Graham Masterton - Innocent Blood

At that moment, the saturnine young man in the gray coat made his excuses to Detective Booker and came over to join them. Frank could tell by the way he walked that he was very fit. His shoulders were broad and his pecs bulged under his sweater. He had a long straight nose like a Greek statue, and dark, deeply buried eyes. Frank disliked him even before he opened his mouth. Too damn handsome, too damn self-possessed.

He held out his hand. ‘I think we may have met before,’ he said in a distinctly British accent.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Nevile Strange. Maybe you’ve heard of me.’

‘Sorry.’

Lieutenant Chessman said, ‘Nevile is what you might call a psychic detective. We call him in from time to time when we’re not making much headway with good old-fashioned procedure. You remember last January, when the Dikstrom girl was kidnapped?’

‘Sure, I remember.’

‘Nevile told us that her little bead bracelet had fallen down the crack in the rear seat of the suspect’s station wagon. Sure enough, when we searched the vehicle again, there it was.’

‘Really.’

‘You don’t sound terribly impressed,’ Nevile said and smiled at him.

‘Well, no. I’m afraid I don’t believe in the world beyond.’

‘I can’t say that I do, either,’ Lieutenant Chessman put in. ‘But Nevile has a terrific record of helping us with some very intractable cases. Whether you believe in it or not, seven times out of ten, he gets it right.’

‘Let me show you what I’m doing here,’ Nevile suggested. ‘Frank, is it? Detective Booker was telling me you lost your little boy.’

Frank looked at Lieutenant Chessman and Lieutenant Chessman pulled a face as if to say, why not?

Nevile walked off between the distorted school gates. When he reached the shattered security booth he turned and waited, like a parent waiting for a laggardly child. Frank hesitated and then reluctantly followed him.

As they crossed the parking lot, Nevile said, ‘Everybody has the potential to be psychic, you know. It’s a skill, not a gift. But some people have it more than others.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Me, I’ve been blessed with psychic perception all my life, ever since I was a snotty-nosed kid in South London. My parents just accepted it – for instance, if ever my mother lost her purse, she’d come to ask me where it was and I’d say, “under the couch” or “you left it at Mrs So-and-so’s house.” I never thought that there was anything amazing about it.

‘Then one day, when I was about ten, my best friend, Robert, was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver, right outside his house, and killed. There were no witnesses and nobody came forward to admit it. I went to the spot where he had died, and while I was standing there, Robert appeared, just the way he was before the car hit him.

‘I couldn’t see him directly, not face-on, but I could see him out of the corner of my eye, as if he was standing just behind me, and a little way off to one side. It was then that I heard the car coming, and I stepped back on to the pavement. The car drove past me, whoooosh , maybe forty or fifty miles an hour. It almost hit me, but I didn’t feel any slipstream, nothing at all. The only thing was, I saw Robert rolling over and over on the road, arms and legs flapping like a scarecrow, and I knew that I had seen him being killed.

‘The car was a gray Hillman Minx, and the last three numbers on its license plate were seven-six-six. I went back home and told my father what I’d seen, and my father took me to the police station. Of course the police were highly skeptical, but they checked it out all the same. They found the car in Brighton, about a week later. It still had a clump of Robert’s scalp sticking to the front grille.’

They had reached the area in front of the school where the bomb had exploded. The bodies and the pieces of bodies had been removed, but all of the rest of the debris had been left where it was, so that the forensic team could catalog every scrap of it, from shredded T-shirts to charred sports bags. Most of them were on their hands and knees, carefully picking up the fragments of twenty-three lost lives and dropping them into polythene evidence bags.

Frank breathed in the stench of detonated explosive and scorched metal and brick-dust. The clatter from the diggers was so loud that Nevile had to shout.

‘When somebody is violently killed, they leave what I like to call a psychic imprint on their physical surroundings. When my friend Robert was killed, the trauma of those moments was imprinted on the highway, almost like a series of high-speed photographs. What I can do – because I have very developed mental awareness – is I can develop those photographs in my mind’s eye, so that I can see the event happening all over again.’

‘So . . . what can you see here?’

Nevile looked down at a chalk outline on the blistered tarmac. ‘A little girl with blonde curls died here. Her first name was Amy and her second name had something to do with ships. She was laughing when the blast hit her. She had her head thrown back and her eyes closed. And then – bang. Now . . . now she’s thinking . . .’

‘ Now ?’

‘She’s dead, Frank, in the physical sense. But now she’s worried about her pet hamster, who’s going to take care of it.’

‘Her pet hamster ?’ Frank didn’t know whether to laugh or to walk away.

‘What?’ said Nevile. ‘You think I’m being cynical? What do you think a little girl would be worrying about, if she knew that she could never go back home?’

One of the forensic investigators came waddling toward them in her white Tyvek suit, her short red hair sticking up like rooster feathers. She took off her face mask and wiped the perspiration from her freckled forehead with the back of her hand. ‘So they brought you in, Nevile,’ she said. ‘They must be desperate.’

Nevile turned to Frank and grinned. ‘Lorraine’s a non-believer, like you. If you can’t touch it, feel it, eat it, or see it under a microscope, Lorraine won’t admit it exists. How about dinner, Lorraine? I could put you in touch with your dead grandmother and find out what she did with that cultured-pearl necklace you always wanted so badly.’

‘How the hell do you know about that?’

‘Because I can read your mind. And because I met your sister about three days ago at the Roeg Gallery and she asked me if there was any chance of my tracing it for you.’

‘You fake.’

‘All right,’ said Nevile. ‘If I’m such a fake, tell me who was killed right here.’

Lorraine lifted up the clipboard that was dangling from her belt and leafed through it until she found a diagram of all of the dead and injured. ‘Amy Cutter, aged eight and a half. She was Pam Cutter’s daughter – you know, the actress who plays Kirsty Harris in Time Of Our Life .’

Nevile looked at Frank as if to say, there you are, what did I tell you ?’

Frank said, ‘OK, I’m about three-tenths impressed. Why don’t you take a look at the van, see if you can’t work out who the killers were.’

‘Well . . . I’ve already done that. That was Lieutenant Chessman’s first priority.’

‘And?’

‘There’s very little in the van in the way of psychic imprints. Maybe it was something to do with the bomb going off only two or three feet away from them. They were atomized in a millionth of a second, so their spirits didn’t have the time to make an impression on their immediate surroundings. The man left a very faint resonance, the driver. I’d guess that he was a loner, quite a disturbed kind of individual, with some very odd beliefs about forces from outer space. His name could have been David but he was usually known as something else, something Arabic like Hassan.’