Harry looked at the other steel-tubing knives. There were five more of them. Four were called after girls whose names he knew from the police files but didn’t know personally, and the fifth carried the name Pamela. This bastard kept them like mementoes, like photographs of old flames! Harry could imagine him masturbating over them.
Six weapons in all, yes, but there were seven velvet-lined trays in the drawer. Found must have the seventh tube with him, except it wouldn’t have a name yet.
Suddenly Harry’s vampire awareness warned him of someone – in fact more than one – entering the main door of the house to creep in the communal corridor outside Pound’s door. E-Branch? The police? Both? He sent out his thoughts to touch upon their minds. Another mind stared back at him for a moment, then withdrew in shock and horror. It had been a middling telepath; E-Branch again; but the others out there were police. Armed, of course. Heavily.
The Necroscope snarled a silent snarl and felt his face twisting out of its familiar contours. For a mad moment he considered standing and fighting; why, he could even win! But then he remembered his purpose in coming here – the job still to be finished – and conjured a Möbius door.
He went to the Frigis Express depot.
Emerging from the Möbius Continuum on to the grass verge where the Frigis works exit turned on to an Al South access road, he was in time to feel the blast of a big articulated truck as it sped by. The man at the wheel was just a shadow behind the glassy night sheen of his windscreen, but despite the fact that the legend on the side of the truck said only frigis express, still it spoke volumes. For one leg of the ‘X’ was missing where the paint had peeled away, making it look like eypress.
Johnny Pound’s ‘lucky charm’ truck.
Harry came forward to the edge of the road, was trapped for a moment in sweeping headlight beams where a large, powerful car followed not too far behind the truck. Intense faces merely glanced at him as the car swept by.
But there was something about those faces. Harry reached out and touched their minds. Police! They were after Found; they still wanted to catch him red-handed, or if not that, at least on the point of picking up some poor unsuspecting girl. Fools! There was evidence enough in his flat to put him away for … not for long enough. Pamela was right: he’d probably go into a madhouse, and be out again in short order.
That other party back at Johnny’s flat in Darlington: maybe they had broken in by now. Maybe they knew. So if Harry wanted the necromancer for himself, he was going to have to work fast.
But then he remembered Penny, alone in the house in Bonnyrig. He didn’t know how long this was going to take. He could simply kill Found out of hand, of course, or cause him to be killed in any number of ways. Except he’d made a deal with Pamela Trotter, and he still wouldn’t cheat on the dead. Also, Pound’s punishment should fit the crime. But Penny shouldn’t be left on her own . . . Not for too long . . . They’d killed Darcy Clarke, hadn’t they? . . . Why the fuck was everything so complicated?
Harry felt the tension building . . . felt it swelling until the pressure inside was enormous . . . then gulpingly filled his lungs with the cool night air and took a firm, deliberate grip on himself. Penny had put him first; he must put her first; he took the Möbius route to Edinburgh.
She wasn’t in the house!
Harry couldn’t believe it. He’d told her to stay here, to wait for him. So where had she gone? He reached out with his telepathic mind –
– But which direction? At this hour of the night, where could she have gone? Why? For what reason? Or had she simply taken Trevor Jordan’s advice and walked out on him?
He let his vampire awareness guide him, sent probes into the night, spreading outwards like ripples on the surface of a sentient mind-pool, seeking for Penny . . . and found others! Espers! Again!