Dead Men's s Boots

15

It may dent my image of macho, gung-ho capability to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and then another to Nicky to tell him what was up and to ask him if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left, but that was all he’d say.

A third call, to Gary Coldwood, just got me his answering machine. ‘What does something juicy mean?’ I asked it, and hung up.

I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though it involved a certain amount of blackmail – both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.

When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been melted, decanted through a pipette and left to stand in the Petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have got me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning – and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages, then it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner – the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right – bequeathed them to the Crown. The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annexe was built on as demand grew: it seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early twenty-first century.

But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic: he’s just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fits. And, after all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and – thanks largely to me – has never gone home again.

It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily: she’s known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured a question at him, thumb up and then down. He shrugged massively.

‘He’s quiet,’ he said. ‘Kind of. Had a rowdy night and I guess he’s resting now. Still wide awake, though.’ He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. ‘You’re not gonna like what they’ve done to him,’ he warned me. ‘Try to keep your cool, okay?’

‘Okay.’

Paul swung the door open and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix too. I know because I paid for it to be installed: cost a small fortune, but it’s worth it because for at least some of the time it keeps Rafi’s passenger from getting too frisky.

Friskiness didn’t seem to be an issue right now, though: in preparation for transit, Webb had Rafi trussed up tighter than a Christmas turkey.

They’d built – or perhaps Jenna-Jane had supplied – a massive steel frame, about seven feet high by four wide, standing on three sets of wheels like a mobile dress rack. The resemblance didn’t end there, either: Rafi was hanging inside this construction, in an all-over-body straitjacket fitted with a dozen or more steel hoops to which lengths of elasticated cable had been attached. Like a spider trussed in his own web he dangled at the centre of the frame on a slight diagonal, his face the only part of him that was visible. I would have expected that face to be livid with demonic rage, but it was a near-perfect blank, the eyes – all pupil, no white – staring at me and through me.

‘OPG?’ I asked Paul.

‘Yeah.’

‘Inhaled or injected?’

‘Both.’

‘Bastards.’ I could smell the stuff in the air now – although it was the propellants rather than the gas itself that I was smelling: OPG itself is too volatile to linger for more than a couple of seconds after it’s been used. It was produced as a weapon – a nerve toxin, derived from the less potent Tabun – but was banned for military use decades ago. You can still use it on the mentally ill, though, because of a sweet little legal loophole: in tiny, almost homeopathic amounts it’s been proven to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s and to have a sedative effect on manic patients. I was willing to bet that the amounts we were talking about here were more in the bulk haulage range.

‘I’m gonna leave you to it,’ Paul said. ‘And if anyone asks I’m gonna lie and say I never saw you. Sorry, Castor. Bastards they are, but for now I still work here. We’re meant to be wheeling him out to the front in a few minutes, so you’d best keep it short.’ He stepped out and pulled the door almost to behind him.

‘Hey, Castor,’ said Rafi, his voice crystal clear despite the zoned-out stare.

‘Hey, Rafi,’ I answered, giving him the benefit of the doubt until I could be sure. I came in a little closer, but not too close: I wasn’t sure how much give there was in those elastic straps. ‘Asmodeus in there too?’

‘Yeah, he’s here. He’s not happy with you.’

‘I bet. Can I have a word?’

There was a long silence. I waited it out, knowing from past experience that there was no way of rushing this. Asmodeus rose or fell under his own steam and at his own pace: and the massive OPG hit, whimsically cross-connecting the circuitry of Rafi’s nervous system, wouldn’t help much either. But slow ripples began to pass across Rafi’s face, each one leaving it subtly altered. The effect was slow enough that you could convince yourself it was an optical illusion, but it didn’t much matter how you rationalised it: after half a minute or so, the fact was you were looking at a different face.

The new face, wearing Rafi’s features like a savagely ironic quote, stared at me with a sour grimace twisting one corner of its mouth.

‘Can’t hear the cavalry,’ Asmodeus said, sounding like he was crunching down on a mouthful of ground glass.

‘They’re coming,’ I answered, with more confidence than I felt. ‘In the meantime I was going to ask a favour.’

‘I love doing you favours, Castor. Come in a little closer. Kiss me on the lips.’

‘I want you to burrow down, as deep as you can. Go all the way to sleep, if you can. I’ll play for you: listen to the music instead of trying to avoid it. Let it work through you, and use it to get as much distance from Rafi as you can.’

Asmodeus smiled politely. ‘And why should I do this thing?’

‘Because someone who looks like one of my species but acts like one of yours is coming to get you. And she’ll pick you to pieces with tweezers and she’ll mount you on slides and she’ll label all the pieces of you. You know this is true.’

There was silence for a moment except for the puncturedtyre hissing of Asmodeus’s breath. ‘The bitch,’ he said at last, without heat. ‘The bitch with the fishing rod and the big ambitions. When she hits the wall, it will make a very sweet sound.’

‘Maybe,’ I allowed. ‘Maybe not. She’s a crafty player, Asmodeus, and too fucking big for you right now.’

‘And for you, Castor.’

‘Goes without saying.’ Knowing what Asmodeus was, I felt seriously uncomfortable with all of this: almost, as though the phrase has any meaning at all, like a species-traitor. I was discussing tactics with a demon, trying to keep him out of the hands of the closest thing the human race had to a predator of demons. This was what Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had brought me to, and at that moment I hated her for it.

‘The people outside need to see Rafi,’ I said, taking my whistle – it was the first alternate, and I hadn’t properly worn it in yet – out of my pocket. ‘They don’t need to see you. If they see you, they’ll think she’s right. You understand?’

‘Humans can’t think, Castor. They can only think that they think.’

‘Point stands. Maybe I’ll see you later, but I sure as fuck don’t want to see you now. And I’ve said all I’m going to say.’

I stopped talking and played. It started out as a recognisable tune but then became a crazy medley, fast at first but decelerando, working down through the scale with a certain doleful urgency. Asmodeus bobbed his head in time with the beat, ironically showing me that he was keeping up. He sang improvised words in a guttural language that the human voice box was never shaped for, and I hoped I’d never meet anyone who could provide me with a translation.

But his eyes were closing, and his voice was faltering. The movements of his head dropped out of sync with the music, then slowed and stopped.

When the door finally swung open behind me, he was still.

‘Got to move the patient,’ Paul said brusquely.

I turned around, tucking the whistle back in my coat. Paul wasn’t alone; a Welsh guy named Kenneth and a third Stanger staffer I didn’t recognise stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him on either side, while further back I could see Doctor Webb, the Stanger’s director, directing proceedings along with a bald, austere stick-figure of a man in a dark grey suit. Paul’s face was impassive: he barely even looked at me. Webb, on the other hand, was dismayed and outraged to see me there ahead of him.

‘Castor!’ he exclaimed, spitting up my name in much the same way that a cat spits up a hairball. ‘Who let Castor in here? He’s trespassing! Move him aside!’

‘Sorry,’ I said, stepping determinedly into the path of the little party as they came forward. ‘Got to move the patient where, exactly? Who says? What are you talking about? I’m the patient’s next of kin so why don’t I know about this?’

‘You’re not his next of kin!’ Webb snarled. He snapped his fingers under Kenneth’s nose and pointed at me imperiously. Kenneth put a hand on my chest and pushed me firmly to one side, allowing Paul and the other male nurse to walk past me and take either end of the metal frame. They manoeuvred it round so that they could wheel it end-on through the door, but I wasn’t done yet. I ducked under Kenneth’s hand, crossed to the door and slammed it shut. The mortise lock clicked home, which meant that Paul would have to leave off what he was doing, get his keys out and open it again. And that meant he had to come through me.

Webb bought me another few seconds, obligingly. Turning three shades south of purple he stalked towards me, then stood in front of me with his clenched fists hovering an inch from my face, paralysed by an approach-avoidance conflict so painfully visible that I couldn’t look away. He wanted to hit me: he knew there were witnesses. But he wanted to hit me: but then there were those darn witnesses . . .

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the room at large, ‘but I’m performing a citizen’s arrest.’

Kenneth looked pained as he advanced on me again, having to step around the good doctor. ‘You’re performing a what, my lovely?’ he demanded.

‘A citizen’s arrest. I’m arresting all five of you for the attempted abduction of a mentally ill person against his-’ Kenneth clamped a massive hand on my lapels. I swatted it vigorously away. He came back again with both hands, and although I parried again he managed to get a better grip this time and keep his purchase.

He outweighed me by a good fifty pounds: I could have taken him, but only by playing dirty, and getting myself banged up for assault at this stage of the game wasn’t a risk I could take. I let him pull me aside and pin me into a corner of the cell while Paul got the door open again and he and his colleague manhandled the massive steel frame through it, hindered rather than helped by Webb’s unnecessary instructions and ubiquitous presence. ‘To the right, Paul. No, to the left . . .’

‘Mind your feet, Doctor Webb,’ Paul rumbled, and then there was an agonised yelp from Webb that did my heart good. But they were out in the corridor now and picking up speed: my delaying tactics had foundered.

‘Okay, boyo, you just stay put,’ Kenneth growled, wagging his finger sternly in my face. But as he turned to follow the others I shouldered past him and got to the door first.

We trotted along the corridor in a strange and unwieldy procession: Paul and the other nurse pushing the frame along after Doctor Webb, the ugliest drum majorette in history, flanked on one side by Jenna-Jane’s tame lawyer and on the other by me, with Kenneth bringing up the rear.

When we got to the reception area they faltered to a stop, staring out through the double doors onto the small apron of the Stanger’s front drive. In theory, I knew, there should have been a van waiting there, its back doors open and a ramp in place, with a happy crew of psychiatric interns and burly removal men all ready to take Rafi aboard and whisk him away to his new life in Paddington.

The van wasn’t there, though. Presumably it was still out on the road, or stranded at the Stanger’s gates: meanwhile the drive had been colonised by three or four hundred young men and women who were singing ‘You can’t kill the spirit’ with as much wild energy as if they knew what they were talking about. They were mostly in casual dress, but black T-shirts predominated and on a lot of them I could pick out the slogan DEATH IS NOT THE END.

‘Holy fuck,’ Paul muttered, under his breath.

‘What . . . ?’ Webb demanded, words seeming to fail him for a moment. ‘Who are all these people?’

‘Mostly the local chapter of the Breath of Life movement,’ I told him helpfully, relieved that they’d all made it on time. ‘I met some of them a couple of days ago. Really nice guys, once we’d got past the small talk and the mutual fear and loathing. They were fascinated when I told them what you and J-J were up to.’ I didn’t mention the frightener I’d had to put on Stephen Bass – threatening to tell his tutors and the police about his hobbies of vandalism, stalking and criminal damage – before I could get him to agree to this. That seemed to fall under the heading of a trade secret. ‘Oh, and I think those guys over there,’ I went on, ‘are from a national TV network. You see the letters on the side of the camera? They stand for Beaten, Buttfucked and Clueless, and they’re talking to you.’

Webb shot me a look of horrified disbelief and opened his mouth to speak. But his words were lost to posterity, because at that moment the double doors of the Stanger swished open and Pen strode across the threshold, bang on cue.

‘Where’s my husband?’ she demanded, projecting beautifully for the cameras and standing dead centre between the doors so that they slid impotently backwards and forwards on their tracks, unable to close on her. ‘What have you done with my husband, you bastards? I want him back!’

Webb blinked, his jaw dropping. He turned, at bay, to face Pen and took a step towards her, but then stopped as flashbulbs popped out on the drive – one, two, then a whole cluster all at once. The paparazzi were moving into position on either side of the doors so that they could enfilade anyone coming out from a variety of photogenic angles.

‘Miss Bruckner!’ Webb struggled with the polite form of words, forcing them out through clenched teeth. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Ditko aren’t married. You don’t even—’

‘He’s my common-law husband!’ Pen shouted. ‘We’re married in the sight of God! And I’m not letting you put him in a concentration camp!’

Webb was struggling to make any sound at all now, his complexion getting darker and more alarming by the second. ‘The – the MOU in Padddington is not a – a—’

‘Oh, look what they’ve done to him!’ Pen wailed, pointing at the frame and Rafi’s glum, limp form hanging in the centre of it. ‘He’s not a criminal! He’s not a monster! Why are they torturing him?’

‘Rights for the dead, and the undead!’ Stephen Bass bellowed, from the front ranks of the Breathers. ‘Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!’ The chant was taken up by his undisciplined but enthusiastic cohorts. It didn’t mean a damn thing as far as I was aware, but it sounded great.

‘Your move,’ I murmured to Webb, in a lull between the twenty-first and twenty-second repetitions. ‘My advice would be to—’

‘I do not,’ Webb gurgled, swallowing hard several times, ‘want your advice, Castor. And this – this will not make a difference.’

‘Well, that’s not strictly true,’ I demurred, with a mild shrug. I caught Paul’s eye and he winked solemnly at me over Webb’s shoulder. ‘I think it’s going to make a difference of at least – let’s say – four or five days. Maybe a week. Depends how cold it gets at night and how much staying power these kids have got. They’re young and idealistic, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t make it at least up to the weekend. After that I’ll have to think of some other way to make your life a misery.’

I walked away from him before he could answer, passing Pen in the doorway. ‘You can take it from here?’ I murmured. ‘Keep things percolating? Make sure they don’t get Rafi out the door?’

‘Trust me,’ Pen snarled back. There was a dangerous gleam in her eye as she stared at the restraint frame. She wasn’t faking it: she was really angry.

‘Play it cool, though,’ I cautioned her, a little worried. ‘You’ve already got one assault charge pending. Be the victim, and let Webb be the monster.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Pen told me, a little curtly. ‘Where are you going, anyway?’

‘The United States. Alabama.’

‘Looking for a change of scene?’

‘I’m looking for a dead woman.’

‘Get Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to come down here. I’ll make you one.’

I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but only for a moment: I didn’t want to lose it.

I was hoping the crowd might part for me, but I’m no man’s Moses. I picked my way through the massed ranks of the Breathers, trying not to tread on any fingers or toes, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. They were in a volatile mood, bless their rabid little hearts.

The flight I’d booked was going out of Heathrow at a few minutes past noon. I checked in with just hand luggage at a little after six and went to wait for Juliet in the grotesquely named Tap and Spile bar.

She was already there, waiting for me. So was Nicky, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing shades indoors like some vampire wannabe. He gave me a sardonic wave when he saw me. He had a full glass of red wine in front of him, and Juliet had an empty one. She also had a UK passport in her hands. That was a relief: Nicky hadn’t been sure he could cobble something together at such short notice and have it pass muster.

‘Another?’ I asked Juliet, pointing at her empty glass.

She shook her head. ‘It reminds me a little of blood,’ she said.

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘I’m about to spend ten hours in a confined space with three hundred people, Castor. You tell me.’

I let that one go and just ordered a whisky and water for myself. I took it over to the table and sat down in between them. Nicky nodded his head towards a folded sheet of paper which was sitting on the table.

‘Names and addresses,’ he said. ‘Juliet’s got one too, in case you get separated.’

I unfolded the sheet. ‘Fair enough. Who’s on here?’

He waved vaguely. ‘Anyone I could find who might remember Myriam Kale or have anything interesting to say about her,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you the address of the Seaforth farm – where she lived until she got married – but there’s no phone number I can find so my guess is nobody’s living there now. There’s a maternal uncle – Billy Myers. You’ve got his last address. And I called through to the local paper, the Brokenshire Picayune.’

‘The what?’ I winced at the first taste of the lousy blended Scotch.

‘Picayune. Means trivial or everyday. Great name for a newspaper, huh? “It doesn’t matter a tinker’s fuck, but you read it here first.” Anyway, the editor’s a guy named Gale Mallisham. I told him you were digging for information about Kale and might have some to trade.’

‘And he said –?’

‘“Fuck. Another one? Why won’t anyone let her lie in her fucking grave?”’

‘Well, thanks for priming the pump there, Nicky.’

‘Don’t mention it.’ He put his wineglass underneath his nose and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. Since he died, that’s Nicky’s most sensual pleasure: I let him spin it out as long as he wanted to. Juliet was following all this with a detached, almost bored look on her face, but I knew that she was taking everything in. You don’t get to be as old as she is by letting your attention wander.

When Nicky put the glass down I shot him an expectant look. By way of answer he sat back in his chair and made himself comfortable.

‘The stuff in the box,’ I prompted.

‘Sure.’ He was still in no hurry. ‘I notice Johnny boy’s little gofer is dead.’

‘Meaning Vince Chesney?’ I frowned. ‘Yeah, he is. How’d you know?’

Nicky looked smug. ‘Two and two, Castor,’ he said. ‘The little baggies that Gittings’s souvenirs were packed in had a name label printed on them – some animal-pathology outfit called Nexus. And this morning Nexus is all over the news on account of having lost one of its employees last night in an inexplicable bloodbath at their premises in Victoria. Some security guard got to join the choir invisible, too. No witnesses, no leads, at least when I hacked the PNC at four a.m. Juliet tells me you were there.’

‘Yeah. I was there.’ I glanced at Juliet, who shrugged. I hadn’t told her it was a big secret, but I’d still have liked the right of veto on telling Nicky about it.

‘It was a loup-garou, right?’

‘Right. Nicky, have you got something for me or not? Because twenty questions was never my game.’

He gave me a languid grin, stubbornly determined not to pick up the pace. ‘I know your game, Castor. It’s blind man’s bluff.’ I opened my mouth to curse him out and he raised a hand, forestalling me. ‘Okay, don’t start on me. I’m just in an expansive mood, that’s all. I like days when I throw out the questions and the answers bounce right back.’

‘So you’re saying –?’

‘I went through the stuff on the disc and I cross-checked it myself in a couple of places. It was mostly bullshit – your man measured everything he could touch a ruler to, whether it mattered or not – but if you want a smoking pistol then I think you got one.’

‘Go on.’ I could tell by the lingering smile that Nicky had a bombshell to drop, or thought he did. He reached into his pocket and handed me one of the small evidence bags. I remembered the object inside the bag pretty well, because it stood out from the mostly innocuous stuff in Chesney’s little treasure chest like a dildo in a nun’s boot-locker.

‘The bullet,’ I said, resigning myself to the role of straight man.

‘Bullet casing, actually. It’s from a 10mm auto round, and according to your now deceased doggy pathologist it was fired from a Smith & Wesson 1076. Got a lovely clear print on it, too – Les Lathwell’s. You know, the East End gangster? The one they called the Krays’ heir apparent?’

‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I’m a little hazy on social history. I know the name, but—’

‘Kind of an entrepreneur in the violence and intimidation line. He went to America to learn from the greats: came home and built his own little mafia on the Mile End Road. You should read about this stuff: it’s inspirational. Anyway, I went online and did some rooting around – that’s why I hacked the Police National Computer – and the print checks out A1 at Lloyds. I’m no expert, but I think the ballistics do, too. And that’s where things get interesting.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Lathwell died in 1979. The 10mm round didn’t even get introduced until 1983 – in a Swedish hand-pistol that kicked like an unlimbered cannon and broke people’s arms if they weren’t expecting it. It didn’t get popular – and I use that word in heavy quotes – until the FBI picked it up in 1988. In other words, Lathwell couldn’t have fired that round, or loaded it into a gun, because he died before the gun ever came off the assembly line. So there’s your Rod Serling moment. Enjoy.’

Nicky indulged in another deep snort of the wine breath, drawing it out for maximum dramatic impact. He got the timing just about right, because I was struggling to fit that spiky fact into what I already knew – which was only possible at all because I knew jack shit. Looked at from one angle, though, it made a queasy kind of sense.

‘You think Lathwell rose in the flesh, then?’ Juliet asked, voicing my thoughts. ‘As a zombie?’

Nicky put his glass down, basking in our undivided attention. ‘Could be. Or maybe someone just flayed his fingertips and wore them for a joke. There are a couple of other titbits like that in the notes on the disc. Anachronisms, I mean. My favourite is a letter from Tony Lambrianou to his brother Chris. You know the hearse that carried Lambrianou’s body had a message from Chris, in the middle of a wreath the size of Canary Wharf? It said “See you on the other side.” Well, this letter is dated about six months later, and it’s exactly three words long: “I made it.” Sick joke or mystical revelation? You decide.’

He leaned forward, suddenly more animated. ‘Okay, that’s what’s on the disc, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service. You get this because I’m obsessive and because I’m dead: in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t ever need to sleep if he’s got something on his mind. Look at this – and look at this.’

I was expecting him to give me some more of the little evidence bags, but instead he held out two badly photostatted fingerprint charts – copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and smears.

Juliet looked over my shoulder: her pattern-recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine. ‘They’re the same,’ she said. ‘Or almost the same. The differences are very few, and very small. Is that the point?’

‘Yeah, that’s the point. You want the punchline? The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is different by about three ridges and one friction artefact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-grandad of all East End psychopaths. There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys. Only they’re not. They’re the same guy twice.’

I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right: this was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book – in fact, it was a whole roomful of smoking machine rifles. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

Who wants to get you, John?

The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

‘They’re coming back,’ I summarised. ‘All the East End bad boys. All the biggest bastards.’

‘But how are they coming back?’ Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them. ‘Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time: become more like the flesh they inhabit. In the long term the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal: diluted to the point where it’s really just not there any more. As for the revenants – the zombies – their bodies seldom last more than a year, or two at most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them together.’

The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky and saw him staring at her, grimly deadpan. ‘I’m sorry if that was tactless,’ she added. ‘I’m talking in general terms.’

‘Sure,’ said Nicky tightly. ‘I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?’

Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow. ‘No, obviously you’re subject to the same—’

‘Shut the fuck up. Please.’ Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl: he’d drawn in a large breath just beforehand for exactly that purpose. ‘I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just – don’t talk, okay. Don’t talk about things you know fuck-all about.’

The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions, and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them. Tactfully, though, she made no reply.

I tried to pull the conversation back onto less controversial topics. ‘They’ve still got their own fingerprints,’ I said, answering Juliet’s question. ‘So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—’

‘1908,’ Nicky supplied, sullenly.

‘1908. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the 1960s and 1970s, his body would have to have been spectacularly well embalmed.’

Juliet shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work in any case,’ she pointed out. ‘This other man – Les Lathwell – he had friends? Family?’

‘Two brothers, both dead,’ said Nicky. ‘A sister, who’s still alive.’

‘And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?’

Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. ‘Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.’

‘Then how – and when – did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?’

It was a more than reasonable question. Something was niggling at me – something that felt as though it might be part of the answer – but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.

‘Not plastic surgery,’ Nicky said. ‘They could do it now – fingerprints and all – but in the 1960s the technology wasn’t that advanced. Except on Mission Impossible. You know, that guy with all the masks.’

‘Flesh is plastic enough in any case,’ Juliet said, and I almost had it.

But then Nicky spoke again and I lost whatever connection my subconscious was trying to make. ‘I haven’t managed to find any Myriam Kale memorabilia,’ he said. ‘Turns out East End gangsters are easy compared to sexy American assassins-for-hire. A few things came up, but they all smelled like scams. I’m still looking. But since you’re going to where she lived, maybe you’ll pick something up along the way. In which case, throw it to me when you’re through with it and I’ll find it a new home.’

So Chesney’s Kale piece had come from some other source. I decided not to mention that: Nicky was touchy enough already without being told that someone else had outscored him. ‘I’ll do that, Nicky,’ I said blandly. ‘In the meantime, could you check something else out for me?’

‘Well, I’m always at your disposal since, obviously, I don’t have a fucking life,’ Nicky observed dryly, flicking a cold glance at Juliet.

‘Can you find out where all these guys are buried?’

‘Yeah, sure. That’s easy. Why, you want to put some flowers on their graves?’

‘I want to find out if there’s any connection here to John Gittings’s list of London cemeteries. If there’s a pattern – if they all ended up in the same place—’

‘Yeah, I get it, Castor. The thing about the flowers? Joke. Is your mobile tri-band?’

‘I don’t have the faintest idea. But the battery’s flat in any case.’

‘Fine.’ Nicky gave it up, getting to his feet and shoving the untouched wine away with a disgruntled air. ‘So you get yourself a stack of dimes and call me. I know you don’t travel much so I probably ought to make it clear that dimes are what Americans use for currency. Have a nice flight, the both of you. I’ll see you when I see you.’ He was about to walk away, but then turned and held out his hand, palm up. I almost shook it, misinterpreting the gesture, but he clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘The bullet casing. You go through the metal detector with that in your pocket, there could be all kinds of humorous misunderstandings.’

I gave it back to him. ‘Thanks for everything, Nicky.’

‘You’re more than welcome.’ There was something in his tone, in his face, that I couldn’t read. ‘You want to pay me back, then keep me in the loop. I want to see how this comes out. By the way, someone else knows you’re coming.’

He threw it out with carefully measured casualness, playing for the double take.

‘What? What do you mean, Nicky?’

‘When I got your names off the airport data system, there was a nice little tripwire set up there. I saw it because was coming in on a machine code level.’

‘A tripwire?’

‘Yeah. Like, a relay. So if your name came up on any flight, someone gets told.’

‘My name? Or Juliet’s?’

‘Just yours, Castor. Anyone wants to know a demon’s whereabouts, they just have to stick their nose into the wind.’

Nicky walked away without waiting for an answer. ‘I hurt his feelings?’ Juliet asked. She wasn’t contrite, she was just asking for the sake of information: something to add to her database of human foibles.

‘You shoved his face in his own mortality,’ I said. ‘Nobody likes that much.’

‘He’s already dead.’

‘Doesn’t make it any easier to live with.’

A few moments later, the tannoy told us that our flight was ready to board at Gate 17. I just about had time to finish my whisky. Nicky’s wine remained on the table behind us, untouched.

In the departure lounge, Juliet stood at the window and watched the planes taking off. She seemed fascinated, and it made her oblivious to the covetous stares she was collecting from the male passengers sitting around her. I hadn’t thought about it much, but this was her first flight.

Joining her at the window, I told her about some of the side effects she could expect to encounter. She wasn’t troubled about the changes in pressure and what they might do to her ears. ‘I’ll adjust,’ was all she said. She seemed to be looking forward to the experience.

We boarded at the tail end of the line because Juliet preferred not to join the crush until the last moment. Our seats were just forward of the toilets at the very back of the cabin, in what would once have been the smoking seats – and explaining the concept of smoking seats to Juliet took us all the way through the safety lecture. She was amused at the fences and barricades that humans had built around their pleasures: but then she was amused at the whole concept of deferred gratification. Demons, she said, tended to work more in terms of reaching out and grabbing.

‘Well, any time you feel the urge,’ I gallantly didn’t say.

She took an almost child-like interest in the take-off, swapping seats with me so that she could look out of the window and remaining thoroughly engrossed right up until we were in the air.

But after that her mood changed. She seemed to withdraw into herself, somehow, her expression becoming cold and remote. I checked out the in-flight movies, none of which looked particularly exciting, and then looked around again: Juliet had her head bowed and her eyes closed, and her hands were clasped – very tightly, it looked to me – in her lap.

‘You okay?’ I murmured.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Juliet answered tersely.

I left her to it while the cabin staff came around with complimentary beverages. I opted for coffee, bearing in mind the risks of deep-vein thrombosis, but hedged my bets to the extent of asking for a brandy to spike it with. Juliet just shook her head when the stewardess asked her if she wanted a drink: she didn’t even look up. Was she nauseous? Could demons get travel sickness?

I waited a while to see if she’d come out of it by herself: I didn’t want to irritate her by seeming too solicitous. But when we’d been in the air for half an hour, her expression had become a rigid mask of suppressed suffering. Juliet isn’t capable of going pale, because she’s already pale enough to make most albinos look ruddily healthy, but something had happened to her complexion, too: it was as though the radiant white of her skin was losing some of its intensity, some of its definition.

As tactfully and neutrally as I could, I showed her the sick-bag and explained its function.

‘I’m not sick,’ she said, her voice low and harsh.

‘Okay,’ I allowed. ‘But you’re not your usual cheeky, chirpy self. What’s the matter?’

She shook her head, but only half an inch in either direction so the movement was barely visible. ‘I don’t know.’

I wasn’t going to press it any further, bearing in mind how fiercely Juliet defends her privacy, but she spoke again after a pause of almost a minute. ‘I feel – stretched,’ she muttered. ‘Strained. As though – part of me is still down there. On the ground.’

I could hear the tension in her voice and see it in the set of her shoulders. The whole of her body was clenched tight, like a fist: the nails of her latticed fingers were digging into the backs of her hands.

‘Maybe it’s a kind of travel sickness that only demons get,’ I suggested tentatively. ‘If it is, you’ll probably get over it soon: it’s just your body adjusting to the weird input – the cabin pressure and the motion of the plane.’

‘Yes,’ Juliet growled. ‘Most likely.’

But she didn’t get better. She got worse. Two hours out, I saw a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I could hear her breathing. Both were alarming signs, because for all her scary sexiness Juliet wears human flesh at a jaunty angle. She’s not human, so a human body is only ever a disguise for her, or a craftily designed lure like an anglerfish’s light. She doesn’t have to breathe or sweat if she doesn’t want to. There are, of course, times when she wants to do both – but this seemed to be involuntary.

A little while later, when I looked at her again out of the corner of my eye, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she’d either fallen asleep or passed out. At any rate, she’d slumped over sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost rested against my shoulder. Then as I watched it tilted the rest of the way, smoothly and inexorably.

She didn’t respond when I whispered her name, and her sharp, sweet scent – the smell that more than anything else defined her in my mind – was gone. She smelled of nothing except a faint, inorganic sourness: an almost chemical odour.

What was going on here? I turned over some possibilities in my mind. Maybe it was because demons were chthonic powers, linked in some way to the earth itself – as though, in addition to the biosphere everyone knows about, there’s another meta-biosphere which includes the fauna of Hell. Maybe demons were like the children of Gaea in Greek mythology, who were invincible as long as they were standing on terra firma, but weak as kittens if you could manage to lever their feet off the ground.

Or maybe this was something completely different: an anti-demonic casting that we were flying into, like the wards and stay-nots that people put up over their doors to stop the dead from crossing the threshold. Maybe the whole of the USA had wards on it, and they were already operating even this far out and this far up.

Either way, there might be something I could do about it. I started to whistle under my breath, so faintly that it was barely voiced and wouldn’t carry beyond the row of seats we were in. The tune was Juliet: the sequence of notes and cadences that represented her in my mind. No summoning, no binding, and certainly no banishing – just the bare description. Perhaps it might work as a kind of anti-exorcism: give her immune system a little boost and help her to fight back against whatever was happening to her.

She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came round with our meals, I ate one-handed so as not to disturb Juliet. It was an odd and unsettling experience. Normally any part of me touching any part of Juliet would have been so agonisingly arousing that I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else. After a few seconds I’d have been physically shaking. Now, though, it was as though something inside her had switched itself off: as though she was only a lifelike model of Juliet, and if I tapped her skin she’d ring hollow.

For the second half of the flight I dozed too – fitfully and intermittently, waking every so often to check the flight-progress screen on the back of the seat in front of me and discover that we’d inched forward another couple of hundred miles. Juliet didn’t stir, but her chest rose and fell arrhythmically. I let her be, figuring that she was probably better off asleep than awake. Even the changes in pressure as we started to descend didn’t wake her.

But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham her eyes snapped open.

Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.