by Mike Carey
‘She’d been nervy for a few days before this,’ Sue went on, staring morosely into her glass. ‘Not herself. Snapping at me about things that didn’t really matter. Normally she’s calm about almost everything. It’s only a few things that make her angry. And even then, it’s sort of a . . . a big, heavy disapproval. She doesn’t throw tantrums. She doesn’t shout, or throw things.’
‘And this time she did?’
Sue shot me a sheepish, unhappy look. ‘Me,’ she said. ‘She threw me. Does that count?’
‘How long did the fight go on for?’ I asked, trying my best to make this seem like a doctor’s consultation so I didn’t have to respond to the hurt in her face. ‘And how did she . . . you know, how did she feel about it afterwards?’
‘It wasn’t a fight, Felix. She hit me, and I tried to get away, and she hit me some more. You know how strong she is. There was nothing I could do.’ Sue paused, frowning, reconstructing the scene in her mind. ‘She was sorry, afterwards. Or . . . perhaps puzzled is a better word. She couldn’t understand how it had happened. She apologised lots of times, and said it would never happen again.’
Her voice was breaking, and she was obviously close to another storm of tears. When she stopped speaking, I waited in silence, giving her the chance to pull the curtains decently closed on those terrible, shaming emotions. I suppose it must always be like that for succubi: every relationship you form has to have an element of addiction to it. You’re not just someone’s partner; you’re simultaneously the drug they crave and the pusher who supplies their craving. Then again, as far as I knew, Juliet was the first succubus ever to set up house on Earth and try to live monogamously. It was uncharted territory.
‘I told her . . . it was all right,’ Sue said. ‘That I forgave her. But it was the last . . . the last time. It had to be. I said if it happened again, she’d have to leave.’ She laughed hollowly. ‘You can imagine how convincing that sounded. If she left me, I think I’d kill myself. Or else I’d just die anyway, from not having her here.’
The surface of the water in her glass became choppy and turbulent as Sue’s hand shook. Distracted, she put it down on the floor beside her chair, but then had no idea what to do with her hands.
‘You said she’d been keyed up,’ I said. ‘Was there something specific that was on her mind? Is she working a difficult case?’
Sue shook her head, shrugged. ‘She doesn’t talk to me about her work,’ she said. ‘Not unless I ask. But I don’t think she’s got much work on at the moment at all. Sometimes Sergeant Coldwood calls her, to read a murder scene, but that hasn’t happened for a few weeks now. She was laying down wards in a hotel that’s being renovated in Ealing. And there was a geist, locally - in Wembley. But it was only moving furniture, not being violent. Just business as usual really.’
‘But there could be a job she took on without telling you?’
‘It’s possible.’ Sue didn’t sound convinced.
‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘If there’s something on the professional side that’s distracting her, maybe she’ll open up to me about it. She trusts my judgement on that stuff.’
‘Thank you, Felix,’ said Sue humbly. She could just as easily have said, ‘Distracting her? She punched me in the face hard enough to turn it particoloured. Seemed pretty focused to me.’ But Sue hasn’t ever been the kind to make a drama out of a crisis.
I got up. There are a lot of things you can do at a moment like that to let the other person know you feel their pain. Most of them are outside my repertoire - or at least outside the relationship I have with Sue Book.
‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said again, the words sounding even more awkward the second time around. ‘Listen, if it happens again, and you need somewhere to go, Pen has about a million rooms doing nothing. You can come and stay any time.’
Sue nodded, giving me a weak smile, but clearly didn’t trust herself to speak again.
I left her there, hanging on the cross I’d wanted so much to be nailed to myself, and went on my merry way. Which, let’s face it, was getting less merry by the moment, even before I went over to the Costella Café and met up with Gary Coldwood.
But the fact that I was already looking like a wet weekend just saved him the unhappy obligation of wiping the smile off my face.
Gary looked hunted. He was sitting at the back of the long, narrow dining area, as far away from the window as he could get, dissecting a slightly watery portion of scrambled eggs on toast with grim and humourless precision.
There was no table service, so I grabbed a coffee and went over to join him.
‘I’m telling you this as a friend,’ he said when I sat down opposite him. ‘Which means, if you tell anyone else and if it comes back on me, I’ll kick you face down into a ditch and stand on the back of your head until you stop moving.’
‘As a friend,’ I clarified.
‘Exactly. As a friend. Listen, after I left you last night, I went back over to Uxbridge Road to meet this SOCA fuckalong. Name of Brake, which was what I wanted to do to his face after five minutes in his company. He’d called me in to put a marker down.’
‘Which was?’
Gary shot me a scowling glance, putting his knife down as though the memory had spoiled his appetite. ‘The Ditko case. It’s closed.’
For a moment that statement was too incomprehensible to be alarming. I laughed, but Gary didn’t join me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That must be the quickest collar you ever got.’
‘I’m serious, Fix.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But what the Hell does it mean? How can the case be closed? Rafi’s still out there. Asmodeus too. The job’s not done because this guy decides to move the file from one drawer to another. Did you tell him that?’
‘No,’ said Gary, spitting the word out. A couple of toast crumbs came along with it as unwilling passengers. ‘I didn’t, because he outranks me, and he made it clear right at the start that mine was not to frigging reason why. He was spoiling for a fight before he walked in the door, if you want to know. We get tied up in jurisdictional pissing contests with these arseholes every day of the week, and I think he was looking forward to a rumble. So I didn’t give him the excuse. I was civil and solemn and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-bum-crack, which was as good as giving the bastard two fingers.’
‘But you did ask what the Hell he was on about?’
‘Of course I did. What do you bloody take me for?’ Gary was indignant. ‘I pulled out all the public safety issues and waved them in his face, and I said there was a cast-iron case for parallel parking - homicide running its own investigation alongside SOCA’s and sharing resources.’
‘So?’
‘Nothing doing. And this is the bad news, Fix.’
‘There’s bad news?’
‘SOCA aren’t running the show either. It’s been contracted out - his words - to a privately run agency. They’re better resourced for this sort of palaver, he said, and they’ve already got the clearances they need to deal with a killer who can’t be arrested by anything short of an army division. In fact, they’re not looking to arrest Ditko at all; just to make sure he doesn’t kill again. Their brief doesn’t say anything about ways and means or about what state they leave him in afterwards.’
The horrible truth hit me just before he said it. I gave an incredulous laugh that almost hurt my throat coming out.
‘Tell me it’s not—’
‘It’s the Anathemata, Fix. The holy-water boys. If they can figure out a way to do it, they’re going to kill Ditko and Asmodeus both.’
5
I just leaned back and waited for a few moments, trying to let that digest, but it sat in my stomach like a rock. The Anathemata. The bastards had screwed up my life every time I’d had the bad luck to run across them. And Rafi’s too. They were even more to blame for Asmodeus than I was: for his being here at all, and for his still being free. This was a sicker joke than the one about the nun and the gorilla.
> ‘Who are they, Fix?’ Gary demanded. ‘This is only the second time I’ve even heard of them, and both times I’ve had a case taken out of my hands and my arse smacked like I’m a kid trying to raid the sweet jar. Tell me what I’m up against.’
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.
When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.
But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.
A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled - or better yet, blessed - by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘Crux sancta sit mihi lux’ and becomes really hummable with ‘Vade retro, Satana’.
So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously - I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.
The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.
“They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits - you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’
I was trying to be concise and factual, but the truth was that venting all this stuff made me feel marginally better. And it was pretty fresh in my memory because I had to look it up the first time Father Gwillam waved his wedding tackle in my face.
‘Pope Paul seemed to feel that the Inquisition had gone soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime,’ I went on. ‘The Anathemata’s scarily open mission statement was to deal with anything that the Church had declared anathema - abomination - and by deal with I mean stop dead. Then a much later pope excommunicated the whole outfit, right down to the factory cat, but not before he’d voted it enough funds to keep it going to the crack of doom. Pretty neat trick, that - adding plausible deniability to the list of Christian virtues.’
Coldwood grunted. ‘If they were closed down,’ he said, ‘what are they doing working my case?’
I shook my head. ‘I never said they were closed down, Gary. The Anathemata still exists. My brother reckons they’ve got more than a thousand people on their payroll. But they’re on silent running now. They’re officially disconnected from the apparatus of the Church. They can’t receive communion, be given the last rites or be buried in hallowed ground. And they eat that shit up, in my opinion. Being all virtuous and irredeemable; chucking over the chance of grace to save the world. They think they’re the scourge of God, fighting the last crusade against the undead.’
‘And you,’ Coldwood interjected.
‘What?’
‘And against you. You seem to get right up their noses, for some reason.’
‘Yeah, well I’d love to think that. But it’s not personal, Gary. Nothing ever is with fanatics. It’s Rafi. It’s always been Rafi.’
Father Thomas Gwillam, the current head of the Anathemata, had known about Rafi Ditko’s demonic passenger right from the start; he’d probably even been tailing Rafi as one of Fanke’s votaries before he ever summoned Asmodeus. He’d considered killing Rafi, but opinions among his own exorcists differed: the death of the human host might kill the demon too, or it might simply set the demon free to be resurrected elsewhere. On the balance of odds, Gwillam had decided to do nothing as long as Rafi was safely locked up at the Charles Stanger Care Home, in a cell lined with silver and with frequent visitations from yours truly to play his inner demon to sleep whenever he got too boisterous.
But once I’d moved Rafi from the Stanger to Imelda’s house, all bets were off. Gwillam had let the dogs out, and eventually they’d run Asmodeus to ground in Peckham, only to fumble the ball so badly that three of their best exorcists found their insides becoming their outsides, while the demon walked out from between them onto the streets of London, and in due course back into the life of Ginny Parris.
I could see where Gwillam might feel he had some sins to atone for. But I didn’t want him paying for them with Rafi’s intestines if there was anything I could do to stop it. And there was the big question, complete with neon lights, fireworks and a bank of laser beams playing across its fifty-foot-tall letters. Was there? Was there anything I could do to head the god-botherers off at the pass?
Coldwood seemed to be brooding on the same question, which was alarming.
‘Forget it, Gary,’ I advised him. ‘You piss these guys off and you’ll spend the rest of your life as a lollipop man on the M25. They don’t play games.’
‘Neither do I,’ Coldwood growled. But it was just something to say. He couldn’t stand up for a second against Gwillam’s heavies and Gwillam’s twisted cunning. I used to think I could, and the mess I was in now just went to show how badly wrong I was.
I finished my cooling coffee in three swigs, put the cup down. Coldwood watched me in silence. ‘So you’re advising me to lie back and think of England?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what you’re planning to do?’
‘I don’t know, Gary,’ I lied. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do.’
But the idea had already come to me, a whole lot more bitter and harder to swallow than the last dregs of the Maxwell House. When God has abandoned you and the devil is snapping at your heels, what you really need on your side is a bigger devil.
Paddington. St Mary’s Hospital. The Metamorphic Ontology Unit, or MOU for short. I hadn’t been here since the last time Asmodeus tried to break his chains. Life had seemed simpler then, in some ways. You knew who your friends were, even if you could count them on the fingers of a mutilated hand.
Today though, none of that really mattered. Today I was coming here to cosy up to one of my worst enemies.
I lost my way at first, because the place had moved. I went to the old building - the Helen Trabitch Wing, on Praed Street - only to find that it had turned back into a genito-urinary clinic and was filled with a random cross section of Sussex Gardens prostitutes, all cheerfully comparing notes on last night’s slate. A harassed young house officer with a clipboard in his hand and a look of terminal embarrassment on his face directed me around the corner and along South Wharf Road to the Paterson Building, still billed on all the signage as the Department of Psychiatry.
But it was clear as soon as I walked inside that the building had a new tenant. The steel grille ac
ross the hall, just inside the street doors, had more of the flavour of a prison than a hospital, and the guy behind the desk was a uniformed flunkey from some private security agency. He was built like a brick mausoleum, and his head seemed to get broader as your glance travelled down from crown to jaw, as though someone had jammed the open end of a tuba over his head and left it there until the bones of his skull conformed to the shape. He bared his teeth as I approached, having been told somewhere down the line to smile at the mug punters when you weren’t actually applying electrodes to their extremities. His teeth were very white and even, and not in any way filed to sharp points or stained with the blood of infants. Probably I was doing the guy a disservice: probably he was kind to children and small animals and his elderly mother, as the Krays were said to be. His uniform was very dark blue, and a single word, DICKS, was printed in grey on a sewn-in label attached to his lapel.
I pointed to it. ‘Is that your name?’ I asked. ‘Or is it a stop-me-and-buy-one kind of deal?’
The guy’s brow furrowed and his mouth quirked down, as though thinking that one out caused him mild pain. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said at last, letting the feeble witticism lie where it had fallen. His voice was well down into the bass register, but it had the front-of-the-mouth vowels of South African Dutch. That and his towering build activated a number of stereotypes I carry around with me, most of them centring on bound suspects mysteriously jumping out of fourth-floor windows under police questioning.
‘Felix Castor,’ I said. ‘I’m here to see Professor Mulbridge.’
‘And is she expecting you?’
‘For the last five years,’ I said.
Dicks didn’t press the point, but he seemed to decide that was a no. ‘Can I tell her what it’s regarding?’ he asked, after a slightly strained pause.