Vicious Circle

19

I’m not good at waiting. I never have been. I’ve met people who can switch into Zen mode when there’s nothing going on and just mentally hibernate until the toast pops up. I tend to be punching the walls after a while – or, in the absence of walls, other people.

Basquiat had left me my watch, which was either a rare sign of humanity or the most insidious and refined torture. I looked at it often enough over the next few hours to wear a hole in the glass.

The day dragged on, like a glacier fingernailing its way down a mountain. I couldn’t settle to the car reviews again, so I found myself leaning on the windowsill looking out across Highgate Hill, where the sun, shot down in terrible slo-mo, made the sky over Marx’s tomb flare a deep enough red to have satisfied even him.

Maybe that red sky was an omen of some kind – happy shepherds notwithstanding. Just before the sun touched the horizon there was a sound like the clapping of God’s hands, followed by an endlessly prolonged windchime scream of breaking glass.

The fire alarms went off all over the building, including one just outside my door which drowned out any sounds from further away. I felt the vibrations of running footsteps, though; then immediately afterwards there were shouts in the corridor outside. I heard some kind of bellowed challenge or warning, cut short as something hit the door with enough force to pop the top hinge.

The door leaned inwards an inch or so, and then a second impact made it topple forward into the room, crashing down a few inches from my startled face. One of the uniformed constables came down with it, obviously unconscious even though his glazed eyes were still half open. Even though it was the one who’d tossed his small change onto the floor so that I’d had to grovel for it, I still felt a twinge of compassion for him. But it passed.

The werewolves, Zucker and Po, stepped over the body. Zucker was in human form – or what passed for human form with him. Po was a monstrous tower of flesh, the remains of a torn shirt still clinging to his barrel-like torso in strips here and there. An unfeasible array of yellow-white fangs bristled in his face, drawing my gaze so completely that the other features became a sliding blur as he lumbered past me to check that the unfortunate cop wasn’t likely to get up again soon.

Zucker flashed me a scary smile.

‘We were in the neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘Thought we’d drop in.’

‘And me without a cake,’ I mourned.

‘We don’t eat cake. You got anything you need to pick up on the way?’

I shook my head. I’d have dearly loved to get my own clothes back, but I had no idea where Basquiat would have stashed them. I was just going to have to get by.

Po loomed over me, and Zucker flicked him an appraising glance. ‘You know that Olympic event where people walk really fast?’ he asked me.

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Well, that’s what you’ve got to do. If you run, my friend here is apt to knock you down, step on your head and rip your guts out. It’s his way. But we are in a hurry. So – as fast as you can without running.’

Zucker turned and led the way out of the room. I followed, and Po brought up the rear like a walking wall. Except that walls mostly have graffiti rather than spines, fangs and slavering jaws.

The other cop was slumped out in the corridor, the scattered pages of a pink racing paper bearing silent witness against him. Not that he’d have had a much better chance if he’d seen the loup-garous coming: I had a suspicion that you’d need something on the scale of a howitzer even to slow Po down.

The alarms were still screaming, filling the air to the exclusion of everything else. I was sort of assuming that they were a default distress signal, but I realised as we reached the short flight of steps at the end of the corridor that the building was actually on fire. At least, the level below us was full of smoke that hung heavily in the air in visible layers, and there was an acrid chemical smell that took a lot of the fun out of breathing.

We came down into an open space lined with chairs – a waiting area of some kind for one of the Whittington’s specialist units. Zucker hesitated, then pointed to the far side of the room and headed off in that direction. I followed, at a constrained jog-trot. I didn’t want Po trampling me under from behind, and I wanted still less for him to get a mental image of me as a rubber bone.

There were three sets of lift doors in a row. Zucker pressed the DOWN buttons on all three, and the middle one slid open immediately. Po pushed me forward and I staggered in. Zucker glanced off to left and right, then backed in himself and hit the ground-floor button.

‘If the power goes, we’ll fry in here,’ I told him, the thought genuinely making my stomach turn over slightly: I’ve got just a touch of claustrophobia that surfaces every now and again when I’m in enclosed spaces with semi-human monsters that smell like old, damp carpets.

‘Not a problem,’ Zucker said tersely. ‘Trust me.’

The doors slid open again and we came out fast into a wide corridor, Zucker still taking point. The ground floor was like some kind of vision of Hell. The smoke was thicker here, shutting my line of sight down to my own arm’s length, and the chemical stench was worse. There were a whole lot of other sounds now beneath the wail of the alarm: screams, shouted orders, the scrape and thud of booted feet. No footsteps from behind me, though: I looked round, and saw that Po’s feet were as bare as mine. The last vestiges of his clothes had sloughed away now, and with them whatever laughably slim chance there’d been of him passing for human. Even if he got his errant flesh under control, he’d be stark bollock naked.

I collided with a wheelchair that was just sitting in the corridor and almost went over on my face. Po snarled warningly: he clearly took my breaking stride as a provocative act. ‘How are we getting out of here?’ I called out to Zucker, who was a good few yards ahead of us on account of not having to worry about losing major limbs and organs.

‘Trust in God,’ he suggested. I looked at him curiously, but he was forging on down the broad corridor without looking behind, so that all I could see was the back of his head. There was no trace of irony in his tone.

‘Not usually an option for me.’

‘But now you’re in His hands.’

A pair of large doors were in front of us. Zucker kicked them open and went on through, into an atrium of some kind. The higher ceiling made the fumes dance in hypnotic convection currents like curdled milk in coffee. My head was spinning, my stomach heaving. Neither of the loup-garous seemed to be affected at all.

I lost sight of Zucker almost at once, but he hadn’t gone far. When I stepped through after him his hand shot out of the fug and gripped my wrist. His voice sounded close to my ear.

‘Stay close to me,’ he muttered. ‘If we have to leave you behind, we’ve been told it’s okay to kill you. Po is hoping it pans out that way, but I prefer to stick to the script as far as possible.’

It occurred to me to wonder what Zucker looked like when he made the change into his animal form. He obviously had a lot more self-control than his partner. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when that self-control snapped.

He hauled me after him into the thunder-grey semi-dark. I presumed that Po was still with us, but I couldn’t see him any more. I couldn’t see anything. It seemed like the whole place was ablaze, although I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen any flames not felt any heat.

Suddenly a face loomed out of the smoke: a security guard, in full uniform, wielding a futile torch that did nothing but reflect off the churning billows. The guard saw us as we saw him, and opened his mouth to yell.

Po leaped more or less directly over my head, landing full on the guy’s chest. He went down hard. Then Zucker was on top of Po, grappling with him. ‘Leave him!’ he snapped. ‘Leave him, brother! Let God find him out! Let God judge!’ There were grunts, and scuffling, and then a full-throated roar from Po.

For a moment I thought I could give them the slip. That would have made life a lot simpler. But stepping sideways in the stinking gloom, with the shrilling of the alarm still jangling my thoughts, I bumped straight into a wall. Then the alarm stopped, abruptly, leaving the appalling vacuum of silence to rush in and claim the space where it had been. After-echoes died away and were swallowed in the deadening fog.

Zucker’s arm clamped down on my shoulder, whatever altercation he’d had with Po presumably settled.

‘It’s this way,’ he said, with an undertone of warning.

We moved forward. There was something cold and granular underfoot: for a moment I wasn’t sure what it was, then I heard the crunch from under Zucker’s boots and realised that I was walking on broken glass. ‘Fuck!’ I protested. Zucker hissed me silent. My voice sounded indecently loud in the sudden hush.

Two eyes opened in the fog ahead of us: gleaming yellow eyes, about seven feet apart. An engine revved. Zucker waved, and the eyes flashed: headlights, on full beam. But we were still inside the building.

More indistinct figures were staggering through the gloom off to our right. Someone shouted, and I saw the flash of another torch beam. Zucker snapped his fingers and, before I even figured out that it was a signal, Po scooped me off my feet. He ran behind Zucker, around to the left, past the lights. The side of a vehicle slid by us, dull white, and two metallic clangs sounded one after the other. Then I was thrown down, not onto the glass-strewn floor of the atrium but into the back of some kind of van. The two loup-garous piled in after me and we backed at reckless speed, Zucker pulling the doors closed with a deafening crash, then swung around with a squeal of tyres.

‘Mach two,’ Zucker bellowed, pounding twice on the roof with the heel of his hand.

And we tore away so fast that I was thrown over onto my face again just as I’d finally managed to get up on my hands and knees. A siren gave a mournful, oddly truncated whoop-whoop-whoop as the driver shoved down hard on the accelerator, making the speed limit a distant memory.

I twisted my head around and took in the gurney with its wheel locks, the medical kit on the wall, the oxygen cylinder strapped down solid in its recess. We were in an ambulance. The sneaky bastards had hijacked an ambulance.

There was a third man lounging in a fold-down seat next to the gurney. He was stocky, with a pugnacious, peeled-red face and the kind of hair that – although long and even luxuriant – starts a good couple of inches below the crown of the head, leaving a shiny circular landing area for mosquitoes. He was wearing a biker’s jacket and a pair of torn jeans that looked as though the rips had all happened by accident rather than being installed at the factory, and he was holding a gun with a silencer so long it suggested desperate over-compensation. It was pointing at my head.

‘I’m Sallis,’ he said, in a voice as raw as his face. ‘I’ll be your stewardess for this evening, and if you so much as fucking move I’ll be putting a really slow .22 hollow-point into your skull. They’ll have to pour what’s left of your brain out through your nose.’

‘What’s the movie?’ I asked him, and he prodded my cheek with the end of the silencer barrel as if to say that he didn’t appreciate my trying to move in on his stand-up act.

‘You just lie there,’ Zucker elaborated, sounding a little more relaxed now that the hard part – for him, anyway – was over. The ambulance was lurching from side to side as we banked and turned in the narrow streets, so the loup-garou had to grip a handrail to keep from being bounced off his feet: it made him seem more human, somehow. ‘You don’t say a word to anyone in here, including me. The next words you speak will be when you’re asked a direct question. Okay? Just nod.’

I shrugged. It felt fairly quaint to be threatened with a gun when Po was squatting beside me like a bag full of muscles with a decorative motif of teeth.

‘That wasn’t a nod,’ said Zucker sternly.

‘You didn’t say Simon says,’ I pointed out.

Sallis kicked me in the ribs, but for all the tough talk they were clearly under orders not to bring me in either dead or too badly creased. I was banking on that – on the fact that Gwillam would want to debrief me before he made any last judgements about my disposal. Otherwise I might have minded my manners a little more, and tried to leave a better impression.

I had plenty of time, as we drove on at breakneck speed through the gathering dark, to figure it out. There’d never been any fire, of course. Just a lot of smoke grenades that the loup-garous had chucked out of the ambulance’s doors as they’d crashed through the large picture windows that fronted the A&E block. The chemical smell was a cocktail of formaldehyde and carbon monoxide – and maybe launch gases too if they’d actually fired the fucking things from a mortar.

It figured, of course. The Anathemata wouldn’t do anything so indiscriminate as to set fire to a hospital – but the judicious application of panic was well within their remit. If anyone actually died in the resulting stampede, I was sure Gwillam would fill in the appropriate form and a Mass would be said. One thing you can’t fault about Catholics is their organisational skills.

But of course these were ex-Catholics: they’d been outlawed as an organisation and excommunicated as individuals. What did that make them? The papacy’s equivalent of the Mission Impossible team, maybe. Fanatics, certainly: so convinced they were fighting the good fight that they’d ignored their own leaders’ orders to stop.

That made what I was doing here more dangerous, and more uncertain. Fanatics are unpredictable, zigging when you think they’re going to zag: they don’t connect to the world at the same angle as the rest of us do, and you have to bear that in mind when you try to reason with them. Better yet, cut your losses and don’t bother to try.

I’d only called Gwillam because I was out of other options, and because I didn’t know Basquiat well enough to trust her yet. Maybe she’d have enough sense to see the truth when it reared up and smacked her in the face, but maybe not. In any case, I wasn’t going to bet my life on it; or Abbie’s soul. Or my own arse, for that matter. A smart cop is still a cop, with all that that implies.

We slowed down, abruptly, then speeded up again. That process was repeated several times over the next few minutes: even with the siren, and the emergency lights presumably flashing to beat the band, we could only push so far against the press of London traffic. At one point, as we were crawling along in some jam we couldn’t shift with our borrowed moral authority, Zucker suddenly tensed and Po emitted a sound that was halfway between a snarled curse and a cat’s yowl. I knew what that meant, and it gave me a rough indicator of how far we’d come. It also left me a little awestruck at how much punishment the two loup-garous were prepared to take in the line of duty. We were crossing the river. They had to be in agony: running water is like an intravenous acid bath to the were-kin, and they took it in their stride.

Well, not quite in their stride: I noticed that Po’s claws were gouging into the plastic anti-slip slats on the floor, reducing them to ribboned ruin. His head was bowed, his breath coming in quick, barking grunts. Zucker was leaning against the gurney, his eyes clenched shut, a sheen of sweat on his pale face.

This would have been a good time to launch a daring escape, but the guy who’d introduced himself as Sallis was just as aware of that as I was. He jabbed the gun in between my shoulder blades and held it there until Zucker got his groove back. Like it or not, I was along for the whole ride.

A few moments later we dipped very sharply, with a harsh shudder as the suspension didn’t quite manage to take the strain, bumped over a series of badly fitted steel grids that shrieked under our wheels like a cageful of rats, and rolled to a halt. Zucker threw the doors open. He stepped down first, and the solid thud as his feet hit the ground outside had a strange echo to it. The darkness was impenetrable. Po gathered himself up and rolled out into the night with eerie, silent grace, then swivelled to stare back in at me. Sallis waved the gun, indicating that it was my turn next.

I climbed down from the back of the ambulance and looked around. I still didn’t have enough night vision to see what kind of somewhere I was standing in, but again there was that echo, from somewhere close at hand. Every scrape of foot on concrete, every pop and twang from the ambulance’s engine, cooling rapidly in the night chill, had its attentive twin rushing out of the dark to join it.

A rectangle of grimy-yellow light opened in front of us, and with its help I saw what I’d already guessed: we were inside, in a sepulchral space that was enormous in extent but as low-ceilinged as a church catacomb. White lines on the ground, parallel and evenly spaced, gave the game away still further: not a church, but an underground car park. ‘Get him inside,’ said a cold voice, which was so dead and flat that it scarcely stirred the echoes at all. A hand – Sallis’s, presumably – gripped my shoulder from behind and I was pushed brusquely forward, Zucker and Po falling in on either side of me.

We stepped through the doorway into a concrete stairwell. Father Gwillam closed the door, which was a fire door, and pushed the bar back into place with a small grunt of effort. Then he turned to me.

‘Good to see you again, Castor,’ he murmured. ‘On the side of the angels at last.’

‘Colour me undecided,’ I suggested.

Gwillam smiled – a brief flicker of expression that couldn’t take root in the affectless terrain of his face – and nodded. ‘Everything’s set up upstairs,’ he said, to the company in general: it wasn’t a comment I liked very much, but my personal honour guard closed in on me as Gwillam led the way up the stairs, so I didn’t have much choice about whether or not I followed.

I was looking for clues as to where we were. Close to the Thames, I knew, but where had we crossed? Not as far east as Rotherhithe, surely? In any case, I was pretty sure I’d have heard the engine noise change if we’d come through the tunnel. But maybe we’d gone west. There was no way to be sure: at a rough guess, we could be anywhere between Wapping and Kew.

But as we came out of the stairwell onto a wide blue-carpeted corridor with a gentle incline, bells began to chime. I’d been here before, some time in the long-ago. I experienced a flash of déjà vu that included the insanely staring eyes of Nosferatu, and I almost had it. A cinema? Had the Anathemata found one of London’s decommissioned dream houses and moved in, as Nicky had done over in Walthamstow? That would be a pretty sick irony.

But no. As it turned out, they’d gone one better than that. Gwillam threw a door open and flicked a light switch. Strip lights flickered in sequence along a wall as long as a football field. A black wall: black floor, too, scarred with the scuff marks of innumerable feet. Up ahead of me, something that looked a little like a tyrannosaurus rex made of glass and black steel reared itself up to about twice my height. But it wasn’t a T-rex: it was a Zeiss projector.

‘Son of a bitch!’ I said, impressed in spite of myself as the penny dropped.

‘That’s the sort of language Po doesn’t appreciate all that much,’ Gwillam murmured, raising the disturbing possibility that he might actually have a sense of humour.

He walked around the Zeiss projector, and I followed: or, rather, I was herded. The vast expanse of floor on the far side was mostly empty, except for a ghost-pattern of unbleached areas on the carpet where other objects had once stood: display stands, partition walls, ancient cine-cameras, life-sized dioramas from great movies. The Anathemata had colonised one small area: there were a couple of guys working on laptop terminals at desks that were surrounded by thick, overlaid loops of electric cable like barbed-wire entanglements. Another couple of guys were talking on mobile phones, one of them tracing a line with his finger on an ops board – a huge map of London pinned to the wall, like I’d only ever seen in 1970s cop shows. That was pretty much it: that, and a whole lot of empty space stretching away into the middle distance.

‘You should move somewhere smaller, now that the kids have grown up,’ I commented, trying for a nonchalant tone that I think I missed by a mile or so. ‘You’re probably paying more rent than you need to.’

Gwillam smiled thinly. He was watching my face, taking a clinical interest in my reaction. ‘Who mentioned rent? They left the key under the mat, and we let ourselves in. I’m assuming you know what this used to be, before it died?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I know.’

But Gwillam wanted to give me the punchline, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. ‘It was the Museum of the Moving Image.’

Just the words conjured up a little squall of memories. The Museum had been part of the South Bank complex, like the National Theatre and the Festival Hall – but it had been added on after all the rest were built, because film was the scruffy little johnny-come-lately of the art world and had to make space for itself at the table with its elbows. I’d only been here once before in my life – on a school outing when I’d been thirteen. All the way from Liverpool on the train, with four stuffed-pork-roll sandwiches and a can of Vimto to see me through the day. I’d pretended to think it was shit, because that was what all my mates were saying, but secretly I reckoned the low-tech horror of the magic-lantern shows was the dog’s bollocks, and I sneaked back to watch the X-wings-versus-tie-fighters battle sequence from Star Wars twice over.

Now it was just an empty warehouse.

‘They closed the place down some time in the late 1990s,’ said Gwillam absently. ‘Took the exhibition on the road. It’s meant to be opening again in three years or so. In the meantime . . . it’s really handy for the West End. Sit down, Castor.’

I hadn’t even seen the chair. It was sitting in a patch of shadow just on the further side of the ops board where two of the strip lights had failed to come on. A coil of rope and a doctor’s little black bag lay on the floor beside it. There was a table, too: a small, round coffee table with a stained formica top which looked as though it had wandered in here from somewhere else. Gwillam swivelled the chair around to face me.

‘Please,’ he said, in the same deadpan tone.

‘I’d rather stand.’

Gwillam sighed, and pursed his lips in a way that suggested he got a lot of this selfish and hurtful behaviour but never quite got used to it.

‘If you’re standing,’ he pointed out patiently, ‘Zucker and Sallis can’t tie you to the chair.’

‘My point exactly,’ I agreed.

‘And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.’

‘Look,’ I began, ‘as a concerned citizen, I’m really happy to cooperate with any–’ But Gwillam must have given some kind of signal to his team that I didn’t catch. Po’s massive clawed hand closed around my throat and he hauled me unceremoniously over to the chair, slammed me down and held me in position. Zucker and Sallis made busy with the ropes. They were enthusiastic amateurs where knots were concerned, but they made up in quantity what they lacked in real finesse.

While they worked, Gwillam brought up another chair and placed it opposite me. Then, when they stood back respectfully from the finished job, he nodded a curt acknowledgement to them. ‘Sallis,’ he said, ‘you’re with me. Mister Zucker, after your recent exertions you and Mister Po might wish to avail yourselves of the chapel.’

‘Thank you, father,’ Zucker said, and the two of them turned on their heels and walked away into the darkness. Po looked over his shoulder at me: he bared way, way too many teeth. Sallis went over to the wall and sat down with his back to it, the gun not exactly pointed at me but still ready in his hand.

‘Is that a euphemism of some kind?’ I asked Gwillam.

He shot me a look of genuine surprise.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We have a field chapel wherever we set up, Castor. Our faith is very important to us.’

‘Your former faith.’

Gwillam quirked one eyebrow. He didn’t look upset, though: the barb didn’t have quite as much sting as I’d expected it to.

‘Do you know how many Catholics there are in the world, Castor?’ he asked me.

‘Before you and your pals got their marching orders, or afterwards?’

‘There are more than a billion. Seventeen per cent of the world’s population. Five hundred million in the Americas alone.

‘So the Holy Father must of necessity be a statesman as well as a religious leader. He has to play the games of men, and of nations. And sometimes that means he has to balance small injustices against larger gains.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The Anathemata Curialis was given a massive appropriation of funds just before the death of John Paul II. Then his successor, Benedict XVI, ordered us to disband or face excommunication. The two actions are best seen as the diastolic and systolic beats of a heart. The Church has disowned us, but it has not ceased to wish us well.’

‘Even though you use werewolves as field agents? How broad is your brief, Gwillam? I’m just curious.’

He knelt down, picked up the black bag and put it up on the coffee table. He snapped it open and rummaged inside. I hadn’t forgotten the bag: in fact, it was fair to say that it was preying on my mind a little.

‘Our brief,’ Gwillam said, ‘is narrow and exact. We fight the last war. We’re Heaven’s skirmishers, sent into the enemy’s heartlands to gauge his strength and harry his forces as he attempts to deploy them.’

‘The enemy being . . . ?’

‘Hell, of course.’

He took from the bag, one by one, a disposable hypodermic, a bubble-pack with a small snap-in vial of some straw-yellow substance, a larger bottle of clear liquid and an unopened pack of surgical swabs. ‘The rising of the dead,’ he said, looking me full in the eyes with the deadly calm of the fanatic, ‘was the opening of hostilities. Hell is on the move against Heaven, in every sphere, in every nation of Earth. It was forseen, and it was foretold. We were not taken by surprise. But there were those in the Church who wouldn’t accept the evidence of their own eyes.’

Gwillam smiled bleakly. I got the impression that he was remembering specific conversations; specific clashes of wills and words. ‘They forgot their duty of stewardship,’ he said gently. ‘They became too ensconced in the comforts of the world, and forgot that the world must always and ever be a forge. You do not sit comfortably by God’s fire: you are plunged into it, and are shaped and made by it.

‘You seem to think, Castor, that there’s some contradiction between the battle we wage and the tools we use. There isn’t. We fight against the demons who are Satan’s generals in the field – and we avail ourselves of whatever weapons God places in our hands. If faithful Catholics return from the dead not because they conspired with the Adversary but because the rules of engagement have changed, then we will not turn our backs on them. Po and Zucker have suffered much, and they have turned their suffering to good account. I number them among my most trusted officers.’

He counted off the items on the table, pointing at each with his index finger, as if to satisfy himself that he had everything he needed. Then he nodded, satisfied, and stared at me again.

‘Where is Abbie Torrington?’ he asked me.

‘In a police morgue in Hendon.’

Gwillam blinked, once, twice. ‘I don’t mean her shell,’ he said, with the closest thing to heat I’d ever seen from him. ‘I mean her true self. Her spirit. As you of all people must appreciate.’

Me of all people? I let that one pass.

‘Her soul is in a locket,’ I said. ‘Made of gold. Shaped like a heart. Her father took it from her neck just after she died. I think it has a lock of her hair inside it, and I think that that’s what she’s clinging to. And Fanke has it now: he took it from Peace’s body after he killed him at the Oriflamme on Castlebar Hill.’

‘And where is Fanke?’

‘I don’t know. Gwillam, if you can see that Abbie’s ghost is the same thing as her soul, then how in fuck’s name can you talk about destroying it?’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Isn’t that what we do?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that exactly the power that was given to us?’

‘We?’ I don’t know why that came as a shock: it was pretty much on the cards, given that he was the one the Anathemata had chosen to head up this mission. ‘You’re an exorcist?’

He nodded curtly. ‘That was how I knew that God had chosen me to fight in His cause.’

‘Funny,’ I said. ‘That was how I knew I’d never have to work on a building site. What do you use? A fragment of the True Cross?’

Gwillam looked at me reflectively. His hand slid into his breast pocket, and it came out holding a small book bound in black leather.

‘The Bible,’ he said. ‘This Bible. I read aloud – words and phrases taken at random from different verses. The words of God make a cage for the souls of sinners – as you would expect.’ He put the book away. ‘I told you, Castor. I’m a soldier. If I could save the child, then I would save her: but I can’t and won’t allow her soul to become the mechanism through which Hell’s mightiest general is unleashed upon the world. The ritual that was used here requires the sacrifice of body and soul: therefore without the girl’s soul, it can’t be completed. Now, I ask you again, for the second time: where is Fanke?’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ I said. It was true, as far as it went: I didn’t know where Fanke was right then. I was pretty sure I knew where he was going to turn up at some point in the very near future, but I was keeping that little nugget to myself. Maybe Gwillam was the best chance I had of dropping a spanner into Fanke’s good works: but at the expense of Abbie’s soul? It couldn’t be done that way. Not if I was going to be able to look in the mirror afterwards.

Gwillam nodded to Sallis, who stepped up beside me. He tucked his gun into a holster strapped across his chest under his jacket and took a double handful of my hair, pulling my head back as far as he could. I tensed against him, but standing over me like that he could exert a lot more leverage than I could. Unhurriedly, Gwillam uncorked the large bottle and poured some of its contents onto one of the surgical swabs. The pungent smell of some strong disinfectant filled the air. Gwillam carefully swabbed the area where my shoulder and throat met, then threw the used swab down on the table.

‘I’m telling you all I know,’ I snarled, finding it hard to talk with my head tilted back so sharply.

‘We’ll see,’ said Gwillam tersely. He tore the bubble-wrap open, loaded the syringe with the snap-in ampoule and pumped it lightly, sending a thin jet of fluid spraying from its tip. ‘Hold him steady,’ he warned Sallis, bending back over the doctor bag for a moment so that I lost sight of him. ‘If this goes into his carotid artery it will probably kill him.’

That was bad news, whichever way you looked at it. But even if I survived this, it was obvious that Gwillam was about to shoot me full of some thiopental derivative to ensure a fuller and franker discussion. Was there anything I could do to stop him? I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

What did I know about truth serums? Only what I’d picked up from reading cheap spy thrillers, but that was enough to know that they didn’t work. They were just disinhibitors, cutting the brake cables of your subconscious so that you freewheeled endlessly, gabbling on about whatever came into your head. People injected with propofol or pentathol couldn’t consciously lie, but they could and did talk a load of free-associative shite. That was why truth drugs didn’t turn up much any more even in cheap spy thrillers.

On the other hand, did I want to free-associate in front of Gwillam about Asmodeus and Abbie and Juliet and Saint Michael’s church? No, I didn’t. This was definitely a good time to be keeping my thoughts to myself.

And just then, another bit of trivia that I didn’t even know I knew popped up out of nowhere. I suddenly remembered what class of drugs the truth serums belonged to – and it gave me the bare bones of an idea: thin and pathetic but marginally better than nothing. No harm in trying, anyway: the only downside was that if it didn’t work, I might never wake up. I started to breathe fast and deep, forcing air into my lungs.

‘Would it be better if he was unconscious?’ Sallis asked, with what from my point of view sounded like an indecent amount of enthusiasm.

‘Hardly,’ Gwillam snapped. ‘How will he be able to answer any questions if you’ve put your fist through his skull?’

He loomed back into my field of vision, the needle raised in his hand.

‘Gwillam!’ I growled, still breathing in fast, forced gasps. I must have looked like I was starting a full-fledged panic attack.

Gwillam hesitated. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘I’m allergic.’

‘Allergic to what, exactly?’ Gwillam asked, his tone dangerously mild.

There could be any of twenty different drugs in the syringe. All I could do was guess.

‘Propofol,’ I said.

Gwillam shrugged. ‘Then you can relax,’ he said. ‘This is something different.’

The needle came down towards my neck. I twisted suddenly in Sallis’s hands, and Gwillam stopped: he didn’t want to kill me – or at least, not until he’d asked the rest of his questions. ‘Hold him steady,’ he rasped. Sallis threw one arm around my neck and leaned in hard against me to restrict my movement as much as he could.

All of this was just playing for time while I drew as many breaths as I could, working my lungs like bellows until the actual moment when the tip of the needle slid into my skin and Gwillam’s thumb pushed home the plunger.

A red curtain fell across my mind. A black one followed, half a second later. But they weren’t curtains at all, they were solid walls, and I crashed into unconsciousness so fast and hard that I actually felt the impact.

I woke up slowly and painfully, bleeding fragments of thought running together like mercury and pooling like ultra-cold lakes in the fractal wastelands of my cerebellum.

The ‘I’ came first, but there was nothing to join it to. Just I. What I? Where I? Who the fuck cared? It couldn’t matter. Whoever he was, let the bastard wait. There was pain going on somewhere nearby and I wanted to lie low so that it didn’t find me.

A minute or an hour later, an ‘am’ trickled down from somewhere and attached itself to the ‘I’. I am. I therefore think.

It was me, again, bubbling up from under the chemical sludge of anaesthesia whether I liked it or not; being harshly, achingly reborn in a dark, cold room which seemed to be hanging at an angle. But no, that was me. I was lying skewed, my cheek pressed against the floor, my legs canted up into the air. I couldn’t figure it out so I let it go.

I was still alive, anyway. And I was still thinking. Any brain damage? How would I tell? If you’ve lost enough of your brain function to make a difference, you’ve probably lost the ability to see it as a problem. Maybe the terrific throbbing inside my skull was a good sign: there had to be a lot of nerves in there still doing their jobs.

Truth serums are general anaesthetics. They’re the primary inducers that you’re given to kick your conscious mind away into the long grass so that your body can be cut and spliced and sewn without any kickback from your cerebellum. By hyperventilating, I’d tried to make sure that I got as big and fast a hit as the dose in Gwillam’s syringe could provide. I’d been hoping that I’d go straight past the rambling stage into full unconsciousness. It might even have worked: I didn’t have any memory of talking, anyway. But maybe a hole in your memory was normal with these things.

I opened my eyes, but there was nothing to see. Either I’d been struck with hysterical blindness or I was in an absolutely dark space. I tried to move, and couldn’t. I could lift my head, just, but that turned out to be a mistake because it made the throbbing worse. I opened my mouth to swear and discovered that my tongue was glued to my dry palate.

Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.

Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me bound to it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.

As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner for ever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots were within reach of my fingers.

All the same, it took me a long time – I guessed more than an hour – to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibres that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.

Okay, so I was free. But where the hell was I? I set out from the chair in tiny, inching steps, my arms straight out ahead of me, until I found a wall. Then I worked my way along it to the corner. This was no cupboard, obviously: it was a fair-sized room, although the roughcast feel of the walls still suggested a storage area of some kind rather than a public space.

I was intending to circumnavigate the room, but a little way along the second wall I found a door – and then its very welcome neighbour, a light switch. I turned it on with a silent prayer, and three strip lights flickered into life over my head, leaving me blinking in a harsh white radiance.

I’d guessed right: this was a storeroom, high-ceilinged, with deep shelves running the entire length of the far wall. They were all empty, though, except for a few circular drums about a foot and a half in diameter, which were presumably old movie reels. When the standing exhibition went walkabout, they must have taken pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. Either that or Gwillam had ordered the room cleared to make sure I didn’t find anything that might help me escape.

But nobody’s perfect. As my gaze came full circle and I looked across at the far side of the room from where I stood, a grim smile spread across my face. Because screwed to the wall, hiding in plain sight, was a small white box with a red cross stencilled on its face. A first-aid kit.

My ticket out of here.