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‘But there could be a job she took on without telling you?’

‘It’s possible.’ Sue didn’t sound convinced.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘If there’s something on the professional side that’s distracting her, maybe she’ll open up to me about it. She trusts my judgement on that stuff.’

‘Thank you, Felix,’ said Sue humbly. She could just as easily have said, ‘Distracting her? She punched me in the face hard enough to turn it particoloured. Seemed pretty focused to me.’ But Sue hasn’t ever been the kind to make a drama out of a crisis.

I got up. There are a lot of things you can do at a moment like that to let the other person know you feel their pain. Most of them are outside my repertoire – or at least outside the relationship I have with Sue Book.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said again, the words sounding even more awkward the second time around. ‘Listen, if it happens again, and you need somewhere to go, Pen has about a million rooms doing nothing. You can come and stay any time.’

Sue nodded, giving me a weak smile, but clearly didn’t trust herself to speak again.

I left her there, hanging on the cross I’d wanted so much to be nailed to myself, and went on my merry way. Which, let’s face it, was getting less merry by the moment, even before I went over to the Costella Café and met up with Gary Coldwood.

But the fact that I was already looking like a wet weekend just saved him the unhappy obligation of wiping the smile off my face.

Gary looked hunted. He was sitting at the back of the long, narrow dining area, as far away from the window as he could get, dissecting a slightly watery portion of scrambled eggs on toast with grim and humourless precision.

There was no table service, so I grabbed a coffee and went over to join him.

‘I’m telling you this as a friend,’ he said when I sat down opposite him. ‘Which means, if you tell anyone else and if it comes back on me, I’ll kick you face down into a ditch and stand on the back of your head until you stop moving.’

‘As a friend,’ I clarified.

‘Exactly. As a friend. Listen, after I left you last night, I went back over to Uxbridge Road to meet this SOCA fuckalong. Name of Brake, which was what I wanted to do to his face after five minutes in his company. He’d called me in to put a marker down.’

‘Which was?’

Gary shot me a scowling glance, putting his knife down as though the memory had spoiled his appetite. ‘The Ditko case. It’s closed.’

For a moment that statement was too incomprehensible to be alarming. I laughed, but Gary didn’t join me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That must be the quickest collar you ever got.’

‘I’m serious, Fix.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But what the Hell does it mean? How can the case be closed? Rafi’s still out there. Asmodeus too. The job’s not done because this guy decides to move the file from one drawer to another. Did you tell him that?’

‘No,’ said Gary, spitting the word out. A couple of toast crumbs came along with it as unwilling passengers. ‘I didn’t, because he outranks me, and he made it clear right at the start that mine was not to frigging reason why. He was spoiling for a fight before he walked in the door, if you want to know. We get tied up in jurisdictional pissing contests with these arseholes every day of the week, and I think he was looking forward to a rumble. So I didn’t give him the excuse. I was civil and solemn and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-bum-crack, which was as good as giving the bastard two fingers.’

‘But you did ask what the Hell he was on about?’

‘Of course I did. What do you bloody take me for?’ Gary was indignant. ‘I pulled out all the public safety issues and waved them in his face, and I said there was a cast-iron case for parallel parking – homicide running its own investigation alongside SOCA’s and sharing resources.’

‘So?’

‘Nothing doing. And this is the bad news, Fix.’

‘There’s bad news?’

‘SOCA aren’t running the show either. It’s been contracted out – his words – to a privately run agency. They’re better resourced for this sort of palaver, he said, and they’ve already got the clearances they need to deal with a killer who can’t be arrested by anything short of an army division. In fact, they’re not looking to arrest Ditko at all; just to make sure he doesn’t kill again. Their brief doesn’t say anything about ways and means or about what state they leave him in afterwards.’

The horrible truth hit me just before he said it. I gave an incredulous laugh that almost hurt my throat coming out.

‘Tell me it’s not—’

‘It’s the Anathemata, Fix. The holy-water boys. If they can figure out a way to do it, they’re going to kill Ditko and Asmodeus both.’

5

I just leaned back and waited for a few moments, trying to let that digest, but it sat in my stomach like a rock. The Anathemata. The bastards had screwed up my life every time I’d had the bad luck to run across them. And Rafi’s too. They were even more to blame for Asmodeus than I was: for his being here at all, and for his still being free. This was a sicker joke than the one about the nun and the gorilla.

‘Who are they, Fix?’ Gary demanded. ‘This is only the second time I’ve even heard of them, and both times I’ve had a case taken out of my hands and my arse smacked like I’m a kid trying to raid the sweet jar. Tell me what I’m up against.’

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.

When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.

But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.

A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled – or better yet, blessed – by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘Crux sancta sit mihi lux’ and becomes really hummable with ‘Vade retro, Satana’.

So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously – I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.

The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.

‘They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits – you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’