Josh didn’t say a word all the way back to the house.
He didn’t know what he could say.
A week?
It couldn’t be a week since the funeral.
It was impossible.
But as they turned into the estate he saw the first of the posters his mother had glued up on one of the telephone poles. It was his face. The word MISSING was right there in block capitals above it and their phone number beneath it. He didn’t know what he was supposed to think. He’d been at the funeral two days ago. He’d spent the night at the flat in Rotherhithe and then the rest of the day chasing clues left by Boone. He’d stood face-to-face with Damiola last night. He’d seen incredible things, yes, but they’d only happened to him yesterday. He’d seen an iron raven do battle with dead comedians with mouths like sharks. He’d met a woman who hadn’t aged a day in ninety years, and set foot in a part of London that hadn’t existed for just as long. He was surrounded by impossible things. What was one more?
He was about to ask the obvious question, but took his phone from his pocket to check the date and time on it instead, forgetting that the battery was dead. It didn’t matter; he was already beginning to believe crossing the length of Glass Town had taken days not minutes.
I can’t leave this place—not for more than a few minutes. You’ll see why when you leave.
Now he was seeing why: minutes there were days here.
The policeman looked at him through the mirror again.
Josh turned away from his scrutiny, looking out through the window instead of making eye contact.
It was the first time he’d stopped running since the break-in, and with the adrenaline draining from his system he was left feeling utterly and completely exhausted. And lost. There was no fight left in him, just acceptance. If this was the way the world was, then this is the way the world had to be. It really was as simple as that. If a man could weave magic and make people and places fold away in space and time somehow, then men could weave magic and make people and places fold away in space and time. QED. Denying that, pretending it wasn’t happening, that the wonderful wasn’t possible, forcing himself to believe that the amazing wasn’t actually part of the human condition, all of that, was counterproductive. It was. It had to be, because he’d experienced it. He’d run through streets in minutes only to emerge from them a week later. He’d been chased by monsters and talked to a woman who was 109 years old and looked bloody good for it. Who was to say what was and wasn’t possible anymore? Not him, that was for sure.
The streets became more and more familiar until they finally pulled up outside of Boone’s house. Only of course it wasn’t Boone’s house anymore, it was their house and only their house. That would take some getting used to.
The policeman clambered out of the car and came around to open his door.
Josh didn’t want to get out.
But then he saw the front door open and he saw his mother, Rosie Raines, standing there, the look of desperate fear on her face. He knew what she was thinking in that moment: a police car at the door, the driver had to be the bearer of bad news. Then, even as grief tore at her, there was no mistaking the sudden overwhelming flood of relief as she saw Josh emerge from the back seat.
Rosie stood there for the longest time staring at her son, then came running up the drive toward the car, arms out blindly.
She swept him up in a fierce embrace before he could straighten up, only to push him away and start beating at his chest with the full force of her fists, weeping and gulping down air and trying not to choke and say something all at once. It took Josh a second to realize what she was saying: “I thought you were dead! I thought you were dead!” The same words over and over until they lost all sense and meaning. “I thought you were dead!”
Josh pulled her close, crushing his mother’s fists between their chests and held her tight until she stopped fighting him. Rosie shuddered against him, struggling to breath, but he refused to let her go. “It’s okay. I’m here,” he said. “I’m home.”
She leaned back, arching her spine to pull away from him so that she could look at his face, like she couldn’t believe it was really him, that it had to be some horrible prank being played on her by the universe.
And then she hit him again.
Just once.
Hard.
Before she broke down into uncontrollable sobs, snot and spittle dribbling out of her nose and mouth as she tried to say thank you to the policeman who had brought the prodigal son home.
Then behind her, Josh heard his baby sister yell, “You bastard! You thoughtless fucking bastard!”
Alexandra Raines came running out of the house.
“Not the sort of homecoming you were expecting, eh?” the policeman said, wryly. “That’s what happens when you disappear for seven days without so much as a peep.”
“Where the hell have you been, Josh?”
He shook his head. It was no easier to explain now than it had been ten minutes ago and it would be no easier in ten minutes, ten days, or even ten years’ time for that matter. There were no words that wouldn’t sound like lies. “I don’t know,” he said.
Lexy was chalk to his cheese, salt to his pepper, yin to yang, tortoise to hare, and every other diametric and polar opposite. They couldn’t have looked more physically different if geneticists had taken random eggs and sperm from donors and fused them in a petri dish. Growing up he’d tormented her mercilessly, claiming that she was variously the window cleaner’s daughter, the postman’s, the milkman’s—while they still had a milkman—and in return she came home from art class one day to present him with a homemade birth certificate that named him heir of some Nigerian prince’s millions. Family stuff. Normal. She was a nurse down at St. Thomas’s by the river. She’d been on the long-term care ward for five months. She spent most of her nights looking after an old woman who never woke up. He knew everything about her; she knew everything about him. But the way she looked at him now it was like she’d never seen him before in her life. That scared him more than anything that had happened since the funeral. This was his baby sister, she knew him better than he knew himself.
“We should take this inside,” the policeman said, gently easing them in the direction of the door. “Especially if you intend on killing him now he’s home safe and sound.” He nodded toward twitching curtains across the street. “Fewer witnesses.”
Rosie nodded, allowing herself to be led inside. She didn’t seem to realize it was a joke.
They’d cleaned up the mess since he was last here. The memory of the woman upstairs going through Boone’s things was visceral; it gripped him, clenched his gut and twisted. He winced, looking instinctively toward the stairs like he still expected to see her waiting at the top.
The landing was empty.
There was no Myrna Shepherd looking down at him. Still, he shivered at the thought of it.
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” Rosie said, as though she’d hit up on the last great secret of the universe in a perfect eureka moment. “You like tea, Officer Gennaro?”
“That’d be great,” the policeman said. There was a look that passed between the policeman and his sister. It was there and then it was gone, but it had definitely been there. They weren’t strangers. “We’ll go sit down in the front room while you put a brew on.”
She came back through a few minutes later balancing a tray loaded with the finest china and a pot of tea stewing. She took a seat opposite them. No one really seemed to know what to say now they were all face-to-face with no pretend errands to run. There was one question they obviously wanted to ask.
Lexy broke the silence, “Where have you been?” She leaned forward, her fringe falling over her face.
Josh looked at her, and for just a moment wished they shared some sort of telepathic bond so she could see it, so that he could make her understand. But he knew she’d never believe him, so he said, “I don’t know,” and offered a shrug.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Lexy pressed. His sister never had been one for letting go of a bone once she’d got her teeth into it. “Are you seriously going to pretend you’ve got amnesia? That you just woke up now and everything that happened since Granddad’s funeral is just a bloody blur?”
“No. Not that.” Josh said, helplessly.
“Then what? Why the hell didn’t you just ring? Do you know what we’ve been going through here? We thought you were dead, Josh. We thought you were dead. So the least you can do is tell us where the fuck you were.”
But he couldn’t.
No matter what he owed them, no matter what they’d been through, he couldn’t tell them where he’d been because it was one thing to think something, to come around to accepting it, no matter how impossible, even embrace it, but it quite another to share it with someone you loved when you knew they’d think you were mad for believing it.
He reached across and took his mum’s hand, ignoring Lexy for a moment. The room reduced to two people. “I’m sorry, Mum,” Josh said, and meant it. He’d never meant anything more in his life. She looked up at him with so much sadness in her eyes he thought his heart might just break beneath the burden of it. He squeezed her hand. He knew it wasn’t just about him; it was about Boone and about his father and her own father. All of the men in her life, the ones she gave her heart to, always left her. He was her last man, and she’d thought she’d lost him just like she’d lost his dad when he’d gone out to buy that packet of cigarettes.
Life had a cruel sense of humor sometimes.
He didn’t know what to say to make that better.
“They fired you, you know? Mike Nicholson called from the office. He was very polite about it, but said they couldn’t keep your job open indefinitely. The second time he called he was less polite, concerned, I think, that you might never come home, but he said they had to fill your post. Still, you’re home now, that’s all that counts.”
“Why don’t you talk us through it, Josh,” Julie Gennaro said, intruding gently on the moment. “Everything you can remember from the funeral onward. This is a safe place; no one is going to judge you. You never know, it might help saying stuff aloud.”
“I doubt it,” Josh said, letting go of his mum’s hand to reach for one of the cups. He didn’t drink from it. He cradled it in both hands. He couldn’t look his mum in the eye as he explained what had happened after Boone’s funeral, how he’d slipped out the back and met his “cousin” in the yard behind the Scala, how Lockwood had asked if Boone had left him anything in his will, and how he’d returned home to find some woman in the process of robbing the place. He didn’t say she looked like a long-dead Hollywood icon. Or that she glowed blue. There were some things that didn’t need sharing.
“And you think Gideon Lockwood was behind the break-in?” the policeman asked, pushing him toward the truth. “You think that he sent the woman to find whatever he suspected your grandfather left you?”
“Seth,” Josh corrected him without thinking. “And, yes, that’s exactly what I think.”
“So, do you mind if I ask what your grandfather left you?”
“Nothing,” Josh said, a little too quickly.
Julie Gennaro’s lip twitched—maybe it was his bullshit detector pinging? Josh figured cops had fairly finely tuned BS detectors. People lied to them all the time, maybe not big fat lies; just little ones to make them look better or make sure they took themselves out of the frame. “That’s a lot of trouble to go to for nothing, if you don’t mind me saying, Josh.”
“We haven’t had the will reading yet,” Rosie said, supporting her son. “We were supposed to do it on Monday, but with Josh gone…” She didn’t finish the thought.
“Ah, so Lockwood might not actually be wrong then? There could be something? Any idea what it might be that Lockwood thinks it might be?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Josh said, finding it a little easier to lie now that his mother had given him a way to wriggle around the truth.
“Okay,” Gennaro seemed to accept his denial at face value. “So what happened next?”
“You went after him, didn’t you?” Lexy blurted the words out. “Oh, you fucking idiot. You promised me you weren’t going to do anything stupid … but you went after Lockwood, didn’t you?” Lexy pushed herself up out of her chair. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She couldn’t storm out, but she couldn’t sit still, either, so she stood there, fists clenching and unclenching impotently. “What did you do?” What she really meant was what kind of trouble are you really in?
He could see the cogs clicking into place and 2 and 2 making about 6,027 as she leaped to all sorts of worst-case conclusions. He could guess what they were: He’d gone after Lockwood; lost, badly; and they’d taken him prisoner. That was the only way she could rationalize him not calling, not letting them know he was alive—because he couldn’t.
That changed the way she looked at him.
She stared at Josh, looking for signs of it on his body; there had to be bruises, cuts, something, some marks to prove he wasn’t just a fucking selfish bastard for making them suffer.
Josh held out his hands for her to see. “I’m all right,” he promised, knowing she didn’t believe him. “Really.”
“Did they hurt you?” That was his mother’s next question.
“No. I’m fine.”
“Do you know where they held you?” That was the policeman.
“They—” he started to say didn’t, but knowing that by denying that he’d been held captive he’d have to find another excuse for his disappearance, stopped himself. “Isn’t it enough that I’m back? I’m not hurt. I’m safe.”
“Obviously that’s between you guys,” Julie said. “If you tell me there’s no crime here, there’s really not a lot I can do apart from enjoy this touching family moment, but I’d advise you strongly to tell the truth.” Josh shrugged. “Okay, well, do me a favor, walk me back to the car, will you? If that’s okay with you, Mrs. Raines?”
Rosie nodded.
They left the house together. Outside Julie said, “Okay, mate, you’re not a bad liar, I’ll give you that, but you’re far from a good one. What is Lockwood after and don’t think about lying to me again. There’s just me and you here. You don’t have to worry about protecting your mother from the truth. I don’t care what you’re involved in, but I want to know what happened to you? What’s going on here? You know a lot more than you’re letting on.”
“I really don’t know if I can explain it.”
“Try.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Again, try me. I’ve seen some shit over the last couple of hours. You never know, I might wind up being the friend you need.”
Josh shrugged. “Okay, but it’s better that I show you.”
“Then maybe you want to let your mum know we’re taking a little trip. Wouldn’t want her thinking you’d disappeared again, would we?”