‘What?’ I asked. A horrible portent crashed into me from nowhere: like a contact on my death-sense, but with no ghost present. ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen to the kid?’
Trudie shook her head, but I read something else in her face: something like guilt, or maybe shame. I took a hold on her shoulders without even knowing I was doing it.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded. ‘Where did you take him?’
Her gaze flicked left. I turned my head to see a light green tent where two or three nurses fussed around a huge water-heater while half a dozen others distributed the resultant hot horse-piss among the shell-shocked survivors: a comfort station.
‘He’s . . . in there,’ she said.
And he was. I caught a sudden glimpse of him, still in his pyjamas, sitting next to his father while his mother knelt in front of him and wiped at his grimy face with a damp J-cloth, showing the same merciless assiduity that all mothers show when they decide that you need a public face-washing. And Bic was fighting back the way all kids do, by squirming and shifting around to make the task as hard as possible.
‘He’s fine,’ Trudie blurted. And he was. It was plain to see.
‘Then is there something else on your mind?’ I began. ‘Because you don’t look–’
The penny started to drop as I was speaking, because my gaze had lingered on Bic and I finally saw what was staring me in the face. They were the wrong pyjamas: plain blue flannel rather than rampant superheroes. In a war zone? Someone had stopped to change him out of his old gear in the middle of all this? And not into outdoor clothes, but into another set of PJs?
‘I didn’t know,’ Trudie was saying, her voice high and strained. ‘They didn’t tell me.’
I stared at her in sudden, near-incontinent horror. ‘While — while Cheadle was making you change–’
‘Father Gwillam had Sallis plant a GPS pip on the boy. He didn’t tell me, Castor. When I said that you should trust me, I meant it. I never lied to you. I’ve told them I won’t stay in the order–’
I was already running. I had to get out past the police roadblocks and out onto a road where there was some traffic running. The Walworth Road: there ought to be some cabs there. But the crowds of onlookers seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, and short of bludgeoning them to the ground there was no way to get through them at anything faster than an arthritic shuffle.
Coldwood. I turned and headed back towards the steps, caught sight of him almost immediately coming down them. I headed towards him, but someone grabbed hold of my arm. Trudie again, her face red with crying.
‘Let me come with you. Let me help.’
‘When I need your help,’ I snarled, ‘I’ll swallow a razor blade. It’s quicker.’ I pulled free with a savage wrench and yelled at Gary just as he was getting into the back of a big black cop-mobile. He saw me coming and stopped.
‘I need to get to Peckham,’ I panted.
‘Try walking for once,’ he told me coolly. ‘I’m about to get your brother off a murder charge, and then I’m back here all day dealing with the fallout from this shit-fest.’
‘Gary, I’m serious. I need to get to Peckham fucking now. It won’t wait.’
He gave me a quizzical look and opened his mouth to argue the toss some more. With an agonised bellow of frustration, I grabbed his lapels and yelled into his face. ‘Asmodeus! Fucking Asmodeus! You remember St Michael’s church, in Acton? Abbie Torrington? The body bags at the Whiteleaf shopping mall?’
‘Get in,’ Gary said. And to the driver, ‘Take him where he tells you. I’ll scrape up an ARU and follow you.’
Amazingly, Trudie Pax was still with me. She got into the other side of the car at the same time as I got in myself. Kicking her out again would have scratched an itch, but it would have wasted ten or twenty seconds — longer if she’d fought — and I could always do it once the car was moving.
I told the driver Imelda Probert’s address and waited in an agony of impatience as he threaded his way slowly and carefully through the interlaced armies of firefighters and nurses. Once we were clear, though, he put the siren on and hit the reheat, slamming us back into the leather upholstery.
Trudie was talking to me, but the words washed over me like whale-song. I was trying to decide which of the many appalling outcomes from this I was most afraid of.
And which I was actually hoping for.
25
The front door of Imelda’s was broken in and hanging on a single hinge.
On the second-floor landing, Rafi’s door seemed untouched, but closer inspection showed that someone had fired several bullets through the lock until the striking plate simply came away from the splintered door frame.
No sign of Rafi, but Sallis was there. He was staring at nothing. His hands were clasped across his lower abdomen, but they hadn’t been able to halt the jack-in-the-box exuberance of bloody intestines that had spilled out through the huge hole in his lower torso. Feld was there, too: parts of him, anyway. Trudie was noisily sick in the corner of the room. I left her there, still sobbing and heaving.
A trail of bloody footprints led up the stairs from the second floor to the third. Imelda’s door had been torn loose and thrown across the landing where it lay, in two separate pieces, on the floor.
I went inside with my heart hammering a hectic, unsustainable beat like a schoolgirl’s skipping rope when she’s high on adrenalin and pushing it too far: about to fall, all tangled up in her own misjudgement; about to hit the asphalt one last and lasting time.
Imelda was in her kitchen, which had become an abattoir. Her head was in Lisa’s lap, and Lisa was in shock: exhausted and bullied by grief into some private place from which she didn’t stir when I came in.
But Imelda did stir. Amazingly, she wasn’t quite dead, though how a body could take so much damage, so much insult, and still not yield up the spirit it contained was a mystery beyond my fathoming.
She couldn’t speak. Judging from the blood that covered her lower face like a painted-on beard, Asmodeus had torn out her tongue. But she could move her right arm, just barely. She lifted it, like Atlas hefting the weight of the world. It trembled, but it stayed aloft while her chest rose and fell three times. Three last, agonising breaths.
She pointed at me.
And I nodded, accepting both the accusation and the challenge in those tortured, furious eyes.
You did this.
You talked to him, and he wound his lies around you.
You gave him to eat, and he grew stronger.
You let fools follow you here, and the fools set him free. Whatever they thought to do — whether to destroy him or to bind him faster — in their blind arrogance they set him free.
You killed me, Castor.
And now you have to kill your best friend.
about the author
Mike Carey is the acclaimed writer of Lucifer and Hellblazer (now filmed as Constantine). He has also written extended runs for Marvel’s fan-favourite titles X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, the comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and a movie screenplay, Frost Flowers, soon to be produced by Hadaly/Bluestar Pictures. He lives in London with his wife, Linda, also a novelist and screenwriter, their three children and a cat named Tasha.
For more information about Mike Carey visit www.mike-carey.co.uk
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interview
This is your fourth Felix Castor novel. Have you found the story branching off in areas you didn’t expect when you started or has everything gone exactly to plan?