Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (29 page)

Walking thoughtfully back to B.J.’s in the rain, he considered the face he’d seen, or that glimpse of a face, before the

- what, observer? - had wrenched himself free. That face on the little man, that startled face, that had decided Harry against any further action at this point. It wasn’t that he’d felt afraid of the little man, just… surprised? Startled? Even as startled as the small observer himself? But by what?

There are looks and there are looks, and the little man had had one of those looks. Like a cornered rat. And everyone knows that it’s best not to corner a rat.
Such
a look, on the face of the little man, had been enough to stall Harry - on this occasion, anyway. But if there should be a next time - then he might want to know more.

Approaching B.J.’s, he pictured that face again: that wrinkled old face with its rheumy, runny eyes. At a distance he’d thought of them as ‘bright bird eyes,’ but seen close-up they weren’t. Those oh-so-strange three-cornered eyes that one second looked grey and the next shone dull silver, like an animal’s at night… and the
next
turned grey again; or maybe it was a trick of the street lights. And the long, heavily veined nose, flanged at the tip; and the too-wide, loose-lipped mouth in its thrusting, aggressive jaws. And overall, the grey, aged aspect of the face generally.

Just a glimpse, yes, and not necessarily accurate. But it had been sufficient to give him pause …

Letting the picture gradually fade in the eye of his mind, the

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Necroscope was satisfied (but not pleased) that he wouldn’t easily forget it. Indeed he might just ask BJ. about it. About its owner, anyway. For if she was aware of the little man - if she’d ever seen him -she’d certainly know who Harry was talking about.

It was just one of the several questions he had for her. As for the questions she might have for him … wel, he’d do his best to avoid them.

So he told himself, anyway …

The door was heavy and banded with metal, and equipped with a buzzer, a peephole, and a speaker grile. Harry buzzed, detected slight movements within, and felt himself observed. Eventualy a female voice asked:

‘Are you a member, sir? If so, hold up your card. If not, state your business.’
Obviously one of the club’s ‘young lassies,’
Harry thought.

‘I’m not a member,’ he answered. ‘I was invited - by Bonnie Jean.’

There was silence for a long moment, then:”Wait.’

Harry seemed to wait an inordinately long time, but when the door finaly opened it was B. J. herself who stood holding it open for him. And again Harry wasn’t certain what he’d been expecting. He had met her before, yes, but a lot had been happening at the time. Funny, but the best picture he had of her was the one George Jakes had given him:

A real looker … Tall, slim, slinky, yet natural with it.
(The shape in Jakes’s dead mind had been that of Lauren Bacal in that old Bogie movie where she says, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you?’)
Maybe Eurasian? She could be, from the shape of her eyes: like
almonds and very slightly tilted… And her hair, bouncing on her shoulders, seeming black as jet but grey in its sheen.

The ageless type … Anything from nineteen to thirty-five … But a looker, oh yes!

And now the reality. But still the Necroscope couldn’t see her clearly enough, not in the dim light in the hallway inside the door. On the other hand, she could obviously see him.

‘So, it’s mah brave laddie in person,’ she breathed, smiling at him wonderingly with her head on one side. ‘Mah own wee man wi’

no name.’ Then she straightened up, and was still two inches shorter than Harry. ‘And maybe no’ so very wee at that! But I was beginning to think I’d never see you again! Come in, come in.’

The hallway or corridor was wide, high-ceilinged, carpeted. Low music came from somewhere up ahead; pop music, Harry thought, late ‘50s or early ‘60s. He quite enjoyed all that old stuff. The corridor seemed a long one; there were pictures on the walls, large tapestries in gilt frames; but there were no doors leading off to right or left. A peculiar set-up.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ B.J. said, leading the way. ‘I thought so myself the first time I saw it - a fire hazard, right? Aye, well the

authorities thought so, too. But in the event of fire - God forbid! - there are escape routes enough at the back and out into the garden. And we are on the ground floor, after all.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about fire,’ Harry answered, not looking where he was going, and bumping into her where she paused at a fire door. And: ‘Sorry,’ he said, as she raised a querying, perhaps amused eyebrow. ‘Clumsy of me …’

‘But you weren’t so clumsy the last time we met,’ she answered, with the hint of a frown in her voice. ‘Indeed, I might even say greased lightning!’ If she was fishing for some kind of reaction she didn’t get it. Harry merely shrugged, and continued:

‘No, I wasn’t considering the fire risk. I was just wondering: why such a long corridor?’

They were standing very close together. He could smel her scented breath when she answered, ‘Originaly it was an aley between the buildings to right and left. When the shop fagades were built at the front, the aley was roofed over to give safe access to the property at the rear - my place, now.’ Her Edinburgh burr had almost disappeared, replaced by something Harry didn’t quite recognize. ‘Downstairs is B.J.’s,’ she continued, turning from him and pushing through the door.

‘Upstairs is my living area. And the garret… is my bedroom.’

Harry folowed her, commenting, ‘When you answer a simple query, you realy do answer it in ful, don’t you?’

And giving him that look again, ‘Wel, at least
one
o’ us does!’ she replied, and a little of the brogue was back. Then, with a wave of her arm: ‘B.J.’s,’ she announced.

Inside was definitely beter than out. Shrugging out of his coat, which a prety girl in a
not-quite-Playboy
outfit took to the cloakroom, Harry looked the place over. There was a longish mahogany bar with access hatches at both ends, behind which two more girls served drinks - or would serve them, presumably, but at the moment there were only one or two customers. And at the far end of the room another girl sat near the juke-box, an original Wurlitzer by its looks, flipping the pages of a magazine.

‘A “quiet” night,’ Bonnie Jean commented wryly, as Harry perched himself awkwardly on one of too many empty bar-stools, and she went behind the bar to serve him. ‘It’s always the same when it’s raining.’ There were two other customers (‘club members,’ Harry reminded himself) at the bar, one at each end where they nursed their drinks and chated up the girls, and a group of three seated at a table in a corner close to a darts board. B.J.’s clients were al over forty, wel turned out, business types. Men with money, anyway. It looked like the taxi driver was right: this wouldn’t be a cheap place to drink.

Harry continued to look the place over and decided:
It’s a converted hole-in-the-wal pub.
And he was right. B.J.’s had been a fairly standard 148

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if poorly-frequented public house at one time. The ancient pumps were still in place behind the bar, and the oak ceiling beams were dark-stained from genuine fire smoke. The open fireplace itself was still there, big enough to take a smal table, but the flue had been sealed when central heating replaced the warmth of a real fire.

That fireplace isn’t Victorian!’ he said: an awkward seeming statement - almost an accusation! But he was still finding his way, geting used to the place. And to B.J. To her presence. Or to his presence in her place.

She took pity on him and didn’t smile, but answered what he now saw as a dumb comment with a reasoned reply. ‘You’re right. This place isn’t Victorian. It goes back a lot further - two or three hundred years at least. Remember, it’s set back from the “modern” stuff, the terrace that fronts onto the street. Twenty years ago it got annexed to al of that almost by mistake, when they started to convert the whole street on this side into some kind o’ shopping arcade! But the builder went broke and it al fel through. And a good thing, too, for this old building was here first. More recently it was a pub, but too out of the way. When I bought it I couldn’t afford to modernize it, and now I’m glad.’

And before he could make another stupid comment (what the hel
was
it about this girl that so tangled his tongue, Harry wondered?) she went on: This was once a huge living room. Why, it took up most of the ground floor! Now it’s split in two by the wal behind this bar. Back there is a storage room, an original kitchen, modern toilets, and access to the garden. And the stairs.’

‘What’s the difference?’ said Harry.

‘Eh?’ She cocked her head, and he admired the angle of her jaw, but found that he couldn’t look at her. It was disconcerting. He
wanted
to look at her but couldn’t. It was as though he was a schoolboy again - his first fumbling approach to Brenda?

That
brought him up short! What was this Bonnie Jean, some kind of Lorelei?

The difference?’ she said.

‘Oh!’ He puled himself together. ‘Between a wine bar and a pub.’

She nodded and smiled knowingly. ‘I had’na taken ye for a drinking man, and it seems I was right. But while we’re on that subject, what would ye like?’

‘Hmmm?’

To drink!’

Harry shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A short?’

‘Vodka, gin, whisky, brandy, rum - you name it.’

‘Er, brandy, I think.’

‘Cognac? Courvoisier?’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘No, no,
no!’
She laughed. ‘It’s
what you
say!’

The man at the closest end of the bar had been listening to their conversation. NoV, sneeringly, he caled out, ‘Seems ye’ve got yoursel’ a real live one there, B.J.!’ He was short, stocky, and seemed to have no neck; well-dressed but uncomfortable-looking.

What, a rough diamond? A rough something, certainly.

Smiling along the bar at him, the Necroscope said, ‘A live one? I guess I am - for the time being.’ The other didn’t know what to make of that; scowling, he turned back to his girl.

And in a lowered voice, Bonnie Jean said, ‘He chats me up from time to time. The protective type, you know?’ She slid a glass of cognac in front of Harry, and said, ‘On the house. I… don’t know your name?’

‘It’s Harry,’ he told her. ‘Harry Keogh. So what with him and me, it seems you’re well protected, Bonnie Jean.’ He sipped at his drink, which hit him at once and in al the right spots. So now he knew what Alec Kyle’s tipple had been; what his body’s tipple stil was!

‘B. J.,’ she told him. ‘In here I’m just B.J.’ But she had known what he meant well enough, and quickly went on, ‘I still owe you for that, Harry.’

‘Well, you owe me an explanation at least,’ he agreed, and gave a shrug. ‘You know, of a couple of smal things …?’

‘But not here,’ she replied. ‘Not now. And there’s a good many things I don’t know about you, either …’

Harry knew a word game when he heard one, and he was good at them. ‘Yes, but not here,’ he said, smiling. ‘Not now.’ Astonishingly, after just a sip or two, the cognac was loosening him up! But he’d better not let it loosen him too fast or far. And aware of her eyes on him, finaly he looked back at her - and
looked,
and drank her in.

Finaly he had her; her picture had firmed-up, taken on life. And she wasn’t so much the looker that Harry and George Jakes had thought she might be. But undeniably attractive, yes - even to the point of magnetic. Those eyes of hers, their oh-so-slight slant -and their colour, a deep, penetrating hazel flecked with gold: feral eyes. Her ears, large but not obtrusive, flat to her head and elflike with their pointed tips, not quite hidden in the swirl and bounce of shining hair. Her nose, tip-tilted but by no means ‘cute.’

And
her mouth: too ample by far, yet delicious in the curve of its bow. As for her teeth: the Necroscope couldn’t remember seeing teeth so perfect or so white!

But she had been studying him, too. ‘Funny eyes,’ she said. ‘Well, not funny … strange. Like someone else is looking out of them.’

Harry could have answered that one, but he kept silent as she went on: They look sort of sad, compassionate, and … I don’t know, trustworthy? But deep down, maybe they’re a little cold, too. Maybe you’ve been made cold, Harry. Have you led a strange life?’

‘What, have you been reading my palm?’ He smiled his sad smile, which was always a part of him and couldn’t be changed, not even by

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Alec Kyle’s face. ‘Maybe you’ve missed your calling, BJ. Maybe you should have been Gypsy Bonnie!’

‘I… fancy I might have come from Gypsy stock at that,’ she answered. ‘But how close was I, really?’

‘Maybe too close,’ he answered. ‘Maybe right now, you’re too close.’

Showing feigned alarm, she drew back a fraction. ‘Oh? And are ye big trouble, Harry?’

‘I hope I’m not going to be,’ he told her, honestly. ‘And I hope you’re not going to be. I do need to talk to you, BJ.’

She drew back more yet, and meant it this time - not away from Harry, but from the man who had spoken to him just a moment ago from the end of the bar. He had finished his drink and now knocked a bar stool aside in his stumbling approach. There was an unpleasant something on his face: a question - an accusation - aimed at B.J. but intended for Harry. Now he gave it voice. ‘Is this creep botherin’ ye, hon …?’

And Harry thought:
Protective? More the possessive type, I’d have thought.
And seeing the ugly glint in the man’s eyes, and weighing him up:
Two hundred and twenty pounds if he’s an ounce, and every ounce a pain in the backside!

Ill

HOME WITH BONNIE JEAN

And:
Sergeant,
said Harry to a good friend of his, well over a hundred miles away in the cemetery in Harden, /
believe
I have a problem.
His dead friend, an ex-Army physical training instructor, and an extremely hard man in his time, was into Harry’s mind at once, looking out through his eyes and reading the picture he saw in the bar room.
The thing is,
Harry went on, while Sergeant got acquainted, /
don’t want too much mess.