neighbouring building. A sickly, yellowish light glimmered through the cobwebby, cracked panes of windows to either side of the door.
Hunching low, Harlan crossed the walkway and peeped through a window into an attic room maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. Jones was stood with his back to him at its far end. In one hand he held what appeared to be some kind of oil lamp. With his other hand he removed bricks from the wall. He reached inside the hole and withdrew a black plastic sack. He put down the sack and took a cardboard tube from it. Very carefully, he slid a bunch of rolled up canvases out of the tube.
I’ve got you, thought Harlan. I’ve fucking got you! With a look of twisted glee, he burst into the room. Jones barely had time to turn, before Harlan was on him. He knocked Jones to the floorboards with enough force to wind a bull. Thrusting a knee into Jones’s back, he twisted the canvases out of his grasp and unfurled them. His triumph dissolved into sick rage. There were three paintings. Two of them were of young boys he didn’t recognise. The third was of Jamie Sutton. The artist had captured perfectly the benumbed horror in their eyes, the agonising vulnerability of their naked bodies, the destruction of their innocence.
What is right? The thought tolled in Harlan’s mind like a death knell. He savagely dismissed it. In that instant, he didn’t care what was right. He only knew that he wanted to kill Jones so badly it gave him the shakes. He snatched up a brick and raised it over Jones’s head. Jones struggled weakly, whimpering, “Please, please don’t…”
Harlan’s shaking intensified. Tremors contorted his face, as if he was torn between two directions, two warring identities. A wild voice — a voice he barely recognised — burst from him. “Do it!”
In reply, Garrett’s accusing voice rose into his thoughts, you’re a menace to society.
“Kill him!”
Garrett’s voice came back, a madman.
There was a sudden splitting, dislocating sensation in Harlan’s head. “No,” he cried, silencing both voices. He slammed the brick against the floorboards an inch from Jones’s skull.
Jones’s screamed, then realising he was unhurt, gasped out, “Thank you, thank you.”
Harlan ground his knee into Jones’s spine. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll change my mind.” He returned the canvases to the plastic sack. There were other things in there too — pencil sketches, bundles of Polaroids. He jerked Jones to his feet. As he did so, Jones grabbed the lantern and swung it at him. The lantern shattered, splashing burning oil over Harlan and the sack. He dropped the sack, and frantically patted out the flames on his arms and chest. Scooping up the burning sack, Jones ran for the door. Harlan pursued him, catching him up as he reached the walkway. Jones flung the sack over the railings, before pitching forward onto his face. Harlan watched it sail through the darkness and hit the concrete thirty feet below, bursting and scattering its contents like burning coals. He watched any chance of connecting Jones to Jamie Sutton go up in flames.
“Help me,” groaned Jones, holding up his hands, which were coated with smoking, melted plastic.
The wild voice stirred inside Harlan again. And this time no other voice rose up in opposition. He looked down at Jones, his eyes blank as the night that surrounded him. He stooped to haul him upright. “I don’t think I can make it down the ladder,” said Jones, his voice grating with pain.
“Is there another way down?”
Jones shook his head. “You’ll have to call a fire engine or something.”
“There’s no need.”
“But how else am I going to-” Jones broke off as Harlan reached down, grabbed his legs and flipped him over the railing. For an instant, his shrill scream raked across the derelict steel-mill’s courtyard. There was a dull, crunching thud as he hit the floor head first. Harlan stood for a moment, listening to the silence outside and inside. Then he crossed to the opposite doorway. Holding onto the doorframe, he stamped on the walkway and felt it give a little. He drove his heel into the metal grating again and again, until all of a sudden the bolts came loose and it collapsed, swinging against the opposite wall, dangling there for a few seconds, then clanging to the ground. Even before the echoes had died away, Harlan was making his way quickly but carefully to the ladder.
Keeping his head down, sticking to side streets and unlit back alleys, Harlan returned to his car. He drove through the empty city night, keeping well under the speed limit. He kept expecting to feel something — relief, guilt, satisfaction, fear — but he didn’t. It was as though the part of his brain’s circuitry that controlled his emotions had burned out. He pulled over outside Eve’s flat, got out of the car and pressed the intercom button. After a long moment, she answered, her voice sleepy but concerned, “Harlan, is that you?”
Still nothing. Not even a flicker of feeling. What’s wrong with me? Harlan asked himself detachedly. Am I in shock? Or did my emotions die along with Jones? A kind of numb panic closed his throat. He heard his voice come out tight, choked. “Yes.” Eve buzzed him in, and he climbed the stairs, moving like a man unsure of what would happen next. She was waiting for him at the door to her flat. When he saw her face, when he saw the slight swelling of her belly, all he felt for her, all he’d once felt for Tom, came rushing back. He stopped a few paces short of her, tears welling into his eyes, stammering, “I…I’ve done…something…I had no…” He trailed off. I had no choice, he’d been about to say. But he realised that wasn’t true. There was always a choice.
“Shh,” soothed Eve, moving towards Harlan, resting her head against his chest. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I love you.” She drew his hand to her belly. He felt a pulse of life under his palm, faint and hardly there, but strong enough to make him tremble. Tears fell from his eyes onto her neck.
“Will you still go away with me?”
Eve looked at Harlan as if to say, do you even need to ask? “Where would we go?”
“Somewhere…somewhere where it never gets dark.”
“I don’t think any such place exists.”
“Neither do I,” said Harlan. “But let’s see if we can find it anyway.”
