Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘Some woman named Pax. She called lots of times. She said she had some news for you.’

Trudie could keep on stewing. There was nothing she could tell me that I wanted to hear. Her heart belonged to Mother Church, and I wasn’t interested in the rest of her, shapely though it undoubtedly was.

‘What else?’

‘Someone from the Brent Library Service. A woman . . .’

‘Susan Book.’

‘Sounds about right.’

That was more interesting. Susan is married to Juliet, and Juliet is always interesting, just by virtue of being Juliet.

‘And Gary Coldwood,’ Pen finished up. ‘He rang just now, but he couldn’t stay on.’

‘How come?’

‘He said he was on his way to a murder scene. And he wanted you to read it for him.’

Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.

‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.

‘Yeah,’ Coldwood confirmed with a laconic nod. ‘I note the pained emphasis, Castor. I know Pen Bruckner is the only woman who deserves that label in your book, but this is all ancient history now. Ginny Parris was named on the incident sheet when Ditko was first brought into the Stanger for psych evaluation. Her statement was still there in the paperwork, and that’s how she described herself. Relationship to patient: girlfriend.’

He stared at me for a moment, as if he was expecting me to argue the point. It was the last thing on my mind.

‘So,’ I said, my casual tone sounding hollow even to me, ‘did your forensics boys come up with anything?’

Gary shrugged with his eyebrows. ‘They took prints,’ he said.

‘From where?’

‘The door. The broken table. The light. Even a good virtual from the dead woman’s throat. Whoever it was didn’t go out of his way to be discreet.’

‘Whoever it was?’ I must have sounded like I was clutching at straws.

Coldwood’s eyebrows rose and fell in a virtual shrug. ‘We haven’t had a chance to match them yet,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Ditko’s prints are on file. If it was him, we should get a positive in the next couple of minutes.’

He looked past me towards the door. ‘So he comes in through the door,’ he said didactically. ‘We’ll assume it’s a he. He doesn’t force it. Doesn’t have to. Left hand on the knob, which is consistent with using a key. Smeared print on the lintel above the door, which we’re taking to mean . . .’

‘That’s where she kept the spare,’ I said.

Coldwood smiled dryly. ‘You’ve got a larcenous mind, Fix.’

‘I keep the wrong company. Coppers, mainly.’

Gary let the insult slide, turning his head as his gaze travelled from the door to the broken table and then on to the bed. ‘She hasn’t heard him yet. Most likely she’s asleep. He walks towards her. Maybe he smashes the table then, to wake her up, to get her attention. Maybe he just says her name. But she hears something anyway, and she reaches out for the light.’ He glanced down at the bedside lamp lying on its side on the floor: its feeble little pool of radiance reminded me of a votive candle in a funeral chapel. ‘She turns the lamp on, but her hand slips – probably she’s panicking a little. The lamp falls but doesn’t break. She can see him now. Her gentleman caller – again, just for the sake of argument. He doesn’t touch the lamp himself. No prints of his anywhere around there. So evidently he doesn’t mind being seen.’

Coldwood turned again, to look at the window. My gaze followed his, and a little bile rose in my throat as I stared at Ginny’s broken body.

‘The fingerprints on the throat were a telling little detail,’ Coldwood ruminated. ‘I mean, given that the cause of death wasn’t strangulation. It ties in with what you said about him being in here with her for a long time. He held her by the throat, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Not straight away.’

‘You don’t know that.’

Gary was measuring angles with his eye, his head turning to the bed, to the window, back to the bed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if it’s Ditko we do. Because he could have snapped her neck one-handed in half a second. He might have been giving her a shiatsu massage, or intimidating her, or feeling for a pulse, or doing pretty much anything else, but the one thing he wasn’t doing right then was killing her. So . . .’

He paced out the distance from the corpse to the bed, walking around the tangle of bedclothes.

‘So there was something else,’ I finished. ‘Something he did first. Or tried to do.’

‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Gary knelt at the head of the bed, staring at the headboard. I’d only just noticed that there was blood on it, and on the pillows beneath it. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing.

I thought of the emotions – recent, strong – that hung in the air of the room like a visible fog. Fear had been the most vivid of all, but hope had been in the mix too. Ginny Parris knew what Rafi was now: who he bunked with. But at least once after she woke up and realised she wasn’t alone in the room, she had thought she might make it out of this alive. What did that mean? That she saw Rafi, as well as Asmodeus? Spoke to him?

I tried to piece it together in my mind.

‘He was holding her still,’ I said tentatively. ‘Maybe while he talked to her.’

‘About what?’

‘No idea. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. But whatever they were doing, he started to get angry. The blood on the headboard means she was injured here, right?’

‘Lesion to the back of the head. Lots of superimposed lacerations.’ Gary smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Bang, bang, bang. Then he lets go of her, and she runs. But for the window. Why not the door?’

I ignored the question because I was still thinking about the previous one. If it was Rafi – Asmodeus – then what would he want to talk to Ginny about? Would she still have connections among Fanke’s all-American satanists? Fanke himself was dead, but did she still subscribe to the newsletter? Attend the AGM? Was he shaking her down for a phone number or an address? That didn’t feel right, somehow. Surely Asmodeus would have better ways of making contact with the necromantic fraternity than dropping in on Rafi’s ex? And if he wanted to send a message, he’d probably have had enough self-control not to shoot the messenger.

‘She runs,’ I agreed. ‘And he kills her. Without a second thought. So either he’s already got what he came for by this time, or else he knows it’s not here. Or maybe he’s lost interest. Anyway, for whatever reason, it’s game over now. He . . .’ I didn’t finish the sentence. I just nodded toward the broken table.

‘We’re three storeys up,’ Gary persisted. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t head for the door.’

‘He was between her and the door,’ I pointed out, but that was only half the answer. She knew she couldn’t fall forty feet to the ground and walk away. She didn’t care. She had to get out of this room, and away from the thing that had come for her. Even death must have seemed better than the alternative right then. No, cancel that: death was on the cards either way. She just wanted to meet it on her own terms, without any help from the thing that was wearing her former lover like a glove puppet.

The opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ sounded in the room. Gary fished about in his pocket and came up with his mobile.

‘Hello?’ he said into the phone, and then, ‘Right. Thanks. Keep me posted.’ The voice at the other end of the line gabbled, sounding – as voices at the other end of the line always do – like a sound effect from a 1940s Looney Tunes cartoon. Gary frowned. ‘What? What’s that supposed to mean? Well put him on then. No. No, I’m still at the effing crime scene. I’ll come in when I’m done here, not before.’