Dead Men's s Boots

‘Then do whatever needs to be done,’ he said. ‘Enlist yourself an army of exorcists – or dredge your own courage up from whatever cloaca you keep it in. Invite the lady to come with us, if she’s still taking your calls. The details I’ll leave to you. The offer is exactly as I’ve stated it. That we go to Mount Grace crematorium, you and I. Together. In fact, you and I and the lady, because the odds will be against us even with her: without her we won’t prevail. You will go to avenge your friend’s death, which you’re beginning to suspect – correctly – was actually two separate deaths. I will go to feed. The lady – well, she’ll go because you’ll ask her to. Because she’s trying to pretend to be human, and in some way that makes her vulnerable to you even though she could kill you with a single flexing of her pudenda.

‘Say that all this will happen, and it will happen. Or say no, and I’ll find somewhere else to eat. The meal you so kindly laid on for me has given me enough strength to wait a few centuries longer.’

So this was it. The moment of truth. Maybe the demon was bluffing about going elsewhere: on the other hand, it was clear to see that he’d changed from the walking skeleton I’d met outside Todd’s office. He probably could wait a little longer now if he had to. Okay, he was going to be as safe to be around as sweaty gelignite. But too many people had died already, and I couldn’t see where a better offer was going to come from.

‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘We’ll go in there. Together. We’ll wipe out the whole fucking nest of them.’

‘You swear this?’

‘I swear it.’

‘On what do you swear it?’

‘On myself, because I don’t believe in any bastard else.’

Moloch bowed, with a faintly satirical emphasis.

‘Then it will be so,’ he said.

He turned to the window again and opened it as far as it would go.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do first. Before we tackle the ghosts. I want to go and sweat the lawyer. Todd. He’s in this up to his kishkas.’

‘Is he?’ Moloch still had his back turned to me, so I couldn’t see his face.

‘Of course he is. He was the one working the angles to get John Gittings exhumed and trundled away to Mount Grace. He’s handling the legal affairs of the Palance family, which means he’s conducting the whole show. And in any case, that’s why you were hanging around outside his office. Because he’s one of them: one of the killers whose scent you’ve been following. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Possibly,’ Moloch said. ‘Again, you’ll do as you see fit. I saved your life, and I gave you information you couldn’t have obtained by any other means. I consider that, at the moment, you’re heavily in my debt. So whatever you do on your own account, don’t include me as a factor in your plans. All that’s between us is the bargain, as we’ve already agreed it. When you’re ready to make the journey to Mount Grace, just say my name – out in the open air, with silence all around, and preferably in darkness. I’ll hear you.’

I thought he was just going to walk out of the window into the night, but the night came to him instead. Blackness spilled into the room like a solid wave, washing over Moloch and swallowing him up. An instant later it cleared, and he was gone.

There was a soft thump as the skull fell onto the carpet and rolled a few inches before rocking back and settling on its apex. The upside-down sockets stared vacantly at me, inviting me into the well within that used to be full to the brim with cat-thoughts and now was full of nothing.

Normal service had been resumed.

Almost in the same instant, the TV set gave an unsettlingly organic shudder and the screen lit up like an eye opening in the dark corner of the room.

‘- Don’t even know where she came from,’ a man’s voice said, sounding strained and almost tearful. The man on the screen was burly, middle-aged, dressed in what I took at first to be a police uniform. He didn’t look prone to tears. ‘She just walked right past the guard post, and we all – three of us – we all ran out after her. I was just thinking how did she get in, because there’s a wall. It’s twenty feet high, and then – there’s an overhang, with razor wire. You can’t climb it. Nobody could climb it.’

The image switched abruptly to an external shot of one of the five wings of Pentonville, and I realised that he wasn’t a cop: he was a prison guard.

‘Nobody else had any clearer explanations to give,’ said a news presenter’s voice in public-solemnity mode, ‘for how a prisoner on remand for murder was able to walk out of one of London’s highest-security prisons, in what was evidently a highly planned and meticulously executed raid. The mystery woman entered here . . .’

I shook my head to clear it, which turned out to be a mistake: the various dull aches in my neck and in the muscles of my face connected up suddenly into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganza. On the screen, successive still photos of Pentonville were overlaid with computer graphics mapping a route through a gate, now hanging off its hinges, over an inner wall of impressive height and down through an interior space punctuated with inspection posts and barred, locked doors. The voice was still talking, but I was momentarily distracted by the pretty pictures.

Another talking head popped up, this time wearing a suit and batting for the Home Office. He denied allegations that staff cuts had played a part in these events. ‘There were plenty of guards on the scene. Three at the first guard post and three more in D wing itself. Two of them were very seriously assaulted – hospitalised. The rest seem to have been exposed to some sort of drug – a nerve gas, or a hallucinogen – and are unable to give a clear account of what happened.’

Cutaway to some hand-held footage of another uniformed guard sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a blanket round his shoulders. He was staring at nothing as cameras flashed all around him.

‘She just looked at me,’ he said. ‘She just – and then – I was – I don’t know. I don’t know. I was so-’ He hid his face in his hands, either trying to evade that remembered gaze or to relive it.

Cut to still image of Doug Hunter: an archive shot of him walking into court, presumably on the day of his remand hearing. His face impassive, closed, giving nothing away.

‘This is the man who walked out of the front gate of Pentonville this evening, leaving the prison and the system it represents in chaos—’

I’d found the remote by this time. Now I found the off switch. Moloch had made his point: Juliet was home, the fewmets had hit the windmill and if time had ever been on my side then it sure as hell wasn’t any more.

I limped through into the bathroom, so overwhelmed with tiredness that I felt like my body had melted and then congealed again as a lump of undifferentiated matter. I splashed cold water in my face, stripping one layer off the exhaustion and revealing a lot more layers underneath.

Try to forget about Juliet, at least for now. What she’d done, terrible though it was, was no surprise – and it was a big silver lining that she’d managed to do it without killing anyone. How long that would last was another question altogether. If she just let Myriam Kale walk away in Doug Hunter’s body after the jailbreak, then it was only a matter of time before Kale met some guy who pushed all the wrong buttons for her. Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere for the maid to find when she came to turn the sheets over.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try: it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames, instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was just a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.

Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus for long enough to know what kind of moves demons favour and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done. But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist, adapted to the terrain and the situation by whatever passed in Hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.

That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside –  someone who was writing him briefing notes and giving him tips on strategy. Take back-up: take lots of back-up. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do – and exactly what John had been calling me to arrange. Me, and maybe Stu Langley too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion and John had had to go in alone.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt. I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor façade, but I saw someone else’s face staring