The Neverloving Dead, page 15
Like, why had Patrick kept saving him? When he’d dragged him off the street that night, how had that been for Patrick’s energy? Or to get Stuart to himself?
Telling himself again to drop it, all of it, Gethin headed down a new corridor to the left. Right now, he couldn’t think about Patrick, he had to concentrate on keeping his form and finding the–
Major Crimes Unit, he read on a glass-fronted door. He paused. Surely that was the one.
Making up his mind, he slid the card and photographs under the door then glided in behind, picking everything up one last time. There was no one here. Just seven or eight desks, arranged in a staggered horseshoe, several metal filing cabinets, a load of computers, some pots of pens, walls plastered with maps, whiteboards and certificates, and lots of stacked plastic in-trays full of cardboard files and loose paperwork.
Now he was actually here, he felt nervous. He looked down at the things in his hand. What if they weren’t enough?
What then?
His plan would work, he told himself. They’d get it. They would.
He picked the desk with a name plate that read Chief Inspector Brian Sullivan.
Sliding a grey cardboard file out of the in-tray, he set it in the centre of the desk, making a background so ‘Brian’ definitely couldn’t miss his display in the morning. He arranged the two photographs on top, pushed together, with the Gayles Bar card just below, then rummaged in the pen pot, eventually finding the red marker he was looking for on a ledge beside the whiteboard. Focusing hard on one last burst of solidity, he pulled off the lid. He knew he wouldn’t be able to write anything, but Patrick had said you could make ‘limbo circles’...
He was right. The circles practically formed themselves – as if the pens had a will of their own. It was fine. He made one around his own face, one around Matt’s, and one around the killer’s face in both photos. The pen seemed to want to keep going.
Round and round in circles, like everything else in bloody limbo.
Trying not to think about that, he set the pen back beside the whiteboard and left.
§
The next day, Thursday, came and went, with the murder-feelings so strong Gethin felt like he was sitting in acid. On Friday, the killer turned up again, watching through the window for maybe ten minutes before leaving, feelings burning through their horrible link. Whoever he’d chosen was in there. Gethin had known then: if the police didn’t figure it out soon, it would be too late.
Saturday night, he’d come back. And gone in.
He’d been in there nearly two hours. Gethin could see the guy he was focusing on: pretty, blond like Gethin, young like Matt. A little bit ragged-looking.
Like he might really need five hundred quid, Gethin thought bitterly.
The killer had bought round after round. Gethin thought he’d seen him spike the last one. And still, he couldn’t do anything. The murder-feelings had skyrocketed – like the killer was high on them, held in only by patience and a thrill that Gethin knew was anticipation. Excitement.
Then, just when Gethin began to think he should have listened to Patrick after all, and blown three hundred sleeping men to make himself strong enough for this, blue lights flashed down the road.
And the police rolled up outside. Two cars.
Gethin could have wept with relief.
He’d done it. He’d sodding done it. He wouldn’t need to stop anything...
He thought it right up until they emerged again.
With Jonno in tow.
CHAPTER 11
RULE 6: KNOW WHEN IT’S TOO LATE
PATRICK
Patrick watched as the hotchpotch of buildings outside Gayles lit blue almost in rhythm with the music spilling from the bar. Hope, relief and victory flooded Gethin’s face. There was no concern about moving on. No mixed feelings. Just delight at achieving what he’d wanted to at last.
It was good to see. Patrick couldn’t begrudge him his joy. It wasn’t often a ghost managed to resolve whatever they’d bound themselves here to do. But Gethin hadn’t been like the others. Those who had loved life usually moved straight on from it. Free, Patrick had always thought. Not Gethin. Gethin had been free. And he had loved life: that was, Patrick now realised, the brightness he’d always seen in him.
Gethin had stayed for others.
And now he’d saved them, and Patrick knew – just as Gethin had never clung to life, he wouldn’t cling to limbo either. He’d go. Peaceful and happy, as he deserved.
It was all Patrick had hung around for: the entire reason he’d kept watching Gethin after telling him he was through. Or perhaps not the entire reason, he thought. Perhaps there was a part of him that had also wanted to keep seeing him for as long as possible. Or perhaps he’d just wanted to make sure the Welshman really was going this time – that he wouldn’t turn up in another few months, disrupting Patrick’s plans all over again.
His one chance.
But he’d seen the killer go into the bar, and now the police were here and Gethin was celebrating.
So he wouldn’t have to worry about that, would he?
Dampening some pain or another, he floated through the window of the clothes boutique in which he’d installed himself since vacating Gethin and Stuart’s flat, heading down the street into the quieter shadows, in the opposite direction. Away. The last place he wanted to be was anywhere near Gethin as he fragmented into oblivion.
Maybe he should find someone to feed from, he thought, a little sourly. He hadn’t been able to since that day. He knew it was costing him, that every day without meals was just delivering weeks and months of the same bleak solitude he’d endured for so long already. He didn’t care. Limbo had never felt this flat. His future had never felt this hopeless. He’d been so dedicated to his long quest And now it seemed nothing more than a silly fantasy for which he was fundamentally ill-equipped. Gethin had proven in months what Patrick had avoided for centuries: men didn’t want men like Patrick. They wanted men like Gethin.
It was why he’d goaded Gethin about failure. Because Stuart, a living man, had chosen him.
And it was why he’d stayed away since. Shame.
Staying insubstantial to preserve what energy he had, he turned onto a residential street lined with cars shining beneath white xenon streetlights or shadowed beneath the odd sycamore. Ahead, a gaggle of girls in tiny dresses and huge heels teetered along, tugging hemlines, giggling and catcalling a lone man on the other side of the street. Patrick melted into a doorway across the pavement from a hire van, waiting for them to pass, not wishing to drain himself further.
It didn’t matter that Gethin didn’t want him, he told himself, or even that Stuart didn’t. It didn’t mean no one in his new life would. Gethin wasn’t litmus paper just because he was experienced and beautiful and Patrick was neither. The fact was he’d always known Gethin was out of his league – not just physically, but in every single way. Patrick should never have let the idea of him get any deeper than that.
The girls passed. Patrick stayed where he was, pushing down the ache. He was two streets from the bar by now and it was quiet here. A faint breeze lifted the leaves, the pleasant hiss just masking the hum of the city. Music leaked from a nearby house. A cat yowled somewhere. A rat scurried under the van.
He would be okay, he thought. It really was better that Gethin was leaving. Look what getting involved with him had done to Patrick’s plans: the things he’d worked towards for centuries. This was why he’d needed to remain detached, wasn’t it? Because emotions were dangerous. They ruined everything. How had he ever forgotten it?
He raised his eyes to the sky, gritting his teeth over the pain to wish Gethin well as his soul moved on. Forwards. As his gaze came down, he looked to the rat – a scavenger like him – exploring a drain near the van’s tyre. The words on the side of the van read: Hire Purpose.
Which felt a little ironic for an ex-priest. Especially one whose two-hundred-year mission was on the ropes.
The rat scurried away. Patrick was about to move off too, when the houses lit slightly, then again, then again, each time a little stronger. Blue. The police, evidently taking the subtler residential route back to Walworth Road. He drifted onto the pavement. If Gethin’s killer was being taken away at last, Patrick wanted to see him too – to see whether there was any remorse on his face, any fear for his soul.
The lights flashed over the hire van’s windscreen, illuminating a cross hanging from the rearview mirror.
The cars drew nearer still.
A cross? some part of him registered.
He dismissed it. It was nothing. Perfectly normal. He’d seen hundreds of crosses hanging from rearview mirrors. It just went to show how much Gethin had got under his skin that he’d imagine, even for a second, that this one might be anything other than a lucky charm for driving.
The first car went past. In the back was a man. Dark grey hair, neat beard, medium build. He was side-eying the window anxiously. Something – the rat, possibly – caught his attention. His face turned towards Patrick, splashed by cool light from a streetlamp.
Patrick felt a flash of satisfaction, then...
The second car went past, replacing the view. There was no one in the rear seat. It had plainly been meant as backup – in case the killer put up a fight or pulled weapons or took hostages or ran. In case something went wrong, in short.
Which it had, he thought.
They had Jonno.
How many times had Patrick seen him when they’d been watching the bar?
The cars drifted away, indicating at the end of the street, turning onto Walworth Road. Patrick stood there.
After a while, his gaze travelled back to the van. Hire Purpose. The cross, hanging there.
It didn’t mean anything, he told himself again.
As he stared at it, it occurred to him that Gethin had been about to move on. From the expression on his face when Patrick had left, he’d certainly believed he’d done what he’d meant to do. Succeeded.
What if he’d already gone?
He looked back the way he’d come, throat tightening.
He shouldn’t get involved, he thought. It was getting involved that had cost him all of this already. He had to remain detached. Disciplined. He mustn’t have anything to do with this. He turned away, began drifting towards Walworth. There were rows of flats there – there was a reasonable chance he’d find a meal in one of them.
He’d gone perhaps three hundred metres when his conscience caught up.
If Gethin had moved on and the police had the wrong man... He thought back to before the police had arrived. Gethin had looked agitated. Frantic, even.
Had he sensed the murderer was about to kill?
Tonight?
As he floated there, seconds turning into minutes, the van seemed to grow larger in his mind. If the killer was going to attack tonight, could Patrick really leave him to do it? Not just kill a man, but kill a man in the way Gethin had been...
Again, there was the cursed tightening at his throat. His death. His future, shrinking.
If he’d been too ashamed to go back before – to apologise for the spite he’d thrown at Gethin about having sex rather than ‘working towards what matters’ – how could he go and feed now, as if his own appetite was more important than a man’s life?
He turned, heading back for the bar, wishing he either hadn’t been such a fool as to keep walking in the first place, or that he could go faster now. After months of semi-starvation, he was weaker than he’d been in years. Decades, possibly. And if Gethin had gone, it would be down to him to stop the murderer.
Patrick hadn’t prayed in two hundred years, but he did now. He prayed the presence of the police might have made the killer think twice: that he, Patrick, would get to feed – to strengthen himself – before anything happened. Why hadn’t he stayed just a little longer at Gayles?
Braved watching Gethin leave.
He’d only just passed the van again when he saw his prayer wouldn’t be answered. Not fifty feet away, two men rounded the corner, an older one in baggy Oxford trousers supporting a younger one in skinny jeans as they headed towards him, back in the direction of Walworth Road. They were trailed by a third man, who was tugging at the younger one and shouting at him to run. Patrick recognised him immediately: short, muscular, blond, handsome, the Welsh accent clear as a bell.
Relief exploded through Patrick, chased by hope; then horror. He pushed them all away, annoyed with himself. He was too drained already. Feelings were the last thing he could let himself have. He knew how this worked.
The young man’s hand kept flopping from Gethin’s grip as Gethin flickered in and out of solidity, emotions all over the place. The chap looked too drunk to register Gethin at all. He lurched, knees softening.
The older man was taking most of his weight, urging him to keep walking, promising he’d get him safely home if he’d just tell him his address. He looked stressed and harassed, as if the evening wasn’t going at all as planned. But feverish too. It was a look Patrick had seen on ghost after ghost during their long descents into madness: the obsessive fixation he’d told Gethin about. Desire gone mad. The man wouldn’t stop. He’d reached a point where the only thing he could see was the thing he was about to do.
The drunk man murmured something that sounded like, “Home.”
“Yes, where?” the other one said.
“Run!” Gethin yelled, noiselessly to all but Patrick. Again, the younger man’s hand slid through his grip. Gethin would be losing energy every time it happened. Getting weaker and weaker...
Weaker even than Patrick, most likely. What on earth had Patrick done?
The young man didn’t look able to run anywhere. The thought struck Patrick that all the men had been killed in their homes.
“Gethin, stop,” he managed. He’d barely got the words out. If Gethin was too weak to stop the man, it was Patrick’s fault. He’d left Gethin to catch his killer alone, knowing he was about to kill again. After two centuries and seeing thousands of men together, he’d seen two together and lost all reason. He’d doomed this man himself.
Killed another man, after all. Again, horror rose. Again, he pushed it down. His energy lurched.
Gethin’s eyes widened as, finally, he saw Patrick, standing there, dithering. His expression said he didn’t believe it. “Patrick, it’s the killer, he’s–”
“Gethin, stop. This is pointless, you have to calm down. Here, let me try.” He made himself as solid as he could and went to grab the younger man’s hand instead. He didn’t think it would work, but–
Gethin roared. “It’s not pointless and don’t bloody tell me to calm down!”
Before Patrick could so much as look at him again, Gethin shoved him, so hard he crashed into the wall of someone’s house, losing yet more energy. The two living men just kept hobbling down the street, unaware. If the van was the killer’s, they’d be there any second. “Gethin, what are you–”
Gethin ignored him, running after the men, trying again to grab the younger one’s hand, plainly focusing everything he still had on solidity. His emotions were too wild, though. He was dry-sobbing with fear and frustration. His hand slipped through again. The killer pressed an electric key fob. Lights at each corner of the hire van flashed.
Patrick wished he’d just waited there: his instinct had been right after all. And he’d dismissed the feeling. Of course he had.
Because it was a fucking feeling.
He dropped his solidity, trying to keep his energy. By now, the killer had opened the passenger door and was ‘helping’ the younger man in, clipping the seatbelt while Gethin tried to fight his way through them both, succeeding only in draining himself more. The killer hurried around to the driver’s side and got in.
“I suppose we’ll go to mine, then,” he said, closing the door.
“Gethin, quick!” Patrick ordered.
Gethin stopped, staring at Patrick as if he was only just now noticing him, despite the wall.
The engine started.
“Gethin, into the van!”
“Patrick, what the sodding–”
Patrick charged, hoping Gethin would remain insubstantial, scooping him up and leaping through the metal panel with him. “Turn solid,” he snapped as they landed in the van’s rear section, letting go of him immediately, “or you’ll fall out of the back.”
He waited until Gethin had done it before doing the same himself. Gethin did so, then sat up, staring at Patrick like he was an alien.
Neither of them spoke. The van began to move.
Calm. Professional. Detached, Patrick told himself. Emotions were dangerous. The mantra didn’t seem to help. What in all hell were they doing? Why had he pushed Gethin into the van? What did he imagine either of them could do to stop anything? Patrick had lost a ludicrous amount of energy and Gethin... well, Gethin looked almost as weak as the first night they’d met.
The Welshman looked away. Around. There was nothing to see: metal walls and a moulded metal base. No windows. A plywood partition separated them from the front, so they couldn’t see either of the living occupants. Gethin’s gaze drifted to it.
“Gethin, you can’t do anything now. You could cause a crash. That could kill them both.”
Gethin’s eyes flicked back to him. After what felt like Patrick’s centuries all over again, he said, “You came back.” Beneath them, the floor vibrated.
The tone was so strange, Patrick nearly forgot he wasn’t meant to be having any feelings. Weak or not, Gethin still seemed to pulse with the bright, lively energy he always had. The van stopped, engine idling awhile, then began again, as if they’d waited at traffic lights.
Patrick swallowed needlessly. “You have to get control of your emotions,” he recited, not really sure which of them he was saying it to. “If you want to stop him and leave,” he added, to cover the uncertainty.
