Dead Men's s Boots

Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere for the maid to find when she came to turn the sheets over.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try: it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames, instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was just a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.

Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus for long enough to know what kind of moves demons favour and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done.

But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist, adapted to the terrain and the situation by whatever passed in Hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.

That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside – someone who was writing him briefing notes and giving him tips on strategy.

Take back-up: take lots of back-up. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do – and exactly whaÃandes t John had been calling me to arrange. Me, and maybe Stu Langley too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion and John had had to go in alone.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt.

I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor façade, but I saw someone else’s face staring back at me: John’s face, from my dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.

‘Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.

’

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

Maybe I had some back-up already: maybe John could pitch in for me in just the way I’d refused to do for him.

Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions – my favoured location for all flat valuables – until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria.