It took her a while to get served. Another bunch of guys with flashy cameras had rolled in and there was a logjam at the bar. Two in the morning seemed to be happy hour in this place. When she came back, bringing me another pint of London Pride and herself what looked like a triple whisky, she tried again.
‘I told Father Gwillam that same night - the night when we met - that I was out of the game,’ she said. ‘I was angry at the way I’d been set up. I told him I couldn’t be a part of the order because I couldn’t trust him any more.’
‘How did he take that?’
She laughed ruefully. ‘It didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He certainly didn’t beg me to stay, anyway. And he didn’t apologise. He just said I should think carefully about my decision, because it would be irreversible. Once I left, I couldn’t come back. The Anathemata would strike me from their list retroactively, so I wouldn’t ever have been a part of their operations. I’d be forbidden from contacting anyone in the order or talking about our work, with the implied threat that if I didn’t keep quiet, they could turn my volume down permanently.
‘So . . . I walked. And I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.’
‘Harder to make the break than you thought?’
Trudie was grim. ‘No, Castor. I said I was through, and I was through. But despite what Father Gwillam said, they weren’t quite through with me. About three weeks later I went back to the hostel where I’d been living. It was more of a barracks, really, for the members of the order, but it looked like an ordinary church hall from the outside. I needed to clear out the last of my stuff, and I’d emailed one of the deacons to say I was coming.’
She scowled into her drink, her hand gripping the stem of the glass tightly enough for the knuckles to show white. ‘I walked into the aftermath of a battle. They’d turned the dormitory into a field hospital. Every bed was occupied, and there were people running around with bandages, tourniquets, buckets. Doctors stitching up wounds. Members of the order - people I knew - screaming or sobbing or shrieking out swear-words. Some of the bodies on the beds weren’t moving. They were dead. And the wounds . . .’ She stared at me. ‘They looked as though they’d been clawed by wild animals or . . . or been dragged along behind a truck, or something.
‘I just stood there in the doorway, staring. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. The . . . the smell was worse than anything. Blood, and shit, and sweat, all mixed together.
‘Then someone shoved a bucket and a sponge into my hands, and at least I had something to do. Mopping up the blood, so nobody would slip in it and break their neck. I got stuck in. It was a way of shutting my mind down, so I didn’t have to think about it.
‘I worked for hours. Not just with the bucket. I stitched up a wound too, which is the first time I’ve used a needle and thread since I left seminary school. It was Speight. I think you met him. Something had gashed his arm really badly, from the shoulder down to the elbow. I stitched it up the best way I knew how, while someone else - a man I didn’t know - held his arm still and stopped him from struggling.’
‘Why do this there?’ I demanded. ‘Why not take them to a proper hospital?’
Trudie had a hard time focusing on the question. She was back in that room, in her own vivid memories, breathing in the stink of other people’s pain and terror. ‘I think . . . operational secrecy, mainly,’ she said at last. ‘We’re legal in some ways, but we’re vulnerable in others. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and if . . . if our people had left other people dead . . .’ I nodded and waved her on. I got it. When you’re an excommunicated secret sect fighting an undeclared guerrilla war, sometimes it’s best not to invite too much scrutiny. At the Salisbury the Anathemata had moved openly, but then at the Salisbury there were tower blocks burning and dead people falling out of the sky. The cops had been grateful for all the help they could get. Evidently this operation was different. More like the Abbie Torrington business, in fact, when Gwillam’s lunatics were shooting it out with another secret army in a west London church. That was an unwelcome memory. A prickle of presentiment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
‘Speight was raving,’ Trudie went on. ‘Feverish. I think his wound was poisoned in some way. They’d shot him full of antibiotics but he was burning up. I wasn’t listening; I was too busy trying to sew up all these loose shreds of flesh into the shape of an arm. But I heard him anyway. Enough to put it together. There’s a group called the Satanist Church of the Americas . . .’
‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘Twice.’
Trudie nodded. She knew that, of course. The Anathemata had a file somewhere with Rafi’s name on it, and she’d presumably read it from cover to cover before she ever met me in the flesh. Most of the last three years of my life would be in there.
‘We thought they were defunct,’ she said, sombrely. ‘The man in charge - Anton Fanke - died, and after that there was a schism. They spent a lot of last year fighting among themselves. But from what Speight said, there was a clear winner in that contest. And then the order got word that SCA people were filtering into the UK, in ones and twos. Some of them were travelling on false passports, but we had people in place, watching them. We were able to track them as they started to come together.’
My throat was dry by this time. It wasn’t just the vividness of Trudie’s description, it was the growing certainty that I knew where she was going. ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked tersely.
‘Last weekend. Six days ago. But Father Gwillam was tracking these arrivals for two weeks before that, so the Satanists started to gather in London about a week after Asmodeus broke free.
‘They didn’t come here to see the sights, Castor. They came to perform an invocation of some kind. They’d brought a girl with them: a sacrifice-child, like Abbie Torrington, born and bred to be ritually murdered. But the order was right on top of them, every step of the way. Father Gwillam called down an attack before they could finish the ritual.’
‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Did you—?’
‘Not me,’ Trudie corrected, deadpan. ‘I wasn’t there, remember? But yeah, the order got her out in one piece.’
Remembering Abbie, I bared my teeth. ‘How long is that likely to last?’ I demanded. ‘Gwillam is all about the greater good, isn’t he? He’d kill this kid in a heartbeat if he thought there was any risk the satanists would try again.’
‘That’s just it.’ Trudie tapped the back of my hand with her index finger. It was the first time we’d touched, and the tiny, subtle gesture of intimacy made me start slightly. ‘There isn’t a risk. Not any more. The order took casualties, but we wiped them out: not one of the satanists got out of that room alive. And they put everything into this. Our agents in America raided all their known chapter houses and found nothing. Even the sacrifice farm in Iowa was deserted.’
I tried to get my head round this. So either Asmodeus had contacted his acolytes as soon as he was free, or else they’d known by some other means that he was back in circulation. They’d tried to mount an operation that was a carbon copy of the one they’d pulled off two years ago when Fanke was still alive: to summon the demon out of Rafi’s body by means of an esoterically prepared human sacrifice. And they’d failed.
After that, Asmodeus had murdered Ginny Parris, attacked me, started to stalk Pen. Why? Just out of rage that plan A hadn’t worked? Or was he already working on plan B? I had to ask myself what I was missing, because there was bound to be something. Following the demon’s terrifying corkscrew logic was like trying to figure-skate on the pitching deck of an icebreaker.
Trudie was staring at me as though she was waiting for me to speak. ‘Thanks,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I did need to know about that stuff, and I appreciate you telling me.’
That seemed to exasperate her. ‘Oh you’re very fucking welcome,’ she said, throwing out her hands. The tourists looked across at us from their table, startled at her loud imprecation. When you’re having a cheap holiday in someone else’s death, you don’t expect to hear bad language. ‘Castor,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘whatever you think of me - of my opinions - you have to see that we’re on the same side in this one thing. We were both there. We both helped to set Asmodeus free because somebody else lied to us and tricked us.’
She leaned in closer to me, not for intimacy’s sake this time but because she’d realised she needed to lower her voice. ‘So you feel dirty? Compromised? Played? Well, snap. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I went straight from the Anathemata to the MOU - because there wasn’t anywhere else I could go, if I still wanted to be in this fight. I’m going to do what I came for, which is to put that monster back in its cage. And I’m doing that whether you help me or hinder me or blank me or sabotage me, or whatever the hell you choose to do. But I think if we trust each other we might get further.’
She didn’t wait for an answer this time: she was too angry and too full of the restless energy the memories had stirred up. She downed her second whisky in a single swallow, grabbed her bag and walked, leaving me to it.
She was right, of course. We were both enemy agents, in effect, in the monolithic structure of the MOU, and we’d be a lot more effective if we were prepared to at least watch each other’s backs.
It was a big if, though. It was a very big if.
10
Walthamstow High Street hosts the longest street market in Europe. It’s a proud boast, but it’s also one that’s worded with legalistic precision: it’s not the biggest market, just the longest. It’s a market shaped like a bootlace, in other words, stretching from Hoe Street in the east practically all the way down to Coppermill Lane in the west. By day it’s an ever-running river of people moving to the fractal music of a thousand shouted conversations.
At this time of night though, it was just me and the ghosts.
I’d had to take another cab - no choice, so long after the last train - but I’d asked the cabbie to drop me at Blackhorse Road Tube station so I could walk the last mile or so on foot and clear my head a little. It was a good idea in principle, but it didn’t work out all that well. The air was muggy, and heavy with a pre-thunderous load of unshed rain. There was a faint luminosity in the air, like the glow of a false dawn, although that was still a good few hours away. Around the railway bridge at the top of Vernon Street the ghosts of suicides clustered, a voiceless choir waiting for a cue that would never come. I felt like I was walking in the bulb at the bottom of a barometer: all those hundreds of miles of atmosphere, pressing down on me with a precisely calibrated intensity. One life, one load, one size fits all.
My bed was calling me, but Nicky - like rust - never sleeps, and we had a lot to talk about. This was a good time; I wasn’t going to let it slip just because I was tired. You can come out through the far end of tired into a productive if slightly dangerous place. I knew how that felt and I was consciously searching for it, even though it seldom comes when it’s looked for.
The street was twice as wide at night as it is by day, because none of the pitches are permanent. All the stall-holders pack their goods and their booths back up into a million white vans and depart with the setting sun, an east London caravanserai wending its way across the border into Essex, which for most of these wide boys is both physical and spiritual home.
But as I passed Manze’s pie and mash shop, I saw there was one stall still out, probably in violation of a hundred local by-laws. A few steps closer, and I recognised the stall-holder as Nicky. Only it was Nicky dressed as Del-Boy, in a herringbone jacket and a black shirt with a white yoke and collar.
He had a good pitch, as far as that went. Close to Sainsbury’s, which guarantees more passing trade than you can handle, and on a corner, which is always an advantage in terms of display space. What he didn’t have was any stock, or - this being four in the morning - any customers. He was showing off his bare trestle tables to me and the man in the moon.
‘Hey, Nicky,’ I said, as I drew level with him.
‘Hey, Castor.’ He didn’t look up from what he was doing, which was measuring the interior space of the stall and the dimensions of the three display tables with a tape measure.
‘So, may I politely enquire what the fuck?’ I asked him.
‘Give me a minute,’ Nicky said distractedly.
I waited while he paced up and down, applying the tape measure to every straight line available. He wasn’t writing anything down, but I knew he didn’t need to. Death hadn’t done anything to impair Nicky’s scarily efficient memory; if anything it had cleared his mind of a lot of distractions.
Finally he wound the tape measure around his hand - making me think momentarily of Trudie and her cat’s cradles - and slid it into his pocket. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m done here. You want to help me pack all this stuff up?’ He pointed to a large, battered Bedford van standing with its doors open on the other side of the road.
‘You don’t think it’s worth hanging on for a few more minutes?’ I asked. ‘Trade’s bound to pick up once the word-of-mouth starts working.’
Nicky gave me a tired look. ‘Trial run,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how much space these things give you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why the hell do you think, Castor?’ He started to fold up the tables as he spoke. ‘I’m going into business.’
I stared at him blankly. It was actually about the least likely explanation I could think of for this nocturnal ramble. ‘Selling what?’ I demanded.
‘DVDs. VHS tapes. Videodiscs. Actual film prints. Hard-to-get stuff in a variety of formats. In fact that’s probably going to be the name of the stall: Hard-to-Get.’
He was starting to fold down the stall’s marquee, which is a two-man job. Mechanically I stepped in to help. ‘But Nicky,’ I pointed out as tactfully as I could, ‘the market’s only open during the day.’
‘I know that.’