Deadspeak

'What of Ken Layard now?' Darcy wanted to know.

Papastamos was small, slender, all sinew and suntan and shiny-black, wavy hair. Handsome in a fashion, and usually full of zest, now he looked harassed and hagridden. 'I don't know what it is,' he gave a series of questioning, desperate shrugs, held out his hands palms up. 'I don't know, and blame myself because I don't know! But... they are not easy to understand, those two. Policemen? Strange policemen! They seemed to know so much - to be so sure of certain things - but never explained to me how they knew.'

'They're very special,' Darcy agreed. 'But what about Ken?'

'He couldn't swim, had a bump on his head. I dragged him out of the harbour onto some rocks, got the salt water out of him, went for help. Jordan was no use to me: he just sat on the mole under the old windmills babbling to himself. He was suddenly... crazy! And he's stayed that way. But Layard, he was OK, I swear it! Just a bump on the head. And now...'

'Now?' said Harry.

'Now they say he may die!' Papastamos looked like he might cry. 'I did all I could, I swear it!'

'Don't blame yourself, Manolis,' Darcy told him. 'Whatever happened wasn't your fault. But can we see him?'

'Of course, we go to the hospital now. You can see Trevor, too, if you wish it. But,' and again he shrugged, 'you won't get much out of that one. My God, I am so sorry!'

The hospital was off Papalouca, one of the New Town's main roads. It was a big, sprawling place with a frontage all of a hundred yards long. 'One section - a ward, clinic and dispensary - is reserved mainly for the treatment of the tourists,' Papastamos explained as their taxi took them in through the gates. 'It's not much in use now, but in July and August the work doesn't stop. The broken bones, bad sunburns, heatstroke, stings, cuts and bruises. Ken Layard has a room of his own.'

He told their driver to wait, led the way into a side wing where a receptionist sat in her booth clipping her fingernails. As soon as she saw Papastamos she sprang to her feet and spoke to him in breathless, very much subdued Greek. Papastamos at once gasped and went pale. 'My friends, you are too late,' he said. 'He is ... dead!' He looked at Sandra, Darcy and Harry in turn, and shook his head. 'There is nothing I can say.'

They were too dumbstruck to answer for a moment, until Harry said: 'Can we see him anyway?'

Harry looked cool in a pale blue jacket, white shirt and slacks. He and the others had slept on the plane, catching up on a lot of lost sleep. And despite his travails of the night before, he seemed to have come through it better than them. His face was calm, resigned; unlike Sandra's and Darcy's, Papastamos saw no sorrow in it. And the Greek thought: A cold-blooded one, this Harry Keogh.

But he was wrong: it was simply that Harry had learned to view death differently. Ken Layard might be finished 'here' - finished physically, materially, in the corporeal world - but he wasn't all dead. Not all of him. Why, for all Harry knew Ken might be seeking him out right now, desperate to engage him in deadspeak. Except Harry was forbidden to hear him, and forbidden to answer even if he did.

'See him?' Papastamos answered. 'Of course you can. But the girl tells me that first the doctor wishes to see us. His office is this way.' And he led them down a cool corridor where the light came slanting in through high, narrow windows.

They found the doctor, a small bald man with thick-lensed spectacles perched on the end of his hook of a nose, in his tiny office room signing and stamping papers.

When Papastamos introduced them to him, Dr Sakellarakis was at once the soul of concern, displaying his very genuine dismay at the loss of their friend. Speaking half-decent English and shaking his head sadly, he told them:

"This bump on the Layard's head - I 'fraid is much more than the simple bump, gentlemen, lady. There is perhaps the damage inside? This is not certain until the autopsy, naturally, but I thinks this one is causing the death. The damage, the blood clot, something.' Again he shook his head, gave a sad shrug.

'Can we see him?' Harry asked again. And as the doctor led the way: 'When is the autopsy?'

Again the Greek's shrug. 'One days, two - as soon as it can be arranged. But soon. Until then I am having him removed to the morgue.'

'And when did he die - exactly?' Harry was relentless.

'Exactly? To the minute? Is not known. One hour, I thinks. About... ah, 1800 hours?'

'Six o'clock local time,' said Sandra. 'We were on the plane.'

'Does there have to be an autopsy?' Harry hated the thought of it; he knew the effect necromancy had on the dead, how much they feared it. Dragosani had been a necromancer, and oh how the dead had loathed and feared him! Of course, this wouldn't be the same; Layard would feel nothing at the hands of a pathologist, whose skills would be those of the surgeon as opposed to the torturer, but still Harry didn't like it.

Sakellarakis held up his hands. 'It is the law.'

Layard's room was small, white, clean and pungently antiseptic. He lay full length on a trolley, covered head to toe by a sheet. The bed he'd used had been made up again, and the window closed to keep out flies. Darcy carefully laid back the sheet to show Layard's face – and drew back at once, wincing. Sandra, too. Layard's face wasn't in repose.

'Is the spasm,' Sakellarakis informed, nodding. 'The muscles, a contraction. The mortician is putting this one right. Then Layard, he is doing the correct sleeping.'

Harry hadn't drawn back. Instead he stood over Layard, looking down at him. The esper was grey, clay-cold, frozen in rigor mortis. But his face was fixed in something rather more than that. His jaws were open in a scream and his upper lip at the left had lifted up and away from the teeth, leaving them visible and shining. His entire face seemed pulled to the left in a sort of rictus, as if he screamed his denial of something unbelievable, unbearable.

His eyes were closed, but in the eyelids under the brows Harry saw twin slits in the membranous skin. They were fine but dark and plainly visible against the overall pallor. 'He's been... cut?' Harry glanced at the Greek doctor.

The spasm,' the other nodded. "The eyes come open. It can happen. I make the small cuts in the muscles... no problem.'

Harry licked his lips, frowned, peered intently at the large blue lump showing on Layard's forehead and continuing into his hair. The shiny skin was broken in the centre, a small abrasion where flesh white as fishbelly showed through. Harry looked at the lump, reached out a hand as if to touch it, then turned away. And: 'That look on his face,' he said, under his breath. 'No muscular spasm that, but sheer terror!'

Darcy Clarke, for his part, had taken one look at Layard and drawn back first one pace, then another. But he hadn't stopped drawing back and was now out in the corridor. His face was drawn, eyes staring into the room at the figure on the trolley. Sandra joined him; Harry, too.

'Darcy, what is it?' Sandra's voice was hushed.

Darcy only shook his head. 'I don't know,' he gulped. 'But whatever it is, it's not right!' It was his talent working, looking out for him.

Papastamos put back the sheet over Layard's face; he and Sakellarakis came out of the room into the corridor. 'Not the spasm, you say?' The doctor looked at Harry and cocked his head on one side. 'You are knowing about these things?'

'I know some things about the dead, yes,' Harry nodded.

'Harry's ... an expert,' Darcy had himself under control now.

'Ah!' said Sakellarakis. 'A doctor!'

'Listen,' Harry took him by the arm, spoke earnestly to him. 'The autopsy must be tonight. And then he must be burned!'

'Burned? You are meaning cremated?'

'Yes, cremated. Reduced to ashes. Tomorrow at the latest.'

'My God!' Manolis Papastamos burst out. 'And Ken Layard was your friend? Such friends I don't need! I thought you were the cold one but... you are not merely cold, you are as dead as he is!'