The Naming of the Beasts

20

Imelda Probert had lived – and died – in an otherwise abandoned low-rise block in a grubby little cul-de-sac in Peckham, south London. Long ago scheduled for demolition, the building hung on like most of Imelda’s clientele in a sort of limbo state between life and death. The front door was nailed up with plywood boards, across which someone had sprayed the word WU-TANG CLAN inside a stylised W logo that looked like spread wings of a bird. More inexplicably, someone had painted the entire frontage of the block matt black, although red brick showed like raw flesh in places where the paint had cracked and fallen away. From the outside the building looked not just dead but already decayed.

Imelda hadn’t minded that at all: it just guaranteed her the quiet and privacy she needed to work. Her third-floor flat had been like the spark of life in a zombie’s cooling brain. That was until I brought Asmodeus here for the first time, and shifted the balance in favour of death. Everything that had happened since stemmed from that one stupendously bad decision.

Now here I was again to put things right – with Wayne Coyne singing ‘Too Heavy for Superman’ in a dirgy adagio inside my head.

We drove up and parked right in front of the house, the four of us, like the horsemen of some B-movie apocalypse, except we were riding in a high-sided Fiat Ducato which Nicky had appropriated from God knew where. It had been modified for use in the first London mayoral election, and for some inexplicable reason had never been touched since. Its customised sides were emblazoned with Frank Dobson’s gormless, what-me-worry face along with the worst election slogan in the history of the civilised world: FRANK AND TO THE POINT. In the middle of Peckham’s genteel Georgian slum district, the van was about as inconspicuous as President Ahmed Ahmedinajad at a Village People concert.

Gil slid over and let Trudie take his place in the driver’s seat. She shot me a glance, troubled and unhappy.

‘I’d rather be in there with you,’ she said.

I touched the thick mass of bandage on her upper arm, like an American football player’s shoulder pad. ‘You can’t fight,’ I pointed out gently, ‘and you can’t perform an exorcism. But you can do this. It makes sense.’

‘I know it makes sense.’ Her voice was tight. ‘But I’ve been in on this hunt from the very start. And I’ve got the feeling tonight might be it for me. The last time I ever do this. It’s hard when it’s your last time and all you’re good for is back-up.’

‘You’re not back-up,’ Gil said. ‘You and Heath, you’re our long-range artillery.’

Trudie grinned at that, a little sourly. ‘And I suppose the three of you are the cavalry?’ she said. ‘Great metaphor, Gil. You can take turns being General Custer.’

I jumped out of the van and went round to the back, where I opened the doors. Juliet was slumped among the boxes there – probably full of old campaign fliers and I’M BACKING FRANK badges – but she climbed to her feet and stepped down, the wobble in her stride barely noticeable. She was wearing a black tracksuit that Trudie had picked up from the Oxfam shop on Hoe Street; a pair of black boots with tall heels, likewise. For once, I felt no compulsion to imagine what she was wearing underneath. No electricity came from her. Even her scent had gone. She smelled of nothing but new leather.

‘You’ll need to hang back,’ I told her, for the tenth or maybe the twentieth time. ‘If you go in too fast, he’ll figure it out. And if he figures it out, we’re all dead. The only reason he won’t just kill us all outright is because he still needs you to do him that one last favour.’

‘I’ll eat his face right off his skull,’ Juliet growled.

‘A sentiment we can all get behind,’ I agreed. ‘But for the love of God, Juliet, hang back. Don’t take the lead.’

‘For the love of who, Castor?’

Another good point. I let it stand.

We synchronised watches, mostly for Trudie’s benefit: ten to midnight.

‘Luck, Castor,’ she said.

‘Yeah, and you. We’ll have a pint afterwards, yeah? I think it’s my round next.’

‘Do you even have any money?’

‘No. But I like to keep track of my debts.’

I led the way, the point of a triangular battle formation that had Juliet and Gil McClennan as its other two vertices. My skin prickled as an invisible wave of pressure swept across it, the feeling an exorcist gets when the dead or the undead are watching him.

Asmodeus knew we were coming. He’d known we were coming even before we did.

Ignoring the front door, we circled around the left-hand flank of the building. A little way along, the black brickwork gave way to a spavined wooden fence with a door set into it. The door had a Yale lock, but it had never been locked as long as I’d known it. It wasn’t even bolted: the warped wood was all that kept it from swinging open by itself. It yielded to my push and we stepped through into a backyard so thick with brambles and thistles that it looked like the set of Day of the Triffids.

The side door was open too, and the hall inside was completely dark. I tiptoed to the foot of the stairs and listened for a moment or two in silence, throwing out my arm to hold Juliet back in case she tried to step past me. Nothing seemed to be moving in the gulf of air above us.

Slowly, I began to climb the stairs, with Juliet right at my back. They creaked and shifted under us, appallingly loud in the echoing emptiness. Ridiculously, even though I knew there was no point in stealth, I couldn’t keep myself from moving softly, trying to minimise the noise.

I also couldn’t stop watching the shadows, but that was a whole lot more rational. The room that Imelda and I had kitted out for Rafi was up on the second floor, but there was no reason at all why Asmodeus would feel obliged to play by the rules. He could be anywhere in the building.

But he was in the building, at least I knew that. The sense of him was everywhere, so pervasive that I could only pick up the barest hint of a direction. Above us somewhere, and watching, even now, because there was that prickling, itchy pressure again, across my shoulder blades.

We got to the first landing, turned onto the second flight of stairs. Juliet was crowding me from behind, filled with a desperate urgency that wouldn’t let her slow down even though she knew how this was meant to work. No good. No good at all. If we kept on climbing, we’d run into the demon in the dark, on his terms, and everything would accelerate out of control.

‘Are we really taking this to the wire?’ I asked aloud, in a conversational tone. ‘It’s late, and I’m tired, and we all know what you want, you grandstanding prick. Send the women down, and Juliet comes up.’

‘No,’ said the demon’s voice, echoing down the stairwell. He sounded relaxed and amused. ‘This isn’t a hostage situation, Castor. I said I’d keep them alive until you got here, that’s all.’

‘So where are they?’ I demanded. Impossible to get a fix on him in the pitch dark. He sounded close, but the stairwell was four storeys high. Close could mean ten feet, twenty, even thirty. There’s nothing worse than a valiant charge that turns into a long-distance slog.

‘They’re here,’ Asmodeus assured me. ‘They’re not in very good condition, but they’re here. Still breathing. More or less. If I were a man, I’d be a man of my word.’

‘You fucking . . .’ The words caught in my throat. ‘If you’ve done anything to them . . .’

‘I did a few things, at first. Then I discovered it was more interesting to make them do things to each other. It’s like they say, Castor. Fear eats the soul. Get someone scared enough, and civilisation flies right out the window.’ He chuckled softly, the sound falling like aeons-old dust through the dark. ‘You’ll have to watch your step when you come up here. It’s a little slippery underfoot.’

Juliet gave a wordless cry. I knew what was coming and I lunged to stop her, but her headlong rush knocked me sprawling against the banister, which cracked and gave ominously under my weight.

Too soon. Way too soon. I threw out my arm and caught her ankle just before she got out of reach, tripping her so that she fell full-length on the stairs.

‘Don’t!’ I shouted desperately. ‘Juliet, don’t!’

She kicked me on the point of the jaw. At any other time that would probably have killed me, but she wasn’t herself right then. Blood filled my mouth as my teeth were driven into my tongue, but I somehow managed to catch hold of her leg again, dragging her back down the stairs and clambering up in her place.

‘We don’t even know what you’ve got,’ I yelled up into the dark. ‘This is all bullshit until we see them.’

A hollow click sounded from above, and the stairwell was flooded with stark, shadowless light from a 150-watt bulb hanging directly over our heads. Asmodeus, up on the second-floor balcony, took his hand off the switch and let it fall back onto the banister rail. He was obviously alone.

‘I rest my fucking case,’ I said, sounding far less tough and uncompromising than I would have liked.

The demon just smiled. ‘Do you need to see them?’ he asked, speaking past me towards Juliet, who was only then struggling to her feet.

‘No,’ she whispered. I don’t know how Asmodeus heard her. Standing right next to her, I could barely make out the word.

‘No,’ the demon agreed, almost gently. ‘Because you can smell her. You can smell her flesh, her blood and her breath, even from way down there. You know she’s still alive, but you don’t know how long that might last. And the only way you’re going to get to her, and find out how bad it is, is to go through me. You, fuck-doll. Just you. Anybody else who comes up here goes down again in pieces.’ He shrugged theatrically. ‘So what are you waiting for?’

Juliet pushed me aside. I raised an arm to halt her again, because I knew we still had time to kill before zero hour, but her hand moved in a flicker of speed, and she caught my wrist in a grip so tight I cried aloud. Evidently her strength was coming back. So was the crackling erotic aura that normally surrounded her. Her touch made the breath catch in my throat.

‘Mine now,’ she growled.

And she threw me aside so that I tumbled and rolled back down the stairs, coming to a jarring halt on the warped boards of the first-floor landing. The wood was so dry and worm-eaten that I almost went through them.

I rolled onto my side so that at least I was facing the right way to see what was happening above me, but there was no way I could stop it now. Juliet was taking the steps two at a time, her long-legged stride indicative in itself of the renewed energy and potency that was pouring into her – at the worst possible time.

I clambered up, a jolt of agony shooting through my right knee. Maybe I shouted out her name again, but I really don’t remember. She was face to face with Asmodeus now, and he was spreading his arms to receive her. The smile of welcome that broke across his face was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen.

‘What part of this are you not getting?’ Nicky demanded, exasperated.

‘All of it,’ Gil admitted. ‘You’re saying he actually wants the succubus to devour him?’

‘No, he wants her to devour Rafi,’ I said. ‘Think about it, Gil. Think about everything he’s done since he got free. First of all, he contacts the satanists—’

‘Castor!’ Trudie warned, but I had no intention of giving away professional secrets, and anyway it was all on the point of not mattering very much. I ignored her and went on. ‘They were meant to do an encore of their number from last time – carry out a sacrifice on a child who’d been born and raised and prayed over in all the right ways, and set him free. But they blew it. They couldn’t deliver.

‘That’s when he starts in on the murders. I think they’re a crude improvisation – trying to shake Rafi loose by making him despair. Certainly they weaken him. They keep him on the defensive. Maybe they loosen his hold on the body they both share.

‘But it’s plan C that Asmodeus is putting his money on. If Juliet can be made to devour Rafi – body and soul together – what will be left?’

Gil shrugged. ‘A greasy stain?’

‘The demon,’ Trudie said. ‘Just him, in some bodiless form. It has to be that. He wouldn’t respond to Juliet’s spell – he’d feel no lust for her, because it’s human lust she’s adapted herself to arouse. So he’d be indigestible. When she was finished, he’d still be there. It would just be Ditko who’d be gone.’

‘That’s insane,’ Gil objected.

‘I think it’s fucking genius,’ Nicky said. ‘As prison breaks go, it makes digging a tunnel under Rita Hayworth look like nothing at all.’

Juliet put one soft, caressing hand behind Asmodeus’ head, drawing his face in close to hers. Their lips met.

Presumably, on a psychic level, some vast ethereal centrifuge began to turn, slowly at first but with gathering speed and irresistible momentum. Being a man, Rafi was drawn to Juliet. There was nothing he could do to stop it. I’d been there and I knew how it felt: the desire that was so like despair that you poured your heart and soul and lungs and liver and lights into its welcoming emptiness, wanting nothing but to penetrate, to be accepted, to be swallowed up.

Asmodeus, being a demon, would stand out of that vortex, immune to its pull. He would watch Rafi succumb, experiencing the immense satisfaction of a long and complicated chain of events drawing to its inevitable conclusion. He had turned his enemies into the moving parts of a machine which would deliver him from his bondage; there couldn’t be many pleasures more visceral than that.

I heard a whimper come from Rafi’s lips, and I knew who it belonged to. On a different level entirely, I heard the whispering echo of the demon’s laugh.

And then, louder than either, I heard the liquescent, insinuating crunch as Juliet drove her makeshift blade home into Asmodeus’ chest.

His eyes widened and he drew in a shuddering, unsteady breath. He winced, almost in slow motion. It was as though he fought against the recognition of that pain, with all that it implied.

He took a single step back, staring down at his chest. The irregular triangle of glass, like a flattened icicle, protruded from the left side of his body, high up, more or less where you’d expect his heart to be. Blood welled up around it and poured down, saturating his shirt in an instant and spilling out across the fabric with the suddenness of the paint-bucket effect in Photoshop.

If it had been a knife, Asmodeus would have torn it out of his own flesh and cut Juliet’s throat with it. But it wasn’t a knife.

‘I thought silver was what you were supposed to use against demons and the undead,’ Gil said, with the tone of someone letting us down gently.

‘That’s the rule of silver,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘This is the rule of names.’

‘I’m . . . not seeing a name,’ Nicky interjected into the profound silence. ‘Should I be?’

‘It’s Rafi’s communion photo, Nicky.’ I held up the biggest piece to show him: an isosceles triangle, three inches wide at the blunt end and eight inches long, with half of Rafi’s twelve-year-old face visible close to the tip. ‘Printed onto the glass instead of onto paper. It’s a real big thing in Macedonia. Trust me.’

Nicky raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure. So the question is . . . ?’

I spelled it out. ‘Exactly how does this work? Do names have power because of their mystical correspondence with the thing they name? And if they do, would that correspondence be stronger or weaker for an actual image of the thing?’

‘What Martin Moulson did,’ Trudie mused, ‘was to inject himself – by means of his name – as an antibody into his own system, to drive the demon out of him. We want to drive Asmodeus out—’

‘With a Polaroid. Yeah. Pretty much.’

Asmodeus screamed.

It was a sound born out of anger as much as pain. He had it all worked out, and we weren’t playing by the rules.

But if having Rafi’s smiling face rammed into his left ventricle was an unpleasant surprise, it wasn’t the coup de grace I was hoping for. His arm came around like a scythe, smashing Juliet to her knees. Then he caught her as she fell with a swivel kick that lifted her into the air.

The wood of the banister exploded into jagged splinters, and Juliet pitched headlong into the stairwell. She fell past me, and there was a liquescent thud as she hit the tiles below.

And then there was one. But this was all about misdirection, and I hadn’t been a kids’ party magician for nothing. If you can make a roomful of six-year-olds watch your left hand while you slip the rabbit into the hat with your right, then a ten-thousand-year-old demon is nothing much. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I advanced up the last flight of stairs, drawing my whistle and setting it to my lips like a sniper finding the spot weld.

Asmodeus snarled and stepped up to meet me – then stiffened, eyes wide, as Gil hit him from behind with the taser.

‘I’m going to be fuck-all use in all this,’ Gil commented sourly.

‘The one thing we’re not throwing against the sonofabitch is an actual exorcism.’

‘Can you climb a drainpipe?’ I asked him, producing Jenna-Jane’s M18 with a certain sense of occasion.

Fifty thousand volts isn’t a lot, when you come to think about it. That’s manufacturer’s spec, too, so you’re probably talking forty-eight thousand and some small change, if anyone bothered to check. A bolt of lightning can get you up into the millions, no trouble.

But Asmodeus was hurting already – in his dignity, as much as anywhere. He was pumping arterial blood, he had a razor-edged smiley face in his heart that was making him feel anything but happy, and his meticulously laid plans were turning into a Whitehall farce. So I’m willing to bet the effect in this case was out of all proportion to what it said on the label.

Again, it might have ended there. He could have folded up into nothing, and left Rafi in charge of a body that was leaking precious fluids faster than they could be replaced.

He didn’t. He grabbed hold of the taser’s conductive wire and hauled hard. Instinctively, Gil tightened his grip on the taser, so he was yanked forward, off balance. Asmodeus’ fist met him halfway, catching Gil at the junction of neck and shoulder, so that he fell to the ground as heavily as a bag of hammers. It had all happened so fast that the echoing boom reached me a second afterwards.

But as the echoes of that unlovely sound died, we both heard something new and worse coming in from the street, sickening the air. It was like the skirling call of an infernal ice cream van, playing at a hundred and some decibels, summoning ghosts and ghouls and damned souls to stop me and buy one.

‘We’ll need a way of playing this,’ I said, turning Nathan’s disc in my fingers with the gingerly care of the technologically challenged. ‘I mean . . . aloud.’

‘I think I can cut you a deal there,’ Nicky ruminated. ‘You remember the first mayoral elections? When Red Ken beat friendly Frank by a country mile? I know a guy who bought up some of the leftovers. Including one of those fucking trucks with all the loudspeakers that drives by at six in the morning and tells you that the candidate won’t come inside you . . .’

‘What do you know?’ I said, as I finally reached the upper landing. ‘They’re playing our tune.’

I drove my fist full into Asmodeus’ face. The satisfaction I took from that was tempered by the fact that the face actually belonged to Rafi, but it still felt pretty good, all things considered.

His head snapped back, but he didn’t lose his footing even for a second, and his riposte was swift and terrible. His arm swept round in an elliptical arc, the air cracked like a whip, and the world exploded.

There are two or three seconds here that I can’t account for. The next thing I was aware of was a pressure against my back, and a sensation around my mouth and chin as though someone was drinking from me through a straw of enormously wide bore.

Not knowing if I was standing on my feet or sprawling on my arse, I twitched my limbs in random combinations in the hope of getting good reports. But my eyes were definitely at floor level, and canted at ninety degrees.

The demon flickered in my blurred vision, getting closer and then receding. I steeled myself for the blow that would end everything, shut me down for good, but it didn’t come. I blinked furiously to clear my sight, and saw something I didn’t understand.

Asmodeus was dancing. Or at least that was what it looked like. The light from a street lamp, shining in through a window just off to our left, picked him out like a spotlight.

It was finally zero hour, and everything was kicking in. The bastard was writhing on an invisible cross as big as the world. But would that be big enough?

‘It’s not enough to hurt him,’ I said, with absolute certainty.

‘Not nearly enough. Moulson drove in fifteen hundred nails. He punctuated his body at microscopic intervals . . .’

‘You want something to pull him in a lot of different directions, ’ Gil said.

‘Yes.’

‘With your glass dagger pinned in his chest. So he’s stretched out taut and he can’t get away from the pain.’

‘Fuck! Yes! If you’ve got something, McClennan, spit it out.’

Gil gave us a guileless look. ‘Vote early,’ he said, ‘and vote often. Heath, how many friends have you got on all your conspiracy-of-the-month websites?’

‘A million,’ Nicky said. ‘Give or take. Why?’

‘How many of them can do a summoning?’

Asmodeus staggered, fell, scrambled to his feet. He baulked, and blood spurted between his clenched teeth in a pressurised stream.

His searchlight gaze found me across the width of the landing. His eyes narrowed.

‘Very clever,’ he bubbled. ‘Castor, I love you. I never expected for a moment that you’d make a fight of this.’

He slumped against the wall, his eyelids flickering like those of an epileptic in the grip of a grand mal seizure. He was on the ropes. The very mechanism he’d chosen for his escape – using Juliet’s guaranteed fatal attraction to separate out the human from the the demonic parts of the amalgam he’d become – gave us our window of opportunity. If there was ever a time when Asmodeus’ grip on Rafi’s soul could be prized free, it was now. The demon had done the groundwork for me. All I had to do was to bring it home.

As though God loved me, I found my whistle ready to hand. It had fallen only a few feet away, and it hadn’t broken. I took it in my hands and raised it, my fingers finding the stops by automatic reflex. I pursed my lips.

Where were my lips?

I couldn’t even feel the mouthpiece where it pressed against my mouth. I tried to blow a note, and red froth sprayed the metal. The tingling, sucking absence in the lower part of my face made sudden, sickening sense, and I moaned aloud.

Reeling like a drunk, Asmodeus wheeled about.

‘But everything’s relative,’ he growled. ‘Isn’t it? You feel like playing me another of your lazy little ’tudes? No?’ He kicked something across the floor at me – something red and wet that looked as though it belonged in the little plastic bag you find up a chicken’s arse and throw away before you cook it. Part of my jawbone; I could tell by the fact that it still had three teeth embedded in it.

‘Then let’s shut that fucking PA up,’ Asmodeus slurred. He crouched low on his haunches and leaped into the stairwell.

There’s a moment in the execution of any plan when you realise that you’re just not as good as you think you are, that you’ve done everything you could and it isn’t enough. You got the angle right, and you gunned the engine like a maniac, but your bike isn’t going to make it to the other side of the canyon.

That moment fell on my shoulders now. I struggled to my feet, trying it on for size. It felt like it belonged, like I’d been wearing it, more or less, ever since the night when I sat down in Rafi’s cramped bathroom and performed the one, crappy piece of improv that was destined to encapsulate my life.

I flexed my legs to see if they were going to give. Then I charged the window and kicked it out of its rotten frame in one piece. It fell and shattered on the pavement below me with a crash that could be heard even above the screaming discords of the demon lullaby. Climbing up onto the ragged ledge of splintered plasterboard where the window had been, I launched myself after it into the street.

Two storeys isn’t even twenty feet, but it’s enough to snap your legs like a couple of twigs unless you’re either a professional stuntman or very lucky. I’m not either of those things, but I was aiming for the Ducato, which stands eight feet high on its wheelbase. My feet staved in the roof and part of the near-side panel, turning Frank Dobson’s slick smile into a leering grimace, and no doubt taking Trudie to the brink of a heart attack.

A second later the front door of the building was ripped off its hinges from the inside and tossed negligently away through the air.

Asmodeus stepped out into the night, shaking his head the way a dog shakes itself off after diving into ice-cold water. His gaze tracked from side to side, seeming to miss the van first time round even though it was right in front of him, but then catching it on the next pass.

He walked towards us, the glass dagger protruding obscenely from his chest. Fresh blood gouted from it with each step.

I banged on the roof of the van to get Trudie’s attention. ‘Give me the gun,’ I shouted, but what she would have heard was ‘WUFF-uffa-FUH!’ I didn’t really have a working vocal apparatus any more, and in a wistful, just-about-to-go-into-shock kind of way, I was starting to miss it.

Asmodeus was maybe three strides away from us when Juliet plunged through the doorway behind him and tackled him from behind. They went down together and rolled almost under the van’s wheels. Juliet’s hands were locked around Asmodeus’ throat, but he had his own hands – which looked much bigger than Rafi’s right then, the muscles in his forearms standing out like ropes – clamped to either side of her head. He forced her head further and further back, trying to snap her spine.

I dropped off the roof of the van, falling on all fours but scrambling to my feet again quickly. Trudie was fumbling with the shotgun, but she only had one hand and she couldn’t seem to find the safety. Nicky had only demonstrated it once, and things can slip your mind in the heat of the moment. Right then, the moment felt hot enough to scald.

She blanched when she saw me, and almost dropped the gun. ‘Oh shit!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Castor!’ I held out my hand, and she put the shotgun into it without a word. Probably just as well. The conversation was likely to be pretty one-sided in any case.

Asmodeus had rolled over on top of Juliet. He drove her face hard into the pavement and lurched to his feet. He turned to face me, his agonised features rippling like water.

‘Now . . .’ he snarled.

‘Fifteen hundred nails,’ I’d said. Actually, they were tiny metal discs, which sounds a lot less dramatic, but that doesn’t lessen what Moulson did. Inch by inch, he had waterproofed the house of his own flesh against the bad weather coming from Hell, and when it was all over the house was still standing. Fifteen hundred surgically precise incisions. Fifteen hundred grinding ordeals as he forced the metal deep enough for it to stay. He said it had taken most of a day.

A shotgun doesn’t score quite as high on accuracy, but it’s a fuck of a lot faster.

I fired the first barrel.

Glass. Glass ground up as fine as birdshot. It was such a light load that at twenty yards or so it probably wouldn’t even sting. But this was six feet.

Asmodeus’ jacket and shirt were flecked, ripped, stripped away by the multiple, stinging impacts. The demon flinched, drawing in a harsh, astonished breath, and then he bellowed in agony as our purpose-built payload started to work on him.

We’d selected three pieces of glass from Rafi’s photograph for Juliet to use as knives: we thought overkill was advisable under the circumstances. That still left a whole lot of fragments that were too small to have any viable use in hand-to-hand combat. A little bit of Rafi’s arm here, the other half of his face there. It seemed a shame to let them go to waste. Nicky carefully unpacked the shot he normally kept in the gun, looking thoughtfully at the little pile of glass shards. Then he went away from the table and came back with a hammer.

Asmodeus stared at his hands with a sort of numb fascination. Blood from a dozen lacerations welled out onto his palms, between his fingers, down over his wrists.

‘Fuck,’ he said distantly.

With terrible deliberation, he focused his will on his raised hand, trying to exert the same authority over that tortured flesh that he had enjoyed by right of conquest from the night when he moved in right up until now.

The flesh didn’t obey. Didn’t even answer. Asmodeus started towards me. Anger and consternation crossed his face, but what finally stood out there was fear.

‘When you die,’ he grated hoarsely. ‘When you die, Castor . . .’

That was as far as he got. He fell a few feet away from me, twitching. I followed him maybe a second later, unable to hold myself upright any more. I was staring directly into his eyes, so I saw when they filmed over, and then cleared again.

‘Fix . . .’ Rafi whispered.

The street was alive with noise suddenly, as black cars and vans and at least one eight-wheeled truck rolled into the small cul-de-sac and screeched to a precipitous halt that left the asphalt streaked with burned-rubber spoor. Doors slammed open, men and woman in black stealth gear jumped down and deployed themselves in blunt wedge formations, looking in all directions for an enemy who wasn’t there.

Thomas Gwillam stepped out of one of the cars and surveyed the carnage. His cold, appraising gaze started up high, at the broken window, and ended with the bodies on the pavement, lingering on Rafi before finally coming to rest on me.

‘I came as soon as you called,’ he said. ‘But of course you didn’t call until you could be sure I’d arrive late. I warned you against false pride, Castor. What good is back-up that arrives when the battle’s over?’

He had a point. Astutely, I lost consciousness before I could be made to admit that. Glad to be out of it, to tell you the truth. My jaw was starting to sting like a bastard.