Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (91 page)

That’s it.’

Take care of yourself,’ said Harry, and without waiting for an answer put the ‘phone down.

At the London end, Trask looked at Darcy Clarke standing beside him and growled, ‘I didn’t much like that.’

‘I could see and hear,’ the other nodded. ‘I understand and totally agree. Now forget it and tell me what you think.’

Trask shook his head. ‘It’s a funny one,’ he said. ‘I got the impression he
thinks
he’s telling the truth.’

Thinks?’

‘From his point of view,’ Trask tried to explain, ‘he was telling the truth - he wasn’t involved in whatever it was that happened up there. And yet… I can’t swear. I’ve only rarely come across this complication before.’

‘A complication?’

‘Where I trust someone’s word implicitly, and so must consider my own talent suspect! Still, I agree with you: the whole thing up there, whatever it is, has Necroscope stamped all over it. And by the way: the same goes for you.’

‘What’s that?’ Darcy didn’t understand.

That complication I mentioned?’ Trask stared hard at him. ‘When it comes to Harry, I get much the same feeling about you. I mean,
trust you all the way, Darcy. But somehow I get this feeling that you … don’t!’p>

*

After Trask left his office, Darcy sat at his desk and thought about it, and sighed. For he knew that Trask’s talent wasn’t in question. The esper had been right: Darcy didn’t trust himself. Or at least, he didn’t trust the decision he had made that time more than three years ago. His loyalties continued to be divided between Branch security and the well-being of a friend. And Harry was still under those post-hypnotic strictures imposed by Dr James Anderson.

Just how they were affecting his life … who could say? But on the whole, Darcy liked to believe that his decision had been the right one. This thing with these red-robed priests out of Tibet was a case in point. Okay, so Harry wasn’t involved - but supposing he had been? What if these religious fanatics had known about his talents and had been hunting him down for their own purposes? Surely it was better for all concerned that Harry had been neutralized in that respect? Of course it was—

—Yet still Darcy felt guilty. Well, it was something he would just have to learn to live with.

In his house outside Bonnyrig, the Necroscope absentmindedly heaped pillows and sat back against them, frowned at the telephone, and wondered what all of that had been about. Red-robed Tibetan monks? Of course he knew something about them … that in some way or other they or their monastery were tied up with his future. But that was all. Maybe in the not so distant future he would try to find out more. But as for the recent past: A couple of corpses in a burned-out car, and evidence of a sectarian war? Was there a connection? If so, it wasn’t even beginning to make itself apparent! For the moment at least, he must let it go at that.

It was all he could do, for the fact was that the conscious, waking Harry Keogh really didn’t know a thing about it. It had been excerpted from his life like a page lost from a manuscript, and there was only one person who could rewrite it.

Since she wasn’t likely to, or wasn’t ready to, for now it had become a part of the lost years …