‘That’s just it.’ Trudie tapped the back of my hand with her index finger. It was the first time we’d touched, and the tiny, subtle gesture of intimacy made me start slightly. ‘There isn’t a risk. Not any more. The order took casualties, but we wiped them out: not one of the satanists got out of that room alive. And they put everything into this. Our agents in America raided all their known chapter houses and found nothing. Even the sacrifice farm in Iowa was deserted.’
I tried to get my head round this. So either Asmodeus had contacted his acolytes as soon as he was free, or else they’d known by some other means that he was back in circulation. They’d tried to mount an operation that was a carbon copy of the one they’d pulled off two years ago when Fanke was still alive: to summon the demon out of Rafi’s body by means of an esoterically prepared human sacrifice. And they’d failed.
After that, Asmodeus had murdered Ginny Parris, attacked me, started to stalk Pen. Why? Just out of rage that plan A hadn’t worked? Or was he already working on plan B? I had to ask myself what I was missing, because there was bound to be something. Following the demon’s terrifying corkscrew logic was like trying to figure-skate on the pitching deck of an icebreaker.
Trudie was staring at me as though she was waiting for me to speak. ‘Thanks,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I did need to know about that stuff, and I appreciate you telling me.’
That seemed to exasperate her. ‘Oh you’re very fucking welcome,’ she said, throwing out her hands. The tourists looked across at us from their table, startled at her loud imprecation. When you’re having a cheap holiday in someone else’s death, you don’t expect to hear bad language. ‘Castor,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘whatever you think of me – of my opinions – you have to see that we’re on the same side in this one thing. We were both there. We both helped to set Asmodeus free because somebody else lied to us and tricked us.’
She leaned in closer to me, not for intimacy’s sake this time but because she’d realised she needed to lower her voice. ‘So you feel dirty? Compromised? Played? Well, snap. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I went straight from the Anathemata to the MOU – because there wasn’t anywhere else I could go, if I still wanted to be in this fight. I’m going to do what I came for, which is to put that monster back in its cage. And I’m doing that whether you help me or hinder me or blank me or sabotage me, or whatever the hell you choose to do. But I think if we trust each other we might get further.’
She didn’t wait for an answer this time: she was too angry and too full of the restless energy the memories had stirred up. She downed her second whisky in a single swallow, grabbed her bag and walked, leaving me to it.
She was right, of course. We were both enemy agents, in effect, in the monolithic structure of the MOU, and we’d be a lot more effective if we were prepared to at least watch each other’s backs.
It was a big if, though. It was a very big if.
10
Walthamstow High Street hosts the longest street market in Europe. It’s a proud boast, but it’s also one that’s worded with legalistic precision: it’s not the biggest market, just the longest. It’s a market shaped like a bootlace, in other words, stretching from Hoe Street in the east practically all the way down to Coppermill Lane in the west. By day it’s an ever-running river of people moving to the fractal music of a thousand shouted conversations.
At this time of night though, it was just me and the ghosts.
I’d had to take another cab – no choice, so long after the last train – but I’d asked the cabbie to drop me at Blackhorse Road Tube station so I could walk the last mile or so on foot and clear my head a little. It was a good idea in principle, but it didn’t work out all that well. The air was muggy, and heavy with a pre-thunderous load of unshed rain. There was a faint luminosity in the air, like the glow of a false dawn, although that was still a good few hours away. Around the railway bridge at the top of Vernon Street the ghosts of suicides clustered, a voiceless choir waiting for a cue that would never come. I felt like I was walking in the bulb at the bottom of a barometer: all those hundreds of miles of atmosphere, pressing down on me with a precisely calibrated intensity. One life, one load, one size fits all.
My bed was calling me, but Nicky – like rust – never sleeps, and we had a lot to talk about. This was a good time; I wasn’t going to let it slip just because I was tired. You can come out through the far end of tired into a productive if slightly dangerous place. I knew how that felt and I was consciously searching for it, even though it seldom comes when it’s looked for.
The street was twice as wide at night as it is by day, because none of the pitches are permanent. All the stall-holders pack their goods and their booths back up into a million white vans and depart with the setting sun, an east London caravanserai wending its way across the border into Essex, which for most of these wide boys is both physical and spiritual home.
But as I passed Manze’s pie and mash shop, I saw there was one stall still out, probably in violation of a hundred local by-laws. A few steps closer, and I recognised the stall-holder as Nicky. Only it was Nicky dressed as Del-Boy, in a herringbone jacket and a black shirt with a white yoke and collar.
He had a good pitch, as far as that went. Close to Sainsbury’s, which guarantees more passing trade than you can handle, and on a corner, which is always an advantage in terms of display space. What he didn’t have was any stock, or – this being four in the morning – any customers. He was showing off his bare trestle tables to me and the man in the moon.
‘Hey, Nicky,’ I said, as I drew level with him.
‘Hey, Castor.’ He didn’t look up from what he was doing, which was measuring the interior space of the stall and the dimensions of the three display tables with a tape measure.
‘So, may I politely enquire what the fuck?’ I asked him.
‘Give me a minute,’ Nicky said distractedly.
I waited while he paced up and down, applying the tape measure to every straight line available. He wasn’t writing anything down, but I knew he didn’t need to. Death hadn’t done anything to impair Nicky’s scarily efficient memory; if anything it had cleared his mind of a lot of distractions.
Finally he wound the tape measure around his hand – making me think momentarily of Trudie and her cat’s cradles – and slid it into his pocket. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m done here. You want to help me pack all this stuff up?’ He pointed to a large, battered Bedford van standing with its doors open on the other side of the road.
‘You don’t think it’s worth hanging on for a few more minutes?’ I asked. ‘Trade’s bound to pick up once the word-of-mouth starts working.’
Nicky gave me a tired look. ‘Trial run,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see how much space these things give you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why the hell do you think, Castor?’ He started to fold up the tables as he spoke. ‘I’m going into business.’
I stared at him blankly. It was actually about the least likely explanation I could think of for this nocturnal ramble. ‘Selling what?’ I demanded.
‘DVDs. VHS tapes. Videodiscs. Actual film prints. Hard-to-get stuff in a variety of formats. In fact that’s probably going to be the name of the stall: Hard-to-Get.’
He was starting to fold down the stall’s marquee, which is a two-man job. Mechanically I stepped in to help. ‘But Nicky,’ I pointed out as tactfully as I could, ‘the market’s only open during the day.’
‘I know that.’
‘Whereas you’re kind of a nocturnal life form, give or take. Plus you just flat-out hate people. You think two’s a crowd.’
‘Thanks, Castor. Believe it or not, these things had not slipped my mind.’
‘Fine. Just checking.’
Nicky laid a bundle of scaffolding legs in a canvas bag, one at a time, where a living man might just have thrown them all in at once and taken a chance on the odd ricochet. You didn’t last long as a zombie if you were cavalier with your mortal remains – and when it came to longevity, Nicky intended to break all known records. ‘I’m buying a lot of stuff,’ he said, ‘and sometimes to get the stuff I want I have to buy a lot of shit I can’t use.’
‘So wouldn’t A Lot of Shit I Can’t Use be a more accurate name for the stall?’
