The Naming of the Beasts

13

‘Felix! Welcome back. Come and give us the benefit of your expertise.’

Jenna-Jane’s voice was courtesy itself: no snide cracks about broken alarm clocks, no sarcastic sallies of the ‘So good of you to join us’ variety. Then again, Gil McClennan, at her elbow, radiated enough resentment and disapproval to make anything she felt like doing in that line redundant.

I’d knocked on J-J’s door, found the office empty, then followed the sound of voices to the map room. Everyone was there, sitting or standing at the edges of the room, around the circumference of the sprawling map-sheets: Jenna-Jane and Gil, obviously, Trudie, with Etheridge hovering at her shoulder like Tinkerbell to her Peter Pan, Samir Devani, looking like he might have gone to bed even later than me, and a man and two women I hadn’t seen before – presumably exorcists on loan from other work teams.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said insincerely. ‘Keep talking. I’ll get up to speed.’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Actually,’ Trudie said, after glancing briefly but curiously at the flat brown-paper-wrapped package I held under my left arm, ‘I think we’d better recap, because this is important. Gil, would you mind telling Castor what you found?’

McClennan gave a show of impatience, but Jenna-Jane made an open-handed gesture, giving him the floor. He couldn’t very well say no after that.

‘I started off by looking at the clusters,’ he said, pointing to the map. ‘The points with the densest concentration of lines. One right where you live, Castor, in Turnpike Lane. One over here in Wembley – Pax says that’s Juliet Salazar, who helped you break up Asmodeus’ game last time he tried to get free, so maybe he’s out to settle old scores there too. Another cluster down here in south London. Peckham Rye.’

‘The Ice-Maker’s,’ I confirmed. ‘That’s where he was until he escaped.’

‘Right. And then a few more in the centre of the city, here, here and here.’ He pointed to King’s Cross, Holborn, Waterloo. ‘Maybe these are just hubs – not places he’s visiting, but places he has to go through to get to where he’s going. You’d expect to find some stuff like that.’ Gil paused, staring across at me. ‘You with me so far?’

I nodded wordlessly.

‘Okay, then look at this.’ He tapped the map, at a point where Trudie’s ink lines were so densely overlaid on each other it was almost impossible to see the streets beneath. Gil’s finger traced a line away from Turnpike Lane to the south, which was where most of the lines seemed to bleed off, Asmodeus either coming or going by the same route each time.

The lines weren’t exactly straight: they veered to left and right, while still heading broadly south into the centre of London. Some of them diverged at this point, heading west; others kept right on going.

‘Why the zigzags?’ Gil demanded in the tone of a man who already knew the answer.

I took a closer look, but it seemed like an easy one. ‘Because the streets don’t head exactly where he wants to go.’

‘Yeah.’ Gil nodded. ‘Exactly. He turns into Tollington Park here, and Stroud Green Road there. No straight lines. You can’t walk through London and go in straight lines, right? Maybe New York, but not London.’

Trudie made an impatient tutting sound, obviously wanting Gil to cut to the chase, but he was going to do this his way. ‘Now look here,’ he said, moving his finger down into the centre of the map – the centre of London.

The difference was obvious, but only because he’d told me what to look for.

‘Straight lines,’ I said.

‘Straight lines. Mostly around Holborn, which is one of our secondary clusters. See, he’s going either north or south here, but he doesn’t cut to the left to go into – whatever that is, Old Gloucester Street. He keeps right on going. Walking through walls. Making like the street grid doesn’t matter to him. Which it doesn’t.’

‘Because he’s underground,’ I finished.

Gil looked annoyed that I’d got to the punchline ahead of him, but all I was doing was joining the dots. It was still his insight, and I was impressed. Jenna-Jane was right: he was a good exorcist and nobody’s fuckwit.

‘Or flying,’ Trudie added scrupulously. ‘We didn’t want to rule out the possibility that he might be able to transform himself somehow.’

‘But in that case,’ Gil broke in again, ‘we’d be seeing straight lines all over. We don’t. They’re just in the centre. So he’s got an underground route that takes him through just this stretch here.’ He indicated with a broad sweep of his hand an area that extended from the river up almost as far as Russell Square. ‘The next question is why does he use it? I mean maybe it’s quicker, but not by much. And he’s not afraid of bumping into people. If he’s got to go over-ground for most of the time, why use this one little stretch of tunnel that he’s found? And why keep going back to it?’

‘He’s got a base there,’ I said, playing straight man again. ‘This is where he hangs his hat.’

‘And that,’ said Jenna-Jane, taking charge of the proceedings again, ‘is the conclusion we’d reached just before you arrived. The puzzle that remains is to determine what tunnels he’s using. The London Underground network seemed the likeliest option, given the density and depth of the tunnels in the centre of the city, but there’s no obvious candidate.’

‘We got hold of some maps from the city engineers department,’ Samir said. ‘They give a pretty exact mapping of the tunnels onto the streets above. The Piccadilly Line goes up here, about a hundred yards east of this nexus of main roads. The demon’s path veers west, if anything, so it’s not that. Central Line’s too far down . . .’

‘He wouldn’t be likely to use tunnels that are actually in use in any case,’ I pointed out. ‘Too risky and too inconvenient. Do the inspection tunnels follow the same plan?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Trudie, ‘but they run parallel with the main line and they’re still too far out.’ She showed me some red lines traced on the map a long way from the black flecks that marked the demon’s comings and goings. ‘We thought of disused stations too,’ she added, forestalling my next question. ‘No joy. There was a lot of old digging around King’s Cross and the Angel, and some of those tunnels extended quite a long way to the south and west, but he’s not following the line of any of them that we can see.’

‘So now we’re working on sewers and sealed-off waterways, ’ Gil grunted. ‘Which could take us days, because there are literally hundreds of miles of them to cover, and the maps don’t always correlate to street level except at known access points.’

‘Any insights, Felix?’ Jenna-Jane coaxed.

I stared hard at the map: at the way the black flecks siphoned into High Holborn and Kingsway and then splurged outwards again at Waterloo Bridge. I tried to imagine myself walking that route, as I’d done a thousand times. Down Woburn Place, past Russell Square Gardens, into Southampton Row . . .

‘No?’ J-J seemed disappointed. ‘Well, then I suspect you work on two fronts, Gilbert. Keep someone here, adding the sewer and waterway information to the map grid, while the rest of your people go out and walk the ground. Assuming the demon has gone to ground for the day, we might get a current time fix on him just by being there.’

McClennan became brisk. ‘Teams of two,’ he said. ‘Cartwright and Powell. Greaves and Etheridge. Devani, you can come with me. That leaves you and Castor on the map, Pax. Let’s move.’

He probably thought that grounding me would piss me off. It probably would have too, if I intended to do as I was told. I wasn’t done with Gil yet though, and I stepped into his path as he headed for the door.

‘We need to talk about Super-Self before you go anywhere,’ I said.

He stared at me, deadpan. ‘That’s all in hand,’ he said. ‘If you’re looking to clock up some overtime, Castor, you can forget it. I don’t want you, and more to the point I don’t need you.’

‘You might want to know what you’re facing, all the same,’ I said. ‘And you might need this.’ I held up the key to the gym’s front door. McClennan recognised it at once, or maybe just guessed what it was. He took it out of my hand, looked at it thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

‘You’ve got your assignments,’ he said to the other exorcists in the room. ‘Get moving. Samir, wait for me downstairs.’

‘I’d rather make a start,’ said Samir.

Gil didn’t even look round; his eyes were locked on mine. ‘Make a start then,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you when I get over there.’

The room gradually emptied until it was just the four of us: Trudie, Jenna-Jane, McClennan and me. Gil looked at Trudie and motioned with his head towards the door. She didn’t move. ‘If it’s about Super-Self,’ she said, ‘I’d like to hear this. I’m part of that team too.’

‘If you need to hear it,’ Gil said with heavy emphasis, ‘I’ll brief you later, at the same time as everyone else. Right now this is private. Go make yourself a cup of coffee, Pax. Make me one too.’

Reluctantly, Trudie headed for the door. As soon as it closed behind her, McClennan turned to Jenna-Jane, holding the key up in his hand. ‘He stole this from a secure cupboard,’ he said. ‘That’s where the rest are. I signed them back in yesterday morning, as soon as I got here. You think he stopped at the keys? He’s probably raided med cabinets, equipment, case files . . .’

‘I took it off the ring while I was talking to you, Gil,’ I told him. ‘Sleight of hand, not breaking and entering. Not that I’ve got anything against petty larceny, you understand; it’s just more effort.’

‘I want him off my team,’ McClennan said to J-J as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘Gilbert . . .’ she said, sounding as though this rift between her little lambs distressed her beyond bearing.

‘It’s not as if he brings us anything. It’s not as if we need him.’

Jenna-Jane turned to me. ‘What do you bring us, Felix?’ she asked in a colder and more businesslike tone.

‘The rickety twins,’ I told her.

She made an open-handed gesture. ‘Go on.’

‘Between the Strand and Wych Street,’ I said, ‘from the middle of the nineteenth century right up until they levelled the whole area to build the Aldwych in 1901, there were two theatres: the Opera Comique and the Globe. They were mostly underground. In fact the Opera Comique was reached through tunnels; it didn’t even have a street-level entrance.’

‘I’ve heard of the Opera Comique,’ Jenna-Jane said musingly. ‘Some of the early Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were performed there – before D’Oyly Carte built the Savoy.’

I shrugged. ‘If you say so, Jenna-Jane. I’m not big on Victorian theatre. I can tell you though, courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archive, that there was a really nasty incident there in 1879. The theatre had fallen into debt, and some bailiffs tried to repossess the sets and props. They got into a stand-up fight with the cast in the middle of a performance. Then someone knocked over a lantern and the set caught fire. Four hundred people in the audience, all trying to get out of a burning basement through the same three tunnels. Mostly in the dark . . .’

‘Why is this relevant?’ Gil demanded angrily. ‘What has the fucking nineteenth century got to do with—?’

‘Hasn’t the penny dropped yet?’ I yelled back at him. ‘The ghosts in the swimming pool are actors. They’re not from Roman Britain; they’re from the cast of some crappy play. I saw one of them last night blowing her nose on a lace fucking handkerchief. And she was wearing button-up boots!’

That shut him up for a moment, so I pressed on, determined to get to the point that really mattered.

‘So the ghosts are about a century old,’ I said, addressing myself to Jenna-Jane. ‘That’s still unusual, but it’s not impossible. It’s just right at the end of the bell-shaped curve. What is unusual is the thing that’s in there with them.’

McClennan opened his mouth to bandy some more words with me, but J-J held up an imperious hand for silence. ‘What thing?’ she asked.

‘My source calls it a Gader’el,’ I said. ‘It’s demonic, but it’s something we haven’t met before. It feeds on fear. Probably the fear still attaching to that site was what brought it there in the first place. It’s like an angler fish, J-J. It sits down there in the dark, dangling those old ghosts like a lure. When living people come in close to look, it gets its hooks into them. It amplifies any fear they’re already feeling, turns it into blind terror, and somehow it takes nourishment from that.’

I turned to look at Gil now, seeing only resentment and suspicion on his face. ‘The point is,’ I told him, ‘you can’t destroy it with a frontal attack. It’s not like the demons we’ve met before; it’s . . . I don’t know, a lower life form. More primitive. More instinctive. Trying to exorcise it just makes it hit out harder. That’s why Etheridge got damaged the way he did, and why your other man – Franklin – ran under a car.’

McClennan shook his head, but slowly and without much conviction. He was thinking, and thinking was taking some of the momentum out of his anger. It was hard for him to listen to the message when he wanted so badly to kill the messenger, but I could see that I was getting through to him.

‘So what are you saying, Felix?’ Jenna-Jane asked.

‘I’m saying you need to wait,’ I said. ‘There’s probably a way to drive this thing out without facing it head on. I had an idea last night: sort of a time bomb. A way of giving this thing some grief from a safe distance. I don’t know if it will work, but I want to try it. It will take a while to set up, that’s all. A day or two. Maybe longer.’

‘From a safe distance?’ McClennan echoed me. ‘How would that work?’

But Jenna-Jane was already shaking her head, very firmly. ‘We go ahead with the plan as agreed,’ she said.

‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘Why take the risk?’

‘Because we’re scientists,’ she said simply. ‘We gather data and then we reach conclusions based on that data. We don’t prejudge, however tempting a particular prefabricated theory may be. By all means proceed with your own plans too. If Gilbert’s team doesn’t succeed tonight, you can try your alternative method. I see no harm in that – in having two strings to our bow.’

‘The harm is that your first string might snap and put someone’s eye out,’ I said caustically. ‘You’re sending your people into a dangerous situation when there’s no need.’

I looked to McClennan for support, but J-J’s rationalist call to arms had stiffened his sinews. ‘I think the team I’ve put together will be up to the job,’ he said, toeing the company line. ‘You can tell me what your back-up plan is, if you want to. If I think it’s got any merit, I’ll put someone on it.’

There was a dead silence. Both of them looked at me expectantly. All I could think of was to quote Gil’s own words back at him, like a snot-nosed schoolkid doing dumb insolence.

‘Well maybe I’ll brief you later,’ I said. ‘If you need to hear it.’

Nobody was going to give me any exit music, so I just left. Jenna-Jane called out something to me, but I was already halfway down the corridor and I didn’t hear it.

Trudie Pax was loitering by the lifts, leaning against the wall with her arms folded and a grim look on her face. She straightened as I approached. ‘I have to get out of here,’ she said.

‘I thought you were on map duty,’ I reminded her.

‘I’ll come back later. Right now I need the air.’

‘When you go back,’ I said, ‘take this with you.’ I handed her the package and she hefted it, feeling its weight.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘A photo of Rafi. Take a look.’

She tore away the paper from one corner and examined the contents of the package without enthusiasm.

‘I’ve seen this technique before,’ she said. ‘The photo was developed right onto the glass, right?’

‘Printed onto the glass,’ I corrected her. ‘Right. It was all the rage back in the Victorian era. But apparently Macedonia gets the fashions late.’

‘So is the picture significant in some way?’

I see-sawed my hand. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It was Rafi’s first communion. Big day for most Catholic kids, right? A lot of emotion invested, a lot of vivid memories laid down. I thought it might give you another focus, if you need one.’

Trudie didn’t seem impressed. ‘It’s a lot older than the fingernail.’

‘I know. Look, try it if you think you need it. Otherwise don’t. And either way give it back to me when you’re done. I’ll give it to Pen for a keepsake.’

I shied away from the implications of that statement: that whether Asmodeus won or lost, keeping Rafi alive might turn out to be a trick outside our collective skills; that the photo might turn out to be the last thing Pen had to remember her former lover by.

‘I’ll try it,’ Trudie promised. ‘I’ll put it back in the map room now and feed it into the loop later on.’

‘Later on? Why not now?’

‘Because if you’re going to go down to Holborn and look for Asmodeus’ rabbit hole, I’d like to join you.’

I tried the idea on for size, and found I hated it less than I would have expected. ‘I’ve got something else I need to do first,’ I warned her.

Pax seemed nonplussed. ‘Something more important than Asmodeus?’

‘No, less important. A lot less. It’s just . . .’ I threw up my hands in a shrug, found that I had to unclench them in order to do it. I hadn’t realised how angry and frustrated I was until that moment. I almost punched the wall, but my left hand was still stiff and sore from punching Gil McClennan’s jaw exactly twenty-four hours before. ‘Super-Self,’ I exploded. ‘Fucking Super-Self. Jenna-Jane is determined to send in the troops, even though they don’t have a blind clue what it is they’re facing. She thinks blitzkrieg is the right answer no matter what the question is. No, actually it’s worse than that: she thinks the data you get from a wipe-out are as good as any other kind. If some of Gil’s people die in the process, or get their brains fried like Etheridge, well, what the fuck? Science marches on.’

Pax was giving me a curious look. I threw it right back at her. ‘What?’ I demanded.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s just . . . do you think it will help?’

‘Help what? What are you talking about?’

Trudie looked as though she was picking her words with care. ‘The MOU exorcists aren’t your favourite people in the world, are they? They’re as bad as the Anathemata, in your book.’

‘So?’

‘So why does any of this matter to you? If you save some bunch of people you don’t really know and don’t really care about, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you did care about? Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? The redemption train. You’re standing on the footplate and sounding the whistle, Castor.’

‘The whistle’s all I’ve got,’ I muttered sourly as I punched the button for the lift. ‘Don’t knock it.’

I never did like being psychoanalysed, even before I grew up, read the literature and realised that Freud only got into that game to pick up girls. Maybe that was why I asked Trudie to cover for me on the Holborn beat while I went across town to see a woman about a tune. Or maybe I was still reluctant to trust her further than I had to, even though we were de facto partners now. She was still Anathemata on some level: still fighting the same war against the same enemies. It felt like all there could ever be between us was a truce. I arranged to meet her in an hour’s time, at Seven Dials, and headed west.

On one level I was close to screaming in frustration. Asmodeus had fallen off the map after his second visit to Pen’s house, the night before last, when he’d left me a knife and a neatly bisected button to remember him by. He was still out there somewhere, still working, and I didn’t even know what it was he was working towards. Just that it involved the deaths of everyone Rafi had ever known, that I couldn’t possibly stop that from happening, and – hardest to take of all – that those deaths would turn out to be some sort of horrendous fringe benefit. They weren’t the point. They arose out of some bigger scheme that Asmodeus had cooking.

Maybe his priorities were the same as they’d always been. ‘I’m thinking of going home for a while,’ the demon had told me, ‘when I’m free of this meat.’ He wanted to scrape Rafi off his shoe and rise in all his splendour, one hundred per cent guaranteed Hell-spawn: that had been on his mind ever since I’d inadvertently trapped him. So was that the big plan now?

He’d gone to the satanists first, but they’d let him down. The Anathemata had broken up the party before the mages of the SCA could complete their rituals and tear the man and the demon from their non-consensual embrace. Plan B had to be under way by now. Asmodeus wouldn’t stop because he’d been put down once; he’d just come back again harder than ever.

And now, when we were finally closing in on the brimstone-arsed bastard, I was trudging halfway across London on a different job entirely, working to an agenda set by Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. That zombie in Somers Town had been right, and so had old Rosie: the world had changed all right. It had shaken itself inside out and all of us who thought we had the high ground were living in the valley of the shadow. What goes around, comes around, and it turns out to be a chainsaw blade.

In Kensington Church Street, I gave Evelyn Caldessa the schematics I’d sketched out on the train, and asked her if what I wanted could even be done. Caldessa is an antique dealer, and a good friend of mine ever since she helped me out on the Abbie Torrington case. She’s imperturbable normally, having seen so much crazy shit in her seventy-four years that nothing surprises her any more. This commission made her raise an eyebrow though.

‘Well there’s no reason why not, in theory,’ she said, after scanning the sheets several times over, tracing the lines with her stick-like finger as she puzzled out the sequence. But despite that hopeful start, she shook her head dubiously.

‘In practice?’ I prompted.

Caldessa glanced across at her only other customer, a middle-aged man in a three-quarter-length fawn coat who was ogling a case full of porcelain shepherdesses with the furtive air of a punter in a porn shop. She clearly had some hopes that he was going to make a purchase; either that or she thought he might have sticky fingers.

‘None of the standard designs would work,’ she said. ‘They have a very tiny range, because the mechanism is very small and very crude. So you want something bespoke . . .’

‘I’m prepared to pay,’ I said, four words that have a magical effect in a lot of situations.

‘. . . but you want it done quickly. Bespoke and quick turnaround don’t sit well in the same sentence, dear heart. The people who I could ask to do this would enjoy the challenge, but they’d want to take weeks over it and charge you thousands.’

‘Okay,’ I said, rubbing my chin ruefully. ‘I thought I was prepared to pay, but it turns out I’m not. I can’t raise that kind of money, Evelyn. And the time won’t shift. If I can’t have it today, there’s no point having it at all. Tell me if there’s another way.’

‘Those items,’ Caldessa said, not to me but to the well-dressed shepherdess-fancier, ‘are part of a collection. I’m afraid I can’t split them up.’

Turning back to me, she winked conspiratorially. ‘Never make it too easy for them,’ she murmured. ‘Obsession thrives on surmountable obstacles. Yes, Felix, there is another way. Several movements set side by side in one casing would do the job. Each mechanism would still be in the standard range, but together they’d be able to do what you need them to do. What a job though! Not making the individual cylinders – that’s no effort at all. But making them work in time with each other . . .’

‘If you could do it,’ I said, ‘how much would it cost?’

She gave me a slightly surprised look. ‘Oh, more than you could afford, my lamb. A lot more than you could afford. But I assume there’s a story attached?’

‘Yeah, there is. Very much so.’

‘And I’d very much like to hear it.’

‘Done.’

‘I’d very much like to hear it at Claridge’s. Gastronomy Domine says Gordon Ramsay is back on form this year. A coarse and odious little man, but he knows how to cook.’

‘Cheap at the price, Evelyn.’

‘Then I’ll see what I can do. Keep your mobile phone on vibrate, Felix, and in your back pocket. When I goose you, you’ll know it’s time to come see me again.’

From Kensington I grabbed a number 14 bus back into town: not as quick as a cab but cheaper. Now that I was committed to dinner for two at Claridge’s, I was already counting the pennies.

Having Caldessa on the case gave me a sense of having made some progress, maybe spurious, but when your own wheels are spinning in the air it helps to know that other people are moving. In that regard, I called Nicky and asked him about the three stooges known as Tlallik, Ket and Jetaniul.

‘A couple more bites,’ he said. ‘One on Jetaniul this time, and one more on Tlallik. The references are really fucking old, like with the Grazimir citation. Again, just lists of names from a couple of early grimoires: translations of translations of translations, so far from the original context that it’s not worth chasing up. Nothing to indicate who they are, or what they are, or what they do. Judging by the company they keep though, they were pretty big players at one time. Which makes me wonder how come none of them stayed in the hit parade after the thirteenth century.’

‘And no known aliases?’

‘Not yet. I tell you what though: Juliet could ask her brother.’

‘Say again?’

‘She comes from Baphomet’s lineage, doesn’t she? She is of Baphomet the sister, and the youngest of her line, et cetera. His name turns up on one of these lists too, so maybe him and Tlallik ran in the same crew.’

‘I don’t think she phones home all that often,’ I said. It was an automatic response, dating back to when Juliet was trying to keep her nose clean. After last night’s performance, maybe I’d need to revise that estimate.

‘Doesn’t hurt to ask, anyway,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m still on it, but I’m thinking this is a waste of time. These guys all closed up shop a long time ago.’

‘Do demons retire, Nicky?’

‘You can run that one past her too.’

I got off the bus at Trafalgar Square, then walked up St Martin’s Lane, where I found a bank and wired a ton, in pounds sterling, to the personal account of D. Anastasiadis. A hundred quid a book, he’d said, so now he could make a start on Rafi’s journals if he hadn’t done so already. If you’d asked me what I hoped to find in there, and what I thought I could do with it, I’d have had to admit I had no idea. Again, it was the illusion of moving forward that was comforting, even though forward doesn’t really mean anything if you have no clue where it is you’re going.

As I carried on towards Seven Dials and my rendezvous with Trudie Pax, I made one final call, to Juliet – or as it turned out, to Sue Book. She sounded scared and hunted, as though picking up the phone was an act that was fraught with danger. I asked her if Juliet had seemed okay when she got home last night.

‘Last night?’ Sue echoed, sounding uncertain. ‘She wasn’t here. She didn’t . . . I thought . . .’ There was a pause, and then the sound of another voice in the background. Sue answered the other person, but her voice was muffled now – a hand over the receiver, most probably.

‘Sue?’ I prompted.

There was a spate of rattles and clicks.

‘Who is this?’ It wasn’t Sue’s voice. It wasn’t Juliet’s either – or rather, not quite. It was close, but it had a ragged edge to it with oddly placed peaks and troughs, as though it was being played back on the wrong device and in the wrong format.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Castor.’

‘She called you?’

The threat in the tone was palpable. ‘Uh . . . no. I called her. I just wanted to see how you were feeling. If you’re managing to . . .’ I groped for a circumlocution that avoided words like devour and soul. ‘If you’re keeping it together,’ I finished cravenly.

There was a long silence, long enough to make me think that the connection had broken, but Juliet spoke again just before I did.

‘Tell me where you are,’ she said.

From behind her, I could dimly hear a squeal of dismay from Sue. ‘Jules, no. He’s just a friend. He’s your friend too. It’s not—’

The crash that obliterated the end of the sentence was loud enough to make me flinch away from the phone. ‘Juliet,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t hurt her. Fuck it, don’t hurt her. I’m in town. On Seven Dials. What do you want?’

At that moment Trudie rounded the corner of Shorts Gardens, about fifty yards away. She waved to me, then registered my expression and lowered her hand. Only silence now on the other end of the line.

‘Juliet?’ I yelled again.

There’s a weird experience I get every now and then, where I look at my watch and I think it’s stopped, because the second hand doesn’t seem to be moving. It just sits there, seemingly for a whole lot longer than a second hand should, until finally it wakes up and jumps to the next notch. It’s just a second, but it’s a second you’re glancing at sideways somehow, and from that angle it looks longer. That’s probably what happened here. It felt like I was waiting for a night and a day, but since nothing else happened in that time, it’s a fair bet that it was no time at all.

‘She’s fine, Castor,’ said Juliet in her normal voice.

‘What do you mean, she’s fine?’ I snarled. ‘I heard you tearing the whole place apart.’

Her voice was eerily calm, and the dislocation from what had just happened was so complete it was terrifying. ‘I swung a chair against the wall, and it broke. Sue wasn’t hurt. But now she won’t let me touch her or come near her. Can I ask a favour?’

Trudie had come up to join me now, and was waiting silently at my side, trying to piece together what the hell this was about from my side of the conversation. ‘A favour?’ I repeated blankly.

‘I told you I’d send her away if I thought I might hurt her again.’ A pause. ‘She can’t stay here.’

‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Don’t either of you move.’ Inspiration struck, and I added, ‘Give Sue the phone.’ I looked around for a cab, but there were none in sight. I started walking rapidly along Mercer Street with Trudie in tow. I’d reached the end of the street before Sue’s voice sounded down the line again, breaking even on the single word ‘Hello?’

Plenty of cabs on Shaftesbury Avenue. I flagged one down with my right hand, holding the phone in my left.

‘I’m going to put a friend on,’ I said to Sue as we climbed into the cab. ‘Keep talking to her. Let her know if anything happens.’ I passed the phone to Trudie, adding ‘Royal Oak’ for the cabbie’s benefit, and we were away.

Thanks to Mr Livingstone and his wondrous congestion charge, we made good headway through the centre, but then got hopelessly snarled up as we headed up Edgware Road toward the Westway. Trudie was keeping up a non-stop stream of meaningless conversation with Sue Book the whole way, which was what I was hoping she’d do: taking Sue’s mind off the terror and at the same time letting me know that she was still alive. I sat with my eyes closed, thinking about Juliet, or rather thinking about the tune that corresponded to Juliet. If I had to fight her, I needed to have that music clear in my mind, and at the moment it was rubbing shoulders with other tunes, to their mutual detriment. I had to unremember the harsh skirls of the fear-thing in the Super-Self swimming pool and the insidious discontinuities of Asmodeus, had to put them way to the back of my mind where they couldn’t be heard.

I was kidding myself, of course. The tin whistle is a great specific against ghosts, but when you’re fighting demons it has the disadvantage of a crossbow against an AK-47: you get off one shot, and then you’re dead before you can ratchet up for the second. But this was yet another fine mess I’d invited an innocent bystander into, so there was no walking away from it. No, as usual, I had to walk right into it whistling a jaunty refrain.

Bourne Terrace was quiet and deserted, and from the outside Sue’s house looked similarly untroubled.

‘We’ll be right back,’ I told the cabbie. ‘Don’t move.’

Trudie kept up her running commentary all the way to the door. ‘We’re coming up the driveway now. We’re right outside . . .’ But it was Juliet who opened up, and stood aside to let us in. I stared at her questioningly. Her gaze flicked to the tin whistle I still had clutched in my hand, and she quirked an eyebrow.

‘You won’t need that,’ she said. ‘Luckily for you.’

‘Maybe I won’t,’ I conceded. ‘Do you?’

‘Need you to play me back into my right mind?’ Juliet asked with sardonic emphasis. ‘No. I don’t. Not for the moment, anyway. But get her out of here quickly. She won’t look at me, and she cries when I come near her. It makes me . . . agitated. I can feel myself slipping.’

‘You’re sure there’s no other way?’ I asked lamely. ‘You don’t have any clue why this might be happening? You can’t get any kind of a handle on it?’ I remembered the painted stones. ‘I found some summonings around your house and in a few other places. You think maybe someone could have . . . ?’

Juliet scowled. ‘Could have raised one of the other powers against me? No, Castor. Not without me noticing. I think . . .’ She gave a sudden shrug. It looked almost involuntary, as though she was shaking off some unwelcome touch. ‘It’s my nature,’ she said, her tone tight. ‘There are limits to how far you can change yourself. I’ve come to the end of an arc, Castor, and I’m swinging back.’

She was staring at me, and I realised suddenly that her eyes were back to their usual black on black. The red fires had died for the time being. But there was no mistaking the rigid tension in her posture: she was fighting her own instincts, guarding the borders of rationality from one second to the next.

‘Go wait in the kitchen,’ I suggested. ‘Shut the door. Turn the radio on. Make yourself a coffee.’

Juliet considered this, nodded and retreated. ‘Decaf!’ I shouted, as the door closed on her.

Sue was sitting on the living-room sofa, the wreckage of the chair scattered across the carpet a few feet away from her like debris from an explosion. The TV set had had its screen staved in too, and was lying on its side in the corner of the room. A ragged hole in the plaster above it showed how it had got there, and roughly how fast it had been travelling.

Sue rose to greet us as we entered, saying hello to me and then shifting her gaze enquiringly to Trudie in a way that invited me to make introductions. I’d been afraid we might find her in shock, but there was a desolate calm about her. She looked like someone who’s finally let go of the last shred of hope, and is just beginning to discover the terrible relief that despair brings.

‘You should pack some things,’ I said. ‘Clothes. Toiletries. Anything you can’t do without. We don’t know how long it will take to sort this.’

‘Sort it?’ Sue gave me a pitying look. ‘You can’t, Felix. You can’t sort it. Whatever she felt for me . . . it’s gone. I don’t even know her.’

‘Me neither,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s happened so suddenly, Sue. Maybe it’s a sickness. Or something that just happens to demons when they get to a certain age. What we’re doing now . . . it’s not forever. It’s damage limitation until we can work out something better.’

Sue wasn’t convinced or consoled, but Trudie stepped in at this point and took her away upstairs to help her through the process of packing. I was left alone in the living room, surveying the destruction. Sue had lived here all her life: with her mother, until her mother died, then alone, and finally with her demon lover. Maybe I should have suggested that Juliet be the one to go, but then when her self-control evaporated again she’d probably head straight back here and reclaim the things that were hers – including Sue. This way was better.

The room stank of her anger, and Sue’s fear. Having a death-sense makes me sensitive to emotional resonances too, and when they’re strong and recent they can be overpowering. My own heart rate started to climb, riding a second-hand adrenalin rush.

I retreated into the hall just as Sue and Trudie came down the stairs. Trudie was carrying a suitcase, Sue a small flight bag.

‘Everything?’ I asked.

Sue nodded, her face expressionless.

‘Go ahead and wait in the cab,’ I said to Trudie. ‘I’ll be right there.’

I watched them down the drive, then tapped lightly on the door of the kitchen. Juliet opened it instantly. I suspected she’d just been standing there, on the other side of the door, waiting for the coast to clear, waiting for the woman she’d lived with for more than a year to depart.

‘She’s gone,’ I said.

Juliet nodded. She already knew that.

‘Would you rather not know where she is?’ I asked her. ‘I was going to take her to Pen’s, but I could find a hotel, if . . .’ I let the sentence hang. If you’re so afraid of losing control that she’d be safer in hiding, was the implication.

‘Let her be among friends,’ Juliet said, her voice a throaty murmur. ‘I won’t . . . I don’t believe I’ll seek her out. The wards at your house are strong. And you’re there, which is some protection – not because of the whistle but because you’re such a slippery little bastard.’

‘Okay,’ I said. On another occasion I would have thanked her for the compliment, but right then didn’t feel like the time. ‘I’m still tied up with this other stuff. With Asmodeus. He’s cooking something up, and I really need to find him before it comes to the boil. You’re sure you won’t . . . ?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘You don’t need me at your back right now. Half the time I’d be at your throat instead.’

‘And parts south,’ I acknowledged. ‘Yeah. You’re probably right. But when it’s done . . . we’ll talk.’

‘Castor.’

I’d got to the door. I paused with my hand on the latch and turned back. She was holding something out to me. By reflex, I took it. A small sheaf of fifty-pound notes, the four I’d given to her two days ago, when I’d paid her to keep watch over Pen.

‘You’re right,’ Juliet said. ‘She’s more than a friend. I don’t want her to be hurt. I need you – I’m employing you – to make sure that doesn’t happen.’

‘I’ll do that without the money,’ I said.

‘Do it with the money. Friendship is hard for me to understand or to believe in right now. Bargains I understand. Say yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Bind yourself to it.’

‘I bind myself to it. I won’t let her get hurt.’

‘Good then. Go away.’

I hesitated. ‘What will you do?’ I asked.

She made another of those abrupt movements, like a shrug that was close to getting out of control. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice was cold and flat, with none of its usual thrilling harmonics. ‘I might give up on this experiment. Go home.’

I felt an unnerving shifting in my stomach. It wasn’t pleasant hearing Asmodeus’ words echoed so closely by Juliet.

‘Don’t do that without talking to me first,’ I said.

She shot me a bleak hard stare. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she growled.