Vicious Circle

10

I drove back up Colney Hatch Lane like a bat out of some part of Hell where life was particularly cheap, took a hair-raising left onto the North Circular and accelerated to eighty. That took me past the Stanger, and I thought fleetingly of the incredible change that Rafi had undergone.

Why now? What had happened to trigger it? Were the forces that seemed to have driven so many Londoners over the edge into murderous insanity only one half of some cosmic see-saw that had also tipped Rafi back into his right mind? And was either end of the see-saw connected with the sudden interest that the Anathemata were taking in me? The link there was Peace. I was looking for him, and they were too. So were they only following me to get to him, or was there some other reason why I couldn’t spit without hitting them? And given what Matty had said about their attitude to the undead, what were they doing handing out stake-out jobs to the likes of Po and Zucker in the first place?

I pulled my attention back to the job in hand. Whatever was going down in White City, I needed some more information before I walked into it, that was for damned sure: otherwise what I didn’t know could end up hurting me quite a lot. I didn’t even know what I was going to do when I got there – I just had a feeling, maybe activated by seeing Susan Book in the middle of all the bad craziness, that this was somehow connected to what Nicky had described: the wave of murder and mayhem that had swept through West London on Saturday night. That part of the city was the epicentre of something very nasty: something subterranean that broke the surface as a murder here and a rape there – and now as a riot. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a link.

I turned on the radio, one-handed, and after a few wild stabs in the dark found the channel-search button. Samples of pop, reggae, advertising jingles and the occasional solemn BBC voice washed around my ears as I realised that I didn’t even know exactly where I was headed. Bloemfontein Road. I didn’t know it at all, but the announcer on the TV news had said it had a north and a south end, so we were probably talking about either a turning off the Westway or one of the maze of streets around the stadium. I just had to hope that once I got close enough I could find my way by following the flames and the sirens.

The road was reasonably clear at first, and I made good time – but the traffic was bound to start piling up once I got to Hanger Lane, and in any case there was a quicker route down through Willesden to Scrubs Lane. I realised as I turned off onto the Harrow Road that I was going to drive within a hundred yards or so of my office. Well, Pen was always telling me I should spend more time there.

‘– in what has rapidly turned into a siege situation.’ Finally! The tone as much as the words told me that I’d found what I was looking for. I stopped the channel search, again with a fair bit of fumbling, and turned up the volume. I also switched on the back wipers and the hazard lights along the way, but this was no time to worry about fine details. A man’s voice, solemn but with an undertone of excitement, blared out of the speakers, the car’s crummy sound system giving him a tinny echo. ‘It’s thought that there could be as many as twenty people still inside the shopping centre, but we don’t have any idea as yet how many of them are being held against their will, or even who their attackers are. The fires are mostly out now, and the immediate danger has passed, but these armed men and women have issued no demands and given no indication of what their agenda is. The earlier destruction seemed almost random, and from the sounds we can hear it’s still going on inside the centre. Only five minutes ago, an exercise machine came flying through a window on the upper level and fell onto a police car parked on the street below. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it’s a very tense situation here and there’s little prospect of it being resolved any time soon.’

A sudden absence of street sounds in the background made it clear that we’d gone back to the studio, as a second voice, female this time but with the same titillated solemnity, took up the story – or rather, hijacked it away into rarefied realms of speculation about terrorist cells and soft economic targets. I tuned it out. This wasn’t about terrorism, I felt that in my guts: it was about Nicky’s bell-shaped curve. And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you’re not going to like the answer.

My phone went off and I took it in case it was Pen, wanting to know where the hell I’d scooted off to in such a hurry. But it wasn’t.

‘Hey,’ said Nicky. ‘Catch you at a bad moment?’

The Civic was an automatic: I could manage with just the one hand, but I had enough to concentrate on without shooting the breeze with Nicky on top of it all.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Can I call you back?’

‘Sure. You watching TV?’

‘I was. Now I’m listening to the radio.’

‘Interesting times, eh? Call me when you’ve got a moment. But make it quick. This shit you need to hear. Actually don’t call me, because I’m going out to the Ice-Maker’s. You can meet me down there.’

‘Peckham? Nicky, it’s been a long day—’

‘Fine. Wait until tomorrow. It’s your call. But if I were you, I’d want this particular dish served hot.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I’d almost reached the Westway, which meant I had to be getting close to the action now. I slowed just a little as I came around the underpass in case I ran into any of those police roadblocks. Nothing to see, but as I passed White City stadium I caught sight of the flashing lights of the police cars a couple of hundred yards up the road. Okay, X presumably marked the spot. I took the first left, then a right – past a closed-up nursery school whose deserted swings and climbing frames leaped into the bleaching glow of my headlights: in the harsh light they were divorced from their functions in a way that was frankly sinister, looking more or less like the contents of a torture chamber.

I was counting off the distance roughly in my head, but long before I got to the next intersection I could see exactly what I was aiming for. Up ahead of me was a wall of red-brick which was already familiar from the TV news bulletin: the give-away, though, was the wide strip-sign hanging out over the road, which proclaimed Whiteleaf Shopping Centre in an Italic font with plenty of scrolling. Heavy coils of smoke hung above and around it, wearing out their welcome in the still spring air.

I turned off the lights and pulled over. Up ahead of me the street was packed with people: cops in uniform, ambulance crews, passers-by who’d stopped to watch the drama play itself out. I walked up, skirting the edges of the crowd as I looked for a way to move in a little closer without drawing unwelcome attention to myself. I didn’t have any definite plans past that point, except that I wanted to get inside the building and take a look for myself at what was going down in there. And that I wanted Susan the verger to get out of this intact, with all her doubts and hesitations. A modest enough goal, I thought. The police could sort out the rest of it: that was what they were paid for.

But the crowd was a solid wedge, and even if I could have got past them there was a police cordon all around this face of the building. To the right that cordon stretched all the way up the street back as far as I could see – probably all the way to the roadblock on the Westway. On the other side the houses came right up to the wall of the shopping centre, the last one facing it at an oblique angle like a dinghy that had collided with an ocean liner and been knocked spinning. I was going to have to try elsewhere.

That last house offered a possibility, though. It had a strip of garden to the side, bordering right up against the wall of the shopping centre. I slipped in through the gate, trying to look like I owned the place, and trotted around to the side. There was a fence at the back that was low enough to vault over; then another strip of garden, helpfully shielded from the house it belonged to by a clothes line full of washing. Unfortunately there was a stout, hatchet-faced brunette in the midst of the washing, presumably evacuating it to the safety of the house. She had two or three clothes-pegs in her mouth, but she gaped when she saw me and they fell out. Her shriek of surprise and protest pursued me across the narrow lawn to the higher brick wall on the far side. I took a flying jump and scrambled up, using elbows and feet.

I found I was looking down into a service area where a dozen or so lorries in red and silver livery were parked. No sign of any police cars, nor any rioters for that matter. Straight ahead of me there was a loading bay, and its corrugated-steel rolling door was only three-quarters shut. That’s an open invitation to a thief. I jumped down lightly on the further side, hearing a woman’s voice behind me yell, ‘There was a man, Arthur! There was a man in the yard!’ and a male voice truculently reply, ‘What effing man? I can’t see a man.’

I glanced around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then crossed quickly to the loading bay. There was a lorry drawn up there, its back doors wide open and its loading ramp lowered. An overturned pallet nearby had spilled brown cardboard boxes across the concrete apron in front of the rolling door. Whoever had been working here had downed tools pretty abruptly: with luck that meant they’d fled when the riot started, but it was also possible that they were among the hostages inside. I wondered belatedly what the Hell I was getting myself into here, but it seemed a little late to start having second thoughts. Probably the trick was to rule out stunts like this at the first-thoughts stage.

The rolling door would probably lift if I got my hands underneath it and pulled, but there was no way of telling how much noise it would make. Instead, I went down on hands and knees and went under it.

If someone had been waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have been an easy target as I crawled through on all fours and scrambled to my feet again on the far side: this wasn’t exactly covert infiltration. But the room I found myself in, long and narrow, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side with boxes and crates, was thankfully devoid of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with broken pieces of furniture. I stood still for a moment or two, listening, but the silence was absolute. All the action was clearly happening somewhere else.

But as I moved forward into the room, I started to become aware of a whole range of sounds almost at the limits of my hearing: dull thumps and muffled shouts, softened by the distance so that if you closed your eyes you could almost convince yourself you were listening to a cricket match on the village green.

There was no door at the further end of the room – just a square arch which led out into a larger warehouse space. I threaded my way cautiously through this, the back of my neck prickling every time I passed a darkened aisle. I came across an elevator shaft big enough to take me and the Civic I’d rode in on, but the elevator itself was elsewhere: the gaping doors opened onto a vertical corridor of grey breeze-blocks whose bottom I couldn’t see. I kept on going, until finally a pair of black rubberised swing doors let me out into a tiled corridor. The posters on the wall here, advertising designer jeans at less than half price and three hundred top-up minutes with every new phone, told me that I wasn’t backstage any more: I was in the mall itself.

I expected the corridor to bring me out into the central arcade, but I’d got myself turned around somehow and I ended up in a blunt cul-de-sac facing the toilets and an ‘I speak your weight’ machine. The noises were fainter here, but as I turned around to go back the way I’d come my other sense – the one I use in my professional capacity – went haywire. Something was coming down the corridor treading in my footprints, and I didn’t need any pricking in my thumbs to tell me that it was wicked: it was dead, or it was undead, or it was something worse. And whatever it was, it was heading straight towards me. Another second would bring it around the bend in the corridor and right into my line of sight.

Since there was nowhere else to go, I took a silent step backwards, pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilet and slid inside. If the thing was already on my trail, then it would certainly follow me inside – but at least now I had a few seconds to prepare a suitable reception.

My own silver dagger is barely more than a fruit-parer: I keep it, like the chalice, mainly for ritual occasions. But the knife that the loup-garou had dropped the night before was still in my outside pocket. I took it out and slid the cardboard sleeve off the wickedly sharp blade. Then I took up position behind the door and waited.

Footsteps echoed hollowly on the tiling outside, coming towards me, and then stopped. There was a silence, which stretched agonisingly: I imagined the thing, whatever it was, standing in the corridor just on the other side of the door, its own senses straining as it tried to decide whether I’d gone for the gents or the distaff side.

Then the door opened, and I tensed to lunge at whatever came into view when it swung closed again. The only thing that stopped me was a sigh, which sounded both long-suffering and a little disappointed.

‘Castor.’

False-footed, I let the knife fall to my side. Juliet pulled the door back towards the closed position a little way, and stared at me around the edge of it. Under a floor-length coat of black leather she was dressed in blood-red silk: a rose in a gloved fist. In the medieval Romance of the Rose, floral metaphors were used as a way of smuggling smut past the vigilant eyes of the Church. I thought of roses opening, and had to wrench my mind back brutally from pathways that would take up too much time, and leave me too far off balance.

‘I thought so,’ Juliet said.

As always when I feel like an idiot, I went on the offensive. ‘You thought so? What about that infallible sense of smell of yours? You should have seen me coming a mile off.’

‘Too many other smells about,’ muttered Juliet, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, as if to make the point. ‘There’s something else walking around in this building, and it’s a lot bigger and ranker than you are.’

‘I suppose I should take that as a compliment.’

‘Take it however you like.’ I suddenly realised that she was rigidly tense: the muscles in her neck standing proud of her alabaster flesh like filigreed ropes, and her posture stiff with readiness. The last time I’d seen her like this, she’d been hunting me: whatever she was hunting now, I felt sorry both for it and for anyone else who got in the way.

‘So where are they?’ I asked her. She shot a glance at me as if she was surprised to find that I was still there. ‘The hostages,’ I clarified. ‘And the rioters?’

Juliet glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Up there,’ she said. ‘Almost directly above us.’

‘How do you want to play this? And what are you even doing here in the first place? Did you see Susan Book on the TV news?’

She shook her head, frowning momentarily as if I’d accused her of something faintly indecent. ‘No,’ she said tersely. ‘But if I had, it would have been that much clearer a confirmation. This is all connected to what happened at St Michael’s. I’m certain of it. I’m getting the same sense here that I got there – the scent that faded when I tried to focus on it. This thing has broken cover. If I can get close to it, I’ll be able to see it for what it is.’

I digested that statement with some difficulty, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. Having important conversations in the toilet is very much a girl thing.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘we don’t really have the faintest idea what’s going on here.’ She seemed about to interrupt, but I ploughed on. ‘All we know is that there are some people up on the mezzanine tearing the place apart, and some other people who got in the way of that. You could be right: maybe there is something making that happen, and maybe it’s the same something that’s setting up house over at the church. Doesn’t really matter in any case. Now that we’re here, the best thing we can do is pull our little playmate out of the line of fire and then get the hell out before the police start to lob in the tear gas.’

Juliet shook her head irritably. ‘I’m only interested in finding the thing that brought me here. The thing I’m smelling. By all means rescue Book, if you want to. I can’t see how she’s relevant.’

‘She’s in love with you,’ I told her.

‘What?’

‘Well, in lust, I mean. She’s got a bad dose of that stuff you dish out, anyway, and being as how she’s both devout and straight she doesn’t have any idea how to handle it. You mean to say you didn’t notice how she looks at you?’

‘I tune that information out,’ Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. ‘You’re not asking me to feel – whatever it’s called – guilt about this, are you?’

‘No.’ It was my turn to be impatient. ‘But think about it. She might not have got herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.’

‘Her emotions are no business of yours – or of mine.’

‘Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.’

Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously: she still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve got an idea that might get both of us what we want. Let me show you something.’

I stepped past her, pulled the door open and went back out into the corridor. She followed me as I retraced my steps to the warehouse, and I showed her the open elevator shaft.

‘No use to me,’ I said. ‘But I thought maybe you could. . .’

‘Yes,’ said Juliet. ‘I could. But why should I?’

‘You want to look for your demon, and you don’t want to be watching your back all the time in case these nutcases stick a knife in it – especially not when the siege might turn into a firefight at any moment. So it makes sense if we clean up first and look around afterwards.’

‘Just tell me what you want me to do, Castor.’

‘You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. While they’re watching me, you sneak up behind them and take them out with your usual mixture of elegance and brutality. Then we’ll look around and see what we can see.’

I was really impressed with my own performance: my voice didn’t shake in the slightest. You’d have thought I waded into the middle of riots every day of the week – whereas, in fact, since my student days ended I’ve more or less kicked the habit.

I’d expected more opposition from Juliet, but she made a one-handed gesture that suggested she was sick of the subject. She shucked her coat and let it fall to the ground. Roses opening. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll climb the lift shaft. And you’ll—?’

‘I’ll use the escalator. I want to stop in at Top Man.’

Before she could change her mind I walked away, still trying not to think about roses.

The other end of the corridor opened directly onto the main concourse, which was looking as though a hurricane had hit it while it was pulling itself together after an earthquake. The floor was a carpet of broken glass from storefront windows, in which display dummies lay sprawled like place-holders for the dead. Someone had trodden down hard on the head of one of them, shattering it into powdery shards: for some reason I thought of Abbie’s porcelain doll, and shuddered in a kind of premonitory unease. Dress rails that had been used as battering rams lay half-in and half-out of the window frames they’d shattered, and up against one wall a gutted till leaked copper coins like congealed blood. This didn’t look like looting, though: not that looters have any higher standards of respect for the retail environment, but the crunching debris under my feet included wristwatches and shiny gold bracelets from a jeweller’s carousel that I’d already had to step over. At some point, the sheer fun of destruction had taken over from any purely mercenary considerations here. That told me a little bit more about what I was dealing with – in fact, at that precise moment, more than I wanted to know.

The escalators were right out in the centre of the lower piazza, which meant that as I approached them I had plenty of time to look up at the galleries on the first and second floors. The first floor seemed to be deserted, but up on the top level three men were struggling with a fourth in what I took at first to be a good-natured scrum. Then I realised that I’d misread the situation: it only seemed friendly because three of the men were laughing. The fourth wasn’t making any sound at all, because they’d gagged him before slipping the noose around his neck. Now they were tying the other end of the rope around the railings: it wasn’t hard to guess what the next item on the agenda was.

Okay, it was definitely time to make an entrance. I stepped onto the escalator, which wasn’t moving, and put my whistle to my lips. Walking slowly up the steps, and almost stumbling because of their uneven height, I played a shrieking, nasal blast like the scream of a lovesick bagpipe. The mall had pretty good acoustics, at least when it was relatively empty like this. Up above me the crazies paused in their recreations to look around and find out who was killing the cat.

They separated and stood up, allowing me to get a better look at them. They looked scarily ordinary: one in late middle age, bespectacled and balding, dressed in shirtsleeves and suit trousers; the other two much younger – one of them maybe no more than a student – and in casuals. You couldn’t imagine them carrying out a murder together. You couldn’t even imagine them standing in the same bus queue.

But this wasn’t the time to speculate about how they’d met and discovered a common interest in death by hanging. No, this was showtime. Theatre was going to be all-important here: I wanted them to keep watching me rather than getting back to the business in hand. I started to scuff my feet on each step, Riverdance-style, to get a rhythm going in counterpoint to the skirling notes I was pushing out of the whistle. Left foot and then right, raising my knees high and swaying my upper body from side to side like some kind of deranged snake-charmer trying to go it alone after his cobra had left him.

All of which combined to produce the desired effect. The three men abandoned their hog-tied victim and crowded to the railings to watch me walking up towards them. Then a whole lot of other faces appeared behind theirs, men and women both, clustering at the railings to peer past them with varying expressions of alarm, eagerness and incomprehension. I hadn’t seen these people before because they’d been standing away at the back of the upper gallery, presumably in a tight, attentive cluster.

My skin crawled. Somehow the intended execution was made infinitely worse by the fact that it would have had an audience. If I’d had any doubts before as to whether I was in Kansas or the merry, merry land of Oz, I ditched them now: whatever was going on here, it wasn’t natural.

I stepped off the first escalator, turned and crossed the short expanse of tiling which separated it from the second. That meant presenting my back to the crazies, which I didn’t welcome at all, but on the credit side it meant the escalator was going to bring me out on the opposite side of the upper gallery from where they were. Something big and heavy crashed to the floor right in front of me, showering me with shards of glass and plastic. It had been a sound system of some kind, speakers not included, and one of the fragments close to my foot bore the Olu of a Bang & Olufsen logo: not a missile you see used all that often. I stepped over it, and kept on going.

There were howls and jeers now from the gallery above me, followed by a rain of smaller objects that I didn’t bother to acknowledge. One of them thumped me in the back, but it wasn’t sharp, or heavy enough to break bone. Maybe I hiccupped on a note, but it’s not like I was playing Beethoven’s Ninth to start with. It was just noise, loud and discordant and impossible to ignore.

As I climbed step by step up towards the top level, the crazies ran around the gallery to meet me. That was good insofar as it took them away from the man they’d been about to kill, but bad because I still couldn’t see any sign of Juliet and I honestly didn’t think they were running to get my autograph. I got to the top of the escalator just as they rounded the last corner and came running towards me in a solid wall. I tried to swallow, but found that my mouth was dry: this was the moment of truth, and I normally prefer elegant prevarications. I cast one last forlorn glance around the gallery in the hope that my curvaceous, demonic cavalry might appear in the nick of time: no such luck. With a muttered curse, I slipped my whistle back into my inside pocket, out of harm’s way, clenched my fists and braced for impact.

The first of the rioters to reach me was a woman, dressed for the office in a pastel-coloured two-piece and sensible heels. The only thing that spoiled the ensemble effect was the claw hammer she was waving over her head. I jumped awkwardly back out of its way as it came down: then, since she followed through with her entire body, bending from the hip to get more of her weight behind the blow, I was able to hit her on the back of the head with a roundhouse punch. She went down heavily, the hammer skidding away across the tiles. I didn’t feel particularly good about it, but this was no time for chivalry.

In fact it was probably a time for running away, but I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of being run down from behind and trampled. As two burly men lunged for me at the same time, I ducked and crouched low to the ground, and their momentum carried one of them on past me, the other over my head in a graceless somersault.

That was it for tactics. A great many arms were clutching at me all at once, a great many fists pummelling at my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was hauled to my feet, then knocked sprawling again as the crazies got in each other’s way in their eagerness to claim a piece of me.

At that moment the shop window behind them – one of the few that was still intact – exploded outwards in a rapidly expanding flower of glass splinters which somehow, miraculously, gave birth to Juliet. She dived through the window head first, but rolled in the air and landed on her feet with a barely perceptible flexing of the knees. Then, having made her entrance and her point she strode forward with perfect poise, glass splinters pouring off her like water.

The crazies had turned at the sound, their assault on me slackening for a moment as they took in what was happening – and then for another moment, as they stared at Juliet and came to terms with her scarily perfect beauty.

Then the nearest guy swung a metal bar at her head. It wasn’t much of a bar: it looked as though it had been torn from a clothes rail of some kind, and it was probably hollow, so the chances are that it wouldn’t have done that much harm to Juliet in any case. But we never got the chance to find out: she ducked gracefully around it, took the guy’s arm at wrist and elbow and flung him backwards over her shoulder through the window she’d just smashed. Another man did manage to land a blow, with his bare fist, on the point of her jaw: she took it without comment and kicked him in the stomach, making him fold with an unpleasantly liquescent gurgle.

Without breaking stride she walked into the midst of the rioters, a cat among seriously unbalanced pigeons. They closed around her, hands and weapons raised, which only went to prove that they hadn’t really been watching when she came through the plate-glass window. It takes a lot to hurt Juliet; and then a lot more on top of that to slow her down. There were sounds of organic impact, truncated gasps and grunts, then the dull thunder of collapsing bodies as people fell like wheat around her.

There was a hypnotic fascination to it that made it hard to look away. But since the heat was off me, I reckoned I’d better put my time to some productive use. Turning my back on the scene of rapidly diminishing mayhem, I sprinted along the gallery to the section of railing that had been turned into an impromptu gallows. The man they’d been looking to hang was lying on his stomach on the floor, his hands and feet tied tightly and then an additional length of rope lashed between them so that his legs were bent back, his feet sticking up into the air. I used the loup-garou’s knife to cut this last rope, but the blade was too sharp for me to risk using it close to his wrists and ankles. I rolled him over on his back and hooked the gag away from his mouth. He was pale and sweating, his dark hair lank and his eyes exopthalmically huge. The fact that he was wearing a tie struck me as a piquant little grotesquerie: who goes to a riot wearing a tie?

‘The hostages,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

He spat in my face. ‘You fucking piece of shit,’ he screamed. ‘Satan will ream your throat out, you degenerate bastard motherfucker! He’ll shove his fist up your—’

A little of that kind of thing goes a long way. I stuffed the gag back in his mouth and wiped away the spittle while he glared and grunted at me. ‘Not on a first date, pal,’ I murmured.

Hostage, hostage, who’s got the hostage? I looked around for inspiration. The news footage had been shot from the front of the building, out in the street, and that was where I’d caught sight of Susan Book’s face peering out through the smashed window. I tried to orientate myself, remembering which way I’d come in and which way the main concourse underneath me ran. It seemed that the front ought to be over to my left, where foot-high red capitals shouted T. K. MAXX to the world.

‘Where now?’ said Juliet, appearing silently and alarmingly at my elbow.

I got to my feet and pointed. She walked across the gallery without a sound and entered the store. I shot a single glance back to the scene of the earlier engagement: bodies littered the ground, and none of them were standing.

I ran to catch up with her. ‘Did you kill anyone?’ I demanded.

‘No. There’s one who could die from her wounds – one of her comrades slashed her neck and shoulder with a knife, trying to get through to me. The rest will live.’

‘Thank God for that,’ I said, dryly. ‘I was thinking you’d just turn up the heat under their libidos and melt their brains into slush. This was a little more . . . direct than I expected.’

‘I tried,’ Juliet snapped. ‘They should have been incapable of any aggression as soon as they saw me. They should have been incapable of anything except involuntary orgasm.’

‘Oh. So what went wrong?’

‘Perhaps I’m losing my touch.’

It wasn’t that. Even without looking at her, I could feel her sexuality washing over me like a warm, caressing tide. And I knew from terrifying experience how strong the undertow was in those waters. But I think we both knew the answer: the demonic miasma was all around us now, and it had been ever since we got up onto this top level. These poor sods were possessed.

Without having to discuss tactics we both shut up at this point. We were walking through the shop, which was eerily silent apart from the mournful echoes of police bullhorns from the street outside: our own footsteps were very effectively muffled by the clothes spilled from the racks and strewn on the ground. The rails and shelf units were none of them higher than about four feet off the ground, so we had a good view of the big open-plan area we’d moved into, but up ahead of us the store curved around in an L-shape which we couldn’t see until we got to the end of the aisle. We weren’t trying for stealth, exactly – Juliet didn’t have much use for stealth – but we didn’t want the sound of our conversation to drown out any warning we might get of a possible ambush.

Rounding the corner, we found ourselves right in the thick of the party. The wall ahead of us now was the front face of the shopping centre – windows from floor to ceiling, with the night pouring in through that ragged hole in the centre pane that I’d seen from the other side in the news broadcast. To either side of it, maybe three or four men knelt low or flattened themselves against the wall, peering out at the cordon in the street below as if they’d never heard of police snipers. Further away from us still there was a circular display area ringed with floor-level mirrors, which seemed to have been intended for trying on shoes: in this cramped amphitheatre, two more men, one armed with a baseball bat, kept watch over a small, terrified huddle of presumably innocent shoppers. That was all – and it looked like good odds except that one of the men at the window had a rifle. Long-haired and thickly bearded, he looked as he swung back the bolt and put the first bullet into the chamber like someone who’d accidentally wandered off from the set of Deliverance and found himself in an episode of EastEnders.

All heads turned towards us, and I glimpsed Susan Book in among the hostages. I also saw a man lying full-length on the ground, a bloody hole where his face ought to have been. Susan was sitting right next to this poor bastard: her eyes widened when she saw me, and she opened her mouth as if to speak.

I spoke first. ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Saw you on the nine o’clock news. Where do we sign up?’

We were walking forward all this time, but now the man with the rifle swung it around to cover us. ‘You don’t,’ he snapped coldly. ‘You get with those dumb fucks over there, and you shut up.’

We kept on coming. ‘What kind of weapon is that?’ Juliet murmured to me under her breath.

‘Sports rifle,’ I growled back, sounding a lot more definite about it than I actually was. ‘Semi-automatic – which means one bullet at a time.’ The truth is, I know sod all about weapons despite having once lived for a year with a sweet girl who subscribed to Arms and Ammo; but this thing was all dark red wood and elegant curves. No gun that dolls itself up as pretty as that ever gets asked out to an actual battle. Plus it had a dinky little magazine about the size of a mobile phone. If it was ever set on auto, it would run out of bullets in the time it takes to scream ‘Die, mother—.’ On the other hand, and assuming the guy had a steady hand, that would be plenty long enough to see me and Juliet thoroughly ventilated. She’d probably survive that, unless the bullets were silver: the odds on me were a little longer.

Fortunately, these guys weren’t all singing from the same hymn book: the other three men, wielding various makeshift clubs and cudgels, chose that moment to charge us, helpfully blind-siding their friend. Juliet accelerated so that they’d reach her first, taking out two of them with strikes that I’d be happy to call surgical because most surgery leaves you unable to walk for a while and maybe a body part or so short.

The third man I managed to drop with a flying tackle, which was probably the best result he could hope for under the circumstances. We went down together, but with me on top, and though he swiped at me with the jagged metal shard he was using as a knife, my elbow in his face threw off his aim and slammed his head hard against the floor. He was still moving, though, and a lucky slash with that thing would leave me bleeding out on the floor, so I brought my knee up between his legs, introducing him to the concept of planned parenthood with immediate and devastating effect. Leaving him curled around his pain, I scrambled to my feet just as the rifle went off.

It wasn’t aimed at me, of course. These guys might be crazy, but it would be a special kind of crazy who pointed the gun somewhere else when Juliet was bearing down on him with her killing face on. The back of her jacket opened up at chest height as the bullet tore through, and a fine red spray showered my face and upper body.

The rifle was semi-auto: it had to be, because the man got a second shot off even as Juliet kicked him backwards through the window. He fell with a scream that sounded more enraged than afraid, and that was all he got in the way of famous last words: I heard the dull thump as he hit the street.

‘Juliet!’ I shouted. ‘For fuck’s sake, they’re possessed. There’s something riding them!’

She didn’t seem to hear me. She turned, a little bent over, her movements too slow, just as the two guys who’d been guarding the hostages charged her from the side.

One of them had a knife, and he slashed at her stomach. The other swung his baseball bat and hit her full in the face. She reeled with the blow, then stabbed out with her left hand, putting her thumb and middle finger through the second man’s eyes.

That left the knife-man, and as he brought his hand back for a second thrust I finally, belatedly, forced myself to move. I went directly for his knife hand, grabbing hold of it in both of mine and twisting it up behind his back with brutal, desperate force. He dropped the knife, and Juliet, glancing over her shoulder and seeming to notice him for the first time, swept her fist up in an uppercut that almost took his head off his shoulders. He slithered to the ground between us, already unconscious.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked Juliet, my chest heaving both with the effort to catch a breath and with the nausea that was beginning to hit as the adrenalin turned sour in my stomach.

‘I’m fine,’ she muttered, but there was a breathy gurgle behind the words that scared the shit out of me. Her shoulders were bowed: she was inspecting the bloody mess in the centre of her shirt front, and her feet shifted a little as if she was having a hard time keeping her balance.

I jumped to a conclusion. A whole generation of entrepreneurs were making their first fortunes by trading on the fears that the living felt for the living dead: silver-coated ammunition was just one of the fads that had come in as a result. ‘Juliet, was the bullet—?’

I could only just hear her answer. ‘Silvered. Yes. But it only went through my lung. I think I can . . . deal . . . with the . . .’

Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t fall. All her attention was turned inward, and wherever she was right then I knew she wasn’t going to be aware of her surroundings for a while. From the street outside came shouted orders and the wail of a single siren. The police weren’t going to wait much longer before storming the place: not with bodies flying out of the windows.

I turned to look over at the hostages. Susan Book was already heading towards me, but the others were all still in a huddle against the base of the wall, some of the kids sobbing and keening, nobody daring to move. I opened my mouth to say something – probably something along the lines of ‘You’re safe now.’ Susan’s hand lashed out, and as I reflexively parried something red shot from her fingers to bounce off my chest and hit the floor at my feet. I didn’t even see her other hand come up: her nails raked my cheek, savagely deep, and I staggered back in numb surprise. She followed up, punching and clawing at me as she screamed obscenities into my face. The same obscenities I’d heard from the almost-hanged man outside, mostly, focusing on my sexual relationship with my parents and the cocks I’d suck in Hell: it was like some kind of virus.

I fended Susan off, using my height and reach to block her wild, uncoordinated attack. I didn’t want to hurt her, though, so I was backing away across the floor, calling out her name as I gave ground in an effort to wake her out of whatever trance she was in. Then a shelf unit bumped against my back and I had to stop, which meant that she was finally able to close with me: out of options, I knocked aside her clutching hands and punched her hard on the point of the jaw. She went over backwards, and there was an alarming crack as the back of her head hit the tiles.

It was followed a moment later by the crump of a detonation, and another window blew out as something hard and metallic shot through it to arc end over end through the air, trailing a plume of feathery smoke. As it landed and bounced, another and then another window burst, and the screams of the hostages drowned out all other sounds – even the hiss of the tear-gas grenades releasing their indiscriminate loads.

I staggered back to where Juliet had been standing, almost slipping as my foot came down on something smooth and hard. I glanced down: it was a Victorinox Swiss Army penknife, multi-functional blades extended at both ends. Susan’s weapon: I’d been within an inch of being corkscrewed to death.

Juliet was kneeling over the body of one of the fallen rioters, her hand on his chest: I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but then I realised that she was searching his pockets. I grabbed hold of her arm and her head snapped up: her dark-eyed stare locked with mine. My eyes were starting to water as filaments of CS gas drifted across the store.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I shouted over the shrill screams. ‘This is to soften up the opposition. Any moment now they’re gonna storm the place.’

Juliet stood, with some difficulty. ‘I’ll have to lean on you,’ she rasped, and she almost fell into my arms as I led her back the way we’d come. The hostages would be okay, I told myself. They’d suffer from the effects of the gas, but the cops would be all over the place within the next couple of minutes so the riot was over. There was nothing we could do for them now that the paramedics couldn’t do a whole lot better.

All the same, I felt more hollow than heroic as I staggered back down the stalled escalators, Juliet leaning heavily against my chest, the harsh gurgle of her breath in my ears. She’d been right: something was loose in here, and it had our number – turning victims into aggressors with a magical wave of its invisible hands, wrapped around and around us like some kind of spiritual smallpox blanket, infecting where it touched.

Skirting the debris in the ground-floor arcade was a lot harder now that I was steering for two. As we headed for the corridor where the toilets were I heard the loud slam of the main doors off to our left and the crunch of running, booted feet on the shattered glass. I went a little faster, risking a misstep that would send us both sprawling on our faces. We got into the corridor and the echoing steps ran straight on past. I was expecting a voice from behind us to shout, ‘Stop where you are. Put down the succubus – slowly!’ But it didn’t happen.

The loading bay was still empty. I got Juliet to the edge of the platform, set her down, then jumped to the ground myself and hauled her after me. Amazingly, exasperatingly, in spite of everything that had just happened and the sick horror that was throbbing inside my head, I was still responding physically to her closeness – still breathing hard and heavy, and feeling my prick stir inside my pants, as I inhaled her primal perfume.

She couldn’t climb the wall: she could barely walk. But there was a gate at the far end of the yard, and it was only bolted rather than locked. I slid the bolts and we limped through, both of us torn and exhausted and blood-boltered, like the last contestants in a dance marathon in Hell.

I had to slow down once we got out onto the street. It was dark, so if we stayed away from the street lights nobody would be likely to see our various wounds and blemishes, but the way we were staggering would draw attention anywhere. I pulled Juliet close to me and tried to pretend that we were lovers drunk on our own hormones – and, yeah, before you ask, that was an easy part to play. Every inch where our bodies touched was an inch I was painfully, achingly aware of.

The road we were in led back around to the street where I’d parked, bringing us out again behind the rubbernecking crowd. There was a whole lot more going on now, and nobody had time to notice us. Police were pushing the lollygaggers back while officers with riot shields and impact armour ran across the road towards the mall’s front entrance. White-shirted ambulance crews brought up the rear. The assault had begun in earnest now, and we’d got clear with seconds to spare.

I propped Juliet up against the car and got the passenger door open. She was starting to pull out of it now, or at least to recover some degree of control over her own movements, and she was able to lower herself into the seat without much help from me. I shut the door without slamming it, went around to the driver’s side, slid in and started the engine.

Since the road ahead was blocked I had to make a three-point turn in the road. Fortunately there was enough street theatre going on that nobody spared us a glance. We drove back towards White City stadium, where I pulled over because my hands were shaking so much that I wasn’t really safe to drive.

Juliet’s breathing was shallow now, but even, and she was looking at me with something of her old, cold arrogance in her eyes.

That stare made a lot of possible words die in my throat. Finally I said, ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into that.’

‘It’s all right,’ she answered, her voice still a harsh rasp. ‘It was . . . interesting.’

‘No, I mean I’m really sorry you were there. You killed a man, and probably blinded another. If I’d known you were going to let out your inner demon—’

She cut across me, remorseless. ‘One man was dead already. How many more do you think would have died if I hadn’t acted?’

‘We can’t know that.’

‘No,’ she agreed, sounding almost contemptuous. ‘We can’t.’

‘Was it worth it?’ I asked, still shell-shocked. ‘Did you get any kind of a handle on what we’re dealing with here?’

‘Oh yes. Didn’t you?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Although—’ I fell silent. There had been something familiar in the way that formless evil had presented itself to my sixth sense: but it had been mixed up with a lot that was purely alien, and the gestalt effect hadn’t been something I’d been able to focus my mind on for very long – like trying to join the dots when they were spinning separately in a whirlpool. I didn’t finish the sentence: there didn’t seem to be any good way of explaining what I’d felt. ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Give me the starting prices.’

‘Soon,’ said Juliet. ‘Not yet. And not here.’ There was a long silence. Then she turned and stared at me. ‘Castor—’ Her voice had a breathy echo to it that suggested she still hadn’t finished repairing the damage to her lung.

‘What?’

‘Is that how you dress for dinner?’