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 gardens.