But Susan couldn’t. She forgot what she’d been saying, tried to start again, floundered into silence. For the first time in many, many months, I felt sorry enough for her to forget how much I envied her. I changed the subject by main force, swivelling it back around in the direction of shop talk, and ended up regaling both of them with some of my favourite ghost stories. Most of them had happened to other people, not to me, but I stretched the truth to pretty good effect. The moment passed. The tears that I’d seen in Sue Book’s eyes never actually fell.
‘Moloch said I should go to the source,’ I told Juliet, when I was a fair way into my fourth glass of Glen acetone.
‘Did he?’ Juliet’s tone sounded hard and cold. But when Susan topped up her glass, she reached out to touch her hand for a moment: a very delicate touch, expressing both affection and something a little more proprietorial. After what had passed between them earlier, it was a healing touch – or something close. ‘And did he say what he meant by that?’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘He didn’t. But I’ve got some ideas of my own. Have you got anything on tomorrow afternoon?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Well, there’s something happening in the morning over in Muswell Hill – something I want to be around for. But I’m free after that, and I was wondering how you’d feel about leaning on some people while I ask them a whole bunch of leading questions.’
‘Which people?’
‘I’ll know when I see them,’ I said evasively.
Juliet rolled her eyes. ‘Where?’ she demanded. ‘Where do they live?’
I swirled the whisky in my glass, studiously avoiding her gaze.
‘Alabama,’ I said.
15
It may dent my image of macho, gung-ho capability to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and then another to Nicky to tell him what was up and to ask him if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left, but that was all he’d say.
A third call, to Gary Coldwood, just got me his answering machine. ‘What does something juicy mean?’ I asked it, and hung up.
I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though it involved a certain amount of blackmail – both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.
When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been melted, decanted through a pipette and left to stand in the Petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have got me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning – and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.
The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages, then it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner – the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right – bequeathed them to the Crown. The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annexe was built on as demand grew: it seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early twenty-first century.
But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic: he’s just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fits. And, after all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and – thanks largely to me – has never gone home again.
It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily: she’s known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.
One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured a question at him, thumb up and then down. He shrugged massively.
‘He’s quiet,’ he said. ‘Kind of. Had a rowdy night and I guess he’s resting now. Still wide awake, though.’ He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. ‘You’re not gonna like what they’ve done to him,’ he warned me. ‘Try to keep your cool, okay?’
‘Okay.’
Paul swung the door open and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix too. I know because I paid for it to be installed: cost a small fortune, but it’s worth it because for at least some of the time it keeps Rafi’s passenger from getting too frisky.
Friskiness didn’t seem to be an issue right now, though: in preparation for transit, Webb had Rafi trussed up tighter than a Christmas turkey.
They’d built – or perhaps Jenna-Jane had supplied – a massive steel frame, about seven feet high by four wide, standing on three sets of wheels like a mobile dress rack. The resemblance didn’t end there, either: Rafi was hanging inside this construction, in an all-over-body straitjacket fitted with a dozen or more steel hoops to which lengths of elasticated cable had been attached. Like a spider trussed in his own web he dangled at the centre of the frame on a slight diagonal, his face the only part of him that was visible. I would have expected that face to be livid with demonic rage, but it was a near-perfect blank, the eyes – all pupil, no white – staring at me and through me.
‘OPG?’ I asked Paul.
‘Yeah.’
‘Inhaled or injected?’
‘Both.’
‘Bastards.’ I could smell the stuff in the air now – although it was the propellants rather than the gas itself that I was smelling: OPG itself is too volatile to linger for more than a couple of seconds after it’s been used. It was produced as a weapon – a nerve toxin, derived from the less potent
‘I’m gonna leave you to it,’ Paul said. ‘And if anyone asks I’m gonna lie and say I never saw you. Sorry, Castor. Bastards they are, but for now I still work here. We’re meant to be wheeling him out to the front in a few minutes, so you’d best keep it short.’ He stepped out and pulled the door almost to behind him.
‘Hey, Castor,’ said Rafi, his voice crystal clear despite the zoned-out stare.
‘Hey, Rafi,’ I answered, giving him the benefit of the doubt until I could be sure. I came in a little closer, but not too close: I wasn’t sure how much give there was in those elastic straps. ‘Asmodeus in there too?’
‘Yeah, he’s here. He’s not happy with you.’
‘I bet. Can I have a word?’
There was a long silence. I waited it out, knowing from past experience that there was no way of rushing this. Asmodeus rose or fell under his own steam and at his own pace: and the massive OPG hit, whimsically cross- connecting the circuitry of Rafi’s nervous system, wouldn’t help much either. But slow ripples began to pass across Rafi’s face, each one leaving it subtly altered. The effect was slow enough that you could convince yourself it was an optical illusion, but it didn’t much matter how you rationalised it: after half a minute or so, the fact was you were looking at a different face.
