and if it comes back on me, I’ll kick you face down into a ditch and stand on the back of your head until you stop moving.’
‘As a friend,’ I clarified.
‘Exactly. As a friend. Listen, after I left you last night, I went back over to Uxbridge Road to meet this SOCA fuckalong. Name of Brake, which was what I wanted to do to his face after five minutes in his company. He’d called me in to put a marker down.’
‘Which was?’
Gary shot me a scowling glance, putting his knife down as though the memory had spoiled his appetite. ‘The Ditko case. It’s closed.’
For a moment that statement was too incomprehensible to be alarming. I laughed, but Gary didn’t join me. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That must be the quickest collar you ever got.’
‘I’m serious, Fix.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But what the Hell does it mean? How can the case be closed? Rafi’s still out there. Asmodeus too. The job’s not done because this guy decides to move the file from one drawer to another. Did you tell him that?’
‘No,’ said Gary, spitting the word out. A couple of toast crumbs came along with it as unwilling passengers. ‘I didn’t, because he outranks me, and he made it clear right at the start that mine was not to frigging reason why. He was spoiling for a fight before he walked in the door, if you want to know. We get tied up in jurisdictional pissing contests with these arseholes every day of the week, and I think he was looking forward to a rumble. So I didn’t give him the excuse. I was civil and solemn and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-bum-crack, which was as good as giving the bastard two fingers.’
‘But you did ask what the Hell he was on about?’
‘Of course I did. What do you bloody take me for?’ Gary was indignant. ‘I pulled out all the public safety issues and waved them in his face, and I said there was a cast-iron case for parallel parking – homicide running its own investigation alongside SOCA’s and sharing resources.’
‘So?’
‘Nothing doing. And this is the bad news, Fix.’
‘There’s
‘SOCA aren’t running the show either. It’s been contracted out – his words – to a privately run agency. They’re better resourced for this sort of palaver, he said, and they’ve already got the clearances they need to deal with a killer who can’t be arrested by anything short of an army division. In fact, they’re not looking to arrest Ditko at all; just to make sure he doesn’t kill again. Their brief doesn’t say anything about ways and means or about what state they leave him in afterwards.’
The horrible truth hit me just before he said it. I gave an incredulous laugh that almost hurt my throat coming out.
‘Tell me it’s not—’
‘It’s the Anathemata, Fix. The holy-water boys. If they can figure out a way to do it, they’re going to kill Ditko and Asmodeus both.’
5
I just leaned back and waited for a few moments, trying to let that digest, but it sat in my stomach like a rock. The Anathemata. The bastards had screwed up my life every time I’d had the bad luck to run across them. And Rafi’s too. They were even more to blame for Asmodeus than I was: for his being here at all, and for his still being free. This was a sicker joke than the one about the nun and the gorilla.
‘Who are they, Fix?’ Gary demanded. ‘This is only the second time I’ve even heard of them, and both times I’ve had a case taken out of my hands and my arse smacked like I’m a kid trying to raid the sweet jar. Tell me what I’m up against.’
I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. Truth to tell, that wasn’t an easy one to answer.
When it comes to the whole faith thing, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. Growing up in Liverpool in the 70s, I came to the same conclusion that L. Ron Hubbard did in Nebraska fifty years earlier: that anyone can make a religion out of ingredients they probably already have lying around the house. You just take equal parts bullshit, xenophobia and moral outrage, mix well and leave to curdle.
But on one level at least, religion works. Any religion, almost, although I’d probably have to draw the line at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s as though the human soul is an iron filing, and religions are magnetic fields that get all our north and south poles lined up along the same axis. As a consequence, and please don’t ask me why, power flows.
A jobbing exorcist sees it every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. The crucifix, the shield of David, the star and crescent, the Hindu swastika and the Gnostic sun-cross all work as specifics against the undead, as long as they’ve been handled – or better yet, blessed – by somebody who actually believes in them. When Juliet first rose from Hell and tried to love me to death in my own bedroom over at Pen’s, my brother Matthew, who’s a priest, brought me through the worst of the after-effects with prayer and holy water. And the most commonly practised exorcism ritual is still the one the Benedictine monks wrote down in the Abbey of Metten in 1415. It starts with ‘
So in some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I’m like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it. And when I come up against religious zealots of any persuasion, I lose the cheerful, easygoing disposition that I’m widely known for and become a surly, intemperate bastard. I mean, everyone has to choose their own poison, obviously – I’m all for freedom of choice. But if you say ‘Praise the Lord’, I’ll be the one who answers ‘Pass the ammunition’.
The Anathemata Curialis, therefore, pushes all my buttons so hard they leave permanent indentations in my spine.
‘They’re a holy order,’ I told Coldwood. ‘They were founded and given their charter by Pope Paul III. The same gent who bankrolled Ignatius Loyola when he set up the Jesuits – you know, “Give me a child until he’s seven, and I’ll give you a brainwashed drone that thinks its name is Harvey Maria.” And he was doing all this in between trying to steal the wheels off the Reformation bandwagon, so he was a busy little bee. Quotable quote: “Of course there’s a God. Martin Luther just had a stroke, didn’t he?”’
I was trying to be concise and factual, but the truth was that venting all this stuff made me feel marginally better. And it was pretty fresh in my memory because I had to look it up the first time Father Gwillam waved his wedding tackle in my face.
‘Pope Paul seemed to feel that the Inquisition had gone soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime,’ I went on. ‘The Anathemata’s scarily open mission statement was to deal with anything that the Church had declared anathema – abomination – and by deal with I mean stop dead. Then a much later pope excommunicated the whole outfit, right down to the factory cat, but not before he’d voted it enough funds to keep it going to the crack of doom. Pretty neat trick, that – adding plausible deniability to the list of Christian virtues.’
Coldwood grunted. ‘If they were closed down,’ he said, ‘what are they doing working my case?’
I shook my head. ‘I never said they were closed down, Gary. The Anathemata still exists. My brother reckons they’ve got more than a thousand people on their payroll. But they’re on silent running now. They’re officially disconnected from the apparatus of the Church. They can’t receive communion, be given the last rites or be buried in hallowed ground. And they eat that shit up, in my opinion. Being all virtuous and irredeemable; chucking over the chance of grace to save the world. They think they’re the scourge of God, fighting the last crusade against the undead.’
‘And you,’ Coldwood interjected.
‘What?’
‘And against you. You seem to get right up their noses, for some reason.’
‘Yeah, well I’d love to think that. But it’s not personal, Gary. Nothing ever is with fanatics. It’s Rafi. It’s always been Rafi.’
