The Naming of the Beasts

14

Despite what she’d said the night before about going hunting on her own account, Pen was home when we arrived, and once I’d explained the situation, she rolled with the punch of having a new tenant landed on her.

‘We’ve got lots of empty rooms,’ she said to Sue, taking the little sheaf of fifties from me without comment. ‘Come and find one you like, and we’ll open the windows and air it out a bit.’

She spirited Sue away into the remote fastnesses of the house – the no-man’s-land between her basement and my attic, where she scarcely ever ventured. Like Sue, she was living on in the house where her mother had lived. In fact, she could boast three generations of Bruckners who’d all lived and (with one exception) died on this soil. Maybe that would give the two of them something to talk about.

Judging by the look on Trudie’s face, we had something to talk about too, and I knew what it was before she spoke.

‘That thing is dangerous,’ she said. ‘Probably too dangerous for you to handle yourself. The fact that it’s been playing house with a human being doesn’t change what it is underneath. You should tell Professor Mulbridge about what’s happening here.’

‘Juliet isn’t a thing,’ I said. I helped myself to a large brandy from a bottle on Pen’s sideboard, then realised what I was doing when the glass was halfway to my lips. Tense and frustrated, I set it down again untasted. ‘I count her as a friend.’

Trudie shook her head grimly. ‘Then you’re an idiot,’ she said. ‘Castor, didn’t you learn anything from what happened with Ditko?’

I fought down a surge of anger. Trudie had been a tower of strength out at Royal Oak, but every time I got close to lowering my guard around her her she pulled something like this.

‘Rafi is an old friend who got ram-raided by a demon,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Juliet is a demon I happen to like. I don’t see the analogy.’

Trudie saw the warning in my look, but she had no intention of backing down. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do. You just don’t want to. If you anthropomorphise these things, you blind-side yourself. You start expecting them to behave like people.’

‘Well, I haven’t given up on you yet,’ I pointed out.

Surprisingly, the sucker punch seemed to hurt her. She affected a laugh but blinked a few times quickly and looked away. I’d been seeing her as Joan of Arc up until then: armoured in righteousness, no time for losers. It was a surprise to find that the armour had weak points.

‘They’re our enemies,’ she said, automatically adjusting the strings around her hands. ‘They torture and they kill and they poison everything they touch. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.’

‘And I don’t understand why you think you already know all the answers,’ I said, but with a lot less heat. ‘Look, the point about Juliet is that she doesn’t always kill when she can, or when she wants to. She didn’t kill me, two years ago. That was what broke the ice between us.’

I could see she wasn’t the slightest bit convinced, and for some reason, now, I wanted to plant the seed of a doubt. ‘Trudie,’ I said, ‘think about this. There’s a difference between Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark. Have you ever been to Ararat? It’s in Turkey. You can go up there on a day trip, take a picnic. But does that prove that Noah washed up there when the flood waters fell?’

Trudie was giving me a blank stare. ‘You think I’m a literalist?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You think I believe every word of the Bible is infallible truth?’

‘No. I just want you to see the difference. Ararat exists, but it doesn’t prove Noah, or the flood. Now we know that Hell exists too. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you, or Gwillam, or any other Christian soldier, knows what Hell is. Gossip isn’t fact, and when it comes to Hell, the Bible is just the Hello! magazine of the ancient world.’

This was too much for Trudie. She gave a wordless yell of exasperation. ‘Castor, you don’t have to believe the Bible; you just have to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Ajulutsikael may wear a dress and have a nice arse but it was never a baby or a child or a teenage tearaway or anything you’d see as female. It’s nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother. It’s a woman the way a stick insect is a stick. No, in the way a praying mantis is a leaf. The moment you forget that—’

She stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, looking past me towards the door of the room. I turned involuntarily, following her gaze. Pen was framed in the doorway. Sue had already taken a few steps into the room, but had then stopped dead, brought up short by Trudie’s wall of words. Now she came forward again.

The colour had drained out of her face; even her lips were white. For a moment she had the ivory pallor of Juliet herself. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her body so rigid it looked like it would ring out with an A sharp if you touched it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Trudie faltered. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘A stick insect.’ Sue’s voice was an ugly, grating thing. ‘A praying mantis. What have you . . . What did you ever touch? Who have you . . . loved and cared for and, and, and lain with, you twisted bitch? How dare you stand there and pass . . . pass judgement on my . . . wife?’

On the last word she launched herself at Trudie in a flying leap. Trudie had six inches on her, and had been trained by the excommunicate sergeant majors of the Anathemata to hold her own against men and demons, but she didn’t fight back as Sue went for her, punching and clawing; she just raised her arms to protect her face.

It was a tricky job to disentangle Sue from Trudie without hurting her, but Pen and I managed, taking an arm each and half-lifting her off the floor to take away her leverage. Trudie took a hurried step back, lowering her en garde.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ she said, and then to Sue, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

She fled out of the room and up the stairs. When the street door slammed behind her, we carefully let go of Sue and stepped away from her. Anger and indignation had done her a power of good. She looked more like herself than she had at any time since I’d found her nursing her black eye three days before.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m calm.’ A second later she exploded with another ‘Bitch!’ – which showed us exactly how calm she was, and probably brought her lifetime tally with that word up to two. Pen took her into a consoling embrace.

‘I’ve got to get back out there,’ I said to Pen. I thought of explaining why, but ‘Asmodeus is underground’ wasn’t a revelation that could help her very much. She couldn’t join the hunt, and the thought of Jenna-Jane’s exorcists combing the streets for Rafi would just make her miserable. ‘Back on the case,’ I finished lamely. ‘I’ll come by again later, if I can. Will you be okay here?’

Pen nodded to me over Sue’s head, and I cravenly left them to it.

‘Call Leonidas!’ Pen shouted to me as I was on my way up the stairs to ground level. I turned around and went back down.

‘That’s the guy from 300,’ I pointed out. ‘Gerard Butler.’

‘Something like that, anyway.’

‘Anastasiadis?’

‘Exactly.’

Progress on the journals? Some good news would have been pretty welcome right then. I joined Trudie out on the street and asked her if she’d give me a minute or two to make the call. She still seemed a little shaken up by the storm she’d provoked from Sue.

‘Take as long as you need,’ she said, and walked off to the end of the drive, out of earshot.

Anastasiadis’s secretary spoke only Macedonian, so all I could do was repeat my name until she gave up and put me through.

‘Mr Castor.’ The lawyer sounded tired and dispirited. But then given what day it was, that was hardly surprising. I looked at my watch. Allowing for the time difference, it must have been about three hours since Jovan walked the last mile.

‘Feeling rough?’ I commiserated. ‘You did everything you could, man. Like you said, Jovan’s cards were marked in advance. They probably put the execution on the docket before they fixed up a trial date.’

‘That is why I called you, Mr Castor.’ Anastasiadis’s tone was grim. ‘There was no execution.’

I blinked. ‘What? You mean the pardon came through, after all?’

‘That is not what I mean. Jovan Ditko was murdered last night. Someone broke into Irdrizovo Prison, tearing a gate off its hinges, and killed him in his cell. It was not quick, and it was not clean. There was . . . mutilation. His eyes, in particular . . .’

I didn’t hear the next few sentences, because the momentary paralysis of shock had allowed the phone to slip through my fingers. I had to flail and lunge to retrieve it before it hit the ground. When I got it back to my ear, the lawyer was still describing what had been done to his client before – or perhaps, to take an optimistic view, after – he died. I cut him off in full flow. I could fill in the details without any help from him.

‘Did they catch anyone?’ I demanded. But he’d already answered that: you don’t say someone broke in if you know who the someone is. ‘See anyone?’ I amended.

‘Neither,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘The other prisoners in the block heard – it would have been impossible not to hear – and they screamed for the guards. But the guards feared a riot, which is a very common thing on the night before an execution, so they did not come. He was found when they came in the morning to take him.’

Asmodeus. Asmodeus had travelled a thousand miles to murder Rafi’s last living relative hours before he was due to die in any case. How? How had he done it? When Juliet had flown with me to the United States, the experience had almost destroyed her: it had left her weak and sick and at half-strength for weeks afterwards. Demons are chthonic powers, and too much distance from the ground hits them like a bad dose of flu. For that very reason Juliet had refused to take the flight back to Heathrow. She told me she had other ways of travelling that wouldn’t involve leaving the ground.

‘Mr Castor? You are still there?’

‘Yeah. I’m still here.’

‘I apologise. I had not meant to burden you with the unpleasant details. But they weigh on my mind. It is hard for me to stop thinking about them. And I wondered – inevitably I wondered, given the things you said to Jovan yesterday – whether this demon you spoke of might have been involved in his death.’

‘We don’t have any way of knowing for sure,’ I said bleakly.

‘But in your own estimation?’

‘Yes. It was Asmodeus.’

The lawyer sighed – a drawn-out sound with a slight tremor in it. ‘I have a translator working on the books,’ he said. ‘You have an email address?’

I gave him Nicky’s and Pen’s, and asked him to send the translation on to both accounts.

‘You are still looking for this thing?’ he asked me.

I didn’t quibble about the choice of words this time. ‘Yeah, I’m still looking for him.’

‘Be careful, Mr Castor. And be lucky. I do not believe that any god holds me in his good graces, but still I will pray for you.’

‘Thanks. I’ll take all the help I can get.’

I slipped the phone into my pocket and rejoined Trudie. She didn’t look any happier. For a moment I considered keeping what I’d just learned to myself, but a deal is a deal. I filled her in as we walked to the Tube station.

‘Macedonia!’ She seemed more amazed at the logistics than disturbed by what Asmodeus had done, but then she’d never met Jovan Ditko, or Rafi for that matter: a lot of this was still theoretical for her.

‘Macedonia,’ I agreed. ‘Some time in the middle of last night. God knows how long it took him to get there, or whether he’s back now.’

‘Maybe that’s why nobody has got a hit yet,’ Trudie mused sombrely. ‘Even if he has got a tunnel under Holborn, we might not get a fix on him if he hasn’t been there recently. We’re probably wasting our time.’

She filled me in on the morning’s activities. Most of the area between Holborn and the river had been searched pretty thoroughly, and McClennan had told his teams to fan out to the east and west. Trudie herself had criss-crossed the backstreets around Kingsway for most of the morning, but the only things that had impinged on her death-sense were the local ghosts and zombies.

‘Maybe what you said,’ I mused. ‘The trail’s not fresh enough. Or maybe he’s just too deep. There could be Victorian sewers down there, fifty feet below the regular ones. Or Tube tunnels that were never documented, for that matter. We only know what someone decided to write down.’

Trudie didn’t answer. Since the argument at Pen’s she seemed to have drawn in on herself. She kept up the silence all the way into town, and while we were retreading the beat she’d walked for most of the morning. We ran into Etheridge and his partner – the woman Gil McClennan had referred to as Greaves – coming towards us along Kemble Street. Etheridge was his usual nervy, tic-ridden self, no better and no worse than when I’d seen him last, but Greaves was tired and disgruntled.

‘Nobody’s got a trace of anything,’ she said. ‘And we’ve walked every square foot of this area ten times over by now. If there was anything to find, we’d have found it. But Gil says we have to keep on going until the light fails.’

‘He’s very keen,’ I commented neutrally.

Greaves snorted derisively. ‘He’s shit-scared,’ she retorted. ‘This keeps his mind off it, doesn’t it?’

‘Off what?’ Trudie asked.

‘Off Super-Self. He’s got to go in tonight, and he doesn’t know how it’s going to pan out. Keeping himself busy is his way of dealing with it.’

I thought about the fight I’d had with McClennan the day before. Greaves might be right, but if Gil was scared, I suspected it wasn’t just for his own safety. He’d thrown that punch at me because he saw my off-the-cuff battle plan as putting his exorcists in danger. But then this morning he’d rejected my suggestion, which would have given him an easy out. He must be wondering now what he’d let himself and his team in for, and whether he was going to end the evening with blood – someone else’s blood, I mean – on his hands. He might be the first McClennan ever to fret on that score.

We kept on going to the end of the street, then did one more long trek up and down Kingsway. At that point Trudie announced she was going back to the MOU – back to her map. Maybe the fact that Asmodeus had been out of town would make a difference. There’d be new lines to draw now, with a jump discontinuity from the old ones because Asmodeus had nipped over to eastern Europe on his murderous little day trip. That time lapse might be enough to allow her to distinguish his present movements from older ones.

I was going to offer to go with her, but my phone rang and a glance at the display told me it was Caldessa. ‘I have to take this,’ I apologised to Trudie. She shrugged and backed off a few steps.

‘Hello?’ I said, turning my back on her.

‘Hello, dear heart,’ Caldessa said. ‘Good news. My friend Burgerman was able to help me with the internal workings of your dread device. It transpires that the drilling and pinning process is done by means of a computer these days – quelle surprise. Burgerman knows a man who makes them up in batches for the tourist dollar, from old chocolate boxes and jewel cases. He boggled a little at your specifications, but he was able to run off the cylinders in no time, and the combs are standard.’

‘So it’s all done?’ I demanded.

‘Not quite, but it will be by the time you get here. I’m just fitting everything into the case now.’

‘You’re the eighth wonder of the modern world, Caldessa,’ I said fervently.

‘Of the ancient world,’ she sighed, ‘unfortunately.’

I hung up and looked around for Trudie, but she was nowhere in sight. She must have got tired of waiting for me, or maybe she felt being on her own for a while would be an improvement on my company. I couldn’t fault her logic on that one.

I looked at the time and weighed up my options. I wanted to go back to Pen’s and make sure both she and Sue were still there and still safe. I wanted to check in with Nicky and see if he’d managed to get the dirt on Tlallik and Ket and Jetaniul. More than anything, I wanted to sleep, but you can do that when you’re dead, at least if your luck is in.

Before doing any of those things, I took the Tube out to Kensington and collected my order. Caldessa demonstrated its workings to me with pardonable pride.

‘Three keys,’ she said, rotating the drab little wooden box in her hands. It hadn’t been painted or varnished, and unlike Burgerman’s enterprising friend, Caldessa hadn’t used a Victorian chocolate box or jewel case as her starting point; she’d just nailed six roughly sanded pieces of MDF together into a cube, cutting slatted holes into one of them to allow the thing to function. ‘But once they’re all wound up, you can turn it on and off with this toggle switch here. It doesn’t open, of course. And it doesn’t look like anything very much. But I assume function is more important than form, and it’s a lot sturdier than the regular kind.’

‘It’s perfect, Caldessa.’ I kissed her on the cheek, and she yelped because my stubble was more than usually obtrusive. ‘I’ll be in touch about that date, as soon as I’m done with this. I’ll even shave.’

‘You needn’t bother as far as that goes,’ Caldessa allowed. ‘Your louche charm is a selling point, Felix. A shave and a manicure would just make you look like a used-car salesman.’

She had a point. I never did scrub up more than halfway decent. I thanked her again and retired with some of my dignity still intact.

No answer from Pen’s house, or from Nicky either at the Gaumont or on his mobile. Fatigue was catching up on me with a vengeance now, and my eyes were doing that thing where they only stay open while you’re actually making them, and close by infinitesimal degrees whenever your attention slips.

It was only six thirty or so, more than five hours yet before I had to be at Super-Self to head Gil McClennan off from his Little Big Horn. I bowed to the inevitable, caught a Circle Line train running widdershins through South Ken, and put my head down for half an hour.

Well, half an hour was the plan. When sleep opened its black throat at my feet I lost my balance and pitched in head first, like a drugged honey cake into the gullet of Cerberus, and lulled by the motion of the train we both went rocking into the dark together.

It was a sleep that was almost deep enough to be dreamless: or at least the things that populated it were too primitive and unformed to resolve themselves into actual images or sounds. They were just inchoate feelings, made up of unease and familiarity in equal amounts. It was as though I was sliding down an endless helter skelter of déjà vus.

What woke me was the sound of the PA system at Moorgate reporting a good service on all lines. It’s like they say: there are lies, damned lies and London Underground service announcements.

I was groggy and crumpled and slumped into a corner of the seat. The first thing I realised was that I’d slept with my tin whistle jammed against my third rib, so that I winced in discomfort every time I breathed in. The second was that the man in the snow-white mac sitting opposite me, staring at me with an expression of distant, contemplative calm, was Father Thomas Gwillam.

‘Good evening, Castor,’ he said solemnly.

Evening? I looked at my watch. Half past nine. I’d slept for three hours. Still no need to panic, but this had to be my last turn on the merry-go-round.

‘Evening, Father,’ I muttered. ‘It’s been sixteen years or so since my last confession.’

Gwillam’s thin lips pursed slightly: he doesn’t like it when people make light of grave matters. His pale eyes blinked and then opened again slowly, like a cat’s. ‘I’ve been excommunicated,’ he reminded me. ‘I’m therefore no longer qualified to take confession. Your sins will have to remain on your conscience a while longer.’

I looked around me as I came awake properly, belatedly taking in the fact that Gwillam wasn’t alone. Two of his team – a very young woman and a man built even more solidly than Mr Dicks – stood to either side of me, close enough to intercept if I tried anything that smacked of lèse-majesté.

‘You’re playing a very dangerous game,’ Gwillam told me.

I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help myself; it was just so obviously something he’d heard someone say in a Bond movie.

‘What do you suggest?’ I asked him. ‘Twister’s no good. I’m just not as supple as I used to be.’

‘You set this thing free in the first place, Castor. All the deaths that have resulted from that act are on your hands. And it’s your responsibility more than anyone’s to see that it’s destroyed before it can do any further harm.’

Anger crawled up my throat like bile. In spite of his two bodyguards – and I was under no illusions that the girl was at least as dangerous as the bruiser – I was tempted to lunge across the aisle and take a poke at him. One good whack on his self-satisfied snout: that would almost make up for being beaten into lumpy porridge immediately afterwards.

But I still had promises to keep.

‘It was your people who set him free, you fuckwit,’ I snarled instead. ‘I got him out of the Stanger, but your hit men opened his fucking door and let him walk right out. It’s on you as well as me.’

To my surprise, he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘It’s on me too. I don’t deny that. It’s the reason I’ve allowed you to operate as a free agent. I know what you’re trying to do. I don’t hold out any great hope that you’ll succeed, but the smallest chance that you might outweighs the risk that you’ll sabotage our own operation.’

He paused for a second, frowning at me. He tilted his head to one side to get a better angle on the only slightly faded bruises on my face, the ones left over from my first encounter with Asmodeus down in Brixton.

‘But we suspect that the demon has plans of his own in train,’ he said. ‘Plans that are already far advanced. So I’m swallowing my pride, Castor. I’m here to suggest that we work together to bring him down.’

‘No thanks,’ I said.

Gwillam didn’t seem surprised, but his eyes narrowed into a severe frown.

‘You’re making no progress alone. You’re flailing in the dark.’

I laughed again. ‘Gwillam, do you think I’m an idiot?’ I demanded. ‘You’re here because you’ve fired every shot in your locker and you didn’t hit a blind thing. You’re coming up empty. This is no-stone-unturned time, and I’m probably the last stone you got to. But you think offering to share will play better than asking if you can pick my brains for free.’

Gwillam’s expression didn’t change. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘Your cynicism demeans you, but it’s understandable, to some extent. It’s true that we haven’t run Asmodeus to ground, any more than you have, but we’ve succeeded in closing down his support system.’

‘The American satanists,’ I translated, and I took a certain pleasure in seeing in his face the surprise he tried to hide.

‘Exactly,’ Gwillam confirmed. ‘The remnants of Anton Fanke’s organisation, now completely eradicated. Whatever Asmodeus is doing, he’s been thrown back on his own resources. We have a window, and if we use it wisely – if we cooperate and pool our intelligence – we can bring him down.’

I shook my head firmly. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we can’t. Because that – bringing him down, I mean – is exactly where we part company. You want him dead; I just want him caught.’

‘I want the demon dead,’ Gwillam corrected me.

‘And you don’t care who else gets left in the dirt – or under it – along the way. I’ve seen you work, Gwillam. I chose Jenna-Jane Mulbridge as a partner over you – that ought to tell you a lot.’

‘Suppose I swore – on the book that I love – not to kill Ditko unless it’s absolutely unavoidable?’

‘You’re excommunicated. You’ve got nothing to lose now, have you?’

The train pulled into the next station, and Gwillam stood. The young woman turned her head to stare at him, but he moved his hand in an almost imperceptible horizontal gesture: No.

‘You can call me,’ he said. ‘A message left at the house in St Albans – where you tracked me down last time – will still reach me. Don’t let false pride lead you astray, Castor. You’re right that my word on this thing, even my sworn word, is worth nothing. I’ll break any promise and betray any trust, to cauterise this evil. But if your methods were a little more like mine, fewer people would have died. Consider. And when you reach the end of your own pathetic Calvary, let me know. My offer will still be open.’

He stepped down, followed by his two asymmetrical minders. Four stops to go before Paddington. I used the intervening time to get my head together and to try to shake off the lingering atmosphere of that fucking dream.

The estimable Mr Dicks was on duty at the front desk again, and his flatulent grunt as he pressed the gate release said louder than words that seeing me had made his day. I walked on by, whistling a slightly out-of-tune ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’.

The place was dark and all but deserted. Another guard was checking windows in a desultory way, but I didn’t see anybody else around until I got up onto the second floor and noticed the faint glow coming from between the slatted blinds of Jenna-Jane’s office. I went by on tippy-toe, very keen not to alert her to my presence.

The map room was in darkness, but when I turned on the light I found that Trudie was there all the same. She’d been sitting in the dark, up to her knees in shredded paper. That at least explained where the map had gone, although not why.

She looked up and gave me a hollow-eyed stare. She looked as though she’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now. Her fists were clenched, but the cat’s cradles normally wound round her knuckles trailed across the floor now like Pierrot’s sleeves, giving her a tragic air.

‘You okay?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really.’ Her tone was hard, but brittle too – a catch at the back of it warning me to tread carefully.

‘I was going to ask you how it went,’ I said, indicating the torn fragments of map, ‘but I guess I’ve got my answer.’

‘He’s not back yet. Not in London, anyway. No new lines. Nothing to go on. Waste of time.’

I waited. If she wanted to tell me what had happened, she’d tell me. If she didn’t, asking about it might bring on a crisis we probably didn’t have time for. For something to do, I started to clear up some of the mess. Where the black lines had been too thickly overlaid on each other, becoming a single indecipherable mass, Trudie had at some point resorted to a silver Sharpie marker. The silver lines, their lustre deadened by the thick black tracery underneath, looked like day-old snail slime.

‘I took your advice,’ Trudie said in that same dangerous tone.

Down on one knee, my fists full of scraps like the guy who lays the trail on a paperchase, I looked up at her. Her red-rimmed eyes blinked once, twice, three times.

‘What advice was that?’

‘You said I should look in the basement here. If I wanted to know who I was working for.’

Okay. That explained a lot.

‘Those cell blocks are a logical extrapolation from a certain position,’ I said carefully. ‘I just wanted you to think about the implications of—’

‘I know what you wanted, Castor,’ Trudie growled. ‘I told you I’ve been down there. Tonight. About an hour ago. I’d have to be pretty fucking dense not to get it, wouldn’t I?’

A pause.

‘Look. Look at this,’ Trudie said. She held out her hand, which was shaking visibly. ‘An hour. It just won’t stop.’ She took a deep breath and stood. Her hand fell to her side again, the fingers flexing and clenching. ‘Principled resignations,’ she said, shaking her head sombrely. ‘They look really bad on your CV, don’t they? Nobody likes a quitter. Especially a holier-than-thou quitter.’

I took a step towards her, but the hand came up again like a shot, warding me off. She didn’t want any consolation that I could offer, even though it looked as though the tears were starting again.

‘You’re still wrong,’ she said, ‘and Mulbridge is still right. That’s the horror of it, Castor – that we have to turn ourselves into what she is if we want to survive. Hell is coming to Earth, one piece at a time. Not the sky falling, but the ground opening up under our feet. There’s nowhere that’s safe to stand any more. If I walk out on this, it will just be because I’m a coward, like you.’

I didn’t argue. It wasn’t just her hands that were shaking, it was her whole body. She looked down at the trailing strings that dangled from her wrists, made a half-hearted gesture towards rewinding them, but then gave it up after the first two or three turns.

‘Will you?’ I asked her. ‘Walk out?’

Trudie shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Not yet. Not until we’ve found Asmodeus and got him locked away again. After that . . . I’ll see how I feel.’

‘Then can I ask for your help with one other thing?’ I asked, keeping my tone studiously neutral.

‘What’s that?’

‘The Super-Self entity. Gil is scheduled to start his demolition run at midnight. I want to get in there first and see if I can take it down myself.’

Trudie stared at me, mystification rousing her for the first time from her own tortured thoughts. ‘Take it down?’ she repeated. ‘Last time it chewed us up and spat us out. Why should tonight be any different?’

‘Because tonight I’ve got a secret weapon,’ I said. ‘Inspired by you, actually. I liked what you did with the map – the way you pushed yourself out past your comfort zone and did the necessary. I think maybe I can do the same thing here. But I want an anchor in case things go Pete Tong on me. The two of us working together damped that thing down just enough so that we could walk out of Super-Self on our own four feet. That’s what I want you to do tonight: be my back-up, and give me some room to manoeuvre if it drops on me before I make my play.’

Trudie hesitated for a second, then shrugged. ‘Okay. Why not?’

‘Thanks. Is there anything else you need to do here?’

She surveyed the devastation she’d wrought and shook her head again. ‘No. I think I’m done.’

We were both pretty near stony, as it turned out – I should have kept one of those fifties back for emergencies – so my first idea of grabbing a cab down to the Strand foundered on an absence of hard cash. We used our travel-cards from earlier in the day instead, taking the Circle back round to King’s Cross and then changing to the Piccadilly Line. But Holborn was closed because of a suspect package, so we were booted off at Russell Square and had to walk the rest of the way.

That didn’t feel like much of a hardship. The day had been another scorcher, and even this late in the evening, with the rush-hour crowds long gone, the train had smelled like one titanic armpit. It was a relief to walk in the cooling air, and to feel the city poised on that luminous knife-edge where day becomes night. There was still light in the sky, but the buildings were black masses on either side of us, the occasional still-open shop looking like a cave in a cliff face.

Another dark mass rose ahead of us, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. When I did, I stopped dead and stared at it in blank-faced wonder.

Trudie looked at me curiously, then followed my gaze. The same penny dropped a moment later.

‘Mary, mother of us!’ she whispered.

London hasn’t had a tram system since before the Second World War, but some of the infrastructure is still kicking around. You can see stretches of track in a hundred places where old street surfaces haven’t been asphalted over, or have been restored, and in my west London stamping ground the Acton tram depot, which looks like a Victorian siding shed with white-brick walls and a massive fan-vaulted ceiling, was still used for buses right up until last year.

What we were looking at was the north end of the Kingsway underpass – an underground tramway closed down in the 1940s. Later on, the council converted part of it into a tunnel for cars and buses coming from Aldwych by the simple expedient of building a new steel-and-cement corridor within the tiled and brick-built passage that already existed. The rest had been closed off and left to rot.

‘How did we miss it?’ Trudie demanded, amazed.

I was asking myself the same question. The answer – beyond ‘We’re thick as bricks and we can’t find our own arses without a map’ – was that the tunnel had no opening between Holborn and the river. This end was on Southampton Row, a couple of hundred yards up from Holborn station, and the other end was somewhere on the Embankment west of Waterloo Bridge. Both ends were closed off now, and apart from this short stretch of black stone parapet wall there was nothing to show on the surface that the tunnel was there.

We looked at each other, probably thinking in tandem. If this was where Asmodeus was hiding, then going inside with the light failing and no torch was probably insane. On the other hand, with the demon still out of town, this might be the best chance we were ever going to get.

‘Do you feel anything?’ I asked Trudie.

She raised her hands in front of her face, fingers flicking back and forth, weaving complex traceries out of her looped strings. ‘Nothing,’ she said tersely. ‘How about you?’

‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘You think we should call J-J?’

‘I think we should go in,’ Trudie said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘We don’t know when Asmodeus will be back. If we wait for the MOU people to get here, he might arrive first and get a whiff of us somehow. The best thing would be to find out exactly where he’s been hiding, then back off. When he goes in, we seal the exits and pump OPG or Tabun in – incapacitate him at a distance.’

It sounded good to me. I looked at my watch. Almost eleven. If the timing worked out, we could even kill two birds with one stone. When we called Gil in to lay an ambush for Asmodeus, he’d have to call off the Super-Self raid. Then I could come back tomorrow and try out my secret weapon in daylight, with the wind at my back.

‘Let’s do it,’ I said.