Free Light by M. John Harrison Page B

instead. Anna stared after him puzzledly then burst into tears. Kearney put his arm round her shoulders. She leaned in to him.
    “Or did you come back to kill me,” she said quietly. “The way you killed all those others?”
    Kearney walked off towards the Underground station at Gunnersbury. His phone chirped at him suddenly, but he ignored it.
    Heathrow Terminal 3, hushed after the long night, maintained a slow dry warmth. Kearney bought underwear and toilet articles, sat in one of the concessions outside the departure lounge reading the Guardian and taking small sips of a double espresso.
    The women behind the concession counter were arguing about something in the news. “I’d hate to live forever,” one of them said. She raised her voice. “There’s your change, love.” Kearney, who had been expecting to see his own name on page two of the paper, raised his head. She gave him a smile. “Don’t forget your change,” she said. He had found only the name of the woman he had killed in the Midlands; no one was looking for a Lancia Integrale. He folded the paper up and stared at a trickle of Asians making their way across the departure lounge for a flight to LAX. His phone chirped again. He took it out: voicemail.
    “Hi,” said Brian Tate’s voice. “I’ve been trying to get you at home.” He sounded irritable. “I had an idea a couple of hours ago. Give me a ring if you get this.” There was a pause, and Kearney thought the message was over. Then Tate added, “I’m really a bit concerned. Gordon was here again after you left. So call.” Kearney switched the phone off and stared at it. Behind Tate’s voice he had heard the white cat mewing for attention.
    “ ‘Justine!’ ” he thought. It made him smile.
    He sorted through the courier bag until he found the Shrander’s dice. He held them in his hand. They always felt warm. The symbols on them appeared in no language or system of numbers he knew, historical or modern. On a pair of ordinary dice, each symbol would be duplicated; here, none was. Kearney watched them rattle across the tabletop and come to rest in the spilled coffee by his empty cup. He studied them for a moment, then scooped them up, stuffed newspaper and phone hastily into the courier bag, and left.
    “Your change, love!”
    The women looked after him, then at each other. One of them shrugged. By then, Kearney was in the lavatories, shivering and throwing up. When he came out, he found Anna waiting for him. Heathrow was awake now. People were hurrying to make flights, make phone calls, make headway. Anna stood fragile and listless in the middle of the concourse, staring every so often at their faces as they brushed past her. Every time she thought she saw him her face lit up. Kearney remembered her at Cambridge. Shortly after they met, a friend of hers had told him: “We nearly lost her once. You will take care of her, won’t you?” He had remained puzzled by this warning—with its image of Anna as a package that might easily slip the mind—only until he found her in the bathroom a month later, crying and staring ahead, with her wrists held out in front of her. Now she looked at him and said:
    “I knew this is where you’d be.”
    Kearney stared at her in disbelief. He began to laugh.
    Anna laughed too. “I knew you’d come here,” she said. “I brought some of your things.”
    “Anna—”
    “You can’t keep running away from it forever, you know.”
    This made him laugh harder for a moment, then stop.
    Kearney’s adolescence had passed like a dream. When he wasn’t in the fields, he was at the imaginary house he called Gorselands, with its stands of pine, sudden expanses of sandy heath, steep-sided valleys full of flowers and rocks. It was always full summer. He watched his cousins, leggy and elegant, walk naked down the beach at dawn; he heard them whisper in the attic. He was continually sore from masturbating. At Gorselands there was always more; there was always