Vicious Circle

11

There’s a Thai restaurant up by Old Oak Common where I’d eaten a few times before. It’s a perfect place for snacks and cocktails after work, or after summarily executing deranged riflemen in gutted malls – and since there’s no dress code, it doesn’t even matter if you’ve been shot through the chest and a massive exit wound has spoiled the line of your jacket.

To be fair, by the time we got there Juliet was looking almost as fresh and fragrant as if she’d just stepped out of the shower – an image I had to rein in sternly before my imagination got out of hand. The blood that had saturated her shirt front had disappeared, and the line of bruising along her jaw had faded to near-invisibility. I’d seen Asmodeus do something similar to Rafi’s body when it had taken some damage in one of his rampages, but this was more extreme and a whole lot quicker – I guess because Rafi’s body was still made of real flesh and blood at the end of the day, while Juliet’s was made of – something else. I never know how to ask.

A maître d’ whose suavity was a little dented by Juliet’s black-eyed gaze seated us in the window – no doubt seeing what kind of effect she was likely to have on the passing trade. As soon as he’d left, she reached into her pocket and took out a thick wad of paper, which she unfolded and put down on the table between us.

‘Patterson, Alfred,’ she said, fanning the sheets out. ‘Heffer, Laurence. Heffer, John. Jones, Kenneth. Montgomery, Lily.’

It was a sheaf of photocopied pages, all in the same format . Each one had a passport-sized photo in the top right-hand corner: mostly men, a few women, all ordinary to the point of banality. The faces stared up at me with the terrified solemnity you’d expect from people whose lives had just body-swerved away from them into insanity and despair.

‘These are police SIR sheets,’ I said.

Juliet nodded, looking at the menu.

‘How did you get hold of them?’

‘A nice young constable at Oldfield Lane ran them off for me.’

I thought very carefully about the wording of the next question. ‘Did you bribe him, or—?’

‘I let him hold my hand.’

A waiter had started to hover: he was barely more than a kid, with ginger curls and plump, freckled cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off Juliet. Of course, better men than me have fallen at that hurdle. I looked up and tapped the table with my fingertip: after a moment he turned with a slight effort to meet my gaze, as if he was unwilling to acknowledge that I was there. ‘Can I get you any drinks to start with?’ he asked, in an artificially bright tone.

‘I’ll take a whiskey,’ I said. ‘A bourbon if you’ve got it.’

‘We’ve got Jack Daniels and Blanton’s.’

‘Blanton’s. Thanks. On the rocks.’

‘Bloody Mary,’ said Juliet, predictably. The waiter tore himself away from us with difficulty and trotted off, looking back over his shoulder at her a couple of times before he disappeared from view.

I went back to the incident forms. Some of them I vaguely recognised from the news articles I’d seen open on Nicky’s desktop last night. Alfred Patterson was charged with strangling a complete stranger with his own tie in an office off the Uxbridge Road where he used to work. The two Heffers, father and son, had apparently raped and murdered an eighty-year-old woman and then thrown her body into the Regent’s Canal. Some of them were new, though. Lily Montgomery had been arrested and remanded after police were called to a loud domestic: they found her sitting on the sofa quietly knitting next to her dead husband, who had choked to death on his own blood after his throat had been perforated with two sharp objects entering from different sides. Her knitting needles were oozing half-congealed blood all over the baby booties she was making for her niece, Samantha, aged eleven months, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

There were more. A couple of dozen, at least. After a while I just skimmed them, noting place and time while avoiding the noxious, heartbreaking details in the Summary box.

The waiter came back with our drinks. He almost spilled my bourbon in my lap because of the problem he was having with his eyes, which still kept being wrenched back to Juliet’s face and body whenever he let his concentration slip for more than half a second. We gave our food orders, but it was kind of a triumph of hope over experience: the kid wasn’t writing anything down, and nothing was going to stick in his mind except the curve of Juliet’s breast where it showed through the ragged tear in her shirt.

He hobbled away again, and I shook my head at her. ‘Can’t you let him off the hook?’ I asked.

She arched an eyebrow, mildly affronted. ‘He’s eighteen,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing anything – that’s all natural.’

‘Oh. Well, could you maybe go into reverse or something? Pour some psychic ice water over him? It’ll only improve the service.’

‘“Go into reverse.”’ Juliet’s tone dripped with scorn. ‘You mean, suppress desire instead of arousing it?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘I’ll leave that to you.’

‘Ow.’ I mimed a gun with my right hand, shot myself through the heart. That brutal directness, so easily mistaken for sadism, is one of the things I like best about Juliet. She’s a good corrective to my own natural sentimentality and trusting good nature.

I turned my attention back to the SIR sheets, going through them a little more carefully this time.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I get the point. They’re all local, and the odds against this many violent incidents in such a small—’

I stopped because she was shaking her head very firmly.

‘Well, what?’

‘This.’ She tapped the bottom sheet, which I’d somehow managed to miss because it was in a different format and seemed to be just a list of names. I’d vaguely assumed it was an index of some kind, since some of the names were the same as the ones on the incident forms. Now I looked again, and the penny dropped. If the bourbon hadn’t already been exquisitely sour, it would have curdled in my stomach.

The list, which had been produced on a manual typewriter with the help of a small lake of Tipp-Ex, was headed with the single word Congregants.

‘Holy shit,’ I murmured.

‘No, Castor. Unholy shit. That’s the point.’

‘These people all go to church at Saint Michael’s?’

Juliet nodded.

‘And now they’ve all turned into homicidal maniacs.’

‘That’s a question of semantics.’

‘Is it?’

‘If you call it insanity, you assume they’ve lost the ability to make moral judgements.’

‘Raping pensioners? Knit one, pearl one, puncture windpipe? What do you think they’ve lost?’

‘Their conscience. Whatever evil was inside them already has been given free rein. Whatever desires they feel, they satisfy by the simplest and most direct means they can find. If it’s lust, they rape. If it’s anger, they murder. If it’s greed, they pillage a shopping mall.’

‘So you think those people at the Whiteleaf—?’

‘I don’t think. I checked.’

Juliet reached into the same bottomless pocket, brought out a small clutch of wallets and billfolds and let them fall onto the table. I suddenly remembered her on her knees next to one of the men she’d felled: I thought she’d been checking him for a pulse, but obviously she’d been frisking him.

‘Jason Mills,’ she said. ‘Howard Loughbridge. Ellen Roederer.’

I checked the list, but I already knew what I’d find there.

‘And Susan Book,’ I added, just to show that I was keeping up.

‘And Susan Book. Of course.’

Our food arrived. The waiter drew the process out as long as he could, his stare all over Juliet from every angle he could decently manage. I sat on my impatience until he’d gone.

‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘All these people were in church on Saturday, when . . . whatever it was that happened, happened? And it somehow turned off all their inhibitions? All their civilised scruples? Made them into puppets that can only respond to their own desires?’

Helping herself to some mee goreng that she hadn’t ordered, Juliet nodded curtly. ‘They’re possessed,’ she said.

‘What, all of them?’

‘All of them. Do you read the Bible much, Castor?’

‘Not when there’s anything good on the TV.’

‘Commentaries and concordances? Textual exegesis?’

‘To date, never.’

‘So do you know what the Jewish position on Christ is?’

I shrugged impatiently, really not wanting to sit through what looked like it might be a very circuitous analogy. ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘They probably think he got in with the wrong crowd.’

‘I mean, what exactly do they think he was? What kind of being?’

‘I give up. Tell me.’

‘They think he was a prophet. Like Elijah, or Moses. No more, no less. One in a long line. Someone who’d been touched by God, and could speak with God’s authority, but not God’s son.’

‘So?’

‘But Christians think that the indwelling of God in Christ was different in kind from his indwelling in the prophets.’

I took a long slug on the whiskey, as an alternative to playing straight-man. Presumably Juliet would get to the point without any prompting from me.

‘As in Heaven, so in Hell,’ she said. ‘When demons enter human souls, they can do it in a lot of different ways.’ There was a pause while she ate, which she did with single-minded, almost feral enthusiasm. Then she fastidiously licked the corner of her mouth with a long, lithe double-tipped tongue. That had made me shit a brick the first time I’d seen it. Nowadays I just wondered what else she could do with it besides personal grooming.

Juliet held up an elegant hand and counted off on her fingers. Her fingernails shone with copper-coloured varnish; or, possibly, they just happened actually to be made of copper tonight. ‘First, and easiest, there’s full possession, in which the human host soul is overwhelmed and devoured, and the body becomes merely a vessel for the demon as long as it chooses to use it. That’s commoner than you’d think, but usually it can only be done with consent.’

‘You mean people ask to have their souls swallowed?’

‘Essentially, yes. They agree to a bargain of some kind. They accept the terms, and the terms include forfeiting their soul. Obviously they may have an imperfect understanding of what that means. An eternity of suffering in Hell, or separation from God, or whatever the current orthodoxy is. But for us, it only ever means the one thing. It’s open season. We can eat them.’

Strong-stomached though I am, I was in danger of losing my appetite. Juliet was enjoying this too damn much for my comfort.

‘Who lays down the rules?’ I demanded. ‘“Open season” implies someone dealing out the hunting licences. Is that—?’

‘There are some things I’m not prepared to tell you,’ she interrupted, making a pass through the air with her hand like someone waving away a paparazzo’s camera. ‘That’s one of them. But if you were going to say “Is that God?” then the answer is no. It’s more . . . involved than that.’

‘Involved?’

‘Complicated. Things fall out in a certain way, and accidents of the terrain give birth to rules of engagement. But in any case, that’s one form that possession can take – the most extreme form. The demon devours the human host and lives in its shell.’

‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘Go on.’

‘Number two is house arrest. It’s possible for a demon to overwhelm a soul without its consent and hold it captive. Again, that would allow it to use the host body as if it was its own, but the human soul would still be inside, witnessing its own actions and even experiencing them, but as a passenger rather than a driver.’

‘Fuck.’ I let my laden chopsticks fall back into my pad thai. That was what Asmodeus did to Rafi: hijacked the bus and made him watch while he went on a joyride that was still going on two years later.

‘One and two have a lot in common,’ Juliet said, ignoring my discomfort. ‘They both involve the demon literally invading the human host. But there are other ways in which human and demon can be grafted together. Other degrees and gradations, I suppose you could say. At the opposite extreme, a demon can gift a man or woman with a tiny part of its own essence.’

‘Gift?’

‘Infect, if you prefer. Impart. Impose. Don’t argue semantics with me, Castor. You can’t expect me to have the same moral perspective on this that you have.’

‘I guess not,’ I acknowledged. ‘And yet, here you are.’

Juliet shrugged with her eyebrows. ‘It’s a job.’

‘Right. Like if bubonic plague was a woman, and she signed on as a charge nurse in a hospital.’

She actually laughed at that. ‘Yes. Exactly. Anyway, the point about gifting is that we can do it as many times as we like. It diminishes us a little, and that imposes a limit. A strong demon could gift a couple of hundred people at once, but it would be severely weakened afterwards. To get its full strength back, it would have to call all those pieces home eventually.’

‘But in the meantime—?’

‘In the meantime it would be as if each of those people had a tiny demon of their own, inside them – not controlling them, but encouraging them to see things from a more infernal perspective. And again, the stronger the demon, the more intense the persuasion. You might experience it as just a slight change in perception – so you’d suddenly be aware that if that traffic cop flags you down you could swerve just a little, hit him with your nearside wing and give him something else to worry about. Or that if your girlfriend doesn’t want to kiss on a first date, drugging her and raping her is still an option.’

‘Can I get you anything else?’ The waiter had appeared again, assiduous as ever, like a dog who has to have a stick thrown for him every so often to stop him from humping your leg. I asked him to bring me another whiskey, but Juliet passed.

‘Okay,’ I said after he’d gone, ‘you’ve made your case. Saint Michael’s was visited by a demon, and little pieces of this demon rained down on all the people who were there at the time. But the demon didn’t possess them fully: he’s still there, inside the church, in some form or other, which explains the cold and the slo-mo heartbeat and all of the rest of that shit.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Juliet.

‘Just joining the dots. Isn’t that what you meant?’

Juliet downed her Bloody Mary in a single swallow. ‘It’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘But I was giving you an example, not an explanation. Something possessed the Saint Michael congregation, yes. Something strong enough to leave a piece of itself in each and every one of them. That could be a demon, but it wouldn’t have to be. Human ghosts can possess living things, after all – you’ve met the were-things.’

I nodded reluctantly, but I wasn’t sold on that explanation. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘I have. And if there’s one thing I know about loup-garous, it’s that they go for animal hosts for a reason. Human minds are too hard – way too hard. You hear stories about that kind of possession, but I never came across a case yet where it’s been proved to have happened.’

‘Then I might be about to make history.’

Juliet’s tone worried me. ‘I thought we were here to discuss strategy,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve come up with a plan all by yourself.’

‘I’m going to go in,’ she said.

A whiskey appeared at my elbow. I took it without even looking: right then, the sight of the waiter’s eager-puppy face would just have screwed up my mood even further.

‘Go in where, exactly?’ I asked, although I had a pretty good inkling already.

‘I’m going to treat Saint Michael’s church as if it was a living thing,’ Juliet said, ‘and try to possess it. If there’s an invading spirit there, whether it’s a ghost or a demon, then it ought to be driven out by my arrival.’

‘You could do that?’

‘Yes. It’s not the way I normally work, but I was born and raised in Hell, Castor. Of course I can do it.’

I mulled the prospect over, unhappily. Something about it gave me a dull twinge of foreboding, but it took me a moment or two to isolate what it was. Then I saw the flaw. ‘You said it would take a fairly big player to do something like this,’ I reminded her. ‘To possess so many people all at the same time. Whether it’s a demon or a ghost or whatever the Hell it is, what do you do if it’s stronger than you? I mean, suppose you go into your trance or whatever, and you send your spirit out into the church . . . Do demons even have spirits?’

‘No. Demons are spirit. If it’s stronger than me, it will lock me out: I’ll try to penetrate, and the church simply won’t let me in: I’ll find it solid and dense instead of porous. In any case there’ll be no risk to speak of. I’ll either succeed or I’ll fail. And if I succeed, it might help me with that dietary problem we were discussing.’

‘You could feed on this thing?’

‘I could absorb it. It wouldn’t be like feeding for me, because I feed when I fuck. It would be more like taking nourishment through a drip.’

‘Which is better than starving to death,’ I allowed, without much enthusiasm. I tried to catch the waiter’s eye, failed, managed to snag the maître d’s instead. ‘But the same point applies. If you go head-to-head with this thing, and if it’s bigger and stronger than you to start with, then maybe it’ll be you that ends up on the menu.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Juliet. ‘Maybe. Does that worry you, Castor?’

I measured my words out with care.

‘It’s a job,’ I reminded her. ‘You offered me part of the fee. If you get eaten by a church, I end up a little poorer.’

She looked at me with wicked amusement. ‘Do you think that would be a waste?’ she asked. ‘Me being eaten? Or do you want to volunteer for the job yourself?’

I put my chin on my fist, pretended to consider. ‘I took the pledge,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll never let another woman pass my lips.’

‘A man of principle. I despise that: it’s bad for business.’

‘When are you planning to do this?’ I demanded, cutting through the banter. It was making me uncomfortable because the physical desire Juliet arouses is very real and very acute; and because, given that she is what she is, I know exactly where that desire leads. That fact makes jokes about oral sex ring a little hollowly.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Five minutes to midnight.’

‘Why so precise? What happens then?’

‘Moonrise – except that tomorrow is dark of the moon. It’s a propitious time.’

‘I’d like to be there for it. As back-up, in case something goes wrong.’

Juliet looked a little perplexed. ‘What could you do to help,’ she demanded, ‘if something went wrong?’

‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. ‘But that party at the mall gave me the thin end of a scent for this thing. Maybe I could run interference for you.’ I half-lifted my tin whistle out of my coat pocket and let it slide back again.

Juliet’s eyes narrowed slightly, which I could understand. Showing the whistle was a little bit like offering Superman a kryptonite sandwich. But her tone stayed cool, even slightly bored. ‘You know where I’ll be,’ she said. ‘And when. If you want to come along and watch, be my guest. Don’t bring the whistle, though. Or if you bring it, keep it in your pocket. Your aim isn’t as good as you think it is.’

It was hard for me to argue with that, with Rafi chafing at the edges of my thoughts the way he was right then. That was certainly a demonstration of how dangerous friendly fire could be. I knew I was better now than I had been then, but I could see why Juliet wasn’t keen on the idea.

I stood up, leaving the cash on the table.

‘My treat,’ I said. ‘I came into some money.’

‘Mackie,’ Juliet quoted, ‘how much did you charge?’

‘Funny. I always knew they’d play Bobby Darin in Hell.’

‘Kurt Weill,’ Juliet corrected.

‘Bless you,’ I deadpanned.

The waiter looked stricken to see us go. If Juliet ever came off that diet, she’d be sure of a good meal here.

We said goodbye on the street, without much in the way of small talk, and Juliet walked away with her usual ground-eating stride, not looking back. Showing her the whistle seemed to have spoiled the mood somehow: probably because it reminded her that I was the closest thing the human race had to an antibody against her kind. I’d have to remember that another time, and be more tactful.

I was bone-weary, but Nicky had said he had important news for me, and I’d agreed to meet him at the Ice-Maker’s place, south of the river. That was a fair old haul, but at least the roads would be clear now. I considered leaving Matty’s car where it was and taking the Tube – since I didn’t have the ‘it’s an emergency’ excuse to call on any more – but that would mean getting back here somehow, probably after midnight, and then driving all the way back East again. I couldn’t quite face that.

I drove south down Wood Lane, vaguely intending to cut down through Hammersmith and Fulham and cross the river at Battersea. But in the mood I was in, brooding about the various things I’d left undone or half-done, it wasn’t long before my thoughts came back around in a big, ragged circle to the Torringtons and Dennis Peace. I’d almost had him at the Collective, I thought with grim irritation – but that was a polite gloss on what had really happened. It would be fairer to say that he’d almost had me: certainly I’d been lucky to avoid his kamikaze airborne assault. And then Itchy and Scratchy had turned up and it had become a whole different ball game – with Peace’s balls being the ones on the table, or so it seemed. Why? What did he have that these breakaway provisional-wing religious zealots wanted so badly that they’d hire werewolves to find it? The only thing I knew he had was Abbie Torrington’s ghost: that didn’t seem to fit the bill.

No, I was still seven miles from nowhere here, much as it hurt me to admit it. Okay, I had Rosie Crucis as an ace in the hole, but given her legendary flakiness, and the unappetising prospect of having to go through Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to get to her, maybe now was a good time to go back to Plan A – making contact with Abbie’s spirit directly. I still had the doll’s head with me, and a vivid memory of the tune that it had inspired.

What the hell, it was worth a try. I pulled the car over onto a broad ribbon of freshly laid asphalt on the steeply canted foothills of the Hammersmith flyover, and got out. It wasn’t that the reception would be any better outside the car: I just felt that I needed the touch of the cool night air.

I strolled across to a crash barrier that offered a scenic view of the westbound carriageway, and leaned against it, just taking in the sights for a moment while I got myself into the mood. It had turned into a crazy day, and an even crazier evening. I ought to have been curled up around a half-empty bottle of whisky right about now, but here I was with miles to go and promises to keep. The dull ache in my head and neck had come back, too, and there was a hot, itchy feeling behind my eyes. I was definitely coming down with something, and I wished I knew what the hell it was.

There was a faint smell of woodsmoke on the wind, as though someone was burning a bonfire in one of the gardens nearby – kind of an odd thing to do in May, though, and just for a moment it gave me an odd, dizzying sense of rushing forwards through time. Like I’d only been here five minutes and already it was autumn.

I fished the doll’s head out of my pocket. Tentatively, I traced the line of the cheek with the tip of my little finger, feeling the tiny roughnesses where the glaze was starting to crack. It was a miracle it was still in one piece, given the kind of day I’d had. As soon as I touched it, Abbie’s unhappiness welled up and overflowed, travelling up my hand and arm by some sort of psychic capillary action until it filled my head. That was all I needed, really: just a top-up, so I knew exactly what I was aiming for.

I stowed the doll’s head again and took out my whistle. The contrapuntal lines of white headlights and red tail lights were a little distracting, so I closed my eyes, found the stops by feel and let the first note unfold itself into the night.

For a long time, nothing: just the slow, sad sequence of sounds endlessly descending, like a staircase in an M. C. Escher drawing that never really gets to where it’s going.

Then Abbie answered me. Just like the two previous times, I felt her distant presence stir at the limits of my perceptions – a tropism, a blind turning to the music that was herself. Maybe because my eyes were closed I felt it more strongly this time; or maybe ghosts have tidal rhythms that move them like the moon moves the sea. She was there: a long way away, in the dark, but separated from me by nothing except that distance. It was as though I could reach out, pull the city aside to left and right like curtains and bring her through.

The cut-off, when it came, was instantaneous. But I was ready for it this time, and going by some instinct I couldn’t have explained I banked the music up into a crescendo the instant the contact failed. I can’t say whether or not that made a difference, but it felt like throwing a spear after the fish has broken your line. The sense of direction I’d already got crystallised into something almost painfully precise. Abbie and me, hunter and hunted, caught on opposite ends of the same rigid splinter of sound.

For a long time after I stopped playing, I kept my eyes tight shut and listened to the echoes in my mind. They were still strong. I’d come very close this time, and I had no doubt at all that Abbie had not only heard me but had seen me too. Across the night, across the city, we’d stared into each other’s eyes.

‘I’m coming for you,’ I murmured. ‘Don’t be afraid. Whatever you’ve been through, little girl, it’s almost over now. I’m coming to find you.’

‘Lovely,’ said a man’s voice right beside me. ‘Can I quote you on that?’ My head jerked around so fast it almost came off my shoulders – or at least, that was how it felt: the ache seemed to have become both sharper and deeper.

The man leaning on the crash barrier next to me had a slender, hawk-beaked face, black hair as slick as an otter’s arse, and the sour, what’s-this-stink-under-my-nose expression of a hanging judge faced with a drunken football hooligan at a Saturday-night remand hearing. He had the kind of build that people call wiry – skinny, but the overall impression was of a stick that had been sharpened for a purpose, not something that was just wilting for lack of sustenance. His white raincoat was pristine, and it contrasted so boldly with the black suit underneath it that I found myself thinking of a priest’s robes. Yeah, that was it: not a judge – a priest refusing absolution after a dodgy confession. Your sins will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.

‘Felix Castor,’ he said. His voice was soft and cultured, and so empty of emotion it reminded me for a moment of the programmed voice of Stephen Hawking’s vocoder.

‘Hey, me too,’ I answered, holding out my hand. ‘What are the odds on that?’

He looked at my outstretched hand for a moment, then studiedly looked away. Pity. Skin contact might have told me a lot, and I could have done with some crib notes right about then.

‘Playing it for laughs,’ he observed. ‘Well, why not? The gift of laughter enriches life. No, you can call me Gwillam, if you want to call me anything. And my sense of humour mostly turns on things that would make you weep.’

It was hard to believe, from that bloodless face and voice, that he had a sense of humour at all, but I played along, nodding as if I understood and approved. I did approve, in a way: when a guy starts off by telling you how tough he is, in my experience he’s mostly over-finessing because he’s actually got the moral fibre of a blancmange and he doesn’t want you to suss him right out of the gate. It gave me something to work from, at least.

‘So tell me a joke,’ I suggested.

‘Perhaps I will.’ His gaze flicked past my shoulder and I knew without looking that he wasn’t alone. A second later, that guess was confirmed as a boot scraped on gravel a few feet behind me. ‘I’ve found out a lot about you in the last two days,’ Gwillam observed, almost absently. He looked away again across the river of traffic, narrowing his eyes as the smoky breeze played across his face. ‘You’ve got something of a name for yourself, and from what I’m hearing the name is not “fool”. So I’m wondering why exactly you’re doing this.’

His words stirred up echoes of an earlier conversation, and I suddenly got an inkling of who I might see if I turned and looked behind me.

‘Why I’m doing what, exactly?’ I asked, understudying sweet little Buttercup.

Gwillam frowned and breathed out deeply through his nose, but the level tone of his voice didn’t change by an inch or an ounce. ‘I’m not a fool either, Castor. It will do nothing good for my mood if you try to play me for one.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’ I don’t have the patience for fishing at the best of times: I could never be bothered sitting by the ice hole for hours on end when you could just chuck in a grenade and have done with it. ‘You want to know what I’m doing over at the church, and whose heart is beating in there. You’re wondering what that heartbeat has got to do with all this shit that’s going down in West London right now, including the riot tonight. Maybe you’d also like to know who Juliet Salazar is and where she figures in all this. Right so far?’

Gwillam gave me the kind of pained, wondering stare you’d give to an aged relative who’d just tried to put their underpants on over their head.

‘I was talking about the girl,’ he said, very quietly. ‘The little girl you just made your heartfelt promise to. Unless that was a different little girl. Perhaps this is a hobby of yours.’

Just for a second I had a sense of events accelerating away from me in a direction I wasn’t braced for – like I might go sprawling on my face and lose what was left of my dignity. I really didn’t feel too good now: my head was spinning, and there was a smell in my nostrils like the very faintest hint of rotten meat.

‘The girl?’ I repeated.

Gwillam looked just a little irritated, as if the edge was starting to wear off his patience. Compared to the robotic calm he’d shown up until now, it was almost a relief. ‘Abigail Torrington,’ he said. ‘Or Abigail Jeffers. Whichever you prefer.’

‘Oh, that girl.’ I tried to sound as if everything was falling into place now, although I felt like I was treading water in lead-soled diving boots. I filed the other name away for future reference: that was something, at least. ‘But that’s just a missing-person case. Unless you’ve got some other reason to be looking for Dennis Peace? Is that what this is all about? Is Abbie a means to an end?’

Gwillam frowned sternly, two straight-edged vertical lines appearing in the centre of his forehead. ‘Peace is completely irrelevant,’ he said. ‘Obviously we appreciate what he did but, his motives being what they are, we can’t trust him to follow through. No, it’s Abigail we need to find. And we need to find her before anybody else does. We’re not prepared to consider any other possibility. After all you’ve seen since Saturday, you ought to know exactly what’s at stake.’

I played this back at various speeds, without much luck. ‘It’s funny,’ I said, giving it up. ‘All the words you’re saying make perfect sense, but somehow when you put them all together it comes out as shite. Why should Abbie matter to anyone besides her parents? Or is this a question of the sparrow that falls in the market place? Do you guys look out for every lost soul that comes down the pike? I mean, that’s inspiring, but it’s also a little hard to—’

I stopped because a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I was twisted around about ninety degrees to the left. I found myself staring into a hostile face dominated by a massive barricade of eyebrow.

‘Show respect,’ said the loup-garou sternly, showing me his teeth.

‘Po.’ Gwillam’s tone was mild, but very efficacious. The huge loup-garou let go of my shoulder and stood back, almost like a soldier called to attention. I could see Zucker now, standing over by the Civic as if they thought I might cut and run and they were ready for the possibility. Their own car – another off-roader, even bigger than the jeep – was pulled up onto the kerb about a hundred yards or so further down: they’d walked the rest of the way under the cover of my playing.

Gwillam didn’t look concerned, either for my well-being or about the possibility that I might abscond. I guess he just wanted to have his say more than he wanted to see me get my throat ripped out.

He nodded to the loup-garou at my side, acknowledging the swift obedience with silent approval, then turned his attention back to me.

‘Pythagoras is meant to have made a clever comment about levers,’ he murmured. ‘Levers, and moving the world. I was never entirely convinced – it sounds a little too post-Enlightenment to me. But I’m sure you know the one I mean.’ He stared at me expectantly for a moment. Being in no mood to play straight-man, I stared right back. ‘Well,’ Gwillam went on, ‘that’s what the little dead girl is. A lever large enough to move the world. Which is a troubling thought, to me at least. Because, insofar as I have a preference, I’d like the world to stay where it is.’

This was still about as clear as Mississippi mud. Time for another grenade, I thought.

‘Are you just speaking for yourself?’ I asked him. ‘Or for the Catholic Church as a whole? Which, incidentally, has to be a fucking sight more catholic than I thought it was, given who it’s employing.’

There was a moment’s silence, during which Gwillam just stared at me, nonplussed. Then he nodded, not at me but at Po. And then an explosion of pain in my left side made me crumple and fall, thudding against the crash barrier on the way down. A kidney punch, administered with finely measured force, designed to cause spectacular agony but stop short of actual rupture.

It was a long time before I tuned into my surroundings again – half a minute, maybe, but I’m not the best judge. Given that for a lot of that time I was struggling to suck in a breath without moving a single muscle on my left-hand side, it felt a fair bit longer to me.

‘You were warned once,’ said Gwillam, his voice sounding hollow and distant. ‘But from what Zucker and Po said, I was afraid that you might not have taken the warning seriously enough.’

I still couldn’t get enough breath to answer – which might have been for the best, since the words uppermost in my mind right then were ‘Fuck you’. As I knelt there, folded up around my pain, something cold and hard was pressed against the back of my neck.

‘We are serious,’ Gwillam said, quietly but with very precise, almost stilted emphasis. ‘We don’t take life lightly, but we’re empowered to do so, if the need arises. Right now, killing you seems to me to be very definitely the lesser of two evils.’

‘And yet . . .’ I grunted, wincing as the effort of speech tugged at muscles that weren’t quite ready to move again ‘. . . I can’t help noticing . . . I’m still alive.’

‘Yes.’

The pressure on my neck disappeared, and a moment later there was the unmistakable sound of a safety being thumbed back, with a slight catch along the way, into the ‘on’ position. The son of a bitch had had the gun cocked. If he’d sneezed at the wrong moment he could have blown my head off. I looked up, moving my head as little as possible, to find Gwillam sliding the gun back into a shoulder holster. Meeting my gaze, he shook his head.

‘We were watching you at the mall,’ he said. ‘At that point, killing you was very definitely part of my night’s work. But then I saw you and the woman – is she a woman? – dealing with the possessed and saving the hostages. I’ll admit that wasn’t what I was expecting – and it made me a little uneasy. You see, if I’m going to turn Zucker and Po loose on you, I’d rather do it with a clear conscience.’

‘They didn’t seem to be on the leash last night,’ I wheezed.

‘At that time, they were under orders not to kill you. Hurting you wasn’t particularly discouraged. Castor, I’m going to ask you again, and probably for the last time: whose side are you on in this?’

If I’d had more notice of that question, I might have given it some thought and come up with a cute, ambivalent answer. As it was, I didn’t hesitate.

‘Abbie Torrington’s side.’

Gwillam made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle. ‘That’s even possible,’ he said. ‘If so, those stories about you not being a fool may just about be true. Although it’s still more likely that someone is playing you the way you play that whistle.’

He went quiet for long enough that I thought he’d finished.

‘If I stand up,’ I asked, risking a very slow and very gradual glance over my shoulder, ‘will this arsehole knock me down again?’

Gwillam went on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘You were ahead of us at the Collective,’ he said. ‘That was . . . impressive. Do you have any other leads on where Peace is hiding the girl?’

Well, I had about a half of one, and I was keeping it to myself. I got a hand up on the crash barrier and began to lever myself back up onto my feet. My teeth were clenched shut with the effort, so of course I couldn’t answer Gwillam’s question.

He sighed again, sounding like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

‘If I tell you to find your reverse gear and back out of this – say until you hit China – is there any chance that you’ll do it?’

It’s probably a sin to lie to a priest, and I had enough sins on my conscience already without going out looking for new ones. I just shook my head once: more than once would have been pushing it, given that I’d only just got myself back on the vertical.

‘I didn’t think so,’ said Gwillam sadly. ‘But I’m telling you anyway. It’s by way of being an acknowledgement of what you did tonight. A professional courtesy, let’s say. It’s the last you’re going to get. Goodnight, Castor – and goodbye.’

He made the sign of the cross over me – not threateningly, or ironically, but deadpan serious. Then he signed to the two werewolves and they fell in at either side of him as he walked back to the car.

As they drove away Zucker misjudged the angle – or maybe got it exactly right – and scraped along the passenger side of Matt’s Civic with a sound like the shriek of a neutered elephant. Then he accelerated into the eastbound traffic and within a few seconds their tail lights had merged with the rest of the river.

Imelda Probert, better known as the Ice-Maker, lives in a squalid little third-floor flat in Peckham, in a block whose brickwork has been painted black in some sort of abortive experiment with stealth technology. The door off the street is boarded up, so you go in around the side through a yard that’s like an urban elephants’ graveyard, strewn with the rusting, wheelless hulks of expired cars. It’s something of a conundrum, given how much hard cash the Ice-Maker must pull down, week in and week out: after all, she offers a specialised and much sought-after service. But then again, I guess by the same token she doesn’t have to worry about bringing in the passing trade: people who need her, find her.

Before I went in I checked an additional piece of equipment that I’d picked up along the way. It was a sprig of myrtle, borrowed from a graveyard. Myrtle for May: if I’d been on the ball, I should have had some already – then I wouldn’t have had to shinny up cemetery walls after midnight. I whispered a blessing to it, feeling like a fraud as I always do when I’m mucking about with things that lay-people would call magic.

The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer – two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with ‘dead-drunk guy face down in his own vomit’. But I didn’t meet anybody on the way up, and when I knocked on the door on the third floor – the only door that wasn’t covered over with plywood and nailed shut – the sound echoed through the building with telling hollowness.

After a few seconds, the door was opened by a skinny black girl of about sixteen or so, whose eyes were each, individually, bigger than her whole face. I only knew she was a girl by the pigtails: the hard, hatchet face was one-size-fits-all, and the black jeans and manga-chick T-shirt were unisex.

‘Yeah?’ she said.

‘Friend of Nicky’s,’ I told her.

She frowned at me with truculent suspicion. ‘You got a pulse?’

I checked. ‘I do, but it’s running kind of slow. Is that a deal-breaker?’

She swivelled her head and looked behind her into the flat. ‘Mum,’ she called. ‘There’s a live man out here.’

‘Is he police?’ a much deeper voice answered from somewhere inside. ‘If he’s police, Lisa, you tell him to go fuck himself because I paid already.’

The moppet turned her face to me again. ‘Mum says if you’re police, you can—’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I got it. I’m not police. The name’s Castor. If Nicky Heath is in there, I’m here to see him and give him a ride home.’

Lisa called out over her shoulder, keeping her stare fixed on me this time in case I tried to steal something. It would have had to be the door or one of the walls: there was nothing else on the landing, not even carpet to cover the warped floorboards. ‘He says he’s Castor and he’s gonna give Nicky a ride.’

‘Oh, Castor.’ There was edgy disapproval in the voice, and I knew exactly why. ‘Yeah, you show him into the parlour, Lisa. He can just hold his horses until I’m done here.’

Rolling her eyes to show what she thought of these instructions, Lisa flung the door open. Showing me into the parlour meant pointing to a door off the narrow entrance hall to the left as she took off in the opposite direction herself. There was a door right at the end of the hall where I could see Imelda’s back as she laboured over her latest patient. She was singing to herself: a gospel song, most likely, but it was under her breath and from this distance I couldn’t make out either the words or the tune.

I’d been here before, about two years back, so I knew the drill. I also knew that Imelda didn’t like me very much: exorcists were bad for business. Sending me into the parlour to wait was a piece of calculated sadism, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it, so I just took a deep breath, held it, and walked in.

The Ice-Maker is basically just a faith healer with a very specialised clientele: a clientele whom no other doctor, whether alternative or vanilla, is likely to want to poach. She deals exclusively with zombies, and she claims, by laying-on of hands, to slow the processes of decay almost to a standstill. I always thought it was bullshit, but Nicky goes to her twice a month without fail – and he’s been dead a long while now, so I respect his judgement on matters of physical decomposition. Her moniker – Ice-Maker – comes from her boast that her hands are as good as a deep-freeze when it comes to keeping dead meat fresh.

But the smell in the parlour, I have to say, was one of sour-sweet decay, deeply ingrained. Like I said, this wasn’t my first visit, so I knew what to expect, but it still hit me like a wall and almost knocked me down. I went on inside, and six or seven of the walking dead glanced up to appraise the newcomer: the sitting dead, actually, since the room was laid out like a doctor’s waiting room with chairs all around three of the walls, and most of the chairs were taken. There were even magazines: a chalk-faced woman in the corner with a small hole in the flesh of her cheek was flicking through a vintage copy of Cosmo.

Zombies don’t breathe, so sharp intakes of breath were out of the question; and there wasn’t a stand-up piano to tinkle and plunk its way into shocked silence as I walked in. All the same, though, I could feel the tension. The zombies who’d already looked up to clock me carried on staring: the others, catching the mood, glanced up to see what was happening.

I sat down, just inside the door, and picked up a Reader’s Digest. Flicking through it, I found an article about a possible enhanced role for walnuts in the treatment of colonic cancer, and started to read. The great thing about the Reader’s Digest is that it exists outside of space and time as we know them: mystics and ecstatics read it to achieve a trance state deeper than normal meditative techniques allow.

Sadly, though, I wasn’t going to be allowed to attain a lower consciousness tonight. Over the top of the magazine, I saw a man’s broad torso heave into view.

‘You’re alive,’ said a harsh voice, through a bellows-like soughing of breath.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, without looking up. ‘I’m working on it, though. You know how it is.’

‘The fuck you doing here, you blood-warm piece of shit?’ This was said more vehemently, and the waft of fetid breath made me wince.

‘I’m waiting for a friend,’ I said mildly.

There was a heavy pause, and then: ‘Wait outside.’

I looked up. The guy must have been a real holy terror back when he was still counted among the living, and if anything he was even scarier now that he was dead. He stood about six-two, and it was mostly muscle: the kind of sculpted, highly defined muscle you get from working out. And his arms were bare and his T-shirt was tight, so you got to see the muscles sliding against one another like tectonic plates when he moved. His bald head glistened – not with sweat, obviously, so I guessed it must have been with oil of some kind. He was a thanato-narcissist, in love with his own defunct flesh and keeping it polished up like a museum piece.

But I’d been pushed around enough for one night: enough, and heading inexorably towards more than enough.

‘I’m fine right here,’ I said, and returned to the good news about walnuts.

He smacked the magazine out of my hands. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘You’re not. ’Cause if you stay here, I’m gonna rip your tongue out.’

I glanced around the room and took in the reactions from the rest of Imelda’s dead clientele. They seemed a little uneasy about what was happening – but then, Imelda’s services aren’t cheap; most of them looked to be a lot more well-heeled than this sad piece of worm-food, and they probably had that whole middle-class anxiety about making a scene. That was good news for me: it meant they were less likely to mob me and tear my arms and legs off if this went badly.

‘Okay, sport,’ I murmured. I stood up and he squared off against me, waiting for me to throw the first punch. He was sure enough of his own strength to know that nothing I could swing would put him down, and having allowed me an ineffectual tap at his chin he could dismantle me at his leisure.

I had the myrtle twig wrapped twice around my hand. I just slapped it to his forehead and spat out the words ‘Hoc fugere.’ He shot backwards as fast if I’d stuck a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

It wasn’t an exorcism – nothing like. It’s just the most basic kind of nature magic, an elemental ward that has efficacy for about three weeks of the year, so long as it’s been properly cut and blessed. To the dead, whether they’re in the body or out of it, getting too close to a ward is like touching a mains cable: it hurts a fuck of a lot.

The zombie hit the floor hard, and lay there jerking spastically with his eyes wide open. One of his arms, flailing out, hit the leg of the woman who’d been reading Cosmo: she jumped aside to avoid the contact.

‘I really don’t want any trouble,’ I told the room in general.

‘Yeah,’ said Nicky from the doorway. ‘That’s fucking plain to see.’

Behind him, Imelda gave a yelp of dismay and stormed past him into the room, knocking him aside. She’s a big woman, with fists like hams: it would take a lot more than a myrtle switch to take her down. ‘Castor!’ she bellowed. ‘You have no right! You have no right! You get out of my house now, or I swear I’ll call the police on you.’

‘Hey, he was the one wanted to fight,’ I said. ‘I was happy with the Reader’s Digest.’

Kneeling down beside the still-shuddering zombie, she laid her hand on his forehead and shot me a glare of pure contempt. He quietened under her hand.

‘Then you deal with him like a man,’ she said. ‘Not like a cockroach.’

‘I just used a—’ I began.

‘I know what you used,’ Imelda snapped. ‘You swatted him with a stand-not like you’d swat a bug, because you couldn’t win the fight any other way. You’re just a goddamn coward. Now you get out of my house before I throw you out.’

That was a much more serious threat than the one about phoning the police. Imelda would never ask the man to fight her battles for her: but she really could pick me up and throw me, and the way I felt right then I might not survive. I put up my hands in surrender and left the room, hearing Nicky behind me apologising on my behalf and assuring her I’d never come round here again.

Little Lisa was out in the hallway, leaning against the wall. She grinned at me, wickedly amused.

‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.

‘You beat that big lych-man,’ she said scornfully, ‘but you couldn’t beat my mum.’

‘Can you?’ I asked.

She shook her head vigorously. ‘Fuck, no.’

‘Well, there you go.’

I waited for Nicky in the yard, but when he came out he walked right on past me. ‘The car’s out in the street,’ I said, falling into step with him.

‘Fuck you, Castor,’ he snapped, speeding up. ‘I’ll take a frigging cab.’

‘Look, the guy was going to fold me into a paper plane, Nicky. I’m sorry. But I did what I had to do.’

‘You know what it would mean for me if Imelda decides I’m bad news? The only other guy I know who can do what she does lives in Glasgow. I am fucking screwed if she gets mad at me. I wish to Christ I’d told you to wait until tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I already said I was sorry. What did you have to tell me, anyway? What is it that couldn’t wait?’

We were out in the street by this time. Nicky slammed the yard door shut with a bang that resounded across the street – in this neighbourhood, not a wonderful idea.

‘What couldn’t wait?’ he echoed sarcastically. ‘You’ve been fed a line, is what. I wanted to tell you you’re running on pure bullshit. This kid Abbie Torrington – you said her parents hired you to find her?’

‘Right,’ I agreed, a little unnerved by his savagery. ‘Get to the point, Nicky.’

He rounded on me and thrust his face into mine.

‘The point is you had me chasing my own fucking tail, looking through morgue records and autopsy reports and fuck knows what else. And it’s all a waste of time because the kid’s not dead.’

Nicky hit the punchline with grim satisfaction.

‘The kid’s only missing. It’s the parents who are dead.’