The Naming of the Beasts

7

I remember a game we used to play as kids at school, a conceptual game which consisted of endless variations on the same question. If it was a choice between doing X or dying, which would you do? X might be buggering a dog, or killing your mum, or pissing in the communion wine. Usually the game started with stuff like that and then veered slowly but inexorably into even more fantastical waters. If it was a choice between having a third eyeball or dying, which would you do? If you were stuck on a tiny rock in the middle of outer space and it was a choice between eating a bucket of cockroaches or starving to death, which would you do? The fun part was comparing answers and picking holes in each other’s code of ethics. We all knew that some things were so bad that dying was preferable, but we didn’t always agree on what they were. You’d be amazed, for example, how many people found the cockroach diet a sticking point. I always said I’d tuck right in. I suspect that when it comes to the crunch, if I can put it that way, most people would.

But here I was, standing on the lonely heights of my own personal moral watershed. And I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, dazzled by the appalling vista that presented itself on either hand.

Asmodeus had made it clear that he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who knew Rafi was dead. The Anathemata could stop him, I was pretty sure, but they’d kill Rafi in the process – then go to confession, have their sins washed away and go out on the razzle.

Somewhere in the middle was Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. The devil at the crossroads.

The phone rang three times. The static on the line sounded like claws scratching at the bottom of a door: something scrabbling to be let in, or out.

Jenna-Jane picked up on the fourth ring. ‘Hello?’

‘I’m calling your bluff,’ I said.

‘Felix!’ That same tone of simple and sincere delight that she always used whenever I was dragged kicking and thrashing back into her life. ‘You left so suddenly this afternoon, I was afraid I’d offended you.’

It was a tempting phrase, just hanging there in the crackling void. But there was no point taking the cheap shots, not if I was dining from the à la carte menu. ‘You’ve been after Asmodeus for years,’ I said. ‘We do it my way, and I promise you, you’ll get him. Yes or no. Which is it going to be?’

‘That’s not something you can guarantee, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane chided me, using another tone I knew well from times past – the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one. ‘From my point of view, you’re asking me to divert a lot of the resources of my department into a hunt that might not bear any fruit at all. I’m asking you, in return, to shore up those resources by offering me your own professional services – not in the longer term, but just while this operation is in progress. Just until we have Asmodeus under restraint.’

I laughed in spite of myself. ‘You make that sound so reasonable!’ I said. ‘My professional services. Who do you want me to entrap, Jenna-Jane? Who do you want me to destroy? I mean, give it a name. Let me know exactly how much I’m going to hate myself in the morning.’

Jenna-Jane sighed a little theatrically. ‘I can accommodate your scruples, Felix,’ she said, like a waitress confirming that the restaurant did indeed have a vegetarian option. ‘You wouldn’t be required to do anything that made you feel uneasy or compromised.’

‘What, you want me to sweep the floors? Make the coffee?’

‘I want you to investigate a situation and then advise on it.’

‘What kind of situation?’ I felt like I was sniffing around the outline of a bear trap only half-hidden among the leaves on the forest floor.

‘A haunting.’

‘You’ve already got exorcists, Jenna-Jane. You’ve got an army of exorcists. Why not get one of them to advise you?’

‘I’ve put several of them onto this case already. None of them has been able to account for it or eradicate it.’

‘I don’t do eradications any more.’

‘So I’ve heard. But you do offer spiritual services.’ She said the words with a slightly ironic emphasis. It was what the sign on my office door said: FELIX CASTOR, SPIRITUAL SERVICES. I felt it covered enough sins to give me a running start.

‘Question stands,’ I said. ‘Why me?’

‘Because we’ve hit a stone wall, frankly. And this is a new phenomenon, in some ways. It’s something I want to have explained to me, Felix, and that’s what you’d be offering me: an explanation.’

‘And you’d be offering me . . . ?’

‘You know the answer to that. That’s why you came to me in the first place. Oh, we’d pay you, of course. Initially you’d be on a probationary contract. The term for that is usually a week or a month, but given our past history, perhaps we should review your progress after the first three days. Your stipend for those three days would be at an emergency rate of a hundred pounds a day, after tax. But that isn’t the issue, is it? I have an equipment and skills base uniquely suited to finding and capturing Asmodeus. Alive. Intact. With a minimum of damage to the host body he’s currently using. I can get you your friend back, in other words. I can bring Rafael Ditko back into some kind of secure and stable environment. I may even be able to excise the thing that’s living in him.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

If it was a choice between working for Jenna-Jane Mulbridge or eating a bucket of cockroaches, which would you do?

I wasn’t kidding anyone but myself. I called her back about two hours later, which at least gave me the satisfaction of waking her up after she’d gone to bed, and spat out the two words that would make everything else happen, for good or bad.

‘I’m in.’

‘Excellent,’ said Jenna-Jane briskly. ‘So happy to have you back, Felix. ‘It’s like old times.’

I could only cross my fingers and hope that she was wrong.

Pen had already retired to bed when I let myself in, or at least all the lights were out, and there was no sound either from the basement or from her first-floor bedroom. I trudged up the remaining two flights of stairs, lay down on the bed with good intentions about getting undressed and getting under the covers, and was dragged down immediately into an exhausted sleep.

There were dreams, but they were of the kind you always get when you’re so tired you’re almost sick with it: fragmentary, repetitive, meaningless, anchored more in formless feelings than in comprehensible images. The dominant feeling was urgency – the sense of something important that I’d forgotten and still needed to do. I stumbled from one half-imagined scenario into another, locking and bolting doors, looking for car keys, turning off gas rings, but the feeling persisted. If anything, it got worse. Music was playing somewhere: a tune I knew and really didn’t like at all. It sounded something like a waltz played backwards, the notes of the violins sucking themselves up into a dimensionless point and disappearing into themselves instead of expanding and reverberating. A waltz from Hell. I knew bad things would happen if I danced to it.

I woke an hour or maybe two hours later, in pitch dark. The music was still there, playing not in the air but in my mind. Something dead or unborn was nearby, and I knew its pattern as well as I knew my own face in the mirror.

I got out of bed, crossed to the window and looked out.

He was standing at the bottom of the drive, his gaze fixed on the front door of the house. Absolutely motionless, his arms at his sides, he was a darker stain on the fabric of the night.

‘Asmodeus,’ I murmured.

As though he’d heard me, he raised his head and looked up at my window. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could feel his stare like a physical pressure against the surface of my skin.

I kicked off my shoes, shrugged my greatcoat on and walked back down to the front hall, taking care to make no sound as I passed Pen’s room. I unlocked the street door, feeling the skin between my shoulder blades prickle even though I knew rationally that the door – as a physical barrier – made no difference to whether or not Asmodeus could enter the house. It was Pen’s wards that were keeping him out, and nothing else.

Asmodeus was still standing in the same place, and he was still staring up at the window under the eaves where I’d been standing a minute before.

Mindful of what Pen had said about seeding the garden with stay-nots, I took a calculated risk and walked out onto the front step – two paces away from the house, then three. Asmodeus still didn’t move, but I didn’t take my eyes off him for a second. If he did attack, I wanted to be sure I could put the door – which Pen had blessed and anointed and talked to and generally strengthened with her own will every day for the past six or seven years – between us before he got in close enough to do me any damage.

‘The three stars in a row,’ I said, ‘that’s Orion’s belt.’

Asmodeus turned slightly to look at the constellation, which was right above us. He nodded.

‘Really?’ he demanded, in a grating, metal-on-metal voice.

‘Really.’

‘Well you know what that means, Castor.’

‘No. What does it mean?’

‘That Orion wasn’t considered a suicide risk.’ He grinned mirthlessly at his own joke, flashing teeth that didn’t look as though they’d fit inside a human mouth. Flesh is a plastic material to demons, but Asmodeus had never bothered to change Rafi’s body very much. It looked as though he’d done a fair bit of redecorating since I’d seen him last, though. He was both taller and broader across the shoulders, with muscular forearms which tautened the ripped fabric of his shirt. His arms looked longer, and so did his fingers – not long enough to make him look simian, but subtly out of proportion with the rest of the body.

‘Did you catch your bus okay?’ I asked.

Asmodeus stopped laughing. He shook his head at me disapprovingly.

‘I told you once that you were missing the big picture,’ he said. ‘That you don’t know the right questions to ask. That you have no idea what’s really happening, or how you fit into it.’

‘I remember,’ I agreed. ‘Didn’t stop me from whipping you back to kennel the last time you stuck your nose out.’

Asmodeus flexed those overlong fingers, very slowly. He seemed to be measuring the distance between us, and I tensed to run. Maybe Pen’s new stay-nots would hold the demon back, and if they broke maybe they’d still slow him down enough for me to get back over the threshold of the house, where the older, many-times-inscribed wards would protect me. I didn’t want to bet my life on those maybes.

But Asmodeus still didn’t move. ‘I’m kind of glad I didn’t finish you off last night,’ he grated. ‘I really ought to build up to it properly. It was just the heat of the moment. Seeing you there, and feeling Ditko pull back from the thought of it. He’s still seeing you as a way out, Castor. When you die, it’s gonna be a real blow to him. But personally I think that ship has sailed. I’m making my own arragements now.’

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘So I’m not here to kill you. Or Ditko’s whore. You can relax. I just wheeled him over to take a look at the old place.’ He snickered, making the noise a blade makes on a strop. ‘Build up his morale a little. You want to say hello?’

For a moment I thought I’d misheard him. ‘Say hello?’ I repeated stupidly.

‘To your old friend. He’s right here, listening. Just like he was last night. Fuck, wake the redhead up and she can even have a conjugal visit.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ignoring this last suggestion. ‘I’d like to talk to him.’

The demon bowed his head and was silent for a moment. Then, still staring at the ground, he spoke in a different voice, a voice that was as faint as a day-old echo. ‘Fix?’

‘Rafi. I’m here.’

‘I know. I know. My God, Fix, he’s got me . . . staring out of the window here. I can’t stop him, but I have to watch . . .’ He gave a choking sob. ‘Ginny!’

‘Ginny got you into this mess in the first place, Rafi.’ It was meant to console him, but I realised even as I was saying it that it wouldn’t have that effect. ‘She was working for Anton Fanke – the grand panjandrum. She was just using you.’

‘We were using each other.’ Rafi’s voice was barely a whisper. I took a step forward, straining to hear it. ‘I knew what she was, Fix. And it’s not as though I loved her. I’ve never loved anyone except Pen. But . . .’ He gave another sob and lapsed into silence. One of the dark figure’s arms twitched slightly in a vague, abortive gesture – some random nerve impulse of Rafi’s getting past Asmodeus’ guard – but only for a fraction of a second. ‘She didn’t deserve what she got.’

‘I’m going to free you,’ I promised him.

‘Sound familiar?’ The demon’s voice intervening, forcing itself out of Rafi’s mouth like hissing steam out of a pipe. ‘He lives like fucking Nero, Ditko: he fiddles while you burn. Three years, and all he’s ever done is lie to you. He’s lying now. You belong to me, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. I’m so sure of that, I’m not even going to bother to kill him just yet. We’ll leave him till the end.’

‘I will nail him, Rafi,’ I insisted, ignoring the demon’s taunts. ‘I’m onto it, I swear to you. The bastard won’t even see me coming.’

‘Fix . . .’ Rafi’s voice again, a gasping sigh at the lower limit of audibility. ‘Tell my father . . . and Jovan . . . Tell them I’m sorry. Do that for me. Please.’

And then nothing. Slowly Asmodeus straightened until his gaze met mine again. ‘I meant what I said,’ he grated. ‘I’ll kill you last, Castor. And it won’t be all at once. I’m thinking of going home for a while, when I’m free of this meat: I’ll take you along as food for the journey. In the meantime . . . breast pocket, left-hand side.’

Something dropped out of his sleeve into his hand, glinting momentarily in the light from a street lamp. I ducked reflexively, but Asmodeus was so much faster than me that his arm was back at his side before I’d even registered that it had flicked up and out – long before my own lazy nervous system had carried the message down the royal road of my spine to my distant arms and legs.

I felt something like a punch in my shoulder. Dazed, I stared at the long slender handle of a knife sticking out of my own flesh. One of the buttons of the greatcoat hung in neatly severed halves on either side of it, dangling from separate lengths of the same frayed thread. The buttons were solid brass, but Asmodeus had thrown the knife with enough force to hammer straight through it, then through the thick cloth, and still embed itself an inch or so deep into the soft flesh below my collarbone.

‘I only said I wouldn’t kill you,’ Asmodeus snickered. ‘That doesn’t stop me from whittling you into a more interesting shape.’

My teeth clenched on the pain, I groped inside my coat for my whistle, but I’m a southpaw, and it was my left shoulder that Asmodeus had hit, so my movements were jerky and uncoordinated. The demon watched in silent amusement.

I got the instrument out at last and fitted it to my lips. I started to play the opening notes of a tune: not a banishing but a soporific, a piece of music I’d composed for Rafi during the long months when he was stuck in his silver-lined cell at the Charles Stanger Care Home. Asmodeus just laughed and walked away, seemingly unaffected.

‘Be seeing you, Castor,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Eventually.’

‘First of all, he’s lying,’ Jenna-Jane said. She said it in a didactic tone, like a maths teacher stating an axiom. ‘So a logical question to ask would be why.’

We were in her office, and it was still early enough in the day for the workmen not to have clocked on. There was silence throughout the vast building, and a slightly disconcerting echo to our words.

‘About what?’ I demanded, probably sounding childishly truculent. ‘He meant what he said about not wanting to kill me yet. I’m not dead, am I? Ecce homo, ergo elk.’

Reflexively, I rubbed my shoulder. It hurt like hell. The knife hadn’t gone in too deep, all things considered, but it had been thrown with spectacular force. I was bruised as well as cut, and my arm had already stiffened in spite of Pen’s expert ministrations.

‘But his motives for not killing you are far from clear.’ Jenna-Jane leaned back in her seat, one finger touched to the point of her chin. ‘Certainly he needs nothing from you now. As he said, he no longer believes you can free him from Ditko’s flesh.’

‘What if that’s the lie?’ I threw in for the sake of argument.

Jenna-Jane shook her head brusquely. ‘He’s removed himself from your sphere of influence. If he had any faith in your abilities, or your efforts, he would have stayed where he was, in Imelda Probert’s custody. Or else, when he left there, he would have come to you and made his demands clear. No, it’s something else, Felix. He chose his moment. Oh, I know the Anathemata gave him the opening which he seized on to escape, but I believe he acted on a decision he’d already made. He has a project, and you are a part of it.’

‘You just said he didn’t need me.’

‘As an exorcist,’ Jenna-Jane amended, with a touch of impatience. ‘He doesn’t need you in a professional capacity. But he is still interested in you. He sought you out on no fewer than three occasions, first in Brixton and then at Pamela Bruckner’s house. He hovers around you, and he lets you see him doing it. I don’t believe for a moment that’s random.’

‘What is it then?’ The ache in my shoulder and chest made me terse.

Jenna-Jane was silent for a moment, musing. ‘Something we can exploit,’ she said at last. She stood up and crossed to a filing cabinet, where she opened the second drawer and took out the file she wanted without hesitation, seeming to know exactly where it was. She brought it back to the desk.

‘The problem resolves itself into two problems,’ she said, as she took her seat again. ‘Finding Asmodeus, and dealing with him once we have him. You, Felix, are probably the key to the first of those. At least you are our default option. If all else fails, it’s reasonable to hope that the demon will come to you.

‘The second part of the equation will tax us more. We need a mechanism that will bring Asmodeus into our power without permanently harming Ditko.’ She was leafing through the file now, holding it so that I couldn’t see its contents. ‘You say you crafted a lullaby? A sedative of some kind?’

I nodded. ‘I used to use it on Rafi when he was at the Stanger. And then I worked on it some more with Imelda. It seems to knock Asmodeus offline for a while. Sometimes it sends Rafi to sleep too, but other times it lets him be himself for a while.’

‘May I hear it?’

Wincing, I took out my whistle. I played a few repetitions of the tune, clumsily and stiffly. When I’d finished, Jenna-Jane nodded. She had that schoolteacherly look on her face again, as if she’d been listening to a proposition in pure logic.

‘I’d like you to record that for our technical team,’ she said. ‘Before you leave today.’

I made a negative gesture. I didn’t want Jenna-Jane and her white-coated cut-throats to go chasing up any blind alleys, diverting as that might have been at any other time. ‘I tried it on Asmodeus last night,’ I told her. ‘He just ignored it.’

‘But it worked in the past.’

‘It worked when I had him as a captive audience,’ I said, pointing out the obvious. ‘It’s slow, J-J. It does the job, but it’s slow. It’s never going to make a difference in an ambush.’

‘My people will look at it,’ she said. ‘Dissect it. Possibly turn it into something that works a little better.’

‘How?’

She gave me an austere look, hearing the scepticism in my voice. ‘Amplification,’ she said. ‘Distortion. Tonal variation. Peak-trough manipulation. Subsonic harmonic mapping. Instrumental translation. Modal translation. Conceptual reflection and repetition.’ She didn’t bother to wait for my inevitable reductionist put-down. ‘The craft has developed its own specialised vocabulary here at St Mary’s, Felix,’ she said. ‘Its own theoretical underpinnings. Trust me. You made the right decision when you came to me. Now, I wanted to pick your brains on two other matters.’

‘Go on.’

‘The first is the one that Gentle raised with you yesterday. The succubus, Ajulutsikael. I have it on the very best authority that what Gentle said is correct: that the demon remained on Earth after she was raised to kill you, and that you remained on . . . shall I say, friendly terms with her.’

I waited her out. Knowing how sharp she was, I wasn’t prepared to say one word on that particular subject. There was always a chance that I’d give something away without meaning to.

‘She ought to be in my custody,’ J-J said.

I kept up the deadpan for as long as I needed to. Finally, Jenna-Jane sighed theatrically.

‘Very well,’ she murmured. ‘That will have to be a discussion for another day.’

She took a single sheet of paper out of the file and set it down in front of me. It was a badly photocopied passport photograph. Badly enough that it took me a few seconds to identify the person I was looking at.

‘Trudie Pax,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Jenna-Jane confirmed. ‘She’s applied for a position here at the MOU, as an exorcist. I’ve already assigned her to a team, on a probationary basis. What do you know about her?’

I paused for a couple of seconds of reflection. Was J-J really using me as a reference for Trudie, or was this some kind of loyalty test for me? Given the circumstances in which my path and Trudie’s had last crossed, it could be either. But ultimately I didn’t care enough about this political bullshit to lie.

‘She gets the job done,’ I said.

‘You’ve worked with her?’

‘Yes. Recently. When I was trying to clear up that mess at the Salisbury. You probably read about it in the papers.’

‘The riots. Yes, I was aware that something interesting was happening there, and that you were involved in some way. I offered my services, but the detective in charge of the operation – Trotwood, Deadwood, something of that nature – declined. So you and Miss Pax performed an exorcism together?’

‘No, a summoning. She’s good.’

‘But you don’t like her?’

‘She was part of Gwillam’s bunch. You know how much I love religious fanatics.’

‘But you’d have no misgivings about working with her again?’

Another pause for thought. ‘No,’ I grunted at last. I prefer known quantities to unknown ones. Trudie hadn’t flinched when the shit started flying.

‘Good,’ said Jenna-Jane. ‘Because she’s here now. And given her background, I was very much inclined to make her part of our Asmodeus plan.’ She put the sheet back in the file, scribbled something on the inside of the file folder and closed it again.

‘The plan,’ I echoed sardonically. ‘You mean amplification, distortion, attrition and general masturbation?’

Jenna-Jane looked at her watch, a little theatrically. ‘I think it’s time to introduce you to the rest of the team,’ she said.

I followed Jenna-Jane, about as enthusiastically as Dante followed Vergil, down a maze of branching corridors into a room labelled STAFF LOUNGE. Even as a work-in-progress it was pretty well appointed: big enough for a couple of dozen people to chill out without bumping shoulders, widescreen TV, Tchibo coffee machine. I guess if you can afford to use pure silver as wallpaper, then a few comfy chairs and a coffee machine aren’t going to break the bank.

Three men – one of them Gil McClennan – and a woman were sitting in a group at the far end of the room, talking animatedly, but they stopped and turned to face us as we came in. The woman stood, seemed about to put out her hand for me to shake and then thought better of it. After the discussion in J-J’s office she came as no surprise, but I still found seeing her called up enough unpleasant memories to make me grit my teeth momentarily.

‘Trudie Pax,’ Jenna-Jane said.

‘We’ve met,’ I answered bluntly. The tall dark-haired woman flushed slightly and looked away. I noticed that she had several dozen thicknesses of string wound round each wrist. Where I conducted my exorcisms via music, Trudie channelled hers through the children’s game of cat’s cradle, making visual patterns where I made auditory ones. I also noticed that she’d cut her hair extremely short. It had been a good decision. The ponytail she used to wear made her resemble a Lara Croft strippergram, whereas now she looked as though she’d switched role models and gone for Ellen Ripley.

‘The newest member of our little family,’ Jenna-Jane was saying. ‘And she comes with truly impressive references. ’ Knowing all about Trudie’s references, I decided the safest bet under the circumstances was to nod and say nothing.

‘I’m not counting you as new, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane went on, in a teasing voice that set my teeth on edge. ‘I see you more in the light of a lost sheep who’s come back into the fold.’ She turned her attention to the two remaining strangers, who’d also stood. Gil McClennan remained resolutely seated. ‘This is Victor Etheridge,’ Jenna-Jane said, and the younger of the two gave me a nod. He had sandy-coloured hair, a slightly exophthalmic stare and a physique that made a hatstand look broad in the beam. He was wearing a jet-black suit over a jet-black T-shirt, which had the effect of making him fade into the background of his own outfit.

‘Felix Castor,’ he said. And then he winced, his head jerking to the side as though someone had punched him in the mouth. His eyes clenched shut, then opened again and looked at me sidelong. ‘I’m really . . . very . . . I’m pleased, because . . . Pleased to meet you. Because . . . Peckham . . . Peckham Steiner always spoke of you with respect.’

The kid’s head swung round again so that he could look at me full on. His expression was wide-eyed, expectant, as though he’d brought out the big guns and expected to see an appropriate response; but even leaving aside his curious delivery, dropping Steiner’s name didn’t impress me all that much. The crazed millionaire godfather of the London ghost-breaking scene had lost his marbles long before he died, and if this Etheridge character had been his protégé, he might be more of a liability than an asset.

‘You were a friend of Steiner’s?’ I asked, keeping my tone as neutral as I could.

Etheridge stared at me, looking slightly perplexed as though the question was a tough one that he hadn’t expected. ‘He was my patron,’ he said at last. ‘He . . . yeah . . . was going to start a school, if you . . . For exorcists. A school. To teach his own skills to a younger generation. It never really got off the ground, but there were . . . he . . . three or four of us . . .’ He tailed off, looking to Jenna-Jane like an actor asking for a prompt. She said nothing.

I resorted to the dumb nod again. I’d heard of that school before, and I knew damn well why it had never happened. In the last years of his life Steiner had had a million schemes. Some of them had come to pass – like the Oriflamme, the exorcists-only club on Castlebar Hill, and the exorcists’ hostel that had become known as the Thames Collective (built as a houseboat, because ghosts can’t cross running water) – but most had fallen by the wayside, forgotten, as Steiner moved on to the next big thing.

What was the matter with Etheridge? Finding no comfort or support from Jenna-Jane, he ducked his head again, slight tremors shaking his shoulders. He looked like a naughty schoolboy dragged up in front of the class to explain his misdemeanours and promise never to do it again. No, more than that: he looked damaged. A sort of faint, fuzzy-edged misery came off him in waves.

‘And this is Samir Devani,’ Jenna-Jane said. I shook hands with the last man. He had a book in his other hand, his thumb between the pages to mark his place: Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. He was Asian, well built and surprisingly tall, maybe a year or so younger than me but in much better shape. And, like everyone else in the room except Jenna-Jane and Etheridge, he was dressed down – as befitted a dirty job, in a denim shirt, slate-grey chinos and well-worn DMs. He gave me a thoughtful, appraising look, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if he was trying to remember where he’d seen me before.

‘Looks like you’ve been in the wars,’ he said. ‘You’re favouring that left arm. It’s Sam, by the way.’

‘Fix.’ I said it automatically, and cursed myself silently as soon as the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t intend to be on first-name terms with anyone here. Unlike me, they’d presumably chosen to be in Jenna-Jane’s employ. I didn’t owe any one of them the air to breathe, let alone civility. ‘It’s just an old war wound,’ I finished tersely.

‘We tend to work in groups of four or five,’ Jenna-Jane said, forestalling any further getting-to-know-you chit-chat. ‘I make the allocations myself, balancing different techniques so that each team can deal with a broad spectrum of supernormal phenomena. Trudie performs her bindings and exorcisms via a purely physical-manipulative modality, Samir by channelling a second personality, Gil by means of spirit drawing and Victor through actual prayer.’

‘Who’s on drums?’ I asked. Samir laughed, and Jenna-Jane looked pained.

‘We all deal with the emotional stresses of our peculiar line of work in our own individual ways,’ she said dryly. ‘Felix chooses to do so through inappropriate levity. He is, however, a very fine exorcist, and we can all be grateful that he’s been unable, thus far, to push his comedy career to the professional level.’

I took the rap on the knuckles like a man.

‘Okay,’ I said, getting down to brass tacks. ‘I’m thinking we’ll start from what we know. Asmodeus has been staking out the house where I live, in Turnpike Lane. We need someone watching the house on a rota. Two someones, ideally. The rest of us can spread out across the city and scry towards the cardinal points until we get an echo. If we do that enough times, and if he’s not moving around too much, we’ll be able to zero in on him a bit at a time. Then when we think we’ve got it narrowed down enough, Jenna-Jane can bring in the heavies. We’ll use nerve gas first – OPG, assuming you’ve got enough to go around. Soften him up with that, because in my experience he won’t sit still long enough for us to try anything fancy. If we play our cards right, nobody ends up dead.’

The silence that met my little Agincourt speech was deafening. By turns, everyone looked to Jenna-Jane, who glanced at Gil and nodded. ‘Mr McClennan,’ she said.

‘Everyone’s already briefed,’ said Gil, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I’ll be briefing Castor on the Strand haunting later, but there’s nothing we can do there until after dark, so the order of the day is Asmodeus. Pax and Etheridge are staying here to work on the raw data from the sightings. Pax is going to apply her own techniques to the map I was setting up. I’m still working through the grimoires with Klee and Middleton, so Sam and Castor can go over to the Stanger and grab us a focus. Sam’s in charge on that little outing, Castor, and you speak when you’re spoken to. Dr Webb, who’s in charge over there, made it clear to me when we spoke that he hates your guts, and the only reason he’s letting you back into the place at all is because of the respect he’s got for Professor Mulbridge. Does anyone have any questions?’

I had one, but since it was ‘What the fuck?’ I didn’t ask it. I didn’t have to; J-J answered it anyway.

‘You don’t just walk in and head a team, Felix,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘You’ve been away from the unit for a long time, and our operating methods have changed very significantly. Gil has my complete confidence, and I’m sure you’ll find him an inspirational leader.’

She turned on her heel and left, with a final nod to my new colleagues.

‘Any questions?’ Gil asked again, in a voice that expected the answer no. ‘Okay, then get moving, people. There’ll be time enough to sleep when we’re dead.’

‘Or possibly not,’ Samir observed scrupulously as we headed for the lift.