Mo moves farther around the house. A sense of foreboding gathers like static beneath the anvil cloud of a thunderstorm. Her heart is beating overly fast and her palms are clammy. She is certain that Bob’s phone is here, and where goes the phone goes the Bob. But this is not a good place. Suddenly she is acutely aware that she is on her own, the nearest backup ten minutes away.
Well, then.
There is a quiet click as she unfastens the latches of her instrument case. Moments later the bow is in her hand, the chinrest clamped between her jaw and shoulder. The case dangles before her chest, two compact speakers exposed. There’s a sticker on the back of the instrument. It reads: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS.
Mo walks towards the glass doors, on the indistinct shadows behind them, and touches her bow to the strings of the pallid instrument. There is a sound like a ghost’s dying wail as the strings begin to vibrate, blurring and glowing as they slice the air to shreds. “Open,” she says quietly, and as she sounds a chord the glass panes shatter simultaneously and the door frame warps towards her. She advances into the suburban dining room, playing raw and dissonant notes of silence to confront the horrors within.
THE BMW IS HALF A MILE AWAY WHEN PANIN LEANS FORWARD and taps his driver on the shoulder.
“Sir?” The driver glances at Panin’s reflection in his mirror.
A blank business card appears between Panin’s fingertips, twin to one Panin passed to an unwitting contact a couple of days ago. “Track this,” he says.
“Yes, sir.” The driver reaches back and takes the card, then places it on the dashboard in front of him. It glows faintly in the darkened interior of the car.
After a moment, they pull over, then the driver performs a U-turn and accelerates. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir…”
“Yes?” Panin looks up from the map book on his lap.
“Do you want me to call for backup?”
“When we know where we’re going, Dmitry. Patience.”
“Sir. Shouldn’t you have told…?”
“The wolf may not bite the hound, but that doesn’t make them friends. I intend to get there first, Dmitry. Wherever ‘there’ is.”
“Then I shall drive faster. Sir.” The saloon accelerates, heading south.
“HELLO, BOB, ” SAYS JONQUIL’S MUMMY, A SMILE CRINKLING the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes. “Oh dear, what did you do to your arm? Let me have a look at that.” She tuts over the state of Julian’s first-aid-very rough and ready, a wadded-up rugby sock held in place by tubigrip, now black with clotted blood. “You really ought to have taken the week off sick: overwork will be the death of you, you know.”
“Fuck off!” Fury and pain give way to a mix of disgust and self-contempt. I should have seen this coming.
“Do feel free to let it all hang out,” she tells me: “It’s not as if you’ve got anything to lose, is it?”
Damn Iris. She knows me well enough to get under my skin.
“You’ve been studying me, haven’t you?”
“Of course.” She glances over her shoulder. “You. Fetch the first-aid kit at once.” Back to me: “I’m sorry about… that.”
“Does your idiot daughter always go around chopping up strangers when you’re not around?”
“Yes,” she says calmly. “It runs in the family. I don’t think you have any grounds to complain, given what you did to poor Gareth. Would you like me to take those handcuffs off you? Don’t get any silly ideas about escaping: the guards upstairs will shoot anyone they don’t recognize.”
“I didn’t do anything to Gareth,” I say as she pulls out a key and holds it up in front of me between two black-gloved fingers: “If he hadn’t meddled-” I stop. There’s no point arguing. “What do you want from me?”
“Your cooperation, for the time being. Nothing more, nothing less.” There’s a click, and my right wrist flops free. My arm flares for a moment, and I nearly black out. “That looks painful. Would you like something for it?” I don’t remember nodding, but a subjective moment later I’m sitting up on the trolley and someone I can’t see is leaning over me with a syringe. It stings, cold as it goes in-then my arm begins to fade, startlingly fast. “It’s just morphine, Bob. Say if you need some more.”
“Morph-” I’m nodding. “What do you want?”
“Come and sit with me,” she says, beckoning. An unseen minion lifts me with an arm under my left shoulder and guides me towards one of two reclining leather armchairs in the middle of a dim pool of light on the flagstones-Flagstones? Where are we? “And I’ll explain.”
I fade in and out for a bit. When I’m back again, I find I’m sitting in one of the chairs. There’s a tight bandage on my right arm, with something that isn’t a rugby sock under it. My hands are lying on the armrests, un-cuffed, although I’ve got sore red bands where the metal cut into my wrists. I can feel my fingers, mostly-I can even make them flex. And for the first time in hours, my arm isn’t killing me. I’m aware of the pain, but it feels as if it’s on the other side of a thick woolen blanket.
Iris is sitting in the other chair, holding an oddly shaped cup made of what looks like yellow plastic, watching me. She’s put her hair up and changed from her usual office casual into what my finely-tuned fashion sense suggests is either a late-Victorian mourning gown or a cultist priestess’s robes. Or maybe she’s just come from a goth nightclub with a really strict dress code.
I stare past her. We’re in a cellar, sure enough-one designed by an architect from the C of E school of baroque cathedral design. It’s all vaulted arches and flying buttresses, carved stone and heavy wooden partitions cutting us off from darkened naves and tunnels. Just like being in church, except for the lack of windows. Putti and angels flutter towards the shadowy ceiling. There are rows of oak pews, blackened with age. “Where are we?” I ask.
“We’re in the underground chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights,” she says. “They had an overground chapel, too, but this one is more private.”
“More p-” I stop. “Were the ancient whatevers a cover organization by any chance? For a brotherhood of a different hue?”
Iris seems amused by the idea. “Hardly! They were purged in the 1890s, but nobody found the way down to this cellar. We had rather a lot of cleaning up to do, interminable reconsecrations and exorcisms before we could dedicate the chapel to its true calling.” She pulls a face. “Skull worshipers.”
Skull worshipers? Does she mean…? Oh dear. There are as many species of cultists as there are dark entities for them to wank over. If this place has a history of uncanny worship going back a century and a half, then it’s a place of power indeed-and that’s before you take into account its location inside a huge graveyard, at one end of a ley line leading into the heart of London that was traversed by tens of thousands of dead over a period of nearly a hundred years. The whole thing has got to be a gigantic necromantic capacitor. “So it was vacant and your people moved in?”
“More or less, yes.”
“You people being, hmm. Officially, the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom? Or unofficially…?”
She shakes her head. “The Free Church aren’t terribly useful over here-the British aversion to wearing one’s religion on one’s sleeve, you know. We’d get lots of very funny looks indeed if we went around fondling snakes and preaching the prosperity gospel-even though that sort of thing is de rigueur for stockbrokers. No: on this side of the pond we mostly use local Conservative and Unionist Party branches. And some Labour groups, we’re not fussy.”
Enlightenment dawns, and it’s not welcome. Firstly, the Tory grass-roots are notorious for their bloody-minded independence-their local branches pretty much run themselves. And secondly, political leverage… Isn’t the Prime Minister very big on community and faith-based initiatives? Oh dear fucking hell…