Thicker Than Water (48 page)

I waited to see if he was going to come back with any more smart-ass questions. When he didn’t, I hung up and called Juliet.

‘Felix,’ she said, with a warning rumble in back of the usual cat’s-purr roughness of her voice. ‘I’m busy.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked.

‘Making love.’

‘Well, call me back when you get to the cigarette stage. I hate to be a gooseberry, but this won’t wait while you get your rocks off.’

‘I’m coming
now
, Castor. Succubi can sustain an orgasm for days. It’s our tempers that are short. Tell me what you want.’

‘I figured it out,’ I told her. ‘About the thing at the Salisbury, and why you got so coy all of a sudden. It’s kind of a revelation, Juliet – that there are things that make a sex-demon blush.’

She didn’t bother with fencing or denials. ‘Do you really know what’s happening,’ she demanded, ‘or are you just bluffing me to see what I let fall by accident?’ So I told her the truth, as I saw it, in three bald sentences. I managed to keep my voice steady, but my hand was trembling as though I was in the last stages of malaria.

‘Very well,’ Juliet said. ‘What now?’

‘Just tell me – is that it? Is that how it happened?’

‘Yes. I think so. In broad terms, it must be. Why are you calling me, Castor?’

‘Because you said you’d tried to exorcise this thing. Was that just bullshit, Juliet, or do you really want to help?’

‘I don’t have time for bullshit,’ she reminded me with some asperity. ‘So please, stick to the point. I’m in the process of satisfying my lover – my other vocation. But this is a bad thing, and the forerunner of things a whole lot worse, so yes, I’ll help if I can.’

‘Just not with information.’

‘You know why I was silent, Castor. And I still have to decide whether I can trust
your
discretion. Tell me what you want from me.’

‘When you’re sure that Susan is fully satisfied, go to the Uxbridge Road nick and pick up my brother. Gary Coldwood will hand him over to you. Or he may want to come along too. Either way you’ll have to get Matt in here, through Hell and high water and maybe the occasional Catholic werewolf.’

‘Here being—?’

‘The Salisbury. Flat 137, Weston Block.’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘Juliet—’

A pause. ‘Yes, Castor?’

‘Nicky said you’re the youngest in your family. ‘
She is of Baphomet the sister and the youngest of her line
, yada yada.’

‘So?’

‘So who did you . . . ?’ I let the question linger, because I had no idea how to finish it.

‘It was a long time ago, Castor,’ Juliet said coldly. ‘I don’t remember.’ She hung up on me.

Nothing to do now but wait. And watch the show.

It took them close on two hours, but under the circumstances I think that was pretty impressive. Then again, the cross-London cop-demon-and-priest six-legged race is never going to become an Olympic event, so I don’t have anything to base a comparison on.

Now that I’d put my head back together again at least partially after the botched exorcism, I’d come to the realisation that I wasn’t completely helpless. Whistle in hand, I stood at the window and played – the first part of the exorcism ritual, the summoning: drawing the demon in towards me again and again, and then letting it off the hook at the last moment.

It was draining, and in the long run it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It did tie up some of the monster’s psychic resources, though, so that the riot police mostly woke up from their trance, wiped the blood off their hands and retreated at a stumbling, undignified Îpsyrun. Only a few remained: presumably those in whom the demon had been able to embed itself most deeply and most quickly. Maybe they were guys who already had a tendency towards self-harm, or at any rate a fetish thing about wounds and pain.

Inside the flats of the estate, though, nothing moved. There was no general exodus: no chorus of screams as people woke up to the full horror of what they’d done during the night. The demon’s hold was unbreakable there because he had too much of a head start on me. Some of them were never going to wake up at all.

The sky off to the left, behind Guy’s Hospital, had started to lighten just a little but then stalled: the sun stayed stubbornly below the horizon and the zenith was as black as a lecher’s heart. Maybe sunrise had been cancelled.

Then a commotion below me told me that the riot police were back. Only a small contingent of them, coming in from the north in a packed huddle that was vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Roman ‘tortoise’ manoeuvre.

There was a stirring on the barricades and behind the windows. The demon gathered itself – a single entity looking out through a thousand eyes. I put the whistle to my lips and played again, but I was weak and spacey from lack of sleep and my fingers kept fumbling on the stops. I’m not sure if I made any difference at all.

Missiles started to sail down and crash onto the concrete around the tight cluster of Kevlar-clad cops. A couple of bottles and something bigger and heavier found their mark, hitting raised riot shields with thunderous reports that echoed through the eerie silence enveloping the rest of the estate. One of the bottles was a Molotov cocktail, and spilled flame spread across the topmost shields in neon traceries.

One of the riot cops who’d stayed behind when the rest had left appeared now from somewhere and sprinted across towards his colleagues. I thought – and they probably thought, too – that he was trying to rejoin them: but then his hand came up with something jagged clutched in it and he uttered a scream that was more like a torture victim’s dying agonies than like a battle cry. A rubber bullet felled him at about ten yards out from the tortoise: his legs shot out from under him and he went down hard. He lay twitching, trying to rise, his hands fluttering like dying birds.

More bricks and bottles came down, but the tortoise headed on, straight towards me – then passed out of my sight under the walkways directly beneath my window. I had to judge what was happening now from the percussive sounds that came up to my ears. More screams, and a couple more rounds discharged. The smashing and rending of something heavy being moved.

Then the tortoise retreated the way it had come, moving at the same sluggish pace as before because of the need to keep the shields locked together.

Like I said, my mind wasn’t working all that well by this point. It took me a while to realise what payload the tortoise had delivered. I went out of the bedroom, up the stairs, and eased my way cautiously through Kenny’s boarded-up door out into the hallway.

The stairwell below me was in heÓow ooraving commotion. Presumably the cops had lost their hold on the third-floor walkways and the blood-crazed trancers had ventured north to reclaim the territory. Now they were wishing they hadn’t, because Juliet was passing through them in much the same way that a scythe passes through corn.

I didn’t go down to join them: moving as slowly and clumsily as I was now, I could only have got in the way and most likely ended up with a bottle broken over my head or a knife in my ribs. But I played the summoning again, drawing some of the demon’s attention my way in the hope that it might have to loosen its hold momentarily on its possessed servants.

The mismatched threesome came fully into view now, Coldwood coming first with Matt right behind him casting terrified glances to left and right; Juliet bringing up the rear and polishing off a last few attackers without haste or passion: she saved her passion for other things. One man stabbed her in the shoulder: she grasped his arm in an unbreakable grip, removed the blade from her own flesh and gave it back to him, hilt-first. He slumped against the wall, blood gouting from his broken nose. I was amazed – and grateful – that she hadn’t killed him. One of the hardest lessons for Ajulutsikael to learn, when she made the decision to live among men and so became Juliet, was to pull her punches.

‘In here,’ I shouted. Gary looked up and saw me. A few moments later, he and Matt were making their way up the last few steps. I led the way into Kenny’s flat and down to his gutted living room.

‘That was bloody blue murder,’ Gary complained. I ignored him and looked at Matt. He’d sustained a certain amount of damage in getting to this point – a bruised cheek, and a jagged cut on the back of one hand – but clearly he hadn’t been seriously wounded.

Yet.

‘Why am I here?’ he asked me, looking around in something like terror. ‘Why have you brought me here, Felix? Is this where—?’

‘This is where he lived,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sit down, Matt. Pull up a broken-off bit of furniture and park your arse on it, because you’re not getting out of here until you’ve heard the truth.’

Juliet entered the room, rubbing her hands together.

‘It’s worse than I would have expected,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Well, you’d know,’ I said.

‘Get to the point,’ Coldwood suggested. He was leaning against the wall just next to the door, arms folded. His lip was thickened and his voice was slightly slurred, but he too seemed to have got away lightly. Juliet’s flawless white skin, by contrast, was criss-crossed with new wounds, none of which would last: she healed fast, and she would have deliberately put herself between the others and the worst of the violence.

‘The point,’ I said. ‘Right. Matt, you didn’t sit down yet.’

‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Matt said. ‘Not in this place.’ He lookÓplaiv>ed around him with a mixture of fear and hatred.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then stand. Okay, we’ll start with the obvious. You have a son. Or at least you did have one. He’s dead now. And there – right there – is our fucking problem.’

Matt made a strangled noise and staggered backwards, one step and then a second. Slowly he sank down onto his knees. Probably it sounds as though I was being unnecessarily brutal: but there was so much worse to come, there seemed no point in beating about the bush with the relatively straightforward stuff.

‘Oh God!’ Matt whimpered. ‘Oh God!’

‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You had to know that. I mean, Anita didn’t want to be too obvious, but she named him after the next evangelist along. And how else could Kenny have got you to come out here and meet him, Matt?’

‘He said – but I wasn’t—’ Matt looked up at me with horrified, pleading eyes. ‘I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t – I didn’t want it to be true. If it was true, then—’

‘Then you left your kid to be brought up by a psychopathic bully,’ I finished. ‘I did wonder about that one. Working backwards from Mark’s age, it must have been when you came back from the seminary. Before you went to your first ministry. Is that right?’

Matt was still staring at me, unable to look away, unable to speak.

‘Is that right?’ I repeated. The details were going to matter. I couldn’t let him off the hook, even though I could see how much this was hurting him. I had to hurt him a lot more yet.

‘That was – the last time,’ Matt said. ‘We’d already—I loved her, Felix. I almost gave up the Church for her. As it was, I just gave up my conscience. Did what any cowardly philanderer does – taking the easy solace and postponing the hard decision. But I swear to you, Felix, I never knew she’d had a child. My child. If I’d known that, I would have gone to her. I would have been with her, whatever it took.’

‘And you never saw her again?’

He shook his head, tears now chasing each other down his cheeks. ‘I – I only – only heard—’ He fell silent for a while, folding in on his pain. Juliet looked at me inquiringly: she was probably wondering whether there was any point to this beyond pure sadism. Coldwood was watching me too, wary and truculent. He’d been dragged into this against his will and now he knew it bore on his murder case as well as on the current mayhem. He wasn’t happy, but he was letting me play my hand.

A hand in which razor blades counted as aces.

‘Kenny didn’t get in touch with me until after Anita disappeared,’ Matt said, his voice barely audible because he was speaking into his own chest, his upper body bowed now almost to the floor. ‘He said – he said she’d had my child, a long time before. He said he knew all the details. Names. Addresses. If I met him – on the Borough Road overpass – he’d tell me. He’d tell me everythinÓll d, g.’

‘And did he?’ Gary chipped in.

Matt looked up, startled. He seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t alone.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just – he said he’d lied to me. There wasn’t a child. Then he said there was, but he was already dead. He’d killed himself with a – a straight razor.’

‘And he showed you the razor,’ I said. ‘He made you touch it.’

Matt nodded.

‘None of this will ever stand up in court,’ Coldwood said distantly, as though to himself. ‘Okay, I buy Kenny hating his kid’s real father: feeling like he had something to prove, maybe. But tenderising yourself with a straight razor and making it look like it was the other bloke? It’s a plan with a fair few holes in it, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a plan that might seem irresistible,’ Juliet said, ‘if a wound-demon was whispering in your ear. Blood and pain must have started to feel like desirable things in themselves. Kenny Seddon just tried to harness them to a different end.’

‘But it doesn’t work,’ Gary pointed out bluntly. ‘There’s still the angle of the wounds. Some of them were self-inflicted, but some of them couldn’t have been. A fit-up doesn’t explain the facts.’

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’ Gary’s tone was savagely sardonic. ‘I thought it did. Your fucking brother is facing a murder charge, you self-satisfied tosspot!’

‘My fucking brother,’ I snarled back at him, my temper fraying right through, ‘thinks his biggest sin was a fucking bunk-up with Anita Yeats eighteen fucking years ago. When in point of fucking fact, it’s
this
.’ I threw out my arms, indicating with a sweeping gesture not just the room, the flat, the tower, but the whole of the Salisbury Estate in all its singed, shattered, punctured, incised and blood-smeared horror.

‘This is your biggest sin, Matty. How long has it been since your last confession?’