‘You killed two people, Peace. It’s not a joke.’
He scowled at me with something like resentment. ‘What are you talking about? Him I killed, yeah. Mel – I hit her. I remember hitting her. Because I had to make her tell me where Abbie was. I had to stop the whole thing before it got too far. Maybe she thought I was going to kill her, because I must have looked like some kind of a maniac. But I didn’t have the stomach for it.’
‘But – there was a woman’s body. Tied up and beaten and then shot in the stomach . . .’
But with a different gun. I suddenly remembered that odd detail from Nicky’s summary. With a different gun, and maybe as much as three hours later. That didn’t make any sense. Unless . . .
‘Did she tell you? What you needed to know?’ I asked Peace.
‘Yeah. They’d found some old Quaker meeting house in Hendon that was boarded up. It was exactly what they needed: a place where people had prayed, and sung hymns, or whatever it is that Quakers do when they let their hair down. A place where people had worshipped, anyway, because that’s one of the ingredients in the shit they do. I left her tied to a chair. If I could’ve killed her, I would have. I fucking hated her enough to do it. I just – when it came right down to it, I couldn’t pull the trigger with her looking at me. I kept thinking about Abbie. Abbie growing inside her. It made me weak.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ I said grimly. ‘Fanke finished what you started. When the cops got to the house they found two bodies, a man and a woman, and they ID’d the woman as Melanie Torrington. I think he must have figured out how you got that address, Peace – and I think he didn’t like it much. So it was really handy for him that you left her hands tied: meant he didn’t have to get into an unseemly scuffle or anything like that.’
It also meant that the blonde woman he’d brought into my office, and then considerately sent away so she didn’t have to relive her trauma, hadn’t got those bruises from Peace. She’d been beaten up just to serve as a prop and prepare the ground so Fanke could work on my tender feelings.
Peace took the news in dazed silence. It was probably just as welclass="underline" right then I was full of anger and contempt for him as well as for Fanke. Peace might have been protecting his daughter, but the pair of them had been dancing this slow, smoochy dance around each other for long enough, and a lot of innocent people had got hurt because they were caught in between.
‘She deserved to die,’ Peace said, more to himself than to me. ‘After all she’d done—’
‘Maybe she did,’ I said, wearily. ‘Or maybe she was just a bare-arsed bondage freak who Fanke reeled in the same way he did you – because he needed something she had. In her case it was a womb, and an open-minded attitude to sex acts that draw blood. In yours it was functional sperm. For Christ’s sake, Peace, have you really got it that wrong? Did you think she was your enemy? Because it looks to me like you were both played by an expert.’ And so was I, I reminded myself. I had no reason to feel smug here: I’d fetched the stick and rolled over and played dead like the best of them.
Peace got angry, and that was a mistake because it started him coughing again and the pain closed down his lines of communication for the best part of a minute while he wheezed and hissed like an overfilled kettle. There was no steam, though: Peace’s fires were burning pretty low now.
‘She was a vicious, selfish bitch,’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘She got exactly what was coming to her. Don’t judge me, Castor. And don’t try to make me feel fucking guilty, because it won’t wash. I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to get Fanke.’
‘Fanke was at the house?’
‘At the meeting hall, you moron.’
Which brought us full circle, I reckoned. And since he still didn’t seem to want to shut up, I might as well check that I was right about the endgame, too. ‘You got there late,’ I said. ‘The ceremony – ritual – whatever they were doing, it was already under way.’
‘It was already finished. All bar the shouting. Thirty seconds earlier – thirty bastard seconds – and I might’ve stopped them. If Mel had just told me where Abbie was, instead of lying and squirming and lying some more. And you want me to feel sorry I set her up to be killed? Fuck that. I’m only sorry I didn’t do it myself the first night I met her.
‘They were all in costume. Dressed in black, except for Fanke who was all in red and had some kind of a crown on his head. Made him a perfect target, only – only I saw Abbie lying there, in the circle, and I lost it. I just screamed and started shooting. Walked right out into the middle of them – blam, blam, blam. If one of them had had sense enough to whack me on the back of the neck with a chalice, or one of their other bits of fucking paraphernalia, that would have been the end of it. But they closed up around Fanke like I was about to take a penalty and he was the goal. Protecting him: making sure I didn’t muss his hair with a .45 ACP. And then another bunch came at me from the side: they must have been guarding the front door, or something. So I turned and sprayed them instead.
‘I didn’t expect to be walking out of there, Castor. And Abbie was dead, so I didn’t care what happened so long as I did some serious damage. But right then something else happened, and it was as big a surprise for them as it was for me.
‘Something started to appear inside the circle. It – didn’t have any shape, at first. It was like a shadow with nothing there to cast it. Like – I dunno, like a shadow in winter, when the sun’s low in the sky, because it was enormous and stretched out and sort of distorted. Then it moved and you could see that it had hands – arms. And it started to look darker. More solid.
‘The Satanists all went crashing down on their knees like someone had sliced through their hamstrings. Hunkered right down with their arms thrown out, shouting gibberish in Latin or Greek or it might have been the Mickey Mouse Club theme tune because I honest-to-God wasn’t listening.
‘I froze. I knew what it was that they were trying to do, but seeing it was something else. It was a demon: Asmodeus, one of the soldiers of Hell. One of their fucking generals, in fact. He wasn’t really there – not solid, I mean. I could actually see the angle of the wall right through him. And the air currents were moving through him too, pulling him out of shape. But he was bending down over Abbie with this look on his face like Christmas had come early.
‘I had a light-bulb moment, Castor. The words from Fanke’s website blinked on and off in front of me like I was back in school, spelling out from flashcards. Spiritually and physically prepared. He needed her soul, as well as her body. He was going to – to eat her, to consume her, right there in front of me. I had to stop it. I had to stop it.
‘What I did next – I just did it because it felt right. The demon was more like smoke than anything else: you can’t shoot smoke. And in any case, you’re meant to aim at the base of the fire. So I switched to fully automatic and I shot the pentagram. I shot their fucking magic circle.
‘The Tavor’s a bastard on auto. It bucked in my hands and I had to lean down hard on it to keep from being thrown over backwards. But I was already so close to the thing, it was like using a pointer on a whiteboard. I swung the gun round in as small an arc as I could manage, given the angle, and a couple of arms of the pentagram got chewed to pieces. I hit a couple more of their guys, too: leg shots, because I was aiming down – and before you ask, no, I don’t give a fuck.
‘Because it worked. All Hell broke loose – no joke intended. The demon opened its mouth and it gave out with a sound I hope I never fucking hear again. Not a sound, exactly: I mean, it didn’t scream. It wasn’t even loud. But you could feel the pressure on your eardrums, on your goddamn skin, like when a plane hits turbulence and drops a few hundred feet when you’re not expecting it. It hurt. It hurt like things were tearing inside you.