Thicker Than Water

Church Street turned out to be a very narrow road in the middle of a bewildering one-way system at the further end of St Albans High Street. I left Pen’s car illegally parked in front of some gates that led God knew where, and we looked for the Rosewell Ecumenical Trust. It was a modest-looking building that seemed to have been made by knocking two old workmen’s cottages into one structure. The sober, black-painted door looked fairly solid, but came equipped with both a bell and a knocker. I applied myself to both.

While we waited for an answer, Juliet examined the wards that were nailed to the doorposts and the stay-not painted on the wall. They were intended to deter the dead, and the undead, from entering this place.

‘Anything likely to slow you down?’ I asked.

She shook her head brusquely. ‘Not for a moment. They make my skin itch a little, but they won’t keep me out.’

There was a sound from inside of bolts being drawn. A very unecumenical face stared out at us: pug-ugly and brimming with surly suspicion, topped with black hair in a military-length razor cut.

‘Yes?’ it said.

‘We’re here to see Father Gwillam,’ I said, giving him a beaming smile.

He tried to shut the door in our faces, so Juliet slammed it back into his. Then she pushed him up against the wall of the narrow vestibule and I walked on in past him. He rallied, driving a punch into Juliet’s kidneys that actually made her frown slightly. She gripped his throat, slapped him across the face hard enough to make his head snap round a full ninety degrees, and then pitched him out into the street where he fetched up in a heap against a parked car. Its sidelights started to flash and it wailed on a rising pitch as its alarm went off.

Juliet closed the door on the intrusive sound. I looked around me. The ground-floor layout of the place was what an estate agent would have described as deceptively spacious: we were in a hall with a tiled floor, from which three doors opened off. The decor was High Victorian, which in the Catholic Church almost passes for contemporary. The inadequate light came from uplighters high up on the walls and from a heavy and unlovely wrought-iron chandelier suspended from three evenly spaced chains.

I kicked open the first door, seeing a roomful of books beyond and smelling the contemplation-and-dust smell of a library or study. The second was a broom cupboard. I was going for the third when running footsteps sounded from our right: we turned to see two men coming down the stairs towards us. One of them was Gwillam, a book in his hand and a pair of reading glasses on his nose. The other was a slight, bald man in a plain black suit, whose teeth were bared in a subtle but permanent snarl.

Gwillam opened his mouth to speak, but he was too late because Baldy was already in the air, launching a flying kick towards Juliet’s face. Not a bad opening gambit, all things considere“hineakd, but when his leading foot reached its intended destination, Juliet wasn’t there any more. She leaned sideways, her movements seeming almost lazy because they were so perfectly timed that there was no need for haste. Her right arm flicked out and flexed at the elbow, intersecting the bald man’s trajectory and punctuating his leap with a queasily suggestive impact sound. He jackknifed in mid-air, his forward momentum catastrophically sabotaged, and hit the floor in a rolling heap of limbs. He didn’t get up again.

Gwillam’s gaze was locked on Juliet’s face. He recognised her at once, on a level deeper than sight: he knew her for what she was. He began to intone as he descended the stairs towards us, his voice an octave lower than its normal register. ‘Would you tarry for them till they were full grown? They found a plain, in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. The right hand of the Lord hath done—’

‘One more word,’ Juliet said, unconcerned but a little stern, ‘and you’ll die where you stand.’

Gwillam fell silent. He was good, and he was quick, but he knew he couldn’t complete an exorcism before Juliet reached him. He’d only managed to bind her last time because neither of us had seen his particular MO before.

But he lowered the book, allowing us to see that he was holding something else in his other hand. It was a handgun.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You won’t touch me.’

Juliet stared at the gun for a moment in silence. Then she laughed softly, richly. ‘Is that for me or for yourself, servant of Heaven?’ she murmured deep in her throat. ‘Either way, the distance between us is too small for it to matter. Perhaps if it were already pointed at your head, and your finger on the trigger, you could pulverise your own brain while your purpose still held. But see, you stand there listening to me, and seeing me, and smelling me, and it’s already too late. So now -’ her voice had sunk to an insinuating whisper, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke ‘- what will you do?’