘No alergies that I know of. But… sleeping pills?’

‘Just one,’ Darcy told him. ‘Does the trick for me every time. Just switches me off.’

Harry took the glass. ‘Maybe this once,’ he said, tilting his head back and downing the water. But as he drank, he didn’t notice the fact that the Head of E-Branch seemed to be holding his breath …

After the Necroscope left to go to his own room, Darcy caled a Branch ‘specialist’ on his home number. Not an esper as such, still this was a man with an extraordinary talent. ‘Doctor Anderson?’ Darcy inquired, when finaly the ‘phone was picked up. ‘James Anderson? This is Darcy Clarke … ”

And in a moment, answering the tinny, tired voice at the other end of the line: ‘Yes, I do know what time it is, Anderson, and I’m sorry it’s so late. But this is important. Do you remember that Keogh thing we spoke about? Wel, it’s come up.’

And in another moment: ‘Just two minutes ago, yes.’

And finaly, before puting the ‘phone down: ‘Good, I’ll be expecting you.’

After that there was nothing for Darcy to do but wait for Anderson to get there. That and to suffer feelings of disgust, self-loathing, like his substance had devolved to so much quaking, treacherous scum on the surface of a sucking swamp. On the other hand … wel, duty and conscience didn’t mix, not in his job.

Darcy’s first duty was to the Branch (the swamp?), and he knew it. His conscience would have to take a back seat…

Maybe the Necroscope’s atitude had been too casual after al, or he had been too sure of himself. So E-Branch couldn’t discover the whereabouts of his wife and child … so what?
They
didn’t have the Mobius Continuum to work with. (Like a little kid refusing to let the other kids play with his bal - Nyahh! Nyahh!

Nyahh! Or too possessive and much too pleased with himself that he had a bal in the first place). But as the saying goes, what goes around comes around, and just like the little kid Harry had discovered that you can’t play the game on your own. Especialy not hide-and-seek.

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From his rambling old house outside Bonnyrig, he called Darcy Clarke and poured out his frustrations; but Darcy could only tell him what he already knew, (else E-Branch would have contacted him first): ‘We haven’t even the foggiest idea where they could be, Harry. It’s like they’ve vanished off the face of the Earth!’

‘A month, five weeks?’ Harry looked at the telephone like he didn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You’ve been on it for five weeks, and nothing? What, E-Branch, with your locators and your hunchmen, your seers and scryers and precogs? You haven’t the foggiest idea?’

Which got Darcy’s back up more than a little. ‘What are you trying to say, Harry?’ he snapped. ‘That you don’t think we’re trying hard enough? That you don’t believe we’re looking for them, is that it? Well, start getting it together and believe this: that we have as much interest in the kid as you have - if not for the same reasons!’

And while Harry didn’t much like that last, still he knew it must be true. Of course E-Branch wanted to find Harry Jr.

Just because his father had turned them down, that didn’t mean the child would -
when it was his turn!
But maybe Darcy realized he’d said too much, and:

‘Harry,’ his tone of voice was more even now, ‘I … don’t want to fight with you. I mean, Christ, we shouldn’t be fighting! We
are
looking for them, you know we are. And I was wrong to fly off the handle like that. What I said …

wasn’t what I meant to say.’

‘But you did say it,’ Harry answered, and he was quieter, too. ‘My son: the next E-Branch dupe! What, when he’s fifteen, sixteen? And while you’re waiting, you’l be stood off in the background watching him grow up, measuring his skills, letting him develop? Or will you step in before then, recruit him like I was recruited: by showing him all the world’s evil, and telling him that with him on the team E-Branch will have the power to change al that? And what then, Darcy? Wil
he
be the one who ends up slopping out al of those mental sewers? Oh realy? Not if I can help it…’

‘And not if / can help it, Harry!’ Darcy’s voice was pleading now. ‘Look, you’re not yourself or you wouldn’t be talking like this. And I really
didn’t
mean it the way it sounded. You want my word on it? You’ve got it: we’ll never interfere with your son or his way of life. But Harry, the fact is that none of us will ever have
anything
to do with him, if we can’t find him! and at the moment we can’t.’

The Necroscope was silent for a while, then said, ‘But you will keep trying?’

‘Of course we will.’

‘Well, thanks for that, at least.’ And Harry put the ‘phone down …

Down by the river bank, where the water swirled and eddied in a small bight, Harry spoke to his Ma. It was the first time since the day he’d come up here almost three weeks ago, after selling off his flat in

Hartlepool, and the Necroscope’s mother was beginning to feel neglected. But his mind had been troubled - oh, for a long time - and like any mother she’d sensed it. So despite that she could speak to him anywhere, any time, she hadn’t intruded. And anyway, she knew how he liked to visit the people he talked to.

It was the middle of April, blustery but at least dry, and Harry was wearing his overcoat where he sat at the river’s rim.
But you
II probably catch your death anyway!
she told him, feeling the cold breeze in his hair, and scanning the blurred grey mirror images of clouds scudding in the river (as seen through his eyes, of course).
It’s no day to be out, Harry.

She was down there in the mud and the weeds, her spirit at least, and probably her bones, too, even if the rest of her was long washed away. But typical of a Ma (of
any
mother anywhere), even though Mary Keogh no longer felt the cold for herself, she was still able to feel it for her son.

‘I’m okay,’ Harry told her.

No, you’re not.
But she wasn’t ready to push it, not yet at least. And because he didn’t seem ready to speak:
Well, how are things
with the world, Harry? The rest of the world, I mean …

He recognized the ploy: to take his mind off his own problems by getting him to relate the troubles of the world in general. Now that the dead were all linked up and talking to each other from their graves and various resting places, they could get the news from recent arrivals, of course. But through the medium of the Necroscope it was that much more immediate; they could see it and perhaps even feel something of it, if not actually experience it. Harry was their one link with the living. And on this occasion especially he went along with it. For his Ma was right and-he wasn’t ‘okay’.