The Naming of the Beasts

8

Samir seemed disposed to talk on the way to the Tube, and most of his talk consisted of questions. How long had I been on the staff at the MOU? Had I really been part of the team that raised Rosie Crucis? What did I think of Peckham Steiner’s books? Was the London scene any different now than it had been ten years ago?

I fielded most of these queries with grunts and monosyllables. Sam was affable enough, but I really wasn’t in the mood. Since I’d gone to bed the previous night, I’d been stabbed by a demon, patronised by Jenna-Jane and broken back to the rank of poor bloody infantry. On top of all that, being civil seemed like way too much effort.

But in the absence of any input from me, Sam had no trouble keeping up the conversation all by himself. He told me about how the ‘shit’, as he called it, had kicked in for him: how his secondary personality, who he referred to as Turk, had shown himself first in mischievous and even destructive ways – mocking his parents, picking fights with his friends. A posse of psychiatrists had examined Sam, and after flirting briefly with Tourette’s syndrome had converged steadily on a verdict of acute psychosis. Medication of increasing ferocity failed to do anything except make him as dopey as a punched-out prizefighter. ‘I was heading for a rubber room until I saw my first ghost,’ Sam said, laughing as though he found all this genuinely funny now. ‘Then Turk started swearing and catcalling and insulting it. And it just went away. Piecemeal. As though the words blew holes in it. Exorcism by fucking verbal abuse, can you believe that, Castor?’

I said I could. The window wasn’t wide enough to say anything else.

‘My mum and dad wanted me to carry on with the meds, but I was up and out. I’d had enough of that bloody game. And Turk was easier to control now, somehow. It was like he’d found something to occupy himself. He didn’t mouth off at the living any more now he’d found the dead.’ Sam laughed again. ‘So yeah, my superpower is to tell ghosts to fuck off. It’s ridiculous, really. But Professor Mulbridge loves me because I proved a point for her. There were already loads of exorcists who did it with words, but it was always either spells or prayers. She argued that any words would do, because the modality only has to make sense to the person who’s using it.’

The modality, another of Jenna-Jane’s favourite abstract nouns. Maybe it’s easier to have theories about the way it all fits together if you can’t actually do it yourself. Then it occurred to me that this massive theoretical construct that Jenna-Jane had created served the same purpose for her that my tin whistle did for me: it enabled her to touch the invisible world, and bring it within her grasp. For some reason, that insight didn’t make me feel the slightest sense of kinship with her.

At the Stanger Care Home, Dr Webb predictably refused to see us himself, but detailed one of the male nurses to be at our disposal and give us whatever we needed. In the first instance, that meant access to Rafi’s cell.

‘We’re looking for something that was close to him,’ Sam explained. ‘Physically or emotionally, doesn’t matter which – best of all would be something that was both. Some object that he kept with him and thought about a lot. That’s what makes a good focus.’

But there was nothing in Rafi’s cell; there never had been. It was kept as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard because you never could tell what Asmodeus would take it into his head to use as a weapon. Nothing was safe in his hands, so the only option was to make sure his hands were empty. They were dangerous enough even then.

Sam wasn’t discouraged. ‘There’s always something,’ he said, crawling across the floor on his hands and knees, nose to the ground. ‘It doesn’t have to be big.’

‘What’s the focus for, exactly?’ I asked him.

‘For Trudie,’ he explained – although in fact it explained nothing. ‘She’s got an idea. Well, it’s Gil’s idea, but she picked up on it because it fits in really well with the way she does her exorcisms normally. It’s all about psychic geography. Scrying by sympathies, Gil calls it. It was pretty much theoretical until now, but Pax is sure she can make it work.’

Well, it stood to reason that the two of them would get along, I thought, surprised at how pissed-off that made me feel. I tried to focus on the job in hand. Something close to Rafi. Something he thought about a lot. ‘We could go to Imelda Probert’s house,’ I pointed out. ‘Most of his stuff is there.’ My stomach knotted at the thought. Vivid images strobed in red and black in front of my eyes: Imelda’s torn and broken body sprawled on bare boards, her crushed head resting in the crook of her daughter’s arm. If we did go there, I might not even be able to bring myself to walk inside.

‘Ditko only stayed there for a few weeks, didn’t he?’ Sam answered over his shoulder, sounding indifferent. ‘He was stuck in here for years. Got to be a better bet.’ He was combing the floor inch by inch with his fingertips. Trying to get into the game, I scanned the wall before me from floor to ceiling, right to left, then did a quarter-pirouette and started in on the next wall.

The walls were pure white – or rather impure white, disfigured by a million ancient and mercifully unidentifiable stains, but they shone with a silver lustre here and there where the demon had hammered at the plaster hard enough for the undercoat of metal to show through. Asmodeus didn’t like silver. Proximity to silver weakened him and made him sluggish. Enough of it could hurt him, perhaps even kill him, but probably only if you heated it to 961 degrees Celsius and poured it in through the bastard’s ear – which wouldn’t do Rafi a whole lot of good either.

A particularly damaged area of the wall’s surface caught and held my gaze. There were rucks and gouges in the plaster, near-vertical jags where it had come away in narrow strips. Maybe my mental picture was inaccurate. Maybe Asmodeus hadn’t hammered on the walls at all. Maybe he’d attacked them in a different way.

Moving in closer, I traced the line of one of the gouges down to groin level and – unbelievably – hit the jackpot first time. Something pale and slightly curved protruded from the bottom end of the furrow where it tapered slightly to a point. The something was about a quarter of an inch long and shaped like a gibbous moon.

‘Is it okay to touch the focus?’ I asked Sam, who was still genuflecting in the far corner.

He looked up, surprised, responding to the suppressed excitement in my tone. ‘It’s better not to. What have you got?’

I pointed. ‘Rafi’s fingernail. He was clawing at the wall, and he tore it off clean.’

Sam swore loudly, or maybe that was Turk, rejoicing that the game was afoot. He came over to examine the prize, then gave me a ringing slap on the back. ‘You clever bastard, Castor,’ he said. ‘We’re in business.’

He fished the nail out with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a ziplock bag, both items taken from a small kit in his jacket pocket. Watching this manoeuvre closely, I noticed that he was wearing a Spiro Agnew watch: the punchline to the ancient joke What does Mickey Mouse wear on his wrist? and as far as I knew the only public memorial Richard Nixon’s VP had ever earned.

He took out his mobile, flicked it open, and was instantly immersed in a long technical discussion with Gil McClennan. ‘Fingernail. Yeah. Well there’s no way of telling that, is there, but it was a fucking part of him. About three millimetres wide and eight long. Yeah, exactly. Well there’s nothing else here. The nurse said they incinerated all his clothes after he escaped . . .’

The words washed over me, became abstract sounds as I stopped listening. I was feeling hot, light-headed and more than a little claustrophobic in the ten-by-ten-by-ten cube where my friend had spent three years of his life. I stepped out of the cell into the corridor. It wasn’t much better, but right then I preferred the sour institutional stink and the yells and moans of distressed patients in the middle distance to the oppressive silence and stillness of Rafi’s cell. I breathed in and then out, slowly, releasing a tension I hadn’t felt building.

With immaculate timing, a young girl ran through the solid wall to my left, passed straight through me and kept on going, vanishing into the solid wall to my right. I’m not normally startled by ghosts, but the suddenness of her appearance and the fizz of psychic static as we intersected made me stiffen and shudder. Three more phantom girls streaked past, hot on the tail of the first and not even seeming to notice me as they pelted through me. My hair prickled, the neon tube above my head flickered once, and they were gone. The faintest echo of a giggle hung in the air for a moment, distorting as it faded.

I leaned against the wall, my heart beating fast and my momentary calm well and truly shattered. ‘We already asked,’ Sam’s voice came from inside Rafi’s room. ‘No, they didn’t keep anything . . .’

I knew those ghosts well. Three of them had died more than half a century ago, murdered by the psychopath after whom the Charles Stanger Care Home was named. The fourth – the one in the lead – had only been dead a little more than a year. Abigail Torrington. I’d been hired to find her when she went missing – already deceased – from her parents’ house, but there had been a lot more to that commission than met the eye, and a lot of blood under the bridge before I had the light-bulb moment and introduced dead Abbie to her new posse. The Stanger ghosts had welcomed her with open arms, and she fitted right in here.

Why they stayed here was more of a mystery. I’d cut them loose with one of my better tunes, a partial exorcism that permitted them to roam as far as they liked away from this sick building with its self-and-mutually-tortured inmates. And they did roam. They were a common sight in the West End, and there were reported sightings as far afield as Greenwich and Stanmore. But for some reason they always came back. This was where they lived, in spite of everything.

An association of some kind stirred in my mind.

‘Everything all right?’ Sam asked, stepping out into the corridor and slamming the door behind him. The half-formed idea skittered away to the back of my mind and hid itself under a clump of childhood traumas.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are we good?’

Sam made a tch sound. ‘Gil says we should have gone for something bigger,’ he grumbled. ‘Doesn’t understand a bloody thing, that man. The shit’s like static electricity, isn’t it? It focuses to a point. I know this will do the job.’

We went back to the MOU, Sam regaling me all the way with war stories about some of the weird stuff he’d seen and dealt with while he was working for Jenna-Jane. He had a lot more respect for her than he did for Gil, it seemed. I was curious to know how he felt about the Gulag in J-J’s basement, but I’d probably have to wait until I knew him better before I could ask.

Trudie received the fingernail with genuine excitement. We found her and Etheridge in one of the rooms that hadn’t been redecorated yet, a builder’s shell with bare plasterboard walls scrawled with measurements and instructions for the electricians. There were no wall sockets, but someone had run an extension cord from the room next door and an anglepoise lamp had been plugged into it. The lamp was on the floor, so the room had adequate lighting up to about knee level.

The two of them had laid out a colossal map on a row of trestle tables. It was a composite, made from about thirty Ordnance Survey maps taped together at the edges, and it covered most of London, from Oakwood in the north to Richmond in the south. Etheridge looked happy taping the edges of the maps together. He still twitched and flinched from time to time, but he seemed calmer than when he’d tied himself in knots trying to say hello to me. And he couldn’t do enough for Trudie. He kept showing her the progress he’d made so she could thank him and he could say it was no problem, a ritual that was repeated three times while I was there.

‘This is definitely Ditko’s?’ Trudie demanded, tipping the bag and allowing the jagged fragment of fingernail, brown with blood along one edge, to slide out onto an unused table on which a carpenter’s hammer and a dozen or so six-inch nails were lying. She was looking at me, but Sam answered.

‘It was stuck in the wall,’ he said. ‘We checked, and the cell hasn’t been assigned to anyone else since Ditko left. Webb doesn’t think it will be. You couldn’t stick a human being in a place like that; it’d be like Guantanamo Bay!’

I started to speak, but Trudie beat me to the punch. ‘Rafi Ditko is a human being,’ she said sharply. ‘He’s just carrying the demon the way you carry a virus or a parasite. It’s not a good idea to forget that, Sam.’

Sam put up his hands in a mean-you-no-harm gesture. ‘Sorry to offend your liberal sensibilities, Pax. I didn’t know you were a Breather.’

That word – that label – can be almost value-neutral in everyday use; spoken by an exorcist, it always carries an implied insult. The Breath of Life movement is the Amnesty International of the Twilight Zone, its members lobbying to extend human rights to the risen dead. If they ever manage this, exorcism as a profession will vanish overnight, so there’s a lot of cordial hatred on both sides.

Trudie didn’t acknowledge the slur. She was passing her hands over the broken fingernail, first the left and then the right, moving them in small circles as though she was making some kind of blessing.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. ‘It’s his. It’s good, Sam. It’s very good.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Sam. He looked at me over Trudie’s head, rolling his eyes.

‘Shall I fix up the plumb line?’ Etheridge asked, looking to Trudie for another pat on the head. Possibly he was even younger than he looked. Jenna-Jane did the university milk rounds these days. She could have snatched this kid right out of the cradle. I wondered if he’d been in better nick when she acquired him.

‘No.’ Trudie shot him a distracted smile. ‘Not yet, Victor. I need to charge up. And Gil said we weren’t to start until he was here. Perhaps you could go tell him we’re ready?’

Etheridge scooted off eagerly to do her bidding, while she made some more passes with her hands over the nail. ‘I think this might actually work,’ she murmured. ‘I wasn’t sure, but . . . I’m feeling it really clearly.’

She straightened and started to unwind the string from her hands. I suddenly had an inkling of how she was going to put all these bizarre ingredients together, but it was such an insane idea I thought I must be wrong.

Voices in the corridor told me that Gil and Etheridge were returning. Then Gil himself breezed in, waving his arms like a conductor. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Get it moving, Pax. This isn’t the only thing on the clipboard.’

Trudie didn’t bother to answer. She’d unwound about three feet of string from each hand now. They were loops, but she’d untied the knot in each one to unravel them to their full extent, and now she was tying them together into a single length.

While she worked Etheridge scooped up the hammer and one of the nails, jumped up onto a chair and drove the nail deep into the bald plasterboard of the ceiling. Trudie passed him one end of the string and he made it fast around the nail with an inelegant lasso knot.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s . . . we’re . . .’

‘Thank you, Victor,’ Pax said gently.

Since Etheridge had mentioned a plumb line, I thought Trudie might actually tie the broken fingernail to the other end of the string and make the most lightly weighted pendulum in the history of the world. What she did was even stranger than that, if anything. She tied another lasso knot in the free end of the string, looped it over her hand and lowered her arm again until the string was taut. It meant that her hand could only move in a circle defined by the length of the string.

As we watched in silence, she moved her hand to left and right, up and down over the map, keeping the string stretched out tight so there was no give in it. She started in the centre, and the arcs at first were very tight, but they got wider as she worked. Her eyes were closed, and there was a look of intense concentration on her face.

‘You should probably start somewhere where he’s actually been,’ Sam pointed out, but Trudie winced and Etheridge raised a finger to his lips, as stern as a school librarian.

Trudie went back to the centre and started again, this time moving out in long slow loops. Etheridge had now picked up a pen from somewhere and stood expectantly by her side, but she didn’t speak.

The area of the map was huge, but her hand was a good two feet above it. The circles she was describing made up the cross section of a cone that had its base on the map, so she was making relatively small movements to cover wide areas.

After a couple of minutes of this, she went back to the centre for a third time. Sam let out a long breath, like a sigh, and that seemed to break the spell. ‘Are you getting anything?’ Gil demanded a little irritably.

Trudie looked him straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am. But it’s not directional yet. There’s a sense of him, and it changes when I move but . . . randomly, almost. It’s not like I’m getting warmer or colder.’

‘Maybe you want to keep the focus in the loop,’ I said.

She gave me a look, irritated or just uncomprehending. ‘What?’ she demanded.

I pointed to the nail, still lying on the table. ‘You’re relying on a second-hand contact,’ I said. ‘Slip the fingernail under the string so it’s pressed against your palm. Like calls to like, right? That’s the principle here. Also, you want to get your hand in closer to the map. That’s the hardest part, logistically, but what’s the use of getting a bite that could come from anywhere between Charing Cross Road and Dulwich? If you’re in close, that sense of direction might come through a bit more strongly.’

They all stared at me for a moment, in silence.

‘Do it,’ Gil grunted and walked out. Then he stuck his head back in through the doorway and said, ‘Castor, you’re with me.’

I threw Trudie a nod and followed him out. It was a cold nod, but there was grudging respect in it. Trudie was trying to do something I’d never managed to do myself. To use Jenna-Jane’s cute terminology, she was making fine adjustments to her modality.

Every exorcist has their own special way of doing the necessary: a tin whistle, a typewriter, a deck of cards, any damn thing you can think of. It’s the same knack in each and every one of us, the same synapses closing somewhere and making the same things happen, but the tools we use depend on who we are and where we’ve been. That’s a pretty good indication that the tools don’t ultimately matter; they only reflect our experience, our tastes, our comfort zones. Faced with the unknowable, we hide behind the known and take potshots from cover.

I’d seen Trudie perform an exorcism, or try to. She had woven the string around her fingers in intricate and changing patterns, like kids do in the game of cat’s cradle. But Trudie knew that the string was just a security blanket. The real power was inside her, and it used the string as an excuse to come out and play. So now she was making it work for her in a different way. Whether she succeeded or failed, she deserved a certain amount of credit just for trying.

On the other hand, she’d gone from Gwillam’s employ straight into Jenna-Jane’s – from the foam-flecked zealots to the necro-vivisectionists – so what the hell did I care? I only had to work with her.

‘You’re on late shift tonight,’ Gil said, as we rode the lift down to the first floor. ‘Midnight. Charing Cross station, Strand north-side exit. Bring your whistle. In the meantime, Professor Mulbridge wants to record you playing your tune. She thinks we can learn something from it.’ There was a sardonic edge to his voice.

‘You don’t agree?’ I asked mildly.

‘I think if you knew how to deal with Asmodeus, you would have done it years ago,’ Gil said. ‘The fact that you’re here at all means you’re out of ideas.’

‘And the fact that J-J took me back?’ I asked. ‘What does that mean? I got the distinct impression she’s got some shit going on that you people can’t deal with.’

The lift doors opened with a flattened pinging sound, like a bullet bouncing off a bum coin. Gil laughed with what sounded like real amusement. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re her favourite ghost-breaker. But it’s not because you’re any good. It’s just because you’re the one that got away.’ He pointed down the corridor. ‘Lab 3,’ he said. ‘They’re expecting you.’

I started to walk away.

‘Castor.’

I turned back. Gil was holding the lift door open with his finger on the button. ‘She hates you for that too,’ he said. ‘For leaving, I mean. So the way I see it, she’s going to fuck you into roadkill sooner or later.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ I said.

Gil shook his head. ‘It would only be a warning if it was going to make a difference,’ he said. ‘You killed a good man, you bastard. A father. You wrecked a family.’ The lift pinged again several times, and the servos in the doors groaned as they tried to close.

‘Gabe raised a demon,’ I pointed out. ‘It killed him. All I did was get out from between them.’

‘And then the demon ended up as your partner. Watch your back, Castor. Because I will be.’

He took his finger off the button, and the doors slid shut between us. The lift mechanism whined slightly as it carried him back up to the second floor.

In Lab 3 a stolid, stocky guy who looked more like a longshoreman than a medical technician was tweaking the controls of a graphic equaliser as big as a two-car garage. ‘You’re Castor?’ he demanded. ‘Great. I’m Davey Nathan. Let’s do this thing. I got a shit-load of transcriptions piling up here.’ He hustled me into a soundproofed booth rigged up in a space that might once have been a toilet cubicle. He had a transatlantic drawl, and when I asked him where he was from he said he was on loan from the CIA. ‘Seriously,’ he added, looking at me warily in case I was going to question his word.

‘Langley?’ I asked.

‘No, not Langley exactly,’ he admitted, looking sheepish. ‘OSINT. Open Source Intelligence. We’re just geeks, really, sieving publicly available sources for useful information. Only we don’t say useful. We say actionable.’

‘How’d you wind up here?’ I asked.

Nathan shrugged morosely. ‘Pissed off the wrong people, Mister C. Pissed off all the wrong people, from God on down. But fuck, you know? A bi gezunt . . .’

‘A what?’

‘Yiddish. Means “so long as you’ve got your health . . .” But you have to look unhappy when you say it.’

We did some run-throughs for acoustics, then he locked me in and I played my ‘Etude for Hell-spawn’, the tune I’d developed to give Asmodeus a sedative when I’d first discovered that I couldn’t exorcise him. The recording sounded okay to me on playback, but Nathan wasn’t happy with it.

‘It goes way flat around 8,000 hertz,’ he grumbled. ‘This equaliser is a piece of shit. Go on back inside and hit me again. I’m gonna fuck with the RF bias.’

The second take sounded identical to the first, but Nathan liked it better. ‘Three’s the charm,’ he said. ‘Go on, we’ll nail it. Trust me.’

Apparently we nailed it. At any rate, there wasn’t a fourth take. I thanked Nathan for his efforts and asked him what the transcriptions were he was working on.

‘Fifty per cent of my time,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. ‘The ghost-breakers go to some place where there’s a spook – in your sense rather than the CIA sense – and they record it. Only the sound doesn’t show up on tape, right? When ghosts talk, either they don’t make the air vibrate at all or they got some way of hitting the human ear selectively. So that’s what I’m looking for – a wiretap for the fucking spirit world. I told Professor M., if we find it, it’s gonna be just white noise. A billion voices all at once. Only we won’t find it unless it propagates through the air and why the hell should it? So that’s what I’m wasting my life on. All because I missed some survivalists saying, “Let’s all make a bomb.” I didn’t think they could tie their own goddamned shoelaces.’

I was about to leave Nathan with his woes, but a few things clicked together in my mind before I got to the door, and I turned on the threshold. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.

‘The transcriptions. Fifty per cent of your time?’

He shrugged. ‘Give or take.’

‘Is the other fifty per cent Rosie Crucis?’

‘Give the man a cigar. Yeah. She gets an hour with either the professor or that McClennan guy twice a week. I tape the conversations and index them.’

‘You can keep the cigar,’ I told him, ‘but how about the combination for the keypad on her door? Rosie and me go back a long way. And it’s been a while since we got to talk.’

Nathan shook his head theatrically, as though to snap himself out of a trance. ‘Security, Castor. It’s called that because it’s meant to be secure.’

I took a long slow look around the cramped room. ‘You worried about losing your job?’ I asked.

Nathan laughed full-throatedly. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘You remember that battle you guys fought, against the French?’

‘Oh man. There’ve been so many . . .’

‘The one that mattered. The one where they kicked your asses all over the countryside and then moved into the big house.’

‘Hastings.’

‘Bingo. Add twenty, and that’s your magic number.’

‘Thanks, Nathan. You’re a mensch.’

His face lit up at the Yiddishism. ‘A shaynem dank dir im pupik, Castor. You’re welcome.’

I went down to street level and, after a couple of wrong turns, found Rosie’s door. I tapped the keys and the lock clicked. 1086. Jenna-Jane hadn’t had the Battle of Hastings in mind when she set that code; she was thinking of the Domesday Book. That was an enterprise after her own heart.

I opened the door and stepped inside. It was like walking into another world. Rosie’s quarters were schizophrenic in the extreme. The bed was a hospital bed, big and ugly, mounted on a hydraulic pillar for raising and lowering and adjusting of angles. And beside the bed there was a fearsome assemblage of machines with red LED readouts and old-fashioned pressure dials on their fascias. But elsewhere there was a sofa, table and chairs, a TV, cheap prints on the walls – evidence of a general effort to make this institutional space, which in reality was a prison cell, look a little like home.

Rosie was in bed, which is where she spends most of her time these days. It’s a side effect of the wards that J-J uses to keep her contained, and it’s worsened steadily over the years. She spends about half of every day asleep, and it never takes very much effort or emotion to exhaust her. The weird thing is that these symptoms persist and repeat themselves in every body she occupies.

Currently her fleshly tabernacle was male. A guy of about twenty stared back at me from the bed. He blinked a couple of times, and then a smile gradually suffused his features.

‘Felix!’ Like the exhaustion, Rosie’s deep sexy burr always sounded the same no matter whose body she had squatter’s rights in. ‘My darling! My sunbeam! Come and shine on me.’

‘Hello, Rosie,’ I said. ‘How’s your love life?’

‘Entirely . . . theoretical.’

I ambled over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She lifted her pale hand and rested it on mine. Maybe the guy was already pale when he got here, or maybe Rosie’s transformative magic was working on him, making him over subtly into her image.

The rules that govern the afterlife are unfathomable, but they seem to be pretty consistent. Whatever form you take in death, flesh or spirit, you don’t stick around for all that long. Twenty or thirty years is the average, fifty is already pushing it, and a century seems to mark the upper limit. For zombies the attrition is rapid, ruinous and irrevocable; for ghosts there’s a slower and more subtle disintegration as the ego – the glue that holds a human being together – atrophies and melts away.

Rosie is the anomaly. A dozen exorcists working in an insane daisy chain had raised her, pulling on the psychic threads attached to a box of Tudor artefacts that J-J had acquired from God knows where. We caught her in a web made out of our own guts and our own arrogance, and then we decanted her into a waiting body, the first of many. It was a feat that had never been repeated.

Technically what Rosie does – the way she manages to keep on going on the material plane – is spiritual possession. The bodies are those of willing volunteers – psychology and medical students, mostly, who house the old ghost for a week or a fortnight and then walk away clutching (by way of payment) the tapes and transcripts of what she’s said through their lips. The quick turnover means that Rosie’s sedentary lifestyle does no harm to her hosts, although some of them have claimed that they got flashbacks weeks or months later, spontaneous memories of events from Rosie’s life. I suspect that’s part of the draw. To a certain kind of mind, there’s something attractive about the idea of a cheap holiday in the Wars of the Roses.

Rosie is a strange woman. Her name is a joke, or a mask, and she’s never told anyone what name she went by back when she was alive. What I can tell you is that she’s playful, coquettish, filthy-minded and full of life – impressive in a lady who’s been dead for five centuries. She’s also garrulous. She likes to talk about her adventures, and that occasionally includes stories about where she’s been during the 500 years between her death and resurrection. She lies outrageously, contradicts herself without blushing, kids us all straight-faced and then laughs her leg off when we fall for it. And Jenna-Jane writes it all down and pores over it, looking for the needle of truth in the city-sized haystacks of Rosie’s magnificent bullshit.

I left the MOU mostly because of how Rosie was treated there. Because of the way she’d gone from honoured guest to precious resource to de facto prisoner. Jenna-Jane had started to obsess quite early on about undocumented access, and had started to control the comings and goings of Rosie’s visitors. Rosie was allowed out of the MOU only with an escort. The outings got more and more infrequent, until finally they stopped altogether.

I’d seen her just once since then, and that was the last time Asmodeus had tried to break free from his moorings in Rafi’s flesh. It had been more than a year ago now, but Rosie would never have been so indelicate as to tear me off a strip for not visiting – and I guess when you’ve clocked up more than half a millennium the odd year here or there isn’t worth arguing about.

‘It’s so sweet that you came,’ she whispered. ‘Unless it means . . . you’ve taken that bitch’s shilling again.’

‘I’ve missed you too,’ I said, dodging the question. ‘How are they treating you?’

The truth was that she didn’t look all that well. Again, the borrowed flesh thing makes it harder to tell, but given that the guy whose body she was borrowing was a healthy young volunteer, the listlessness and lethargy had to be coming from Rosie herself.

‘They keep me occupied, Fix,’ Rosie said, her lips quirking upwards very slightly. ‘Like an expensive pet. They do everything they can to make sure I’m happy.’

‘And are you?’

The half-smile disappeared. ‘No. Not very. The company isn’t as . . . select as once it was. I see . . . a great many dullards. A great many bullies. I endure. I let them come and go, and they leave no mark on me . . . or on the world, but still . . . it saddens me.’

‘Well, I’m going to be able to visit you for at least the next few weeks. Is there anything I can get you? Grapes? Booze? Porn? A newspaper?’

She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said solemnly. ‘Well, porn, perhaps. If it’s witty. But I’d rather you just talked to me. Tell me how the world works.’

I did, for about an hour or so, concentrating on the sort of things I knew she’d be interested in: politics, but only broad strokes and colourful intrigues; fads and fashions, the more extreme the better; stuff from my own life, luridly exaggerated. After a while she began to interrupt me with the occasional question, but they were questions I couldn’t answer. They bore on the big intangibles, the way London looked and felt these days. I did my best to describe the city as I saw it, but I’m no poet.

Finally Rosie gave a loud sigh, which I took to be a signal that I should shut up. ‘I can’t catch it,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t catch it, Felix.’

‘Can’t catch what, Rosie?’ I asked. Given my part in getting her into this mess, I figured the least I could do was play straight man to her.

‘It’s changing,’ she murmured. Her eyes were closed now, and her head was tilted to one side as if she was listening for something. ‘But so slowly. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.’

‘Are we still talking about London?’ I asked.

‘About the world.’ The silence that followed those three words lasted for so long I thought she’d gone to sleep, but when I stood up to leave she reached out and took my hand again. ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.

‘I never do,’ I said. ‘It all rolls off me, Rosie. You know that. It’s part of my ineffable charm.’

She ignored the invitation to banter. ‘It’s going to get hard to breathe,’ she said. ‘I really believe . . . yes . . . the changes will go on and on. Like water, rising over your head. Don’t drown, Fix. I’d be sad if you drowned. There’s a man here who hates you . . .’

‘Gil McClennan,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. I had his number the first moment I saw him.’

She shook her head slowly, emphatically. ‘You think you . . .’ she began, but for some reason she didn’t finish the sentence. She shaped unspoken words with her mouth, but in the end only shook her head again. ‘Never mind,’ she sighed. ‘It all passes. It all passes. Perhaps you’ll be his . . . comeuppance, Fix. I know what a rogue you are. How hard to pin down. I hope you hurt him. I’d like to see that.’

She said it calmly enough, but I read some old pain in her face. It’s hard to hide your feelings when you’re relying on someone else’s muscles. I made a mental note to ask one of the others, most likely Sam, whether there was any bad blood he knew of between Gil McClennan and Rosie. Gil was her main link to the outside world now, in charge of selecting and briefing her volunteers – organising the meat train, as he put it – so he was in a position to do a lot of harm if he had a mind to. And he was a McClennan. That didn’t earn him the benefit of any doubts in my book.

‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘I need to move, but like I said, I’ll see you again soon. If Gil gives you any grief, you let me know.’

‘Assuredly, my knight in arms.’

‘Seriously. I’ll break his arm. I think Jenna-Jane would let me get away with that as long as he doesn’t take a sick day.’

I kissed her on the cheek, hoping the volunteer wouldn’t object to the liberty when he went through the tapes, and let myself out. She didn’t say goodbye; she was lying back with her eyes closed again, seemingly exhausted just by the conversation.

Walking back along the corridor, my head full of vague and unserviceable thoughts, I was hit full force by an atonal tidal wave of white noise, so suddenly and so painfully that it almost made me stagger. I hadn’t realised I’d gone the wrong way and was walking past the vault-like steel door that led down to the holding cells in the basement. I retraced my steps hurriedly, the cloying atmosphere of the place pressing in on me so that I felt like I was breathing through petrol-soaked rags.

My instinct was to get the hell out, but the mapping was still going on upstairs and I had to see how far they’d got. If Trudie Pax had a line on Asmodeus, I wanted to be the first to know. I went back up and found the room again. Trudie didn’t seem to have moved in the two hours I’d been gone: she was still standing at the table, the taut string linking her hand to the nail in the ceiling as she passed her hand over the map. Some things had changed though. The tables had been banked up at an angle somehow, their back legs precariously balanced on stacks of cardboard boxes, so that the centre of the composite map was only a few inches away from Trudie’s hand. She was holding a steel ruler, to the nether end of which a pencil had been attached with wads of Blu-Tack. This ramshackle apparatus allowed her to stab down onto the map and mark points on it. Victor Etheridge was scuttling around with a pencil and ruler of his own, joining the points up carefully with perfectly straight lines.

Trudie had her eyes closed, but I caught Etheridge’s gaze from the doorway. He held up his hand in the universal stop sign and shook his head vigorously: don’t interrupt.

I wished I could pretend I hadn’t seen his high sign, because I wanted more than anything right then to breeze on in and find out where those marks were falling: where the demon might have pitched his tent. But clearly Trudie was getting into her stride now, and Etheridge was feeling protective of her. Equally clearly, from a purely logical point of view it wasn’t going to be any damn use knowing where Asmodeus was hanging out until we had a weapon that would actually work on him. Trying to take comfort in that thought, I gave Etheridge a nod and a wave and retreated again.

But the logical point of view was a long bus ride from where my head was at. I was seething with restlessness, with the feeling that I had to be doing something right then and there even if it turned out later to be the wrong thing.

So I called Juliet. It seemed to make a crazy kind of sense.