As I got off the bike and walked towards him, he glanced in my direction and then took a longer, harder look. Because of the bike he’d had me pegged as a stranger, but I saw the doubt appear in his face and I saw him tense. By that time I was close enough for him to hear me without me having to raise my voice too much. I took the helmet off and kept on walking.
‘Hey, Paul,’ I offered.
He thrust out his lower lip in a look of truculent puzzlement. ‘Hey, Castor. I thought you were meant to be on the run from the police.’
I nodded easily, strolling up beside him and resting one shoulder against the ambulance, the helmet tucked casually under my arm and my free hand thrust into the pocket of Sallis’s leather jacket. ‘That’s right,’ I said, flicking the helmet with the tip of my thumb. ‘Hence the cunning disguise.’
‘Armed and dangerous, is what I heard.’
‘Armed, yes.’ I showed him the handgun and put it away again fast. ‘I’d only be dangerous if I was organised. How’s Rafi?’
Paul took a drag on his cigarette and blew out some more smoke. The gun had brought a pained look to his face, but he wasn’t surprised or intimidated by it. ‘He’s good,’ he said. ‘Rafael is good. Best he’s ever been. You want to know the truth, I can hardly believe he’s the same fucking person.’
‘You want to know the truth, he isn’t. Paul, I need to get in and see him.’
He chuckled softly and shook his head, grinning as if in appreciation of a good joke. ‘Not gonna happen, man,’ he said. ‘They got your face on the TV – everyone inside is talking about it. The ones who reckon you always had shifty eyes are kind of winning right now.’
‘They don’t have to see my face.’ I held up the motorcycle helmet. ‘Just get me inside, Paul. It’s important. And afterwards you can say I had a gun on you.’
‘Have you, Castor?’
‘Have I what?’
Paul looked me in the eye, calm and cold. ‘Got a gun on me?’
I winced. ‘Fuck, no. I didn’t kill anyone, Paul, and I’m not planning to start now. But I need to speak to Rafi, and I thought you could help. If you don’t want to, then I guess all I can ask you to do is to hold off on raising the alarm for a while.’
He dropped the last inch of his cigarette onto the asphalt and trod it out. ‘This is going to upset Doctor Webb,’ he observed. ‘Make him look all kinds of stupid.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess.’ I was working out distances and odds. If I just walked in off the street and headed for the annexe where Rafi’s cell was without going through reception first, the nurse on duty would hit an alarm. I could get to Rafi, but could I get into the cell without a key? And could I get out again afterwards?
‘Bound to,’ Paul pursued, meditatively. ‘Bound to ruin his day. A wanted man walks in off the street, gets through all his security and then walks out again. That kind of thing is real hard to explain to the board of trustees.’
He squared his shoulders, like a man walking back into the fray after a short, well-needed rest.
‘So let’s do it,’ he said.
Paul went first, hands swinging at his sides, looking bored and indifferent. I followed, helmet on and visor down, holding one of the film canisters because it was the only prop I had to hand.
The nurse on reception looked up and saw that it was Paul. Then, as she was about to return to her novel, she saw the other, unfamiliar figure looming behind him. She stared at me, and at what I was holding, with a quickening of interest.
‘Where’s Doctor Webb, Lizzie?’ Paul asked her. ‘This guy – ’hooking a thumb over his shoulder ‘—needs a signature for something, and it’s got to be the boss man’s.’
‘I think he’s in his office,’ the nurse said, glancing back to Paul again. ‘Shall I page him?’
‘Nah, I’ll take him through. You sign in first, though,’ he said to me severely. ‘This is a stupid time to be making a delivery in any case. Come on, move it up. Some of us have got work to do.’
The nurse held out a biro and I signed the day book as Frederick Cheney LaRue, a name that had stuck with me after I’d read that Woodward and Bernstein book about Watergate.
‘It’s this way,’ Paul said, ambling away along the corridor. I waved to the nurse, the helmet making the gesture look more paramilitary than civil, and followed him. I wanted to look back but made myself keep right on going: I hoped for my sake that whatever chapter Lizzie was on in her book was more interesting than a weird stranger walking in out of the night to take a movie reel to her boss.
Webb’s office was off to the right when you reached the annexe. We went left, towards the secure cells. Paul used the Judas window to check exactly where Rafi was – a touch of caution born of long experience – and then unlocked the door for me. I stepped inside, and he followed close on my heels, swinging the door to. When I looked a question at him, he shrugged. ‘How’m I going to say you had a gun on me if I’m out there keeping lookout, Castor?’
‘Fair point,’ I admitted.
Rafi was lying on a tubular steel bunk – a new addition to the cell that was in itself a vivid testimony to how much he’d changed in the last few days. When Asmodeus was in the ascendant, the cell was kept absolutely bare because you could never tell when the demon’s mood would toggle from quiescent to murderously playful. Too many staff had taken hits in the early days: Webb had made Pen sign a waiver as Rafi’s legal executor, and the cell had been reduced, as far as possible, to a featureless metal cube.
By contrast with those bad old days, right now it was looking almost cosy. In addition to the bed there was a poster on the wall – a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers – and a chest of drawers with a pencil and paper resting on top of it. Enough right there for Asmodeus to have caused some serious mayhem back in the day.
Rafi was asleep: very deeply asleep. I looked from him to Paul, who gave a grin that was almost a snarl. ‘Doctor Webb says that until we get the results of the new assessment back, Mister Ditko stays on his meds. Same times, same dosages. Of course, when he was sharing the premises, so to speak, it didn’t matter so much. He could shrug off the drugs whenever he needed to, seemed like. Now those two Temazepam he gets at nine p.m. knock him out stone-cold until morning.’
It didn’t surprise me, because that was the kind of bastard Webb was: the play-it-by-the-book and my-hands-are-tied kind. Since there was nobody to explain myself to, I did what I’d come to do without preamble. Taking out the scissors that I’d taken from the first-aid box back at the South Bank Centre, I carefully cut a lock of Rafi’s hair without waking him.
‘What d’you need his hair for?’ Paul asked me, his face registering something like disgust.
‘Sucker bait,’ I said grimly. Paul’s distaste couldn’t be anything like as great as mine: I knew the truth. It would be the last resort, I told myself. I wouldn’t use it unless everything else failed. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t even get in close enough to use it in the first place. And the timing would have to be perfect, so the chances were that I’d made this detour for nothing.
I ran through that litany three times over: it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better.
I put the scissors in my pocket and tied the hair around the ring finger of my left hand where I couldn’t lose it. Then, self-conscious because Paul was still standing right behind me, staring at my back, I lowered myself to the floor and crossed my legs. With my head bowed and my eyes closed, I began to whistle softly.
It’s harder without an instrument, but far from impossible: back when Juliet was still mad, bad and fucking lethal to know, and was about to devour me body and soul, I’d dragged myself out of the jaws of death (actually it was a different part of death’s anatomy, but let’s not get bogged down in the technicalities) by tapping out a rhythm with my hand. Everything we ghost-breakers do is just a metaphor – visible or audible or what the hell else – for something else that’s going on inside our minds. The limits are the ones we impose on ourselves.