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She goes to Mark first. It's a practical choice, since John will be working for hours yet, but she dispassionately notes the assumptions grinding like gears beneath her thoughts. It's only practical if she wishes to see him, and why should she? Affection, perhaps, of the companionable sort she was supposed to have felt for the family dog. If John leaves with her, they won't be back for a long time, if ever; perhaps she just wants to tie up a loose end.
He opens the door for her as she raises her pick to the lock. She smiles at him, realizing there was a reason she hadn't considered. Curiosity. She has always wanted to see a ghost.
*
As a child she had been immune to the garish Halloween tricks that sent her peers into ecstasies of terror. She hadn't minded, except insofar as she resented not being able to understand. How could one choose to percieve something that wasn't there? Could one actually see a ghost in the flutter of an old sheet?
She'd dismissed it as immature fancy, but later recognized it as children playing a terribly adult game. The ability to convince oneself of a lie, it turned out, was the only trick worth knowing. She wonders if her life would have been easier had she been able to learn it.
Haunted houses are real, of course. She's standing in one, watching Mark put the kettle on. Children just have the roles mixed up; the dead don't linger. It's the living you have to worry about.
*
Mark's home is shabby and lovely and sad, just as he is. Just as he always was, if Alice is being honest with herself, and she does try to be. She doesn't remember him being much different before Zoe's death, and afterward - well, rage makes warriors of us all, but it doesn't last forever.
He makes small talk easily, at any rate, and doesn't hesitate to serve tea in cups she remembers from Zoe's home. And it was Zoe's, right to the end, despite all the men demanding a place there, clamoring for her attention, her help, her loyalty, her body, her love. Alice had admired that willful streak in Zoe. Not to say that they would have been friends, but if Alice had known how it would end she would at least have skipped the bit with the hat pin.
Hosting duties attended to, Mark settles into the armchair across from her. "Tell me, Alice. What do you plan to do now?"
"I think I'll go abroad." She gives a little shiver, like she's shaking free of an unwelcome touch. "Been feeling a bit confined, lately."
"Are you taking John with you?" She must show her surprise, because he hides a smile behind his cup. "You should, if he'll go. It would be good for him."
"You could come, too," she says, mostly sincere, and unwittingly gets what she came for when he goes positively translucent for a moment. She knows then that he'll haunt this city for the rest of his life. It took the last of his strength to crawl out from under the wreckage of his one grand adventure. Now he'll stay where the anchor of the past is strong enough to keep him from drifting too far.
She respects that about Mark, the way he knows himself, the way he owns his desires and his limits. They're more alike than she and John could ever be, twin comets drawn into orbit around the same star.
"I'll keep in touch," she says later, as she's pulling on her coat. She leans over to lay her cheek atop his head for a moment, and he touches the back of her hand with his fingertips.
"Do," he says.
*
Right to the end she carries, in the back of her mind, a slender flame of hope that John will actually come with her. The thought inspires a thrill of dread. If John leaves this place tonight, he'll be walking away from everything that was keeping him in check.
She laughs as she lets herself into his appalling flat. Hadn't she said she'd had enough of swimming with sharks?
*
She sends John postcards with desert landscapes on them, though she herself prefers more inviting locations. She doesn't write anything on them. He's always seen through her words, anyway, always been able to stare right into her soul no matter what clever lies she tells.
It's why she loves him. If that's the right word for it.
She sends Jenny postcards, too, with stark modern art on the front and cheery notes on the back. She feels they are likely to encourage and disturb her in equal measure, which seems about right. Alice is, apparently, on the hook for the girl's long-term health and safety. Surely she's allowed the odd maternal instinct.
*
Mark is the only one she speaks to on the phone. She calls at very irregular hours, but he always answers with the same tone of mild impatience, as though she was late for an appointment but he was too polite to say so. It gives her the pleasant sense of being missed, and she supposes it must a nice change for him to miss someone who might one day come back.
He thinks she has John watched, which is absurd. She'd no sooner need to point a telescope at the sun to track its movement. She maintains sufficient contact with London to sense John rising and setting across different parts of the city, sometimes leaving a slow-fading warmth in his wake, sometimes landscapes seared quite clean of whatever used to grow in the shadows there.
Besides, John's work is his life, and his cases simply don't interest her. The lives he touches are, on the whole, utterly frivolous, their tragedies as petty as their triumphs. Even if it was in her to feel a sense of cosmic injustice, she wouldn't be able to help the fact that John has terrible judgement when it comes to people. Absolutely terrible. Caring about people just because John cared about them would be madness.
But the people who care for John...well. That's another matter entirely. The kind of person who trips too close the bonfire of John's contradictions and finds herself warmed instead of scarred is the kind of person worth knowing better.
*
Sometimes her phone rings. Not her real phone but the one at the end of the trail of breadcrumbs she placed so carefully, and she knows that someone has been exceedingly naughty this year. A lump of coal for you, my dear, she purrs to the screen. Nobody's looking for her, after all, save those that John have sent her way.