Finally Rosie gave a loud sigh, which I took to be a signal that I should shut up. ‘I can’t catch it,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t catch it, Felix.’
‘Can’t catch what, Rosie?’ I asked. Given my part in getting her into this mess, I figured the least I could do was play straight man to her.
‘It’s changing,’ she murmured. Her eyes were closed now, and her head was tilted to one side as if she was listening for something. ‘But so slowly. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.’
‘Are we still talking about London?’ I asked.
‘About the world.’ The silence that followed those three words lasted for so long I thought she’d gone to sleep, but when I stood up to leave she reached out and took my hand again. ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.
‘I never do,’ I said. ‘It all rolls off me, Rosie. You know that. It’s part of my ineffable charm.’
She ignored the invitation to banter. ‘It’s going to get hard to breathe,’ she said. ‘I really believe . . . yes . . . the changes will go on and on. Like water, rising over your head. Don’t drown, Fix. I’d be sad if you drowned. There’s a man here who hates you . . .’
‘Gil McClennan,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. I had his number the first moment I saw him.’
She shook her head slowly, emphatically. ‘You think you . . .’ she began, but for some reason she didn’t finish the sentence. She shaped unspoken words with her mouth, but in the end only shook her head again. ‘Never mind,’ she sighed. ‘It all passes. It all passes. Perhaps you’ll be his . . . comeuppance, Fix. I know what a rogue you are. How hard to pin down. I hope you hurt him. I’d like to see that.’
She said it calmly enough, but I read some old pain in her face. It’s hard to hide your feelings when you’re relying on someone else’s muscles. I made a mental note to ask one of the others, most likely Sam, whether there was any bad blood he knew of between Gil McClennan and Rosie. Gil was her main link to the outside world now, in charge of selecting and briefing her volunteers – organising the meat train, as he put it – so he was in a position to do a lot of harm if he had a mind to. And he was a McClennan. That didn’t earn him the benefit of any doubts in my book.
‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘I need to move, but like I said, I’ll see you again soon. If Gil gives you any grief, you let me know.’
‘Assuredly, my knight in arms.’
‘Seriously. I’ll break his arm. I think Jenna-Jane would let me get away with that as long as he doesn’t take a sick day.’
I kissed her on the cheek, hoping the volunteer wouldn’t object to the liberty when he went through the tapes, and let myself out. She didn’t say goodbye; she was lying back with her eyes closed again, seemingly exhausted just by the conversation.
Walking back along the corridor, my head full of vague and unserviceable thoughts, I was hit full force by an atonal tidal wave of white noise, so suddenly and so painfully that it almost made me stagger. I hadn’t realised I’d gone the wrong way and was walking past the vault-like steel door that led down to the holding cells in the basement. I retraced my steps hurriedly, the cloying atmosphere of the place pressing in on me so that I felt like I was breathing through petrol-soaked rags.
My instinct was to get the hell out, but the mapping was still going on upstairs and I had to see how far they’d got. If Trudie Pax had a line on Asmodeus, I wanted to be the first to know. I went back up and found the room again. Trudie didn’t seem to have moved in the two hours I’d been gone: she was still standing at the table, the taut string linking her hand to the nail in the ceiling as she passed her hand over the map. Some things had changed though. The tables had been banked up at an angle somehow, their back legs precariously balanced on stacks of cardboard boxes, so that the centre of the composite map was only a few inches away from Trudie’s hand. She was holding a steel ruler, to the nether end of which a pencil had been attached with wads of Blu-Tack. This ramshackle apparatus allowed her to stab down onto the map and mark points on it. Victor Etheridge was scuttling around with a pencil and ruler of his own, joining the points up carefully with perfectly straight lines.
Trudie had her eyes closed, but I caught Etheridge’s gaze from the doorway. He held up his hand in the universal stop sign and shook his head vigorously: don’t interrupt.
I wished I could pretend I hadn’t seen his high sign, because I wanted more than anything right then to breeze on in and find out where those marks were falling: where the demon might have pitched his tent. But clearly Trudie was getting into her stride now, and Etheridge was feeling protective of her. Equally clearly, from a purely logical point of view it wasn’t going to be any damn use knowing where Asmodeus was hanging out until we had a weapon that would actually work on him. Trying to take comfort in that thought, I gave Etheridge a nod and a wave and retreated again.
But the logical point of view was a long bus ride from where my head was at. I was seething with restlessness, with the feeling that I had to be doing something right then and there even if it turned out later to be the wrong thing.
So I called Juliet. It seemed to make a crazy kind of sense.
9
‘A hundred pounds?’ Juliet repeated. She sounded suspicious.
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed.
‘Per day?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Plus expenses?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Shit, no. What expenses are there likely to be, anyway? All I’m asking you to do is to watch Pen’s house and make sure Asmodeus doesn’t get near it. Pen’s already got the place hot and jumping with stay-nots, so the chances are you won’t have anything to do in any case. But if the wards go down, I want there to be another line of defence. That’s you.’
Juliet sipped her coffee, which was black and thick and treacle-sweet. The waiter, who had a hangdog look and a ridiculous bandito moustache, hovered nearby with the pot, hoping she’d hold up her cup for a refill. That way he’d have an excuse to get in close enough for another lungful of essence-of-succubus.
‘It sounds dull,’ she said, setting the cup down and dabbing her lips with the serviette. She left a smeared imprint of vivid red lipstick on the folded edge of it, like a streak of blood.
‘Oh, I think it will be a lot duller than it sounds. But it’s easy money, right?’ As in, ‘Easy come, easy go,’ I added mentally. It was everything I was getting from Jenna-Jane. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it was kind of a relief to shunt J-J’s tainted favours directly onto a third party. On the other hand, you can’t eat air. If this thing didn’t wrap itself up quickly, I was going to be dining in the bins behind Pizza Hut.
‘I’m not interested,’ Juliet said.
‘What?’ I was dismayed. I’d started with my best offer, knowing from experience that you can’t drive a hard bargain with a woman who can smell your soul, so I had nowhere to go now but down. ‘At least think it over, Juliet. Please. It won’t be for very long, and you can always—’
‘I’m not interested in the money,’ Juliet clarified. ‘Give it to her.’
‘To her? Her who?’
‘The one who bruises so easily. My little friend.’
She spat the words out with searing contempt.
‘Susan?’
‘Exactly. She’s the one who needs clothes to wear and food to eat and toys to play with. Make her happy, if she’s capable of being happy. I’ll give you three days.’
I didn’t answer. To tell the truth, I was still trying to digest ‘bruises so easily’, and it was sticking in my throat like a chicken bone. Juliet stared at me with an edge of challenge in her narrowed eyes.
‘She’s . . .’ I began tentatively. ‘That is . . . Sue has been a lot more to you than a friend.’
‘Has she? How would you know, Castor?’
Okay, that was an easy one. ‘Because you can get sex anywhere,’ I pointed out bluntly. ‘You can have anyone you want, on whatever terms you want, for as long as you want. So if you choose to live with one woman, and to stay faithful to her, then it has to be because—’