Read Resolution Way for Free Online Page B

good.
    Scotland? Do you have any contact details for him, postal address?
    Howard slipped on a pair of comically dusty glasses hanging on a cord around his neck and began to thumb through a large red rolodex on the coffee table.
    Yes, here we are. Do you need a pen? He glanced around. That’s fine, Alex said. I’ll take a photo. Phone out, quick tap. Gotcha. Alex’s face remained neutral but a long plangent thrill went through him, seemed to snag at the back of his right eye and suddenly make it water.
    All the way up to Aberdeen? Howard asked him. He must have something really worthwhile.
    We hope so, yes. He had some connections back in the early Nineties.
    Howard was looking at him intently now, his mouth half open, his hand up and stroking at his beard, his breath more rapid, a slight catch in his chest turning it into a wheeze.
    Anyone specific?
    The temperature in the room had shifted now, the shaft of sunlight as bright as ever, the books around him seeming to stand as witnesses, some odd entreaty pushing at him.
    Vernon Crane. I understand you were friends. You were one of the last people to see him. That’s what Paula Adonor tells me.
    Howard’s eyes remained fixed on Alex Hargreaves. When he spoke again his voice had grown deeper, almost as though it belonged to someone else entirely.
    Now listen to me, listen to me. This name, Vernon Crane that you’ve been given, you should think back to who has given it to you, though I’m sure they have tried to hide themselves one way or another because oh, it’s a coward’s tactic this, a coward’s revenge. The name, Vernon Crane, is a cursed name. Pursuing this can come to no good, no good at all.
    Alex smiled. Here we go. He had anticipated that there would be flakiness. He could tell the second he set eyes on Howard that there would be mumbo-jumbo to navigate. Scratch the New Age surface and there’s a paranoid loon beneath.
    What has happened to you since you heard that name? I can tell you, you have become obsessed; you have abandoned your work, your home, your loved ones, to pursue a phantom.
    Well, not exactly, Alex said.
    Howard was looking down at the floor now and shaking his head. Who told you this name? He asked again. You have an enemy. You have someone who wishes you ill. The past will not stay dead, he said.
    Look, he said, lots of people know that name. I am just one of the better informed ones.
    Go home. Go home, forget this. What does it matter to you? He was scrutinising Alex closely now, trying to intimidate him, but Alex Hargreaves wasn’t the type to be intimidated.
    Well, Alex said. He swept his arms open expansively. It matters. Matters to me.
    Howard had raised his eyebrows. Do you know what they used to get up to, him and Robert Gillespie? What they dabbled in?
    Mystical stuff by any chance?
    Magical practices. Howard said, he fixed Alex with a severe gaze, one eyebrow arched. Alex almost wanted to laugh.
    Have you got any of Crane’s work?
    You have come here under false pretences, Howard said. You are one of the tricksters, one of the damned ones who will not be steered from the course and with whom it is either kill or be killed.
    The dead, Howard said, must die again and again. The past must be killed repeatedly.
    Is that right? Well, thank you for the information on Robert Gillespie, Alex said as he waved his phone at him, a flash in the sunlight among the dusty books, the dead pages, indistinguishable from magic.
    Well, that short meeting with Howard had proven to be intense but useful. He laughed in the car as he pulled out of town, surges of adrenalin magnified by the Deveretol surging through him and making his fingers tingle. He sent Paula Adonor a message:
    Just met Howard. Wow. Robert Gillespie next. Hope he’s not as intense.
    Message back:
    Howard always scared me tbh. Good luck with Rob!
    The car told him it would be five hours to Aberdeen, and he decided to do it in two stages: the first half of it up to Glasgow on the