The Naming of the Beasts

4

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Pen shouted, for about the fourth or fifth time.

‘I was going to,’ I protested. ‘Seriously, Pen, I was going to. But . . . you were tired, and you were upset, and I just thought—’

‘Don’t spare my feelings, Fix!’ She stood before me, rigid with fury, her fists clenching as though she wanted to hit me. ‘Don’t ever hide things from me and think you’re sparing my feelings, because you don’t know what they bloody well are!’

It was four in the morning by the kitchen clock, and only ten or fifteen minutes after my brief encounter with Asmodeus, so we couldn’t expect the sun to come up for a couple of hours yet. The night seemed unfairly, impossibly prolonged. Its twisted events were taking on some of the flavour of those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you’re waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their mouldering fingerprints all across your day.

‘Fair enough,’ I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. They felt like they’d been boiled and peeled in their sockets. I leaned against the wall for some much-needed support, but I didn’t feel as though I could sit down right then, with every nerve in my body still trying to opt for either fight or flight and arguing the toss with its neighbours. ‘You’re right. I know you’re right. I’m sorry.’

The soft answer is meant to get you out of corners like this, and it generally works pretty well for me because I use it sparingly. Now, though, Pen seemed to take my throwing in the towel as an insult on a par with the original offence. She needed to fight someone, and I wasn’t helping. ‘You . . . ratbag!’ she exploded, and punched me hard on the shoulder. My shoulder had seen a fair amount of rough handling when I danced with the devil down in Brixton, and Pen packs more beef than you’d think, given her petite frame, but I gritted my teeth and took it like a man.

She stomped away to the sink and threw stuff around for a while. I thought she might have been making coffee, or maybe running up a tasty and nourishing meal out of Ryvita crumbs and bloody-mindedness, but there were no visible results: just pots and pans and dishes and items of cutlery being moved from A to B, and in some cases from B back to A again.

After a few minutes they weren’t moving so fast or so frequently, then they stopped altogether, but Pen still kept her back to me and didn’t speak for a while.

‘How did he look?’ she asked at last, her voice barely audible.

‘He was . . . mostly Asmodeus,’ I answered, choosing my words very carefully. ‘I mean, Rafi was in there, but Asmodeus was driving. And, you know . . . the first time he was attacking me. The second time I only saw him for a moment. We didn’t get the chance to talk much.’

It’s hard to fob someone off when they know you as well as Pen knows me. She turned to stare at me grimly, hands clasping the sink’s stainless steel rim, like a boxer in his corner waiting for the bell to ring for the next round.

‘He looked unhappy,’ I temporised.

‘Go on.’

‘He looked as though he was awake and aware but completely under Asmodeus’ thumb.’

Pen flinched visibly. It was a worst-case scenario: for Rafi, it meant not just seeing but experiencing everything that the demon did. But there was worse, and I had to say it now, because if I let it roll until the morning she’d be even less likely to accept it.

‘Pen,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to get out of here.’

Her eyes widened and she gasped out loud. ‘What?’

‘Just for a while.’ I raised my hand placatingly, thought about putting it on her shoulder and then thought again. ‘Just for a few days, until this is all over. Until we’ve managed to get him back.’ Those last three words sounded exactly like the shameless fudge they were, eliding the whole process of subduing the demon, capturing him without harming Rafi, and getting him back into some place where he could actually be contained. I had no ideas, currently, as to how any of that was going to be done, but it didn’t change the situation, and I ploughed on doggedly, trying to make her understand.

‘He’s trying to kill us,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why, when he’s walked the thin red line for so long, but he’s out for blood, and we’re all in danger until he’s locked up again.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Pen snapped back angrily. ‘He came after you. Twice. That doesn’t mean he wants to hurt me.’

I took a deep breath, wincing because my ribs were bruised too and it bloody well hurt. ‘The woman he killed in south London,’ I said. ‘Her name was Ginny Parris. She was involved with Rafi around about the time he was getting into all the black magic stuff. She helped him with it, because she was part of that scene. But they were lovers too, Pen. And for one of those reasons or the other, or maybe both, he went to her flat tonight, had a little chat about old times, and then murdered her with the leg of a table.’

Pen looked me squarely in the eyes, unimpressed. ‘Then the connection’s obvious, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘This woman helped Rafi to perform his summoning. You tried to exorcise Asmodeus afterwards. It’s the people who were there on that night – that’s who he’s going after.’

‘No,’ I said flatly, ‘it’s not.’ This was the hardest part to explain, but I tried anyway. ‘Asmodeus was talking all the while we were fighting. Taunting. Making jokes.’

‘He does that, Fix.’

‘I know. But he said one thing that stuck in my mind because I didn’t get it at first. He said, “Count backwards, down to zero.” It felt weird. Sort of abstract, when you put it next to the “I’m going to feed you your own intestines” stuff. I thought . . . maybe he was thinking of a surgical operation, where the anaesthetist tells you to count down from ten, and you fall asleep when you get to seven. That kind of black humour would be in Asmodeus’ style.’

Pen carried on staring at me, not speaking. She knew there was more.

‘But just now, after he came here – after I saw him jumping off your roof – I realised something else. Something I probably should have clicked on earlier. When we fought, Asmodeus wasn’t talking to me. Rafi was – he told me to run. But when Asmodeus referred to me, he used the third person every time. “He’s funny. He makes me laugh.” He never spoke to me once; he was just talking to Rafi the whole time. So he was telling Rafi to count backwards, not me. To count down to zero. And I’m nearly certain he meant it as a threat, or a promise.’

I did put my hand on her shoulder now, leaning forward until our faces were almost touching. I had to make her understand this. ‘He meant, “You’re going to lose your friends, one by one. I’m going to take out everyone who ever meant anything to you, until there’s no one left.” Pen, who’s to say he even started with Ginny? He could have been busy on this ever since he broke free from Imelda’s. He’s had time to work his way through Rafi’s entire address book by now. I don’t want to think about what we’re going to find when we start looking into this properly. And I don’t want you to be next.’

Pen swatted my hand away and put the tips of her fingers lightly, momentarily, to my chest: not pushing, but warning me to keep my distance. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here.’

‘I’m telling you, he didn’t just come for me. He was hanging around here before, that’s obvious. He was probably the one who trampled your tulips. If he decides to—’

Pen cut across my words. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, Fix. I just said I’m staying.’ Well, I’d known before I weighed in that this was going to be tough. I opened my mouth to hit her with a fresh wave of eloquence, but she hadn’t finished. ‘If Asmodeus was after me, then why was he up on the roof when I live in the bloody basement? You know the answer as well as I do. It’s because I’ve put wards on every window and door and wall of this place. They’re strongest at ground level, because that’s where I cast them, but they work all the way up to the chimney stacks – otherwise you’d have woken up to find Asmodeus sitting in your lap. Today I’ll do the upstairs rooms and the eaves. And I’ll work outwards from the house through the drive and the garden, planting stay-nots every four or five feet. He won’t be able to get within a hundred yards of us.’

‘Pen, you can’t live like a hermit,’ I pointed out. ‘You’ve got to come out some time.’

‘You said it would just take a couple of days. I can stay at home for a couple of days. I work over the phone mostly anyway, so it’s no hardship.’

‘A couple of days was a guess,’ I protested. ‘It could be weeks, or months. We just don’t know.’

‘I’m staying,’ Pen repeated. ‘Don’t try to argue me out of it, Fix. If Rafi needs me, I want him to know where to find me. And if Asmodeus comes round, I’m not scared of him.’

Not scared? I was fucking terrified, and I didn’t care who knew it. I’d seen what the bastard could do.

When the sun came up I climbed up onto the roof using an extending ladder that I’d half-inched from a building site down the street. I was pretty sure I could get it back before anyone clocked on for the day.

Sitting precariously on the ridge, I inspected the damage. It made interesting reading. The demon had raked the slates with his fingernails, snapping several and scoring deep gouges in others, but he hadn’t punched at them or tried to tear them free. Pen was certainly right when she said that if it was a matter of strength alone he could have smashed his way in without even working up a sweat. So whatever had kept him at bay, it had nothing to do with the physical properties of slate and wood and lead flashing. Pen’s wards had taken the strength out of his hands and the will out of his cold, clammy heart.

That made them something special in the way of stay-nots. In St Albans, when I’d gone after the leader of the Anathemata, Father Thomas Gwillam, with Juliet riding shotgun, I’d seen my favourite succubus walk through a door that had a dozen different wards on it. They hurt her, but they didn’t slow her down. I’d seen her walk through Pen’s wards too, for that matter, seen it a dozen times, most recently when she’d brought me home after one of my epic drunks. The only thing different this time was that the demon Pen was keeping out was a passenger inside the body of her ex-lover. Food for thought. Maybe not all magical prophylactics were created equal; maybe, as in quantum physics, the observer was part of the system.

After I came down, I made up a list of people I should call: people who’d known Rafi at college and might possibly be on Asmodeus’ hit list now, and people he’d introduced me to later when we met up for one of our infrequent reunions. Some I didn’t have numbers for, and the numbers I did have, when I finally picked up the phone and tried, weren’t always live any more. But I put the word out (lie low, lock your doors and windows and don’t talk to strangers), and I asked everyone I could reach to call anyone else they knew who might have counted as a friend or acquaintance of Rafi’s either in Oxford or in London.

But Rafi had been born in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic, and for all I knew he had an entire extended family out there. Would Asmodeus go after them? He might be disinclined to try. Demons are chthonic powers, and they don’t respond well to air travel: the one time Juliet had tried it, it had knocked her out for days. Asmodeus could take a bus or a train, but it was a long trip and most of the demons I’ve met have tended to have a hard time with the concept of deferred gratification. Hopefully – assuming I was right in the first place about what he was doing – Asmodeus would start with the targets that were closest to hand.

All the same, I could ask Nicky Heath, my go-to dead guy, to pull up whatever family records he could find and maybe shake loose a few phone numbers for me. I had to try, anyway: the karmic weight I was carrying already from this fucking fiasco was heavy enough to stave half my ribs in, and I seriously didn’t want to add to it.

Nicky doesn’t like talking specifics over the phone. He has a paranoid streak wider than the Thames at Deptford, and prefers to take commissions on a face-to-face basis. That meant a pilgrimage out to Walthamstow, to the abandoned cinema he’d lovingly restored and re-equipped for an audience of one. It wasn’t a place I liked to linger: the decor is great, but being of the zombie persuasion, Nicky finds a temperature of three degrees Celsius a little on the warm side.

I called Gary Coldwood first, and told him about my late-night bare-knuckle fight with Asmodeus. He was solicitous for my health but oddly vague about the progress he’d made on the case.

‘I talked to about fifteen or twenty people,’ I said. ‘To tell them what had happened to Rafi if they didn’t already know, and to warn them that they might get a visit. But some of them must have thought I was just a crank. It might sound better coming from a copper – and you could probably get updated numbers for some of these other names. Do you want the list?’

‘Where are you now?’ Coldwood asked instead of answering me.

‘I’m at Pen’s, but I won’t be staying here for long. Sue Book has been trying to get hold of me for the past few days, so I need to go see her.’

‘Sue Book?’

‘Juliet’s lady love.’

Gary gave an involuntary exhalation, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. It was the same sound he always makes when he’s forcibly reminded of Juliet’s sexual orientation. He’s not homophobic; it just hurts him, fairly viscerally, that she’s not available.

‘Well where will you be in a couple of hours?’ he asked me.

‘Willesden Green, most likely. Sue works in the library over there.’

‘Okay. You know the Costella Café on Dudden Hill Lane?’

‘I can find it.’

‘Call me when you’re done. I’ll meet you there. If Asmodeus didn’t leave enough of your face for me to recognise, wear a red carnation in your buttonhole.’

I made a comment in which both buttonholes and arseholes figured largely, and hung up on the cheeky sod.

As I walked up Pen’s crazy-paved garden path, something in the semi-tamed undergrowh next to it caught my eye. Maybe the trampled tulips were still in my mind, or maybe I was catching some death-sense echo from what was hidden there. Either way, before I really thought about what I was doing I knelt down and parted the blades of elephant grass.

There was a flat piece of stone lying on the ground, right beside the path. It was the neutral grey of granite, but it had a slightly polished sheen. On the upper face of it someone had painted, in red, a pentagram.

I picked it up and examined it. The work was very fine: thin lines, perfectly straight and uniformly thick. The whole thing was only about four or five inches across, so the lettering around the outside was very tiny, but still perfectly legible: the names of Samael and Lilith figured there, along with the names of three of their kissing cousins. In the centre was a single word consisting of four Aramaic symbols:

I ducked out of seeing The Passion of the Christ because someone spoiled the ending for me, so my Aramaic is pretty rusty these days. If it had been Greek, I could probably have made shift, but I can’t get along with these proto-Hebraic alphabets that have about seven different shapes for each letter depending on where they appear in the sentence: they give me migraines. Some things though, I could tell just from a superficial inspection.

There are two kinds of necromantic contraption exorcists regularly run into. The first is a ward, also called a stay-not or occasionally a foad (short for ‘Fuck off and die’). They’re basically magical prophylactics, setting up boundaries the dead and undead can’t pass. Some of them aren’t necromantic at all: they’re pure nature magic, using flowering herbs and twigs cut, bound and blessed by priests or adepts – life and faith as a bulwark against death and its dominion. Others are incantations, like the ones that Pen uses to bless the walls of her house. Often though, they’re devices just like the one I was holding in my hand right then: collections of visual symbols tied together in intricate patternings that somehow trap a tiny potent piece of reality in their folds. I suppose it’s something like the way my music works. In the centre of the circle there’s a command aimed directly at the dead soul to show it how unwelcome it is: Hoc fugere is the commonest – Latin for ‘Get out of town’ – closely followed by Apoloio, which means ‘Don’t let the sun go down on you here’ in Ancient Greek.

The other kind of magic circle is the exact opposite of a ward: it’s a summoning. The design is similar in almost every respect, but the word in the centre of the pentagram will usually be the name of the entity you’re trying to call up or get on the right side of.

I didn’t know what it was I had here, because I had no idea what that four-letter word meant. I could see at a glance though, that it was a meticulous piece of work: someone had put a lot of time into it, even if they hadn’t bothered with the incantations that usually go with the design. You didn’t make a ward like this and then throw it over your right shoulder for luck.

Something of Pen’s, then, set down here to supplement the organic wards she normally used. It was straying a bit further into Dennis Wheatley territory than she normally liked to go – her magic being of the ‘Hello birds, hello sky, hello trees’ variety – and for a moment I thought about asking her what it was for. Second thoughts prevailed: given the mood she was in right then, it could wait.

In any case, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, especially in the digital age. I took out my phone and used its crappy little built-in camera to take a picture of the stone, right up close, then put it back where I’d found it.

Willesden is within spitting distance of my walk-up office in Harlesden, but I try not to spend a lot of time over there in case someone tries to employ me. It’s been known to happen in the past, and it usually leads to unfortunate consquences.

I’d tried calling Sue Book to tell her I was coming, but I only got her voicemail. And at Willesden Green Library, what I got was short shrift. ‘She’s not in,’ the man at the desk told me. ‘She took the day off sick.’ He was a slim, vaguely Goth-looking twenty-something with a festive sprinkling of acne across his forehead and a Love Will Tear Us Apart T-shirt which I was willing to bet he’d bought on the strength of hearing the track once on YouTube. He looked me up and down with what he probably thought was withering scorn. But I’ve been withered by the best, and this kid left my foliage intact.

‘Is she okay?’ I asked him.

‘Depends what you mean by okay.’

‘Well let’s say I mean what everyone else means by okay. Is she sick? Unhappy? Has she been hurt in some way.’

‘You should probably ask her.’

I gave it up. The unfriendly vibe was puzzling: the kid was making some assumption about me, but I just didn’t have the leisure time to tease it out. I grabbed a 297 bus over to Wembley, where Sue and Juliet live together in the house Sue inherited from her mother and walked the last half-mile through the day’s uncompromising heat, feeling slightly out of place and disadvantaged in the sunshine as nocturnal creatures usually do.

There was no answer to my knock. The windows were closed in spite of the heat, and the curtains drawn. It didn’t look promising. I knocked again, then took a few steps back from the door, positioning myself so that if anyone looked out from behind the living-room or bedroom curtains they’d see me standing there.

I waited for about two minutes. It occurred to me to pick the lock and go inside – my misspent youth has left me with the best set of cat-burgling tools in the Home Counties and a relaxed attitude to using them – but what would I say if Sue was in there, laid up with flu, and I walked in on her in her smalls? It was the sort of thing that might be hard to explain to Juliet, even on the grounds of neighbourly concern.

But unless my night-adapted eyes deceived me, there was indeed a twitching at the corner of an upstairs curtain. And then, after another short interval, the scratching sound of a door chain being disengaged.

The door opened a crack, and Sue peered out at me, a fuzzy-edged silhouette in the twilight of her hall.

‘Felix,’ she said, in a slightly bewildered tone.

I walked back to the porch, giving her a reassuring wave. ‘You called,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ If anything, the crack got a little narrower. ‘But . . . it’s all right now. I’m fine. I just wanted to ask you something, but . . . it got sorted.’

To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.

‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’

Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.

She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.

With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.

‘Sue . . .’ I said.

Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.

‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’

The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.

‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’

‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’

Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her – using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent – and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.

I know all this because I was one of her victims. Gabriel McClennan, a fellow exorcist and part-time necromancer in the pay of an eastern European master-pimp named Lucasz Damjohn, had raised the demon Ajulutsikael and set her on my tail, figuring that a lethally close encounter with a demon would look like an occupational hazard for someone in my line of work. But I survived, against the odds. I managed to talk the succubus out of finishing me off (an experience which bore the same relationship to normal coitus interruptus as an exploding supernova does to a Bic lighter), and then she talked herself into sticking around on Earth. She changed her name to Juliet Salazar, met a nice girl, got married and settled down. A happy ending for everyone except me: part of my soul still has a hard-on for her that doesn’t look like dying down any time soon.

The phrase ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ gets bandied around a lot, with ‘drop-dead’ functioning as an over-intense intensifier. Juliet is drop-dead gorgeous in a very specific and literal sense. The bone-white skin, the black eyes that are almost entirely without whites – these things might seem too odd to be attractive if you met them anywhere else, but as soon as you see Juliet you want her. Her tall, generously curved body becomes the image of the ideal for you, the incarnation of desire. And if you get in close enough to inhale her perfume – her earthy natural musk – then you’re lost.

There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know, but if I’m honest, what I was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process, with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.

As I stared at Sue’s battered face, one of them flashed across my memory with sudden and unsettling vividness.

Juliet and I were mooching our way through a disused factory somewhere out past Gants Hill. It had changed hands at a bankruptcy auction, and the new owners were concerned about the complaints they were getting from residents in the area. People had seen lights and heard noises in the dead of night when it wasn’t Christmas and they weren’t even drunk. So the outfit that had taken possession hired me to give the place a prayer and a sing-song, and I took Juliet in with me because at that point I was still pretending to be her sensei.

We’d been all through the building once and found nothing more suspicious than some obscene graffiti. It was half past one in the morning, nothing was moving, and we were pretty sure that we were in for a quiet night. So we sat down on a lathe, or maybe a steam press, and I started to rummage through my pockets for a hip-flask full of liquid sunshine which by rights ought to be there.

But Juliet caught the edge of a scent that shouldn’t be there, and before I could even get comfortable she was off – across two shop floors and a storage hangar the size of the Hatfield Galleria, out onto the yard and in among some prefab packing sheds at the far end of a desolate asphalt apron where a fleet of a hundred vans had once been parked.

Seven of these sheds were empty. The eighth . . . well, that was empty too, but there was a trapdoor in the floor and Juliet made a beeline straight for it. It was locked, but it didn’t fit all that tightly. She got her fingers in around the edge on one side of the lock plate and started to pull. I went looking for a crowbar, and found one eventually. I also found some stuff I wished I hadn’t, including an inspection pit full of gnawed bones. I had a bit of an inkling now what it was that had been giving the neighbours disturbed nights.

I took the crowbar back to the trapdoor and started to use it to good effect on the opposite side from where Juliet was tugging, but I think she’d have got there without my help. After thirty or forty seconds the wood of the trap gave a series of gunshot-sharp cracks and she lifted two thirds of it free. The rest stayed attached to the hinges.

From the bottom of the lightless well we’d opened came a weak, despairing wail, and then another.

I’d brought a torch with me. I switched it on now and pointed it down into the dark. It lit up a small, terrified face – just for a second, before a hand came up to shield those wide eyes from the sudden, unaccustomed light. I moved the beam to right and left: wherever the spotlight fell, whimpering children ducked and scurried away from it.

We’d stumbled across a loup-garou’s larder.

We looked for a ladder or a rope, but found nothing. The kids, meanwhile, cried and shrieked at the bottom of the hole. I shouted a few reassurances down to them, but clearly this was a conditioned reflex: they knew by now that when the trapdoor opened, someone’s number was up.

After a terse parley, we agreed that Juliet would stay at the mouth of the pit and keep guard while I went and found some means of getting down into it. I headed for the door, but I was still a few steps short of it when two unsettlingly tall shapes filled it, blocking my path.

Not one loup-garou then; this was a team effort.

I eyed their muscular frames to get an inkling of what I’d be up against. They weren’t overly broad at the shoulder, but they were so tall that they easily outmassed me anyway. The one on the left looked unremarkable except that when he grinned – as he did then – his teeth showed as a spiked forest of razor-sharp incisors with not a molar in sight. The other had a face that was a mass of old scar tissue so deep and rucked that I could barely see his eyes. They were both dressed in blue overalls, presumably so that from a distance – or to a trusting or myopic observer – they’d look as though they had some reason to be here.

They came inside and closed the heavy steel door with an echoing clang.

I took a step back, reaching into my coat and unshipping my whistle. Then I changed my mind, let it slide back again and picked up a heavy cast-iron pulley block from a pile of packing cases instead. Werewolves, you’ve got to hate them. They’re mostly old souls because it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and to pry the spirit loose from the animal flesh that it’s shaped and sculpted . . . well, that’s even harder. In fact it’s like pulling buckshot out of a tiger’s hide while the tiger is trying to eat your head. Given the fact that the pair of them were going to be on me inside a second, I was probably going to have better luck with the pulley block than the whistle – a cat in Hell’s chance, say, rather than a snowball’s.

They moved forward in unconscious synchrony, and I swung with the block. I timed it right, catching the scar-faced one off balance as he moved in, but it made no difference: he was too damn fast. His arm flicked out and swatted the thing out of my hand before it could touch him. On the backswing he pounded his closed fist into the side of my head and I staggered back a step, seeing stars. Then I backed away again, quickly, out of instinct, and his extended claws whipped past so close that if I’d been wearing a tie it would have been reduced to comical confetti.

The two of them tensed to leap, and I went for my whistle again because it was all I had left. But then Juliet pushed me firmly aside and strode past. I caught my breath. I had to, because it was so thick with her pheromones it almost choked me. The two loup-garous stared at her as if she was a page of unholy writ.

‘Last man standing gets to kiss me on the lips,’ she said. And then, after a charged pause of about half a second, she added, ‘Dealer’s choice.’

The were-thing with the teeth made a clumsy lunge for her on the spot, which just left him open for a scything uppercut from his partner that almost floored him. He got his feet back under him though, and came back spitting and snarling, slamming scarface against the wall and pinning him there with his shoulder. As they wrestled, trying to get a grip with teeth and claws, I found myself stepping forward with my own fists tightly clenched. Juliet’s arm came out and blocked me, without effort.

‘Not you, Castor,’ she said with clinical calm. ‘This one is by invitation only.’

She watched as they took each other apart. I’m not normally squeamish but I looked away before the end, because the loup-garous couldn’t stop fighting even when they were bleeding to death and their entrails were spilling out on the floor. They lost their hold on their human forms as they weakened, the fluid flesh sliding back into half-remembered configurations. Even then they snapped at each other feebly with misshapen snouts, looking like nothing that had ever lived or moved on the face of the Earth.

Juliet breathed in and then out, savouring the tang of blood on the air – or more likely some other spoor that I couldn’t even detect.

‘Go and look for that rope,’ she suggested, her voice thick.

It was hard to walk away from her – like walking uphill with a bag of rocks on my back. The attraction she exerted was that strong: as strong as gravity.

I took my time poking around the storeroom for a suitable coil of rope. The hormonal stranglehold on my mind had loosened by this time, and I was aware that the petrified little kids had been stuck at the bottom of the pit all this time, hearing the roars and snarls and howls of agony from above them. I was aware of it, but I truly didn’t want to go back too soon and catch a glimpse of Juliet feeding.

By the time I did step back into the shed, she was sitting in the open space left by the shattered trapdoor, her legs dangling over the edge, entertaining the children with her own version of Little Red Riding Hood. Of the two loup-garous there was no trace, whether flesh or bone or sinew or greasy stain. I dumped the rope down next to her and listened to the end of the story, resigned to sleeping with the light on for the foreseeable future.

‘It was my fault,’ Sue repeated, more defiantly this time – as if warning me that any criticism of Juliet was off-limits. In the one eye that was still functional, tears brimmed but didn’t fall.

With more tact than I can usually muster, I closed the street door. At the same time, Sue remembered my face-saving lie about needing a drink and fled to the kitchen, mumbling that she’d bring me a glass of water. I went through into the lounge and waited for her there. I knew her well enough to be sure she wouldn’t want an audience for her weeping.

As I waited, sitting on a black leather sofa that squeaked whenever I breathed, the surly assistant at the library came back into my mind. I thought I could see now why he’d been so truculent with me. Sue kept her private life to herself and presumably hadn’t introduced any of her work colleagues to Juliet, so the guy had put two and two together and got the square root of one, pegging me for an abusive boyfriend.

‘Water,’ Sue said, coming in with a tray. ‘And some biscuits. Just ginger thins – that’s all we’ve got. I haven’t . . . I didn’t do my weekly shop at the weekend.’

She set the tray down and retreated to a chair opposite me, angling her body so that the damaged side of her face was mostly out of my line of sight. She’d brought a glass of water for herself too, because a good hostess doesn’t let her guest drink alone. She held it in both hands but didn’t raise it to her lips.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I asked. Any small talk would have sounded grotesque in these circumstances, so I just cut to the chase.

Sue’s shoulders twitched, a subliminal suggestion of a shrug.

‘We had an argument,’ she said, her voice slightly tremulous. ‘It was the usual thing, really. Jules doesn’t like it that I go out to work. She’d rather I stayed here and just . . . well, just . . .’ I nodded emphatically to get her over the bump. I knew exactly what she meant. It wasn’t that Juliet saw Sue just as a sex object; she saw her as the provider of many pleasures and diversions, with sex at the top of the list. But there was no getting round the fact that Juliet wanted Sue to be a stay-at-home housewife, servicing her needs uncomplainingly whenever they arose. Maybe feminism hasn’t reached Hell yet, or maybe one woman subordinating another is a special case. In any event, the question of Sue having a life apart from Juliet had been a snake in their Eden before now.

But it had never come to blows. Juliet tended to treat Sue as something precious and fragile that might break if carelessly handled, which is actually true of anyone in Juliet’s hands, because her strength is as the strength of ten, even if her heart is only about as pure as New York snow.

‘She’d been nervy for a few days before this,’ Sue went on, staring morosely into her glass. ‘Not herself. Snapping at me about things that didn’t really matter. Normally she’s calm about almost everything. It’s only a few things that make her angry. And even then, it’s sort of a . . . a big, heavy disapproval. She doesn’t throw tantrums. She doesn’t shout, or throw things.’

‘And this time she did?’

Sue shot me a sheepish, unhappy look. ‘Me,’ she said. ‘She threw me. Does that count?’

‘How long did the fight go on for?’ I asked, trying my best to make this seem like a doctor’s consultation so I didn’t have to respond to the hurt in her face. ‘And how did she . . . you know, how did she feel about it afterwards?’

‘It wasn’t a fight, Felix. She hit me, and I tried to get away, and she hit me some more. You know how strong she is. There was nothing I could do.’ Sue paused, frowning, reconstructing the scene in her mind. ‘She was sorry, afterwards. Or . . . perhaps puzzled is a better word. She couldn’t understand how it had happened. She apologised lots of times, and said it would never happen again.’

Her voice was breaking, and she was obviously close to another storm of tears. When she stopped speaking, I waited in silence, giving her the chance to pull the curtains decently closed on those terrible, shaming emotions. I suppose it must always be like that for succubi: every relationship you form has to have an element of addiction to it. You’re not just someone’s partner; you’re simultaneously the drug they crave and the pusher who supplies their craving. Then again, as far as I knew, Juliet was the first succubus ever to set up house on Earth and try to live monogamously. It was uncharted territory.

‘I told her . . . it was all right,’ Sue said. ‘That I forgave her. But it was the last . . . the last time. It had to be. I said if it happened again, she’d have to leave.’ She laughed hollowly. ‘You can imagine how convincing that sounded. If she left me, I think I’d kill myself. Or else I’d just die anyway, from not having her here.’

The surface of the water in her glass became choppy and turbulent as Sue’s hand shook. Distracted, she put it down on the floor beside her chair, but then had no idea what to do with her hands.

‘You said she’d been keyed up,’ I said. ‘Was there something specific that was on her mind? Is she working a difficult case?’

Sue shook her head, shrugged. ‘She doesn’t talk to me about her work,’ she said. ‘Not unless I ask. But I don’t think she’s got much work on at the moment at all. Sometimes Sergeant Coldwood calls her, to read a murder scene, but that hasn’t happened for a few weeks now. She was laying down wards in a hotel that’s being renovated in Ealing. And there was a geist, locally – in Wembley. But it was only moving furniture, not being violent. Just business as usual really.’

‘But there could be a job she took on without telling you?’

‘It’s possible.’ Sue didn’t sound convinced.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘If there’s something on the professional side that’s distracting her, maybe she’ll open up to me about it. She trusts my judgement on that stuff.’

‘Thank you, Felix,’ said Sue humbly. She could just as easily have said, ‘Distracting her? She punched me in the face hard enough to turn it particoloured. Seemed pretty focused to me.’ But Sue hasn’t ever been the kind to make a drama out of a crisis.

I got up. There are a lot of things you can do at a moment like that to let the other person know you feel their pain. Most of them are outside my repertoire – or at least outside the relationship I have with Sue Book.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said again, the words sounding even more awkward the second time around. ‘Listen, if it happens again, and you need somewhere to go, Pen has about a million rooms doing nothing. You can come and stay any time.’

Sue nodded, giving me a weak smile, but clearly didn’t trust herself to speak again.

I left her there, hanging on the cross I’d wanted so much to be nailed to myself, and went on my merry way. Which, let’s face it, was getting less merry by the moment, even before I went over to the Costella Café and met up with Gary Coldwood.

But the fact that I was already looking like a wet weekend just saved him the unhappy obligation of wiping the smile off my face.

Gary looked hunted. He was sitting at the back of the long, narrow dining area, as far away from the window as he could get, dissecting a slightly watery portion of scrambled eggs on toast with grim and humourless precision.

There was no table service, so I grabbed a coffee and went over to join him.

‘I’m telling you this as a friend,’ he said when I sat down opposite him. ‘Which means, if you tell anyone else and if it comes back on me, I’ll kick you face down into a ditch and stand on the back of your head until you stop moving.’

‘As a friend,’ I clarified.

‘Exactly. As a friend. Listen, after I left you last night, I went back over to Uxbridge Road to meet this SOCA fuckalong. Name of Brake, which was what I wanted to do to his face after five minutes in his company. He’d called me in to put a marker down.’

‘Which was?’

Gary shot me a scowling glance, putting his knife down as though the memory had spoiled his appetite. ‘The Ditko case. It’s closed.’

For a moment that statement was too incomprehensible to be alarming. I laughed, but Gary didn’t join me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That must be the quickest collar you ever got.’

‘I’m serious, Fix.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But what the Hell does it mean? How can the case be closed? Rafi’s still out there. Asmodeus too. The job’s not done because this guy decides to move the file from one drawer to another. Did you tell him that?’

‘No,’ said Gary, spitting the word out. A couple of toast crumbs came along with it as unwilling passengers. ‘I didn’t, because he outranks me, and he made it clear right at the start that mine was not to frigging reason why. He was spoiling for a fight before he walked in the door, if you want to know. We get tied up in jurisdictional pissing contests with these arseholes every day of the week, and I think he was looking forward to a rumble. So I didn’t give him the excuse. I was civil and solemn and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-bum-crack, which was as good as giving the bastard two fingers.’

‘But you did ask what the Hell he was on about?’

‘Of course I did. What do you bloody take me for?’ Gary was indignant. ‘I pulled out all the public safety issues and waved them in his face, and I said there was a cast-iron case for parallel parking – homicide running its own investigation alongside SOCA’s and sharing resources.’

‘So?’

‘Nothing doing. And this is the bad news, Fix.’

‘There’s bad news?’

‘SOCA aren’t running the show either. It’s been contracted out – his words – to a privately run agency. They’re better resourced for this sort of palaver, he said, and they’ve already got the clearances they need to deal with a killer who can’t be arrested by anything short of an army division. In fact, they’re not looking to arrest Ditko at all; just to make sure he doesn’t kill again. Their brief doesn’t say anything about ways and means or about what state they leave him in afterwards.’

The horrible truth hit me just before he said it. I gave an incredulous laugh that almost hurt my throat coming out.

‘Tell me it’s not—’

‘It’s the Anathemata, Fix. The holy-water boys. If they can figure out a way to do it, they’re going to kill Ditko and Asmodeus both.’