The Demon Code (23 page)

Tillman crossed the room to examine the other bloodstains. There were fewer of them and they told a different story. A wide sprinkle of near-invisibly small flecks, irregularly distributed with wide gaps: a blow to upper body or more likely to the head, in a space where objects – objects no longer present – occluded the blood spatter. He saw a fast, furious fight, a lucky or well-aimed blow breaking the septum of one fighter’s nose, or else a cut to the cheek or forehead.

On the wall immediately behind the blood spatter there was an area of damage, a roughly circular area, just below Tillman’s head height, where something had smashed into the plaster hard enough to leave an impact crater. Someone’s fist, or the back of someone’s head.

Now that he could see how narrow and restricted a space this was, he marvelled all over again at the skill the unknown girl had shown. To take down two armed opponents, when one of them is already pointing a gun at you … that’s something of a challenge even when you’ve got all the free space you could wish for. In this small bedroom, where the battlefield included the splayed body of the woman she’d come to rescue, it was only a hair’s breadth short of a miracle.

But she had one advantage over them. She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Something brightly coloured caught Tillman’s gaze, tucked right up under the bed where it would have been invisible from most angles. He knelt and retrieved it. It was a torn corner of glossy paper, showing part of a photograph, the curve of a woman’s breast and part of her shoulder.

Not just helplessness. Her disguise had gone further than that. Knowing she was dealing with – what? Ascetics? Misogynists? Religious zealots? All of the above seemed to fit the bill – she’d armoured herself in unrighteousness and carried her Taser into the room behind the makeshift screen of a pornographic magazine.

So where had she gotten it? Tillman looked around, found the rest of the skin-mag where it had fallen or been thrown behind a chest of drawers.
Bush League
.
Hot amazon action. Mandy and Celeste get dirty with toys – and boys!
There was no price sticker, nothing to provide a clue as to the magazine’s origin.

He backtracked into the hall, flicking the flashlight around the floor. After a few moments he found a wrinkled skein of torn shrink-wrap. At one corner was a green label, smearily printed with the words
US hardcore: only £3.99
.

Paydirt. So to speak. This was a local product, snatched up to meet the needs of the occasion.

Tillman found the shop around the corner in Fynes Street. It called itself a newsagents, confectioner’s and tobacconist’s, but it was also a general store in a half-hearted way, boasting a single shelf unit stacked with tins of baked beans, Green Giant sweetcorn, Vesta curry sauces, digestive biscuits and bottles of washing-up liquid old enough to have wept fluorescent green tears a third of the way down their plastic sides. One wall, behind the counter, was stacked high with cigarettes. The wall opposite was a magazine rack, whose top two shelves were a cornucopia of T&A. A closed-circuit camera on a jointed steel arm leaned down from the ceiling at a crazy angle. The angle was because the housing was loose and the supposedly tamper-proof unit had slid halfway out of it – but it looked as though the camera was in the grip of a voyeuristic impulse, coming in close to ogle the porn.

Between the cigarettes and the magazines sat a bored, flabby man with thick glasses and a pock-scarred, glassy-eyed face. He was slumped in on himself as though he was cowering away from his own cash register. Then Tillman realised that both the man’s expression and his posture had the same explanation. He was watching a tiny portable TV, an antique model shaped like a rectangular telescope. The TV spoke in waves of murmured static, but presumably there were words or music of some kind underneath.

‘You sell this?’ Tillman asked the man. He held up the magazine and the man leaned forward to peer at it. He kept looking for a lot longer than seemed necessary, first taking in the cover image and then – judging by the movements of his eyes – reading not just the title but also the rest of the copy.

‘Could be,’ he said at last. ‘We sell a lot of ’em.’

‘Mostly to men, though,’ Tillman said. ‘Right?’

The man switched his gaze from the passionately entwined amazons to Tillman’s face.

‘Of course to men,’ he said. ‘I don’t sell to kids, do I? Are you from the council?’

‘No, I’m not. Were you working here last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Until midnight?’

‘We’re open all hours. It says so on the sign.’

‘Well, last night you sold this to a woman. A young woman.’

The man blinked and his Adam’s apple bobbed a little. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Her. All right, yeah. I remember now.’

‘What do you remember?’ Tillman asked.

‘Sour-faced little madam, wasn’t she.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I tried to have a bit of a laugh with her. I can’t remember what I said, but something harmless, you know. Something a bit light-hearted. And she give me a look like I was something under her shoe.’

‘Kids of today, eh?’ Tillman said, stony-faced. ‘So does that thing work?’ he nodded up towards the camera, and the shopkeeper followed his gaze.

‘Yeah, it works.’

‘And it was working last night?’

‘It’s on all the time. It’s on a loop.’

‘I’d like to take a look at the tape.’

The man looked scandalised. ‘I can’t do that. My customers value their privacy.’

‘Is that why they buy their porn in a sweet shop? What if I told you she was underage?’

A flicker of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, but he rallied quickly. ‘I asked her to show ID,’ he said. ‘It looked good enough to me.’

‘And that’s on the tape too, is it?’ Tillman asked.

‘It … I … yes … I think, that might have been on another occasion, when she …’ the man floundered, looking for a safe haven to sail his white lie into.

‘I’m not from the council,’ Tillman said. ‘And I don’t care what you sold her. I’m just her social worker and I want to make sure it was actually her. Show me the tape, I’m on my way.’

‘It’s digital,’ the man said. ‘On a disc. I don’t understand it myself. I’ll have to get our Kevin.’

Tillman nodded. ‘Good call,’ he said.

The screen on the portable TV was about three inches square and the picture was every bit as good as the sound. It offered a glimpse into a fragile, beleaguered world, canted slightly off the true and periodically overwhelmed by waves of interference like pixellated blizzards.

The slight, speechless teenager who answered – or more usually failed to answer – to ‘our Kevin’ messed with the controls on the TV, the playback machine, the TV again. The picture swam into and out of focus, but after a while it was obvious that sharpening it up any further would just add more contrast rather than more detail. They fast-forwarded through the previous day’s footage, telescoping twelve hours of lived time into a couple of minutes of jerky stop-motion. The man with the bottle-glass spectacles seemed to have been on duty for the whole of that time, apart from a couple of toilet breaks lasting four or five frames each, during which his part was played by our Kevin.

‘There,’ the man said at last, jabbing his stubby index finger at the screen.

Kevin froze the image, but he froze it between frames, so that the girl danced in and out of the shop’s entrance, her foot over the threshold, then back, then over it again. The boy swore to himself a little, pressing PLAY and PAUSE alternately until the image stabilised.

But the resolution was so bad that freezing the picture just removed one layer of information. Tillman reached past Kevin and hit PLAY again, watching the whole short sequence through from start to finish. You could tell more about the girl while she was in motion. There was a care and an economy in her movements, the tightness of a coiled spring, or of a dancer waiting for her cue.

He rewound to the beginning, watched again as the girl entered the shop, picked up the magazine – after a quick, detached scan of the top shelf – and presented it to the man at the counter.

‘So is it her?’ the man asked Tillman. ‘The one you’re looking for?’

‘Does it zoom?’ Tillman asked Kevin, ignoring the question.

‘A little,’ the boy muttered. He held down a button and the central part of the image swelled until the girl’s face, seen from above and off to one side, filled the screen.

It was a reasonably attractive face, as far as Tillman could tell from this soup of pixels, heart-shaped, with large dark eyes, framed by a barbed wire tangle of short, spiked hair. She was too pale, though – pale enough that you might think she was anaemic, or recovering from a recent illness.
Or that she grew up underground
, Tillman thought,
in a city that was never open to the sun and saw nothing unnatural in that deprivation
.

So what do you make of the outside world, princess? Not a whole lot, probably, since they only let you out to hunt.

He rewound and watched again, but he went too far, past the point where the girl entered the shop. Outside the front window, in shot but barely visible, horizontal blurs were succeeded by vertical blurs. Then the door opened and the girl stepped inside, quick, methodical, racing against time – on her way to save Heather Kennedy’s life.

What had he just seen?

He rewound again and pondered those blurs. Something moving on the pavement or on the road. Moving sidelong into sight. Then a bob, or a dip: the sense of a quick, downward movement, ended as soon as it was begun.

Then the door opening.

Again. He still couldn’t make sense of it. Again. He turned the sound up, hoping for another contextual clue, and heard a rumble like a slowed-down road drill. It stopped before the girl came into the shop. In fact, it stopped just before that quick dip.

Of course it did.

Tillman turned to the shopkeeper. ‘She was on a motorbike when she arrived,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

The man’s face lit up with sudden animation. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘She was. I remember that, because she didn’t have a helmet on. That was what I said to her. I said, you’ll come a cropper one of these days, riding without a helmet. And she just give me a look, like I didn’t have the right to even talk to her.’

‘Do you remember anything about the bike?’

The man shrugged. ‘Sorry. I don’t know nothing about them things.’

‘Anything at all? The colour? Decorative trim? One exhaust or two?’

The man shrugged again. ‘It was just a bike.’

‘Actually,’ Kevin said, ‘it was a Ducati Multistrada 1200. The Sport version, in red and silver, with a hybrid frame. Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres, front and back. And she had the side panniers, too.’

There was a pause while both older men stared at him, the shopkeeper in blank astonishment and Tillman with something like respect.

Kevin blushed furiously under this close surveillance. ‘But she’d taken the windshield off,’ he mumbled.

24

H. Fossman. N.O. DeClerk. P. Giuliani. S. Rake. J. Leavis. D. Wednesbury. A. Davies. And so on.

Rush didn’t have much to go on, at first, but he reasoned that most of the people who went looking for
A Trumpet Speaking Judgment
would do so for professional rather than recreational purposes. Camped out in Emil Gassan’s office, where he figured he was unlikely to be disturbed, he started off by typing each of the names into a meta-search engine along with a number of additional terms such as ‘Civil War’, ‘English history’ and ‘seventeenth century’.

A fair few of them turned out to fit right into that framework. They were historians with published works including a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Nigel DeClerk), a history of religious dissenters in northern Europe (Phyllida Giuliani) and a racy study of the British interregnum called
The Headless Kingdom
(Stephen Rake). The rest didn’t appear to be famous in any field that Google cared about. They were stubborn enigmas until Rush remembered that they had to have taken other books out of the British Library, too, and would probably still be on the main user database. That gave him full names and contact details, and opened up a lot of other options.

Most of which then closed again, pretty quickly.

When Rush saw the pattern emerging, he swore under his breath. He called Kennedy in a state of barely suppressed hysteria and told her that he had something he needed to talk over with her right then. She told him to meet her at the Union Chapel, so he grabbed his coat and sprinted most of the way there.

She was sitting right under the pulpit, with her backside on the back of one pew and her feet on the seat of the pew behind. Even in a deconsecrated church, that felt slightly shocking to Rush, whose Catholic upbringing furnished him with enough devils and guilt for any three ordinary people.

She was talking on the phone, and judging by the half of the conversation he could hear, it was to a boyfriend.

‘No, of course I miss you. It’s just that I’m still … if I could get up to see you, I would. You know I would.’

Squeak and rattle of the boyfriend’s voice. He sounded shrill.

‘I get that, babe. But I don’t know and I can’t promise.’

Squeak. Rattle rattle squeak. ‘Izzy,’ Kennedy said, interrupting the flow. ‘Isobel. Stop. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’ Rattle. ‘Yeah. Love you, too. Well, hold that thought and we’ll work on it soon.’

She snapped the phone shut and put it away. Rush stared at her. He’d registered that the boyfriend was a girlfriend and was trying to process the information.

‘What?’ Kennedy said.

He pulled himself together and handed her the sheaf of printouts he was carrying. ‘Wales was obsessed with that book,’ he said. ‘
God’s Plan Revealed
, and the talking trumpet, and all the rest of it. He was trying to work up a list of everyone who’d read it or even taken it out of the stacks. So then I tried to find out who these people were. Some of them are dead, but that’s—’

‘Recently?’ Kennedy broke in quickly.