‘Patience,’ Max said. Ahead, Bloom emerged from the phone box and headed down the street.
Rachel gave in to the urge and started nibbling at the nail of her left forefinger.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He needs to do something first. It involves West, and that book he brought with him from Number Ten.’ For a moment, Rachel wanted to storm the highest seat of power in the land and demand an explanation of what the prime minister and his illegitimate son had talked about. ‘Maybe he needs to Zöllner-photograph documents.’
‘If he bolts, if he thought-travels—’ Roger said.
‘Then we will stay on him, Mr Hollis,’ Max said. ‘These nice gentlemen that you brought along inform me that they have the lock on his soul-stone now. Wherever he goes in the aether, we can follow.’ He laughed softly. ‘I could almost believe that Mr Booth and Mr Hickson were bloodhounds in a past life.’
‘This had better work, Rachel,’ Roger said.
‘I believe you are turning into an old woman, Roger.’
Joan set her mouth in a grim line and started the engine. They weaved slowly through the heavy traffic, eyes fixed on Bloom’s short, broad figure.
* * *
Peter crossed Birdcage Walk and did a brief loop around the paths of St James’s Park. His borrowed heart felt like a church bell in his chest. It was wet and quiet, and Buckingham Palace loomed across the lake.
This is the last time I will see anything like this, he thought. Perhaps it was not so bad to carry a memory of trees and a white castle that looked like it was made of porcelain—even if the Queen now ruled from the afterlife. The smell of grass and the cries of birds were sharp and clear.
The last time he had felt like this was when his petition to join the Summer Court had been accepted, and he had gone to the Service’s clinic to pass over.
They set him up in a simple bunk bed with a morphine drip, and before the world faded away, everything was more real than it had ever been. Even now, he could recall the glint of sunlight through a dirty window.
Then he had slept and dreamed of climbing, looking for handholds on the side of some vast ethereal building. A gentle warm sun shone on his back. There were handholds everywhere, statues of angels and engravings and planes where it was easy to find purchase with his rubber-soled shoes. Until a statue of a saint came apart beneath his fingers with a thunderclap, his feet slipped and he fell.
Then he was fully awake, in complete nothingness, surrounded by silence and the chill embrace of Summerland. A suffocating panic filled his chest, but he no longer had lungs. There was no distinction between the self and the other here; both were just eddies and currents in the same fluid medium.
But he was prepared: he had memorised the feel of his body, standing naked in front of a mirror, imprinting the sensation of his falling and rising chest and the flow of air through his nostrils. He summoned the memory and the aether sculpted it for him, stroke by stroke. With that came the amber twilight glow of the First Aether above.
Soon, if things went well, he would undergo the Termin Procedure and leave the aetheric world behind, too, becoming a thought in the mind of the Presence. The notion should have been comforting, but there was a degree of regret, too. He had not said goodbye to Noel, nor to his mother. He hoped that one day, they would understand.
He focused on the route, on the walking. With the clarity of his approaching end, it was easy to memorise faces, gaits, coats and registration plates. He left the park through the west gate, then proceeded to Eaton Square and its opulent residences. The Metropolitan Sepulchre on Primrose Hill loomed to the right, a hundred-storey pyramid with its five million dead, but he ignored its vast mass, focusing instead on the small, on the people.
And then, finally, the safe house.
It was smaller than the one George had used in Chelsea. The cover story was that it was owned by a photographer who used it for the occasional shoot—it was not uncommon for the New Dead to have their picture taken in a charter-body, to help maintain their self-image. His stomach was tense when he picked up the key hidden beneath a flower pot and entered.
If things went as planned, he would never leave. Not in the flesh, in any case.
The house was cold and empty, and the sheets covering the furniture made it look like a wintry landscape in the pale daylight.
The Zöllner camera was a heavy black thing of leather and metal, kept in a safe together with the sensitive, silvery polarisation plates in their brown paper coverings. It was a cumbersome thing: you could only load one plate at a time, and changing used plates was a delicate process that took a couple of minutes even if you had more experience than Peter did.
Peter set The Science of Death up on a low table in the kitchen where the light was good, inserted the first plate into the camera and focused it on the number-covered pages. His hands shook. He could feel Pendlebury’s soul moving in his skull, next to his own. He had to sit down for a moment until the sensation passed.
Only a few photographs, he told himself. Then I can go. Then I can disappear. Would it be like a photographic film exposed to bright light? All the shapes and patterns that made up his being blotted out by exposure to the greater radiance of the Presence?
He picked up the camera again, focused it and took the first picture. The camera buzzed as its circuits imprinted the aetheric pattern into the plate’s magnetic loops. He switched plates and took another picture, then another. Every now and then he paused, tore out the pages he had already photographed, threw them into the fireplace and burned them.
* * *
‘What is he doing?’ Rachel asked.
‘It has only been a few minutes,’ Max replied. ‘The gentlemen from the Summer Court are watching in the aether, my dear Helen is on one side of the building and Mr Stokes is on the other. No one else has gone in or out. If you prefer, Mrs White, I can have a brief look inside.’
‘Please do.’
‘I am going to join Helen for a wee bit,’ Joan said, getting out of the car.
Rachel nodded and drummed on the dashboard with her fingers. She had to do something, and had already gnawed two fingernails to the quick.
Roger coughed. It took her a moment to realise that they were alone for the first time since the night in Roger’s flat. She remembered the smell of his aftershave, the rail-thin feel of his body.
‘Are you happy, Rachel?’ he asked suddenly.
‘I do not want to do this now.’
‘We may not have time later. Why do you stay with him? With Joe, I mean.’
‘What do you think you know about me and Joe?’
‘People talk.’
‘Your secretary floozies talk, you mean.’
‘They do not matter a whit to me, you know that. Come to Summerland with me. It is different there. We can be part of a new Service where they value your soul and not your gender. Leave your soldier to his misery.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ Rachel said slowly. ‘What we did happened because I needed to feel guilty about something. When I handed the file over to Bloom, I had to show a strong emotion to hide my true intentions from him. That’s all it was.’
Roger paused, narrowing his eyes. A cynical smile flashed on his lips.
‘You keep telling yourself that, Rachel. If you don’t mind me saying, it did not look like you were feeling much guilt at the time. I always knew there was a kind of abandon in you, if you just allowed yourself to let it out.’
‘Don’t be disgusting, Roger.’
‘All I am saying is think about it.’ He reached out, took Rachel’s hand and ran a tickling finger along her palm. ‘Life is short.’
She closed her eyes, lost in the sensation for a moment.
‘You are not as bad as all that, Roger. But I love Joe.’ She pulled her hand away.