more deaths in the course of the riot wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows or merited any special investigation. But I’ve gone native. I know that. I can’t help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy.
‘So you get to live. And you also get — at no additional cost — these three pieces of advice. Don’t push this topic any further. Don’t ask questions that you may not want to know the answers to. And don’t assume for a moment that if you make me choose between you and my entire race, I’ll choose you.’
I was about to answer her, but I wasn’t able to because she pressed her lips to mine and kissed me, deeply and passionately.
This was our third kiss, and it was different from the other two. The first, way back when Gabriel McClennan had first summoned Juliet, had been part of a concerted attempt to devour my flesh and spirit in accordance with her brief: it had been an attack, which I’d only survived through dumb luck and fortuitous rescue. The second had lent me enough of her strength to survive the hardest and most gruelling exorcism of my entire life: it was a gift, and I’d never stopped being grateful for it.
This one was a warning. It was meant to remind me of her power, and of how little effort it would take her to destroy me.
When Juliet finally removed her lips from mine I sagged backwards and almost fell. But she kept me upright with one strong arm around my waist.
‘I’d prefer,’ she said, ‘not to have to choose.’
She propped me up against the wall, not without care, and walked away.
Eventually I pulled myself together and became aware of the outside world again. Matt was still kneeling beside Anita on the walkway outside. I couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was still moving and speaking, whether her spirit was still present, but either way I suspected that he wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Coldwood was still talking on the phone on the landing below, directing his lackeys to take whatever they’d found down to the forensic lab on Lambeth Road and then stay with it until the results came through.
I stumbled across to the lift and pressed the call button. It came at once and didn’t smell of piss, as befits an age of miracle and wonder. It made a scary grinding noise as it descended, though, and the floor shuddered and bucked under my feet as if some corner of the cage was scraping against the wall of the shaft. I was profoundly relieved when I got to the ground floor and the doors, after a few premonitory clicks and ratcheting sounds, slid open.
Outside on the concrete apron, paramedics were tacking between the other towers and the fleet of waiting ambulances, carrying bodies on stretchers: all alive, thank God, but then again they’d have left the dead where they were as a substantially lower priority. The police and fire crews were moving too, clearing barricades and locking off stairwells while they conducted shouted conversations on walkie-talkies.
I walked through the melee, unnoticed, and descended the steps to the New Kent Road. More ambulances here, and more cops. Also, away behind the barriers, the media crews and the disaster tourists.
I almost walked past Trudie Pax without seeing her. She was sitting at the edge of the kerb, her shoulders slumped, staring at the ground.
‘Long night,’ I said. ‘How’s Bic?’
She started at the sound of my voice, looked up at me as though for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.
‘Castor–’ She scrambled to her feet with a kind of urgency, but then didn’t seem to know what to do when she’d got there. Her hands moved without purpose, and I suddenly realised that she’d been crying.
‘What?’ I asked. A horrible portent crashed into me from nowhere: like a contact on my death-sense, but with no ghost present. ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen to the kid?’
Trudie shook her head, but I read something else in her face: something like guilt, or maybe shame. I took a hold on her shoulders without even knowing I was doing it.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded. ‘Where did you take him?’
Her gaze flicked left. I turned my head to see a light green tent where two or three nurses fussed around a huge water-heater while half a dozen others distributed the resultant hot horse-piss among the shell-shocked survivors: a comfort station.
‘He’s . . . in there,’ she said.
And he was. I caught a sudden glimpse of him, still in his pyjamas, sitting next to his father while his mother knelt in front of him and wiped at his grimy face with a damp J-cloth, showing the same merciless assiduity that all mothers show when they decide that you need a public face-washing. And Bic was fighting back the way all kids do, by squirming and shifting around to make the task as hard as possible.
‘He’s fine,’ Trudie blurted. And he was. It was plain to see.
‘Then is there something else on your mind?’ I began. ‘Because you don’t look–’
The penny started to drop as I was speaking, because my gaze had lingered on Bic and I finally saw what was staring me in the face. They were the wrong pyjamas: plain blue flannel rather than rampant superheroes. In a war zone? Someone had stopped to change him out of his old gear in the middle of all this? And not into outdoor clothes, but into another set of PJs?
‘I didn’t know,’ Trudie was saying, her voice high and strained. ‘They didn’t tell me.’
I stared at her in sudden, near-incontinent horror. ‘While — while Cheadle was making you change–’
‘Father Gwillam had Sallis plant a GPS pip on the boy. He didn’t tell me, Castor. When I said that you should trust me, I meant it. I never lied to you. I’ve told them I won’t stay in the order–’
I was already running. I had to get out past the police roadblocks and out onto a road where there was some traffic running. The Walworth Road: there ought to be some cabs there. But the crowds of onlookers seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, and short of bludgeoning them to the ground there was no way to get through them at anything faster than an arthritic shuffle.
Coldwood. I turned and headed back towards the steps, caught sight of him almost immediately coming down them. I headed towards him, but someone grabbed hold of my arm. Trudie again, her face red with crying.
‘Let me come with you. Let me help.’
‘When I need your help,’ I snarled, ‘I’ll swallow a razor blade. It’s quicker.’ I pulled free with a savage wrench and yelled at Gary just as he was getting into the back of a big black cop-mobile. He saw me coming and stopped.
‘I need to get to Peckham,’ I panted.
‘Try walking for once,’ he told me coolly. ‘I’m about to get your brother off a murder charge, and then I’m back here all day dealing with the fallout from this shit-fest.’
‘Gary, I’m serious. I need to get to Peckham fucking now. It won’t wait.’
He gave me a quizzical look and opened his mouth to argue the toss some more. With an agonised bellow of frustration, I grabbed his lapels and yelled into his face. ‘Asmodeus! Fucking Asmodeus! You remember St Michael’s church, in Acton? Abbie Torrington? The body bags at the Whiteleaf shopping mall?’
‘Get in,’ Gary said. And to the driver, ‘Take him where he tells you. I’ll scrape up an ARU and follow you.’
Amazingly, Trudie Pax was still with me. She got into the other side of the car at the same time as I got in myself. Kicking her out again would have scratched an itch, but it would have wasted ten or twenty seconds — longer if she’d fought — and I could always do it once the car was moving.
I told the driver Imelda Probert’s address and waited in an agony of impatience as he threaded his way slowly and carefully through the interlaced armies of firefighters and nurses. Once we were clear, though, he put the siren on and hit the reheat, slamming us back into the leather upholstery.
Trudie was talking to me, but the words washed over me like whale-song. I was trying to decide which of the many appalling outcomes from this I was most afraid of.
And which I was actually hoping for.
25
