An hour or so later, Sean, Emma, and Will trooped out to the Jaguar. Pardoe was sitting in the passenger seat, nibbling on a croissant. A large man in a blue cagoule nodded at each of them via the rear-view mirror as they got into the back. Jamie Marshall.
“Hi, Marshall,” said Sean. “Recovered from the stag night?”
“Sorry to be so hush-hush, mate,” Marshall said.
“I doubt I’ll ever be surprised by anything ever again,” Sean remarked.
“You know each other?” Emma asked.
Marshall drove for twenty minutes, navigating A roads and B roads with an almost supernatural knowledge of where explosions had prohibited access. They arrived at a church on the outskirts of Warrington just as sunlight was touching colour to the streets.
There Pardoe kept them, and told them what they needed to know.
“It is unfortunate,” he told Sean and Emma, when they gave their account of what had happened in the house on Myddleton Lane. “But, expected, given your resourcefulness.”
“Why unfortunate?” Emma wanted to know.
“Because once you have passed through a Negstream, you cannot use it again. You have to find your own way back. We think that this is ultimately what did for de Fleche. He constructed his follies around these glorious gateways, one of which he no doubt passed through, and then found that they were as useless to him as a fart in a colander. Oh, do excuse me.” Pardoe flushed. “I’m given to these pathetic little collapses in etiquette. Quite unforgivable. When he found another, he went through and stayed there. He’s been there ever since.”
“And we were detailed to go in and get him?” Sean asked. “Get him how? You can’t bring a dead man back. You can’t kill a dead man.” He looked around at the others. “Can you?”
“Well, he’s not dead. That’s the thing. There are ways and means. It really is fortunate that we found you. De Fleche, in the years since we lost you, has become quite a problem. He’s upsetting the balance and causing a gradual decay. Which is bad for all of us, really. He shouldn’t be there. That’s the bottom line. Negstreams were never meant to be used for travel. They are momentary monuments to the dead at the instant that life departs. The soul made visible as it leaves the body. Death’s mirror, perhaps. Sometimes, like the one you found, Sean, they remain. Flukes of nature, they are. Frozen memories of a life. True ghosts. They are not doorways. Not doorways.”
Will wanted to know if what he had glimpsed after his accident with Elisabeth on the motorway out of London had been a Negstream. He wanted to know where the “there” Pardoe had mentioned was and what it might be. He wanted to know if Catriona might be “there”.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t bother trying to find out if I were you. You aren’t trained for it, dear boy. You aren’t… one of us.”
“What can happen if this guy stays over there?” he asked. “I mean, he’s been there twenty years. So who cares? Let the fucker rot.”
“He isn’t dead. And he’s in a dead zone. How healthy can that be? He is in the place where we all go the second we die. His presence is causing it to decay. Dead things cannot rest easy there.”
“How does that affect us?” asked Emma.
“Well, now, how should I put it?” Pardoe pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and studied the middle distance for a few seconds. “I suppose it affects us because, well, because the dead can leak back.”
Will said, into the heavy silence: “You. Fucking. What?”
Pardoe nodded. “Marvellously put, lad. It’s true. The dead walk among us, if I might be so bold as to put it in hammy language.”
They sat in silence, digesting this, while Pardoe slurped at his tea.
“How do we go about getting back there then?” Sean had asked.
Pardoe spread his hands. “Do you know, I haven’t the foggiest.”
SEAN GREW JITTERY around ten o’clock so Emma took him walking. She’d fastened his coat up to the collar in order to disguise his scarified features. Sunglasses concealed the destroyed eye. They’d draw attention on this wintry night, which they could do without, but not as much as an open wound.
He walked stiffly against the restraining bandages on his legs. He leaned heavily against her and she smelled the copper of his blood seeping through the makeshift dressings. She helped him walk to the estate entrance, where they turned right, towards a tunnel of pedestrian bridges and sodium light.
“Can we stop a moment? I’m having trouble breathing.” He hacked up a lot of blood, and she wiped away the crimson bubbles and ropes from his mouth while he bared his face to the rain. “God, Emma,” he said, “didn’t it used to be so easy? You’d turn a trick here and there and have food for an evening; I’d break my back chasing shoplifters and things would keep moving. I’ve made a bit of a mess of things. I do apologise.”
She hushed him and held him a while, thinking that, compared to what she’d been doing when they first met, this wasn’t too bad. Not really. Remembering his conversation with Pardoe, she gently asked Sean about his parents and why he had not volunteered the information about them earlier.
“Why?” he asked, cruelly. “Because you feel an extra-special bond between us? Because you think you’ve got a right to know stuff just because of what we are?”
“Never mind,” she said, trying to smile to show that she didn’t care what level of divulgence he wanted to allow. The smile didn’t fit too well.
When she felt the rain trickling down the back of her jumper she moved away from him. “Come on,” she soothed. “Let’s get us a drink. Get us both dry.”
In a grim little pub, Sean slumped into a chair while Emma bought whisky. They sat together in silence and sipped, Sean’s damaged fingers curled awkwardly around his shot glass. The punters formed a thin gruel of human waste in the bar that evening. They were either propped up like puppets in broken chairs or sinking their measures of rocket fuel in slow motion, eyes fixed upon a hazy somewhere between heaven and hell. Around the red baize of a pool table pock-marked with cigarette burns, three men took it in turns to smack the cue ball into the pack without the manifest intention of potting anything.
The bartender leaned against the counter at the far end, eyes swivelling up from his motorbike magazine to watch old sports videos playing on the TV that dominated one side of the room. The sound was muted; two teams – one wearing red, the other, blue – stroked a football around a pitch.
A woman in a fake fur coat piled through the doors, the wind and rain at her back as though fuelling the fury she seemed to contain. “Where’s Joey?” she shrieked, looking around the bar. “Shitting priests, I’ll swing for him!” Then she was gone, the door rattling in its frame.
The bartender hollered at the men playing aggression pool to help with the storm shutters, and they returned a few minutes later, having secured the wooden covers over the windows, to be offered free drinks and a towel.
“I like this place,” Sean said. He regarded his drink for a moment and apologised to Emma for snapping at her. “It’s just, I’ve kept so much locked inside me for so long. Sometimes I think about talking to someone about it, but it’s almost as if it never happened and that talking about it will make things bad for me again. Not talking about it keeps the lid on tight.”