Dead Men's s Boots

22

Stoke Newington after dark: the Lubovich Hasidim and the scallies from Manor House wander the streets in feral packs, but I was in a bad enough mood by this time to take on anything I was likely to meet. God was in a bad mood, too: a strong wind was getting up, harrying plastic carrier bags and scraps of paper along the pavements, and the sky was filling up with pregnant clouds.

The offices of Maynard, Todd and Clay were in reassuringly total darkness. I circled the outside of the building looking for the likeliest way in, deciding at last to go in from the back and on the first floor. I had my lockpicks with me and I could have taken the street door inside of a New York minute, but there was too much chance of being seen by people walking past: I couldn’t afford the time I’d lose in any brush with the forces of the law.

On the side street behind the office there was a blind alley full of wheelie bins and old fridges, its high walls topped with broken glass set in very old cement. The only door was bolted from the inside rather than locked, but the brickwork to either side of it was old and frost-pitted and offered pretty good purchase. I shinnied up the doorway itself, using footholds in the brickwork where I found them and just bracing myself against either side where I didn’t.

The top of the door was a couple of inches below the top of the frame. I stood on the door, wadded up my coat and laid it down on the glass. I only had to stand on it for a moment, using it to step across to a shed roof. Then I leaned out and hooked the coat across after me, only a little the worse for wear.

The coat came into play again almost immediately. I wrapped it around my fist to break a single pane of the window at the other end of the shed and then – with gingerly care – to knock the broken glass out of the frame. It was handy that the building had never been double-glazed – although if it had I could always have dropped down into the yard and tried my luck with the back door. Safely out of view, I could have taken my time.

As it was, though, things seemed to be going my way. Even groping around in the dark and at an odd angle, kneeling down because the pane was on a level with my knee, I found the window catch almost immediately and was able to lever it open. Then I slid the window up as far as it would go and climbed inside.

There was carpet under my feet, but it was too dark for me to make out anything of the layout of the room I was in. Fighting the urge to blunder ahead anyway and find my way by feel, I waited for my eyes to get a little more accustomed to the dark. It was just as well I did: as the space around me resolved itself slowly out of shadows into some degree of visibility, I realised that I wasn’t in a room at all: I was in a turn of the stairwell, which was just as narrow as I remembered it. My first step would have pitched me down the stairs on my head.

Trying to remember the layout of the building from my one and only daytime visit, I went up rather than down. I had a rough sense of where Todd’s door would be in relation to the stairs, but not how far up it was. The first door opened when I tried the handle, but the layout within was wrong – the desk was over against the far wall instead of under the window. I pulled the door to behind me and went on up.

On the next floor up the corresponding door seemed to be locked, but then I noticed with a faint stir of surprise that it was bolted from the outside. I undid the bolt and peered in.

This time the darkness was absolute, even when I pushed the door wide open. More unsettlingly, the room was emitting a soft bass rumble, almost more vibration than sound. Under the circumstances, there were close on a million good reasons for not turning the light on, but that was what I did. It was almost automatic: groping on the wall to my left to see if there was a switch there and, once I found it, flicking it on.

Outside of the movies, I’ve never seen an assassin dismount and dismantle his sniper rifle and put the pieces carefully away in the sculpted foam receptacles in a sleek black suitcase. I assume it does happen, but with no personal experience to go on I have to take it on trust. But I am now in a position to comment if I’m ever in a conversation about dismantled werewolves; because when the light clicked on, that was what I was looking at.

The room was full of cats, and they were all asleep: on the floor, on the furniture, on the shelves, covering every surface in sight. The deep vibration was caused by their combined synchronous purring. I took an involuntary step backwards, recoiling from the implications of what I was seeing. And in that queasy moment, as I hovered on the cusp of a decision, a cat in the centre of the room, a big white-furred Persian lying on top of an antique roll-top escritoire, opened its eyes.

Then the cats around it did too, and then their neighbours and so forth, out from the centre in a spreading wave, like one vast creature sending a single instruction via an old and creaky nervous system that took its own sweet time getting the message through.

A hundred or more cats stared at me now, with ancient and inscrutable malevolence in their eyes. It was deeply, viscerally nasty, but there was worse to come. The Persian mewled on a rising tone, and the two cats to either side of it pressed in and nuzzled its cheeks as if to comfort it. But that gentle contact became a firmer pressure, held for too long, and the flesh and fur of the three cats’ faces started to run together into a repulsive amorphous mass. The bodies followed, and more cats were crowding in now, jumping down from the dusty shelves full of old books of legal precedents or leaping up from the floor to join the press.

With a single muttered ‘Fuck!’ I pulled my coat wide open and hooked my whistle out of the inside pocket. It occurred to me – fleetingly – to back out and bolt the door again, but what good would that do? When these cats coalesced into the creature they were going to become, doors weren’t going to hold it.

The three cats in the centre were gone now. The spherical mound of pulpy flesh they’d become had a rudimentary face. The mound rose from the desk as more cats added themselves to the base of it, deliquescing more quickly all the time as though the process was gaining its own momentum. Working from memory, I found the whistle’s stops and started to play.

I’d long ago forgotten the tune I’d composed to get the drop on Scrub the last time we’d met, and in any case I couldn’t be sure that this creature was the same loup-garou that had once worn that name and shape. Like Juliet said, if one werewolf could organise itself as a colony creature, then probably they all could if they got the inspiration.

I had one thing going for me, and one thing only. As the loup-garou in front of me assembled itself by inches and ounces, the sense of it grew stronger in my second sight, or rather my second hearing: the tune of the loup-garou strengthened and strengthened, became more vivid and inescapable from moment to moment. I let the plangent notes fill me; and then I let them ooze out of me through my lungs and my throat and my fingertips and the fragile piece of moulded metal in my hands.

The coagulating mass in front of me roared in anger. It was much bigger already, and its disconcertingly liquid substance spilled down from the desk onto the floor, allowing the remaining cats a much bigger surface area to adhere to and be absorbed into. A stumpy appendage reached out towards me, developed blisters on its outer surface: the blisters grew into recognisable fingers which opened and closed spasmodically. Rapier claws grew out from the fingertips.

I was fighting panic now: I wanted to hurry, but the logic of the tune was pulling me in the opposite direction, making me slow down, hold the notes as long as I could and let them glide out into the room on a descending scale. The tower of matter quivered, ripples chasing each other across its surface. Each ripple was like the pass of a magician’s hand, leaving behind first fur, then bare, disquietingly pink flesh, then fur again. The limbs were forced out from the main mass like meat from a mincing machine, and as soon as the legs were able to stand they began to lurch towards me. The face rose and was extruded from the top of the tower like an obscene bubble, the flesh below it crimping and narrowing, creating a head and neck by default. It was all of a piece, the eyes the same colour and texture as the flesh of the face, but they were starting to clear as I watched. The face leered, and my feeling of panic grew.

But the tune was right, and I was wrong. Slow and steady, note upon skirling note, it laid itself on the nascent thing in front of me like chains. It was working: the only question was whether it was working fast enough to keep me from being eaten alive. The loup-garou slowed, its back bent as though under a heavy weight, but it didn’t stop. It took another step forward, the clutch of scimitars at the end of its arm flexing and clashing in front of my face. Its toothless mouth gaped open and grew fangs that solidified from doughy pink to gleaming white. I lurched back involuntarily and the door frame banged my left elbow, almost knocking the whistle out of my hands. That would have been the end of the story, but I recovered with only a brief slur on one note of the tune.

A morbid paralysis was seizing the loup-garou, but it was coming from the feet on up: its upper body still had a lot of flexibility and it leaned forward, aiming a raking slash at my throat. I ducked back on my trailing foot and the wicked claws turned the front of my coat into confetti: a sharp pain and a sudden rush of warmth down my chest told me that one at least had drawn blood. Shuffling like a blind man, I backed out onto the landing an inch at a time until the wooden stair-rail was pressing against the small of my back and I knew there was nowhere else to run. My options had narrowed to two: play or die.

I played, forcing the other option out of my mind. The loup-garou’s legs buckled, and it crashed down onto its knees, but it was still trying to reach me. When the claws of the thing’s outstretched arm slashed at my ankle, I ducked to the side and kicked it away. The loup-garou roared again, but the sound had a sloughing, sucking fall to it: it was the sound of something falling apart from the inside out.

The face, now fully formed, stared at me with indelible hatred. It was Scrub’s face at first; then another wave crossed the surface of that flesh ocean and it was the face of Leonard the copy boy. Struggling to form words, it spewed out blood and black bile instead. A few fragments of sound bubbled through the liquid decay.

‘C – Cas – Cast—’

The eyes became opaque again, and the fluid in the gaping mouth congealed all at once into something that looked as shiny and vitreous as setting tar. The loup-garou was probably dead by this point, but strange movements from this or that part of the massive, slumped body made me wary of stepping in close to check. I just left it there, sprawled on the landing like something huge and unwanted left out for the dustman.

Maynard Todd’s office was on the next turn of the stairs. I knew it when I saw the light already on. I didn’t see anything was particularly to be gained by subtlety: my fight with Scrub had made enough noise to wake the dead, assuming there were any more of them around, so anybody in there knew I was coming. I could always turn and walk away, but that didn’t seem like an option. So I pushed the door wide and went on in.

Todd was sitting at his desk, the chair tilted back slightly so that he could lean on the shelves behind him. The gun in his hand was pointing at my chest, and his posture was completely relaxed.

‘Mister Castor,’ he said, pushing the chair on the client side of the desk out towards me with his foot. ‘How is it that you can never rely on religious cultists even to get a simple murder right? Take away their pentagrams and their mystic sigils, they’re like little kids. I was very disappointed to hear that you’d survived your little trip to Alabama. But I try to treat every setback as an opportunity. Come on in and sit down.’

I walked on into the room, but I didn’t take the chair: so long as I was standing, there was a chance I might get the drop on him at some point. Sitting down I was dead meat.

‘Working late,’ I commented.

Todd’s gaze flicked towards the corner of the room. Looking in that direction myself, I saw a fold-out bed. ‘I sleep here these days,’ he said, sounding a little flat and resigned. ‘Mrs Todd has filed divorce papers. She says I’m not the man she married. And you know what? She has a point. I asked you to sit down, Mister Castor. A bullet through your kneecap would force the issue.’

I sat down. I wondered why he hadn’t killed me already, if that was the plan. Maybe because he was worried about getting blood on the carpet: if that was it, his night was going to be ruined when he saw what was on the first-floor landing.

‘You’ve come a long way in a short while,’ Todd went on. ‘That’s a tribute to your detective skills.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Except that you’re not a detective.’ Todd’s tone hardened, and he gave me a look of actual dislike. ‘You’re just a man who gets rid of unwanted ghosts. One step up from a backstreet abortionist. What they do at the start of the life cycle, you do at the end. And, like them, you’re just doing it for the money. You don’t have either the brains or the motivation to figure us out.’

I didn’t bother to give him an answer, because he didn’t seem to need one. There was a photo of a beautiful if slightly austere-looking brunette on his desk. I picked it up and inspected it thoughtfully.

‘So who did Mrs Todd marry?’ I asked.

‘An ambulance-chaser with a death wish.’

‘Whereas you . . . ?’

‘I’m nobody you’ve heard of. The way I see it, if a criminal gets a name for himself, it’s because he’s stupid enough to get noticed. But this isn’t a conversation we’re having here, Mister Castor. It may look like one, but that’s only because it’s hard to shake off the veneer of civilisation. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to actually hurting people. That was a conscious decision on our part – switching over to legitimate enterprises as far as possible – but it’s got its drawbacks. You lose the professional edge.’ He leaned forward, putting the front legs of his chair back on the carpet, and stood up. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, coming around the desk, ‘back in Mile End I always preferred a knife to a gun. So I’ll probably start with a knife, if that’s all right with you. Just while I’m easing myself back in. You get more control that way, too. It would annoy me if you bled to death or went into shock before you tell me what I need to know.’

Aha. So that was how it was. I tensed as he approached, looking for a window of opportunity into which I could shove a low blow or a kick to the balls. But he stayed carefully out of my reach as he rummaged in his pocket. I expected his hand to come out with a knife in it, but it didn’t: he was holding a sturdy, slightly scuffed pair of police handcuffs. That was worse news, in a way.

‘Pass your hands through the bars of the chair back,’ Todd ordered me.

‘Tell me what you need to know,’ I temporised, meeting his cold, stern gaze. ‘Maybe we can do this the easy way.’

Todd shook his head. ‘The hard way is the way I know,’ he said. ‘And I tend to rely on the product more if I’ve squeezed it out myself, so to speak. Last time of asking, Mister Castor.’

I hesitated. There are ways of slipping out of handcuffs, but it helps if the guy who’s putting them on you is a bit of a dim bulb. Play along, or lose a kneecap? I made the call and did as I was told, not liking it much. Unfortunately, Todd was skilled and careful. He pressed hard, closing the cuffs as far as the ratchets would let him, and even though I clenched my fists and tensed the muscles of my forearms in the best traditions of Ian Fleming, I could feel that there was no leeway. I was firmly attached to the chair, and the only ways out were springing the lock on the cuffs – only possible with a pick – or smashing the chair itself to kindling. It didn’t seem all that likely that Todd would sit still for either.

‘Okay,’ he said, straightening only after he’d tugged on each of my arms and satisfied himself that my hands didn’t have enough free play to reach my coat or trouser pockets. He didn’t bother to search me: probably he surmised, rightly, that there was nothing I was carrying that could trump a .38.

He went back around the desk, opened the top drawer and took out a very serious piece of ironmongery: the blade was only four or five inches long but it was curiously shaped, with a slight thickening an inch below the point and an asymmetrical profile. The grip was of black polymerised rubber. This was a knife designed for lethal use in difficult circumstances: a weapon of very intimate and individual destruction.

‘You’ve come a long way from Mile End,’ I said, for something to say.

‘Oh yes,’ Todd agreed, testing the edge of the blade on the ball of his thumb. ‘But it’s an easy commute. You’re about to find out how easy.’

‘You think I was stupid enough to walk in here alone?’

‘Well, you arrived alone, so yes. That’s exactly what I think. If I’m wrong, I may end up being seriously embarrassed. But let’s look on the bright side: I’m not wrong and that’s not going to happen.’

He ambled back around to my side of the desk where he half-sat, half-leaned against it: the posture of a man settling in for the long haul. ‘So who are you working for?’ he asked.

I wasn’t interested in misdirection or strategy: I just wanted to find an answer that would, for as long as possible, keep me from getting carved up: the longer I stalled, the better the chance that something might come up that I could use against Todd. Okay, I was clutching at straws here: I knew how bad the situation was, but hope – even pathetic, bargain-basement hope – springs eternal.

‘A woman named Janine Hunter,’ I said. ‘Her old man’s up on a murder charge and she—’

The tip of the knife dipped, then flicked across my cheek. Something warm and wet spilled down over my face, and I was tasting my own blood.

‘Janine,’ Todd said. ‘Yes. We know about Janine.’ He sounded so detached that I thought he might be on the verge of wandering away and finding something better to do with his time. ‘She works reasonably well as a cover story. Full marks for effort there. But what I want to know, obviously, is who told you about us. About Mount Grace, and Lionel Palance, and the whole operation. The way we come back. We saw it happen with Gittings, and then we saw it again with you. A little bit of fumbling around, just for effect, and then you go right to where the answers are. Because someone’s driving from the back seat. That’s the name I need, Mister Castor. Confession is going to be good for your soul. And for – let’s say – your left eye.’ To add emphasis to the words, he held the knife in front of my eyes and showed me my own blood on the blade. ‘Then your right, after a very short interval for reflection.’

So the truth wouldn’t do, I thought: I’d have to fall back on bullshit.

‘I don’t know his name for sure,’ I said. ‘We only talked over the phone.’

‘Then how did he pay you? I’ve checked your bank account, and there’s even less action going on there than there seems to be in your sex life.’

It’s meant to be harder to lie to someone if you’re making eye contact with them. I made myself stare Todd straight in the face, just so he didn’t run away with any ideas about my reliability as an informant.

‘He’ll kill me,’ I said.

Todd shook his head. ‘No,’ he reassured me. ‘He won’t. I’ll kill you, as soon as I’ve got all the details straight. So don’t worry about him. Worry about me, and about how messy this will get if you start being coy. What does he look like, our man? Details. As many as you can give me.’

I bowed my head as if I was giving in to the inevitable. ‘Tall,’ I said. ‘Taller than me. About my age, maybe a little older. Wore a suit even more expensive than yours. Had a beard. Not full – trimmed. A guy who cares about his appearance.’

‘Eyes?’

‘Didn’t notice?’

‘Hair?’

‘Blond.’

I could only see the lower half of Todd’s body from this position, but even so he couldn’t mask a slight stiffening in his posture – a coming to attention. Either he hadn’t been expecting that, or it had just confirmed his worst fears.

‘Build?’ he said. He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he had before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.

‘He was heavy-set,’ I said. ‘A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.’

‘Look at me,’ Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. ‘I was there when you-’ he started to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. ‘Accent?’ he demanded brusquely.

‘Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.’

‘Is that right?’ He smiled the way a shark smiles. ‘You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp for the likes of me.’

The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.

‘What did you call him?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone. ‘You must’ve had some moniker for him, this cultured prizefighter?’

My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. ‘Louie,’ I said, thinking of Louie Cypher in the movie Angel Heart. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay he’ll show a little more class. ‘Louie . . . Rourke.’

‘And how did he contact you?’

I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. ‘I told you – by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good – really good – and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.’

Todd wiped the blade of the knife on his own palm and inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this . . . Rourke prepped you. What he already knew about us.’

‘Why do you care?’ I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes. It was a calculated risk: I needed a few seconds to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the few seconds, but it’s like they say: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly, and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously: my eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood, up into his wide eyes.

‘I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,’ he snarled. ‘Not you. What the fuck do you matter? You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke and you get to die a little bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You should probably have been a watchmaker.’

‘All right,’ I muttered thickly. ‘All right, just don’t hurt me any more.’

It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat himself back down again on the edge of the desk and waved his interrogation tool expansively.

‘Then talk,’ he suggested.

‘He – he told me about the inscription,’ I said, and I saw Todd’s shoulders stiffen as he tried to avoid giving anything away on his face. Over-finessed, you bastard. Hunter had said three days. I did the mental arithmetic. ‘It’s tonight, isn’t it? He said it was going to be tonight.’

Todd didn’t bother to answer. ‘Go on.’

‘He told me there were about two hundred of you,’ I said, quoting the figure that Moloch had given me. ‘And that the operation had been going on for a good few years now. Since –’ I tried to elide over the slight hesitation so Todd wouldn’t notice it ‘– Aaron Silver’s time. He said Silver was the founder member.’

‘Did he?’

I kept my stare locked with his. ‘Well, was he wrong?’

‘The man with the knife asks the questions, Castor. Keep talking until I tell you to stop.’

‘He knew about Silver and Les Lathwell being the same man. I guess that’s what he meant, you know? That the guy had always been there, overseeing the whole operation.’ Todd’s lips curled back in a sneer: he didn’t like that form of words at all. Something else occurred to me: hadn’t Nicky told me that Silver’s real name was Berg? And Les Lathwell had been out in America in the 1960s, learning the gangster game from the Chicago mobs: and from Berg to Bergson wasn’t a big jump at all. I chanced my arm. ‘It was Silver – I mean, Les Lathwell – who brought Myriam Kale in, wasn’t it? So there he is, taking the lead again. Actively recruiting for the cause. I bet a real psycho killer was a real feather in your caps.’

Todd flared up, raising the knife in his clenched fist but then thinking better of it and giving me an openhanded smack across the face instead. ‘Are you really that fucking stupid?’ he demanded. ‘Or are you trying to make me kill you before you talk? Kale was a goddamned disaster, right from the start. I told him: she’s sick in the head. For the rest of us, killing’s just a means to an end. For her it’s an addiction. A disease. She’s never gonna stop, and she’s always gonna draw the wrong kind of attention to herself. She’s the last thing in the world we want. Someone who shits in the nest because she doesn’t know any better and you can’t teach her any better. Fucking – madwoman!’

Todd was right about the veneer of civilisation. Something earthy, East End and broad was creeping into his accent as his emotions got the better of him. I decided to encourage it: if he was angry then he was off balance and not thinking straight, and you never knew what kind of options might open themselves up.

‘But it was Silver’s choice,’ I said, ‘because it was his game. Mister Rourke said if I could take Silver out then everything else would fall apart of its own accord.’

Todd laughed incredulously, shaking his head. ‘Take Silver out? Fuck, if I’d known that was on your agenda, I’d have waited and let you take a shot. We’d do it ourselves, except he’s too cagey to give us an opening. Him and his American whore have fucking ruined us. Made us visible again, after we worked for years to cover our tracks. Live for ever. Live like kings for ever. Build up an empire, stronger and safer than anything we had when we were alive. That was what was in the prospectus – and it was his own fucking prospectus! “We can own this city.” And we do! We do own it! We take our cut and we take our pleasure and nobody even knows – or if they find out they die, and their wives and kids die, and their gardens are sown with fucking salt. We’ve got it all. But you know what they say about love being blind. He wouldn’t listen to reason. From the moment he met her, he was a changed man. Take Silver out?’ He laughed again, but there was a bitter, choking sound in it. ‘You should have fucking said.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, switching tack. ‘Kale was your weak spot all along. Every time you gave her a new body, she’d kill again . . .’ Todd was nodding, so I went on. All I was doing was what mediums do: using the stooge’s feedback to refine the guesswork, zeroing in on the truth so it looks like you’ve known it all along. ‘The old psychosis showing itself again, every time. But you couldn’t just stop. Couldn’t just leave her in the ground. Silver wouldn’t let you. So I guess Mister Rourke was right about the pecking order.’

‘We’re a collective,’ Todd growled. ‘Democratic and egalitarian. Everything is fair, and everything is set out nice and clear in the rules. You spend a year up on top, riding one of the bodies with the influence and the power and the celebrity lifestyle – then you spend a year as one of the grunts, earning your keep, minding the shop. We don’t trust anyone else to maintain the crematorium, or to guard it. We keep it all in the family.

‘But that cunt-bubble is as strong as the rest of us put together. He started to write his own rules. And because he’s the oldest we’ve got to go carefully. Time isn’t just money, it’s power too. We don’t know what kind of safeguards he put in place for himself back when he was the only one. Just in case of emergencies. He’s not ever going to let himself be caught with his pants down. If we did kill him-’ Todd didn’t finish the sentence, but his shrug conveyed his meaning: that killing Aaron Silver, in flesh or spirit or both, would be the start of something, not the end of it.

‘So that was your brief,’ he said, coming back to the point. ‘Not the rest of us. Just Silver. That’s why you went out to Alabama? Tracing his steps?’

‘Looking for information about Kale. She seems to be his weak spot.’

Todd nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right there. But the paraphernalia you collected from Chesney – most of that wasn’t anything to do with Silver. So what was the deal there?’

‘I didn’t know what Chesney had,’ I temporised. ‘I had to take a look.’

Todd looked surprised at that – and suspicious. ‘Then you weren’t working with Gittings?’

I had the feeling of thin ice starting to crack under me. ‘Not directly,’ I said. ‘Gittings and Langley were the first string. I was the second. Rourke didn’t activate me until they crashed and burned. And obviously the first thing I had to do was to find out how far they’d got.’

Todd was staring at me hard now. Whatever was going on behind that stare, it wasn’t looking good.

‘Then how come you spent so long sniffing around Gittings’s widow?’ he demanded.

I pretended to look uncomfortable and abashed. ‘Me and Carla are old friends,’ I said. ‘Kind of – more than friends, once upon a time. I thought – you know, there wouldn’t be any harm in reminding her of that.’

Todd relaxed slightly, giving me a contemptuous grin. ‘That’s actually funny, Castor. Groves was stuck inside the house, right there with you, and all you were thinking about was getting your leg over?’

‘I know,’ I said, adopting a tone of bitter, naked resentment. ‘I figured it out later. Groves was the one who possessed John, right?’

‘Possessed him, realised the guy’s brain was turning to cheese, shot himself. That was a hairy moment. If you’re in someone else’s body, and they go into the whole second-childhood thing, what happens to you? Groves didn’t want to stick around and find out. And he thought he was safe because of the will. Return to sender. But he forgot about the wards on Gittings’s door: too strong for him. He couldn’t get out of the house. He had to pull that tantrum to get you interested. I wasn’t sure what to make of you right then. I thought you’d either be useful or we’d end up having to kill you. But it turns out it wasn’t an either/or kind of proposition.’

‘I thought John knew too much about your operation to walk into a trap,’ I said, trying to push Todd’s expansive mood as far as I could. ‘How did you get him?’

Todd seemed to have momentarily forgotten his rule about the man with the knife. He shrugged. ‘Well, the actual recipe is a trade secret,’ he said. ‘But we got him the same way we get everyone. He came onto the premises and we got the drop on him. That’s what we had in mind for you, of course, on the day we burned Gittings. But your demon bitch walked in and we had to abort the mission. We weren’t sure we could take her down, and we didn’t want yet another loose end floating around. That’s the only reason you walked out of Mount Grace under your own steam. Best-laid plans. Listen, this has been illuminating, but I don’t want to draw it out any longer. You want to buy some more time, or are you all out of revelations?’

He stood up and moved around to one side of me, knife in hand at the level of his waist. I could more or less see the angle he’d decided to use: an upthrust, probably to my throat, from behind and off to the side to minimise the amount of blood he got on himself.

‘Rourke isn’t alone,’ I said quickly. ‘There are two other guys. De Niro and Rampling . . .’

‘Don’t fight it, Castor. Under the circumstances, things could be a fuck of a sight worse.’

I was already moving as his hand flashed up. I kicked with my legs, not against him – he hadn’t been stupid enough to bring himself into range – but against the desk. I pitched out and down, the blade slicing shallowly across my shoulder.

I was hoping the impact would smash the back of the chair. It didn’t. Desperately I swung myself to the left and then to the right, sawing with the handcuff chain against the unyielding bars of the chair-back. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned in over me, but the chair-back shattered into loose kindling and I rolled aside as he reached for me, kicking out again in a one-two bicycling movement and missing him by a mile but fending him off for long enough for me to swivel, get my knees on the ground and lurch/stumble back up onto my feet. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, but at least I was in with a chance now.

Or I would have been, if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back now, the gun once again in his hand. He looked annoyed.

‘What the fuck did that achieve?’ he demanded.

Was it a trick of the light or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step towards the door and he moved in to block me, which conveniently blind-sided him as far as the window was concerned.

‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said, playing for seconds.

‘No?’ Todd raised a mildly sceptical eyebrow. ‘How come?’

‘The noise,’ I said. ‘Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.’

He aimed at my head, thought better of it, and lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful, but a safer shot.

‘Silencer,’ he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand and I dropped as his index finger squeezed, but he would still have hit me. Even with gravity on my side I can’t outrace a bullet.

But the window exploded inwards, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything so quickly that they left stroboscopic after-images on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backwards at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned, without any sense of haste or even of intention. It was more like watching someone practise the steps of a dance than anything else. It kicked Todd in the stomach: the sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed just as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inwards like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.

Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled. I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.

‘Not the saviour you were expecting?’ the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up almost into a foetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead: the kick to the stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.

I struggled up on one knee again, but then took a breather, my legs trembling. ‘Not exactly,’ I admitted hoarsely. ‘You told me you’d had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.’

‘Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs –’ he kissed his fingers. ‘– perfectly aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.’

I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were now free to move, although the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets – and my right shoulder throbbed agonisingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed into the fleshy part of it

I stood up, a little shakily. ‘Well, it’s all part of the service,’ I said. ‘At least, it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.’

‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.’

‘Pick him up,’ I said, pointing at Todd. ‘Put him in the chair.’ Moloch nodded amiably, bent down and hauled the lawyer to his feet. Todd wasn’t dead: he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale and he screamed when Moloch lifted him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely, at an impossible angle.

Moloch dropped him into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet and I had darker work still to do.

‘See if you can find some rope,’ I muttered, without looking round. ‘He probably won’t stay upright any other way.’

The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard had taken that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope – about two hundred feet, unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little of him still in view apart from his pale face.

I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.

‘You started a sentence earlier,’ I reminded Todd. ‘You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?’

‘I forget,’ Todd said, with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of pain. And it was going to get worse before it got better.

‘Okay. Doesn’t matter,’ I reassured him. ‘Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here, in the flesh – even if it isn’t exactly your flesh – there’s another favour you can do me. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be messy and at the end of it I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be in but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I have to. Because if it works it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the set-up at the crematorium. About Inscription Night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defences they’ll have laid on. When it will all get started, and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect, and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll walk out the door and the cleaners will find you in the morning.’

Todd glanced up at me again, from under half-lidded eyes. The pain of his injured arm seemed to have driven him into mild shock: either that or he was controlling it with some kind of meditation technique, because there was something other-worldly about his calm. He breathed out through his nostrils, conveying a world of contempt. ‘You bluff badly, Castor,’ he murmured. ‘I’m a dead man already, so death doesn’t scare me. And I’ve got powerful friends. Torture me and kill me, I’ll just come back.’

‘If you’re dead, I can send you on your way,’ I countered. ‘That’s what I do.’ Moloch perked up at that, and looked around at me with a feral smile. The idea of catching Todd’s soul on the wing seemed to be a turn-on for him.

‘You,’ I said, pointing a finger at him, ‘stay out of this, or our deal’s cancelled. Try to take this one soul now and you’ll lose your chance of eating all the others. You understand me?’

Moloch’s answer came from between bared teeth. ‘Yes.’

‘Okay then.’ I turned to Todd again. ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, ‘don’t you? I’m an exorcist. I have power to bind and break you.’

This time he managed a faint, sickly smile. ‘Do you?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Normally if I’m this close to a ghost, no matter what it’s wearing, I get a ping on my radar. When I met you and Scrub – sorry, I mean Leonard – downstairs here, I got nothing. And every time I’ve seen you outside this building . . . nothing all over again. You’ve got good camouflage, I have to say. I’d love to know how it’s done. But then, I guess you’ve been in the game long enough to have figured out a lot of the angles.’

Todd didn’t answer, but there was a glint in his eye as he looked at me: a hint of challenge, or mockery. Looking down at the music, fixing the opening beats in my mind, I slid my whistle out of my inside pocket again and shipped it into the operating position.

‘But here’s the bad news,’ I said. ‘John Gittings did manage to get a fix on you. I don’t know where he was standing, or what sort of tricks he used. He wasn’t a particularly smart guy, in my opinion, but he did it anyway. He nailed you and he got you down on paper.’ I cleared my throat and spat on the floor. ‘And that’s what I’m going to play for you this evening,’ I muttered, not looking at Todd.

I put the whistle to my lips, tried to find the sense: I took one deep breath, held it for a second, then another second, until the seconds became beats and the music invited me in.

Open with a hot trill like manic birdsong: but the bird’s a dive-bomber, and it crashes down hard through the scale to level out a full octave lower in a welter of hard, pugnacious chords. Bail out into C and hold it for a full four beats before dropping even further. It was all guesswork – and I was trying to cover both parts of John’s wacky notation, playing two voices on the same instrument. Todd looked at me with blank puzzlement, but beyond that he didn’t respond.

Change the key, change the time, start again. Still no reaction from Todd. When I got to the hard part, where Luke Pomfret had told me a third drummer was meant to come in, I started to tap my heel against the wood of the desk in crude counterpoint to the music. It was hard not to tap on the beat, but John’s music was quite clear that the new voice should be at odds with the rest of the rhythm. I kept it up until the weird lack of synchronisation made me stumble, lose my sense of direction and stop dead in the middle of a bar.

‘What’s the point of this?’ Moloch demanded.

‘Shut up,’ I said, trying to think my way through the sequence that had just tripped me.

Again, from the top, and faster now because the sense was growing inside me again: the sense that was my knack, my stock-in-trade, and that had started to kick in back at the National Gallery café when Pomfret was playing the cruet set for all he was worth. My fingers were finding the right stops now, almost without being told to, and the atonal skirl leaked out into the air like toxic waste.

Todd winced, which was encouraging. I had to hope it didn’t just mean he was a music lover.

I skated up to the crux again, started to kick with one heel and then with both. The wailing voice of the whistle and the hollow thudding rhythm clashed and fought. Moloch shook his head and scowled, but Todd was starting to look a little afraid.

‘Castor . . .’ he whispered. I couldn’t hear the next word under the music, but I saw his lips move and read it there. Another chord change brought a flicker of real pain, making him screw his eyes tight shut. John’s evil medicine was working. A symphony for drums, played blind and fumbling on a tin whistle. But if it works, don’t knock it.

‘Castor!’ Todd said again, louder. There was a catch in his voice, and his eyes rolled. I carried on playing: deep in the logic of the scribbled score, it would have been almost impossible to stop. I’d given him a choice, but now there were no choices left. A single phrase from the David Bowie song ‘Sound and Vision’ formed in the music and then dissolved, a surprise visitor from another dimension. Flying on autopilot, I was more surprised to see it there than anyone.

The music rushed to its climax, the backbeat limping along behind in a slow-quick-slow. Todd was yelling, tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘Ash! It’s the ash! The ash of our bodies! The ash is our physical focus and we feed it to the people we want to take. Then we all invade them together, subdue them together, and a single spirit stays inside. Please, Castor! That’s the truth. Inscription stops the host soul from reasserting itself. It’s still there but it’s too weak to fight us. We reinscribe once a month, to make sure- Don’t! Don’t!’

He carried on babbling, but the words were lost to me now in the drumming of my own blood. Drumming. Yes. This symphony needed percussion – demanded it. I jumped down off the desk and started stamping on the floor with my left foot. It turned into a clumsy dance. I was staggering around like a drunk, the sounds rising through me and making me move whichever way they needed me to move. Downstairs I’d played for my life, cold and focused, pulling every note out of my mind and out of the darkness by will alone. What was welling up inside me now was different, and will had very little part to play in it. The closing notes seemed almost to tear the back of my throat, and when they faded I found that I was down on my knees on the floor beside Todd’s chair.

Groggily, I straightened and stood. I stared down at the lawyer in his hemp cocoon. His head lolled at an angle, his glazed eyes staring at nothing. A string of spittle trailed from the corner of his mouth onto the collar of his shirt. I thought he was dead, but I realised after a few moments that his tongue was moving inside his mouth. He was trying to form words.

I bent down, put my ear to his mouth and listened. Nothing intelligible, although there was a faint rise and fall of sound like the half-heard voices in between radio stations that you can never focus into audibility.

‘You drove the possessing spirit out,’ Moloch said, at my elbow.

‘Yeah, I did,’ I said, the words hurting my tender throat. ‘And look – someone else is still home.’

‘The original owner of this flesh,’ Moloch confirmed. ‘He seems . . . disorientated.’

‘He seems pretty much catatonic,’ I muttered, looking away. ‘Did you catch Todd on the wing?’

‘This is Todd. The soul that animates this meat now. What fled is not Todd but someone else, who lived in his body and stole his name. But no, I didn’t eat it. You told me not to. I let it leave unmolested.’

I nodded. I had to sit down: that performance had left me feeling as hollow as a cored piece of fruit. A dull ache was starting inside my head. I stumbled across to a vacant chair and sank into it. My breath was coming as rough and ragged as if I’d just swum the Channel, and panic was settling on my mind like a physical weight.

The thing that had been Todd looked past me with its eyes focused on nothing very much.

‘What did he say?’ I asked the demon. ‘He was shouting, towards the end, but I couldn’t stop to listen or I would have lost the tune. Lost the sense of it.’

Moloch summarised with crisp precision, turning away from the shell of Maynard Todd as though it held no further interest for him. ‘That they use the ash of their cremation as a physical vessel for the possession of new host bodies. The host is tricked or forced into eating the ash. Then all the souls in this – cabal – invade the intended host at once, subduing his soul so that one of their number can possess his body.’

‘I caught that much,’ I said. ‘I thought there was more.’

Moloch nodded. ‘He said they tried to do this to you, when you went to Mount Grace to burn John Gittings. Todd gave you a drink of brandy from a hip flask. The ash was dispersed in the liquor. But the succubus came before they could complete the possession, and they had to stop.’

I remembered the sudden, terrible sickness that had come over me as John’s casket rolled through the furnace doors. Not like me at all, and now I knew why. It wasn’t me at all.

‘He also said that the procedure – the possession – is only temporary. The soul of the possessed tries to reassert itself – tries to break free from their control. It gets stronger again over time, however hard they whip it into submission. They have to meet at Mount Grace once a month to repeat the ritual, for want of a better word, and reassert their control. They do this at the dark of the moon, and they call it—’

‘Inscription.’

‘Yes.’ He stared at me with a hungry intensity. ‘Castor, he answered your question, finally, when he was desperate and trying to make you spare him. But in any case you’d only have to look out of the window. The dark of the moon is tonight.’

‘I know.’

‘We have them. We can take them all.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Yeah.’

Maybe the feeling of foreboding I was experiencing was just paranoia. I’d just performed a full exorcism – or something that felt like one. The ghost that had flown out from this room should either have vanished into the ether or else it should be heading for Hell at a good cruising speed. That was where the smart money was lying.

But what was the worst-case scenario? That the tough old soul had been cast out but had had the strength to resist utter dissolution. That it knew where it was going and had the strength to get there. Sure, the thing inside John Gittings had needed to be taken to Mount Grace and burned there again – but then, John’s house had more wards and fendings on it than Pentonville had bars. They were designed to keep the dead out, but they cut both ways: that was why the mad, desperate ghost had gone geist. But here at Todd’s offices, as I’d noticed when I first came in, there wasn’t anything to keep the evil dead from coming and going as they pleased.

So I’d had my rehearsal for the big show, and that was good: but it was more than possible I’d just told the bastards I was coming. They’d have all the time in the world to prepare us a really nasty welcome.

‘We’ve got to go now,’ I said.

Moloch gave me a look of ruthless, detached appraisal.

‘You think you can walk?’ he asked.

I nodded again. ‘Yeah,’ I said, from out of a fog of exhaustion and pain. ‘Just getting my second wind.’

‘We can’t go now,’ he reminded me, in the same cold tone. ‘We need the lady,’

I climbed unwillingly to my feet. ‘I know,’ I muttered.

‘Can you find her?’

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know. There was only one place I’d thought of that was worth looking in, and I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to be welcome there. I trudged down the stairs: I couldn’t hear Moloch’s footfalls, but the prickle on the back of my neck told me that he was following me.

The night loomed ahead of us like a mountain. Only idiots climb mountains in the dark.