Thicker Than Water

But if I do, a lot more people are going to die tonight - including a lot of your people, unless you pull back and let every man, woman and child who lives on the Salisbury cut themselves to ribbons. I mean it. Get Matt and we can do something.’

There was another silence, but I took it to be a positive sign. I was still hearing the background noises, so he hadn’t hung up.

‘Give me a reason,’ Coldwood said. But I didn’t feel I could do that. Not yet.

‘I’m giving you all I can,’ I said. ‘Matt’s the key to this. What does it cost you to get him out of his cell and bring him in here? You can handcuff yourself to him if you’re worried.

‘It’s not half of South London. It’s one estate. A thousand people.’

‘For now,’ I agreed. ‘For now that’s all it is.’

‘Fuck!’ Gary exploded. ‘Even if I wanted to get him in there, how would I do it?’

‘You want an escort, you call an escort service,’ I told him.

‘Is that meant to be clever?’

‘Juliet.

Gary laughed again, even less convincingly than before. ‘Juliet. Right. Because what this situation needs is another demon.’

‘Juliet will meet you at the station,’ I said. ‘She’ll bring Matt here. You can come too, if you want to.’

‘And then what? You wave your magic wand?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘This probably isn’t going to do a blind bit of good. But it’s a racing certainty that nothing else will. You want to end this, Gary, you get my fucking brother up here. We’ll talk about sin, because priests are experts at that stuff, and he’ll lead us in a few prayers.

I waited to see if he was going to come back with any more smart-ass questions. When he didn’t, I hung up and called Juliet.

‘Felix,’ she said, with a warning rumble in back of the usual cat’s-purr roughness of her voice. ‘I’m busy.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked.

‘Making love.’

‘Well, call me back when you get to the cigarette stage.

‘I’m coming now, Castor. Succubi can sustain an orgasm for days. It’s our tempers that are short. Tell me what you want.’

‘I figured it out,’ I told her. ‘About the thing at the Salisbury, and why you got so coy all of a sudden. It’s kind of a revelation, Juliet - that there are things that make a sex-demon blush.’

She didn’t bother with fencing or denials.