Vicious Circle

4

The front door of Saint Michael’s church was massive: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilised hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand and I gave it up as a bad job. I could have picked the locks with nothing more than main strength and bloodymindedness, but there wouldn’t have been any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.

There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. Saint Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong – it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic: very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription. Which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike: a colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the Day of Judgement.

Some people would argue that he’d overslept.

This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait – and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by: something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind was a searchlight. Whatever it was, it had strongly negative overtones for me – like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.

Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.

Nothing at first – except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch. But it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking towards me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blonde hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders hunched up as if against heavy rain. Except that the rain had rolled away westward: it was a fine night in late spring, and if it weren’t for the cold in under the shadow of the church I might even have been feeling overdressed in my heavy greatcoat. As it was, she clearly felt that her beige two-piece was too skimpy, even though the sleeves were full and the skirt was demurely calf-length: hands folded, she rubbed her upper arms nervously as she approached me.

Lashless black eyes blinked at me from behind those ‘I am serious’ glasses.

‘Mister Castor?’ the woman said, tentatively, as if the question might give offence.

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘I’m Susan Book, the verger. Umm . . . Miss Salazar is around the back, in the cemetery. She asked me to show you the way.’

Her voice had that rising inflection that turns statements into questions. Normally that irritates me a little, but Susan Book was so clearly anxious to please that resenting her, even in the privacy of your own mind, would have felt like taking a hot iron to a puppy. She held out her hand diffidently. I took it and shook it, holding on long enough to listen in on her feelings. They were dark and confused: something was clearly weighing on her mind. I let go, sharpish: I’d had enough of that for one day.

‘I’m all yours,’ I said, and I threw out my arm to indicate that she should lead the way. She started and spun around as though I was pointing to something behind her. Then she recovered, blushed, and darted me a quick, flustered glance.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m really nervous today. All of this—’ She shrugged and made a face. Not knowing what she was talking about, all I could do was nod sympathetically. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come: I fell in alongside her.

‘She’s amazing, isn’t she?’ Susan Book said wistfully.

‘Juliet?’

‘Yes, Jul— Miss Salazar. She’s so strong. I don’t mean physically strong, I mean spiritually. The strength of faith. You can tell just by looking at her that nothing can shake her, or make her doubt herself.’ There was something in her voice that sounded like yearning. ‘I really admire that.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Well, up to a point. Self-doubt can be useful too, though.’

‘Can it?’

‘Definitely. Prevents you from jumping straight off a cliff because you think you can fly, for example.’

Susan laughed uncertainly, as though she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I was joking. ‘The canon says that doubts are like workouts,’ she said. ‘If he’s right, I ought to be benching a hundred kilos by now. I seem to get doubts all the time. But this – maybe the – maybe I’ll get stronger by dealing with all of this. Good comes out of evil. That’s His way.’

I caught the capital H on ‘His’, which my brother Matthew uses too. But there was an almost equally weighted emphasis on ‘all of this’, and I was tempted to ask her what the hell it was that had happened here. But I assumed there was some reason why Juliet hadn’t briefed me in advance, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say a word about Juliet herself, either, although I wondered what Susan would think if she knew what Miss Salazar’s real name was, or where she hailed from. Best to leave her with her illusions intact.

The church stood in its own very narrow grounds on Du Cane Road, almost directly opposite the soul-dampening pile of Wormwood Scrubs – which is angry red chased with white, like bone showing through an open wound. To the left of the church itself, where Susan Book led me, there was a lych-gate, on the far side of which I could see a trim little graveyard like the stage set for a musical of Gray’s Elegy. This gate was locked, too, with a padlock on a chain. Susan took out a small ring of keys from her pocket, sorted through them and found the right one. It turned in the padlock after a certain amount of fidgeting and ratcheting, and she slid the chain free so that the gate swung open, stepping aside to let me through.

‘I’ll unlock the vestry door for you,’ she said. ‘It’s by the west transept, over there. Miss Salazar is—’ She pointed, but I’d already seen Juliet. The cemetery was on a slight slope and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a marble monument of some kind, outlined against the sky. A colossal oak that had to be a couple of hundred years old held up half the sky behind her.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We’ll join you in a couple of minutes.’

Susan Book stood for a moment, staring up the hill at Juliet’s silhouetted form. Then she bustled away, casting a wide-eyed look at me over her shoulder as if I’d caught her out in a moment of self-doubt. I waved, reassuringly I hoped, and walked up the hill to join Juliet. She had her head bowed and she didn’t look up as I approached: she didn’t seem to notice me, although I knew damn well that she’d heard the key rattle in the lock of the lych-gate, smelled my aftershave on the air as I stepped through, and sieved my pheromones by taste to find out what kind of a day I’d had. As soon as she was close enough so that I didn’t have to raise my voice to speak to her, I voiced what was uppermost in my mind.

‘Why a church? Did you get religion?’

Her head snapped up and she frowned at me, eyes narrowing to slits. I threw up my hands, palms out, in a meant-no-harm pantomime. Sometimes I go too far. She infallibly lets me know when that happens.

As usual, once I’d started looking at her the tricky thing was stopping. Juliet is absurdly, unfeasibly beautiful. Her skin is melanin-free, alabaster-smooth, as white as any cliché you care to dredge up. If you go for the default option, snow, then think of her eyes as two deep fishing holes, as black as midnight. But if anyone’s fishing, it’s from the inside of those holes, and you won’t feel the hook until it’s way, way down in the back of your throat. Her hair is black, too: a waterfall of black that falls almost to the small of her back, texturelessly sheer. Her body. . . I won’t try to cover that. You could get lost there. People have: stronger people than you, and most of them never came back.

Because the point – and I know I’ve said this already – is that Juliet isn’t human. She’s a demon: of the family of the succubi, whose preferred method of feeding depends on arousing you to the point where your nervous system starts to fuse into slag and then sucking your soul out through your flesh. Even tonight, dressed coyly in black slacks, boots and a loose white shirt with a red rose embroidered up the left-hand side, you could never mistake her for anything other than what she was. The confidence, the strength that Susan Book had seen in her – that came from being the top carnivore in a food chain that no man or woman alive could even imagine. Except that carnivore wasn’t quite the right term: you needed something like noumovore, or animovore. And even more than that, you needed not to go there.

Thank God she’s on our side, that’s all. And I’m saying that as an atheist.

And, taking another step, I came within range of her scent. It hit me in two waves, as it always does. With the first breath, you’re gulping in the rank foulness of fox, cloying and earthy: with the second, which you draw shallowly because of the sharpness of that first impression, you inhale a mélange of perfumes so achingly sweet and sensual your body goes on instant all-points alert. I’m used to it and I was braced for it, but even so I felt a wave of dizziness as all the blood in my head rushed down to my crotch in case it was needed there to bulk out my sudden, painful erection. Men limp around Juliet: limp, and go partially blind because taking your eyes off her suddenly seems like a waste of valuable time.

Which is why it’s important never to forget what she is. That way, you can maintain a level of good old-fashioned pants-wetting terror as a bulwark against the desire. I’ve found that to be a healthy balance to keep, because obviously if I ever actually had sex with Juliet my immortal soul would be the cigarette afterwards. But still, it’s not easy to think logically when she’s right there in front of you. It’s not easy to think at all.

Juliet unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realised that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realised that Juliet was carrying a grey plastic bowl half-full of water: it had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.

‘So how’s tricks?’ I asked her.

‘Good,’ she said, neutrally. ‘On the whole.’

‘Meaning . . . ?’

‘It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavour, and the joy of it, out of my mind.’

I groped around for a response, but nothing came. ‘Yeah,’ I said after slightly too long a pause, ‘I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.’

Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.

‘So you’ve got a spook?’ I said, to move things along. ‘A graveyard cling-on?’ It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts battening fast to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies: most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.

Juliet looked at me severely. ‘In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor – look at the dates.’

I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.

‘There are no ghosts here,’ Juliet said, stating the obvious.

‘What, then?’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hang around for more than a decade or so – almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.

‘Something bigger,’ said Juliet.

‘Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,’ I said, nodding towards the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.

‘I never said it was holy,’ said Juliet.

‘So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—’

‘Turn around.’ She pointed towards the church.

‘Widdershins or deasil?’

‘Just turn around.’ Juliet put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swivelling me a hundred and eighty degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of Saint Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that the church was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.

‘My kind have a gift for camouflage,’ murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. ‘We use it when we hunt. We make false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seeming, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.’ She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to centre of the water within, then from centre back to edge in choppy, broken circles. ‘So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.’

I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of Saint Michael’s church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downwards into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire – on fire without flames.

Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and sombre. No smoke, no fireworks.

But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. Saint Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.

I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.

‘Anyone you know?’ I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.

‘That’s a good question,’ she acknowledged. ‘But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.’

I felt like that was the last thing I needed. But I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill towards the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.

The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever – and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.

‘You can wait here,’ Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. ‘We’ll be five minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.’

Susan shook her head. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.’ She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.

The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide-open door, into the north transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking towards the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows to our left. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.

I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.

But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling now,’ she said.

I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forwards.

‘It changes,’ I muttered. ‘Son of a bitch. It’s like – there are pockets of cold, in the air, not moving.’

‘Whatever happened here, it happened very quickly. I think that’s why it hasn’t—’

She hesitated, looking for the right word.

‘Hasn’t what?’

‘Spread evenly.’

My laugh was incredulous, and slightly pained.

Susan Book was waiting for us at the end of the transept, and she was looking back towards us, not expectantly but with anxious intensity. She clearly wasn’t going to take a step further without us. So we walked on and joined her.

The shadows were deeper in the nave, because only the windows at the farther end were getting any light. The rest of the cavernous space was a dimensionless black void. The grey flagstones under our feet faded into the dark a scant three or four yards from where we were, as though we stood on a stone outcrop at the edge of a cliff face.

Now that none of us was moving, I was suddenly aware of a sound. It was very low, both in volume and in pitch: very different from the susurration of echoes our footsteps had raised. It rose and fell, rose and fell again over the space of several seconds, dying away so slowly I was left wondering whether I’d imagined it.

Before I could resolve that question, Juliet was on the move again. She crossed the nave into the featureless dark and came back a few moments later, carrying a candle. How she’d even been able to see what she was aiming for was beyond me.

The candle was plain and white, about eight inches long and with a slight taper at the wick end. Susan looked at it with solemn unhappiness. Juliet took a lighter from her pocket and held it over the wick. ‘That’s a votive candle,’ Susan said, a little plaintively. ‘You’re meant to light it when you say a prayer.’

‘Then say one,’ Juliet suggested.

She touched the wick to the lighter flame, and after a moment it flared and caught.

I thought she was going to lead us on up the nave towards the altar, but she just waited, one hand cupped around the candle flame to shield it from any draughts that might gust in from the open door behind us. But the air was as still as the air inside a coffin must be. The flame rose straight and flicker-free, giving off a single wisp of smoke as the wick burned in.

Then it guttered and almost went out. It shrivelled, if a flame can be said to shrivel, and it shrank in on itself. It was as though the darkness and the cold were feeding on it, suckling on the tiny pinpoint of warmth and light and in the process killing it. As the flame surrendered and gave ground, the shadows came back deeper and more opaque than before, and the cold seemed to become a little more intense. In the dead silence, I heard that sound again: the double-spiked, deep-throated murmur at the limit of hearing.

‘You were expecting that?’ I asked Juliet, my eyes on the beleaguered candle flame.

‘It was the first thing I tried. And that was the second.’ She was pointing to the wall over to my right. Glancing in that direction, I saw a row of six squat shapes which resolved themselves, when I took a step towards them, into black plastic plant pots.

Each pot had something dead in it. Leafless stems; sagging, frost-burned blossoms; desiccated corms.

‘The cold will do that,’ I pointed out. ‘You don’t need anything supernatural.’

‘True,’ Juliet agreed. ‘But not in the space of five minutes. Look at your hand. The skin on your wrist.’

I did. It was already starting to pucker and dry: when I ran a finger across it, there was a dull ache.

‘The longer you stay in here, the worse it will get. If you lingered long enough, I suppose—’ Juliet’s gaze flicked across the plant pots with their freeze-dried, grey-green cargoes. She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Again, in the hush after she spoke, a bass rumble in the air or in the stone or in the darkness itself rose and peaked and fell, rose and peaked and died away into silence.

‘What the hell is that?’ I asked. ‘That noise?’

Juliet seemed surprised. ‘You mean you don’t recognise it?’

‘Not so far.’

‘It’ll come to you.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ I said, a little piqued. ‘But probably not before my leaves start to fall off.’

I blew out the candle flame, just before it died of its own accord, and headed for the exit.

It had happened during the evensong service, Susan Book said, the night before last.

Saint Michael’s didn’t have a resident priest, and there were no services there during the week. It was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, when Canon Ben Coombes came across from Hammersmith to lead the services for a congregation that was only half as big as it had been even ten years ago. The rest of the time, Susan looked after the place along with a sexton named Patricks who mainly tended the graves but could occasionally be prevailed on to clean graffiti off the walls.

Evensong was her favourite service. She liked the hymns, which always started with ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us’, and the canticles which sometimes made her cry, they were so beautiful; and she liked the lighting of the candles – especially around this time of year, when they seemed to take up the work of the sun as the sunlight failed. Like the light of the spirit, picking up the slack for the fallible and beleaguered flesh.

We were out among the gravestones again, warming ourselves in the last red rays of sunset after the midnight chill of the church. I was reclining at my ease, more or less, on MICHAEL MACLEAN GREATLY MISSED HUSBAND AND FATHER. Juliet was perched elegantly on the headstone of ELAINE FARRAH-BEAUMONT, TAKEN FROM US MUCH TOO SOON, and Susan was sitting on the grass between us, unwilling to disturb the rest of the dearly departed. Under the circumstances, I didn’t take that as empty sentimentality. Nor did I take it personally that her eyes never wavered from Juliet’s face.

There were about eighty people in the church, she went on. ‘A good house,’ the canon had said jocularly as Susan helped him into his vestments, ‘so we’d better give them a good show.’ He’d led the responses and read a psalm – just as he did every week. They were into the first of the two canticles, which was the cantate domino: ‘O sing unto the Lord a new song: for He hath done marvellous things . . .’

Susan stared at the ground, remembering.

‘There’s a place in the cantate,’ she murmured, ‘where the choir invite the sea and the earth to make a joyous noise . . .’ I remembered it as she said it, thinking back without enthusiasm to my own confused religious education. It had never made a hell of a lot of sense to me. ‘Let the floods clap their hands.’ How, exactly? ‘And let the hills be joyful.’ Was there any way we’d be able to tell the difference?

But Susan was still talking, and I reined in my jaundiced memories.

When Canon Coombes got to ‘Let the sea make a noise,’ there was a noise; from outside, in the street. A shriek of brakes, very loud, followed by the sound of an impact: metal crunching against metal, or against something else. The mood was broken. Even the choir faltered into silence, and every eye looked towards the door.

Canon Coombes cleared his throat, and the congregation faced front again. He nodded to the choir, expecting them to take up where they’d left off. But though they opened their mouths to sing, no sound came out.

‘It got cold,’ Susan said, her voice sounding a little ragged at the edges. ‘All at once, just . . . terribly, terribly cold. I heard people gasp, and everyone was looking at everyone else, or jumping to their feet. Shocked. Scared. Not understanding it, because it was so fast.

‘And then there was something a lot worse.’

I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. She looked at Juliet, as if she needed to be told to come out with the rest of it. But Juliet just returned the stare with her own unreadable gaze, until eventually, abashed, Susan looked down at the ground.

‘Something laughed at us,’ she said.

It was so incongruous, I didn’t take it in. ‘Laughed at. . . ?’

‘Something laughed,’ Susan repeated stubbornly, defensively. ‘It came from high up, near the roof, a long way over our heads. And it was loud. It was very, very loud. It filled the church.’ She glanced across at me, her face set, as though she was certain in her own mind that I thought she was lying. ‘But I can’t describe the tone of it. I can’t make you understand what it felt like. People started to run. Or they just . . . fell down, where they were. Some of them seemed to be having fits, because their arms and legs were jerking and their mouths were wide open.

‘It was horrible! All I wanted to do was get away from that awful sound, but I couldn’t think. I started to run without even knowing where I was going. I bumped into Ben – Canon Coombes – and he didn’t even see me, but he’s so much bigger and heavier than me that I went flying. I grabbed hold of the altar rail to keep from falling, and then I couldn’t seem to let go of it. It was so cold – the cold going right through me, taking my strength away. You know you see skaters on an ice rink, clinging to the side because they’re scared to move out onto the ice? That’s what I must have looked like. I just leaned against the rail, with my head spinning, and with people screaming and running all around me.

‘Then when I did manage to get moving again, I almost tripped over a woman who’d fallen down in the aisle right in front of me. Fainted, or perhaps just hit her head on something. I couldn’t leave her there. But she was too heavy for me to carry, so I dragged her towards the door, a few feet at a time, with rests in between. The laughter had stopped by then, but there was still a sort of sense of . . . of being stared at. I was scared to look up. It really felt as if something enormous – some giant ogre – had taken the roof off the church and was peering in at us.’

Susan swallowed hard and shook her head. ‘I don’t remember getting to the door, but I must have done, because suddenly I was out on the street. The woman I’d been dragging along was still unconscious, lying on the pavement in front of me, and I realised that there was blood all over her white blouse. I thought she was dead, after all – that the laughing thing had managed to kill her somehow. But then I realised . . .’

She held out her hands for us to see. There was scabbed skin on both palms, all the way across in a broad straight line, angry and red at the top and bottom edges.

‘It was my blood, not hers. It must have happened when I touched the altar rail. The metal was so cold that my skin just stuck to it. That was why it was so hard to let go.’

It was a pretty eloquent demonstration. I listened in silence as she wrapped up her story. Everyone got out alive, although some crawled out on their hands and knees: incredibly, very few were even hurt, beyond bruised arms and cut foreheads. The ones who’d gone into fits seemed to recover quite quickly, except that they were still pale and shaking. Canon Coombes had locked up the church there and then, and told Susan to cancel the Sunday services. After which he’d fled, leaving her to call ambulances for the hurt and the traumatised (leaving red smears on the keys of her mobile phone) and to try to talk down those who were still hysterical.

On Sunday he’d called her at home. He’d spoken to the diocese, he said, and they’d authorised him to engage an exorcist – so long as it was a church-approved one. He told Susan to pick someone out of the Yellow Pages.

But Susan didn’t have a Yellow Pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s website had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was ‘Chinese restaurants’ or ‘plumbers’: I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.

The site listed Juliet’s church accreditations – Anglican and Catholic – as pending. Susan thought that was good enough, and called her.

‘And now here you are,’ she finished, brightly. ‘Two for the price of one.’ She smiled her tentative smile at us both, turning her head to left and right to do it. It was the first time she’d acknowledged my presence since she’d started to tell her story.

‘Here we are,’ I agreed. I stood up. ‘And I guess we’d better confer about the case. Could you excuse us for a moment?’

‘Of course,’ said Susan, blushing a hectic red. ‘I have to lock up again, anyway.’

She got up and bustled away, keys jangling. Juliet and I retreated up the hill to the Rybandt vault, with full night coming on.

‘So you think it’s a demon, rather than a human soul?’ I said, when I was sure we couldn’t be overheard.

Juliet didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, I got the sense that she was measuring her words. ‘The scions of Hell,’ she said, ‘I know by their habits and by their spoor. It’s not likely that any of them could be this close to me without me knowing it. But it would take one of the older powers to do that on hallowed ground. Just as it takes all my strength to enter a place like that and not be hurt by it. I have to prepare myself, put a guard up – and not stay there very long.’

‘Then what? What do you reckon it is?’

She turned to face me, and I could see that she was troubled. Which meant that she was letting me see, because Juliet can control her body language in the same way that a fly-fisher can place a lure. ‘If it wasn’t for the cold,’ she said, ‘and for the other signs, I’d swear that there was nothing here. Whatever it is, it has no smell. No body. No focus.’ She sought for words and grimaced as if she didn’t like the ones she’d found. ‘Weight without presence.’

‘What have you tried?’ I asked her, keeping it businesslike.

‘A number of things. A number of askings and tellings, any one of which ought to have made whatever is in those stones show its face to me. They all came up blank. I’m grabbing at smoke.’

I remembered the roiling shadows I’d seen reflected in the bowl of water, and nodded. It was barely a metaphor.

‘And yet—’ Juliet murmured, and hesitated. I’d never seen her be tentative about anything before: it was, to be honest, a bit unnerving, like seeing an avalanche swerve.

‘What?’

‘Occasionally I feel a very faint presence. Not in the stones themselves but close. Close, and moving: moving against itself, in fragments, like a cloud of gnats. Whatever it is, I think it’s linked to what’s inside the church – but as soon as I look towards it, it hides itself from me.’

I remembered what I’d felt as I stood waiting by the church’s front door. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘I think maybe I got that too. A scent, I mean, but not strong enough to pin down.’

I glanced over at the lych-gate: Susan Book was waiting for us there, her pale face visible through the gathering gloom.

‘You want me to try?’ I asked. The stuff Juliet was talking about was probably necromancy – black magic – most of which I tend to regard as a mountain of quackery and bullshit surrounding a few grains of truth. What I do is different: the expression of a talent that’s inside me, with no recitations or rituals and no steganographic mysteries. It was a sincere offer, but Juliet was shaking her head: she wasn’t asking me to do her job for her.

‘I want you to tell me if I’m missing anything,’ she said. ‘You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.’

That was true, as far as it went. Juliet was a good few millennia old, from what she’d told me, but she’d only been living on Earth for a year and a half. There were things about the way the living, the dead and the undead interacted on the mortal plane that she didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.

But if this was a demon, then her experience counted for a fuck of a lot more than mine. What could I tell her about the Hell-kin, when for her Hell was the old neighbourhood?

I chewed it over. I liked it that Juliet called on me when she was baffled – I liked it a lot – and I didn’t want to just turn my pockets out and show they were empty. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.

‘Let me think about it,’ I temporised. ‘Ask a couple of friends. Right now I can’t think of any angle you’ve missed.’

‘Thank you, Castor. I’ll share the fee, of course – if this turns out to need our combined efforts.’

‘The twinkle in your eye is reward enough. Although actually, since I’m here, you can do me a favour in return.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘In your – umm – professional capacity—’

‘This is my professional capacity now.’

‘Well, yeah. Obviously. But in the old days, when you were – hunting, hunting someone specific, I mean, and they knew you were coming and tried to hide. Did you – how did you—?’ It was hard to find a delicate way of putting it, but Juliet was smiling, really amused. Demons have an odd sense of humour.

‘You mean, when I was raised from Hell to feed on a human soul – yours, for example – how did I find you?’

I nodded. ‘In a nutshell.’

‘I hunt by scent.’

‘I knew that. What I was trying to ask was which scent? Was it the soul or the body that you tracked?’

‘Both.’

Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So did you ever come across a situation where your—’

‘Prey?’

‘– I was going to go with target, but yeah. Where your prey knew you were coming, and managed to brush over his trail in some way. So you couldn’t smell him any more?’

Juliet thought about this for a moment or two, visibly turning it over in her mind.

‘There are things that disguise the body’s scent,’ she said. ‘Lots of things. For the soul – a few. Running water would hide both.’

I nodded. That much I did know. ‘But did you ever have a situation where you were following a trail, and the scent was strong, and then suddenly it just went cold? Completely died on you.’

She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No. That couldn’t happen.’

‘Somebody did it to me earlier today.’

‘No,’ Juliet said again. ‘That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.’

Good enough. And food for thought. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.’

‘Come in the evening,’ she suggested. ‘We can have dinner.’

That was a very appealing prospect. ‘On you?’

‘On me.’

‘You’re on. Where do you want to meet?’

‘Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by – perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight-thirty.’

I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.

‘It didn’t come to me,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?’

‘Oh.’ Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I was asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.

‘It’s a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Beating about once a minute.’