The Jaguar sped under the railway bridge where I had been stopped two nights before, and turned sharply onto Kingsland Road. A pedestrian levitated himself out of the way. We drove past the Geffrye Museum. We drove past the new mosque. The gold cap of its tower shone in the late-afternoon sunlight. Cagliostro looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said, “Perhaps you are wondering why I need the book.”
“As a matter of fact, I am wondering why you believe that you need me. You went to a great deal of trouble with your silly little trap, and you did not ask your creature to kill me just now, after you took possession of the book.”
“Times are changing, Mr Carlyle. We are at the end of one age and the beginning of another. It is time to choose sides. Those like you, who attempt to remain neutral, who pretend that they are aloof from the world, will be the first casualties. Do you not think that poetic justice?”
“I see no justice here, only the tired cliche of an old, defeated Nazi attempting revenge on his former nemesis.”
“If I had wanted revenge, Mr Carlyle, I would have found you more than fifty years ago. This is no more than a happy coincidence. I discovered that you had something I wanted, and when you would not accept my very reasonable offer I was forced to take it.”
“I believe it was Miranda who stole the book. You were not able to find my house, although you tried several times to follow me home.”
“A foolish piece of deception, nothing more.”
“A deception you were unable to see through, although Miranda managed it well enough. Of the three of us, who has the most of what you call ‘power’?”
“I broke your wards. I laid the trap.”
“Which did not quite catch me. You have the book, and you have me. Why not let the girl go? She has no part in this foolishness.”
“I can look after myself,” Miranda said.
“I wish it was true,” I told her.
We passed through Hackney, driving beneath the flyovers of the motorway junction beyond Victoria Park to an industrial estate named after Shakespeare’s gloomy, haunted prince. Donny Halliwell heaved out of the Jaguar and unlocked the gate.
“The man in charge of the security of this place is one of Mr Halliwell’s associates,” Cagliostro said. “Remarkably easy to bribe. We will not be disturbed.”
He drove past long low brick sheds housing businesses that mostly had something to do with the motor trade, and stopped the Jaguar beside a fence that, sagging in front of a strip of weeds and straggling elder trees, ran along the boundary of the industrial estate, at the edge of the junction with the Hereford Union Canal and the navigational cut of the River Lea. Menaced by Donny Halliwell’s gun, Miranda and I scrambled through the narrow belt of scrub to the towpath.
“Christ’s cross was made from elder wood,” Cagliostro said, as he followed us. “And Judas hanged himself from an elder tree. A nice symmetry, don’t you think?”
“More likely he hanged himself from a fig tree,” I said, “since fig trees are native to his country and elder trees are not. Still, if you believe in that kind of thing, elder wood is said to be a protection from witchcraft. I find the idea encouraging.”
The air was hot and close, thick with the smell of open water and fecund vegetation. To the west, the low clouds were breaking up, and the sun burned in the middle of a ragged patch of blue sky. On the dual carriageway that was elevated beyond a snaggled sprawl of roofs, fugitive shards of sunlight gleamed on the roofs of speeding cars and trucks. Cagliostro, holding the briefcase in one hand, turned a full circle, taking in the view of the backs of industrial buildings and brick walls on the other side of the canal. It was one of those mournful, scruffy places that belong to no one except the dead, but there were no revenants there — not so much as the smallest imp.
“A quiet place,” he said. “I have made sure that we will not be disturbed, too. Any walkers or cyclists will discover that they have a pressing need to turn back if they approach too closely.”
He set the briefcase between his feet, reached inside his jacket, lifted out a white mouse by its naked tail, and tossed it to the ground. It ran off along the towpath, cheeping like a sparrow. He smiled when he saw my dismay and said, “I believe you have already met the entity my little sacrifice will summon. Shoot him.”
Donny Halliwell stirred like a man jerked out of sleep, raised his little pistol and fired. The bullet punched me in my left thigh. It passed straight through the meat without hitting bone, but even so I felt as if I had been struck with a red-hot poker. I grabbed the spot reflexively, lost my balance, and fell on my backside amongst dry weeds.
“You should have sold me the book,” Cagliostro said. “I made you an excellent offer, and I would have honoured it. I even had another sacrifice marked out for this business. But you were too stubborn, Mr Carlyle, and it has brought you to this.”
“So that was why you were at the cafe,” I said. It was a small consolation that I had saved its kindly owner.
“But instead you walked in, with the girl. You were trying to help her, but later that night she betrayed you and made a bargain with me. And now I have the book, and I have you, and I have her. Miranda, I will make good my promise to teach you something useful. Find four branches of elder wood, each about as thick as your thumb. Break them off and use your knife, the one you think I do not know about, to sharpen the broken ends into points.”
“What for?”
“Because I tell you to.”
They stared at each other. Miranda was searching for any revenant she could use against him, but apart from something with a cold remorseless hunger that was flowing towards us from the west, none were within reach.
“He wishes to stake me out,” I told Miranda. “As a sacrifice to the thing that has taken up residence in this stretch of water. The thing that took your pet two nights ago. Can you feel it draw near?”
“Very good, Mr Carlyle,” Cagliostro said.
“You hope to make it more powerful, and then bind it with incantations from the Stenographia. I should warn you that it will not work.”
“The book has puissance.”
“It has nothing of the kind.”
“I believe your parents would disagree.”
“They are in no position to disagree.”
They had been dead for more than a hundred and seventy years, but it still hurt me to speak about them to a stranger.
“You will soon be at the same disadvantage. Four pieces of wood, young woman. Do it now, or Mr Halliwell will shoot you dead and I’ll feed your ghost to my pet.”
Miranda looked at him from beneath the bill of her baseball cap. She was slight and so very young, but was stiffened by a core of irreducible defiance. “I know you’re gonna do that anyway,” she said, “so don’t expect me to do your work for you.”
Cagliostro shrugged, and told Donny Halliwell to deal with her. As the big man stepped towards Miranda, I used the connection I still had with the imp in her mobile phone, and made the little machine ring. Cagliostro pinched the imp out, as I knew he would, and I used the momentary distraction to loose the imps that I had saved from the trap at Rainer Sue’s house. I had pinched them as small as a full stop and swallowed them. Now I coughed them up and threw them as hard as I could.
Not at Cagliostro — he would have dismissed them in an instant — but at Donny Halliwell.
They slammed into the big man and clung, covering him with crackling sparks of panic and disgust that burnt away the calm of his trance in an instant. His face cleared and he turned to Cagliostro and raised the little black pistol and shot him, shot him again as he pitched forward, blood all over his face. As the two gunshots echoed off the brick wall on the other side of the canal, Cagliostro’s prone body blurred, like a double-exposed photographic image. But even as the ghost, shocked from him by the violent moment of his death, began to get to its feet, a smooth white snake whipped up from the canal and opened its jaws wide and snapped it down. Miranda screamed, and something as massive and fast as an express train blasted over my head and smashed into the ancient revenant. It blew apart like a snowman hit square by a howitzer round. For an instant, a thousand fragments skittered away in every direction across the calm black water of the canal, and then they smoked into the air and were gone.