Grey streaks, so evenly spaced as to seem deliberately designed or affected, were plentiful in Harry’s russet-brown, naturally wavy hair. In a few years the grey could easily take over; even now it lent him a certain erudition, gave him the look of a scholar. A scholar, yes, but in what fabulous subjects? But in fact Keogh hadn’t been like that at all. Hadn’t used to be. What, Harry, a black magician? A warlock? Lord, no!
. . . Just a Necroscope: a man who talked to dead people.
Keogh’s body had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With his height, however, that ought not to have mattered a great deal. But it had mattered to Harry. After that business at the Chateau Bronnitsy – his metempsychosis – he’d trained his new body down, brought it to a peak of perfection. Or at least done what he could with it, considering its age. That’s why it looked only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old.
And inside Harry’s body and behind his face, an innocent. Or someone who had used to be innocent. He hadn’t asked to be the way he was, hadn’t wanted to become E-Branch’s most powerful weapon and do the things he’d done. But he’d been what he was and the rest had come as a matter of course. And now? Was he still an innocent? Did he still have the soul of a child? Did he have any soul at all? Or did something else have him?
Now the pair had passed under the archway of the military guardroom, where several police officers had been interviewing a group of uniformed soldiers, into the cobbled gantlet which was the approach alley to the Castle proper. All of the officers in the guardroom seemed aware that Clarke was ‘something big’; Harry and he weren’t challenged; suddenly the bulk of the Castle loomed before them.
And now Darcy said: ‘So I don’t need to do any tidying up? You left nothing undone, right?’
‘Nothing,’ Harry told him. ‘What about Janos’s set-up in the islands?’
‘Gone!’ said the other with finality. ‘All of it. All of them. But I still have a few men out there – just looking -just to be on the safe side.’
Harry’s face was pale and grim but he forced a strange, sad smile. ‘That’s right, Darcy,’ he said. ‘Always be on the safe side. Never take chances. Not with things like that.’
There was something in his voice; Clarke looked at the Necroscope out of the corner of his eye, carefully, unobtrusively examining him yet again as they entered the shade of a broad courtyard, with gaunt buildings rising on three sides. ‘Are you going to tell me how it was?’
‘No.’ Harry shook his head. ‘Later, maybe. And maybe not.’ He turned and looked Clarke straight in the eye. ‘One vampire’s pretty much like another. Hell, what can I tell you about them that you don’t already know? You know how to kill them, that’s a fact . . .’
Clarke stared directly into the black, enigmatic lenses of the other’s glasses. ‘You’re the one who showed us how, Harry,’ he said.
Harry smiled his sad smile again, and apparently casually – but Clarke suspected very deliberately – reached up a hand and took off his glasses. Not for a moment turning his face away, he folded the glasses and put them into his pocket. And: ‘Well?’ he said.
Clarke’s jaw fell open as he backed off a stumbling pace, barely managing to contain the sigh – of relief -which he felt welling inside. Caught off balance (again), he looked into the other’s perfectly normal, unwavering brown eyes and said: ‘Eh? What? Well?’
‘Well, where are we going?’ Harry answered, with a shrug. ‘Or are we already there?’
Clarke gathered his wits. ‘We’re there,’ he said. ‘Almost.’
He led the way down stone steps and under an arch, then through a heavy door into a stone-flagged corridor. As they emerged into the corridor, a Military Policeman came erect and saluted. Clarke didn’t correct his error, merely nodded, led Harry past him. Halfway along the corridor a middle-aged man – unmistakably a policeman for all that he wore civilian clothing – guarded an iron-banded door of oak.