The Minister gave him a grim look and raised an eyebrow. ‘But you haven’t told it all, Mr Trask.’
Trask gritted his teeth but nodded. And after a moment: ‘I’m just back from a job,’ he said. ‘It’s this serial killer thing we’ve been working on, these brutal, horrific murders of young women. The thing is, Darcy had approached Harry for his help on this one, because . . . you know . . . that’s what the Necroscope is: the one man in the world who can talk to a victim after she’s dead. And Darcy told me how Harry had been especially upset by the death of the latest one, a girl called Penny Sanderson.
‘Well, two days ago Penny turned up – like a bad Penny, eh?’ But he wasn’t grinning. ‘Now this girl was dead and gone for ever, and yet suddenly here she is, right as rain, back home with her old folks. And the point is she couldn’t even convince them that she hadn’t been murdered! They had seen her body; they’d known it was their daughter; they regarded her return as nothing short of a miracle.
The police weren’t happy with any of this. Oh, she had a story to tell, but it rang like a cracked bell. And if she really was Penny Sanderson, then who had been cremated? So the Minister sent me up there to sit on a “standard police procedure interview”. Of course, I was their lie-detector.
‘Well, she was – is – Penny Sanderson; she wasn’t lying about that. But she was lying about her loss of memory and what all. So knowing the Keogh connection, I just sort of thought to ask her if she knew him: had she ever heard of him or met him? And she said no, never, and just looked blank. A bare-faced lie! Which led to my next question, except I didn’t frame it like a question. I simply shrugged and said: “You’re a lucky girl. It might easily have been you who was dead and not your double.”
‘And she looked me straight in the eye and said: “I’m sorry for her, whoever she was, but she had nothing to do with me. I didn’t die.” And again she was lying through her teeth. Well, I trust my talent. It never has let me down. She wasn’t sorry for the other girl because there wasn’t another girl. And her statement that she didn’t die? A funny way of putting it at best, right? So the only conclusion I can come to is that Penny Sanderson did die, and that she’s now . . . back from the dead!’
The gathered espers let their air out in a concerted sigh. All of them. And Trask finished off with: ‘Of course, I couldn’t tell the police she’d been – what the hell – brought back, resurrected? So I simply said she was OK. Just how “OK” she is … well, that’s a different matter.’
At which point the Minister Responsible took his best yet opportunity to introduce a further item of damning information. ‘Clarke sent Keogh the files on all those murdered girls. And up in the Castle on the Mount in Edinburgh, he actually let the Necroscope talk to Penny Sanderson – er, in his own way, you understand.’
Ben Trask, despite what he himself had just related, still wasn’t one hundred per cent convinced. ‘But at the time, wasn’t that the idea? So that Harry could find out who killed her?’
The Minister nodded. ‘That was the idea.’ He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. ‘But a bad one, it now seems.’
It was Paxton’s turn. ‘He’s a telepath,’ he said, his voice hard-edged, defiant.
‘Harry?’ Ben Trask stared at him.
Paxton nodded. ‘He was into my mind like a ferret down a rat-hole! He warned me off and told me he wouldn’t be warning me again. Also, his eyes were feral: they shone behind those dark glasses he wears. And he doesn’t much care for the sunlight.’
‘You’ve really been hard at work, haven’t you?’ Trask growled. But this time he couldn’t accuse him of lying.
‘Look,’ said the other, ‘I was given a job to do. Like the Minister said, after Wellesley he couldn’t take any chances. So when Clarke came back from the Greek islands I hooked into him. And I learned about his suspicion that maybe Keogh was a vampire. Another thing: Keogh told me to tell the Minister that his “worst nightmare” had come true. Ergo: Keogh’s a vampire!’