Dead Men's s Boots

When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been me–;bolted, decanted through a pipette and left to stand in the Petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have got me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning – and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages, then it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner – the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right – bequeathed them to the Crown.

The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annexe was built on as demand grew: it seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early twenty-first century.

But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic: he’s just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fits. And, after all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and – thanks largely to me – has never gone home again.

It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily: she’s known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured a question at him, thumb up and then down. He shrugged massively.

‘He’s quiet,’ he said. ‘Kind of. Had a rowdy night and I guess he’s resting now.

Still wide awake, though.’ He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. ‘You’re not gonna like what they’ve done to him,’ he warned me. ‘Try to keep your cool, okay?’

‘Okay.’

Paul swung the door open and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix too.