The Naming of the Beasts

The constable blanched, mumbled an apology and backed hurriedly out of Gary’s line of sight, where he probably relieved his feelings with an obscene gesture or two.

‘No,’ Gary said again, returning his attention to me. ‘The working hypothesis is a loup-garou. Which is one reason why you’re here, Castor. If whoever did this was undead, you can presumably tell us what size, brand and flavour it was. And then you can toddle off home to bed, which is obviously where you’ve come from.’

I put a hand up defensively to my stubbled chin. Okay, so I looked like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry. But I wasn’t on the force, I was just a civilian adviser, so Gary could go fuck himself. He couldn’t exactly put me on a charge for letting the side down.

‘Didn’t have to be were-kin,’ I mused aloud. ‘Could be a geist, or a zombie.’ Neither of those options sounded right, though. A poltergeist powerful enough to do something like this would have left the air saturated with its presence. Even the Thomases - exorcist hate-speak for rationalist sceptics - on the Met would feel like they were breathing cold shit soup. And most zombies are weaker than humans, not stronger: they can push themselves a little harder, because their pain-pleasure wiring collapses after a while, along with the rest of their nervous system, but this was way outside the normal range of activity for a dead-man-walking.

At that point, belatedly, I registered something else that Gary had said. ‘One reason why I’m here?’ I echoed. ‘Why? What’s the other?’

‘All in good time,’ Coldwood said, his expression studiously neutral. ‘There’s another wrinkle to this one, but I don’t want to prejudice your findings. Now are you going to do that voodoo that you do tolerably well, or shall we all stand around while you carry on throwing guesses at the fucking wall?’

‘Oh, handle me roughly, Detective Sergeant,’ I said in a bored drawl. Gary and me have a certain amount of history now: we’re even friends, in a way, although it’s a friendship with arcane rules about when we cut each other slack and when we don’t. We have default roles and positions that we tend to fall into when we meet. Right now, that was a useful bulwark against the splatter-shot blood-red reality behind me.

I looked round at the busy-bee forensics team, who were still doing their labour-intensive thing on all sides of us, and the small herd of uniformed constables loitering around the doorway.

‘You’ll need to clear the room,’ I told Gary. ‘I won’t be able to pick up a blind thing with this lot going on.’

Gary hesitated, then nodded. ‘Mandatory fag break,’ he called out to his team. ‘Collins, work on the stairwell for a bit. Webb, get some of your mob taking statements from the neighbours. I can see them all rubbernecking out there, so we might as well use them while we’ve got them.’ He pointed towards the door. ‘Everybody out.’

They left in dribs and drabs, the forensics guys packing up their kit with finicky care and looking glumly frustrated, as though they’d been smacked in the head with a wet fish in the middle of some promising sexual foreplay. A case like this doesn’t come along every day: although as far as that goes, they probably only had to wait. Things were changing around us, faster and faster. The world wasn’t a sphere any more, or at least it didn’t feel that way a lot of the time; it felt like an inclined plane.

Gary was the last to leave, and he lingered in the doorway. ‘I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, do I, Fix?’ he asked, his expression hovering somewhere between wary and apologetic.

I looked him squarely in the eyes. I knew what he was thinking. I used to work for the detective branch in an official capacity, under Coldwood’s tutelage: consulting exorcist, by appointment, with all the privileges a civilian informant gets from the boys in blue. Then twice in the last two years I’d been the main suspect in a murder investigation, and Gary had had to bend over so far backwards to keep me out of jail that he could have won a limbo competition in Queenstown, Jamaica. It reflected badly on his judgement that I kept landing up to my neck in shit.

‘I know the drill,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I’m sure you do.’ He gave up the point. ‘Give me a shout when you’re done.’

He left at last, and I was alone with the body. I circled the broken table and stared down at her sombrely, feeling compromised and shamed in some indefinable way by her vulnerability, her violation.

But I had a job to do, and Gary would already be looking at his watch. ‘Meter’s running,’ as he liked to say, still searching for that Hollywood tough-guy persona that always eluded him because he could never quite bring himself to be a big enough bastard.