Thicker Than Water

But there was nothing else I could do from a mile away, and it was more than time that was being wasted. I got back into the cab.

‘New Kent Road,’ I said. ‘The Salisbury Estate.’

We pulled back into the traffic, and I thought about what I had to do. Promises to break. Innocent people to lie to. Stupid, blind risks to take while I pretended that I knew what I was doing. Just another day at the office, really. Maybe I should have worked harder at giving the children’s-party entertaining a fair trial.

It took five or six minutes to get to the Salisbury, the air seeming to thicken and congeal around me with every yard we travelled. I paid off the cabbie and walked up the steps to the concrete apron, where I saw with little surprise a small posse of Gwillam’s merry men and un-men waiting to meet me. The flat-faced man - Feld - was there, but I didn’t know the others. There was a short swag-bellied man in a shabby suit who looked like he might be someone’s fat, jolly uncle, although the Father Christmas effect was slightly spoiled by a horrendous scar that ran diagonally down his face in a bend sinister of rucked and hardened flesh, and a hard case who was dressed entirely in black: ready for night ops, and maybe trying just a bit too hard. He had impressive muscles, though: but then, being around born-again Gwillam’s menagerie would obviously leave an ordinary baseline human feeling like he had something to live up to. Poor sod was probably at the gym all the hours God sent.

‘Mister Castor,’ said the man in black. ‘I’m Eddings, and this -’ pointing to the fat man ‘- is Speight. He’ll brief you as we walk.’ He didn’t bother to introduce Feld: perhaps he knew that we’d already met.

He turned and led the way across the concrete. Speight fell in beside me as I followed, and Feld brought up the rear. Nobody else was in sight, and the silence was more profound than ever. It wasn’t just that there was no noise from the towers nearby: the voices of the city itself, the noise of the traffic on the road only a few yards behind us, the rumble of trains and shouts of convivial drunks, were stilled as we walked forward. The curtains: we’d passed through them, and they’d fallen closed behind us.

‘Last night was very bad,’ the little man, Speigh³tlehint, was saying in a cultured voice with a slight Welsh lilt to it. ‘There were fights, last night.’ He pointed. ‘The police were called, but the fight spread to the walkways. A lot of people got hurt, some of them very badly. Even the ambulance crews, when they tried to treat the injured, were attacked.’

‘Tonight’s an improvement, then,’ I said, looking up at the hulking, menacing shapes of the towers: dark giants with asymmetrical eyes.

Speight looked at me, as if he suspected me of trying to make a joke. ‘No,’ he said, lingering on the syllable. ‘Tonight is worse.’

Gwillam was waiting for us at the foot of Weston Block, with a Bible in his hands and another small gaggle of multi-purpose zealots clustered around him. He watched us come, and Speight said nothing more: obviously it was the boss’s prerogative to fill me in on the rest of the big picture.

Gwillam nodded to me, and I nodded back. There didn’t seem to be much point in small talk, given that I’d laid his face open the last time we’d met. He seemed to have recovered from that, although I couldn’t help wondering if he’d bounced back so easily from the more spiritual pummelling that Juliet had laid on him.

‘It’s a demon,’ he said flatly.

I shrugged. Presumably he hadn’t dragged me all this way to tell me what I already knew.

‘It seems to have an affinity for wounds, as you said,’ Gwillam went on. ‘And its presence twists people’s perceptions - subtly, at first, but with more and more pervasive effect. I’ve got my people on two-hour shifts, rotating. But we’re barely containing it.’

‘You seem to be doing a good job,’ I said. I gestured at the stillness all around us. ‘No riots. No things going bump in the night.’

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t trying,’ said a woman standing to Gwillam’s right. She was tall and well built, attractive in a Junoesque way. I registered that first: then the ponytail, and then the cat’s cradle of string that was wound around her hands. It was only then that I realised I already knew her. When I’d seen her standing out on the walkway it had been dark, and before that, when she’d been with Gwillam, I’d mistaken the tightly looped string on her hands for bandages. In fact it must be the way she focused her power. She was an exorcist, like me, and like Gwillam. So I turned to her, if only for a fresh perspective and an excuse not to look at Gwillam’s sour face any more.

‘Go on,’ I said.

She looked to Gwillam for permission and he gave it with a resigned wave of the hand.