Thicker Than Water

The illuminated displays above the three lift doors weren’t working, so there was no way of telling which lift was in operation or whether it was heading for our floor. I chose the middle one and stood squarely in front of it, waiting to see what would emerge, but Eddings touched my shoulder and shook his head sharply.

‘Go inside,’ he said tersely, pointing to Kenny’s door. ‘You complete the exorcism, this all stops. Until then, we’re just racking up the body count.’

‘What about Gwillam?’ I asked. ‘Don’t we wait for him?’

Eddings looked out towards the barricade we’d just scaled.

I did too. There was no sign of movement out there now. ‘No,’ Eddings said. ‘Father Gwillam will join us when he can. The three of you should be enough to make a fist of it. If not - get word out to me and I’ll send Speight in to you.’

I looked at the hideous thing hunkered down by the right-hand lift doors, like Frankenstein’s cat at the world’s biggest mousehole. ‘Speight?’ I echoed.

‘He’s an exorcist,’ Eddings reminded me.

‘When he’s in human form. Go. We’ll deal with whatever comes through here.’

To put the matter beyond argument, he kicked in the boarded-up door of Kenny’s flat. It wasn’t hard: the council do that sort of job in the perfect knowledge that it’s not going to last more than a day or two.

I went inside and down Kenny’s stairs, followed by the woman and the boy. I heard Eddings levering the particle board back into place behind us, sealing us in as best he could.

The living room was a shambles, which I was more or less expecting.

The most likely reason for the place being boarded up was because it had already been broken into: a familiar pattern that almost made me nostalgic for the Walton of my youth. Our feet crunched over fractured photo frames and shards of porceÃsha brlain.

Mark’s bedroom, though, hadn’t been touched: possibly because there hadn’t been anything there to steal or despoil. I settled myself on the edge of the bed and gestured to the other two to take up their stations.

‘You got names?’ I demanded.

‘Star of Renewed Being Phillips,’ said the old woman.

‘Caryl Langford,’ said the boy. ‘With a ‘y’. Like Caryl Chessman.’

Well, that was a fucking great omen. I took my whistle out and shrugged off my coat. It was feeling oppressively hot, all of a sudden. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Caryl. Ms Phillips. If this was a firing squad, you’d both be shooting blanks today. I’m the one who’s going to kill this thing.