Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (12 page)

Harry found himself interested, and no longer just because it was something to keep him occupied. For of al men, the Necroscope had experience of the strange things of the world, and knew that some of them shouldn’t be alowed to continue.

Finally: ‘Okay, I’m convinced,’ he said. ‘Convinced that something needs sorting out, anyway. So how about the details?’

‘We don’t have any,’ Darcy shook his head. ‘Just a set of utterly senseless murders. On the one hand a couple of police officers already down in the ground, and a third in the morgue waiting to go. And on the other hand their friends, ‘Colleagues and families mourning them, grief-stricken. And dead-centre, a yawning great gap called “motive” and “evidence”. I mean, it’s an old cliche, I know, Harry, but this time it’s also a fact: we just don’t have a clue.’

‘But we do have somewhere to start,’ said the Necroscope, grimly.

And in fact he had three somewheres …

Sometimes I can take it,
Jim Banks told Harry. /
tend to sleep a lot, like I’m emotionally exhausted, you know? But it’s when I’m

‘awake’ that it’s rough.
They
try to comfort me … I have that at least. But even so, it’s hard. Oh, I know I had a long way to go
and a tough road ahead. My life wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t about to get any easier, but it
was
a life!

Banks had been one hard copper; the Necroscope could sense the sob behind his unbodied voice, but Banks never once let it break through to the surface. Harry supposed he’d done most of his crying and cursing earlier on, when finally the dead - and his situation - had got through to him. The ‘they’ he had mentioned
were
the teeming dead, of course, the Great Majority of mankind who were there before him, ‘laid to rest’ in the cold, cold earth, or gone up in smoke into the sky.

Banks was of the former variety: buried in a north-London cemetery under a marker that gave his name, dates and a motto, and a sad farewell from his family. The motto was in Latin and said,
Exemplo Ducemus.
Harry wondered about that.

I was an MP, a Military Policeman, for twelve years,
Banks explained.
SIB: Special Investigation Branch. That’s the Corps motto,

Exemplo Ducemus:
By Example We Lead. Now, in this place, I’m just another follower -following all the poor bastards who beat
me to it! Maybe I should have stuck to a simple
Requiescat in Pace,
eh?

Except, as Harry knew wel enough, the dead don’t rest al that easy but find ways to occupy their incorporeal minds. Jim Banks’s way would be to keep on doing what he’d done in life. A cop, currently he might easily be investigating his own murder, if only in his incorporeal mind. He
would be
investigating it, certainly - or at least trying to think it through - but just like his colleagues in the world of the living he didn’t

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have much to go on. Only the fact that he’d been very close to something. Too close by far.

‘But you’ll tell me as much as you know?’

Not much to tell, Harry. A month ago I was the detective in charge of investigating a ring of car thieves. I got as
far as a pub in the East End one night, and that was where my lead petered out. But after that until he got me, whoever he is-I
don’t know, it was …
weird! /
had this
feeling
I’d been made, that someone had cottoned on to me. Yet I had no
reason
to feel like
that! I hadn’t even known I was that
close
to anything!

Scanning the ranks of old headstones, some leaning, Harry looked around. His gaze followed the tracks of wandering, white gravel pathways between dreary rows of markers, to a high stone boundary wall. Beyond the wall, a distant hill stood silhouetted against the smoky evening sky, where lights were just beginning to come on in a clump of darkly-huddled houses. The cemetery was located in a quiet backwater; well in keeping, distant traffic sounds hung faint as ghosts on the greasy air. It was a late February night, damp and miserable as only London ever gets to be. On the other hand, Harry had to admit that it was peaceful here. Well, to anyone else …

But there was pain in the earth, the Necroscope knew, and in some of its inhabitants. Banks was one of them, and already Harry had made up his mind that Jim Banks must be avenged. For only the teeming dead -and the one man privileged to talk to them - knew how truly precious was life, and how terrible the act of stealing it away.

Harry’s thoughts, except when he shielded them, were just as audible to the dead as his spoken words. Banks had overheard him, and was quick to point out:
This mad bastard didn’t simply ‘steal it away,’ Harry! If you mean he was
stealthy, well, yes, there was that in it. But there was a lot more than that. Something strong and fast and furious.

Something that slid into my chest like the tines of a pitchfork, to puncture my heart and stop it, and me, dead!

‘Do you want to show it to me?’ The Necroscope knew that it could be easier that way. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it you can just… let it happen. That way I get more of the flavour of it.’

Flavour?
Bank’s incorporeal voice was suddenly sour.
It wasn’t ice-cream, Harry.

‘Bad choice of words,’ Harry said, by way of an apology, and he cursed himself roundly. But it was okay; Banks would do anything he could to help bring his killer to justice.

You want to feel something of it, right? You want to get the mood of it?

‘Just the night in question, the start of it,’ Harry told him.

He had forgotten for the moment that he was talking to an ex-policeman, but Banks was quick to straighten him out:
You’d better
have what led to it, too,
he said. And Harry gave a nod, which he knew the dead man, long gone into corruption, six feet deep in his grave,

would sense.
Because I have this feeling it all sprang from that night in the pub where my lead gave out on me.
My
lead ended there, yes, but I think that’s where
he
must have picked me up! Looking back on it, I reckon my mistake
was a simple one. The thing is, I wasn’t looking for violence, you know? I was hunting car-thieves, not some crazy,
vicious, murdering bastard!
So …
maybe I was a little loose with my enquiries.

‘You gave yourself away?’

The Necroscope sensed a sigh from the immaterial mind of the man in the grave.
Yes, probably … No, better than that, I know I
gave myself away.

‘How? I mean, I’m not a policeman, Jim. If I know what it was you did to atract atention to yourself, maybe I can duplicate it and swing a little action my way.’

The other was at once alarmed.
What? You’d use yourself as bait? No way, Harry! Jesus! I had the training, I knew what to expect. But I never expected
this
sod!

Al right, so you’re the Necroscope. But you’ve just admited you’re no James Bond. And you’re certainly not Muhammad AH!

‘No, but I do have a lot of … friends? You know what I mean? I’m never alone, Jim, and I’m not above accepting a few tips from those who went before. Believe me, I can look after myself.’

Really? Well, so could I, or so I thought.
Banks had settled down again, but he was bitter and angry … with himself, not with Harry. Harry was only the trigger, a reminder of what had been lost, the fact that there was still a decent world up there with
some

decent people in it at least. Up there beyond the final darkness, yes. And so:

Okay, this is how it started
…

A nightclub owner’s Porsche had been stolen. Banks hadn’t felt too bad about the theft because he’d known that the owner, one Geordie King, had a lot of previous himself; he’d been a right old Jack-the-Lad in his time, a gangland hoodlum from the good old days. That was a long time ago, however; now he was a ‘businessman’ and ‘going straight.’

But, still having contacts in the underworld, Geordie King had done a bit of investigating of his own. What he’d managed to turn up wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. An informant who owed Geordie a favour had told him he should watch out for a man called Skippy, who could be identified from the spider ‘or something’ tattooed on the back of his right hand. A spider with five legs and a sting. What’s more, this Skippy was from ‘up north’: Geordie’s old patch in Newcastle, where the ‘used car’ business was all the rage. His thick northern accent would give him away at once - especially to a fellow ‘Geordie.’

So King had put it about that he was interested in having a chat with a certain Skippy bloke from up North; various contacts in the pubs and clubs had kept an eye out for the spider tattoo; soon the reports had

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started to come in - in the form of ominous warnings! Skippy was only one member of the gang, and they weren’t the sort to mess with. In other words, colect on your insurance, Geordie, and let it go at that.

At the same time, however, King had heard on the grapevine that Skippy was known to frequent a boozer not far from his own East End club.

Wel, despite King’s chequered history he was wel past his sel-by date. So he’d taken good advice and from there on kept his nose out… but it hadn’t stopped him passing on the information to the Old Bill, namely Jim Banks. It was a mater of principle, so to speak. Honour among thieves, and al that.

Which was how Banks had happened to drop in on the pub in question that night just a month ago …

‘But you hadn’t told anyone about your lead?’ Harry found it a bit odd.

Bank’s incorporeal shrug.
Rivalry. It was my case. Maybe I was out of line, out to prove something - out of touch?

But this is England, not the USA, and there was a time when policemen didn’t get killed too often in the line of duty,
you know? And as far as I was concerned, I was still investigating a gang of car-thieves. Maybe I should have taken a leaf out of
Geordie King’s book and stepped a bit more cautious.

‘You think there’s more to it, then? More than just auto theft?’

No, I think they’re car-thieves, plain and simple. Mainly young and crazy, and probably into drugs, too. And,
fairly obviously, at least one of them doesn’t give a kiss-my-arse about human life! Especially the lives of policemen …

Tell me about the night in question,’ said Harry.

/
thought you wanted to ‘see’ it?

‘Can we save that until later? Like … the end?’

And after a pause:
My murder?

‘If it’s not too - oh, shit!’ (For Harry had almost said ‘painful’).

He sensed Banks’s grin, however grim.
Hey, don’t sweat on it, Harry! Let’s face it, I don’t choose my words any too
carefully either!
Then, quickly sobering, he continued:

It was a civvies job, which goes without saying. I mean, I haven’t worn a uniform in a long time. Nothing fancy, though,
because this pub had a rep as a bit of a rough-house. The night was miserable: rain, sleet and all sorts of shit hammering down
out of the sky. It was a Friday and the bar was packed with all kinds of sub-human specimens. I had a rum to warm up and bought
one for the barman, then asked him if Skippy was in. Good question - bad timing!

A bloke just three stools away straightened up like someone had stabbed him in the back! I’d already checked him out in the
bar mirror: about twenty-six or so, pale and pimply, white and ugly, long-jawed, loose-lipped and shifty-eyed, and a crewcut like
the bristles on a shaving brush.

Hardly inconspicuous! Put it this way: you wouldn’t want your sister dating this one. But his hand stayed wrapped
round a beer on the bar. And that’s what settled it.

And it dawned on me: ‘Skippy’ was probably a foreshortened version of a nickname that must have sounded a bit over-the-top - a bit too
Hollywood? -for this bloke’s Newcastle chums. So they’d cut ‘The Scorpion’ down to Skippy.

That’s what was on the back of his hand: not a spider but a scorpion.
Five
legs (what, artistic licence?) stretched their hairy
joints down his four fingers and thumb; the beady eyes of the beast were located on his index-and third-finger knuckles,
to make them stand out when he clenched his fist; its sting was at the end of a segmented body stretching four inches
along his wrist.

And some other stuf: Skippy was in paint-and oil-stained overalls. His hands were dirty, and there was fresh paint under his
fingernails. But from the moment I mentioned his name he’d been looking at me - glaring at me - in the mirror. Suddenly the
hand disappeared, and Skippy with it. He was out of there.

Well, like I said, the bar was crowded; I couldn’t really take off after him like Kojak. (One, it would give me away
completely. Two, the bloke was young and fast - probably a sight faster than me - and he would know where he was going. Three,
I was sure he’d have some previous; I could find out all about him from police records in Newcastle or New Scotland
Yard). So … I had another drink, hung about for fifteen minutes or so, finally went back out into that lousy night.

And I think that was my second mistake. I should have got straight out of there. See, these new gangs are more audacious
than the old crowd. In Geordie King’s day ifaperp thought the filth had locked-on, he’d head for the hills and keep right on going.