Walking with Ghosts

be Charles to deal with, or his body when he died. But that was all. The woman detective was the one who had started things going wrong, so if William dealt with her that would signal the beginning of the end of his troubles.
    Only it went wrong again.
    He’d trapped the woman detective. Was closing in on her. She already had that look of resignation in her eyes. She was whimpering in the doorway, reconciled to the fact that her life was to be sacrificed when the man in the leather jacket had arrived.
    William didn’t like fighting. He especially didn’t like fighting with men. He knew all about it, of course, how to do it. He’d learned all that when he worked as a bouncer. But he didn’t like it. It was true that the man didn’t put up much of a fight. Probably because his arm was broken. And it was also true that William’d won the fight. He’d killed the man, or nearly killed him when the woman detective had begun her attack.
    William had had to flee again. What should have happened, he should have been able to frighten the woman detective. He should have killed the man who had come to her rescue, and then killed her. But it all took too long. By the time he’d subdued the man, the woman detective had turned into a fireball. William looked at his right hand. There was a clear outline of her teeth there; you could see where she had sunk them into the flesh. If William hadn’t wrenched himself free at that point she would have bitten part of his hand away. He explored the perimeter of the bite with the fingers of his left hand. It was sore. The blood had begun to clot now, but if he applied a little pressure it would start to flow again.
    He should go home and treat it. He had a first-aid kit, with antiseptic ointment, sterile pads and plasters. He could take something for his headache.
    He looked up at Dora’s window.
    There was a choice to be made here.
    Something he had to decide. Only he couldn’t remember what it was.
     
    He had played this part in life. There were no parts like this in the theatre. Not that he’d been offered, anyway. The parts that were on offer in the theatre all required a leading lady. And William didn’t want a leading lady. That’s what had led him to specialize in make-up. All those leading ladies he did not require.
    The problem was the words in all the plays, the words where you had to tell the leading lady that you loved her. William had been able to say all the other words convincingly. But those words where you tell the leading lady that you love her had stuck in his throat.
    At first he’d told himself he had to conform. That other people managed those words, and that he should be able to manage them as well. He’d tried with Pammy. With Pammy he’d said the words, spilt them out, so they stood there between them. And the words had given rise to a huge silence. The words had been unconvincing. Pammy didn’t believe them at all. And neither did William. The words were empty shells, filled with the sound of the world’s oceans. The silence had risen up and engulfed William and Pammy. And that was the moment when Pammy began to fade, to gradually metamorphose into Dora.
    William realized that people didn’t love and hate. There were no passions. He realized that nothing mattered. That it was all play. That there were good actors who survived, and bad actors who fell by the wayside. And he decided that he’d be a good actor.
    A good actor was one who played the parts he was best at. William was never going to be a romantic lead. He knew that. He had insight.
    He was going to play a loner.
    An invisible loner with his own script. He would be a man who lived by night, a man who was unremarkable. Occasionally, from time to time he would audition a leading lady. But only for a very short part. She would not have any lines as such. What you might call a walk-on part.
     
    William held two images in his head. The first was of a howling wind, his cloak whipping around his legs. The second image was of a black Daimler. He promised himself that he wouldn’t move until he’d worked out what connected these two images. He couldn’t remember how long a time had passed since he’d made that promise. It might have been a few minutes, or it might have been several hours.
    He knew why he couldn’t work out the connection between the two images. It was because the images were decoys. They had been put there to distract his attention from something else that he should be