Vicious Circle

22

The noise was like nothing I can describe. If you could imagine a full brass band had packed their instruments with TNT and blown themselves to Hell on the final bar of the Floral Dance, then you’d be off to a good start. But that was just background noise: the sound of the film canisters being ripped into red-hot gobbets that ricocheted off the walls and scythed over our heads as the ignited film spools gushed out a geyser of flame and gas that expanded too fast for them to get out of its way.

It was Asmodeus’s scream that really made the moment special.

Dennis Peace had tried to describe it to me when he’d told me about what had gone down at the meeting house, but he hadn’t done it justice. It was as though you were hearing it through every inch of your skin, on a pitch that made your internal organs vibrate and scream in sympathy: as though you’d become a taut membrane on which broken glass was showering down, playing notes by tearing random holes in you.

I held my hand in the flame for a second or so longer, until the pain became too great to bear. Then I lurched back, which should have been the end of me – but the woman with the piano wire had lost the plot too, slamming her hands unavailingly to her ears. The wooden chocks on either end of the wire fell free, and their weight made the wire bite a little more deeply into my throat, but the sensation was drowned out in the allover-body migraine effect of Asmodeus’s bellowed pain and rage.

Fanke was still standing his ground on the far side of the circle, and his mouth was open as if he was yelling something. There was no sign of Abbie: I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d winked out, but she was no longer wrapped around his clenched fist. Everyone else was collapsing to their knees or trying to run on suddenly rubberised legs. A gout of oily black smoke erupted up the centre aisle, creeping low along the ground at first but rising and opening out as though it was alive and hungry, flickers of flame winking on and off within it like eyes.

I looked up at Asmodeus – I mean, at the clotted shadow-thing that was condensing over our heads: in a different way, I knew, the whole building was Asmodeus. The thing was spasming arrhythmically, the vein-like tendrils drawn in to the heart and then spat out again in whiplash curves, tightening on themselves with audible cracks. That meant my ears were working again, at least: in the initial shock after the movie canisters blew, I was afraid my eardrums had burst.

First things first. I shrugged off the piano wire, feeling it pull and then give, releasing a shower of blood droplets where it had been partially embedded in the flesh of my throat. Letting it fall, I leaned forward across the magic circle and hauled off with a punch that hit Fanke full in the face. It sent a thrill of agony through my burned fingers, but it also sent him flailing backwards into the altar rail. Jumping over the circle, I followed up with a low blow that doubled him up and made him drop Abbie’s locket. Good enough. I snatched the little golden heart up off the flags, and as I straightened again I brought my knee up into the bridge of Fanke’s nose for good measure. That should give him plenty to think about while I took care of Pen and Juliet, I reckoned.

Of course, how I was going to carry two women out of a burning building was a question that I hadn’t really thought through to any firm conclusions. But turning around with the locket clasped in my injured left hand, I discovered that it was unlikely to become an issue. In spite of the flames billowing up towards the ceiling at the back of the church, and the filaments of smoke crawling forward along the aisles, Fanke’s followers had rallied and were running to the defence of their master. The first one reached me just as I turned, throwing a clumsy punch that I clumsily blocked. I caught him on the rebound with a head-butt that he didn’t see coming. The second had a knife, and he stepped in around his injured colleague so that he could use it. But a couple of other robed figures surging up behind him knocked him off balance, and I was able to do a step-and-roll over the altar rail and back away from the charge.

They scrambled after me, fanning out along the length of the rail so that there was nowhere I could run to. This was the last place any of us wanted to be if the fire spread to cut us off from the main doors, but Fanke’s acolytes obviously cared more about completing the ritual than they did about their own safety. That’s what I’ve never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week: at least you can play chicken with him and know he’ll stick to the rules.

I sprinted for the altar, but only because there was nowhere else to sprint. It was a lousy place for a last stand, as the crucified Christ had already discovered. I tried to vault up onto it, but since my left hand was out of action I had to use my right, which as a southpaw I’m a lot less handy with. I didn’t quite clear the marble top of the altar, which projected out about six inches from the base all around: instead I caught it with my knee, slipped and fell back to the floor in a sprawling heap.

The Satanists converged on me, too many to fight and too damn stupid to scare. Then, amazingly, instead of trampling me down and tearing me apart in the time-honoured way of religious zealots everywhere, they hesitated and came to a stumbling halt, staring past me across the altar. I saw why a moment later, as something scratched and skittered along its upper surface, and a set of long, slender talons gripped the stone rim just above my head.

Then the thing that was up there jumped into the midst of the Satanists. It looked like a greyhound at first – but that was because the two overriding impressions were of grey fur and emaciated slenderness. It was nothing like a greyhound in the way it moved: it arced like a striking snake, mewled like a cat, swiped out to left and right with hands from which claws bristled like racks of scalpels lovingly ranged by size. One of the Satanists screamed, but the scream was cut short as blood plumed from his severed throat. Another staggered back clutching both hands to his face, purple gouts welling up between his splayed fingers. A third had a gun already in his hand, and fired, but the shot went wide and broke one arm off the Christ above the altar. It crashed down behind me, unheeded.

The Satanists broke to either side, the grey thing dancing like a dervish between them. I saw its face, and that was a horror with its own special resonance, even in the midst of this symphony of horrors: partly because of the misshapen snout forced into an insane grin by canines too large for it to contain – but mainly because it was Zucker’s face, and I saw the man within the beast.

I tightened my grip on the locket, but my charred fingers wouldn’t close all the way, and the loup-garou’s eyes had already been drawn to the flash of incongruous gold from my blackened hand. He tensed to jump: but then the man with the gun fired again, and one of the beast’s legs gave way under it. Zucker made a squalling shriek, turning to face the new threat. It had already been dealt with, as Po – in human form – strode forward out of the smoke, took the gunman’s head in both of his hands and twisted it until it faced the wrong way on his neck.

I followed the example of most of the surviving Satanists and ran for it. Unfortunately, we were running into a storm: Fanke’s followers fell like threshed wheat as the sound of gunfire spread across the church. They seemed to prefer gunfire to what was behind them: several of them drew guns of their own and fired back. Dimly, through the spreading smoke, I saw black-robed figures moving up from the back of the church, skirting around the ceiling-high pyre in the centre where the film cans had exploded. Then a bullet whanged past on my left-hand side, knocking a fist-sized hole in the back of a pew, and I hit the deck.

I considered the merits of staying there until the whole thing had played itself out. Fanke couldn’t do anything without the locket, and that was still safe in my fire-blackened hand. But Gwillam’s Church commandos were after the same thing, and if they got it they’d exorcise Abbie without a second thought. I didn’t want to give them that chance. Admittedly, it was my fault they were here at all: the note I’d left stuffed into Sallis’s pants back at the South Bank Centre had invited them to join me here for an informal chat and a little light jihad. I’d hoped that their arrival – or Basquiat’s – might come at a point where I needed a diversion: the age-old game of ‘let’s you and him fight’ is one I’ve always liked.

But this was getting too hot for my liking – in the literal sense as well as the other. Pen and Juliet were still out in the open, where a stray bullet could hit them at any moment, and even without that the thickening smoke suggested that the fire was taking hold and spreading. Whatever happened, I didn’t have the luxury of just staying put.

At least the smoke would give me a little cover: it was also choking me, making my eyes water and my lungs ache and spasm with each breath, but you can’t have everything. I crawled on hands and knees to the end of the pew and then sprinted across to the outer aisle, where a line of pillars provided something more solid to hide behind. I snaked forward from one to the next, making for the open area in front of the altar rail where Pen and Juliet were lying.

The smoke was thick enough now so that I didn’t have to worry too much about hiding: gunfire was still echoing and re-echoing through the church, but if a bullet hit me it would only be by accident. Nobody could target through this, even by night-sight: on a night-scope, the church would be one large splodge of undifferentiated red, like spilled blood.

I found Pen first. She was unconscious, which didn’t surprise me. Hooking my hands under her shoulders, I hauled her towards where I remembered the doors being. I was out by a few yards, but there was a smoke-free corridor right up against the outer wall, caused by some freakish thermocline, so once I got there I could see where I was going. I dragged her along to the narthex – a lobby area barely ten feet across – and inside, relaxing in spite of myself to be in such a relatively small space after the terrible exposure of the church proper.

If I’d been thinking about it, of course, I’d have realised that someone on Gwillam’s team had to be watching the doors. It would be out of character for him to miss a trick like that. As I laid Pen down with her head right up against the doors, where clean, breathable air was filtering in from outside, Po lumbered out of the roiling blackness, backlit by the fires of Hell, effectively barring my way back into the nave. He was no longer even remotely human: he was the hyena thing that I’d seen at the Thames Collective and then again at the Whittington, his front limbs twice as long as his back ones so that he stood almost like an ape.

He loped towards me, grinning. It wasn’t a grin of amusement: it was more a question of unsheathing his main weaponry, which jutted from his jaws like steak knives. I watched him closely, tensing to jump when he did, but there wasn’t enough room in the narrow narthex to do much more than duck. Wherever I went, there wasn’t anywhere that would be out of his reach.

Then a second figure appeared at his shoulder, walking unhurriedly towards him out of the growing inferno. She looked – well, right then she looked so good I would have cried, if I hadn’t already been crying because of the smoke.

‘You should have woken me, Castor,’ Juliet said reproachfully, a harsh rasp in her voice. ‘I almost missed this.’

Po turned and jumped in one movement, giving out a terrifying roar. He hit Juliet like a fanged and clawed meteorite, his muscular back limbs raking up from below to disembowel her even as his jaws fastened around her head.

That was the plan, anyway. She bent under him, sinuous and graceful, caught him on her hands and threw him, using his own momentum, into the nearest row of pews. He was up again in an instant, but Juliet was quicker. As he advanced on her again she lifted up one of the pews, judging the balance perfectly and completely untroubled by its weight. She brought it down across his head and shoulders so fast it blurred.

Amazingly, there was still some fight in Po: I suspect there might have been more if it hadn’t been for what he was breathing. He closed with her and they both went down together as a gust of smoke and flame hid them from my sight.

I left Juliet to look after herself, knowing that she could. With the collapse of the ritual, Asmodeus seemed to have loosed whatever hold he had on her: I suspected there was nothing left of him in the church at all now. If there was, he certainly wasn’t on fighting form right then.

I went back to Pen, kicked the main doors of the church open and dragged her onto the cobbles outside. Then I slumped to my knees beside her, sucking in the cool air as if it was wine. Like wine, it made my head spin and a feeling of almost unbearable lightness expand inside my tortured chest.

The bubble burst as a gun muzzle was laid alongside my head.

‘Give me the locket,’ Fanke wheezed, his voice all the more terrifying for the bubbling sound of organic damage at the back of it. Even without turning to look at him, I could tell that this was a man with very little left to lose.

‘I haven’t got it,’ I said.

‘Stand up. Spread your arms. Now, Castor!’

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but it seemed to me right then that my life expectancy was exactly as long as I could keep Fanke guessing. Once he had the locket, he’d be wanting to deal out some payback for his ruined ritual and his lost good looks. I took a gamble on his line of sight, letting the locket slide out of my hand into the space between Pen’s arm and body. Then I stood, very slowly, putting out my arms to either side, fingers spread.

Fanke’s hands patted down my pockets. His breathing was painful to hear: an uneven, drawn-out skirl with that liquid undertow which suggested vital fluids leaking into places where they weren’t meant to be. He went through my coat, then my trousers. When he came up empty, he pressed the gun a little more tightly against my cheek.

‘Where is it?’ he demanded.

‘I think I left it inside,’ I suggested. ‘On the altar.’

The gun scraped against my cheekbone as Fanke thumbed off the safety. ‘Then I think you’re dead,’ he growled.

Certainly one of us was. There was a sound like someone ripping a silk scarf, and the gun clattered to the cobbles. Twisting my head I saw Fanke stiffen, his eyes wide in surprise, and take a step backwards. He looked down at his stomach. His red robes hid the stains well, but blood began to patter and then to pour out from underneath them, pooling and then running in the gaps between the cobblestones to make a spreading grid pattern of red on black. Fanke touched his left side with a trembling hand: his robes seemed to be torn there, in several parallel slashes that seemed to have just appeared there, as if by some magical agency. But the blood gave away the truth: they’d just been made from behind, passing straight through his body.

Fanke gave a sound that was like an incredulous laugh, and then his lips parted as he murmured something that reached me only as a formless sigh: maybe it was the Satanist equivalent of ‘Father, into thy hands . . .’ He folded up on himself like an accordion – although that’s a lousy image because when you fold an accordion it doesn’t leak dark arterial red from every infold. He fell forward onto the cobbles, his head hitting the stones with enough force to shatter bone: but that didn’t matter much to him any more.

Zucker, still in animal form, limped around the body, staring at me with mad eyes. He could only use one of his front paws: the other was bent back against his chest. He must have sat on his haunches when he took that swipe at Fanke from behind – cutting right through the man’s torso below the ribs and turning his internal organs into rough-chopped chuck.

I took a step to the right, leading Zucker away from Pen. He followed, a trickle of drool hanging from his jaw. He was in a bad way, and it wasn’t just the bullet wound. His claws, so terrifying in a fight, slid on the cobbles as if he was having trouble staying upright. But he snarled deep in his throat as he advanced on me, and his eyes narrowed on some image of sweet murder.

I kept on backing, kept on shifting ground so he had to turn as he advanced to keep me in sight. His movements were getting slower and more uncoordinated. His chest rose and fell like a sheet cracking in the wind, but with barely any sound apart from a creak as though his jaws were grinding against each other at the corners.

‘You know which company is the biggest consumer of silver in the whole world?’ I asked Zucker conversationally. He didn’t answer. His good front leg buckled under him and he sank to the ground as if he was bowing to me.

‘Eastman Kodak,’ I said gently. ‘That’s what you’ve been breathing.’

His eyes closed, but his chest kept pumping prodigiously. He might even ride the poison out, but he was finished as far as this fight was concerned.

I went back to Pen. I had to kneel again, fighting off a wave of blackness that came out of nowhere. I was still in that position, just starting to struggle with the layers of duct tape around Pen’s wrists, when Juliet came out of the church. At a distance behind her and on either side came two of Gwillam’s men. They had automatic rifles levelled at her, but they didn’t make any attempt to use them: they’d probably seen what she’d done to Po, and if they had then they almost certainly didn’t fancy their own chances against her very much.

But right then Juliet herself didn’t look too healthy. She’d been breathing silver too, and it wasn’t agreeing with her any better than it had with Zucker. Of course, unlike Zucker she hadn’t taken any metal in the more handy .45 hollow-point form, so she was still on her feet. But there was a sway to her walk that wasn’t entirely voluntary, and her clenched teeth were visible between her slightly parted lips.

She crossed to me, looking down at Pen’s bound form with distant curiosity.

‘Is this a new hobby?’ she asked me.

‘Do me a fucking favour,’ I rasped, my voice as harsh as my mum’s in the morning back when she was on thirty a day. ‘Is there anyone still alive in there?’

Juliet glanced back towards the doors of the church, from which smoke was still issuing in thick, uneven gouts like blood from a wound. ‘The ones in priests’ robes are all dead,’ she said. ‘The werewolf, too. Most of these –’ she nodded towards Gwillam’s men ‘– seem to have survived. Who are they?’

‘The Sisters of Mercy,’ I said weakly. ‘Well, one of those church organisations, anyway.’

Juliet bared her teeth in a grimace. She doesn’t like religion any better than I do.

There was a clatter on the cobbles and I looked up to see Gwillam heading across to us, flanked by two more men with sub-machine guns. He made a sign that could almost have been a benediction, but it wasn’t: it was an order for the men to fan out, so that if they had to shoot us they’d bracket us from as wide an arc as possible. They obeyed silently, the barrels of their squat, ugly weapons all converging on me and on Juliet. She looked indifferent: I felt, I have to admit it, a little exposed.

Gwillam himself walked past us to where Zucker lay on the cobbles. He squatted down beside the corpse, which looked small and pathetic and undignified the way we all do in death, and put a hand on its forehead. His lips worked in silence, and I didn’t try to read them.

Then he stood again and turned to face me.

‘You’re not human, are you?’ Gwillam asked, and I realised that it was actually Juliet he was addressing.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘What about you?’

Gwillam’s brow furrowed. ‘Tell me your name and lineage,’ he snapped. ‘In nominibus angelorum qui habent potestatem in aere atque—’ He broke off as Juliet laughed a rich, suggestive laugh. Either she was recovering from the silver poisoning more quickly than I would have believed possible, or she was putting up a hell of a good front. But then, she always did that.

‘I was old when your religion was young, O man,’ she murmured in her throat. ‘I do not fear your god, and I will not come to heel like a bitch when you call on me, whether you know my name or not.’

‘Then I’ll tell my men to shoot,’ Gwillam said.

‘And I will walk through the bullets and feed upon their hearts, new-ripped from their chests,’ she said. ‘But you I will kill after the manner of my kind, for I am succubus and mazzikim. I will make you love me, and be lost.’

Gwillam’s face went pale, and I could see that that threat had gone home. It struck me, though, that Juliet was actually making the threat at all rather than just going ahead and doing it. Subtlety isn’t her strong point, as a rule. I wondered whether the silver she’d inhaled and the time she’d spent in thrall to Asmodeus had left her weaker than she looked.

With an effort, and slowly, Gwillam turned his attention to me.

‘You killed the girl?’ he demanded. ‘Snuffed out her spirit? Was that why the ritual failed?’

‘You tell me,’ I suggested.

His eyes narrowed, and he stared down at my hands as I fished the locket back up from where it lay in the crook of Pen’s armpit.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s still there.’

‘If he goes for his Bible,’ I said to Juliet without looking up, ‘feel free to rip his throat out.’

I stood, slowly.

‘If I can prove to you that Abbie Torrington isn’t a threat any more, then will you walk away?’ I asked Gwillam.

‘If you can prove that, yes,’ he said, without a pause. ‘You have my word, Castor. I wouldn’t snuff out an innocent soul without powerful reason.’

I nodded. Good enough.

‘Asmodeus already has a human host,’ I said.

‘I know that,’ said Gwillam. ‘We assessed that situation two years ago, and decided that it was better not to act: to kill Rafael Ditko might simply set Asmodeus free to act on the human plane.’

‘And killing him would take a bit of doing,’ I reminded him bluntly, a bit annoyed by the supercilious tone. ‘With Asmodeus bonded to his flesh and spirit, killing him wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a picnic.’

Gwillam acknowledged the point with an impatient wave of the hand.

‘I cut a lock of his hair,’ I said, hesitating slightly because I shied away from saying this – from bringing what I’d just done out of hiding and nailing it down with words for other people to see. ‘Rafi’s hair. I tied it around my finger. And then when Fanke had made his invocation – when he’d summoned Asmodeus to feast on the sacrifice inside the circle – I got there first. It was Rafi’s hair that burned, not Abbie’s. It was Rafi’s soul that was consecrated and offered up, and it was Rafi’s soul that Asmodeus got a mouthful of as he came down to feed.’

Gwillam stared at me in dead silence, waiting for me to go on. Juliet was looking at me too, her expression unreadable.

‘Asmodeus had never entirely left Rafi. Part of him was stuck inside the stones here, waiting to be released by the offering of Abbie’s soul: the other half was still where it’s been for the past two years – stuck like shrapnel in Rafi Ditko’s flesh and spirit.’

Gwillam’s expression was one of profound shock. ‘So the demon—?’

‘—Was starting to eat itself. It’s like a very nasty version of trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps. If Asmodeus devoured Rafi’s soul instead of Abbie’s, the ritual that was meant to free him was going to consume him at the same time. He had no choice but to back off, even if bailing out in the middle of the show aborted the ritual and undid everything that Fanke had managed to achieve. That was why it all fell apart in there. And that’s why Abbie doesn’t matter now – at least as a weapon in your fucking holy war. Asmodeus severed the link, and went scuttling back to the prison he was trying to escape from in the first place.’

‘Rafael Ditko.’

‘Rafi Ditko,’ I agreed. My friend, whom I’d just betrayed for the second time. And as if to make things worse than they were already, I saw that Pen’s eyes were open and she was hearing this. The gag taped across her mouth prevented her from commenting, except with her eyes – but they were eloquent enough.

Gwillam seemed impressed. ‘I have to congratulate you, Castor,’ he said, with a solemn edge to his voice. ‘You’re easily ruthless enough to serve with the Anathemata, if you ever found the light. But—’ He hesitated, massaging the bridge of his nose as if he was raising a slightly delicate subject with as much tact as he could. ‘Why should that change my feelings about Abbie Torrington’s soul? She was consecrated to Asmodeus. What is there to stop some other adept, as ruthless and as lost to human feeling as Fanke, from finishing what he’s started?’

The question took me off guard, but I improvised as well as I could. ‘Nobody else knows about her,’ I said. ‘You’ve just killed all of Fanke’s crew, and Zucker took care of Fanke himself.’

‘True. But what has he written about this on his message boards? Who has he confided in? What will his . . . parishioners in the Satanist church do when they learn of his failure? No, you dealt very cleverly with the immediate problem, but in the longer term the threat still stands. The girl’s soul is still a detonator looking for the right bomb. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Render unto God that which is God’s.’

I opened my mouth to tell Gwillam to take his sanctimonious shit somewhere private and render it unto himself, but he hadn’t quite finished. ‘Yehoshua!’ he said, almost in a sing-song voice. ‘Yehoshua, of all men king and of all men brother, I praise Thee and live in Thine eyes! The vessels being diverse, one from another. What shall we do unto her, according to the law? And when it was day, He departed. Even unto Simon’s house.’

I was too slow out of the gate. I didn’t guess what Gwillam was doing until I glanced sideways at Juliet, realising suddenly that there was a tension in her stillness. She was standing rigidly erect, completely unmoving, though the muscles in her neck stood out like cords.

‘That was the cantrip that binds her,’ Gwillam said. ‘Should I speak the cantrip that destroys her?’

I took an involuntary step towards him. The submachine guns’ muzzles converged on me like the eyes of snakes, targeting on movement. I stopped, realising that I wouldn’t reach him alive.

‘Should I speak the—?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t. Don’t do that.’

I would never have believed that he could have got the measure of Juliet so fast. But her very power lay in filling your eyes and your nose and your mind with her essence: if you’re dealing with an exorcist, that’s a high-risk strategy. You take him out quickly, or you find that you’ve given him all the ammo he needs.

‘Then give me the locket,’ said Gwillam.

I looked down at the locket in my hand, but did nothing. The tableau stood still for the space of three heartbeats.

‘Castor—’ Gwillam murmured warningly.

‘You take the locket, and then you leave?’

‘As opposed to killing both you and your demon whore, which I so clearly could? Yes. Take it. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.’

He was right there. I threw the locket across to him and he caught it one-handed. Juliet’s eyes narrowed, but that was the only move she made: the only move she could make.

Gwillam signalled to his men – a clockwise rotation of his index finger in the air which clearly meant ‘pack up the tents’. They started to file away in good order, two of them carrying Zucker, just as the stained-glass windows to either side of the church door blew out in party-coloured shards, vomiting smoke and fire up into the night.

Gwillam went last of all, and he lingered for a moment as if there was something else on his mind.

‘I told you that we investigated Ditko two years ago – very shortly after you signed him in at the Charles Stanger clinic,’ he said.

‘Yeah. You told me that.’

‘It might make you feel a little better about your part in all of this if I tell you something we found out at that time.’ I didn’t say anything that could have been interpreted as ‘Oh, do tell’ but Gwillam went on anyway, looking at me thoughtfully. ‘Fanke had a mistress back then – dead now. In his sexual liaisons he’s always favoured the young and stupid: he seems – seemed, I should say – to take a certain pleasure in imprinting his own will on people too weak or vapid to resist.

‘Her name was Jane – plain Jane – but she’d rechristened herself Guinevere when she joined the Satanist Church. Obviously she was living out some romantic fantasy of her own. Most people still called her Jane, in spite of all her efforts, but she was introduced as Guinevere to Rafael Ditko and he usually shortened it to Ginny.’

Memory sideswiped me like a truck. Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?

‘My Christ!’ I breathed.

Gwillam nodded, seeing that I’d made the connection. ‘When Ditko raised Asmodeus that night, it was a move in a game – a game that Fanke was playing against God. Abbie Torrington was another such move. Perhaps she was originally destined to be sacrificed on a different altar, to a different devil. But Ditko failed, and you . . . well, you did what you did. He chose his own path, of course, but your choices were made for you a long time ago, Castor. You’re one of Heaven’s soldiers too, whether you believe that or not. You’re the brand that he takes from the fire, already burning, to smite his foes. Perhaps when he’s done with you there’ll still be something left to save.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ I snarled. As clever ripostes go, I had to admit, it lacked something. Actually, it lacked pretty much everything.

Gwillam turned and walked away, his steps ringing on the cobbles until the whoop of approaching sirens drowned them out. It sounded like Detective Sergeant Basquiat had finally checked her messages.

I didn’t have my whistle, but I didn’t need it for this. I whistled a few bars between my teeth for Juliet, ragged and halting: the notes that cut the strings Gwillam had laid on her. When she could, she turned to face me, her gaze deep and searching.

‘Debriefing comes later,’ I said. ‘No smutty double meanings intended. Right now, if I were you, I’d be somewhere else.’

Juliet glanced at the first of the police cars as it turned the corner and came belting towards us. Then, in the glare of its headlights, she turned back to me and nodded once, as if to say that there’d be answers she’d insist on.

When the cars rattled to a halt on the cobbles to either side of me, I was the last man standing.