Deep Secret Read Online Free Page B

unquiet horses the same way. “It isn’t my fault. Another Magid has to be found. And you’re going about it all wrong anyway.”
    “Wrong?” I said. “In what way wrong?”
    “You always were prone to it,” he said. “Going about it like a normal person and forgetting you’re a Magid. You’ve got enormous powers, lad. Use them. Go after them the Magid way.”
    “Oh,” I said. “All right. But not until I’ve had a square meal, another stiff whisky and a pint of coffee. Does your present state remember the needs of the body? Can you wait that long?”
    “They’ve given me a year, these folk Up There,” he said. “If you can be ready before then.”
    That was the Stan I knew. I laughed. It made me feel better.
    An hour later, I took off my jacket. I was just about to hang it over a chair in my usual precise way when I thought of Mrs Nuttall and threw it after my cravat. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, with Stan’s voice occasionally husking hints and short-cuts. It was a long evening. And a frustrating one. Thurless was thinking of staying in Japan permanently. Kornelius Punt had decided to go on to New Zealand. The Croatian and Maree Mallory were still untraceable—
    “Well, they would be,” Stan’s voice observed, “if they want to be. They’re the two with the really strong talent.”
    “And Ms Fisk is probably having a nervous breakdown,” I added.
    “That follows again,” Stan said. “It’s the penalty of being odd when most people are normal. We might have gone the same way, you and me, if we hadn’t been picked out for Magids.”
    “Speak for yourself,” I snapped. My mood had gone bad again after this further frustration. “I regard myself as a stable personality.”
    “Do you now?” said Stan. “You forget. I knew you when you were a schoolboy. This Maree. I agree with you she’s the most likely one. Dowse around for her father. He’ll know where she is. They say fathers and daughters are always pretty close.”
    I followed his advice, and it was excellent. A week later, I drove to a hospital in Kent and interviewed a tired, sagging, small man in a wheelchair who had already lost most of his hair. I could see that he had, only recently, been a fat little man with a twinkle. I could see the cancer. They hadn’t done much for it. I was desperately sorry for him. I gave that cancer a sharp flip and told it to go away. He doubled up gasping, poor fellow.
    “Ouch!” he said. “First Maree, now you. What did you do ?”
    “Told it to go away,” I said. “You should be doing that too, but you’re hanging on to it rather, aren’t you?”
    “Do you know, that’s just what Maree said!” he told me. “I suppose I do – hang on to it – it feels like part of me. I can’t explain. What should I be doing?”
    “Telling the thing it’s an unwanted alien,” I suggested. “You don’t want it. You don’t seem to me to have finished what you set out to do with your life.”
    “I haven’t,” he said sadly. “First the divorce came along, now this. I’m not like my brother, you know, book after book – I have just the one thing. I would have liked to patent my invention, but, well…”
    “Then do it,” I said. “Where is Maree at the moment?”
    “In Bristol,” he said.
    “But I went to see her aunt and—”
    “Oh, she’s gone to her other aunt, up the road. I made her go back, love affair or no love affair, money or no money. She’s training to be a vet, you see, and it’s not a thing you can stop halfway over.”
    “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Would I find her through the university, then?”
    “Or the damned aunt,” he said. “Ted’s wife, Janine. Hateful woman. Can’t think why my brother married the bitch, frankly. Made even more of a mistake than I did, but Ted stuck by his – for the boy’s sake, I suppose.” He gave me the address, maddeningly enough in the same street as the house I’d gone to before, and then