Pound’s flat was grimy as a pigsty and smelled just as bad. Harry moved through it without touching, thinking: Even my shoes will feel unclean.
First he checked the door. It was sturdy as hell, made of heavy old-fashioned oak hung on massive hinges, fitted with three locks and, on the inside, two large bolts. Obviously Johnny hadn’t intended that anyone should break in; which sufficed to make Harry feel a little safer, too. He quickly moved on.
In the front room, before a small, grimy window overlooking the now quiet road, he paused beside a cheap writing desk. One drawer was half-open; Harry glimpsed a metallic sheen from inside but was distracted by the items on top of the desk: a creased, stained, huge-breasted Samantha Fox calendar, with today’s date ringed in biro alongside some scribbled marginalia, and a hand-scrawled message on a sheet of A4 bearing the Frigis Express logo. The calendar didn’t seem especially important … at least, not until Harry had read the message on the A4:
Johnny –
Tonight. A London run. Your ‘lucky charm’ truck, which I’ll have loaded for you. Pick her up at the depot 11:40. It’s for Parkinson’s in Slough. They’ll be dressing it for Heathrow Suppliers starting first thing in the morning, so we can’t be late with this. Sorry for late notice. If you can’t make it, let me know soonest.
The note was signed in some indecipherable scrawl, but Harry didn’t need to know who had signed it. The date at the top was today’s. Johnny had a London run tonight, leaving the Darlington depot at 11:40.
Now Harry looked at the calendar again. In the margin opposite the ringed date, Found had scribbled: ‘London run! Good, ‘cos I feel lucky and this could be my night. And I need to fuck inside a tit . . .’
Glancing at his watch, Harry saw that it was 11:30. Johnny was at the depot right now.
The Necroscope came to a decision there and then. His mad quarry used a Frigis Express truck (his ‘lucky charm’ truck) as a prop in his crazed games of sex, murder and necromancy; and so the truck should likewise feature in his punishment. Very well, tonight would be Johnny’s last run. And now all Harry needed was an item from the lunatic’s personal belongings.
He yanked the desk drawer open the rest of the way, and a half-dozen heavy metal tubes jumped in their velvet-lined compartments. Harry looked at them and thought, What the . . . ? But as he carefully lifted one of the tubes out of the drawer he knew well enough what the . . .
The thing was a weapon, which Found himself must have made or had manufactured, for use on his victims. Or for use on one of them, anyway. A name had been painted with a small brush in black enamel on the shining metal: Penny. And Harry thought, This was what went into Penny, before Found went into her.
The weapon fitted Pamela Trotter’s description perfectly. A section of steel tubing about an inch and a half internal diameter, one end was cut square and had a rubber sheath or hand-grip, and the other end was cut diagonally to a point. That was the cutting edge of the tool and its rim had been filed from the inside out to a razor’s sharpness. The Necroscope already knew how -and why – such a hideous knife would be used. The very thought of it was sickening.
As a kid Harry had played in the deep snows of England’s north-east coast. When he was quite small he’d love just to sit there in the piled snow with an old tin can, driving the open end plop into the cold, soft white bank. When you pulled the can out again it would be full of snow; short fat cylinders of snow, from which you could build castles like on the beach. Except unlike sandcastles, which melted away when the tide came in, these castles would last for days until the weather warmed up. But it wasn’t the castles he pictured now but the perfectly circular holes which the can had used to leave in the snow. In his mind’s eye he could see those holes even now . . . and they were crimson. And they weren’t cut in snow.