knew him better before I could ask.
Trudie received the fingernail with genuine excitement. We found her and Etheridge in one of the rooms that hadn’t been redecorated yet, a builder’s shell with bare plasterboard walls scrawled with measurements and instructions for the electricians. There were no wall sockets, but someone had run an extension cord from the room next door and an anglepoise lamp had been plugged into it. The lamp was on the floor, so the room had adequate lighting up to about knee level.
The two of them had laid out a colossal map on a row of trestle tables. It was a composite, made from about thirty Ordnance Survey maps taped together at the edges, and it covered most of London, from Oakwood in the north to Richmond in the south. Etheridge looked happy taping the edges of the maps together. He still twitched and flinched from time to time, but he seemed calmer than when he’d tied himself in knots trying to say hello to me. And he couldn’t do enough for Trudie. He kept showing her the progress he’d made so she could thank him and he could say it was no problem, a ritual that was repeated three times while I was there.
‘This is definitely Ditko’s?’ Trudie demanded, tipping the bag and allowing the jagged fragment of fingernail, brown with blood along one edge, to slide out onto an unused table on which a carpenter’s hammer and a dozen or so six-inch nails were lying. She was looking at me, but Sam answered.
‘It was stuck in the wall,’ he said. ‘We checked, and the cell hasn’t been assigned to anyone else since Ditko left. Webb doesn’t think it will be. You couldn’t stick a human being in a place like that; it’d be like Guantanamo Bay!’
I started to speak, but Trudie beat me to the punch. ‘Rafi Ditko
Sam put up his hands in a mean-you-no-harm gesture. ‘Sorry to offend your liberal sensibilities, Pax. I didn’t know you were a Breather.’
That word – that label – can be almost value-neutral in everyday use; spoken by an exorcist, it always carries an implied insult. The Breath of Life movement is the Amnesty International of the Twilight Zone, its members lobbying to extend human rights to the risen dead. If they ever manage this, exorcism as a profession will vanish overnight, so there’s a lot of cordial hatred on both sides.
Trudie didn’t acknowledge the slur. She was passing her hands over the broken fingernail, first the left and then the right, moving them in small circles as though she was making some kind of blessing.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice sinking almost to a whisper. ‘It’s his. It’s good, Sam. It’s very good.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Sam. He looked at me over Trudie’s head, rolling his eyes.
‘Shall I fix up the plumb line?’ Etheridge asked, looking to Trudie for another pat on the head. Possibly he was even younger than he looked. Jenna-Jane did the university milk rounds these days. She could have snatched this kid right out of the cradle. I wondered if he’d been in better nick when she acquired him.
‘No.’ Trudie shot him a distracted smile. ‘Not yet, Victor. I need to charge up. And Gil said we weren’t to start until he was here. Perhaps you could go tell him we’re ready?’
Etheridge scooted off eagerly to do her bidding, while she made some more passes with her hands over the nail. ‘I think this might actually work,’ she murmured. ‘I wasn’t sure, but . . . I’m feeling it really clearly.’
She straightened and started to unwind the string from her hands. I suddenly had an inkling of how she was going to put all these bizarre ingredients together, but it was such an insane idea I thought I must be wrong.
Voices in the corridor told me that Gil and Etheridge were returning. Then Gil himself breezed in, waving his arms like a conductor. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Get it moving, Pax. This isn’t the only thing on the clipboard.’
Trudie didn’t bother to answer. She’d unwound about three feet of string from each hand now. They were loops, but she’d untied the knot in each one to unravel them to their full extent, and now she was tying them together into a single length.
While she worked Etheridge scooped up the hammer and one of the nails, jumped up onto a chair and drove the nail deep into the bald plasterboard of the ceiling. Trudie passed him one end of the string and he made it fast around the nail with an inelegant lasso knot.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s . . . we’re . . .’
‘Thank you, Victor,’ Pax said gently.
Since Etheridge had mentioned a plumb line, I thought Trudie might actually tie the broken fingernail to the other end of the string and make the most lightly weighted pendulum in the history of the world. What she did was even stranger than that, if anything. She tied another lasso knot in the free end of the string, looped it over her hand and lowered her arm again until the string was taut. It meant that her hand could only move in a circle defined by the length of the string.
As we watched in silence, she moved her hand to left and right, up and down over the map, keeping the string stretched out tight so there was no give in it. She started in the centre, and the arcs at first were very tight, but they got wider as she worked. Her eyes were closed, and there was a look of intense concentration on her face.
‘You should probably start somewhere where he’s actually been,’ Sam pointed out, but Trudie winced and Etheridge raised a finger to his lips, as stern as a school librarian.
Trudie went back to the centre and started again, this time moving out in long slow loops. Etheridge had now picked up a pen from somewhere and stood expectantly by her side, but she didn’t speak.
The area of the map was huge, but her hand was a good two feet above it. The circles she was describing made up the cross section of a cone that had its base on the map, so she was making relatively small movements to cover wide areas.
After a couple of minutes of this, she went back to the centre for a third time. Sam let out a long breath, like a sigh, and that seemed to break the spell. ‘Are you getting anything?’ Gil demanded a little irritably.
Trudie looked him straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am. But it’s not directional yet. There’s a sense of him, and it changes when I move but . . . randomly, almost. It’s not like I’m getting warmer or colder.’
‘Maybe you want to keep the focus in the loop,’ I said.
She gave me a look, irritated or just uncomprehending. ‘What?’ she demanded.
I pointed to the nail, still lying on the table. ‘You’re relying on a second-hand contact,’ I said. ‘Slip the fingernail under the string so it’s pressed against your palm. Like calls to like, right? That’s the principle here. Also, you want to get your hand in closer to the map. That’s the hardest part, logistically, but what’s the use of getting a bite that could come from anywhere between Charing Cross Road and Dulwich? If you’re in close, that sense of direction might come through a bit more strongly.’
They all stared at me for a moment, in silence.
‘Do it,’ Gil grunted and walked out. Then he stuck his head back in through the doorway and said, ‘Castor, you’re with me.’
I threw Trudie a nod and followed him out. It was a cold nod, but there was grudging respect in it. Trudie was trying to do something I’d never managed to do myself. To use Jenna-Jane’s cute terminology, she was making fine adjustments to her modality.
Every exorcist has their own special way of doing the necessary: a tin whistle, a typewriter, a deck of cards, any damn thing you can think of. It’s the same knack in each and every one of us, the same synapses closing somewhere and making the same things happen, but the tools we use depend on who we are and where we’ve been. That’s a pretty good indication that the tools don’t ultimately matter; they only reflect our experience, our tastes, our comfort zones. Faced with the unknowable, we hide behind the known and take potshots from cover.
I’d seen Trudie perform an exorcism, or try to. She had woven the string around her fingers in intricate and changing patterns, like kids do in the game of cat’s cradle. But Trudie knew that the string was just a security blanket. The real power was inside her, and it used the string as an excuse to come out and play. So now she was making it work for her in a different way. Whether she succeeded or failed, she deserved a certain amount of credit just for trying.
On the other hand, she’d gone from Gwillam’s employ straight into Jenna-Jane’s – from the foam-flecked zealots to the necro-vivisectionists – so what the hell did I care? I only had to work with her.
‘You’re on late shift tonight,’ Gil said, as we rode the lift down to the first floor. ‘Midnight. Charing Cross station, Strand north-side exit. Bring your whistle. In the meantime, Professor Mulbridge wants to record you
