Vicious Circle

14

I took Juliet back to Pen’s and laid her down in my own bed: after all, I wasn’t likely to be using it myself for a while. But Pen wasn’t happy: she wasn’t happy at all.

She’d come back from Rafi’s assessment hearing so full of good feelings that she was in danger of overflowing – practically tap-dancing, because Rafi had stayed rational all the way through and had made a really good impression on both the independent doctors. They’d even given Webb a bit of a telling-off for trying to delay proceedings.

But when she saw Juliet lying on my bed, death-white like a statue stolen from a mortuary, her mood took a downward plunge.

‘That’s the thing that tried to kill you.’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. I didn’t think Pen had got a good look at Juliet’s face, since at the time she’d been looking down the sights of a BB gun and firing filed-down rosary beads into her from behind. But I guess once you’ve seen Juliet, from any angle, the memory tends to stay etched on your brain.

‘Fix, she’s evil.’ There was a slight tremor to Pen’s voice, which I could well understand. ‘She’s so beautiful, but she . . . everything about her . . . She’s like a poisonous snake that hypnotises you so you’ll stand still while it bites.’

‘That’s exactly what she is,’ I agreed. ‘But she doesn’t bite any more, Pen. We laid down some ground rules.’

Pen wasn’t reassured: it wasn’t her physical safety she was mainly worrying about. ‘She shouldn’t be here. This house is a shrine, Fix. You know that. I’ve worked really hard to make it into a place that chthonic powers will be attracted to. Powers of nature and light. If she stays here, they’ll feel the taint. They’ll leave, and I may never be able to bring them back.’

She was almost in tears. ‘The powers seem to cope with me okay,’ I said, getting a little desperate now. ‘They can’t be all that fastidious, can they?’

‘They weighed you,’ Pen said. ‘You came out all right.’

‘Well, can they weigh Juliet?’

She hesitated. Pen hates to judge anyone harshly: I could see her fighting against her instincts, and abruptly I felt sick with myself for trying to twist her arm.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, hefting that negligible weight in my arms again. ‘I’ll take her someplace else.’

But I was pissing in the wind. Back in the car again, driving into the centre of town, I racked my brains for a somewhere else that would serve. Juliet was slumped across the back seats, exuding even in her unconscious state a sweet, rank smell that was trying to insinuate itself between my hind-brain and the more refined areas of grey matter, filling my mind with indelible carnal imagery. Asleep or awake, she was still a Venus flytrap. There was nowhere where she’d be safe.

My brain more or less on automatic as I fought against that smell and against myself, I’d swung west again: not towards Acton but into Paddington. What I had to do there shouldn’t take too long: maybe if I just covered Juliet with my coat, she’d go unnoticed until I got back. I didn’t have too much choice, anyway: there were so many ticking clocks around, it was getting hard to hear yourself think. The thing in Saint Michael’s church was getting stronger; the parishioners were still out there in the night with heads full of poisonous shit; Basquiat was sorting through the red tape so she could arrest me for murder, and the Anathemata had given me my final warning: the only way out of the box canyon was to keep moving forward as the walls closed in on both sides. Find Dennis Peace, find Abbie Torrington’s ghost, and maybe it would all fall into place. Maybe. Otherwise we were all going to Hell in an over-crowded handbasket.

I parked as close as I could to Lancaster Gate station without hitting a double yellow: I didn’t want the car drawing any attention while I was gone, so it made sense to stay the right side of legal. I walked the rest of the way to Praed Street, and in through the ever-open gates of what used to be the genito-urinary clinic – the pox shop. For the past seven years, though, it had been given over to a more esoteric form of medicine: metamorphic ontology.

Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had coined the term, and had then given it currency by hammering on the same drum in about two dozen monographs and three full-length studies – one on the were-things, one on zombies, and one on ghosts pure and simple. In the end she created the climate she needed in which to thrive, forcing university hospitals up and down the country to open their minds to a set of phenomena that hadn’t seemed to be medical at all until she got her hands on them. After all, how can you cure the dead?

How can you cure the dead? Jenna-Jane echoed back. Well, you can’t, of course. But if a dead soul is possessing a living host, then it becomes a condition that can be observed and treated: and if a dead soul returns to its own flesh, makes it move again and speak again and think again, then what definition of death are you using and how are you going to make it stick?

As careerist blitzkriegs go, it had paid off in spades. Most of the big hospitals had opened up MO units, and the biggest and best, at Praed Street, went to Jenna-Jane by right of conquest. She knew what to do with it, too. She pulled in all the London exorcists as consultants right from the start, got them to teach her everything they knew, then took it apart and put it together again with such ruthless, incisive intelligence that pretty soon it was us who were learning from her. That was an incredible time: a time when the baseline concepts of a new branch of science were being laid down, at a velocity that prevented anyone from questioning the route map or even from jumping down safely once things got moving.

Most of us started to have doubts about J-J in the first year, but we stayed on board for quite a while after that. It still seemed like we were doing useful work, even if we were doing it for a self-obsessed, vainglorious fascist. Then, one by one, we began to do the moral sums and see how far they were from adding up. Whether it was for the advancement of science or just for the advancement of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, some of the things that were being done at Praed Street fell well into the realms of the cruel and unusual, and awoke the scruples of even the most hard-bitten and determinedly unimaginative ghost-hunters.

Rosie Crucis was the straw that crippled my personal camel. It had sounded harmless enough at first. Why were all the risen dead recent? Jenna-Jane had asked. Her own researches had yielded no ghosts whose date of death was earlier than 1935. Testimony from other exorcists could push that back at most another twenty years, to the middle years of the First World War. What of the millions upon millions of ghosts from ages past, who ought to have been filling the streets of London like an invisible tide?

Once you get to asking questions like that, you start to feel like you need at least half an answer before you’ll get a decent night’s sleep again. And for Jenna-Jane, it was always a case of learning by doing. She got about a dozen of us together: me, Elaine Vincent, Nemo Praxides, and some other big names flown in from Edinburgh, Paris, Locarno, Christ knew where. She put us all together in a room with nothing except twelve chairs and a table on top of which there was a big cardboard box. When everyone had arrived, she locked the doors and opened the box.

My best guess was a severed head, but it turned out to be a lot less dramatic than that. The box contained a lot of things that were very old without being particularly beautiful: an embroidered fan, on which the colours had bleached out with age to shades of fawn and grey; a handwritten prayer book; a tinted glass bottle that must once have contained perfume; a kerchief with the letter A picked out in over-elaborate needlepoint; a single page from a letter, without greeting or subscript.

‘See what you can do,’ Jenna-Jane said. And we went to work.

Praxides worked by going into a trance state, so he immediately closed his eyes and dropped off the map. Elaine Vincent used automatic writing: she took out her sketchbook and started to scribble. I took out my whistle, some other guy started to tap the fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, hitting out a faint, complex rhythm. We all did what we normally did when we wanted to raise and bind a ghost.

And there was a ghost there, all right; but there was something odd about how it felt. The trace was both strong and impossibly faint at the same time. Like walking past a curry house and getting a faint whiff of fresh cardamon: you know that if you open the door your senses will be overwhelmed, and that it’s only the pungency of the raw spice that’s letting it reach you at all through double-skin brickwork and the olfactory static of the street.

We worked on it for a couple of hours, our professional pride very much on the line. At first we couldn’t get it into focus, but then we brainstormed some tricks that we’d never have been able to try if we’d been working separately. The guy with the happy-clappy fingers worked up a counterpoint to my tune, and Elaine drew the patterns of sound that we were creating. We fed in and out of each other’s talents, creating a cat’s cradle of urgent, bullying concentration that opened out from the room in directions we didn’t even have concepts for, let alone names.

It worked, too. The ghost rose sluggishly, aimlessly towards us, like a balloon whose string some kid wandering around down in Hades had accidentally let slip. We trapped her, turned her round, nailed her down and spread her out between us like a butterfly on a board of charged air.

She couldn’t talk, at first: she learned that later. She’d been dead for so long, sleeping for so long in the gutted house of her own bones, she’d forgotten who she was. She mouthed at us meaninglessly, terrified and angry in about equal parts. She pulled away, tightening the strings of our will around her so that every movement just tangled her up more irrevocably.

She was so tiny. A grown woman – a mature woman, scarred by disease and more generally by life itself – the size of a ten-year-old girl. It’s ludicrous, I know: it was obvious already from the trigger materials J-J had provided that we’d be dealing with a very old soul. But somehow actually seeing her brought me up against that harder and more painfully than I’d been expecting. I’m not big on religion, and I’ve never heard of a god whose company I’d be able to stomach for more than the first half of Heaven’s cocktail hour, but all the same this felt like blasphemy. Because she was so small and so frail, it also felt very much like torturing a child.

But I couldn’t just stop playing. Stopping dead in the middle of a tune is like stepping out of a car that’s moving at seventy: a wide range of unpleasant consequences can be taken as a given. So I wound down as smoothly as I could, and everyone else was doing the same thing: landing the mad, terrified, struggling fish into which we’d all dug our separate, several hooks.

Jenna-Jane was ecstatic. She hadn’t expected to get such spectacular results on the first try. Before we could sort out how we felt or discuss what we’d just done, she moved in with a second team: not exorcists but psychics and sensitives trawled up just as eclectically and non-judgementally as our lot had been. We were elbowed out, because our part of the job was done.

I bailed out of the whole Praed Street project soon after that, and cold-shouldered J-J when she tried to tempt me back for a repeat performance. Reading between the lines, a lot of the other exorcists who’d been there that day had the same uneasy feelings of guilt and shame afterwards. She’d never been able to get that much raw talent together in the same room again, and Rosie Crucis remained a one-off.

The name was J-J’s private joke, and it played in some way off the real identity of the ghost we’d summoned – while at the same time preventing that identity from being revealed by a casual comment. That was important, because – to stick with the fishing metaphor – now that Rosie had been landed, J-J had no intention of throwing her back.

The plan was to allow – or maybe induce – Rosie to possess one of the sensitives, so that her ghost would remain anchored in the living world. J-J had laid on as expansive a buffet of psychics as she could manage: both genders, every age and race, every school and belief from classical spiritualist to lunatic-fringe millenarian to ascetic Swedenborgian and foam-flecked Blavatskian.

Rosie confounded expectation and went for J-J herself – lived (for want of a better word) inside her for twenty days and twenty-one nights, by which time J-J was half-dead from migraine and psychosomatic muscular aches. It was a sweet revenge, if that was what it was: but Rosie didn’t know back then who she had to thank for her much-delayed and unexpected resurrection, so it was probably coincidence.

In any case, on the twenty-first day Rosie allowed herself to be decanted into a young man from Cambridge named Donnie Collett, and that was the start of a running-on the-spot relay race that still hasn’t ended. Volunteers from MO units up and down the country, as well as from Philosophy and Theology courses at universities who still haven’t sussed J-J out for what she is, sign up for stints of up to a week at a time, channelling Rosie and providing her a fleshly receptacle so that the Praed Street ontologists can continue to push the envelope when it comes to our knowledge of life and death and the points where they hold hands across the wall.

And then there’s an entirely different support group: the people who come in to talk to Rosie and keep her mind engaged. Being dead, she can’t sleep: the person who’s hosting her sleeps, and typically wakes up feeling as refreshed and energised as if they’ve had a week at a health spa. Rosie herself needs more or less constant mental stimulation: and since J-J has categorically refused to allow her out of the unit that stimulation all has to be provided on-site. She watches a lot of DVDs (there’s an embargo on live TV), reads a lot of books, and talks endlessly to anyone who’ll listen – with a digital recorder on permanent RECORD in the background.

I’ve been part of that support group, off and on, for a good few years now. Maybe I felt like I needed to apologise for my part in bringing Rosie back up from the dark without asking first: but I also enjoyed her company, and sometimes she made a useful sounding board. Whoever she’d been in life (she claimed not to remember) she’d had a mind like a straight-edge razor. Death had done nothing except rot away the sheath.

But I’d always timed my visits for when Jenna-Jane was away from the unit on one of her lecture tours, or scaring up funds from charities with loosely worded charters. Tonight, I knew from my moles on the inside, she was on-site; so tonight the only way to get to Rosie was to go through J-J.

And the first problem was getting to see her. The place was looking more like a fortress than ever, with an actual guard post now on the main doors where I had to state my business and then wait for authorisation to come down from on high. Then, as I walked along the hallways with their familiar smell of long-departed urine, I noticed that there were alarm buttons labelled with short alphanumeric strings. A notice alongside each one reminded all passersby that a failure to observe containment protocols would result in immediate dismissal, and that in the event of a containment breach floating security staff should converge on the site where the alarm was given while all other personnel went directly to their assigned assembly points. It all sounded like the worst of my memories of Butlin’s Skegness, only with slightly less razor wire.

Jenna-Jane was in the smaller of her two offices – the one that overlooked the open-plan work area of the unit the way a signalman’s hut overlooks the engine sidings.

As I walked up here I’d been mulling over how to phrase my request. Not too long ago, I’d just have been able to drop in on Rosie and say hi without any palaver: but then J-J had caught one of the visitors carrying out messages for Rosie and she’d tightened up the whole operation by a couple of notches. She had a lot of other prizewinning acts in her freak show now, but Rosie was the first and still the jewel in the crown: a ghost still extant on Earth after more than five hundred years. So J-J watched over all of Rosie’s inputs and outputs with a jealous eye which, like Rosie’s, never closed.

I knocked on the door, and J-J looked up from a thick sheaf of papers that she was working through. She gave me a smile – a dazzling, meaningless smile that said she was beside herself with delight to see me. It said that, but it lied through its all too visible teeth.

‘Felix,’ she said warmly, and she stood up and came around the desk. I tried to avoid the pressing of flesh but she wasn’t having any of that. She kissed me on the right cheek, and then on the left for good measure, Continental style. That meant I got a momentary glimpse through my sixth sense of the snake-pit of her mind. It was something I could really have done without right then.

Someone had told me once that J-J’s real name was Müller rather than Mulbridge and that she’d been born in the ruins of Essen while the Third Reich was still thrashing itself to pieces in its death throes. If that was true, she had the best imitation of a tweedily harmless, upper-middle-drawer-decayed-minor-aristocracy-but-let’s-not-talk-about-it English accent I’d ever heard. Like most things about Jenna-Jane, it was a feint that was designed to bring you in close enough for knife-work.

She hadn’t changed by a micrometre: still petite, and neat, and agelessly sweet. She had to be about sixty now, but her body seemed to have decided that mid-forties was a good look for her, and it had held on to it. Her hair was grey, but then it always had been: and on her it seemed less a sign of age than what you see when you scrape the paint off the side of a battleship. And like a battleship, her surface was bland and smooth and impenetrable. She affected a surgical white coat, but underneath it I saw jeans and a plaid shirt. J-J knew how to stand on ceremony when there was something to be gained from it: the rest of the time she was just good plain folks.

‘You never come to see us any more,’ she went on, gently reproachful. ‘It must be two years!’

She sat me down, in a way that was impossible to resist, and then went and sat back down again herself on the other side of the desk. She handled nuance like a ninja: the greeting had been friendly and personal, but once I was sitting down this was a formal visit too and she could appeal to the book – regretfully, full of apologies – whenever she had to.

‘I’ve dropped in a few times,’ I said, ‘but you’re never around.’

She nodded, still smiling. ‘Yes, I heard. I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me on purpose. But here you are.’

Yeah. Here I was.

‘So how’s it all going?’ I asked, on the grounds that ‘I need to talk to Rosie, so hello and goodbye’ might have seemed a little on the abrupt side.

Jenna-Jane shrugged modestly. ‘The unit’s still growing,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a fine faculty now. A lot of genuine high-fliers who’ve graduated from the European schools and come here to find out how it’s really done. I don’t think you’d recognise the names, because you’ve never been all that interested in the literature, but believe me when I say there are university proctors in Germany and America who spit when they hear my name.’

‘I believe you, J-J,’ I assured her, meaning it.

She made a sour face.

‘Please don’t use that nickname, Felix,’ she said. ‘You know how I feel about it. So yes, things here are excellent. It’s such a strong team now, we’ve got to the point where they won’t be needing me any more.’ Her eyes gleamed as she said this: even as a joke, she couldn’t quite get that one out without an edge to it. As if she’d ever let go of her little empire without a good sprinkling of blood and hair on the walls.

‘On the acquisitions side,’ she went on smoothly, ‘we’ve got three loup-garous – including one who’s able to possess and shape insect hosts. The identical-twin zombies from Edinburgh are with us now: that was quite a battle, but I was able to prove to the hospital board that we could offer them a higher standard of care. We can also chart their decay molecule by molecule with the CAT imagers and see how far it follows a parallel course in the two different cadavers.’

‘Unless the Dead Rights Bill gets through its third reading,’ I said. I couldn’t resist: it was too pat a straight line.

J-J didn’t go for the stick, though. She passed her hand through the air in front of her face, pushing the unwelcome topic effectively to the sidelines. ‘I know a lot of people in Westminster, Felix,’ she told me. ‘There’s no way the bill is going to pass. Not in this form, and not in this session. It would be chaos. Oh yes, eventually some measure of legal status will be accorded to the dead. There’s already talk of bringing me in as a consultant on the next bill, after this one hits the rocks.’

I almost laughed at that. Could we consult you on this sheep problem, Professor Wolf? Instead, I said, ‘So you think it’ll be voted out?’

‘Timed out,’ said J-J, with just a hint of malevolent satisfaction. ‘They’ve only set aside two days for the debate, and there are forty-seven amendments coming down from the Lords. The government won’t invoke the Parliament Act for something this contentious, so they’ll run out of time and shelve it until the winter session. And then the process will begin again with even less momentum. Trust me, this will run and run. And when they do finally agree some form of legislation, it will be drafted in a form that allows us to carry on with our work without fear of legal challenges. That, in fact, will be one of the primary desiderata of any act: the government doesn’t want anything to tie their hands at this point.’

‘Which point would that be, Jenna-Jane?’

‘The point where the dead have begun to rise in uncountable numbers, and when it’s starting to look as though the demons of Hell are herding them.’

I shrugged. It was a theory, like any other: I’d heard them all in my time. ‘I thought the demons went wherever they got a whiff of fresh food.’

‘I know what you think, Felix. We’ve discussed it on several occasions. You have a dangerous tendency – in my view – to underestimate the potential threat that the dead pose. In the past, that tendency was tempered by your professionalism: your ability to ignore all irrelevant avenues while you were working on a specific task. From what I hear, though, there’s been a certain . . . erosion of that quality in recent months.’

She was looking at me closely, appraisingly. She paused, as if she expected me to respond to the allegation.

‘It’s good to know that you’re still taking an interest in me,’ I said blandly.

‘Always, Felix. Always.’

‘Listen, Jenna-Jane.’ I was trailing the field in the small-talk stakes, so I reckoned I might as well cut to the chase. ‘I need to speak to Rosie. There’s something I want to ask her about.’

J-J’s eyebrows rose. I knew they did because I saw the crease appear and then fade again on her forehead. The eyebrows themselves were grey, like the hair on her head, and pencil-sliver thin so they couldn’t be seen unless you were right up close.

‘I’ll add you to the roster,’ she said, mildly.

‘I meant tonight.’

J-J smiled a tight, pained smile. ‘That would be more difficult to arrange. We have a formal booking system now, and the time slots for tonight are entirely filled. Probably the earliest I could fit you in would be in about three or four days’ time.’

‘I just need a couple of minutes. Couldn’t you squeeze me in as someone else is clocking off?’

She shook her head with an expression on her face that was indistinguishable from genuine regret. ‘No, I’m afraid not, Felix,’ she said. ‘Everything goes through one of the oversight boards, and I can’t pre-empt their decision. Even for a friend.’ She paused, frowned for a moment in thought, and I waited for the other shoe to drop. ‘For a colleague, though,’ she said, ‘it would be different. If you had an active and current attachment to the unit, I mean. I could stretch a point then, and be reasonably sure that the board wouldn’t smack my hand for it afterwards.’

It was a bitter pill to swallow, but then again if all she wanted was a promise I could be every bit as radiantly insincere as she could. ‘Well, I’m pretty busy right now,’ I said, ‘but when I’ve got an opening, I could maybe come over and do some chores for you.’

Jenna-Jane nodded enthusiastically. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘There’s one thing I’d love to have you do for us.’

‘What’s that?’ I was already standing, trying to hustle her on to the next stage in the proceedings, but when it comes to immovable objects and irresistible forces, J-J can play both ends against the middle.

‘You can persuade your friend Rafael Ditko to sign himself into our care.’

My face froze, and so did I, halfway between sitting down and standing up. In the end I went for standing up, because it got me a bit of distance from her.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That one’s not on the table.’

‘Isn’t it?’ She was all innocent inquiry. ‘I had a call from Doctor Webb a couple of days ago. He seemed to feel that it might be better for Mister Ditko to be in an environment that’s more directly and intentionally geared towards dealing with the kind of problem that he faces.’

‘J-J, no offence, but in here Rafi would be the problem. You don’t distinguish between the carrier wave and the signal.’

Jenna-Jane seemed hurt. ‘That’s a rather opaque metaphor, Felix. And it’s very far from the truth. I’m aware that Ditko and the demon inside him are two distinct entities. I’m probably more cognisant of what that means than you are, and better able to understand the mechanism by which it works. I would never confuse your friend with the passenger he has the misfortune to carry.’

‘No? So you wouldn’t, for the sake of argument, be tempted to try stabbing Rafi with a pitchfork to see if Asmodeus bleeds?’

Jenna-Jane’s disguise is close to being perfect, so there was no sign of anger or frustration on her face. She just shook her head, as if that harsh remark was the latest proof that she was never meant to live in a world as cruel and unfeeling as this.

‘My first concern would be Ditko’s well-being,’ she said solemnly.

‘It’s not negotiable, Jenna-Jane.’

‘Then neither is Rosie, Felix. I’ll add you to the roster, and you’ll get a call within the next few days. Unless, of course, someone on the oversight board has any doubts about your suitability.’

‘And are you on the oversight board, Jenna-Jane?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Of course. I’m one of four faculty members, balanced by three—’

I raised my hand to stop the flow. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I get the picture. Give my regards to any of the old gang you still see.’

‘Of course.’

‘And fall downstairs and break your neck while you’re doing it. The next time I drop in, I’d love to see you in a persistently vegetative state.’

‘Felix!’ I walked out on that tone of reproach – identical to the one I’d walked in on. I didn’t want to see the expression that went with it.

What I did see, on my way back to the guard post, was one of those alarm points with its sternly worded notice. It gave me an idea that was hard to resist. I smashed the glass with my elbow and hit the button. A deep, two-tone whoop sounded from all sides at once. I kept moving, dredging up my memories of the unit’s floor plan. There ought to be a corridor off on my right somewhere up ahead.

There was. Turning along it, I saw a whole lot of people running towards me, some of them in the dark blue uniforms of the security staff. I braced myself, but they ran on past me without giving me so much as a glance. A second wave followed a hundred yards further on, and then I turned into a short side corridor with just the one door at the end of it.

It was locked. I hammered on it and yelled ‘Open up!’ as loud as I could over the continued mad-cow mooing of the alarm. There was the sound of a bolt drawing back, and a surprised face appeared in the gap as the door was pulled open. It was another man in uniform, two inches taller than me and a lot heavier.

‘She’s got to be moved,’ I shouted, pointing past him into the ward.

‘Moved?’ He looked surprised and alarmed. He didn’t budge out of my way, though: he wasn’t going to buy the bridge without looking over the design sketches. ‘Where to? What’s going on?’

‘Out into the yard. There’s a fire.’

He looked less convinced than ever. ‘A fire? That’s the breach alarm, not the—’

Enough is enough. I brought my knee up into his stomach, and then as he went down I spun on my heel and gave him a roundhouse punch behind the ear that laid him out on the floor. There was a fire extinguisher in a niche to the right of the door: I hooked it out and held it ready in case he got up again, but for now he was in dreamland. I felt a little bad about it, because he was only doing his job: but on the other hand, anyone who sticks around in Jenna-Jane’s company on the basis of that excuse has got to be skating on ice so thin you could melt it with your breath.

I pulled him inside and closed the door, after glancing back up the corridor and finding to my relief that it was empty. It wouldn’t be for long.

Rosie grinned when she saw me – a lazy, wicked grin.

‘Felix Castor,’ she said. ‘I had a dream that we were married.’

‘I’d give you a dog’s life, Rosie. I’m not domesticated.’

‘Ah, but in the dream, I was the man and you were the woman.’

‘It would still hold. I’d whore around. I know my own weaknesses.’

I pulled a chair up next to her bedside. The body she was wearing right now was a new one on me, but that wasn’t surprising: like I said, it had been a while. It was a young lad with dark, curly hair and a volcanic spill of acne across his left cheek. He was fully dressed, lying on top of the covers: maybe on some level he was listening in on the conversation, but Rosie was in the driving seat. She usually is.

It’s almost impossible for ghosts – as opposed to demons – to possess living human hosts: that’s why loup-garous pick on animals, despite the social embarrassments that can cause. Rosie manages because the people she insinuates herself into are both extraordinary receptive and extraordinary co-operative, and even then it can be a tight and uncomfortable fit.

I reversed the chair so that I could rest my arms on the back of it as I sat. ‘That’s probably where the dream came from,’ I said, indicating her body with a nod of my head. ‘You’re cross-dressing again, you dirty mare.’

Rosie was still grinning: my visit seemed to have really cheered her up. Or maybe it was the bellowing alarms and what she’d seen of the fight at the door. After seven years in this place, she relished anything that was a break from routine. ‘I like the boys best,’ she confided to me. ‘I stroke them, sometimes, to see if I can make their manhoods stand.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘But it’s like trying to tickle yourself with your own fingers: it never quite works, somehow.’

‘I wish I’d met you when you had a body, Rosie.’

‘So do I, my love, so do I. There was treasure there, and I’d have given you a charter to keep all you found.’

‘Rosie, I set the alarms off so I could have a quick word with you. Jenna-Jane was trying to keep me out.’

‘The noisome bitch!’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself. And the clock is ticking: when she twigs that it was me, which will be in about half a minute, she’s going to be in here with all guns blazing.’

‘You’d better be brief, then, Felix.’

‘I will. I’m looking for another friend of yours – Dennis Peace.’

She frowned. ‘Ah, Dennis,’ she said. ‘The wildest of my boys. He’ll do himself a mischief some day, if he hasn’t already.’

‘When was he here last, Rosie?’

‘A few days ago. Sunday, perhaps, or Monday. He told me that it might be a long while before I saw him again, but that I wasn’t to worry. He had things to do. Debts, he said, that had to be paid, and some of them were bad ones that had to be paid with blood rather than with money. But he knew what he was doing, and he was safe.’

‘Safe where?’

Rosie looked at me strangely, out of the young man’s eyes. ‘What’s your interest in knowing, Fix? You’re not one of those he needs to pay out, are you? I’d hate for the two of you to fight.’

‘I’m not looking to fight him,’ I assured her. ‘But I do need to talk to him. I’m in almost as much trouble as he is, and my trouble is tied up with his in a lot of complicated ways. Maybe we can help each other. Maybe we’ll just swap information and go our separate ways.’

She was silent for a long time. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said at last, and my heart sank. Then she held up a finger as if she was asking me to wait. ‘Not in so many words. But he said—’

There was a loud bang from behind me. Turning my head, I saw Jenna-Jane and three guards standing just inside the doorway. ‘Remove him,’ Jenna-Jane snapped, and the guards squared their shoulders as they advanced on me. There was no point in making a fight of it: they were big enough and burly enough to have folded me down like a deckchair.

Rosie brought her mouth up close to my ear. ‘He said he was staying with Mister Steiner,’ she whispered quickly, just as their hands clamped down on my shoulders and hauled me backwards off the chair. They spun me round to face JJ, who was staring at me with an expression of baffled sadness.

‘You’ve really disappointed me, Felix,’ she told me.

‘J-J,’ I said, ‘you’re only saying that to make me feel good.’

One of the guards punched me in the stomach to show willing, and as I doubled up on a painful whoof of air, Jenna-Jane chided him as gently as she’d chided me. ‘No violence,’ she said. ‘This is a place of civilised discourse. Just show him out, and bring me the tapes from this session when they’re changed. I want to know what they were talking about. I’m sorry you were disturbed, Rosie.’

‘It was all rather exciting,’ said Rosie. ‘Come again soon, Fix.’

‘I’m afraid Mister Castor isn’t in our good books any more. It’s not likely he’ll be back.’

‘Count on it, Rosie,’ I wheezed.

The guards gave me a bit more civilised discourse on the way to the front door, but nothing that would leave any marks.

As I walked, a little shakily, back to the car I played Rosie’s words over in my mind. Staying with Mister Steiner. Since Peckham Steiner was dead and buried, while the guy I’d briefly got acquainted with on board the Collective was definitely alive, that left one intriguing possibility, for which I’d need Nicky’s help.

And maybe – you’ll have to pardon the expression – I could kill two birds with one stone.