The Naming of the Beasts

This was too much for Trudie. She gave a wordless yell of exasperation. ‘Castor, you don’t have to believe the Bible; you just have to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Ajulutsikael may wear a dress and have a nice arse but it was never a baby or a child or a teenage tearaway or anything you’d see as female. It’s nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother. It’s a woman the way a stick insect is a stick. No, in the way a praying mantis is a leaf. The moment you forget that—’

She stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, looking past me towards the door of the room. I turned involuntarily, following her gaze. Pen was framed in the doorway. Sue had already taken a few steps into the room, but had then stopped dead, brought up short by Trudie’s wall of words. Now she came forward again.

The colour had drained out of her face; even her lips were white. For a moment she had the ivory pallor of Juliet herself. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her body so rigid it looked like it would ring out with an A sharp if you touched it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Trudie faltered. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘A stick insect.’ Sue’s voice was an ugly, grating thing. ‘A praying mantis. What have you . . . What did you ever touch? Who have you . . . loved and cared for and, and, and lain with, you twisted bitch? How dare you stand there and pass . . . pass judgement on my . . . wife?’

On the last word she launched herself at Trudie in a flying leap. Trudie had six inches on her, and had been trained by the excommunicate sergeant majors of the Anathemata to hold her own against men and demons, but she didn’t fight back as Sue went for her, punching and clawing; she just raised her arms to protect her face.

It was a tricky job to disentangle Sue from Trudie without hurting her, but Pen and I managed, taking an arm each and half-lifting her off the floor to take away her leverage. Trudie took a hurried step back, lowering her en garde.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ she said, and then to Sue, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’

She fled out of the room and up the stairs. When the street door slammed behind her, we carefully let go of Sue and stepped away from her. Anger and indignation had done her a power of good. She looked more like herself than she had at any time since I’d found her nursing her black eye three days before.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m calm.’ A second later she exploded with another ‘Bitch!’ - which showed us exactly how calm she was, and probably brought her lifetime tally with that word up to two. Pen took her into a consoling embrace.

‘I’ve got to get back out there,’ I said to Pen. I thought of explaining why, but ‘Asmodeus is underground’ wasn’t a revelation that could help her very much. She couldn’t join the hunt, and the thought of Jenna-Jane’s exorcists combing the streets for Rafi would just make her miserable. ‘Back on the case,’ I finished lamely. ‘I’ll come by again later, if I can. Will you be okay here?’

Pen nodded to me over Sue’s head, and I cravenly left them to it.

‘Call Leonidas!’ Pen shouted to me as I was on my way up the stairs to ground level. I turned around and went back down.

‘That’s the guy from 300,’ I pointed out. ‘Gerard Butler.’

‘Something like that, anyway.’

‘Anastasiadis?’

‘Exactly.’

Progress on the journals? Some good news would have been pretty welcome right then. I joined Trudie out on the street and asked her if she’d give me a minute or two to make the call. She still seemed a little shaken up by the storm she’d provoked from Sue.

‘Take as long as you need,’ she said, and walked off to the end of the drive, out of earshot.

Anastasiadis’s secretary spoke only Macedonian, so all I could do was repeat my name until she gave up and put me through.

‘Mr Castor.’ The lawyer sounded tired and dispirited. But then given what day it was, that was hardly surprising. I looked at my watch. Allowing for the time difference, it must have been about three hours since Jovan walked the last mile.

‘Feeling rough?’ I commiserated. ‘You did everything you could, man. Like you said, Jovan’s cards were marked in advance. They probably put the execution on the docket before they fixed up a trial date.’

‘That is why I called you, Mr Castor.’ Anastasiadis’s tone was grim. ‘There was no execution.’

I blinked. ‘What? You mean the pardon came through, after all?’

‘That is not what I mean. Jovan Ditko was murdered last night. Someone broke into Irdrizovo Prison, tearing a gate off its hinges, and killed him in his cell. It was not quick, and it was not clean. There was . . . mutilation. His eyes, in particular . . .’