Thicker Than Water (22 page)

‘We will,’ Susan said, presumably referring back to my begrudged ‘Have a good time’, or whatever it was I’d said.

Juliet made a sour face. ‘Ideas,’ she said.

‘Nothing wrong with ideas, Jules,’ Susan chided gently.

‘No. But my comfort zone is flesh.’

On which note I said my goodbyes, feeling none too happy.

If Juliet wasn’t going to play ball, I was left with Asmodeus. And k As he Asmodeus was a different proposition altogether.

Bigger, for one thing. Meaner. And living inside my best friend.

Rafi only started playing with black magic after he met me and saw the things I could do. This was during my brief, abortive stint at university, when he was an elegant wastrel and I was a working-class Communist with a chip on my shoulder the size of the Sherman Oak. We vied briefly for Pen’s affections, although Rafi never had any doubt that he’d win in the end. He always did: he was one of the people who life went out of its way to accommodate.

Rafi was never part of the exorcist fraternity: he was just an enthusiastic amateur with a sharper mind than most who mixed and matched necromantic rituals until he put one together that actually worked. But he was never a completer-finisher, either, which was the first part of his downfall. He left out one of the necessary wards, and the magic circle that should have kept Asmodeus safely contained was fatally flawed. The demon – one of the most hard-core bastards in Hell – battered his way out and into Rafi’s soul.

A lot of things could have happened at that point: demonic possession is a fairly new phenomenon, and not all that well documented. What actually happened was that Rafi became delirious and got so hot he actually seemed in danger of catching fire. His girlfriend called me, and I tried to carry out an exorcism.

That was the
coup de grâce
. I’d never encountered a demon before, let alone one as powerful as this. I screwed up badly, welding the two of them together in a way that I couldn’t undo. Asmodeus has lived inside Rafi ever since, the senior partner in a very unequal alliance.

For Rafi it was effectively the end of any kind of normal life. A human soul is pretty lightweight when weighed against one of Gehenna’s finest, so Asmodeus would surge up and take the driving seat whenever he felt like it. After a couple of ugly incidents, Rafi was sectioned under the Mental Health Act: there are aspects of the way we live now that the law hasn’t caught up with yet, and this was one of them. Being realists, though, the senior management at the Stanger wrote ‘Schizophrenic’ on the paperwork, while at the same time they lined Rafi’s cell with silver to curb the demon’s worst excesses.

For three years we bumped along and made the best of a bad job: I went along to the Stanger every so often and used my tin whistle to play the demon down so that Rafi got some peace, and Doctor Webb, who ran the place, was happy so long as we kept the money coming.

Happy, that is, until he got a better offer from a former colleague of mine: Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the director of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s hospital in Paddington. Jenna-Jane was just a ruthless monster back when I worked for her, but for the past couple of years she’s been reinventing herself as a crazed zealot, convinced – just as Father Gwillam is – that humanity is now engaged in a last-ditch, apocalyptic struggle against the forces of darkness. As far as I can tell, she sees her role as broadly similar to Q’s in the James Bond films: humanity’s armourer and engineer, forging the weapons that we’re bound to need when the dead and the undead back us up against the wall and finally come squeaking and gibbering for our thro kg founats.

But before she can be Q, she has to be Mengele. She’s turned the Helen Trabitch Wing at Queen Mary’s into a little concentration camp over which she rules with loving, obsessive sadism, and she’s managed to persuade the CEOs of the hospital trust that this still counts as medicine. She’s got an amazing variety of inmates there: werewolves, zombies, the oldest ghost ever raised and some tragic nutcase who thinks he’s a vampire. About the only thing she hasn’t got is a demon, and she’s got her heart set on acquiring Rafi.

About a month back, the cold war between me and
J-J
got a little hotter, as it periodically does: it looked like she was going to be able to persuade the High Court to overturn a decision made by a local magistrate, which had given Pen power of attorney over Rafi. She was looking to have Rafi transferred from the Stanger to the
MOU
, with the connivance of Doctor Webb, whose balls she seems to have in her pocket.

But I’ve started a ball collection too, and the aforementioned magistrate is part of it. I got my own court order, immaculately forged, and went in first. Webb and
J-J
woke up the next morning to a fait accompli. Rafi was gone, having traded the dubious hospitality of the Stanger for the ministering hands of my good friend Imelda Probert – known to most of London’s dead and undead as the Ice-Maker.

It was a spoiler run, and it was desperate improvisation. At the Stanger, Rafi was penned in a silver cell and Webb and his team had a dozen or more ways, ranging from subtle to brutal, of keeping Asmodeus in check when he rose into the ascendant. Now all we had was my whistle, and Imelda – who had never thought that this was a good idea in the first place.

As I trudged back to the Tube, I imagined the ructions I was going to have with her, and the sheer gruelling agony of whistling the hell-spawn up and then back down again in a single session. It was going to be bad. Bad for me, anyway: Pen would see it differently, because she’d be able to visit with Rafi while I – assuming things went to plan – consulted his bad-ass alter ego.

But when I went back to Pen’s to give her the equivocal tidings, she was waiting with the phone receiver still in her hand and some news of her own to pass on.

‘Someone called Daniels,’ she told me. ‘They said it was about Billy. Billy’s awake.’

‘That’s great,’ I said, but Pen was looking solemn and troubled.

‘Apparently not,’ she said.

It was practically on our way: a crow flying across London from Turnpike Lane to Peckham and sticking to the rules would pass within a spitball’s distance of the New Kent Road. Pen wasn’t eager to break the journey, but I had two trump cards. One was that Tom and Jean Daniels were potential clients: Pen likes me to earn money, because I owe her a vast amount of the stuff and every little helps.

The other was what Coldwood had said about someone watching Pen’s house. I’d had my radar out since then, looking for tails, but there hadn’t really been anything at stake un kng wattil now. If it was Jenna-Jane, hoping I’d lead her to Rafi, then the more twists and turns we added to our itinerary tonight, the better. We had to be damn sure that when we got to the Ice-Maker’s we’d be alone.

So we went to the Salisbury, and as we passed into the shadow of the first two concrete monoliths Pen gave an involuntary shudder.

I stared at her curiously. ‘You feel it?’ I demanded.

‘I’m just cold,’ Pen muttered.

‘Billy’s awake,’ Jean Daniels said, almost before we’d got inside the door, ‘but he’s not himself, Mister Castor. He’s wandering in his mind. Tom was sitting with him up until an hour ago, but he had to go and sign on down at the job centre.’

She pointed me through to the living room. Bic still lay on the sofa where I’d deposited him the night before, but in his pyjamas now rather than his street clothes, and with an old overcoat, by way of a blanket, covering him up to the waist. The pyjamas were red and blue: Spiderman fought Doctor Octopus across the front of them.

Bic’s eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see me. He was restless, his fingers moving with small fluttering motions as though he was a guitarist trying to remember a chord sequence with no instrument ready to hand. His lips were moving too, although no sound was coming out.

‘What did they say at the hospital?’ I asked.

Jean flicked a doubtful glance at Pen, seeming reluctant to drag out family business under the eyes of a stranger.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘This is Pen Bruckner. She’s my landlady. She’s also sort of a shareholder in the business, on account of I owe her more than I’m worth.’

Jean accepted the explanation with a hapless shrug: needs must when the devil drives, she seemed to say. ‘They told me he might have a concussion. Then he woke up and they said he didn’t. Then he started to talk all funny, and he didn’t seem to know who I was, so they decided they weren’t sure. They gave him some tests but they wouldn’t tell us what any of the results were. It was obvious they didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him. We were there for five hours, waiting on some consultant or other, and when he came he only said again that it wasn’t a concussion and Billy would probably be all right inside of a few hours.’

She rubbed furiously at her eye, more as though she wanted to force a tear back inside than to wipe it away. ‘They were going to keep him in,’ she said, her mouth setting tight at the memory, ‘but when I asked them what they were going to do they couldn’t give me a straight answer. Keep him under observation, they said. As if that’s going to make him better all by itself. So we brought him home. But he’s getting worse, Mister Castor. It’s like he’s got a fever, only he isn’t hot. So I told Tom we should call you, and we had a big row about it and he said I could only do it when he wasn’t in the house because he doesn’t believe in any of the things you were talking about. I suppose I didn’t either, until all this happened. But there’s no point sticking your head i kng hinn the sand. This isn’t a medical thing, is it? It’s not a medical thing at all. Not with the bleeding and the dreams and all that. It’s . . .’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Well, I think it has to be something more in your line, doesn’t it?’

I nodded, but for a moment I didn’t speak. The miasma – the migraine buzz in the air, the prickling sense at the back of my skull – confused my death-senses to the point where they were almost useless. I honestly couldn’t tell right then if Bic was one of the loci it was coming from or not. On the other hand, I’d seen him the night before about to sleepwalk off the edge of a balcony sixty feet above the ground. And I’d seen his hands running with blood despite the absence of a wound. If it wasn’t possession, then what was it?

‘Yeah,’ I said at last. ‘In my line, certainly. But I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what it was, Jean.’

‘I don’t need to know,’ Jean said, her voice thickening. ‘Just bring him back. That’s all I want. If you can do that, I’ll pay you anything you want.’

It was an empty boast. How much could she afford, if Tom was on job-seeker’s allowance? Even a tenner would probably stretch the budget. But why had I come here if it wasn’t to do the job? And how could I smack this woman in the face with charity after everything else she’d been hit with? It was a knotty problem whichever way you looked at it.

And then there was the matter of my own professional competence, which I reckoned we’d better get sorted right now before we went any further.

‘I don’t know if I can do it or not,’ I told her. ‘Because like I said, I don’t know what I’m dealing with. If I
do
bring him back, it’s not likely to be on the first pass. It could take a few days, and a few visits, with nothing promised at the end of it. I’m prepared to try. That’s the best I can offer.

‘As far as money goes – I’m sort of already working this case for another client,’ I said, shading the truth without blushing. ‘So I can offer you a discount. In fact, under these circumstances I’ll work
COD
. I won’t charge you anything up front, but I’ll send in a bill if Billy gets better and doesn’t get sick again.’

‘A bill for how much?’ Jean persisted, no doubt being far too used to the foibles of debt collectors and money-lenders to fall for vague expressions of goodwill.

‘A hundred,’ I said, plucking a figure out of the air. ‘A hundred quid.’

Jean did some quick mental arithmetic, her eyes moving from side to side as she shunted invisible beads on an invisible abacus.

‘All right, Mister Castor,’ she said at last. ‘A hundred it is.’

I took out my whistle. Jean stared at it a little blankly. ‘I’m on my way to another appointment,’ I said, which was also true. ‘But I’m going to do a preliminary examination now and see what I can find out. Then I’ll come back later – or more likely tomorrow – and spend some more time with him.’

‘I don’t know what I’m dealing with,’ I reminded her. ‘So it’s the best I can do. If it’s a ghost, or -‘ I skirted around the word
demon
‘- something like a ghost, then I need to get a fix on it. Kind of a psychic mugshot. I can’t do anything else until I’ve got that. I still think getting Billy out of here would be the best medicine for him, but if he has to stay on the estate then I’m going to have to do what I always do, which is to work the thing out in stages. Or you can tell me to bugger off, if you want. But either way, I don’t want to give you any false hopes.’

Jean looked at the whistle again, and shook her head. She wasn’t turning down the offer: I think she was just struck with wonder at how slim a reed she was clinging to.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘No false hopes.’ She tried to laugh, but it just loosed the tears at last and she broke down in front of us, which was what she’d been struggling so hard not to do all this time.

Pen scooped her into an embrace, saying the usual consoling nothings. We exchanged a glance over Jean’s bowed head, and I pointed towards the kitchen.

‘Let’s get ourselves a cup of tea,’ Pen suggested, taking Jean in hand and steering her in that direction with the magic of artificial good cheer. ‘I can talk you through what Castor does while he’s doing it, and then we won’t be getting in his way.’

They went through into the hall and I pushed the door to. Pen hadn’t needed to ask why I wanted to be alone for this. She knows from past experience that when I’m putting a tune together for the first time – using the music as sonar to zero in on a dead or undead presence that I haven’t got a proper fix on yet – the two things that are most likely to screw me up are strong emotions and external sounds.