Nobody was going to give me any exit music, so I just left. Jenna-Jane called out something to me, but I was already halfway down the corridor and I didn’t hear it.
Trudie Pax was loitering by the lifts, leaning against the wall with her arms folded and a grim look on her face. She straightened as I approached. ‘I have to get out of here,’ she said.
‘I thought you were on map duty,’ I reminded her.
‘I’ll come back later. Right now I need the air.’
‘When you go back,’ I said, ‘take this with you.’ I handed her the package and she hefted it, feeling its weight.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘A photo of Rafi. Take a look.’
She tore away the paper from one corner and examined the contents of the package without enthusiasm.
‘I’ve seen this technique before,’ she said. ‘The photo was developed right onto the glass, right?’
‘Printed onto the glass,’ I corrected her. ‘Right. It was all the rage back in the Victorian era. But apparently Macedonia gets the fashions late.’
‘So is the picture significant in some way?’
I see-sawed my hand. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It was Rafi’s first communion. Big day for most Catholic kids, right? A lot of emotion invested, a lot of vivid memories laid down. I thought it might give you another focus, if you need one.’
Trudie didn’t seem impressed. ‘It’s a lot older than the fingernail.’
‘I know. Look, try it if you think you need it. Otherwise don’t. And either way give it back to me when you’re done. I’ll give it to Pen for a keepsake.’
I shied away from the implications of that statement: that whether Asmodeus won or lost, keeping Rafi alive might turn out to be a trick outside our collective skills; that the photo might turn out to be the last thing Pen had to remember her former lover by.
‘I’ll try it,’ Trudie promised. ‘I’ll put it back in the map room now and feed it into the loop later on.’
‘Later on? Why not now?’
‘Because if you’re going to go down to Holborn and look for Asmodeus’ rabbit hole, I’d like to join you.’
I tried the idea on for size, and found I hated it less than I would have expected. ‘I’ve got something else I need to do first,’ I warned her.
Pax seemed nonplussed. ‘Something more important than Asmodeus?’
‘No, less important. A lot less. It’s just . . .’ I threw up my hands in a shrug, found that I had to unclench them in order to do it. I hadn’t realised how angry and frustrated I was until that moment. I almost punched the wall, but my left hand was still stiff and sore from punching Gil McClennan’s jaw exactly twenty-four hours before. ‘Super-Self,’ I exploded. ‘Fucking Super-Self. Jenna-Jane is determined to send in the troops, even though they don’t have a blind clue what it is they’re facing. She thinks blitzkrieg is the right answer no matter what the question is. No, actually it’s worse than that: she thinks the data you get from a wipe-out are as good as any other kind. If some of Gil’s people die in the process, or get their brains fried like Etheridge, well, what the fuck? Science marches on.’
Pax was giving me a curious look. I threw it right back at her. ‘What?’ I demanded.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s just . . . do you think it will help?’
‘Help what? What are you talking about?’
Trudie looked as though she was picking her words with care. ‘The MOU exorcists aren’t your favourite people in the world, are they? They’re as bad as the Anathemata, in your book.’
‘So?’
‘So why does any of this matter to you? If you save some bunch of people you don’t really know and don’t really care about, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you
‘The whistle’s all I’ve got,’ I muttered sourly as I punched the button for the lift. ‘Don’t knock it.’
I never did like being psychoanalysed, even before I grew up, read the literature and realised that Freud only got into that game to pick up girls. Maybe that was why I asked Trudie to cover for me on the Holborn beat while I went across town to see a woman about a tune. Or maybe I was still reluctant to trust her further than I had to, even though we were de facto partners now. She was still Anathemata on some level: still fighting the same war against the same enemies. It felt like all there could ever be between us was a truce. I arranged to meet her in an hour’s time, at Seven Dials, and headed west.
On one level I was close to screaming in frustration. Asmodeus had fallen off the map after his second visit to Pen’s house, the night before last, when he’d left me a knife and a neatly bisected button to remember him by. He was still out there somewhere, still working, and I didn’t even know what it was he was working towards. Just that it involved the deaths of everyone Rafi had ever known, that I couldn’t possibly stop that from happening, and – hardest to take of all – that those deaths would turn out to be some sort of horrendous fringe benefit. They weren’t the point. They arose out of some bigger scheme that Asmodeus had cooking.
Maybe his priorities were the same as they’d always been. ‘
He’d gone to the satanists first, but they’d let him down. The Anathemata had broken up the party before the mages of the SCA could complete their rituals and tear the man and the demon from their non-consensual embrace. Plan B had to be under way by now. Asmodeus wouldn’t stop because he’d been put down once; he’d just come back again harder than ever.
And now, when we were finally closing in on the brimstone-arsed bastard, I was trudging halfway across London on a different job entirely, working to an agenda set by Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. That zombie in Somers Town had been right, and so had old Rosie: the world had changed all right. It had shaken itself inside out and all of us who thought we had the high ground were living in the valley of the shadow. What goes around, comes around, and it turns out to be a chainsaw blade.
In Kensington Church Street, I gave Evelyn Caldessa the schematics I’d sketched out on the train, and asked her if what I wanted could even be done. Caldessa is an antique dealer, and a good friend of mine ever since she helped me out on the Abbie Torrington case. She’s imperturbable normally, having seen so much crazy shit in her seventy-four years that nothing surprises her any more. This commission made her raise an eyebrow though.
‘Well there’s no reason why not, in theory,’ she said, after scanning the sheets several times over, tracing the lines with her stick-like finger as she puzzled out the sequence. But despite that hopeful start, she shook her head dubiously.
‘In practice?’ I prompted.
Caldessa glanced across at her only other customer, a middle-aged man in a three-quarter-length fawn coat who was ogling a case full of porcelain shepherdesses with the furtive air of a punter in a porn shop. She clearly had some hopes that he was going to make a purchase; either that or she thought he might have sticky fingers.
‘None of the standard designs would work,’ she said. ‘They have a very tiny range, because the mechanism is very small and very crude. So you want something bespoke . . .’
‘I’m prepared to pay,’ I said, four words that have a magical effect in a lot of situations.
‘. . . but you want it done quickly. Bespoke and quick turnaround don’t sit well in the same sentence, dear heart. The people who I could ask to do this would enjoy the challenge, but they’d want to take weeks over it and charge you thousands.’
‘Okay,’ I said, rubbing my chin ruefully. ‘I thought I was prepared to pay, but it turns out I’m not. I can’t raise that kind of money, Evelyn. And the time won’t shift. If I can’t have it today, there’s no point having it at all. Tell me if there’s another way.’
‘Those items,’ Caldessa said, not to me but to the well-dressed shepherdess-fancier, ‘are part of a collection. I’m afraid I can’t split them up.’
Turning back to me, she winked conspiratorially. ‘Never make it too easy for them,’ she murmured.
