The Naming of the Beasts

22

About a month after the dust settled on all this, I went back to the Whittington one last time. I slipped in quietly, late in the evening.

Nobody had ever come round to question me in connection with the mayhem at the MOU, or the physical and psychological dismantling of two security guards last seen in my company down in Surrey, but that just made me more uneasy. Sooner or later, somehow, the axe was going to fall.

It had been impossible even for Nicky to find out how things had turned out after I slammed the door on Jenna-Jane and her staff and walked away. The embargo on that information went both very high and very deep, which left me with the unnerving conviction that she must somehow have survived. If she’d died, then what was left of her operation would surely have been in more disarray.

I came dressed in overalls and carrying a plastic bucket. That was enough to stop anyone from challenging me as I slipped into the pediatric ward in the wake of a visiting family.

Once in Lisa Probert’s room, I locked the door and took out my whistle. Closing my eyes, I started to move my fingers on the stops, imagining the tune, low and fast; letting it play in my head, because it would take another three months for the bone graft to be stable enough to allow the steel pins to be removed from my jaw.

It was a tune I knew really well, easy enough to visualise in its entirety. I held one end of it in my mind, cast the other end like a hook out into the dark. It seemed like no time at all before a telltale prickle of pressure on the skin of my face and hands told me I was being watched.

The four little girls stood in a ragged horseshoe formation, staring at me impatiently. They never liked to have their city-wide games of hide-and-seek interrupted.

‘Abbie,’ I said, sounding like a bad ventriloquist because my mouth wouldn’t open wider than half an inch. ‘Good to see you. Good to see you all.’ I could never remember the names of Charles Stanger’s three victims, and I never wanted to go back to the records to refresh my memory. ‘I hate to bug you, but I was hoping you could do me a favour.’

I pointed to the still, barely breathing figure in the bed.

‘Find her,’ I said. ‘Find where her spirit is hiding. Bring her home, if you can, back to this body. And if you can’t . . . then maybe she can hang out with you, for a while, until she decides what she wants to do.’

‘All right, Mr Castor,’ Abbie whispered, her voice not stirring the air. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

I left as quietly as I’d arrived, and nobody even knew I’d been there.

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I felt when I dropped in on Juliet and Sue later that same night. The two of them were so wrapped up in each other, they scarcely knew the world existed.

Somehow the power dynamic in the relationship had shifted, and it was a strange thing to see. Juliet had come back to her full strength, but to look at them together you’d think that it was Sue who had the whip hand and the ineluctable magnetism. Juliet was as attentive to her, as solicitous for her, as quietly, ubiquitously there for her, as a Victorian butler. She kept touching Sue’s hand, or her cheek, or her shoulder, as though she had to reassure herself constantly that she was still there.

It was because she’d been back to Hell, or at least that was my best guess. Because Asmodeus’ wards had dragged her back against her will into her own past, and she’d seen with sudden, terrible clarity what it had been like: what she’d gained and what she’d lost, and what she might be again if she let herself slip. She held onto Sue because Sue was the embodiment and the anchor of her new life. Sue was the mnemonic that let her remember who she was.

I excused myself as soon as I found a decent opening, using some mumbled bullshit about Nicky inviting me over for a screening. He hadn’t, but I dropped in on him anyway. As it turned out, he was busy pricing up stock for his new enterprise down the market and had no time to spare for socialising, but he had one quick question for me before he shut the door in my face.

‘One of the original prints of A Matter of Life and Death,’ he said, hefting the heavy silver canister, like a thick discus, so I could see it. ‘Shit-awful condition. Breaks. Burns. Splices. Not really playable, but still . . . an original print. How much?’

‘A tenner?’

‘I was thinking a couple of thousand.’

‘Hoe Street Market? You want to attract the casual impulse buyer, Nicky, not the cruising millionaires.’

‘It’s a piece of fucking history.’

‘Cut it into three-inch pieces. Sell them for a tenner each.’

He tried the idea on for size and decided that – besides increasing his profit margin substantially – it made a lot of sense. ‘I guess people only want as much history as they can easily carry around, right?’

‘That’s always been my personal preference.’

‘Yours feeling any lighter?’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘A little. But I’m benching three and a half decades, Nicky. A month here, a year there . . . it makes less difference than you’d think.’

He nodded philosophically. ‘Sure, sure. Well, I’m up to my neck here, and tomorrow is the grand opening. Stop by if you’re in the neighbourhood.’

I headed back out into the night, the heavy steel doors echoing behind me.

I could have taken in a late-night movie, or caught the last couple of rounds at a bar where the music and the beer were more or less bearable. I could even have gone back home and slept. But Pen and Rafi were renovating both the house and their relationship right then. I never knew which room they were going to turn up in, so the less time I spent at home, the less chance I had of accidentally walking in on some of the wilder stretches of the Kama Sutra.

I caught the last Tube out of Walthamstow Central back into town, and walking on autopilot I found my steps taking me through Somers Town again. To my amazement, I bumped into a familiar group of zombies sitting around a familiar fire, although they had it banked a little higher now that the nights had started to turn.

There was a Londis open nearby, with a small but not too shabby selection of booze behind the counter. I bought a couple of bottles this time, one of whisky and one of rum, and a packet of plastic cups. Then I went and sat with the dead men for a while, fulfilling a promise I’d all but forgotten I’d made.

They were surprisingly good company, once you stopped registering the smell. They’d been through everything the world had to throw at them and earned their philosophical detachment the hard way. It made for a sort of fatalistic good humour: life’s a bitch, and then you die, and then . . .

The levels in the bottles sank inch by inch, the sky started to lighten around the horizon, and I was about to call it a night when a newcomer joined the circle around the fire, crowding me a little close. She brought her own warmth with her, noticeable in this company because most of the regular crowd were at the ambient temperature.

I turned round to see who it was.

‘Private party?’ Trudie Pax asked.

‘Limited to the living, the dead and the pending file,’ I told her.

‘Good enough. Any of that booze left?’

I poured her a generous measure of Scotch. ‘How did you track me down?’ I asked.

She held up her hands, both of which were wound around with many loops of multicoloured string. ‘A little stiff,’ she said, ‘but I’m right back in the game. You wouldn’t believe what I can do with these babies now.’

‘I’d love to find out.’

It was the kind of mildly off-colour remark I throw out by reflex, and I expected an equally perfunctory put-down. Instead, Trudie slipped her hand into mine.

When the dawn filled half the sky, the zombies headed off to pastures new – an ownerless shed round the back of Camden Lock where they could lie low until the unruly sun stopped poking at them. Hand in hand with Trudie, I walked through Euston Square and watched the morning get its kit on.

‘I heard that Imelda Probert’s daughter made a full recovery,’ Trudie said, her tone guardedly neutral.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I heard that, too.’

‘Any idea where she’ll go now?’

‘She got a job,’ I said. ‘At a market stall in Walthamstow. It’ll pay the rent.’ My tone was even more off-hand than Trudie’s, but that was because the subject was one that still hurt too much to dwell on for long. I’d given Lisa back her life: I didn’t believe for a moment that in doing that I’d settled the debt between us.

‘You ever wish you were part of this?’ Trudie asked, indicating with a toss of her head the scuttling commuters, the street cleaners, the shopkeepers taking down their shutters on the station concourse.

‘Of life, you mean?’ I asked, surprised by the question. ‘No. Not much. I’d rather be an ironic commentator. ’ But it was a flip answer, and from the tone of her voice she’d meant the question seriously. ‘I suppose when I think of it at all, I feel like Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel song. “We may be ugly, but at least we’ve got the music.” I wouldn’t want to give up what I’ve got for what they’ve got.’

‘No,’ Trudie agreed. ‘Me neither.’

We walked along together in silence for a while.

‘So how religious are you feeling today, Ms Pax?’ I asked at last.

‘Very. Very devout. How about you, Mr Castor?’

‘Atheistic. Blasphemous. Practically satanic.’

She leaned her head on my shoulder.

‘Let’s form an inter-faith study group,’ she suggested.