by Mike Carey
The withdrawal pangs hit me again, harder than ever, prickling my skin and covering me in an instant with cold sweat. I hardly even noticed. That note, that elusive ostinato, remained wedged in the doorway of my mind like an overlarge piece of furniture that couldn’t be pulled or pushed. It wouldn’t come into clear focus and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
I took out my whistle, put it to my mouth and blew a few random chords. A, C and then G took me by a sort of natural progression into ‘Henry Martin’, a wholesome little tune about murder, exploitation and the irreversible loss of innocence.
There were three brothers in merry Scotland,
In merry Scotland there were three,
And they did cast lots as to which one should go
To turn robber all on the salt sea.
When Henry Martin was swinging from the gallows tree, I moved on to another equally pleasant ditty, and then another after that. The evening wore on into night as I played, and an unsettling feeling crept over me by degrees: a solid conviction based on the most fleeting and ephemeral of impressions.
Imagine you woke up to find yourself a prisoner in an unfamiliar room, in total darkness, with your hands and feet tied. Unable to move, unable to see, you’d have no way of finding out what kind of place you were in. But when you shouted for help, the echoes of your own voice would come back to you, and give you some sense of the size of the room: the extent and maybe even the shape of the volume of air that surrounded you.
That was kind of what I felt right then: playing the whistle woke up my death-sense, and my death-sense told me that the world had changed. The echoes of the simple, dolorous tune described a space that was subtly, infinitesimally altered from what I knew, what I’d expected. I wondered what in Hell that might mean.
Disconcerted, I lowered the whistle. I was about to try another tune when I saw Pen standing in the doorway, staring in at me. There was a tension in her pose and in her expression. ‘You’re upsetting the birds,’ she said.
I put the whistle down on the table beside my bed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I deadpanned.
She stared at the whistle for a moment, then shook her head, visibly giving it up. She turned away, towards the stairs, but an afterthought struck her and she stopped on the top step, looking back at me over her shoulder. ‘You had some calls,’ she said.
‘When I was . . . out?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Some woman named Pax. She called lots of times. She said she had some news for you.’
Trudie could keep on stewing. There was nothing she could tell me that I wanted to hear. Her heart belonged to Mother Church, and I wasn’t interested in the rest of her, shapely though it undoubtedly was.
‘What else?’
‘Someone from the Brent Library Service. A woman . . .’
‘Susan Book.’
‘Sounds about right.’
That was more interesting. Susan is married to Juliet, and Juliet is always interesting, just by virtue of being Juliet.
‘And Gary Coldwood,’ Pen finished up. ‘He rang just now, but he couldn’t stay on.’
‘How come?’
‘He said he was on his way to a murder scene. And he wanted you to read it for him.’
3
Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.
‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.
‘Yeah,’ Coldwood confirmed with a laconic nod. ‘I note the pained emphasis, Castor. I know Pen Bruckner is the only woman who deserves that label in your book, but this is all ancient history now. Ginny Parris was named on the incident sheet when Ditko was first brought into the Stanger for psych evaluation. Her statement was still there in the paperwork, and that’s how she described herself. Relationship to patient: girlfriend.’
He stared at me for a moment, as if he was expecting me to argue the point. It was the last thing on my mind.
‘So,’ I said, my casual tone sounding hollow even to me, ‘did your forensics boys come up with anything?’
Gary shrugged with his eyebrows. ‘They took prints,’ he said.
‘From where?’
‘The door. The broken table. The light. Even a good virtual from the dead woman’s throat. Whoever it was didn’t go out of his way to be discreet.’
‘Whoever it was?’ I must have sounded like I was clutching at straws.
Coldwood’s eyebrows rose and fell in a virtual shrug. ‘We haven’t had a chance to match them yet,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Ditko’s prints are on file. If it was him, we should get a positive in the next couple of minutes.’
He looked past me towards the door. ‘So he comes in through the door,’ he said didactically. ‘We’ll assume it’s a he. He doesn’t force it. Doesn’t have to. Left hand on the knob, which is consistent with using a key. Smeared print on the lintel above the door, which we’re taking to mean . . .’
‘That’s where she kept the spare,’ I said.
Coldwood smiled dryly. ‘You’ve got a larcenous mind, Fix.’
‘I keep the wrong company. Coppers, mainly.’
Gary let the insult slide, turning his head as his gaze travelled from the door to the broken table and then on to the bed. ‘She hasn’t heard him yet. Most likely she’s asleep. He walks towards her. Maybe he smashes the table then, to wake her up, to get her attention. Maybe he just says her name. But she hears something anyway, and she reaches out for the light.’ He glanced down at the bedside lamp lying on its side on the floor: its feeble little pool of radiance reminded me of a votive candle in a funeral chapel. ‘She turns the lamp on, but her hand slips - probably she’s panicking a little. The lamp falls but doesn’t break. She can see him now. Her gentleman caller - again, just for the sake of argument. He doesn’t touch the lamp himself. No prints of his anywhere around there. So evidently he doesn’t mind being seen.’
Coldwood turned again, to look at the window. My gaze followed his, and a little bile rose in my throat as I stared at Ginny’s broken body.
‘The fingerprints on the throat were a telling little detail,’ Coldwood ruminated. ‘I mean, given that the cause of death wasn’t strangulation. It ties in with what you said about him being in here with her for a long time. He held her by the throat, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Not straight away.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Gary was measuring angles with his eye, his head turning to the bed, to the window, back to the bed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if it’s Ditko we do. Because he could have snapped her neck one-handed in half a second. He might have been giving her a shiatsu massage, or intimidating her, or feeling for a pulse, or doing pretty much anything else, but the one thing he wasn’t doing right then was killing her. So . . .’
He paced out the distance from the corpse to the bed, walking around the tangle of bedclothes.
‘So there was something else,’ I finished. ‘Something he did first. Or tried to do.’
‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Gary knelt at the head of the bed, staring at the headboard. I’d only just noticed that there was blood on it, and on the pillows beneath it. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing.
I thought of the emotions - recent, strong - that hung in the air of the room like a visible fog. Fear had been the most vivid of all, but hope had been in the mix too. Ginny Parris knew what Rafi was now: who he bunked with. But at least once after she woke up and realised she wasn’t alone in the room, she had thought she might make it out of this alive. What did that mean? That she saw Rafi, as well as Asmodeus? Spoke to him?
I tried to piece it together in my mind.
‘He was holding her still,’ I said tentatively. ‘Maybe while he talked to her.’
‘About what?’
‘No idea. Maybe I’m barking up the wron
g tree. But whatever they were doing, he started to get angry. The blood on the headboard means she was injured here, right?’
‘Lesion to the back of the head. Lots of superimposed lacerations.’ Gary smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Bang, bang, bang. Then he lets go of her, and she runs. But for the window. Why not the door?’
I ignored the question because I was still thinking about the previous one. If it was Rafi - Asmodeus - then what would he want to talk to Ginny about? Would she still have connections among Fanke’s all-American satanists? Fanke himself was dead, but did she still subscribe to the newsletter? Attend the AGM? Was he shaking her down for a phone number or an address? That didn’t feel right, somehow. Surely Asmodeus would have better ways of making contact with the necromantic fraternity than dropping in on Rafi’s ex? And if he wanted to send a message, he’d probably have had enough self-control not to shoot the messenger.
‘She runs,’ I agreed. ‘And he kills her. Without a second thought. So either he’s already got what he came for by this time, or else he knows it’s not here. Or maybe he’s lost interest. Anyway, for whatever reason, it’s game over now. He . . .’ I didn’t finish the sentence. I just nodded toward the broken table.
‘We’re three storeys up,’ Gary persisted. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t head for the door.’
‘He was between her and the door,’ I pointed out, but that was only half the answer. She knew she couldn’t fall forty feet to the ground and walk away. She didn’t care. She had to get out of this room, and away from the thing that had come for her. Even death must have seemed better than the alternative right then. No, cancel that: death was on the cards either way. She just wanted to meet it on her own terms, without any help from the thing that was wearing her former lover like a glove puppet.
The opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ sounded in the room. Gary fished about in his pocket and came up with his mobile.
‘Hello?’ he said into the phone, and then, ‘Right. Thanks. Keep me posted.’ The voice at the other end of the line gabbled, sounding - as voices at the other end of the line always do - like a sound effect from a 1940s Looney Tunes cartoon. Gary frowned. ‘What? What’s that supposed to mean? Well put him on then. No. No, I’m still at the effing crime scene. I’ll come in when I’m done here, not before.’
He lowered the phone and put it back where it came from. ‘That was the lab,’ he said. ‘It’s Ditko all right.’
‘Asmodeus,’ I corrected automatically. I was already so sure it was him that I felt no surprise, just a faint sense of increased pressure weighing down on me, as though my invisible bathysphere had descended another hundred feet or so into the shit soup that now surrounded us.
‘Listen, I’ve got to get back to Uxbridge Road nick,’ Gary said. ‘Some tosspot from SOCA has popped up and started throwing his weight around. Says he wants to review the case. I’ve got to slap the cheeky sod down before he gets his feet under the table.’
He headed for the door, and I followed him.
‘You want a lift?’ he asked.
I thought about that. It was a long way home, and the last Tube train had gone more than an hour ago. It would have been easy to say yes. But I had a lot to think about, and I wanted to shake off the atmosphere of that room by walking in the clean air.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m good. Gary, keep me in the loop, yeah? I know Asmodeus better than anyone. If you get a lead on where he is, count me in.’
‘Makes sense to me,’ Gary answered as we went down the stairs. ‘No offence, Castor, but I’d rather have you face this bastard than any of my lads - or me, for that matter. At least you know what you’re letting yourself in for. If we get anything, I’ll call you. But keep your bloody phone turned on for once, all right?’
We parted company at the door and I walked away through the thinning crowd of onlookers. Nothing to see now: just the dead woman’s arm up at the window, raised as if she was waving to us. Gary’s hard-working boys and girls were packing up their circus and the novelty had all worn off. Tomorrow was another working day.
As I walked back up Brixton Hill, I tried my best to think about the circumstances of Ginny’s death without letting the image of her body, sprawled on the floor like a broken toy, intrude into my mind. I didn’t manage it.
What had Asmodeus come back for? Why had he taken the trouble to find her, and then to talk to her before he murdered her? Had he come there with bloody execution already on his mind, or had his gleefully sadistic nature, which I knew only too well, simply got the better of him?
The night was hot and sticky, with the smell of tarmacadam rolling in from somewhere on a lethargic wind. It drowned out the more enticing smells of cooking from closer at hand: someone was having a very late supper of jerk chicken, and it wasn’t going to be me.
Perhaps because I’d been playing my whistle such a short time ago, my death-sense was fully awake. I saw a ghost sitting in the middle of the road, its knees drawn up to its chest and its head bowed. Hard to tell if it had been a man or a woman; after a while, unless you had an unshakeable self-image when you were alive, the fact of being dead tends to erode you at the edges. Little by little, you start to dissolve - unless someone like me gets to you first and wipes the slate clean all at once.
There was a much more recent ghost standing in the mouth of an alley just before the junction with Porden Road: a young man in a faded blue shell suit, conducting one half of the conversation he’d probably been having just before he died. The sound reached me as a thin mosquito whine. In his chest there was a deeply shadowed hole about the size of a grapefruit.
In a doorway a little further on, an old woman sat clutching a Tesco carrier bag like a baby in her arms. I could tell without looking that she was dead: not a ghost this time, but risen in the body, a zombie. The smell of putrefaction hung around her, as solid as a curtain.
There was nothing unusual about these sights. London, like the rest of the world, had been playing host to the walking, waking dead for about a decade now; and London, like the rest of the world, had adapted pretty well, all things considered. If a ghost minded its own business, you ignored it; if it became a nuisance, you hired an exorcist to drive it away. You steered clear of zombies unless they were family or close friends, and you put wards on the doors of your house because you knew there were other things abroad in the night that had never been alive in the conventional sense, and an ounce of prevention is worth a metric ton of cure.
So, yeah, this was the new status quo. And for me it’s a living, so it would be a bit hypocritical if I complained about it. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion - the fear - that the status quo was changing. Maybe it was just that drunk-dream about the new note I couldn’t make my whistle play, or maybe it was the stuff I’d learned on the Salisbury estate about how human souls - given the right conditions - can metastatise into demons, in much the same way that axolotls can become salamanders. What with one thing and another, the ground didn’t feel too solid under my feet right then.
And being preoccupied with weighty metaphysical questions, I let my guard down like a total fuckwit.
I was walking past the high wall of someone’s backyard, which was topped with an ornamental layer of broken glass to deter casual visitors. That gave me the only warning I got. Something moved - the merest flick of dark-on-dark at the very limit of my vision - and there was a faint, brittle sound from above my head as one of the shards of glass was broken off clean. Then a great weight hit me squarely between the shoulder blades and I pitched forward, the pavement coming up to meet me.
I managed to turn a little as I fell, meeting the cracked grey paving slabs with my shoulder rather than my face. That was the most I could manage though. I still got the wind knocked clean out of me, and a second later a boot hammered into my midriff to seal the deal. I lay there on the ground, curled around my pain, trying to pull my scattered wits together enough to move.
There was th
e sound of a footstep right beside my head. ‘You see? You see that?’ a harsh voice grated. Actually it didn’t sound like a voice at all; it sounded like someone trying to scrape up a tune by sliding one saw blade across another. ‘Even in this fucking weather, he wears the coat. I think the concept of mercy killing applies here.’
Booted feet walked into my line of sight. One of them drew back for another kick, which gave me time to throw my arms up and catch it as it came forward again. I twisted and pulled, hoping to throw my attacker off balance, but he tore loose from my grip before that could happen. I completed the roll anyway, came up facing him on one knee with my hands raised en garde.
Asmodeus threw back his head and laughed, which isn’t a sound you want to hear with a full stomach. He stared at me with contemptuous amusement. But when he spoke again, the words were so much at odds with the expression on his face that I felt an eerie sense of unreality.
‘Run, Fix,’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, run. Don’t try to fight him!’
This time it wasn’t Asmodeus’s voice; it was Rafi’s. It came as something of a jolt because Rafi had almost never managed to surface by himself, without the help my whistle could provide. Asmodeus was the dominant partner in their forced marriage, with all the rights and privileges that entailed.
He was dressed very differently than when I’d seen him last. He’d have to be, of course: you can’t walk around Brixton dressed in Marks and Spencer pyjamas and hope to avoid public notice. From somewhere he’d dredged up an all-black ensemble - boots, trousers and an overlarge shirt open to the waist over a string vest of the kind our American cousins call a wife-beater. Or maybe these things had been some other colour to start with, and had turned black after the demon put them on.
He walked around me, taking his time. The face was still Asmodeus: the black-on-black eyes, like holes in the world, would have told me that even without the mocking, bestial expression. If he was surprised that Rafi had taken momentary control of the communal vocal cords, he didn’t show it.