The Naming of the Beasts

I didn’t hear the next few sentences, because the momentary paralysis of shock had allowed the phone to slip through my fingers. I had to flail and lunge to retrieve it before it hit the ground. When I got it back to my ear, the lawyer was still describing what had been done to his client before - or perhaps, to take an optimistic view, after - he died. I cut him off in full flow. I could fill in the details without any help from him.

‘Did they catch anyone?’ I demanded. But he’d already answered that: you don’t say someone broke in if you know who the someone is. ‘See anyone?’ I amended.

‘Neither,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘The other prisoners in the block heard - it would have been impossible not to hear - and they screamed for the guards. But the guards feared a riot, which is a very common thing on the night before an execution, so they did not come. He was found when they came in the morning to take him.’

Asmodeus. Asmodeus had travelled a thousand miles to murder Rafi’s last living relative hours before he was due to die in any case. How? How had he done it? When Juliet had flown with me to the United States, the experience had almost destroyed her: it had left her weak and sick and at half-strength for weeks afterwards. Demons are chthonic powers, and too much distance from the ground hits them like a bad dose of flu. For that very reason Juliet had refused to take the flight back to Heathrow. She told me she had other ways of travelling that wouldn’t involve leaving the ground.

‘Mr Castor? You are still there?’

‘Yeah. I’m still here.’

‘I apologise. I had not meant to burden you with the unpleasant details. But they weigh on my mind. It is hard for me to stop thinking about them. And I wondered - inevitably I wondered, given the things you said to Jovan yesterday - whether this demon you spoke of might have been involved in his death.’

‘We don’t have any way of knowing for sure,’ I said bleakly.

‘But in your own estimation?’

‘Yes. It was Asmodeus.’

The lawyer sighed - a drawn-out sound with a slight tremor in it. ‘I have a translator working on the books,’ he said. ‘You have an email address?’

I gave him Nicky’s and Pen’s, and asked him to send the translation on to both accounts.

‘You are still looking for this thing?’ he asked me.

I didn’t quibble about the choice of words this time. ‘Yeah, I’m still looking for him.’

‘Be careful, Mr Castor. And be lucky. I do not believe that any god holds me in his good graces, but still I will pray for you.’

‘Thanks. I’ll take all the help I can get.’

I slipped the phone into my pocket and rejoined Trudie. She didn’t look any happier. For a moment I considered keeping what I’d just learned to myself, but a deal is a deal. I filled her in as we walked to the Tube station.

‘Macedonia!’ She seemed more amazed at the logistics than disturbed by what Asmodeus had done, but then she’d never met Jovan Ditko, or Rafi for that matter: a lot of this was still theoretical for her.

‘Macedonia,’ I agreed. ‘Some time in the middle of last night. God knows how long it took him to get there, or whether he’s back now.’

‘Maybe that’s why nobody has got a hit yet,’ Trudie mused sombrely. ‘Even if he has got a tunnel under Holborn, we might not get a fix on him if he hasn’t been there recently. We’re probably wasting our time.’

She filled me in on the morning’s activities. Most of the area between Holborn and the river had been searched pretty thoroughly, and McClennan had told his teams to fan out to the east and west. Trudie herself had criss-crossed the backstreets around Kingsway for most of the morning, but the only things that had impinged on her death-sense were the local ghosts and zombies.

‘Maybe what you said,’ I mused. ‘The trail’s not fresh enough. Or maybe he’s just too deep. There could be Victorian sewers down there, fifty feet below the regular ones. Or Tube tunnels that were never documented, for that matter. We only know what someone decided to write down.’

Trudie didn’t answer. Since the argument at Pen’s she seemed to have drawn in on herself. She kept up the silence all the way into town, and while we were retreading the beat she’d walked for most of the morning. We ran into Etheridge and his partner - the woman Gil McClennan had referred to as Greaves - coming towards us along Kemble Street. Etheridge was his usual nervy, tic-ridden self, no better and no worse than when I’d seen him last, but Greaves was tired and disgruntled.

‘Nobody’s got a trace of anything,’ she said. ‘And we’ve walked every square foot of this area ten times over by now. If there was anything to find, we’d have found it. But Gil says we have to keep on going until the light fails.’

‘He’s very keen,’ I commented neutrally.

Greaves snorted derisively. ‘He’s shit-scared,’ she retorted. ‘This keeps his mind off it, doesn’t it?’

‘Off what?’ Trudie asked.

‘Off Super-Self. He’s got to go in tonight, and he doesn’t know how it’s going to pan out. Keeping himself busy is his way of dealing with it.’