Two of the three men – at least, their height suggested they were men – went on around to the vestry door: the third stationed himself at the gate, either on guard duty or maybe carrying out some more ceremonial function.
The men had brought crowbars with them, but they didn’t need them because the vestry door was still hanging on one hinge from Juliet’s assault on it the night before. They pushed it all the way open and stepped inside.
By this time, more people were filing silently in through the gate, past the man on watch. Some of them were carrying sports bags or shoulder bags: one carried slung across his back a long case of some kind that looked as though it could contain a fishing rod. It was a regular field-and-stream meet, to judge by appearances.
I counted about two dozen of them in all as they trickled past in twos and threes over the next ten minutes or so. They must have been staggering their arrival so that anybody passing in the street would be less likely to pay them any attention. It had probably been the same drill the week before, at the Quaker meeting house. Discretion is the watchword of the modern necromancer: mustn’t upset the neighbours or you’ll never be invited back. I wondered, fleetingly, what sort of people thought it was a great idea to spend their weekends murdering children to hasten the rule of Hell on Earth, but I gave it up pretty quickly. The less I knew about them the better I liked it.
Fanke himself, when he arrived, was unmistakable. It wasn’t that his build was so distinctive: it was the fawning servility of the men who walked at his side, or rather a couple of paces behind him on either hand, and the way the guard on the gate bowed low as he passed. He didn’t deign to notice this act of self-abasement: he sailed on by, his arrogance ringing him like a visible halo. I fingered the gun again. If I’d been sure that Fanke’s death would have stopped the ritual, and if I’d had more confidence in my aim, I would have emptied the clip at him. But it would have been depressing to do that and miss, and then to have to watch while the bastards got their infernal groove on. No, the gun was more useful in my hands as a deterrent than as an actual weapon: so long as I didn’t use it, nobody would guess what a lousy shot I was.
When the last few stragglers had made their way inside, the guard on the gate pulled it to and tied it off with a short length of rope, or maybe wire – from my vantage point I couldn’t quite see. I was hoping and expecting him to join his friends at the altar, but he didn’t. He leaned against the wall, peering out into the street through the crack where the gate hung slightly loose on its new moorings. Glancing across towards the presbytery, I thought I saw the faintest hint of movement in the darkness just inside the doorway. Then the lights went on in the nave and the man standing there was outlined clearly.
Two guards. No clear line of sight between them, but I couldn’t approach either one without revealing my position to the other. And I really didn’t want Fanke knowing I was there before I was ready to face him. So I had to take these guys out, quietly, without raising an alarm inside the church – and I had to do it fast, before the ritual got too far along to be stopped.
I considered a few variations on thrown stones and improvised diversions before I finally noticed that there was a way up onto the presbytery roof. From where I was, I could carry on around to the far right, shinny up onto the far wall of the cemetery and from there onto the sloping slates. If they took my weight, I could get in close to the guy in the doorway without the one at the gate seeing me coming.
Okay, so that was the plan – if I could call it that without breaching the Trades Descriptions Act. But before I put it into action, there was one more thing I had to do. I took Paul’s mobile out and keyed in a number in the dark, using the raised bump on the number five to guide my thumb. The ring tone sounded loud in my ear – but only in my ear, thank God.
‘Emergency. Which service, please?’ A woman’s voice, brisk and impersonal.
‘Police,’ I murmured throatily.
‘Routing you through, caller.’
I waited. After ten seconds or so, the silence turned into another ring tone. A man picked up. ‘Bowater Street police station, how can I help?’
‘You can patch me through to Uxbridge Road,’ I growled.
There was a fractional pause. ‘I’m sorry, caller, I didn’t get that. How can I help?’
‘Put me through to Uxbridge Road,’ I repeated. ‘This is an emergency.’
I waited some more. This wasn’t how emergency calls were supposed to go, but I knew that the main station on any switchboard had direct lines to all of the others. If the guy tried to pump me for information, I’d just have to leave the details with him. Otherwise . . .
‘This is Uxbridge Road. Do you have a problem, sir?’
‘I’ve got a message,’ I said, ‘for Detective Sergeant Basquiat. Tell her it’s Felix Castor. Tell her I’m at Saint Michael’s church, on Du Cane Road, and that Anton Fanke is here too. Tell her to come right now – and mob-handed.’
I hung up, and put the phone away. I’d played two wild cards now, and that ought to be enough for any hand. Whatever happened next, and whatever happened to me, I took some comfort in the thought that Fanke and his religiously inverted friends were going to have a hard time getting out of the building alive and free.
I stood up, as slowly and smoothly as I could, and slipped away between the gravestones with my knees bent so that my head wouldn’t show against the skyline. For the first ten yards or so, I was in both men’s line of sight if they chanced to turn around: I was counting on the dense shadows to hide my movements and the distant traffic noises from the street to conceal any sound I might make. All the same, I went as carefully as I could, barely lifting my feet off the ground in case they came down on a twig or a discarded Coke can and gave my presence away.
Once I got far enough around for the presbytery wall to give me cover, I relaxed a little. I straightened my back and picked up speed, reaching the wall in a few nearly normal strides. Climbing it in the dark was harder than I expected, because a good foothold at the bottom could still leave me stranded and groping seven or eight feet up, pinned to the wall with my arms splayed out like Christ’s dumb understudy. Once a loose chunk of stone slid away under my foot and fell to the ground below with an audible thump: I froze in place, straining my ears for sounds of approaching footsteps, but nobody came. I resumed the climb, teeth gritted, suddenly aware that there might be razor wire or broken glass or some other bullshit at the top of the wall which I’d seen in daylight but not registered or remembered.
There wasn’t. The stones at the top were uneven, but they were wide enough for me to stand on and walk along without much difficulty. And the roof was no trouble at alclass="underline" the guttering was old, of solid metal rather than UPVC, and it took my weight with a reassuring lack of give.
Leaning into the pitch of the tiles, I edged along from the back of the presbytery to the front. Now I could look around and down and see the doorway below me, a faint glow filtering out from it to light up a keystone-shaped area of gravel in pale gold. Within that lighted space, a dark blob just off-centre showed me where Fanke’s watchman was standing inside the doorway: but the man himself I couldn’t see.
There was no time for bluff, finesse or actual cleverness. All I could think of doing was to reach out and scrape the end of the gun barrel against the stone of the wall. The first time got no response, and neither did the second: traffic sounds from the street drowned out the faint noise. The third time was the charm. Below me in the dark, a darker figure stepped out and a pale face looked up. I launched myself into space.
The guy never knew what hit him, and maybe he would never wake up to find out. As I landed on top of him I struck down hard with the butt of the gun, letting gravity and momentum add their force to mine. It smacked into his skull with a solid, slightly sickening sound and he crumpled underneath me, providing me with a much softer landing than I was expecting.