The Naming of the Beasts

The Naming of the Beasts

MIKE CAREY

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

about the author

Teaser chapter

Praise for Mike Carey:

‘Entertaining, well-paced, intelligently plotted and full of memorable characters’ The Times

‘Imagine an unholy cross between Buffy, Jonathan Creek and hardboiled noir, set it in the sleazier bits of London . . . Fast, fun and furious’

Guardian

‘Witty, deadpan and shudderingly noir . . . You’ve heard the rumour that Londoners are never more than a few feet from a rat - Carey will persuade the same is true of the undead.’

Daily Express

‘Extremely impressive - entertaining and assured. You’re left with the eerie feeling that Felix Castor will be haunting us for a long time to come.’

SFX

‘Simply brilliant novels . . . One of the best books series around right now’

Forbidden Planet International

‘Carey’s writing is nimble and witty, his dialogue believable . . . quirky, dark and imaginative’

Kirkus

BY MIKE CAREY

The Devil You Know

Vicious Circle

Dead Men’s Boots

Thicker Than Water

The Naming of the Beasts

The Naming of the Beasts

MIKE CAREY

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Mike Carey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1214 2

This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

Hachette Digital

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

To Ade - for music, Brick Lane curries,

Bunhill Fields, Masonic temples, Old Brewery

and attendant conversations

Acknowledgements

All my knowledge of the Rickety Twins comes from my wife, Lin, and from the Theatrelands section of the London Metropolitan Archive’s website. I’m grateful to both. For the internal geography of the Paterson Building, and my own visualisation of Jenna-Jane Mulbridge’s little empire, I have to thank Ade Brown: he took the time and trouble to give me a guided tour, and fed me background information as I needed it. Castor’s comments on alcoholism carry echoes from the same source. Thanks also to my agent, Meg, for unfailing support, and to my editor, Darren, for a Spiro Agnew joke that’s better than the one I used.

1

It’s strange how other people’s deaths can take you, sometimes. You can build up as much scar tissue as you like - and I’d say I’ve got more than the average allocation, one way and another - but death can still sneak up on you from an unexpected angle and twist your guts.

The murdered woman had been trying to get out of her tiny little studio flat by means of the window. She’d probably been surprised in bed: woken from sleep to find the intruder already in her room. At any rate, the sheets and the duvet had spilled onto the floor, spread out along a more or less straight line between the bed and the point where she’d died.

A lot of the woman had spilled onto the floor, too. A crude wooden javelin of some kind - most likely the broken-off leg of a table - had passed through her lower abdomen with enough force to drive itself several inches into the plaster of the wall below the window. She remained impaled on it, slumped forward against the glass, one hand dangling at her side. The other hand was raised as though to reach for the latch, but it had come to rest on the sill instead.

A carpet of blood spread out from the body on all sides across the cheap yellow linoleum, setting off the death scene from the rest of the room.