She waved me to a chair, with a visible lack of enthusiasm. I stayed standing: I didn’t feel like I had a right to any hospitality. She sat down herself in one of the armchairs. It was a surprise, and not a happy one, to see a half-empty whisky bottle and a half-full glass on the occasional table next to her.
‘What I wanted to do,’ I explained, ‘was to play the first few notes of an exorcism – an exorcism for Juliet.’ Susan’s eyes went big and wide and she started to speak, but I hurried on, talking over her. ‘Not the binding or the sending, Sue – just the summoning. Juliet said she’d hear that, wherever I played it, and come and –’ rip your throat out had been her actual words; I groped for a mealy-mouthed substitute ‘– stop me from finishing.’
Susan glared at me in deep, almost speechless outrage. She was trembling now. ‘Oh, she’d stop you,’ she assured me.
‘Believe me, Sue, I’m not underestimating her. I’m just hoping I can explain why I’ve come before she cuts in and does something irrevocable to me. That’s why I want to do it here. I’m thinking maybe she’ll hesitate before doing something really violent in front of you. She wouldn’t want to hurt or scare you.’
That didn’t seem to make Susan any happier. Exhausted as I was, and desperate as I was to be moving on and doing what had to be done before I fell down and passed out and deflated like a punctured balloon, I tried to explain.
‘There’s a woman,’ I said. ‘Someone she met. Not . . . romantically. Met in the line of duty. And this woman needs help, that’s the plain truth. Which is what Juliet is trying to do. But I don’t think the help that Juliet is giving her is what she needs. This is what we argued about, back in Alabama. There’s more to it, but I’m hoping that Juliet will accept a compromise solution if I offer one.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘The whole thing. So it’s up to you. I’m going to do this anyway, but if you tell me not to do it here I’ll go somewhere else.’
Susan picked up her whisky glass, but she didn’t drink from it. She just turned it in her hands and stared into the shallows of the half-finished drink.
‘This woman-’ she said. ‘It’s the woman you were talking about before you went away? The killer?’
Warily, I nodded.
‘Who did she kill?’
‘Most recently, a middle-aged gay guy who was looking for a bit of rough trade. Before that –’ I picked my words with care ‘– a lot of people, but mostly people who’d hurt her. Or people who she thought might hurt her. She’s ill. Killing is one of the symptoms of her illness.’
Susan put the glass to her lips and emptied it. She made a sour face. ‘I’m not good at this,’ she said. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed the slur in her voice at the door. ‘I don’t even like the taste. I think I’m going to get sick before I get drunk.’
‘Susan-’ I began. She shook her head impatiently.
‘Play your tune. I want this to be over. I don’t want it in my life any more.’
I nodded. For the third time that night I unshipped my whistle and held it in my hands, ready to play. My mind was fogged by exhaustion, though, and although I knew the notes I had to play – the notes of a summoning that would have Juliet’s name written all over it – I couldn’t get my mind into the place where it needed to be. I felt like someone trying to fit their eye to the lens of a telescope, and screwing up the angle so that all they can see is the magnified reflection of the blood vessels inside their own eyeball.
I played a note, more or less at random, hoping my sixth sense would kick in and the music would start to flow. It didn’t. Nothing at all came into my mind, not even a note that would connect to this one in a way that made sense.
I lowered the whistle and stared at it, blinking my eyes back into focus. It was strange, and it was frightening. I’d had good days and bad days, but I’d never had my knack desert me quite so suddenly and completely before. All I wanted to do was the summoning. It was the easiest part of an exorcism: it just made a path, a line of least resistance for the spirit you were looking for to move through. It was usually easiest if you were close to the spirit, harder the further away you got: but the only reason it wouldn’t work at all, wouldn’t even stay in my head long enough to suggest the beginnings of a tune, was if-
‘She’s already here,’ I said. ‘Isn’t she?’
‘She’s upstairs,’ Susan muttered, pointing. ‘In our bedroom. Or it was our bedroom. I don’t know what it is now.’ Slowly, deliberately, but still spilling a little on the table, she poured herself another drink.
I walked right on past her. I wanted to offer her some kind of solace but what could I have said? Bad friend Felix was on the prowl again: good news wasn’t on the agenda.
The main bedroom was dead ahead. Juliet was sitting on the windowsill, legs hugged to her chest, both feet off the ground. In a way it was a curiously little-girlish pose. Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested himself – or herself, arguably – against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.
I stopped in the doorway. ‘Permission to approach,’ I said.
Juliet gave me what in a human woman would have been an old-fashioned look. ‘You can come in, Castor,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right; or at least, not to that extent.’
I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the street lamp opposite, a dark form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient: waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.
‘So how’d you get home?’ I asked her, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth. ‘Transatlantic cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?’
‘The scenic route,’ she said. ‘It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.’
‘Right, right.’ I was too tired to rise to the bait. ‘I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one from the old neighbourhood.’ I nodded out of the window, but she didn’t bother to look.
‘I smelled him,’ she said. ‘You should be more careful around demons, Castor. It’s only safe so long as they need you.’
‘Now you tell me.’ I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips towards me in a suggestive mime. ‘So how’s Myriam?’
‘She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back again after the last time, but they did anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her to control the urges.’
‘They being –?’
Juliet shrugged and shook her head. ‘She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks about Les, mainly. Les Lathwell. And to him, some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about something called inscription a lot, too: she doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.’
‘Back in the remand wing,’ I said, ‘they had Doug on anti-psychotics. A mild prescription to keep him stabilised. I don’t suppose you brought any out with you?’ Juliet just looked at me. ‘No. I know. Not the way your mind works. And I never thought to mention it to you when you were flinging me around the diner. Pity. It would actually have been a better line than “I’ll hunt you down and kill you like a dog.” That seemed to upset you.’