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So what’s the plan, Mister Castor? What have you thought of?’

So it was time to bite the bullet: time to put up or shut up. And like the cowardly bastard that I am, I lied.

‘There’s another doctor,’ I said. ‘Only a little way from here. He’s kind of an expert in stuff like this, and he owes me a favour.’

Tom and Jean looked doubtful.

‘An expert?’ Tom repeated. ‘In . . . what Billy’s got? In this possession stuff?’

I nodded.

‘What’s his name?’ Jean demanded.

‘You won’t have heard of him,’ I assured her, but she continued to stare at me, half-hopeful and half-perturbed but with the balance definitely tilting.

‘Ditko,’ I said. ‘Doctor Rafael Ditko.’

20

When we reported back to Gwillam, he was still pretty sour about the whole deal.

‘You realise,’ he warned me, ‘that in trying to control this menace you run the very real risk of unleashing a greater one?’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘I know that. And if you can come up with an alternative plan that doesn’t involve Asmodeus, then say so. Otherwise, I’m going ahead.

’

The priest gave me a hard, pained look. ‘This situation . . .’ he said, and then seemed to run out of words.

‘You were happy with the situation when Rafi was at the Stanger,’ I reminded him.

‘Yes. Because we were able to monitor him for ourselves. Now you have him somewhere else, and we’ve only got your word for it that the protections you have in place are adequate to hold Asmodeus in check.’

‘Yes.’

Gwillam bridled. ‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, you’ve only got my word for it. And that’s all you’re going to get.

Now, are we doing this or not?’

He stared me down for another few seconds, then gave a curt nod and walked away.

But it was a while before we hit the road, even then. Getting myself and Trudie Pax to Imelda’s without letting the Anathemata woman see the route we took was fiddly in the extreme, and wasted the best part of an hour. I had to get Gwillam to commandeer a car, then I had to refuse it because while we were waiting for it to arrive I realised that it would be too easy for him to slip some kind of a locator into it.

Hell, he didn’t even have to: these days a mobile phone would do, assuming Trudie was carrying one.

So I went with Plan B, which involved bringing Nicky into the mix. He’s a paranoiac’s paranoiac, and I’d already seen how deeply the idea of shafting Gwillam appealed to him. When I called him and asked him how we should handle this, he only pondered for a couple of minutes.

‘I’m sending a friend,’ he said. ‘Be ready.