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Examining myself with queasy fascination in the bathroom mirror, I could understand her reaction: it looked as though some huge bird of prey had scrabbled at my right shoulder, trying to pick me up, and then – judging from the bruising all over my torso – had given up the effort and dropped me from a great height onto some rocks.

‘You met one of the were,’ Juliet said – an observation, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘You remember Scrub?’

She frowned, consulting her memory. ‘The rat-man that worked for Lucasz Damjohn,’ she said, with no obvious emotion – although she had hated Damjohn enough to linger over his death and add a number of artistic flourishes to it.

‘You killed him at Chelsea Harbour.’

‘I spiked him at Chelsea Harbour,’ I corrected her. ‘Hit him with a chord sequence hard enough to push him out of the flesh he was hiding in. But you know how it is with the were-kin. They’re old souls, mostly, and they’re tough as hell. Most of them are used to migrating to a new host when the old one dies.

’ I winced as Susan applied TCP too enthusiastically to a tender area of torn flesh.

‘Are you saying this was Scrub?’ Juliet demanded.

I shrugged – and gritted my teeth because shrugging seemed to draw the disinfectant deeper into the wounds. ‘I don’t know. For a second, it kind of looked like Scrub. Then it looked like someone else. But Scrub was the only loup-garou I ever met who was a colony. I mean, he made his body out of rats, not out of a rat. And this thing I met tonight was made out of cats in the same way.

’

I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half-disgust and half-fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ flat; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone. I would have bet the farm that there was a cat lurking under the left-luggage lockers at Victoria, too: that it had heard my conversation with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first.

I’d sentenced him to death just by calling him.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. ‘If one were can make that transition – from monad to gestalt – then presumably others can too.’

‘Presumably. Most of them – ow! – most of them don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.