words who were ten years my junior and could have folded me backwards until I broke if the notion had come into their heads. I gave the van’s keys to the taller of the two, who wore a beanie and bands in rasta colours and had a braided beard that impugned the manhood of any man he met. He waved the keys at me like a schoolteacher waving a pointer.
‘Imelda wanted me to say this to you,’ he rumbled. ‘And she wanted me to say it slow, one word at a time.’ He tapped the keys against my chest five times, once for each word. ‘Don’t — make — me — regret — this.’
Being on his turf and his time, I took the insult with as much good grace as I could muster. ‘You ever get any snarl-ups south of the river?’ I asked.
He gave me a suspicious scowl. ‘What?’
‘The beads,’ I clarified, pointing to his beard. ‘Do they get in the way when you muff-dive?’
His eyes widened and his mouth set in a tight line. ‘Man, you’re asking for some real–’
I nodded, making the wrap-it-up gesture used by studio floor managers. ‘Tell Imelda I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘And tell her I’ll sort this out soon. She’s got my word on that.’
South Circular. Kew Bridge. North Circular. In Pen’s car now, which at least didn’t handle like a barge, but I was at the end of my rope, physically. Tiredness kills. Ask anyone. The only thing that kept me awake was surfing the news channels to find out if I was a wanted man.
Pen was waiting in the kitchen with all the lights on. She wanted a debriefing, which was extensive and occasionally hysterical, shading eventually into alcoholic.
When I rolled into bed at last, drunk with fatigue and spent adrenalin and a great deal of actual alcohol, I fell into sleep like a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. On the way down, I thought with a slightly numbed wonder about all the shit that was going to hit all the many and various fans when the morning came.
And decided to sleep until noon.
But we got through the next day without the sky falling, and then the day after that. There was nothing about Rafi in the papers or on the TV news: there weren’t even any good rumours flying on the conspiracy websites, and nobody came to the door to ask me where I’d been on the night of the third. Gradually, Pen and I relaxed from our bunker mentality.
I called Imelda, who said that she’d got Rafi settled in pretty well at her place. ‘Rafi?’ I echoed, just to be sure. ‘Not Asmodeus?’
‘Rafael Ditko,’ Imelda confirmed. ‘In his own right mind and native disposition.’
‘You’re a wonder, Imelda.’
‘Yes, I am. That doesn’t mean I’m any happier about this, incidentally.’
‘I know. This wipes out any debts between us.’
An edge came into her voice. ‘No, Castor, it doesn’t. It leaves the balance on my side. And when I call in that favour, you will damn well know about it.’
‘Okay.’ I was prepared to bend over backwards a long way to placate the Ice-Maker: not many people could have done what she’d done, and I’m not counting myself in that number.
A couple of weeks passed. Pen went down to Peckham every two or three days to visit Rafi, and every visit after the first was what you might call a conjugal one. Without going into indelicate detail, the visits required Imelda and me to pull out all the stops to make sure that Rafi’s infernal other half didn’t surface and try to make it into a threesome. That didn’t bear thinking about.
In fact, there were a lot of aspects of the situation that didn’t bear thinking about, as Imelda was only too happy to remind me. But you can get used to anything, over time. There’s no atrocity so atrocious that it can’t become a routine.
We felt like we were on top of things. We’d plucked Rafi from the jaws of Jenna-Jane: we’d given him some kind of a doll’s-house miniature version of a life. We were shit-hot, all things considered: so good, so sharp, so fly that we knew, even while we were congratulating ourselves, that we couldn’t afford to lower our guard by a fraction of an inch. We were good with that. We were holding the door to Hell fast shut, our shoulders braced and our muscles locked.
But how much use is that when the roof falls in?
2
The sound of hammering dragged me up from uneasy dreams. Then the dreams and the noise got muddily entwined, so that for a few confused seconds I was knocking nails into a cross where one of the Bee Gees — Robin, I think — was hanging in place of Christ. I tried to apologise, but he was laying down the lead vocal riff from ‘Staying Alive’ and with the headphones on I don’t think he even heard me.
Then I was awake, and I realised that the noise hadn’t stopped. I got myself upright and threw the covers back, my head throbbing as though my brain had been set to ‘vibrate’ and was taking a lot of incoming calls all at the same time. Why was that?
Oh yeah. Because last night we’d been down in Peckham at the Ice-Maker’s, for the third time this week, and when we got back Pen had been too wired to sleep. So we’d talked until the early hours, about old times and counter-factual worlds, until the alcohol drowned the adrenalin and we finally staggered off to our beds.
Half a bottle of Courvoisier XO on an empty stomach, and less than two hours’ sleep: the perfect way to start the day, if you want it to feel as long as two days and be filled end-to-end with pain.
I don’t have a dressing gown, but I am the proud owner of a Russian army greatcoat — the latest in a long lineage — so I made that do instead. The bare boards of the stairs were cool under my feet as I trudged down from my attic roost, feeling like something simultaneously thin and fragile and flammable. What time was it, anyway? It had to be well past four o’clock; but, since the half-moon of grubby glass over the door was pitch black, it was still before dawn. Either that or I’d been woken up in the middle of a total eclipse. Someone was going to pay for this, if only in the coinage of over-the-top invective.
Pen came out of her bedroom just as I got to the first-floor landing. She was wearing a black silk kimono with a motif of cranes and floating islands. The raven on her shoulder looked like someone’s sardonic comment on the twee chinoiserie, but it still set off her long red hair to good effect: no pallid bust of Pallas ever made as good a perch as incendiary Pen.
She looked spooked, though, and I knew why it was that she hadn’t just rolled over in bed and ignored the door knocker’s peremptory summons. ‘Fix, don’t answer it!’ she said, her voice hoarse from sleep. ‘It’s got to be the police. They’ve found out!’
I put my hands on her shoulders to stiffen her moral fibre — not usually necessary with Pen, but these were special circumstances. ‘You didn’t do anything illegal,’ I reminded her. ‘I did, but they probably won’t be able to pin it on me — and you’re clean even if they do. Anyway, it’s been two weeks now. If they’d had anything on us, they would have dragged us in for questioning ages ago. So whoever it is that’s down there waking up the neighbours, it’s not about Rafi. Why don’t you go back to bed and let me deal with it?’ I made my tone as emollient as I could: I’d only become Pen’s lodger again a couple of months before, and I was anxious not to spoil the warm afterglow of our reconciliation.
‘Bugger that,’ Pen snapped back. She was deeply rattled, but it wasn’t in her nature to back away from a fight — or even to arrive late for one.
So we went down the stairs in convoy, Pen leading the way. Edgar the raven screeched and baited in protest at the jostling, raising a breeze that would have been pleasant if it hadn’t smelled of raw meat.
Pen spoke a couple of words to the door, under her breath, rapid-fire, and then drew back the bolts. Most people make do with woodbine sprigs and factory-stamped magic circles to keep them safe at night, but Pen is a priestess in a pagan religion that she probably made up herself, so she handles her own security.
Because she was still in front of me, blocking my view, and because the night outside was as black as a bailiff’s soul, I saw Pen’s reaction before I saw the man standing in the porch. She started and took a half-step back, then got herself under control again with an effort I could see even from behind.
‘Sorry, Pen,’ said a voice I knew very well indeed. ‘I need to talk to Fix.’
Pen stepped aside with enormous reluctance, each movement seeming like an effort, and Detective Sergeant
