Inspiration came out of nowhere. No, it came out of thinking about Trudie, and the way she’d bootstrapped her own MO to create the meta-map of Asmodeus’ movements. The trick was seeing through the metaphor to the thing itself: distinguishing how your power actually worked from the interface you’d developed for it. It could be done. It could be done without risk even.
That solved Jenna-Jane’s problem. Now what about mine?
‘Fix.’ Pen stirred on the sofa beside me, rubbing her eyes. ‘What time is it?’
I didn’t bother to check my watch. ‘Later than you think,’ I said. ‘Like always. How was your day?’
She blinked and shook her head, restoring some shape to the incendiary mop of her hair. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, her voice husky and slurred with sleep. ‘Like one of your days. Alcohol, self-hatred, more alcohol and daytime TV.’
‘I don’t watch that much TV,’ I pointed out. ‘What do you hate yourself for?’
‘Just the obvious.’ She sat up, still groggy but gradually coming awake. ‘I can’t do this, Fix. I can’t sit here and wait for you to sort it out. I’m going to start looking for Rafi again tomorrow.’
‘You won’t find Rafi;’ I reminded her, my voice hard, ‘you’ll find Asmodeus.’
‘I don’t care. This isn’t any way to live.’
She was right. We were under siege, and it was affecting both of us in our different ways. The sense of pressure – the feeling of being stalked – was throwing me off my stride, so that I just kept running from one thing to the next instead of stopping to think about where I was going. Worse, I was letting Jenna-Jane set the agenda, when I should have been using her as she was using me: bouncing off her thick, impervious hide in the direction I most needed to go.
That was going to change.
Right now I was going to get some sleep. And in the morning, which was only two and a half hours away . . .
In the morning I was taking back the initiative.
13
‘Felix! Welcome back. Come and give us the benefit of your expertise.’
Jenna-Jane’s voice was courtesy itself: no snide cracks about broken alarm clocks, no sarcastic sallies of the ‘So good of you to join us’ variety. Then again, Gil McClennan, at her elbow, radiated enough resentment and disapproval to make anything she felt like doing in that line redundant.
I’d knocked on J-J’s door, found the office empty, then followed the sound of voices to the map room. Everyone was there, sitting or standing at the edges of the room, around the circumference of the sprawling map- sheets: Jenna-Jane and Gil, obviously, Trudie, with Etheridge hovering at her shoulder like Tinkerbell to her Peter Pan, Samir Devani, looking like he might have gone to bed even later than me, and a man and two women I hadn’t seen before – presumably exorcists on loan from other work teams.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said insincerely. ‘Keep talking. I’ll get up to speed.’
There was an awkward silence. ‘Actually,’ Trudie said, after glancing briefly but curiously at the flat brown- paper-wrapped package I held under my left arm, ‘I think we’d better recap, because this is important. Gil, would you mind telling Castor what you found?’
McClennan gave a show of impatience, but Jenna-Jane made an open-handed gesture, giving him the floor. He couldn’t very well say no after that.
‘I started off by looking at the clusters,’ he said, pointing to the map. ‘The points with the densest concentration of lines. One right where you live, Castor, in Turnpike Lane. One over here in Wembley – Pax says that’s Juliet Salazar, who helped you break up Asmodeus’ game last time he tried to get free, so maybe he’s out to settle old scores there too. Another cluster down here in south London. Peckham Rye.’
‘The Ice-Maker’s,’ I confirmed. ‘That’s where he was until he escaped.’
‘Right. And then a few more in the centre of the city, here, here and here.’ He pointed to King’s Cross, Holborn, Waterloo. ‘Maybe these are just hubs – not places he’s visiting, but places he has to go through to get to where he’s going. You’d expect to find some stuff like that.’ Gil paused, staring across at me. ‘You with me so far?’
I nodded wordlessly.
‘Okay, then look at this.’ He tapped the map, at a point where Trudie’s ink lines were so densely overlaid on each other it was almost impossible to see the streets beneath. Gil’s finger traced a line away from Turnpike Lane to the south, which was where most of the lines seemed to bleed off, Asmodeus either coming or going by the same route each time.
The lines weren’t exactly straight: they veered to left and right, while still heading broadly south into the centre of London. Some of them diverged at this point, heading west; others kept right on going.
‘Why the zigzags?’ Gil demanded in the tone of a man who already knew the answer.
I took a closer look, but it seemed like an easy one. ‘Because the streets don’t head exactly where he wants to go.’
‘Yeah.’ Gil nodded. ‘Exactly. He turns into Tollington Park here, and Stroud Green Road there. No straight lines. You can’t walk through London and go in straight lines, right? Maybe New York, but not London.’
Trudie made an impatient tutting sound, obviously wanting Gil to cut to the chase, but he was going to do this his way. ‘Now look here,’ he said, moving his finger down into the centre of the map – the centre of London.
The difference was obvious, but only because he’d told me what to look for.
‘Straight lines,’ I said.
‘Straight lines. Mostly around Holborn, which is one of our secondary clusters. See, he’s going either north or south here, but he doesn’t cut to the left to go into – whatever that is, Old Gloucester Street. He keeps right on going. Walking through walls. Making like the street grid doesn’t matter to him. Which it doesn’t.’
‘Because he’s underground,’ I finished.
Gil looked annoyed that I’d got to the punchline ahead of him, but all I was doing was joining the dots. It was still his insight, and I was impressed. Jenna-Jane was right: he was a good exorcist and nobody’s fuckwit.
‘Or flying,’ Trudie added scrupulously. ‘We didn’t want to rule out the possibility that he might be able to transform himself somehow.’
‘But in that case,’ Gil broke in again, ‘we’d be seeing straight lines all over. We don’t. They’re just in the centre. So he’s got an underground route that takes him through just this stretch here.’ He indicated with a broad sweep of his hand an area that extended from the river up almost as far as Russell Square. ‘The next question is why does he use it? I mean maybe it’s quicker, but not by much. And he’s not afraid of bumping into people. If he’s got to go over-ground for most of the time, why use this one little stretch of tunnel that he’s found? And why keep going back to it?’
‘He’s got a base there,’ I said, playing straight man again. ‘This is where he hangs his hat.’
‘And that,’ said Jenna-Jane, taking charge of the proceedings again, ‘is the conclusion we’d reached just before you arrived. The puzzle that remains is to determine what tunnels he’s using. The London Underground network seemed the likeliest option, given the density and depth of the tunnels in the centre of the city, but there’s no obvious candidate.’
‘We got hold of some maps from the city engineers department,’ Samir said. ‘They give a pretty exact mapping of the tunnels onto the streets above. The Piccadilly Line goes up here, about a hundred yards east of this nexus of main roads. The demon’s path veers west, if anything, so it’s not that. Central Line’s too far down . . .’
‘He wouldn’t be likely to use tunnels that are actually in use in any case,’ I pointed out. ‘Too risky and too inconvenient. Do the inspection tunnels follow the same plan?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Trudie, ‘but they run parallel with the main line and they’re still too far out.’ She showed me some red lines traced on the map a long way from the black flecks that marked the demon’s comings and goings. ‘We thought of disused stations too,’ she added, forestalling my next question. ‘No joy. There was a lot of old digging around King’s Cross and the Angel, and some of those tunnels extended quite a long way to the south
