Dead Men's s Boots

Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. Answering a panicked phone call from Rafi’s girlfriend, Ginny, I’d found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.

And then a few months ago, when I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price – letting Asmodeus loose on Earth – had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen understood: actually I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.

Pen – Pamela Elisa Bruckner – is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex a whole lot of other things, one way and another. And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together. The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months earlier in which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now Webb had formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane to get rid of Rafi, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead, where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie – replete with ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire – didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and I had to work together to clog her works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.

Meanwhile the war – if it was a war – was still in the ‘cold’ phase. Maybe that was only to be expected when the enemy were the dead.

I’d had more than enough of the legal profession to last me for one day, but a promise is a promise, even if your arm is halfway up your back while you’re giving it. I could have just called, but I needed to pick up some silver amalgam from a dentists’ supplier’s in Manor House, so Stoke Newington was almost on my way.

The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay turned out to be in a converted Victorian court built in chocolate-coloured brick, on the corner of a slightly drab row of terraces from a later era. There were window boxes on either side of the door, painted bright blue, but they contained nothing except bare soil. No flowers at this time of year.

The front door was pretty bare too: no wards, no sigils, no come-nots or stay-nots. Maybe the evil dead avoided lawyers out of professional courtesy, like sharks are supposed to do. I walked in off the street and found myself in a small reception area which, judging from its modest dimensions, must originally have been the front hall of a house. A wide, elbowed staircase took up a good half of the available space: what was left was dominated by a large venerable-looking photocopier. The inspection covers had been removed from the machine and were stacked up against the wall: an enormously fat, enormously pale bald man was on his knees in front of it, one hand thrust into its innards up to the elbow, looking like a vet trying to assist with a difficult birth. He glanced up at me as I entered, and then kept on staring as if he was trying to place the face. He had a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his half-open mouth hung down at the corners like a melting clock in a painting by Salvador Dali. A young brunette sitting at the reception desk in under the stairs watched him work with more attention than a busted photocopier seemed to merit. Maybe it was a slow day.

‘I’m here to speak to Mister Todd,’ I said to her as she pulled her attention away from the exhibition of mechanical midwifery. ‘I called earlier. Felix Castor.’

She ran her finger down the very full columns of a double-width appointment book. ‘Felix Castor,’ she confirmed. ‘Yes. Please take a seat.’

There were several, so I took the one furthest away from Mister Fix-It, picked up yesterday’s Times and started to flick through it as the receptionist called upstairs. I glanced across at the fat man once, out of the corner of my eye: he was still on his knees and he was stilttyd he wal looking at me, although when I caught him at it he dropped his gaze to the ground with a slight grimace and went back to the job in hand.

‘Any luck, Leonard?’ the receptionist asked.