Pound’s way, on the other hand, his modus operandi, was cruel, creeping, designed to terrify even before the terrible act – the monstrous crime itself – was committed. And Harry was concerned that in his case the punishment should fit the crime. Except . . . there should be something of a trial, too. But trial as in ordeal, not as in examination as a precursor to judgement. For if Johnny Found was in fact the man, then the sentence had already been passed.
The working day was over; traffic was thinning in the darkening streets; people wended their ways home. And some of them entered the house of the necromancer. A middle-aged woman with a bulging plastic carrier-bag, letting herself in fumblingly through the front door; a young woman with straggly hair and a whining child pulling on her arm, calling out after the woman with the bag to wait for her and hold the door; an older man in coveralls, weary and slump-shouldered, carrying a leather bag of tools.
A light came on in a garret room under steeply sloping eaves. Another winked into being on the second floor, and one on the third. Harry looked away for a moment, up and down the street, then looked back –
– In time to see a fourth, much dimmer light come on in an angled corner window in the ground-floor flat. But he hadn’t seen Found go in.
The house stood on a corner; there must be a side-door; Harry waited for the traffic to clear, then crossed to the other side of the road and turned the corner. And there it was: a recessed doorway at the side, Johnny Pound’s private access to his lair. And Johnny himself was in there.
Harry crossed the cobbled street away from the house and merged with the shadows of the building on the far side. He turned and leaned back a little against the wall, and looked at the light where it shone out on this side, too, from a tiny window in Pound’s ground-floor flat. And he wondered what his quarry was doing in there, what he was thinking . . . until it dawned on him that he didn’t have to just wonder. For Trevor Jordan had given him the power to find out for himself.
He let his vampire-enhanced telepathy flow outwards on the night air, out and away into the dark and across the road, and through the old brickwork into the smoke-grimed, stagnant house of evil. But the probe was aimless, unpractised and lacking authority, spreading out like ripples on a dark pond in all directions. Until suddenly -the Necroscope found more than he’d bargained for!
His telepathy touched upon a mind – no, two minds -and he knew at once that neither one of them belonged to Johnny Found. They weren’t in the house, for one thing, and for another . . . they were already intent upon him! Upon Harry Keogh!
Harry drew breath in a sharp hiss of apprehension -fought hard against the urge to crouch down, which would only serve to illustrate his awareness – and looked this way and that along the dark alley. E-Branch? No, for there was no strength there, no talent, no metaphysical power. So who and what were they? And where?
Along the alley a cigarette glowed in the dark as someone took a drag, someone keeping to the shadows no less than the Necroscope himself. And across the main road under a lamp-post, there stood a figure in a dark, lightweight overcoat with his hands stuffed forlornly in his pockets, turning first this way and then that, for all the world like a man stood up who still hopes that his date will show: a decoy, to distract attention from the one in the shadows.
And both of them wondering about Harry, so that he picked up their thoughts in snatches right out of their unsuspecting minds.
The one under the lamp-post: Pound’s home, but who’s this bugger? . . . Up and down the street, prowling like a cat. . . The one we were told to watch out for? . . . Said if he showed up we shouldn’t touch him, but . . . feather in the old cap . . . Promotion to Inspector?