I shifted on my bleeding knee, began sorting through the flattened vegetation with my scraped hands. The pain in my head was like a living thing, red and sodden in my skull, and the pulse of sunlight overhead felt as if it was scraping my brain, but still I continued. “Psychometry,” I said to Pickwick. I was babbling, but the sound of my own voice seemed to calm the agony in my head. “It isn’t my specialty, Pickwick, but I can do it. At least, I may be able to. I don’t really know anymore, do I?” I kept searching, my face close to the ground, beyond caring how mad I looked. “If he even dropped it, it may give me nothing. I may see that he enjoys cottage pie, or that he wore brown socks instead of black this morning. I may learn something that isn’t true, or nothing at all. If he even dropped it.”
He had. I found the burned end of an abandoned cigarette alone in the grass, gone out now, not even a smell of ash coming from it. I looked at it for a long moment, thinking of how carefully Gloria’s killer had put out his cigarette after he’d murdered Ramona and possibly Davies, too, how neatly he’d tamped it out and slid it in his pocket. I was looking at one mistake, one single mistake, the only one he’d ever made as he’d gone about killing people.
Maybe it wouldn’t work. I was just a girl, after all, and he was an assassin of some kind, a professional killer. He was one step ahead of everyone—the police, George Sutter, MI5, and the man in the houndstooth jacket—calmly taking lives and walking away like a man who didn’t exist. I was just a flapper who found lost dogs for money. There was no reason it would work.
Then Gloria’s words came back to me, from the last time I had ever seen her, when I hadn’t told her I was sorry or that I loved her no matter what. When I’d let her walk away.
“I was born with something the world has never seen,” I said, and I picked up the cigarette.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
At first there was nothing. I was too tired, my head hurt, I had done too much already, the sun was too bright. My powers were fading. Despite what I so desperately wanted to believe, a single cigarette wasn’t going to tell me anything.
And then I saw a motorcycle with a sidecar, clear as day. I thought, Just a farmhand traveling the countryside on his motorcycle. No one will look twice. That was what he was dressed as, the black suit and hat of London traded for thick boots, rough clothes, and a cloth cap. No reason for anyone to look at what he carried in the sidecar. None at all.
The vision faded, and I was on my knees on the hilltop again, but I gave a crow of triumph at my success so far that made Pickwick open his eyes. He was lying in the grass, having dozed a little after his long run, watching me calmly.
I ran a hand through my hair, rubbed the top of my head. A cloud covered the sun, and the countryside lapsed into pleasant shadow, the breeze cool and fragrant. My power didn’t seem to be fading now; it was painful but almost jaggedly strong, as if joyous that I’d finally set it free. “Again,” I said aloud, and I closed my eyes.
This time I saw the darkened outer wall of a factory at night, a window broken, a suitcase thrown through. A train schedule. Four men at a small table, talking quietly, and I approached them and sat down and spoke to them in a language I did not recognize, watching their eyes go wide in recognition. All of it disjointed, brief, frustrating. I opened my eyes again.
I shifted off my knees and lay back in the grass, like a girl enjoying a lazy day. I held up the cigarette and stared at it beneath the clouded sky. My head thumped, my stomach turned, and then I was ready. “Again,” I repeated.
A woman. Lovely, dark haired. Sitting in a bleak room somewhere, black circles under her eyes. Looking up at me with hopeless dread. No, no. Thinking of her when I throw the suitcase. Thinking of her when the train stops at the border and I show my false papers, calm and unconcerned. Thinking of her when I shave with my straight razor, looking at the blade and wondering how quick I could be, but no, I will not do it, because of her. And then the telephone shrills and I know I’ll pick it up and two words will crackle down the line at me, Black dog, and I will be given a set of coordinates. And I look up into the mirror and—
The shock of his identity made everything fuzzy after that. I dropped the cigarette; it was no good to me anymore. I must have picked myself up off the ground, though later I recalled nothing but the stinging in my knee and the wet blood on my shin. I must have staggered down the hill and toward the road, through the trees, Pickwick following me. I saw only the woman, the images I had seen, the feelings they had given me. I was in someone else’s head, living someone else’s life. The shaving razor. The face in the mirror.
I started up the road toward the Dubbses’ house. He knew I would go there; he had put together what I wanted and why. He would go there as certainly as a bird goes to his nest, unable to stay away, unable not to finish the job. There was the possibility that, after the failed attempt with the rifle, I would turn around and go home, but he didn’t think I would do it. I was supposed to be dead—quick, clean, no chance of getting caught, as usual—but the man in the houndstooth jacket had surprised him, and now he had something of a problem. Still, nothing he couldn’t clean up quickly, as long as I was out of the way. Once I was dead, he could vanish, just as he had before. A man who didn’t exist.
The hum of a motor approached on the road behind me. A thick, heavy sound, not that of a motorcycle. I rubbed my eyes.
It drew up beside me, and the motor idled as I heard the door open. “Jesus God,” someone said. James’s voice. Confusing, because James did not own a motorcar. Where had he gotten a motorcar?
And then his hands were on me, an arm beneath my knees and another behind my shoulders, picking me up swift and easy without even a grunt. “What the bloody hell,” he said, his voice short with fury. I smelled the tangy scent of him, felt myself being placed gently in the motorcar.
“My dog,” I cried.