Thicker Than Water

10

As it happens there are two demons within my immediate circle of acquaintances. Pen had Rafi in mind, for many reasons besides the strictly pragmatic, but of the two of them Juliet is the easier to deal with by a factor of a million: and Juliet was already on the case, in a way, so I dropped in on her first.

I tracked her down at the library in Willesden where her partner, Sue Book, now works. Juliet was waiting for Sue to finish her shift, after which they were going to some kind of a book launch and public reading together. The two of us sat in the children’s section, because children at least were immune to Juliet’s lethally intense sexual aura. But there were a few mothers and fathers dotted around the room, too: Juliet ignored their uneasy, covetous stares and heard me out while I described my latest adventures at the Salisbury.

But she didn’t offer any insights of her own, and in the end I had to put the question directly.

‘So did you make it down there? If you didn’t, no pressure — I know you didn’t make me any promises and you don’t owe me anything. But this has got me scratching my head, Juliet. Anything you could throw me would be good.’

‘I was there,’ Juliet said.

I waited for more, but more didn’t come. Juliet looked down at the book she was reading: The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was a subversive enough juxtaposition to throw me a little off my stride.

‘So what did you find?’ I asked, when it was clear that she wasn’t going to volunteer anything further.

She looked up at me again. A human woman — or man, for that matter — would have looked at the book in order to avoid eye contact, but Juliet was incapable of feeling embarrassment or social awkwardness. She was a stone-cold fact, exquisite and unapologetic, in a world of nuances. So she was looking at the book because something I’d said or something she was thinking had made a connection. To hunger? To caterpillars? To metamorphosis?

‘I can’t discuss this,’ she said.

I took a look at the other people in the room. It was true that there were a lot of eyes on us — or rather, on her. ‘Okay,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘But if I hang around until after the reading, could we–’

‘I don’t mean here and now, Castor. I mean ever. This isn’t a subject that can be raised between us.’ Her stare was cold and stern: she knew me, and she knew how hard it was for me to take no for an answer. She was warning me with her eyes that any subsequent answers would be smackdowns.

But fools rush in, as they say. ‘It kind of already has been,’ I pointed out. ‘Raised, I mean. Can you at least tell me whether you felt this thing?’

‘No.’

‘Or whether you recognised it? Whether it’s something you’ve met before?’

‘No.’

‘But you’re a ghost-breaker,’ I pointed out. ‘This is your living, right? What if I hired you to–’

‘I said no, Castor. I’m not for hire. If you can handle this yourself, do so. If you can’t, don’t come to me for help or try to pick my brains with one of your stacked games of twenty questions. It will cause friction between us. It could even compromise our friendship.’

Before I could think of a question that wouldn’t sound like it was a question, Susan Book crossed the room and joined us. She put a hand on Juliet’s shoulder: Juliet took it in her own, touched it to her lips and then replaced it.

Susan beamed at me. Being with Juliet had made her blossom: turned her from a shy, conflicted little mouse with a self-effacing stammer and a tendency to blame herself for other people’s failings into a woman with confidence and quiet charisma. Sex is magic, and she was tapped into the wellspring. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t envy her that.

But in case the point needed to be made, that unobtrusive little kiss on the back of the hand reminded me that there was a lot more to this relationship now than sex. Susan loved Juliet, wholly and desperately and unquestioningly. And Juliet — felt something too. Something that made her protective and a little possessive and occasionally exasperated when Susan wouldn’t do as she was told or see things as they obviously were. Might as well call that love, too: it had a lot of the hallmarks.

‘Hi, Felix,’ Susan said. ‘Are you going to come along with us to the Martin Amis thing?’

‘And be lectured about how Muslims ought to smack their kids more? Nah,’ I said. ‘No, thanks. You crazy kids go and enjoy yourselves.’

I stood up, trying not to let my consternation and annoyance show on my face. Juliet had warned me once before this — about a year before, if memory served — that certain subjects would always be taboo between us. Heaven and Hell were on the list, and so was God, and so were her own nature and origins. It would be useful to know which of these, if any, were operating here: but Susan’s arrival had made it impossible for me to fish any further.

‘We will,’ Susan said, presumably referring back to my begrudged ‘Have a good time’, or whatever it was I’d said.

Juliet made a sour face. ‘Ideas,’ she said.

‘Nothing wrong with ideas, Jules,’ Susan chided gently.

‘No. But my comfort zone is flesh.’

On which note I said my goodbyes, feeling none too happy.

If Juliet wasn’t going to play ball, I was left with Asmodeus. And Asmodeus was a different proposition altogether.

Bigger, for one thing. Meaner. And living inside my best friend.

Rafi only started playing with black magic after he met me and saw the things I could do. This was during my brief, abortive stint at university, when he was an elegant wastrel and I was a working-class Communist with a chip on my shoulder the size of the Sherman Oak. We vied briefly for Pen’s affections, although Rafi never had any doubt that he’d win in the end. He always did: he was one of the people who life went out of its way to accommodate.

Rafi was never part of the exorcist fraternity: he was just an enthusiastic amateur with a sharper mind than most who mixed and matched necromantic rituals until he put one together that actually worked. But he was never a completer-finisher, either, which was the first part of his downfall. He left out one of the necessary wards, and the magic circle that should have kept Asmodeus safely contained was fatally flawed. The demon — one of the most hard-core bastards in Hell — battered his way out and into Rafi’s soul.

A lot of things could have happened at that point: demonic possession is a fairly new phenomenon, and not all that well documented. What actually happened was that Rafi became delirious and got so hot he actually seemed in danger of catching fire. His girlfriend called me, and I tried to carry out an exorcism.

That was the coup de grâce. I’d never encountered a demon before, let alone one as powerful as this. I screwed up badly, welding the two of them together in a way that I couldn’t undo. Asmodeus has lived inside Rafi ever since, the senior partner in a very unequal alliance.

For Rafi it was effectively the end of any kind of normal life. A human soul is pretty lightweight when weighed against one of Gehenna’s finest, so Asmodeus would surge up and take the driving seat whenever he felt like it. After a couple of ugly incidents, Rafi was sectioned under the Mental Health Act: there are aspects of the way we live now that the law hasn’t caught up with yet, and this was one of them. Being realists, though, the senior management at the Stanger wrote ‘Schizophrenic’ on the paperwork, while at the same time they lined Rafi’s cell with silver to curb the demon’s worst excesses.

For three years we bumped along and made the best of a bad job: I went along to the Stanger every so often and used my tin whistle to play the demon down so that Rafi got some peace, and Doctor Webb, who ran the place, was happy so long as we kept the money coming.

Happy, that is, until he got a better offer from a former colleague of mine: Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the director of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s hospital in Paddington. Jenna-Jane was just a ruthless monster back when I worked for her, but for the past couple of years she’s been reinventing herself as a crazed zealot, convinced — just as Father Gwillam is — that humanity is now engaged in a last-ditch, apocalyptic struggle against the forces of darkness. As far as I can tell, she sees her role as broadly similar to Q’s in the James Bond films: humanity’s armourer and engineer, forging the weapons that we’re bound to need when the dead and the undead back us up against the wall and finally come squeaking and gibbering for our throats.

But before she can be Q, she has to be Mengele. She’s turned the Helen Trabitch Wing at Queen Mary’s into a little concentration camp over which she rules with loving, obsessive sadism, and she’s managed to persuade the CEOs of the hospital trust that this still counts as medicine. She’s got an amazing variety of inmates there: werewolves, zombies, the oldest ghost ever raised and some tragic nutcase who thinks he’s a vampire. About the only thing she hasn’t got is a demon, and she’s got her heart set on acquiring Rafi.

About a month back, the cold war between me and J-J got a little hotter, as it periodically does: it looked like she was going to be able to persuade the High Court to overturn a decision made by a local magistrate, which had given Pen power of attorney over Rafi. She was looking to have Rafi transferred from the Stanger to the MOU, with the connivance of Doctor Webb, whose balls she seems to have in her pocket.

But I’ve started a ball collection too, and the aforementioned magistrate is part of it. I got my own court order, immaculately forged, and went in first. Webb and J-J woke up the next morning to a fait accompli. Rafi was gone, having traded the dubious hospitality of the Stanger for the ministering hands of my good friend Imelda Probert — known to most of London’s dead and undead as the Ice-Maker.

It was a spoiler run, and it was desperate improvisation. At the Stanger, Rafi was penned in a silver cell and Webb and his team had a dozen or more ways, ranging from subtle to brutal, of keeping Asmodeus in check when he rose into the ascendant. Now all we had was my whistle, and Imelda — who had never thought that this was a good idea in the first place.

As I trudged back to the Tube, I imagined the ructions I was going to have with her, and the sheer gruelling agony of whistling the hell-spawn up and then back down again in a single session. It was going to be bad. Bad for me, anyway: Pen would see it differently, because she’d be able to visit with Rafi while I — assuming things went to plan — consulted his bad-ass alter ego.

But when I went back to Pen’s to give her the equivocal tidings, she was waiting with the phone receiver still in her hand and some news of her own to pass on.

‘Someone called Daniels,’ she told me. ‘They said it was about Billy. Billy’s awake.’

‘That’s great,’ I said, but Pen was looking solemn and troubled.

‘Apparently not,’ she said.

It was practically on our way: a crow flying across London from Turnpike Lane to Peckham and sticking to the rules would pass within a spitball’s distance of the New Kent Road. Pen wasn’t eager to break the journey, but I had two trump cards. One was that Tom and Jean Daniels were potential clients: Pen likes me to earn money, because I owe her a vast amount of the stuff and every little helps.

The other was what Coldwood had said about someone watching Pen’s house. I’d had my radar out since then, looking for tails, but there hadn’t really been anything at stake until now. If it was Jenna-Jane, hoping I’d lead her to Rafi, then the more twists and turns we added to our itinerary tonight, the better. We had to be damn sure that when we got to the Ice-Maker’s we’d be alone.

So we went to the Salisbury, and as we passed into the shadow of the first two concrete monoliths Pen gave an involuntary shudder.

I stared at her curiously. ‘You feel it?’ I demanded.

‘I’m just cold,’ Pen muttered.

‘Billy’s awake,’ Jean Daniels said, almost before we’d got inside the door, ‘but he’s not himself, Mister Castor. He’s wandering in his mind. Tom was sitting with him up until an hour ago, but he had to go and sign on down at the job centre.’

She pointed me through to the living room. Bic still lay on the sofa where I’d deposited him the night before, but in his pyjamas now rather than his street clothes, and with an old overcoat, by way of a blanket, covering him up to the waist. The pyjamas were red and blue: Spiderman fought Doctor Octopus across the front of them.

Bic’s eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see me. He was restless, his fingers moving with small fluttering motions as though he was a guitarist trying to remember a chord sequence with no instrument ready to hand. His lips were moving too, although no sound was coming out.

‘What did they say at the hospital?’ I asked.

Jean flicked a doubtful glance at Pen, seeming reluctant to drag out family business under the eyes of a stranger.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘This is Pen Bruckner. She’s my landlady. She’s also sort of a shareholder in the business, on account of I owe her more than I’m worth.’

Jean accepted the explanation with a hapless shrug: needs must when the devil drives, she seemed to say. ‘They told me he might have a concussion. Then he woke up and they said he didn’t. Then he started to talk all funny, and he didn’t seem to know who I was, so they decided they weren’t sure. They gave him some tests but they wouldn’t tell us what any of the results were. It was obvious they didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him. We were there for five hours, waiting on some consultant or other, and when he came he only said again that it wasn’t a concussion and Billy would probably be all right inside of a few hours.’

She rubbed furiously at her eye, more as though she wanted to force a tear back inside than to wipe it away. ‘They were going to keep him in,’ she said, her mouth setting tight at the memory, ‘but when I asked them what they were going to do they couldn’t give me a straight answer. Keep him under observation, they said. As if that’s going to make him better all by itself. So we brought him home. But he’s getting worse, Mister Castor. It’s like he’s got a fever, only he isn’t hot. So I told Tom we should call you, and we had a big row about it and he said I could only do it when he wasn’t in the house because he doesn’t believe in any of the things you were talking about. I suppose I didn’t either, until all this happened. But there’s no point sticking your head in the sand. This isn’t a medical thing, is it? It’s not a medical thing at all. Not with the bleeding and the dreams and all that. It’s . . .’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Well, I think it has to be something more in your line, doesn’t it?’

I nodded, but for a moment I didn’t speak. The miasma — the migraine buzz in the air, the prickling sense at the back of my skull — confused my death-senses to the point where they were almost useless. I honestly couldn’t tell right then if Bic was one of the loci it was coming from or not. On the other hand, I’d seen him the night before about to sleepwalk off the edge of a balcony sixty feet above the ground. And I’d seen his hands running with blood despite the absence of a wound. If it wasn’t possession, then what was it?

‘Yeah,’ I said at last. ‘In my line, certainly. But I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what it was, Jean.’

‘I don’t need to know,’ Jean said, her voice thickening. ‘Just bring him back. That’s all I want. If you can do that, I’ll pay you anything you want.’

It was an empty boast. How much could she afford, if Tom was on job-seeker’s allowance? Even a tenner would probably stretch the budget. But why had I come here if it wasn’t to do the job? And how could I smack this woman in the face with charity after everything else she’d been hit with? It was a knotty problem whichever way you looked at it.

And then there was the matter of my own professional competence, which I reckoned we’d better get sorted right now before we went any further.

‘I don’t know if I can do it or not,’ I told her. ‘Because like I said, I don’t know what I’m dealing with. If I do bring him back, it’s not likely to be on the first pass. It could take a few days, and a few visits, with nothing promised at the end of it. I’m prepared to try. That’s the best I can offer.

‘As far as money goes — I’m sort of already working this case for another client,’ I said, shading the truth without blushing. ‘So I can offer you a discount. In fact, under these circumstances I’ll work COD. I won’t charge you anything up front, but I’ll send in a bill if Billy gets better and doesn’t get sick again.’

‘A bill for how much?’ Jean persisted, no doubt being far too used to the foibles of debt collectors and money-lenders to fall for vague expressions of goodwill.

‘A hundred,’ I said, plucking a figure out of the air. ‘A hundred quid.’

Jean did some quick mental arithmetic, her eyes moving from side to side as she shunted invisible beads on an invisible abacus.

‘All right, Mister Castor,’ she said at last. ‘A hundred it is.’

I took out my whistle. Jean stared at it a little blankly. ‘I’m on my way to another appointment,’ I said, which was also true. ‘But I’m going to do a preliminary examination now and see what I can find out. Then I’ll come back later — or more likely tomorrow — and spend some more time with him.’

Jean looked at me forlornly. ‘Tomorrow?’ she repeated.

‘I don’t know what I’m dealing with,’ I reminded her. ‘So it’s the best I can do. If it’s a ghost, or –’ I skirted around the word demon ‘something like a ghost, then I need to get a fix on it. Kind of a psychic mugshot. I can’t do anything else until I’ve got that. I still think getting Billy out of here would be the best medicine for him, but if he has to stay on the estate then I’m going to have to do what I always do, which is to work the thing out in stages. Or you can tell me to bugger off, if you want. But either way, I don’t want to give you any false hopes.’

Jean looked at the whistle again, and shook her head. She wasn’t turning down the offer: I think she was just struck with wonder at how slim a reed she was clinging to.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘No false hopes.’ She tried to laugh, but it just loosed the tears at last and she broke down in front of us, which was what she’d been struggling so hard not to do all this time.

Pen scooped her into an embrace, saying the usual consoling nothings. We exchanged a glance over Jean’s bowed head, and I pointed towards the kitchen.

‘Let’s get ourselves a cup of tea,’ Pen suggested, taking Jean in hand and steering her in that direction with the magic of artificial good cheer. ‘I can talk you through what Castor does while he’s doing it, and then we won’t be getting in his way.’

They went through into the hall and I pushed the door to. Pen hadn’t needed to ask why I wanted to be alone for this. She knows from past experience that when I’m putting a tune together for the first time — using the music as sonar to zero in on a dead or undead presence that I haven’t got a proper fix on yet — the two things that are most likely to screw me up are strong emotions and external sounds.

I turned to look at Bic. He had carried on twitching and muttering all through our conversation, his eyes wide and unseeing. Lost in his own little world, Jean had said, describing what her son was like when he was reading superhero comics. Well, he was now, that was for damned sure. And wherever that world was, it was a long way from South London.

Sitting on the arm of the sofa, I closed my eyes and fitted the whistle to my lips. I blew a few exploratory notes, drawing them out long and slow, not even trying to fit them together into a phrase. They faded from the air but remained in my mind and on my inner ear: something to build on. The next notes had a suggestion of melody to them, although it was a melody that kept changing its mind, rising and then falling, approaching a resolution and then shying away from it, breaking into discord and then finding the key again when you thought it was out of reach. Gently and painstakingly, I assembled braided ropes of sound and sent them out into the room. And as they grew in complexity, my sense of the room itself faded. I drifted in an undefined un-place, drawn along in the wake of my expelled breath like a sailboat making its own headwind.

Two presences hung off to the right of me, one small and bright, the other huge and sprawling and dark: the boy’s soul and its passenger. But bright and dark were metaphors in this case, because I wasn’t seeing them with my eyes: it was more like how a bat sees a moth, through the shapes made by the distorted echoes of its own shrill cries.

I tried to stifle the surge of triumph that I’d found the thing so soon, because finding it wasn’t the same as driving it out. But it seemed like a good omen, all the same, and I couldn’t resist the urge to push it a little further. I played an atonal sequence that approximated to a stay-not: a crude command to the dark thing to piss off out of here before things got rough. The notes rolled straight forward from my mind like the bow wave of my will and consciousness. They touched the edges of the dark thing.

It backed away from me, in some direction that wasn’t up or down or left or right or anything else I could find a name for. It receded or shrank, and I pressed it hard with more and louder trills and elisions, the tune becoming a hurried, spiky thing with no grace to it but lots of momentum.

Bourbon Bill Bryant, the former ghostbreaker who used to run the Oriflamme, the exorcists’ pub on Castlebar Hill, told me once that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in our profession is to go hunting bear with a pea-shooter. Pretty self-evident, you’d think: but that was the trap I’d fallen into. I was chasing this thing just because it was running away, forgetting that until I had a clear enough mental impression of it to feed into the music I was not only wielding a pea-shooter — I hadn’t even brought along any peas.

Suddenly, the darkness was no longer receding. It was standing still, and I was rushing towards it. It seemed to grow, not continuously but in a series of flickering freeze-frames, becoming denser and deeper and bigger by the moment. I was sailing into a storm, and there was nothing ahead but blackness.

I modulated the tune, letting it dip almost into silence, letting the wind drop. But the darkness was moving toward me now of its own volition, and it was so huge that I had no sense any more of where it began and ended. It was the world around me. It was the hungry void in which I floated, and although it already filled the sky it was still getting closer.

When it was right on top of me, my skin prickling with the ghost-sense of imminent contact, I forced myself to open my eyes. It felt like I was hefting two bowling balls, one on each eyelid. My sight was swimming, both eyes watering and stinging as though I’d jammed slivers of raw onion into my tear ducts. There was a ringing in my ears. But I was back in the real world, so abruptly that it felt like that moment just before sleep when you jolt back into wakefulness with a feeling like you’ve fallen out of thin air onto the bed.

Bic wasn’t moving any more. He was preternaturally still. Very distinctly, he said, ‘I got the sword.’

‘What sword is that, Bic?’ I asked, my voice scraping against the sides of my dry throat.

‘Wilkinson’s. Wilkinson’s Sword.’

‘Just those three words?’ Pen demanded.

‘Yeah. Just those three words.’

‘But what did he mean?’

I shook my head, walking faster so that she had to trot a little to keep up. We could have grabbed a cab down to Peckham, but I was restless and walking felt like a good way to burn it off. A little unfair to Pen, though, whose legs, although in perfect proportion to the rest of her, are a good bit shorter than mine.

‘You don’t know either?’ Pen asked.

‘I know what the words mean,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just not sure who was saying them.’

‘Fix, am I going to have to drag this out of you one syllable at a time? Either tell me or–’

‘Wilkinson’s Sword,’ I said, ‘is a well-known and popular brand of razor blade, second only to Gillette in UK market share.’

Pen digested this in silence for a moment or two. ‘The boy who died,’ she mused.

‘Mark. He was a self-harmer. So is Kenny.’

‘The bully who beat you up when you were a kid? Are you sure?’

‘Reasonably sure, yeah. He’s kept his dead kid’s hurt-kit and there’s so much scar tissue on his wrists he’d have a hard time putting his hands in his pockets.’

‘Is there a connection?’

I shrugged irritably. Having to tell Jean Daniels that I’d blown the gig had left me in a sour mood. I’d promised to come back and try again, but for the time being all I’d managed to do was calm Bic down a little and leave him in a light, seemingly normal sleep. It was some considerable way short of a command performance. Whatever this thing was, it had stopped me cold. But then again, I’d gone in half-cocked, so I had nobody but myself to blame.

Which was about as much of a consolation as it ever is.

We were on the outskirts of Peckham by this time, and Pen’s excitement was becoming a palpable thing. Short legs and all, she was outstripping me now: but then, I was only going to have a chat with a demon — a process that always carries the risk of agonising death — while she was going to meet her lover. On balance, her jubilant horniness took some of the edge off my unease.

And there’s a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean plastic. If you set your back against the kitsch-Bauhaus folly that is Peckham library and walk half a mile south towards the common, you’ll eventually find yourself walking through streets that the property developers haven’t found their way to yet: streets where endless curved terraces of turn-of-the-century three-storey town houses, like the tiers of some city-sized amphitheatre, have been left to fall in on themselves at their leisure. There’s a hectic tubercular beauty to them.

The two of us threaded this maze, thinking our own separate thoughts. I knew what Pen’s were, more or less, because her walk was halfway to being a run by this time, and her hands kept clenching and unclenching from sheer nervous energy. Mine were focused on the question of whether we were being followed. By this time I was almost a hundred per cent certain that the answer was no: not because I hadn’t seen anyone — that didn’t mean a thing — but because I’d added enough loops and squiggles as we went from Pen’s place to the Salisbury to force any tail either to drop us or to show himself. I was satisfied that we were safe, but I remained in paranoid mode because it has its uses.

Imelda Probert’s place stands on a cul-de-sac that reminds you of the literal meaning of that term — the arse end of a bag. There was precious little beauty to be found here: just the ugly functionality of boarded-up windows, basement-level front lightwells turned into skips and shipwrecked cars lying dormant under birdshit-spattered tarpaulins.

We ignored the front door, which had been screwed immovably into its frame in aeons past, and went in via the side alley. That meant braving the yard, where weeds grew to the height of men and every clump of grass hid a broken bottle. Pen led the way with reckless speed: I followed more cautiously, knowing from previous visits how treacherous this terrain could be.

We walked up the stairs in the sullen twilight of a forty-watt bulb. On the second floor Pen’s eyes strayed to a door that was scrawled over and over with makeshift wards and sigils and had been closed with a heavy padlock. She slowed for a moment. This was the lodestone that had been drawing her, and it was hard for her to walk on past it. But she knew there was no way into that room except with me and Imelda to act as Virgils to her Dante.

Imelda is a faith healer for the dead. Most of her work comes from zombies, who find that a laying-on of hands from the Ice-Maker slows down the processes of organic decay for a month or so at a time. That’s a precious boon to zombies, whose biggest problems are the ones that arise from a limited shelf life. But Imelda’s motto is ‘come one, come all’: she’ll help loup-garous keep their animal side in check at the dark of the moon, arrange for bereaved spouses and parents to meet their lost loved ones, and probably do a lot of other things besides that she wouldn’t advertise to a practising exorcist like me.

We continued our ascent to the third floor, where we knocked politely and waited. No wards on this door: no sprigs of hazel or hawthorn or stay-nots in crude, dyspeptic Latin telling ghosts and the undead to shove off without passing GO. Imelda likes the undead and makes them welcome. She’s a lot less certain about me, though.

From inside the flat there came the sound of a great many bolts being drawn back, and then the heavy door creaked open to reveal the wary but curious face of Lisa, Imelda’s sixteen-year-old daughter. She grinned when she saw me.

‘Oh, look what the cat sicked up!’ she said, in gleeful imitation of her mother. She stood aside and we walked through into Imelda’s hallway, which was no better lit than the landing but a lot more spacious: her flat may be falling apart but it’s built on a grand scale. The floor under our feet was actually slightly concave, a sign of some deep malaise of the floorboards hidden from sight by the bilious green carpet.

‘You’re looking well,’ I said to Lisa. ‘Does that mean you’re pregnant again?’

She punched me in the arm, which I took as a fair riposte. In fact Lisa had never been pregnant in the usually accepted sense of the word, but the ghost of a dead baby had taken up lodgings in her once — a regrettable side effect of having no wards on your door — and Imelda had called me in to persuade it to go elsewhere: that had healed a rift between me and the Ice-Maker, and it had made it possible for me to approach her when I had a problem of my own that seemed to need the touch of her skilled hands.

‘Your mother in?’ I asked, rubbing my arm because Lisa packs a powerful punch for such a skinny little kid.

‘I dunno. I’ll go see,’ Lisa said, and then without moving from the spot she bawled ‘Mummmmmmm!’ at the top of her voice.

A door slammed open in the recesses of the flat and heavy footsteps sounded, heading towards us. The rest of the building is empty, so any time you move you raise echoes as hollow and resonant as if you’re walking on a drumhead. Imelda likes it that way, though: she never has to keep the noise down for fear of what the neighbours will say, and there’s nobody to object to the odd hours she keeps or to the inevitable stream of mostly posthumous late-night callers.

Pen and I both looked off left as the footsteps approached the other side of a door whose paint looked not so much chipped as partially boiled. It swung open and Imelda loomed into view, stepping out of a room that was completely unlit. She was a formidable black woman, in her late fifties now but as imposing as she’d been at thirty, with a hard, beautiful face like sculpted ebony and arms like a pair of late-autumn hams. She was dressed in a midnight blue Ashoke-style dress that flowed like churning water when she walked. The Met office would issue a storm warning as soon as they caught sight of her.

‘Hello, Felix,’ she said, civilly enough. Then she turned to Pen and beamed all over her face. ‘Pamela! He’s been asking after you, honey. Doing nothing but. And when he’s not asking after you he’s thinking after you. I can tell every time, because he gets a Pamela look on his face that I can’t mistake for anything else.’

Pen smiled weakly but gratefully. ‘Can I see him, Imelda?’ she asked, putting her hand on the older woman’s arm.

Imelda patted it reassuringly. ‘You mean private?’ she said. ‘Of course you can. Just as soon as me and Felix have gone in there and done the necessary.’ And then to me. ‘Felix, shall we make a start?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘But then I’m on again after Pen. I need to talk to Asmodeus.’

There was a moment when a pin dropping would have sounded like a steel band.

‘Now that wasn’t in the deal,’ Imelda said with dangerous mildness. ‘Not the way I remember it.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We won’t be talking about the weather, Imelda. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.’

The Ice-Maker wasn’t impressed. ‘I got a kid here,’ she said, waving a hand towards exhibit one. ‘You think I want to be summoning up demons in my own house?’

‘I’m not a kid, Mum,’ Lisa protested, scenting excitement. ‘I’m sixteen, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t use that kind of language!’ Imelda snapped.

‘I think the pair of us can handle him,’ I said. ‘And you know you can lock him away again when we’re done. He’d be within the wards and he’d be on the leash. The whole time.’

‘There isn’t a leash short enough for that kind.’

‘There are two of us and one of him.’

Imelda shook her head, not only unconvinced but angry. ‘We had an agreement,’ she said. ‘I said I’d let that sick man stay here, and I said I’d keep his fever down — but that’s all I swore to do. He stays in that room. I go in to him whenever he needs me. End of story. Now you’re asking me to raise the fever up instead, and that goes against the grain of me. The stink of a demon in my place — it will make everything I do harder. I’ll live with it for weeks, and I’ll feel like I’ve got the damn flu the whole time. And that’s the least of it. Calling him makes him stronger, you damn well know that. So why should I do it, Castor? What have you got to tell me that will make me think it’s worth it?’

That was a good question. I decided to duck it until I could think of a good answer. ‘Let’s go ahead and get Rafi ready to receive visitors first,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see if we can cut a deal.’

With an expressive look at me, Imelda swept away. I followed, and Pen remained behind. At this stage of the game, her presence was a wild card that we surely didn’t need.

Down on the first floor, Imelda traced a line around the padlock with a stick of charcoal that she took from the blue-black folds of her gown. Then she spoke to it before she unlocked it and left it hanging on the hasp. There were two further locks on the door itself and they both got the same treatment. Then she stood back and I led the way into the room — the moment of greatest risk, reserved for me because this whole thing had been my stupid idea in the first place.

I’d taken a lot of pains setting the room up in the week or so before we made the raid on the Stanger, so it was a big improvement over Rafi’s cell back there. It had furniture in it, for one thing, and a bookshelf with books on it — including his precious Kerouacs, Corsos and Ginsbergs — and an icebox with a few cans of Fosters floating in cold water that had been ice the evening before. All the comforts of home, give or take: nothing electrical, no TV or fridge, because things of that nature interfere with Imelda’s wards. But back at the care home, Rafi lived in a bare silver box and was given nothing that Asmodeus might use to raise mischief. Even his clothes had to be free of buttons and zips. By contrast, this was one of the corner suites at Claridges.

Rafi was lying on the bed reading the previous day’s Guardian when we entered. He sat up and nodded to us both.

‘Hey, Wonder Woman. Hey, Fix. What’s new? Are we still good?’

‘Still fine, Rafi,’ I assured him. ‘No news is good news. Webb doesn’t seem to be missing you very much.’ I was watching Rafi as I spoke, alert for any trace of the demon Asmodeus in the way he moved or spoke. There was nothing. The Ice-Maker had touched him and he was still chilled.

All the same I played him a binding tune, and Imelda touched him some more on the head and face and shoulders, murmuring to herself in throaty Gabon French as she did so. It was the first time we’d worked in tag-team format like this, but we fell in with each other’s moves without needing to discuss it.

Rafi didn’t talk either, until we’d finished. Then he voiced the question that had been on his mind ever since we’d walked into the room. ‘Is Pen with you?’

‘Nah, she had to do her hair,’ I said, and then, before his face could register either dismay or disbelief, ‘She’s upstairs. She clocks on as soon as we clock off.’

‘Then don’t let me keep you,’ he said, waving us towards the door. ‘Oh, did you bring the whisky, Fix?’

‘I’ll drop it in later,’ I promised. ‘Before I leave, there’s something I want to talk to you about.’

While Pen got her conjugals, securely locked in with Rafi behind the barricade of wards, I explained to Imelda what I’d seen and felt on the Salisbury estate. She was about as impressed as I thought she’d be. ‘You need to drink a little less coffee, Castor,’ she told me stonily. ‘Your nerves are getting jumpy.’

‘I’m serious, Imelda,’ I said, not rising to the bait. ‘This is real, and it’s nasty.’

‘Then go do that thing you do.’ She said this with a contemptuous edge in her voice: like I said, to the Ice-Maker the dead are friends and clients. Consequently she doesn’t have a whole lot of time for exorcists.

‘I intend to,’ I said, flatly. ‘But I’d like to know how the land lies. You don’t defuse a bomb by picking it up and shaking it to see what rattles. You check what kind of trigger it’s got.’

‘What in God’s name do you know about defusing bombs?’

‘About as much as I know about freestyle tap-dance,’ I admitted. ‘But I do know about frying the undead — saving your presence — and I know I’ve got a better chance of coming out of this on my own two feet if I get some decent intel.’

We argued it backwards and forwards a little without getting anywhere. And when it was clear that Imelda wasn’t going to concede the point, I shifted my ground.

‘What if Asmodeus gets out anyway?’ I asked her. ‘We’ve got him under control at the moment, but that might not last. Wouldn’t you like to test the strength of those wards on the door while you’ve got me around as back-up?’

By way of answer, Imelda stood up and beckoned me to follow her. We went across the barren space, smelling slightly of decay, that she calls her waiting room to a doorway, on the far side of which Lisa was reading Hello! magazine by the light of a stub of candle.

‘So say we test the wards, and they fail,’ Imelda said. ‘That’s my sweet girl there, Castor. The only thing I’ll leave behind me when I’m gone to show I was ever here. I stretched a point already, letting you bring an âme raché into my house. I stretched it as far as it’s going to go. Do I want to test the wards? Hell, if that thing gets out of him, all the wards in the goddamn world aren’t going to slow it down for the time it takes you to fart, Castor. I’m relying on the strength of my hands. They’ve never failed me yet.’

I threw up my hands in a gesture of surrender. I could see I wasn’t going to carry the point. By this time Pen’s hour was up and we were getting into overtime. We went downstairs, letting our feet fall heavily to announce us. When Imelda was finally done with the locks and bolts, Pen and Rafi were sitting demurely on the bed together, just holding hands.

I held out the whisky and Rafi let go of Pen’s hand to take it.

‘Jameson’s,’ he said without much enthusiasm. ‘I asked for single malt.’

‘You get single malt when I get a paying gig,’ I told him, and he grunted in disapproval. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I guess we’d better hit the road.’

‘I thought you had something you wanted to say to me.’

I shrugged. There was nothing else I could do. ‘It’ll keep,’ I said. ‘Pen, whenever you’re ready.’

They embraced, long and lingering: in the end I made a throat-clearing noise and they peeled apart reluctantly. Don’t think I was just being an arsehole here, by the way: we’d learned by trial and error that the heightened arousal Rafi gets from being around Pen tends to undo the effect of Imelda’s benediction and my playing. An hour is safe. An hour and a half is usually okay. Two hours or more is asking for trouble.

‘You’re working on the Tune, right?’ Rafi asked me. When he says it that way, with the capital letter, it only ever means one thing: the music of unbinding, the tune that will sunder him from Asmodeus and leave him once again as sole tenant in his own skin.

‘Always,’ I told him, which was as good as saying ‘No news since the last time you asked.’

He nodded slowly, staring me in the eyes the whole time. He knows the only leverage he has on me is my guilt and so he plays it up, afraid that I might one day forget who carries the lion’s share of the blame for what he is. He doesn’t have to worry on that score, but you can understand why he doesn’t take it for granted. I broke that ancient-mariner stare and turned to leave, my hand already on the handle of the door.

The whisky bottle hit the wall right next to my head and shattered spectacularly.

I turned with my mouth open on an oath, but the look on Rafi’s face silenced me. He was staring in shock and horror at his own left hand, which was rotating on his wrist as though he was flexing before some strenuous exercise. I saw the truth in his eyes. Then the hand and arm lifted, against Rafi’s straining efforts, and beckoned me to return.

I didn’t: not straight away. First I went upstairs to get pen and paper.

‘So let’s be absolutely clear,’ I said, looking not into Rafi’s eyes but at his twitching left hand. A black biro was loosely propped between his thumb and forefinger, and a page from the newspaper was spread across the table between us. ‘Asmodeus?’

The moving biro wrote, and having writ moved on. A single word. Yes.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Imelda murmured in her throat. Pen just gave a forlorn moan.

‘How?’ I demanded.

Rafi wrote: The usual way.

‘So you’re building up an immunity to Imelda’s treatment. Very kind of you to let us know. We’ll try harder next time.’

The hand twitched and scribbled, the pen held at a crazy angle, the letters produced gradually by what seemed at first to be random strokes and slashes. You’ll be civil. If you want answers.

I tried to keep a poker face: Asmodeus had the left hand, and clearly he could hear me, too. Safest to assume he was also looking out through Rafi’s eyes. ‘You’ve got some answers for me?’

Ask me a question.

Might as well go for broke. ‘What’s happening on the Salisbury estate?’

A door opening, Rafi wrote. An eggshell breaking across. Call it metamorphosis. Call it transformation.

Great. Who’s up for a game of twenty questions? ‘So what’s changing into what?’ I demanded. ‘Or are you getting writer’s cramp?’

Rafi’s hand laid down the pen, flexed and unflexed, then picked it up again. You’ll laugh when I tell you. It’s a huge joke, mostly on you. But there are two sides to every deal, Castor. You haven’t asked me what my consultation fee is.

And here we were, at the top of the slippery slope. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘How about this? You tell me what I need to know, and I’ll keep doing whatever’s necessary to make sure Jenna-Jane doesn’t get to add you to her zoo.’

But you do that for your friend, not for me. I need

The sheet of paper was now completely filled with angular scrawl. I flipped it over — Rafi’s hand twitching all the while as though the flow of nerve impulses couldn’t be stopped or slowed — and Asmodeus went on as though there’d been no interruption. something else.

‘Like what?’

Entertainment. Delectation. Tasty morsels to gladden my jaded heart.

Despite the situation, I almost laughed. The images conjured up by the words were too grotesque to take seriously. ‘How about an Indian takeaway and a belly dance?’ I suggested.

My tastes run otherwise.

‘Be specific. I’m no way signing you a blank cheque.’

You feed me. And I’ll feed you.

‘Meaning?’

Bring me to it. This thing you want to kill. Set me free, so I can carve off a little piece of it for myself, and enjoy it at my leisure. When I’ve eaten my fill, I’ll tell you how to deal with whatever’s left.

I sat irresolute. I looked into Rafi’s eyes but Rafi only shrugged brusquely, his shoulders hunched and his mouth set in a grimace. This was nothing to do with him, and he obviously wasn’t enjoying the experience.

Imelda saw my hesitation. ‘No deal,’ she said, a warning note in her voice. And I knew damn well she was right.

‘Tell me a way to do this that doesn’t leave you loose in the world when it’s over,’ I said to the invisible presence. ‘Meet me halfway, Asmodeus. If this is something you really want, make it possible for me to say yes.’

The hand stopped its restless movement and lay still for a few moments on the paper. Then Rafi, with a wince, lifted it to head height and massaged the wrist with his other hand.

‘That fucking hurt,’ he said.

Pen was at his side in a moment, embracing him fiercely. Imelda turned to me, her face hard. ‘What did we miss?’ she demanded. ‘What trick did we miss?’

I shrugged. ‘We didn’t miss a thing. I think he’s been building up to that. Keeping a piece of Rafi under his control so he could pull a little coup when the right time came.’ And why would that be now? I wondered but didn’t say. Why had he shown his hand?

Because he felt pretty damn sure that I’d be taking him up on his offer, either now or later.

Rafi disentangled himself from Pen’s consoling arms and stood.

‘You’ve got some more work to do,’ he said to me and Imelda, a tremor in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘You’re right.’ I took out my whistle and blew a low, sustained note while Imelda clamped her strong hands to either side of Rafi’s skull. We got busy.

Again.