Trudie hesitated, then nodded. Turning to Etheridge, she gave him a notepad and a pen. ‘Start writing down the names of the streets, Victor,’ she told him. ‘When I come back we’ll start checking them out with Google maps.’
We went to Paddington Basin, which runs right behind St Mary’s. Part of the basin had been drained a few months back, and the council had erected a sculpture of a giant plug and plughole to raise the morale of local residents while their picturesque canal was a plain of stinking mud. This was where we fetched up, sitting out in front of a pavement café that hadn’t opened for lunch yet.
After extorting a promise from Trudie not to pass any of what I was about to say on to Jenna-Jane, I told her about the bizarre glitches in Juliet’s behaviour, including the beating she’d administered to Susan and the threat she’d made to me. I mentioned the ward I’d found in Juliet’s garden, too, but only in passing because it was part of a wider pattern whose meaning seemed to lie elsewhere. Trudie heard me out in silence, then as soon as I’d finished she started in with the questions.
‘Isn’t this creature savage by her very nature?’ she demanded. ‘Why is any of this a surprise?’
‘It’s a surprise because it goes against everything that Juliet has done since she decided to stay on Earth,’ I explained patiently. ‘She knows damn well that she can only live here as long as she manages to stay on the wagon. If she starts to eat people, even just on special occasions, every exorcist in London is going to come looking for her. And good as she is, sooner or later someone is bound to sneak up on her blind side and finish the job.’
Trudie didn’t look convinced. ‘But what would that do?’ she asked with a shrug. ‘It might just send her back to Hell. She’d be free to rise again whenever she wanted.’
I stared her down. ‘Is that what you think exorcism is?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. And neither do you.’
‘But we know that demons avoid it strenuously. Desperately, even. It’s got to be more than a cab ride home.’
There was a silence. A waiter unlocked the front door of the café, obviously thinking we were his first customers of the day. Not being in the mood for coffee, tea, or any other drink that wasn’t at least 30 per cent proof, I got up and moved on. Trudie followed.
‘Can I see the wards you found?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got a photo of it on my phone,’ I said. ‘I’ll send it on to you.’
‘What about you, Castor? What’s your next move?’
‘I’m going to Macedonia to meet what’s left of Rafi’s family. How about you?’
‘I’ll work over the map with Victor. See if it gives us any clues to where Asmodeus is hiding.’
‘And then when I come back we’re going to make a second raid on Super-Self.’
Trudie rolled her eyes. ‘That’ll be fun.’
‘Working for Jenna-Jane is like being in the army,’ I said. ‘Every day is a holiday.’
‘Send me those pictures before you go,’ Trudie said.
‘Sure.’ I turned to face her. Might as well have this out now as later. ‘But these are the standard terms and conditions, ’ I told her. ‘We don’t share any of this with either your former or your current employer unless I say we do.’
After the barest moment of hesitation, Trudie nodded. ‘Agreed.’
‘And anything new you come up with, you run it by me before you go to Jenna-Jane.’
Another pause. ‘If you agree to do the same thing,’ Trudie said. ‘Share whatever you find in Macedonia with me. And pass me anything you get from Nicholas Heath.’
That came as something of a shock. ‘How did you know I’d seen Nicky?’ I demanded, tensing involuntarily.
Trudie smiled, a little smugly. ‘I researched you very thoroughly when I worked for the Anathemata,’ she said. ‘You’re too set in your ways, Castor. Got your habits. Your superstitions and foibles. Your prime directives. Heath is one of them.’
‘I’m still alive,’ I reminded her.
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘That’s another.’
11
From Alexander the Great International Airport I went straight to downtown Skopje. The airport was a strip of tarmac and a Coke machine, but the city itself was pretty impressive. Sprawling along both sides of the Vardar River, and standing on the main drag from Belgrade to Athens, it’s always seen a fair bit of passing trade. Admittedly it’s also had its fair share – maybe slightly more – of wars, pogroms, earthquakes, corruption, industrial collapse and apocalyptic mismanagement, but it’s always managed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Today it looks like any other medium-sized metropolis, with old and new buildings jostling each other for position on most streets, and a pall of smog closing down the middle distance.
From my hotel – a Holiday Inn on Pijade Street – I called Jovan Ditko’s lawyer, a guy named Anastasiadis, and left a message. I’d already called twice from London, had the receptionist take down my contact details with agonising thoroughness, then got no reply. If he didn’t call back this time, I’d grab a cab out to the prison by myself and take pot luck. They could only say no. Well, that and beat me with rubber truncheons; but with EU membership still pending, I was gambling they’d be wanting to keep their noses clean.
As it turned out, though, the phone rang less than ten minutes after I’d hung up.
‘Mr Castor?’ The man’s voice was rich and resonant, and held barely a trace of accent.
‘Yes,’ I confirmed.
‘Dragan Anastasiadis. I believe you wanted to see a client of mine.’
‘That’s right. Jovan Ditko.’
‘And you are interested in Jovan Ditko because . . . ?’
‘I’m a friend of his brother, Rafael.’
A sound like soughing wind came down the line. ‘Ordinarily,’ Mr Anastasiadis said, ‘this would be a difficult thing to arrange. Since you are a foreigner, I would have to submit your name to the prison authorities and wait for approval. But today it is relatively easy. If you take a cab to the prison gates, I will meet you there.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’ And then, before he could hang up, ‘Mr Anastasiadis?’
‘Dragan.’
‘Dragan. Why is today easier?’
‘Because Jovan’s last appeal failed this morning, Mr Castor. Tomorrow he will hang.’
All prisons I’ve ever been in have felt pretty much the same to me. They may be more or less grim, more or less grey, more or less tolerant of torture and the meticulous demolition of the human spirit, but the same pall of despair and abnegation hangs over them all, a psychic fog sublimed out of shipwrecked lives. For an exorcist, the genius loci is always a very real presence: after my first few minutes in Irdrizovo Prison – an innocuous cluster of low whitewashed buildings behind an endless chain-link fence, vaguely reminiscent of a high-security Butlins – there was a taste in my mouth like rancid tin and a throbbing pain behind my eyes.
Dragan Anastasiadis seemed oblivious to this miasmic atmosphere. A tall fat man dressed immaculately in a light blue linen suit and a cream shoestring tie, he had met me at the gates as promised, shaken my hand and offered heart-felt commiserations that I didn’t really need – I’d never even met Jovan Ditko – and shepherded me past the various guard posts with dispatch.
He kept up a courteous, consultative manner in front of the guards, talking about the mechanics of the appeals process and the hopes he’d entertained that the president might be persuaded to intercede with a stay of execution at the last moment. But when we were briefly alone, waiting in a bare anteroom for someone to escort us through to the maximum-security wing, he let the mask slip.
‘The truth, Mr Castor,’ he said, ‘is that this entire legal process was a farce. The death penalty in Macedonia is available only for treason and the most atrocious war crimes. The man Jovan killed was a colonel in the army, but the motive had nothing to do with war. It was about a woman. The prosecution did not even contest this. But to kill a colonel, apparently, is a war crime – even if you kill him because he is having sex with your fiancée. And even if there is no war.’