Vicious Circle (29 page)

A maître d’ whose suavity was a little dented by Juliet’s black-eyed gaze seated us in the window—no doubt seeing what kind of effect she was likely to have on the passing trade. As soon as he’d left, she reached into her pocket and took out a thick wad of paper, which she unfolded and put down on the table between us.

“Patterson, Alfred,” she said, fanning them out. “Heffer, Laurence. Heffer, John. Jones, Kenneth. Montgomery, Lily.”

It was a sheaf of photocopied pages, all in the same format. Each one had a passport-size photo in the top right-hand corner: mostly men, a few women, all ordinary to the point of banality. The faces stared up at me with the terrified solemnity you’d expect from people whose lives had just body-swerved away from them into insanity and despair.

“These are police
SIR
sheets,” I said.

Juliet nodded, looking at the menu.

“How did you get hold of them?”

“A nice young constable at Oldfield Lane ran them off for me.”

I thought very carefully about the wording of the next question. “Did you bribe him, or—?”

“I let him hold my hand.”

A waiter had started to hover: he was barely more than a kid, with ginger curls and plump, freckled cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off Juliet. Of course, better men than me have fallen at that hurdle. I looked up, tapped the table with my fingertip. After a moment he turned with a slight effort to meet my gaze, as if he was unwilling to acknowledge that I was there. “Can I get you any drinks to start with?” he asked, in an artificially bright tone.

“I’ll take a whisky,” I said. “A bourbon if you’ve got it.”

“We’ve got Jack Daniel’s and Blanton’s.”

“Blanton’s. Thanks. On the rocks.”

“Bloody Mary,” said Juliet, predictably. The waiter tore himself away from us with difficulty and trotted off, looking back over his shoulder at her a couple of times before he disappeared from view.

I went back to the incident forms. Some of them I vaguely recognized from the news articles I’d seen open on Nicky’s desktop last night. Alfred Patterson was charged with strangling a complete stranger with his own tie in an office off the Uxbridge Road where he used to work. The two Heffers, father and son, had apparently raped and murdered an eighty-year-old woman and then thrown her body into the Regent’s Canal. Some of them were new, though. Lily Montgomery had been arrested and remanded after police were called to a loud domestic: they found her sitting on the sofa quietly knitting next to her dead husband, who had choked to death on his own blood after his throat was perforated with two sharp objects entering from different sides. Her knitting needles were oozing half-congealed blood all over the baby booties she was making for her niece, Samantha, aged eleven months, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

There were more. A couple of dozen, at least. After a while I just skimmed them, noting place and time while avoiding the noxious, heartbreaking details in the summary box.

The waiter came back with our drinks. He almost spilled my bourbon in my lap because of the problem he was having with his eyes, which still kept being wrenched back to Juliet’s face and body whenever he let his concentration slip for more than half a second. We made our food orders, but it was kind of a triumph of hope over experience. The kid wasn’t writing anything down, and nothing was going to stick in his mind except the curve of Juliet’s breast where it showed through the ragged tear in her shirt.

He hobbled away again, and I shook my head at her. “Can’t you let him off the hook?” I asked.

She arched an eyebrow, mildly affronted. “He’s eighteen,” she said. “I’m not doing anything—that’s all natural.”

“Oh. Well, could you maybe go into reverse or something? Pour some psychic ice water over him? It’ll only improve the service.”

“ ‘Go into reverse.’ ” Juliet’s tone dripped with scorn. “You mean, suppress desire instead of arousing it?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

“Ow.” I mimed a gun with my right hand, shot myself through the heart. That brutal directness, so easily mistaken for sadism, is one of the things I like best about Juliet. She’s a good corrective to my own natural sentimentality and trusting good nature.

I turned my attention back to the
SIR
sheets, going through them a little more carefully this time.

“Okay,” I said. “I get the point. They’re all local, and the odds against this many violent incidents in such a small—”

I stopped because she was shaking her head very firmly.

“Well what?”

“This.” She tapped the bottom sheet, which I’d somehow managed to miss because it was in a different format and seemed to be just a list of names. I’d vaguely assumed it was an index of some kind, since some of the names were the same as the ones on the incident forms. Now I looked again, and the penny dropped. If the bourbon hadn’t already been exquisitely sour, it would have curdled in my stomach.

The list, which had been produced on a manual typewriter with the help of a small lake of Tipp-Ex, was headed with the single word “Congregants.”

“Holy shit,” I murmured.

“No, Castor. Unholy shit. That’s the point.”

“These people all go to church at St. Michael’s?”

Juliet nodded.

“And now they’ve all turned into homicidal maniacs.”

“That’s a question of semantics.”

“Is it?”

“If you call it insanity, you assume they’ve lost the ability to make moral judgments.”

“Raping pensioners? Knit one, pearl one, puncture windpipe? What do
you
think they’ve lost?”

“Their conscience. Whatever evil was inside them already has been given free rein. Whatever desires they feel, they satisfy by the simplest and most direct means they can find. If it’s lust, they rape; if it’s anger, they murder; if it’s greed, they pillage a shopping mall.”

“So you think those people at the Whiteleaf—?”

“I don’t think. I checked.”

She reached into the same bottomless pocket, brought out a small clutch of wallets and billfolds and let them fall onto the table. I suddenly remembered her on her knees next to one of the men she’d felled: I thought she was checking him for a pulse, but obviously she was frisking him.

“Jason Mills,” she said. “Howard Loughbridge. Ellen Roederer.”

I checked the list, but I already knew what I’d find there.

“And Susan Book,” I added, just to show that I was keeping up.

“And Susan Book. Of course.”

Our food arrived. The waiter drew the process out as long as he could, his eyes all over Juliet from every angle he could decently manage. I sat on my impatience until he’d gone.

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “All of these people were in church on Saturday, when . . . whatever it was that happened, happened? And it somehow turned off all of their inhibitions? All of their civilized scruples? Made them into puppets that can only respond to their own desires?”

Helping herself to some
mee goreng
that she hadn’t ordered, Juliet nodded curtly. “They’re possessed,” she said.

“What, all of them?”

“All of them. Do you read the Bible much, Castor?”

“Not when there’s anything good on the TV.”

“Commentaries and concordances? Textual exegesis?”

“To date, never.”

“So do you know what the Jewish position on Christ is?”

I shrugged impatiently, really not wanting to sit through what looked like it might be a very circuitous analogy. “I dunno,” I said. “They probably think he got in with the wrong crowd.”

“I mean, what exactly do they think he was? What
kind
of being?”

“I give up. Tell me.”

“They think he was a prophet. Like Elijah, or Moses. No more, no less. One in a long line. Someone who’d been touched by God, and could speak with God’s authority, but not God’s son.”

“So?”

“But Christians think that the indwelling of God in Christ was different in kind from his indwelling in the prophets.”

I took a long slug on the whisky, as an alternative to playing straight man. Presumably she’d get to the point without any prompting from me.

“As in heaven, so in hell,” she said. “When demons enter human souls, they can do it in a lot of different ways.” There was a pause while she ate, which she did with single-minded, almost feral enthusiasm. Then she fastidiously licked the corner of her mouth with a long, lithe, double-tipped tongue. That had made me shit a brick the first time I’d seen it. Nowadays I just wondered what else she could do with it besides personal grooming.

She held up an elegant hand, counted off on her fingers. Her fingernails shone with copper-colored varnish; or, possibly, just happened to be made of copper tonight. “First, and easiest, there’s full possession, in which the human host soul is overwhelmed and devoured, and the body becomes merely a vessel for the demon as long as it chooses to use it. That’s commoner than you’d think, but usually it can only be done with consent.”

“You mean people ask to have their souls swallowed?”

“Essentially, yes. They agree to a bargain of some kind. They accept the terms, and the terms include forfeiting their soul. Obviously they may have an imperfect understanding of what that means. An eternity of suffering in hell, or separation from God, or whatever the current orthodoxy is. But for us, it only ever means the one thing. It’s open season. We can eat them.”

Strong-stomached though I am, I was in danger of losing my appetite. She was enjoying this too damn much for my comfort.

“Who lays down the rules?” I demanded. “Open season implies someone dealing out the hunting licenses. Is that—?”

“There are some things I’m not prepared to tell you,” Juliet interrupted, making a pass through the air with her hand like someone waving away a paparazzo’s camera. “That’s one of them. But if you were going to say ‘Is that God?’ then the answer is no. It’s more . . . involved than that.”

“ ‘Involved’?”

“Complicated. Things fall out in a certain way, and accidents of the terrain give birth to rules of engagement. But in any case, that’s one form that possession can take—the most extreme form. The demon devours the human host and lives in its shell.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Go on.”

“Number two is house arrest. It’s possible for a demon to overwhelm a soul without its consent and hold it captive. Again, that would allow it to use the host body as if it were its own, but the human soul would still be inside, witnessing its own actions and even experiencing them, but as a passenger rather than a driver.”

“Fuck.” I let my laden chopsticks fall back into my pad thai. That was what Asmodeus did to Rafi: hijacked the bus and made him watch while he went on a joyride that was still going on two years later.

“One and two have a lot in common,” Juliet said, ignoring my discomfort. “They both involve the demon literally invading the human host. But there are other ways in which human and demon can be grafted together. Other degrees and gradations, I suppose you could say. At the opposite extreme, a demon can
gift
a man or woman with a tiny part of its own essence.”

“Gift?”

“Infect, if you prefer. Impart. Impose. Don’t argue semantics with me, Castor. You can’t expect me to have the same moral perspective on this that you have.”

“I guess not,” I acknowledged. “And yet, here you are.”

Juliet shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s a job.”

“Right. Like if bubonic plague was a woman, and she signed on as a charge nurse in a hospital.”

She actually laughed at that. “Yes. Exactly. Anyway, the point about gifting is that we can do it as many times as we like. It diminishes us a little, and that imposes a limit. A strong demon could gift a couple of hundred people at once, but it would be severely weakened afterwards. To get its full strength back, it would have to call all those pieces home eventually.”

“But in the meantime—?”

“In the meantime it would be as if each of those people had a tiny demon of their own, inside them—not controlling them, but encouraging them to see things from a more infernal perspective. And again, the stronger the demon, the more intense the persuasion. You might experience it just as a slight change in perceptions—so you’d suddenly be aware that if that traffic cop flags you down you could swerve just a little, hit him with your near-side wing, and give him something else to worry about. Or that if your girlfriend doesn’t want to kiss on a first date, drugging her and raping her is still an option.”

“Can I get you anything else?” The waiter had appeared again, assiduous as ever, like a dog who has to have a stick thrown for him every so often to stop him from humping your leg. I asked him to bring me another whisky; Juliet passed.

“Okay,” I said after he’d gone, “you’ve made your case. St. Michael’s was visited by a demon, and little pieces of this demon rained down on all the people who were there at the time. But the demon didn’t possess them fully: he’s still there, inside the church, in some form or other, which explains the cold and the slo-mo heartbeat and all of the rest of that shit.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Juliet.

“Just joining the dots. Isn’t that what you meant?”

Juliet downed her Bloody Mary in a single swallow. “It’s a possibility,” she said. “But I was giving you an example, not an explanation. Something possessed the St. Michael congregation, yes. Something strong enough to leave a piece of itself in each and every one of them. That could be a demon, but it wouldn’t have to be. Human ghosts can possess living things, after all—you’ve met the
were
.”

I nodded reluctantly, but I wasn’t sold on that explanation. “Yeah,” I agreed, “I have. And if there’s one thing I know about loup-garous, it’s that they go for animal hosts for a reason. Human minds are too hard—way too hard. You hear stories about that kind of possession, but I never came across a case yet where it’s been proved to have happened.”

“Then I might be about to make history.”

Her tone worried me. “I thought we were here to discuss strategy,” I said. “Looks like you’ve come up with a plan all by yourself.”