‘You mean, when I was raised from Hell to feed on a human soul – yours, for example – how did I find you?’
I nodded. ‘In a nutshell.’
‘I hunt by scent.’
‘I knew that. What I was trying to ask was which scent? Was it the soul or the body that you tracked?’
‘Both.’
Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So did you ever come across a situation where your—’
‘Prey?’
‘– I was going to go with target, but yeah. Where your prey knew you were coming, and managed to brush over his trail in some way. So you couldn’t smell him any more?’
Juliet thought about this for a moment or two, visibly turning it over in her mind.
‘There are things that disguise the body’s scent,’ she said. ‘Lots of things. For the soul – a few. Running water would hide both.’
I nodded. That much I did know. ‘But did you ever have a situation where you were following a trail, and the scent was strong, and then suddenly it just went cold? Completely died on you.’
She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No. That couldn’t happen.’
‘Somebody did it to me earlier today.’
‘No,’ Juliet said again. ‘That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.’
Good enough. And food for thought. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.’
‘Come in the evening,’ she suggested. ‘We can have dinner.’
That was a very appealing prospect. ‘On you?’
‘On me.’
‘You’re on. Where do you want to meet?’
‘Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by – perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight-thirty.’
I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.
‘It didn’t come to me,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?’
‘Oh.’ Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I was asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.
‘It’s a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘Beating about once a minute.’
5
I went back to the car, which I’d parked in the back lot of a wine warehouse that closed early on Mondays. It was Pen’s Mondeo, which she lets me use whenever she doesn’t need it herself. With Dylan’s Lexus currently handling most of her transport needs, I had it on semipermanent loan.
I let myself in and locked the doors behind me just in case because my attention was going to be elsewhere for a few minutes. In a Sainsbury’s bag in the front passenger seat of the car was Abbie’s doll. I took it out, held it in both hands and closed my eyes.
And shuddered. There it was again: the fathomless ache of Abbie’s long-ago and long-sustained unhappiness, brimming behind the frail ramparts of rag-stuffed muslin. Got you, you bastard, I thought with cold satisfaction. You can throw me off the trail, but only when you know I’m on it. You can’t be on silent running all the goddamn time.
Laying the doll down on the steering wheel like a tiny Ixion, I took out my whistle and launched into the opening notes of the Abbie tune, which was still fresh in my mind.
Within seconds I got the same response as before; the same sense of something touching the music from outside, as though it was a physical skein that I was throwing over West London. Except that it was stronger this time. I was barely a quarter of a mile to the east of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half further south. And yes, the orientation was different – the faint tug on the web of sound coming not from over my left shoulder now but from straight ahead, from where the sun had set not long before. That made it easier to shift my attention, my focus, into that one quarter. The touch was faint, vanishingly faint, but I opened myself up to it, shutting out all distractions, tautly listening in on that one channel even as I was creating it, sustaining it, with the soft drawn-out complaint of the tin whistle. She seemed to recede. I held a single note, almost too low to hear, the barest breath into the mouthpiece, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees—
Suddenly a shrieking discord bit into my mind like a deftly wielded Black & Decker power drill. It came out of nowhere, slicing through my nerves, sundering thought and feeling and music so that their writhing, severed ends leaked chaos and agony. I screamed aloud, my back arcing so that my head slammed back into the headrest of the driver’s seat and my feet jammed down on the pedals as if I was trying to bring the already stationary car to a dead halt.
It only lasted for a second: less than that, maybe. Even while I was screaming, the pain was subsiding from its lunatic peak and I was slumping forward again, a puppet with its strings cut, my forehead thumping against the body of the doll which was still lying on the steering wheel in front of me.
I lay there weak and dazed for a few seconds, static fizzing and stinging through my nervous system, trying to remember where I was and why I was drooling bloody spittle onto a stuffed toy. My tongue throbbed in time to my heart, seeming too big for my mouth: I’d bitten deeply into it, and that bitter tang was my own blood. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and pulled myself together: that was a job that I had to tackle in easy stages.
I fished out my flask of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-cognac and unscrewed the lid with shaking hands. The first sip was medicinaclass="underline" I swilled it around my bitten tongue, trying not to wince, rolled down the window and spat out the blood. The second sip was for my jangled nerves. So were the third and fourth.
I suddenly realised that as I stared down between my feet my gaze had met another pair of eyes gazing back up into mine. With a queasy jolt, I picked up the head of Abbie’s doll from the floor of the car: it must have parted company from the body when my head crashed forward into it, and it was pretty amazing that it hadn’t shattered as it fell. I slid it into the pocket of my coat, automatically. The decapitated body I dropped back into the Sainsbury’s bag, like any tidy-minded serial killer.
I think it became official right about then, for me at least. I was in a duel of wits, and I was three-nil down. The man was good, no doubt about it. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as you’ll know if cat-skinning is your thing.
I was looking forward to meeting him.
And punching his teeth down his throat.
Still shaky, I got the car moving and threaded through the side alleys back into Du Cane Road. I passed the church, heading east, and almost immediately I saw a familiar figure walking ahead of me. It was Susan Book, now wearing a long fawn-coloured duffel coat but still recognisable because the hood was down and she was still looking around her every so often as if she’d heard someone call her name.
I brought the car to a halt a few yards ahead of her and wound the window down. She began to skirt warily around it, then saw that it was me.
‘Do you need a lift?’ I asked.
She seemed surprised and a little flustered. ‘Well, I only live about a mile or so away,’ she said. ‘In Royal Oak. The bus goes straight there.’
‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Through it, anyway. It’s no trouble to drop you off.’
Susan fought a brief, almost comical struggle with herself. I could see she didn’t like the idea of accepting a lift from a stranger, which was fair enough: also that she didn’t relish the wait at the bus stop with the dark coming on.
‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you.’
I opened the door and she climbed in. We drove in silence for a while – a sort of charged silence. She was so tense it was like a static hum in the car.