insanity at the Salisbury – but you never seem to put two and two and two and two and two together.’
‘Meaning . . . ?’
‘Meaning that it’s not just isolated incidents. So why do you pretend it is? “Nothing is at stake.” Do you remember saying that to me? I remember it. It was the night when the Salisbury burned and Asmodeus got free.’
‘The night when you and Gwillam carved me up,’ I reminded her – not to pick a fight, just to keep things clear.
She rolled her eyes. ‘If you like. But my point is that you said it, even when the world was coming to pieces all around us. You’re like some anti-Chicken Licken, running around telling everyone the sky isn’t falling, when you ought to be able to see that it damn well is.’
Some of the things that had happened since that night flashed through my mind like a slide show, things that weren’t on Trudie’s list but made her point, if anything, even stronger.
‘I may have been wrong about the sky,’ I conceded. ‘But if I admit that it might be falling, will you at least consider the possibility that fanatics like Gwillam and Jenna-Jane aren’t doing anything to hold it up?’
Trudie tapped the side of her glass, watched the ripples chase each other from edge to centre and back again. Then she looked up and met my gaze. ‘Doing something is better than doing nothing,’ she said flatly.
‘Is it? So if your bed’s on fire and you’ve got no water, you might as well douse it in petrol?’
‘You know what I mean, Castor.’
‘Yeah, I do. Have you seen what J-J keeps in the cellar yet? If not, take a look. Then we’ll talk some more.’
An uncomfortable silence descended. Trudie finished her drink and I made some serious inroads into mine.
‘You said you had something to tell me about Asmodeus,’ I reminded her. I just wanted to hear her out and get away now. The sense of camaraderie that comes from any shared ordeal had dissipated quickly, and I was feeling the distance that separated us more keenly than ever. I’d been wrong to think there could be any common ground between us.
‘After I left the order . . .’ Trudie began hesitantly. Then she lapsed into silence again. After a moment she stood up. ‘I think maybe I need another drink,’ she muttered and headed for the bar.
It took her a while to get served. Another bunch of guys with flashy cameras had rolled in and there was a logjam at the bar. Two in the morning seemed to be happy hour in this place. When she came back, bringing me another pint of London Pride and herself what looked like a triple whisky, she tried again.
‘I told Father Gwillam that same night – the night when we met – that I was out of the game,’ she said. ‘I was angry at the way I’d been set up. I told him I couldn’t be a part of the order because I couldn’t trust him any more.’
‘How did he take that?’
She laughed ruefully. ‘It didn’t seem to bother him all that much. He certainly didn’t beg me to stay, anyway. And he didn’t apologise. He just said I should think carefully about my decision, because it would be irreversible. Once I left, I couldn’t come back. The Anathemata would strike me from their list retroactively, so I wouldn’t ever have been a part of their operations. I’d be forbidden from contacting anyone in the order or talking about our work, with the implied threat that if I didn’t keep quiet, they could turn my volume down permanently.
‘So . . . I walked. And I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.’
‘Harder to make the break than you thought?’
Trudie was grim. ‘No, Castor. I said I was through, and I was through. But despite what Father Gwillam said, they weren’t quite through with me. About three weeks later I went back to the hostel where I’d been living. It was more of a barracks, really, for the members of the order, but it looked like an ordinary church hall from the outside. I needed to clear out the last of my stuff, and I’d emailed one of the deacons to say I was coming.’
She scowled into her drink, her hand gripping the stem of the glass tightly enough for the knuckles to show white. ‘I walked into the aftermath of a battle. They’d turned the dormitory into a field hospital. Every bed was occupied, and there were people running around with bandages, tourniquets, buckets. Doctors stitching up wounds. Members of the order – people I knew – screaming or sobbing or shrieking out swear-words. Some of the bodies on the beds weren’t moving. They were dead. And the wounds . . .’ She stared at me. ‘They looked as though they’d been clawed by wild animals or . . . or been dragged along behind a truck, or something.
‘I just stood there in the doorway, staring. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. The . . . the smell was worse than anything. Blood, and shit, and sweat, all mixed together.
‘Then someone shoved a bucket and a sponge into my hands, and at least I had something to do. Mopping up the blood, so nobody would slip in it and break their neck. I got stuck in. It was a way of shutting my mind down, so I didn’t have to think about it.
‘I worked for hours. Not just with the bucket. I stitched up a wound too, which is the first time I’ve used a needle and thread since I left seminary school. It was Speight. I think you met him. Something had gashed his arm really badly, from the shoulder down to the elbow. I stitched it up the best way I knew how, while someone else – a man I didn’t know – held his arm still and stopped him from struggling.’
‘Why do this there?’ I demanded. ‘Why not take them to a proper hospital?’
Trudie had a hard time focusing on the question. She was back in that room, in her own vivid memories, breathing in the stink of other people’s pain and terror. ‘I think . . . operational secrecy, mainly,’ she said at last. ‘We’re legal in some ways, but we’re vulnerable in others. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and if . . . if our people had left other people dead . . .’ I nodded and waved her on. I got it. When you’re an excommunicated secret sect fighting an undeclared guerrilla war, sometimes it’s best not to invite too much scrutiny. At the Salisbury the Anathemata had moved openly, but then at the Salisbury there were tower blocks burning and dead people falling out of the sky. The cops had been grateful for all the help they could get. Evidently this operation was different. More like the Abbie Torrington business, in fact, when Gwillam’s lunatics were shooting it out with another secret army in a west London church. That was an unwelcome memory. A prickle of presentiment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
‘Speight was raving,’ Trudie went on. ‘Feverish. I think his wound was poisoned in some way. They’d shot him full of antibiotics but he was burning up. I wasn’t listening; I was too busy trying to sew up all these loose shreds of flesh into the shape of an arm. But I heard him anyway. Enough to put it together. There’s a group called the Satanist Church of the Americas . . .’
‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘Twice.’
Trudie nodded. She knew that, of course. The Anathemata had a file somewhere with Rafi’s name on it, and she’d presumably read it from cover to cover before she ever met me in the flesh. Most of the last three years of my life would be in there.
‘We thought they were defunct,’ she said, sombrely. ‘The man in charge – Anton Fanke – died, and after that there was a schism. They spent a lot of last year fighting among themselves. But from what Speight said, there was a clear winner in that contest. And then the order got word that SCA people were filtering into the UK, in ones and twos. Some of them were travelling on false passports, but we had people in place, watching them. We were able to track them as they started to come together.’
My throat was dry by this time. It wasn’t just the vividness of Trudie’s description, it was the growing certainty that I knew where she was going. ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked tersely.
‘Last weekend. Six days ago. But Father Gwillam was tracking these arrivals for two weeks before that, so the Satanists started to gather in London about a week after Asmodeus broke free.
‘They didn’t come here to see the sights, Castor. They came to perform an invocation of some kind. They’d brought a girl with them: a sacrifice-child, like Abbie Torrington, born and bred to be ritually murdered. But the order was right on top of them, every step of the way. Father Gwillam called down an attack before they could finish the ritual.’
‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Did you—?’
‘Not me,’ Trudie corrected, deadpan. ‘I wasn’t there, remember? But yeah, the order got her out in one piece.’
Remembering Abbie, I bared my teeth. ‘How long is that likely to last?’ I demanded. ‘Gwillam is all about the greater good, isn’t he? He’d kill this kid in a heartbeat if he thought there was any risk the satanists would try again.’
