‘Terrific,’ said Nightingale, and he followed Miller through to a modern galley kitchen with gleaming white units and a fridge festooned with family photographs and school notices.
Miller saw Nightingale looking at the photographs. ‘Wife and kids are staying with her mother for the night,’ he said. ‘No one’s going to walk in on us. Milk and sugar?’
‘Just milk,’ said Nightingale.
Miller picked up a jar of Nescafe Gold Blend and made him a coffee. ‘How long have you known Joshua?’ asked Miller.
‘A while,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’s a good guy.’
‘One of the best,’ said Miller, pouring in a splash of milk.
‘He thinks very highly of you,’ said Nightingale.
Miller blushed and waved away the compliment like a schoolgirl who had just been told she was pretty. ‘And you haven’t done anything like this before?’ He handed the mug to Nightingale.
‘I’m not sure exactly what it is that we’ll be doing,’ said Nightingale.
‘It’s a ceremony,’ said Miller. ‘There’ll be five of us. You, me and three others. The other three will be masked. They’re wary of outsiders.’
‘No problem,’ said Nightingale. ‘You’ve done this before, right?’
‘Loads of times,’ said Miller. ‘There’re a lot of like-minded people here in Milton Keynes. Quite a little gathering.’ He smiled. ‘So tell me who it is you want to contact?’
‘A nine-year-old girl,’ said Nightingale. ‘Her name’s Sophie Underwood. I say nine, but she’d be eleven now.’
‘Time doesn’t pass once you move into the spirit world.’
‘How would you know that?’
‘We’ve called up spirits that passed over fifty, a hundred, years ago. If time passed they’d be skeletons, right?’
‘So Sophie will never get any older now that she’s a spirit?’
‘Appearance-wise, no. Ageing is something that happens in this world, not the next.’ Miller finished his coffee and nodded at the door. ‘So, let me show you the room.’
He took Nightingale along the corridor to the stairs and up to the first floor. There was a small bedroom at the back of the house with a hatch in the ceiling from which protruded an aluminium ladder. Miller motioned for Nightingale to go up. He climbed the rungs slowly. The attic ran the full length of the house, with beams overhead and bare floorboards. There were no windows and the only illumination came from a single bare bulb hanging in the middle of the roof space.
Nightingale walked away from the hatch and looked around as Miller climbed up. In the middle of the attic floor was a piece of purple cloth, about four paces square, on which a pentagram had been drawn with white chalk.
Nightingale nodded at the pentagram. ‘I thought that was just for summoning devils,’ he said. ‘To protect against them.’
‘The pentagram has a lot of uses,’ said Miller.
At the top of the pentagram was a small wooden altar on which there was another, smaller, pentagram with a silver chalice and a small brass bowl at its centre. There were several peeled cloves of garlic in the bowl and a small black candle at each of the points of the pentagram.
‘Are we going to be summoning a spirit? Is that how it works?’ asked Nightingale.
‘There won’t be any fire and brimstone, if that’s what you mean,’ said Miller. ‘What we’ll be doing is basically a ritual that allows a spirit to return to this world and to interact with the people here. There are spirits all around us, but usually they can’t see or hear us and we can’t see or hear them.’
‘Like ghosts?’
‘Ghosts are different,’ said Miller. ‘Ghosts are tied to a particular place because of something that has happened there. You only ever see them in that one place.’ He smiled and shrugged. ‘You really are a novice, just like Joshua said.’
‘I’m new to this, yes,’ Nightingale said. He gestured at the pentagram. ‘But I’ve learned enough to know that you use the pentagram to protect yourself when you summon devils, and that they appear in physical form. So tell me, have you done that? Have you ever called up a devil?’
‘Me? God, no. That’s not why I’m into this. Summoning up devils is totally different to what we do.’
‘But you’re Satanists, right? The same as Joshua.’
‘Yes, but saying we’re the same is equivalent to saying that a guy who plays football with his local team is on a par with a guy who plays in the Premiership. Trust me, there’s no one in our group that would even contemplate summoning one of the Fallen. We worship them, sure, and we source power from them, but I’m nowhere near strong enough to start summoning one.’
‘I get it,’ said Nightingale.
‘And if you’re considering it you need to be very careful. A friend of mine tried it a couple of years ago and she ended up in a mental hospital. She’s a shell; her mind was totally destroyed.’
‘Were you there when it happened?’
Miller shook his head. ‘When you do a deal with one of the Fallen it has to be one-on-one. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Any sign of weakness, or you drop your guard for a second, and they’ll rip out your soul. I can’t stress that enough: you don’t mess around with them. Someone like Joshua, okay, maybe, but the likes of me?’ He shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t even think about it.’
‘I hear you,’ said Nightingale.
Down below, the doorbell rang. ‘That’ll be the rest of the group,’ said Miller. ‘By the way, did you bring something belonging to the deceased?’
‘I couldn’t get anything,’ said Nightingale. ‘I did try.’
‘It’s not essential,’ said Miller. He went back down the ladder.
Nightingale walked around the purple cloth towards the far end of the attic. There were two old steamer trunks there, wooden with leather straps around them. They weren’t locked but the straps were held in place with brass buckles. Nightingale’s curiosity got the better of him and he knelt down and undid the straps of the trunk closest to him. The lid groaned as he pulled it open. It was full of chalices, bottles, and objects wrapped in cloths of various colours. There was a strong smell of incense and something bitter and acrid that made his eyes start to water. He picked up one of the cloth-wrapped bundles. It was a brass knife covered with runes, the handle in the shape of a goat’s foot, the blade serrated and with a sharp point. Nightingale re-wrapped the knife and put it back in the chest. On the left-hand side of the trunk were bundles of candles, mostly black.
He heard voices downstairs so he hurriedly closed the lid and fastened the buckles. He was standing by the small altar when Miller’s head popped through the hatch. He had changed into a long black hooded robe. He was holding a Marks amp; Spencer carrier bag and he took out a robe and handed it to Nightingale. ‘We all wear these,’ he said. Nightingale took off his raincoat and draped it over one of the trunks. As he was putting on the robe a second man appeared; he was in his sixties with a goatee beard and a black mask over his eyes and nose.
‘This is Martin,’ said Miller. Martin shook hands with Nightingale. ‘Martin is my second in command.’
‘His wing man,’ said Martin. He was wearing a large sovereign ring on his left hand and a bulky gold chain on his right wrist. Even the baggy hooded robe couldn’t conceal his expanding waistline; he was clearly a man who enjoyed his food and drink.
‘Hood up or down?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Up when we begin,’ said Miller. ‘Colour is a distraction so things have to be as dark as possible.’
A blonde head appeared in the hatch. A woman’s. Miller and Martin helped her up. She was in her forties and had dark eyebrows and a slash of red lipstick over lips that looked as if they’d been pumped full of fat from elsewhere in her body. She was plump and as she stepped into the attic her robe fell open, giving them all a glimpse of cleavage and of a small rose tattoo on her left breast.
‘Jack, this is Joanne,’ said Miller.
She offered her right hand as she adjusted her mask with her left. Her hand was pasty and white and there was a silver ring on each finger. Her nails were the same scarlet as her lipstick, long and filed to points. Her handshake was twice as firm as Martin’s and she maintained eye contact while she shook.