“He might not, and if he does, there’s still the south of sodding France!” Will said loudly. “You don’t have to be anywhere near this—this morgue!”

“Mausoleum.”

“What?”

“A huge empty building that only serves to glorify the dead is a mausoleum.”

Will had a strong urge to shake him. He also had a creeping and unpleasant memory of men he’d known in the trenches. Some had broken to varying degrees in the face of the mud and the endless noise and the unspeakable things you saw and smelled and did; some had constructed mental shields, built up of religion or superstition or whatever they could use. Some, like Will, had turned off the parts of the mind that thought about anything but the present, and carried on day after day, doing what needed doing and seeing how it went. And some men had gone away inside their heads because that was the only place they could go, and that was the look in Kim’s eyes now.

It might not sound like much—a bullying brother, an unfair father. People had far worse all the time. Will couldn’t give a tinker’s curse for people: he cared about Kim, and the mental laceration that had led him to take a razor to his arms, and the way he was moving now, like his entire body was a mass of paper-cuts.

“You’re not going to hurt yourself, right?” he said, unsure if he should, unable not to.

“Hurt—? Hardly. Why would I need to with so many people ready to do that for me?”

All right, fuck this, we’re leaving, Will wanted to say. He could lie low somewhere else. But Kim couldn’t go because he needed to talk to Chingford, to find out whatever he could in a last-ditch effort to extricate himself from this mess. Which he might have done from a distance, but he’d thrown away his leverage with the Private Bureau, his best chance at freeing himself, for Will’s sake.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Kim.”

“What?”

Will wanted to hold him, except they were walking down a path through a formal garden, with yew clipped into stupid unnatural shapes, and men standing around them, cutting off the bits that didn’t fit. He bit back a curse. “Didn’t we drive past a wood? Can we get to that?”

“If you like.”