Silence at the other end of the line, apart from the sirens and shouted commands.
‘Did you hear me, Gary?’
‘No. I’m not sure I did. I thought you said you wanted me to bring your brother in to you.’
‘Yeah. That’s right.’
The next sound I heard was an incredulous laugh. ‘Did you fall on your head at some point, Fix? I told you, I can’t get in. And your brother’s on remand for fucking murder.’
‘Which he didn’t do. But that’s beside the point. He’s the only person alive who can stop this.’
‘Why?’ Coldwood’s voice was strained. ‘Explain the logic. No, on second thoughts don’t bother because this is not fucking happening.’
He hung up on me. I dialled again. There was nothing else to do except keep hitting at the one point and hope that something gave way. If it didn’t, I was going to sit here until the demon crept past my defences: and then I was probably going to do pretty much what everyone else was doing.
‘Fix, piss off out of it,’ Gary yelled down the phone.
‘I’d love to, Gary. Sincerely. But if I do, a lot more people are going to die tonight — including a lot of your people, unless you pull back and let every man, woman and child who lives on the Salisbury cut themselves to ribbons. I mean it. Get Matt and we can do something.’
There was another silence, but I took it to be a positive sign. I was still hearing the background noises, so he hadn’t hung up.
‘Give me a reason,’ Coldwood said. But I didn’t feel I could do that. Not yet.
‘I’m giving you all I can,’ I said. ‘Matt’s the key to this. What does it cost you to get him out of his cell and bring him in here? You can handcuff yourself to him if you’re worried. Or you can sit back and watch while half of South London goes to hell.’
‘It’s not half of South London. It’s one estate. A thousand people.’
‘For now,’ I agreed. ‘For now that’s all it is.’
‘Fuck!’ Gary exploded. ‘Even if I wanted to get him in there, how would I do it?’
‘You want an escort, you call an escort service,’ I told him.
‘Is that meant to be clever?’
‘Juliet.’
Gary laughed again, even less convincingly than before. ‘Juliet. Right. Because what this situation needs is another demon.’
‘Juliet will meet you at the station,’ I said. ‘She’ll bring Matt here. You can come too, if you want to.’
‘And then what? You wave your magic wand?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘This probably isn’t going to do a blind bit of good. But it’s a racing certainty that nothing else will. You want to end this, Gary, you get my fucking brother up here. We’ll talk about sin, because priests are experts at that stuff, and he’ll lead us in a few prayers. And maybe we’ll all still be alive when the sun comes up. Or alternatively, make sure you’ve got enough body bags.’
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.
23
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 run. 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.