Thicker Than Water Page 34

  Trudie ignored the finger, took the threat without flinching. ‘We all want what’s best for William,’ she said.

  ‘Billy,’ Jean muttered caustically, turning back to me. ‘His name is Billy. So what’s the plan, Mister Castor? What have you thought of?’

  So it was time to bite the bullet: time to put up or shut up. And like the cowardly bastard that I am, I lied.

  ‘There’s another doctor,’ I said. ‘Only a little way from here. He’s kind of an expert in stuff like this, and he owes me a favour.’

  Tom and Jean looked doubtful.

  ‘An expert?’ Tom repeated. ‘In . . . what Billy’s got? In this possession stuff?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Jean demanded.

  ‘You won’t have heard of him,’ I assured her, but she continued to stare at me, half-hopeful and half-perturbed but with the balance definitely tilting.

  ‘Ditko,’ I said. ‘Doctor Rafael Ditko.’

  20

  When we reported back to Gwillam, he was still pretty sour about the whole deal.

  ‘You realise,’ he warned me, ‘that in trying to control this menace you run the very real risk of unleashing a greater one?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I know that. And if you can come up with an alternative plan that doesn’t involve Asmodeus, then say so. Otherwise, I’m going ahead.’

  The priest gave me a hard, pained look. ‘This situation . . .’ he said, and then seemed to run out of words.

  ‘You were happy with the situation when Rafi was at the Stanger,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yes. Because we were able to monitor him for ourselves. Now you have him somewhere else, and we’ve only got your word for it that the protections you have in place are adequate to hold Asmodeus in check.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gwillam bridled. ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve only got my word for it. And that’s all you’re going to get. Now, are we doing this or not?’

  He stared me down for another few seconds, then gave a curt nod and walked away.

  But it was a while before we hit the road, even then. Getting myself and Trudie Pax to Imelda’s without letting the Anathemata woman see the route we took was fiddly in the extreme, and wasted the best part of an hour. I had to get Gwillam to commandeer a car, then I had to refuse it because while we were waiting for it to arrive I realised that it would be too easy for him to slip some kind of a locator into it. Hell, he didn’t even have to: these days a mobile phone would do, assuming Trudie was carrying one.

  So I went with Plan B, which involved bringing Nicky into the mix. He’s a paranoiac’s paranoiac, and I’d already seen how deeply the idea of shafting Gwillam appealed to him. When I called him and asked him how we should handle this, he only pondered for a couple of minutes.

  ‘I’m sending a friend,’ he said. ‘Be ready. His name’s Cheadle, and he does good work. I mean, he’s scarily focused. He’ll need paying, though.’

  ‘How much?’ I asked, briefly thrown as I tried to imagine what ‘scarily focused’ would mean to a mind like Nicky’s. The money didn’t matter - Gwillam was going to have to foot the bill because I was a pocketful of small change away from being dead broke - but I wanted to know what to ask for.

  ‘A couple of ton, let’s say. And a contribution to the widows and orphans fund.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s a gratuity, Castor. You keep the man sweet, he doesn’t make any widows or orphans.’

  I passed the word along the line, and Gwillam gave his sour, begrudging assent. ‘You already have my word,’ he told me coldly. ‘That ought to be enough for you, Castor. I’m a man of God, and a man of conscience.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘And this would be what they call a leap of faith on my part, right? Much valued in religious circles, but elsewhere, poking the bear trap with a stick before you put your foot in it is generally preferred.’

  Cheadle drove up ten minutes later in a red Bedford van with DRAINS AND SEWAGE emblazoned on the side in eye-hurting neon yellow. He didn’t park out on the street: he drove the van up the shallow steps onto the forecourt and slowed to a halt right in front of us, jumping rather than stepping down from the driver’s seat and sizing us up with bullet-grey eyes.

  He was a small but very solid man with the kind of natural surliness that dries up small talk over a range of ten metres. He wore shapeless clothes that looked as though they might be made of moleskin, with a few moles still along for the ride. His hair was white, with a nicotine smear of light brown at the front. He carried a small rucksack in his hand by one strap, the other dangling broken.

  ‘Who’s Castor?’ he said, looking around.

  I put up my hand like a schoolboy.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You ride in the front. I’ve got the route worked out already, so you don’t have to say anything. Where’s the other one?’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Trudie Pax.

  ‘Then get your kit off,’ said Cheadle, dumping the rucksack down on the ground, ‘and put this lot on.’

  Her eyes slightly wider than before, Trudie picked up the bag and examined the contents.

  ‘It’s new,’ Cheadle assured her. ‘I picked it up from the cash-and-carry on the way here. Extra large. If it’s too big, it doesn’t matter. You can just roll the sleeves and the legs up.’

  ‘I’ll need somewhere private to change,’ Trudie said.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Cheadle demurred. ‘You’ll do it right here. You can keep your underwear on, and it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. But no pockets, no hoods, no buttons or zips. That’s the deal, love. Take it or leave it.’

  Gwillam nodded and Trudie stripped. You can say what you like about religious fanatics, but they show a dedication to the cause that’s nothing short of admirable. Some of them have very shapely bottoms, too, I couldn’t help but notice.

  The contents of the rucksack turned out to be a baggy sky-blue tracksuit with a Nike swoosh on the front that was fooling nobody. Sweatshop chic. Trudie put it on without complaint, and then reached for one of her boots.

  ‘No shoes, neither,’ said Cheadle. ‘It’s a warm night, love. You’re not going to catch cold. Now let’s have a look at you.’

  From a side pocket of the rucksack he took a hand-held electronic reader - to my untrained eye, it looked identical to the ones that the security guys at airports use - and played it over Trudie from head to foot while she stood there with her arms folded, staring at the ground. Her face was carefully blank: if she was feeling humiliated and resentful because of all of this, she wasn’t showing it.

  ‘Okay, said Cheadle, ‘you’re clean. Let’s go.’

  ‘I need to bring the boy down,’ I told him. ‘Bic. Did Nicky explain about that part?’

  Cheadle shrugged, already turning his back on me. ‘I didn’t ask him to. He told me there was three of you, and to bring something for the kid to lie on. All I needed to know. You do what you have to do, I’ll get our lady friend set up in the back. Come on, love.’

  He led Trudie round to the back of the van and threw the doors open. I went upstairs and collected Bic from his parents.

  ‘You’ll keep him safe,’ Jean said as I hefted him in my arms - her tone halfway between a plea and a warning.

  ‘Scout’s honour,’ I said. ‘Trust me, Jean. I’m not letting anyone hurt him.’ Or at least, it would be over my dead body - and probably a couple of others.

  Bic weighed next to nothing: I could probably have carried him one-handed. But my ribs were reminding me of the hard time they’d had of it lately, and I had to pause and get my breath back when I got to the bottom of the eight flights and came out onto the concrete apron. Cheadle was waiting in the van, Gwillam’s stooges standing in a cluster looking tough because there was fuck-all else they could do.

  Cheadle opened the back door of the van for me. I stopped dead, staring inside. Trudie was cross-legged on the floor, her arms handcuffed behind her back.
He’d put something over her head that looked very like a bondage rig: a helmet with a rubber face mask attached, the whole thing secured under her chin and around her neck with two thick straps. There were no eyeholes in the mask.

  ‘Can she breathe?’ I asked.

  ‘Course she can breathe,’ Cheadle snapped. ‘She just can’t effing see, is all. The kid goes there.’

  He pointed to a bare and maculate mattress thrown down diagonally across the floor of the van. I leaned forward and laid Bic down on it carefully. He was still twitching and muttering, but he never even came close to waking. I wished I’d remembered to bring a blanket. Cheadle was right, the night was warm enough to make blankets unnecessary: it would just have made this feel less like a kidnapping.

  Cheadle slammed the door shut and I went round to the passenger side.

  ‘Trudie is in your safe keeping, Castor,’ Gwillam reminded me. ‘No less than the boy.’

  I nodded, acknowledging the point. ‘We should be back inside of an hour,’ I said. ‘One way or another. Be ready for us. I want to get this over with. And Gwillam - if we’re followed, we stop. No second chances.’

  I climbed into the passenger seat and there was a solid metallic chunking sound as Cheadle reached down to lock the doors from his side.

  ‘You got a mobile on you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

  ‘Turn it off. They might not know your number, but if they do you might just as well be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Better put it in there, for the duration.’ He pointed down to a box at my feet. I’d taken it to be a toolbox but when I opened it, it proved to have thicker sides than that, the interior space small and cluttered. Cluttered with telecommunications gear, mainly: esoteric stuff whose purposes I didn’t know and didn’t care to guess: there were even some naked circuit boards.

  ‘Right,’ said Cheadle, ‘we’re off.’

  He backed down the steps again, bumpity bumpity bump, and reversed out onto the road.

  ‘Is Trudie going to be okay back there?’ I asked.

  He threw the briefest of glances towards the back of the van. ‘Should be,’ he said. ‘So long as she hadn’t got any inner-ear problems.’ There was an observation window which presumably opened into the van’s rear space, but when I went to open it Cheadle put his hand on mine and shook his head.

  ‘No no no. The magical mystery tour is waiting to take her away. This is a full professional service, satisfaction guaranteed, and we put the blanket over the top of the cage so the little birdie can sleep. You got my money?’

  I handed over the notes that Gwillam had magicked up from somewhere. Cheadle fanned them out and nodded, apparently satisfied.

  We drove around South London for forty minutes, taking every alley and back crack that Cheadle could find. He turned the radio on, but only a dull bass-line thudding came out of it.

  ‘Your speakers are bust,’ I said.

  ‘Nope,’ Cheadle replied. ‘They work all right - but they’re mounted in the back of the van. If her indoors is trying to figure out where we’re going by the sounds of the city, she’ll have her work cut out for her. As for you and me, well, we’ll have to make do with witty repartee, won’t we?’

  That turned out to mean dead silence. I sat back and watched him work.

  It wasn’t just a case of randomly tacking across the city. He was checking for tails, too, his eyes on the rear-view mirror for so much of the time that I was really afraid we were going to hit something. At one point he stopped, took his own phone out of the reinforced box, turned it on and made a call. He didn’t speak but he listened for half a minute, then turned it off and replaced it.

  ‘You do this sort of thing a lot?’ I asked, as we drove down Camberwell Church Street.

  Cheadle made a tutting sound. ‘I do what I’m paid to do.’

  ‘Nicky said you’d worked for him before,’ I observed.

  ‘I don’t know any Nicky,’ Cheadle said shortly, in a tone that made it clear that further questions would not be welcomed.

  We rolled up to Imelda’s place just as the moon rose, so I guess I’d put the time at about one in the morning. Cheadle waited at the back of the van, leaning against the doors, while I went around the back and up the stairs to talk to Imelda.

  She wouldn’t have been happy to see me even if my knocking hadn’t got her out of bed. She wrapped her tent-like floral-patterned nightgown around her and stared me down with a face like a volley of small-arms fire.

  ‘We had this conversation, Castor,’ she growled.

  ‘We did,’ I admitted. ‘But the situation has changed, Imelda. A kid’s life is at stake. You have to let me do this.’

  It was - I admit it - a cheap shot. But it was the obvious cheap shot, and I’m way too cheap not to take it when it offers. Imelda is a mother herself, and Lisa is the one thing in her life that she can’t be hard-bitten and cynical about.

  So I told her about Bic, and I let her make the call. That’s how big a bastard I am.

  Five minutes later she was unlocking Rafi’s door, having previously removed the wards from it. Trudie was with us: Cheadle had freed her hands, but she still wore the helmet and mask. Rafi stared at us in blank amazement as we trooped into the room: me first, with Bic in my arms: then Cheadle, steering Trudie by her shoulders; and Imelda last of all, her expression somewhere close to hangdog.

  More explanations, while Trudie sat like a slightly kinky version of Blind Justice on a chair in a corner of the room, and Bic lay moaning and murmuring on the couch. Rafi was unhappy, and scared. Since he’d moved in here, he’d got used to being the only inhabitant of his own brain, and I was proposing to wake up the sleeping sub-letter with a vengeance.

  ‘Is there no other way of doing this?’ he asked.

  ‘None that I can think of,’ I said. ‘But believe me, Rafi, I’m open to suggestions.’

  Rafi looked to Imelda in mute appeal, and Imelda shook her head: the rock, crying out no hiding place. ‘If you’re asking me if this is safe,’ she said sternly, ‘then, honey, I’m going to have to tell you I don’t know. Castor and me have been up to the job so far, more or less - kept that nasty little thing under his rock most of the time. But this is different. We’re waking him up and we’re letting him off the leash. Whether we can put him down again afterwards is a blue-breezing blind guess, and anyone who’d tell you any different would be lying.’

  ‘But it’s not just the two of us this time,’ I pointed out.

  Imelda looked at Trudie, who was missing all the finer points here because of the BDSM harness.

  ‘Can you let her out of that thing now?’ Imelda asked Cheadle.

  ‘No,’ Cheadle answered shortly. ‘But you can. I don’t mind what you do here in this room, so long as she’s all wrapped up in the ribbons and bows again when we come to leave. I’ll be waiting at the bottom of the stairs. And you can tell madam that if she comes down them with her eyes open, I’ll bounce five pounds of loose change off the back of her neck. She might survive the experience, but she won’t appreciate it.’

  He left without further ceremony. Imelda helped me to undo the straps and we removed the mask from Trudie’s flushed, sweating face. ‘Thank God!’ she said. ‘I thought I was going to suffocate in—’ She broke off, staring hard at Rafi. After a moment or two, she crossed herself: four short, decisive jabs of her right hand, which she then clenched into a fist.

  ‘The abomination,’ she said.

  ‘I go by Rafi,’ Rafi answered bleakly.

  Trudie nodded. ‘I know. You’re only the vessel. I’ve heard of you, of course. We have . . . briefing materials on you. At one time there was talk of killing you, but the prevailing opinion in the society was that Asmodeus would survive, and then he’d be free to choose another vessel. So we left you as you were.’

  In the charged silence that followed this pronouncement, she looked from face to face.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That was tactless, right? I’m sorry. I’ll shut
up until I’m spoken to.’

  ‘We’re about to wake - the abomination,’ I told her. ‘And we want to make sure we can keep him contained. Not to mention putting him back to sleep again afterwards. Any ideas?’

  ‘Intravenous silver oxide,’ she said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  I patted my coat pockets theatrically, searched a couple randomly and shrugged, coming up empty.

  ‘Well, you did insist I change out of my regular clothes,’ Trudie said, in a slightly truculent tone. ‘Wards, then. Lots of them. On the doors and on the walls and probably on his flesh, too.’

  ‘Wards keep him down if he starts from down,’ Imelda objected. ‘They’re not going to slow him much once he’s up and running. He’s too old and he’s too sly. Let you nail a thousand signs to him, he’s still going to find a way to slip in between them and come for you.’

  ‘A pentagram, then,’ Trudie said.

  We all stared at her.

  ‘You can draw a pentagram?’ I demanded.

  She seemed surprised at my surprise. ‘Of course.’ ‘With all the whistles and bells?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Why not?’

  ‘You’ve had a slightly more catholic education than I would have expected,’ I said. ‘Small c.’

  ‘We use whatever methods work.’ Trudie’s tone was cold, as though I’d accused her of sleeping with the enemy. ‘We’re soldiers, Castor, not pastors or contemplatives. We’ve got a different brief.’

  ‘Evidently.’ I looked at Imelda, who nodded curtly, and Rafi, who gave a resigned and helpless shrug.

  ‘Black magic is how I got into this fucking mess in the first place,’ he said, with a touch of bitterness. ‘Don’t ask me for an opinion.’ He paused, swallowed, shrugged again. ‘I don’t want the kid to die any more than you do. If this is what it takes, then go for it. But if Asmodeus rips your throats out, try not to bleed on my Kerouacs.’

  ‘A magic circle it is, then. Let’s go.’

  Imelda went and got some chalk while Rafi, Trudie and

  I moved the furniture and rolled the carpets back. Bic roused a little when we rolled the couch to the wall, staring at us with slightly more focused eyes.