Tom does House to House interviews with RDC Fillide Melandroni - formerly a whore, who died centuries ago and was resurrected, and who was the lover and model of the great artist Caravaggio.
But Tom and Fillide discover that the whole thing is a trap. The excavation of the gardens has triggered a Hell Breach. The ground explodes and demons and resurrected warriors from Hell invade the East End. A battle royale commences.
Simultaneously with this, Gogarty, accompanied by a giant red demon, escapes from his cell in Dougie’s nick.
Tom and Fillide and the rest of the police and army assault force defeat the invaders from Hell. But Gogarty has got away. The killer is once more on the loose.
Chapter 1
Fillide watched Tom walk off, his body stiff with desire.
A thought glimmered in her mind - then wavered - then vanished. Like mist, half-glimpsed, on a sunny day.
She continued to look at his receding form. Beetling away from her, with his skinny body, and his badly fitting shirt. Racing off somewhere, not for any reason, just to be away from her, as if she were scum, to be shunned, to be - no - no - he wanted her, she was sure of it.
She thought her dangerous thought again. And then she thought it harder. So hard it hurt.
Slowly the thought began to coalesce. Like a dune in a sandstorm. Like a drip of water in a crashing wave. Like - like - like what? Like nothing else, not really. But there it was. The hints of a plan were forming form. Inchoate shadows in the swirling chaos of her mind. Could it be - would it - might it - could she - what was - Little Tom Derry! Could he really be the one?
Not that she desired the little bastard. Far from it. Tom was but a child. A pup. Skinny as a starving hen. Acned, for fuck’s sake! With blackheads, no less. And shy. And his voice - so shrill! She liked men who were bold and arrogant, with bodies like gods, and bedroom eyes, and velvet voices. She could never love a man like Tom. And yet - and yet - and yet!
Fillide smiled.
Skip back, many years.
One month had elapsed since Fillide was resurrected by the warlocks in Freemason’s Hall, and had gone to live with Roy Hall.
She was now his lover, his slave, and his whore. He treated her like shit, on a daily basis: but she endured. No, she did more than endure; she thrived. She inhabited each day with spirit, with style, and with attitude. For she could not let this bastard know that he had defeated her.
Tonight, Roy had decided to hold a party at his Chelsea apartment.
The guests were all men just like Roy himself, with Cockney voices and vulgar attitudes, accompanied by their much younger girlfriends. All of them brassy tarts who’d do anything for a table at Quaglino’s. Fillide knew the type well; she was the type.
Roy was in an affable mood. She dressed to please him: a tight dress, a gold choker, high shoes. The dress was Valentino, a gold and blue brocade gown with a neckline that plunged to below her ribs.
‘Mickey, meet my girl Fillide. Fillide, this is Mickey,’ said Roy, introducing her to an old man with no hair and blotchy, wrinkled skin and bloodshot eyes.
‘Delighted to meet you, darling,’ said the old man in a wheezing voice. Somehow, he had charisma.
‘Mickey Dolan, you see,’ Roy clarified. ‘He was my mentor. He taught me all I know.’ Roy beamed like a son with a famous father.
‘That ain’t much,’ said Mickey, laughing without making a noise, his shoulders shaking, his crinkled old face lost in a moment of simple pleasure.
‘Give him a good time eh, darling?’
Fillide smiled.
She took Mickey upstairs and gave him a good time. Afterwards he told some funny stories and left her money on the bedside cabinet.
Like Roy, Mickey had a body that was scarred with bullet entry wounds, and she knew he’d led a bad life.
She liked Mickey though. He was polite. He took the trouble to remember her name. And after they’d swived, he told her that she weren’t half bad in the sack. Plus, the tip he gave her was a generous one. It was all painless enough. But, as she’d feared, he was only her first of that evening.
It was a long and, even by Fillide’s standards, tedious night.
She didn’t mind the sex of course, for that was her profession. But these men, these Masonic handshake copper bastards, they were all, except for Mickey, so fucking disrespectful. She allowed them to do everything they wanted and more, and yet they never thought of her pleasure, and they treated her like trash. In the old days, she’d have cut the bastards another smile. But those days were gone.
‘How did it go?’ Roy asked at the end of the evening.
‘Fine,’ she said smiling.
‘I hope I’ll have no complaints.’
‘You’ll have no complaints.’
‘What did you think of the old man?’
‘Who? Mickey? He was nice.’
‘Did he get a hard-on?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Did he like you?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I want you to see him again.’
‘If you like.’
‘I do like.’
‘Then I will happily fuck him again, for your sake, my darling.’
‘Nah, nah. You don’t get it. That’s not what I want.’
Roy paused.
‘Have you ever wondered,’ he asked, smiling his false smile that once had fooled her so utterly, ‘why I summoned you from that place where you were trapped? Why in other words I went to such enormous trouble to have you resurrected?’
She laughed, faintly.
‘I think I know why,’ she told him.
In his dining room Roy had on proud display, above his baroque marble fireplace, a painting: a classic work by the great Counter-Reformation artist Michel Agnolo Cerisi. Who these days, she had learned, was always referred to by the name of his home town - Caravaggio.
This painting was the portrait of a street whore provocatively holding a jasmine flower, the symbol of erotic love, upon her breasts. She is smiling faintly as she casts her cool and amused glance upon the rapt artist who is attempting to capture her extraordinary essence. It was a priceless masterpiece, Roy bragged, the prize of his collection.
The street whore was Fillide.
‘You fell in love with my portrait,’ she said.
‘I did,’ he admitted. The portrait had been acquired from one of Roy’s Mason friends. ‘Big Belly Joe’ as his friends all amusingly called him. Formerly a German politician, now Director of the London Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Herr Joseph Goebbels, that was his proper name. Fillide gathered he’d been quite the celebrity during his lifetime.
Big-Belly Joe had, so Roy informed her, died badly. But now he was back on Earth and had unparalleled access to previously lost art treasures that had been stashed in various places across Europe, including several salt mines in Bavaria. Such as the portrait of Fillide which Michel Agnolo had so many years ago given her as his special gift; and which had eventually been acquired by the Nazis.
‘Michel Agnolo da Caravaggio was my friend, and my lover,’ said Fillide. ‘That excites you.’
‘It does. But that’s not why I summoned you.’
Roy leaned in close and kissed her cheek. He kept his face close to hers, so that her nostrils flared with the smell of his boozy breath.
‘I want you to get to know Mickey. Get him to like you. Can you do that?’
‘Yes of course.’
‘You have to make him trust you. Feel safe with you. Can you do that?’
‘Yes of course.’
‘Then I want you to kill him. Can you do that?’
She hesitated but not for long.
‘Yes of course.’
‘Good girl.’
‘Can I ask why?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
The following week it was Roy’s fortieth birthday. He asked her to cook for him, and she chose to make her speciality. Pipkin pie.
It took her an entire day to prepare the meal
. First she cooked a haunch from a freshly slaughtered cow that she had picked out at the abattoir. She tenderised the meat with her palms, then put it in the pot and added cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg and olives. She cut up four loaves of ciabatta to make sugared crostini with cheese. She opened three bottles of Chianti and drank most of one of them to keep her spirits high during the cooking. Then she set it all to stew and she washed her hands and for the first time in weeks she felt proud of herself. Cooking for her man! It was a simple pleasure that made her feel alive.
Roy came into the kitchen, and tasted her simmering stew off a long wooden spoon.
‘Good,’ she instructed him, awaiting her due praise.
He smiled. ‘Too thick,’ he said gently.
‘I think not,’ she told him confidently.
‘I think so,’ he contradicted her, still with that twinkle in his eyes.
She took the spoon and dipped it in the stew. She sipped the hot broth. It made her think of summers in Rome and all her lost loves. She supped again.
‘It’s good,’ she affirmed.
‘No it’s not good. It’s thicker than a jobby in the toilet bowl. Dilute it.’
She laughed. ‘Go, get out of my kitchen. You scamp. No not “scamp”, that word is wrong. You rogue. You rascal. You -’
‘That’s not a request.’
‘I’ve made this pie a thousand times. Go! Go hang yourself, you lean-witted fool. Or I’ll make a quagmire of your mingled brains!’ The translation spell was starting to work with a little more panache, she noted with pleasure. ‘Avaunt, begone, go!’
She was shouting by now and stamping her feet, as she always did when she was in her cooking frenzy.
Naturally she expected him to melt before this display of her legendary volcanic temper. For that was how it had always worked in the past, with all her other lovers. Instead Roy became cold and angry.
‘You do not, do not, do not talk to me like that, you stupid bitch!’ he said viciously.
Her nostrils flared. ‘Ah vaffanculo! I talk to you and to any man how I fucking well wish. And yes, I am a bitch, and proud of it, and you should think yourself lucky to drink my piss! You are a eunuch’s balls, you are a bull’s pizzle! You are a column of shit from a horse’s arse! You -’
‘But I’m not going to punish you.’
‘Too fucking right you are not, you –’
‘You are going to punish yourself.’
He raised his index finger, as he had before. She became mute again. Suddenly she was afraid.
‘Punish yourself,’ he advised her. ‘It’s up to you how you do it. But do it now.’
She looked at him, with imploring eyes. But he was implacable.
So she walked over to the stove and plunged her hand in the pan of hot pipkin stew, until the skin came off in sheets and mingled with the juices. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t.
He stood behind her, and whispered in her ear: ‘You useless fucking cow, everyone hates you, you even hate yourself. You were better off dead, you were better off in Hell. Every minute you are with me, I will make you weep, you evil bitch. Do you understand me?’
She took her hand out of the beef stew and touched her own cheek with her palm; until that too burned, leaving a black palm print upon her soft tanned flesh.
‘I think the stew is too thick,’ he said softly.
‘I think so too,’ she said calmly, through the pain.
So while her hand and cheek were healing, she cooked a fresh stock with celery and carrots, which took about forty minutes. Then she poured the stock into the stewpot. It was still too thick, so she added white wine, until Roy was satisfied with the consistency. By now the beef was overcooked, and the sauce was as runny as piss, but he didn’t care about that. Because he’d made it his pie in a pipkin. And she’d dumbly obeyed him, like the puppet she was.
Later that night she sat on the roof of Roy’s apartment block in Chelsea, looking across the rooftops at the river, sky-clad, relishing the whip of wind upon her flesh. Cold could not kill her but she could feel it. Pain could not damage her, but she savoured it; it gave her a hint of how it must be to truly feel.
She had stolen a knife from Roy’s kitchen. One of his sharpest blades, used for carving joints. She looked at the blade and she licked it; blood dripped from her tongue on to the concrete.
She remembered the white jasmine flower, that day she’d posed for Michel Agnolo in his studio. Its powerful fragrance enveloping her for all the many hours of her sitting. She remembered clutching it to her breast whilst glancing boldly at her portraitist, smiling at his beauty which was greater even than hers. And she remembered the joy she’d felt on her day of resurrection, and the endearing shyness of the white-robed grey-haired clean-shaven man who had claimed her.
She remembered too the many kind things Roy had said to her in those early weeks. None of which – she now realised - he had meant. She remembered their first night in Soho: the rickshaws trundling past; the drag queens with big jaws and slender waists strutting down Old Compton Street on high heels; the Italian meal they’d eaten, and the shamelessly over-attentive waiters who had flattered her so much.
And she recalled tonight’s pipkin pie. His contempt, the pain she’d felt, the agonising moment when she had burned her palm print into her own fair cheek.
As her tears trickled down her icy cheeks, Fillide plunged the knife into her chest. With a two-handed grip, she thrust it deeper, until the tip touched her heart.
Then she thrust deeper still, and her heart exploded.
She felt the pain in her body, the spurt of old blood belching out of her arteries. She pulled the knife free of her body and cast it aside and waited.
But barely a trickle of blood emerged from the hole in her chest. And so she ripped the top of her gown open and looked at herself - saw the gaping red gash between her ivory bra cups. And as the minutes passed, she saw the red wound in her skin heal, like time travelling backwards.
She did not die. Even the pain was not, in all honesty, especially intense.
The wind at least was cold. She rejoiced in the coldness of that wind. And she revelled in the pain within her chest, as her dried-up torn heart tried to pump but could not. But in an hour or so that too would heal. Her ripped heart would be whole once more. And her life with Roy would continue.
The wind whipped her body. Her heart gurgled and sputtered. Her tears stung her eyes but did not trickle down her cold face. And she yearned to be, ah! once more and forever, dead.
Chapter 2
‘First you byaaow,’ said Sensei Chikamatsu.
Fillide bowed. She liked the ritual of the dojo; it reminded her of life among the nobles, in the palazzi of Rome.
Sensei wore a simple white cotton gi with a red belt to denote his seventh dan status. Fillide had refused to don such a simple garment. Instead she was wearing a red silk Chinese robe with a dragon pattern on the back, tied incongruously with a thin white belt as befitted her novice rank.
‘An’ then aye byaaow you,’ the Sensei said gravely, in a voice so heavily accented it was as if he had pebbles in his mouth.
And Sensei bowed to her.
‘And then you pauunch an’ staep and kiiick and maauave saaideways.’
He demonstrated, moving so fast she could barely see him.
Fillide copied the kata, perfectly.
The Sensei waited. The dojo was a white cubed room with white matting, brown makiwara planks lining one wall, and dark oak barres for stretching your legs along the other. A huge black and white photograph of the aged, peanut-headed Chōshin Chibana, founder of Shōrin-ryū karate, dominated the wall opposite the door.
Chikamatsu was considered to be the finest martial artist in London, according to Roy. He was a short stocky man in his 40s with thinning hair on top and a long ebony pony-tail. There was not an ounce of flesh on him – his girth was all muscle. His skin was like teak. Fillide suspected he had some black blood in him somewhere. He walked like s
hadows. Fillide was in awe of him.
‘And now thiais.’
Sensei made another move, this time so fast he blurred.
She copied him, moving more slowly than he had, feeling clumsy and inept.
‘Naw, naw, like thiais.’ Chikamatsu punched high, then low, went into cat stance, did a double roundhouse kick with alternating legs segueing into a back kick, then into horse stance; then he moved forwards, punching with each step until he reached a makiwara plank and hit it so hard it poinged. Then he stepped backwards still punching the air ceaselessly whilst also kicking in arcing roundhouses and long back kicks till he was, once more, five paces away from her.
He did this entire combination of moves in slo-mo and Fillide realised she hadn’t seen him do it at all the time before. She’d just registered a Thunk noise of wood vibrating: the makiwara being punched.
This time she copied his moves perfectly, at the same dead slow pace. Then she repeated the whole kata at half-speed.
‘Correct.’
Then she did it again as fast as he had, and the room blurred until she was once more utterly still.
‘How am I doing?’ she asked cockily.
‘No humaan beiang,’ said the Sensei, ‘could do as waeell, with so little traaining.’
‘I have to kill a man,’ she told him.
‘I dawn’t need to know tha’,’ the Sensei said.
‘With my bare hands.’
‘I dawn’t need to know.’
‘His friends will have guns. They’ll shoot me. I have to be fast and I have to kill with a single punch.’
The Sensei leaped and rained blows upon her. His first punch broke Fillide’s jaw, then he swept her off her feet and trapped her arm with his foot and dislocated it. She felt the bone pop out of the socket. She scrambled to her feet. Her arm hung loose. She spat and a tooth came out. She tried to speak and she croaked, not because she was mute but because of the broken jaw.
He stepped back a pace and bowed.
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