I stepped out into the dark instead. If I smoked, I’d have lit a cigarette. If I’d had any booze left, I’d have had a drink. As it was there was nothing I could do but wait. I must have been wrong about the car door, because nothing was stirring.
Doctor Feelgood ought to have been here by now. Edgy and irritable, I fished out the phone again to call Pen and ask her to hurry him along. This time I noticed what I hadn’t before: there were four missed-call alerts, all from the same number: Nicky Heath’s number.
The first and second times, he hadn’t left a message. The third time he had. I played it back.
‘There’s something wrong here, Castor.’ Nicky’s voice, stiff with tension; a prolonged scraping sound in the background as he moved something heavy across the floor. ‘There’s a whole bunch of people outside. They turned up in four cars, and now they’re standing around like they’re waiting for someone. I do not fucking like this. If it’s anything to do with the shit you’re involved with, why don’t you come over here and deal with it your fucking self, okay? Call me. Fucking call me, okay? Like, now.’
My throat suddenly dry, I flicked to the last message.
‘This is a siege here, Castor!’ Nicky’s voice was a yell now, which meant he would have had to work hard to inflate his non-functional lungs. ‘They shot the cameras out. The fucking cameras! I’m blind, you understand me? They could be right outside my door, and I wouldn’t— Oh, shit!’
There was an abrupt click, and then the high-pitched single tone that means ‘message ends’. I dialled Nicky’s number with shaking hands. Nothing, for ten or twenty seconds: just silence. With a muttered curse I terminated the call and started to dial again, but before I even finished the area code I heard the sound of footsteps walking down the short path from the road.
I turned in that direction. A figure came into view a second later, stepping out of the shadows and through the narrow opening between the raised earth beds onto the driveway.
‘Over here, Doctor Forster,’ I called. The figure turned and came forward into the light.
When I got a look at his face, I experienced a momentary lurch of dissociation: then my heart jumped in my chest like a test pilot in crash webbing. I’d never met Dylan Forster, but I knew that face well enough. When I’d first met the guy, only three days before in my office, he’d introduced himself as Stephen Torrington. And now, in a sudden flash of elementary logic, it occurred to me that both of those names were as good as each other because his real name had to be something different again. I also knew now why he’d had to send someone else to look after me when I’d collapsed at Pen’s house: at that point, he couldn’t afford for me to see his face.
I thought of Peace’s Glock, which was still inside lying on the floor of the Oriflamme. But it wouldn’t have mattered even if I could have got to it. The bastard had set this up exactly the way he wanted. He already had a gun in his hand and it was pointing at my chest.
‘You want to watch that thing – or it could go off,’ I said, because I had to say something: had to get some kind of interaction going that might buy me some time while I thought of a way to distract, disarm and decapitate him.
He shook his head. ‘It won’t be going off just yet,’ he said, in an almost languid tone. Funny that Pen had never mentioned his soft, half-elided mid-Atlantic accent. The smirk playing across his lips confirmed what I already knew.
‘You’re Anton Fanke.’
He made a mock bow, saluting my way-past-theeleventh-hour leap of intuitive logic. ‘If you’d figured that out three days ago,’ he said, his tone the gentlest of sneers, ‘I might have been impressed. Check him for weapons.’
The last words weren’t addressed to me, but past me into the shadows at the side of the building. Three men who must have been standing absolutely still until then stepped out of the darkness, surrounded me and frisked me with extreme thoroughness. They didn’t look like my mental image of Satanists: they looked a lot more like my mental image of FBI agents. One of them was carrying a snub-nosed handgun, which he pressed to the base of my neck.
The other two, searching my left- and right-hand sides in rough synchrony, came up with my dagger and whistle respectively. They held them up for Fanke’s inspection.
‘Now we’ll go inside,’ Fanke said.
I took a step towards him, but the men on either side of me moved in to block me and the gun at my neck pressed a little harder. I knew I’d never get there.
‘Why Pen?’ I demanded, between my teeth. ‘What did you need her for?’
‘Rafael Ditko was the vessel,’ said Fanke, throwing out his arm towards the door of the Oriflamme in formal invitation. ‘I had to get close to him. We had our plan already in place, but if it failed – it might have been necessary to take Ditko from the Stanger clinic and kill him to release Asmodeus’s spirit from him. Pamela would have been very useful in that eventuality. As things have turned out, though, I think we’ll be just fine as we are. Wilkes, you can lead the way. You’re just marginally more expendable than Mister Castor is at this point.’
Things were coming apart fast. In desperation, I tensed to jump for Fanke as he walked towards me. He favoured me with a glance of amused contempt.
‘That would be a mistake,’ he said in a clipped tone. ‘I’d like you alive at this point, because you’re looking like a pretty good scapegoat, but don’t push me.’
Caught in his sights and those of the guy behind me, I briefly considered tackling him low and seeing if they both let fly and took each other out. But that wouldn’t even work in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Fanke was watching me closely, and he saw the moment when I stood down from the fight-or-flight precipice. ‘Inside,’ he said again. The man behind me tapped the base of my neck with his gun barrel, and I obediently followed the man that Fanke called Wilkes back into the Oriflamme. I’d half hoped that Peace might have caught something of the commotion outside and scraped together some kind of an ambush. No such luck. His head snapped around as he registered the multiple sets of footsteps. As Wilkes stepped to one side of me and the goon with the gun stepped to the other to get a clear line of sight, Peace’s gaze darted to one, then the other, then back to me. By some reflex he couldn’t control, his hand shot up to grasp hold of Abbie’s – and went right through her insubstantial form. Abbie didn’t even notice. She was staring in wordless, silent terror at the strange faces. Or maybe not so strange to her: she might be recognising them from five nights before. She might remember Fanke as the man who’d put a knife into her heart.
‘You bastard, Castor,’ Peace said, his voice a dead whisper. His second thoughts were better. He reached down and scattered the deck of cards across the floor. Abbie flickered and then disappeared, her mouth open to call out to him.
‘Don’t make this worse than it has to be,’ I said, and before anyone could stop me I stepped forward.
My eyes hadn’t had any more time to readjust to the deeper darkness inside the Oriflamme than theirs had, but I knew roughly where Peace’s Glock was. I didn’t even have to break step: I just had to flick my foot out a little to the left as if I was intercepting a pass inside the penalty box, and touch the toe of my shoe to the trigger guard.
I flicked the gun end over end through the air, and my aim was good: wasted afternoons in the old gym at Alsop’s Comprehensive School for Boys, kicking and heading a ball endlessly against the wall, had brought belated and unexpected dividends.
Peace reached up, took the Glock out of the air and fired without seeming to aim. The thunder roared directly in my ear, and a body slammed against a wall just to my right. As it slid to the floor the thunder sounded again, deafening in this shell of a room with no soft surfaces to catch and filter the sound. On my left, Fanke jerked as if stung, then brought his own gun up to return fire. I knocked it out of his hands with a scything, two-fisted swipe.