‘Don’t worry, J-J,’ I assured her. ‘I think I’ve got the implications pretty much taped.’
Jenna-Jane’s eyes narrowed, and she breathed out heavily through her nose. She made to walk past me, out into the corridor, and I held out my free hand to push her back. She touched my hand with her own, and a jolt of white lightning went through me. Suddenly I was down on the floor of the room, my elbows and knees stinging from where they’d hit the tiles, my head full of ringing after-tones as though somebody had decked me with a glockenspiel.
Jenna-Jane stood over me. The thing in her hand looked like a Stanley knife, black steel overlaid with yellow warning strips. She had it aimed squarely at Gil McClennan’s chest. ‘Please drop the baton, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘and then go and sit next to Felix on the floor. This is an M18 taser. It shoots a shock-charge of fifty thousand volts, and I can assure you that it’s a great deal more pleasant to give than to receive.’
Gil weighed up his chances, which at that range were pretty much non-existent. He let the sidewinder drop to the floor, where it bounced once and then rolled in a half-circle around the fulcrum of its own weighted end, coming to rest a good six or seven feet out of my reach.
Gil sat down.
‘Now, if somebody would be good enough to call a security team,’ Jenna-Jane said in her most schoolmarmish voice, ‘perhaps we can proceed.’
Perhaps she expected a docile chorus of ‘Yes, Professor Mulbridge’ from the gaggle. Instead, the sound that met her pious request was a strangled wail from the white-coated woman who’d been untying Juliet’s wrists. My gaze flicked in that direction, just as everyone else’s did.
Juliet was on her feet. Admittedly she was leaning against the table for support, but her feet were planted firmly on the tiles. Vivid rivulets of blood marked her perfect, pigmentless skin in meandering lines, as though a butcher had marked her up for filleting. She had her hand on the throat of the lady doctor, her arm fully extended so that the other woman had to lean back from the waist. They were staring at each other, the lady doctor in abject terror, Juliet with the pained wonder of someone who’s just scratched their pubes and come up with something small and wriggling.
‘No,’ she said very distinctly. ‘Not you. Where? Where is she?’
Jenna-Jane swung the taser round, but she didn’t have a clear line of fire. The moment that she hesitated was long enough for Gil to kick her legs out from under her.
There was a scramble for the taser. The doctor with the broken arm won it, but I’d gone for the fire axe. I took a wild swipe and knocked the weapon out of his hand with the flat of the axe blade, making him yelp in anguish. The way I was feeling right then, he was lucky he didn’t get the sharp end.
As I lurched to my feet, the echoing tramp of booted feet in the corridor outside announced some late arrivals to the party. The security guards we’d passed among the cell blocks – or maybe a different group altogether – came charging through the door, only to come to a dead halt when they found that I had the axe blade pressed to Jenna-Jane’s throat. I was still shaking violently from the taser zap, and it was all I could do to hold it steady, but I did my best to look like a man you wouldn’t want to cross.
‘Better think about this,’ I advised the rent-a-cops, my voice a little more tremulous than I would have liked. ‘If she dies, who’s going to give you your Christmas bonus?’
‘His name is Castor,’ Jenna-Jane said quickly. ‘Felix Castor. The other man on the floor there is Gilbert McClennan. Radio to someone outside the building and give out those names.’
‘You don’t want to do this, son,’ one of the goons said, holding out his hand for the axe. Son? He was probably younger than me.
‘Actually, Dad,’ I told him, ‘it would make my entire year. I’m aching for a little uncomplicated good news, you know?’
The man hesitated. A lot of thoughts were probably going through his mind, and I suspected it wasn’t used to handling that volume of traffic. Axe blades are generally kept blunt, but you don’t have to break skin to snap someone’s throat, especially someone like Jenna-Jane, who was past the first flush of youth. Did I look like the sort of man who’d commit cold-blooded murder in front of a dozen witnesses? Did his desire to make me eat the fire axe offset the trouble he could get into if Jenna-Jane died and the company he worked for had to pay damages to the MOU? How would it play on the ten o’clock news?
I don’t know exactly which argument swung the vote but finally the guy stepped aside. So did the men behind him, but they parted to both sides of the door so that I’d have to have my back to at least one of them as I went through.
‘Over there, numb-nuts,’ I said to the guy in charge, nodding toward the far corner of the room. ‘Go play doctors and nurses with the doctors and nurses.’ I returned my attention to Jenna-Jane. ‘There was a note,’ I said, ‘at the house. A note from Asmodeus. Do you have it on you? Think carefully before you lie to me, J-J, because I’m a desperate man already. You wouldn’t want to send me over the edge.’
‘It’s in my pocket,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘On the left-hand side. There’s no need for melodrama, Felix. I always intended to show it to you when you came back from Surrey.’
Holding the axe in place one-handed, I dipped into her pocket. There was a slip of paper there, folded into four. I took it out and glanced at it. All I could see were a few words, at random and upside down: ‘only possible place’. It looked like the real deal though. Asmodeus formed his letters in a style that was almost pointillist, from myriads of straight lines no bigger than ink flecks. It would take a lot of effort to forge, and I couldn’t see why she would have bothered. Despite that bland assurance, I was never meant to see this. I stuffed the note into my own pocket.
‘McClennan,’ I said, ‘we’re leaving. Bring Juliet.’
Juliet had been holding the throat of the lady doctor all this time, but she released her grip as Gil approached her. The woman staggered back from Juliet, her hands going to her bruised neck. That meant she backed into Gil, who steadied her with his hands around her shoulders.
‘Take off your coat,’ he told her, ‘and give it to me.’
The woman did as she was told without argument. She’d stared into Juliet’s black-on-black eyes at point-blank range. Juliet’s inner fires were at a low ebb right then, but even so that had to have left her shaken to her psychosexual core. There was no fight left in her.
Gil draped the coat over Juliet’s shoulders, very tentatively, being careful not to touch her. She stared at him with a feral intensity.
‘We have to go,’ he said.
For a few moments she seemed not to have understood, but finally she nodded and pushed herself away from the table. Her legs folded under her immediately and Gil caught her as she fell. His eyes widened. He must have been surprised, as I was when I carried her out of the Mount Grace crematorium, by how little she weighed. But it was more than that. He stared across the room at me, tense and alarmed. ‘She’s like ice,’ he said, ‘and she’s barely breathing.’
I hesitated. I could swap places with McClennan, and have him take charge of the Mexican stand-off while I used my whistle to try to bring Juliet back to herself. I’d done it before with varying degrees of success, so I already knew the tune. But setting off the fire alarm would have alerted the emergency services too. They were probably already on their way, and getting out of the building would be complicated if it was surrounded by a ring of fire engines and police cars.
‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ I said. ‘And she only breathes for show. She’ll make it.’ I turned my attention back to the security guards, who’d all relocated to the corner of the room, behind the operating table. ‘You stay there,’ I said. ‘If you follow us, I’ll play who’s-got-the-guillotine with the good professor here.’