’ Her voice sounded strained. ‘Don’t look around, Castor. I’m changing.’

Once she said that, I had to fight the urge to sneak a sly peek. The van’s side mirror had popped out when it went over and was lying in the roadway at my feet. All I had to do was lean forward and look down. But the indelible sound of that splintering skull was still reverberating inside my head: I decided I didn’t want an indelible sight to go with it.

The Satanist Church of the Americas. So these guys were nothing to do with Myriam Kale or our current fact-finding mission. They were Anton Fanke’s boys and girls: another contingent of the same bunch of arseholes I’d rumbled with in West London the year before, when I was looking for the ghost of Abbie Torrington. They must have been following us all the way from the airport. But before that?

I leaned down and gave the guy I was still standing over another shake. ‘You put a trace on my passport?’ I demanded. ‘That’s how you knew I was coming?’

He gave a twitch that looked as though it might have started out as an attempt to shake his head.

‘Told us,’ he slurred. His eyes were rolling on different orbits: he was probably in an even worse way than he looked.

‘Who told you?’

‘Friend. Friendly interest. Told us when. Where.’

‘Give me a name,’ I demanded.

‘Don’t – have—’

‘Give me a name or I’ll throw you to the succubus and let her finish you off.’

He whimpered brokenly, ‘A–Ash! Said his name – was Ash!’

‘Someone you’ve used before?’

Shake.

‘Just a call out of the blue? Word to the«ue?ne wise?’

Nod.

‘You can turn around now,’ Juliet said quietly from right behind me. I let the guy drop again, and he twisted away in terror just from the sound of her voice – but he was too weak to move very far.

I stood and looked her up and down. She shot me a look as if challenging me to say something, so I bit back whatever profanity had come to my lips.

She’d done a good job, but it clearly hadn’t come easy.

Her eye was back in place in its socket, and through her ripped shirt I could see that her shoulder was whole again: no tell-tale glint of bare bone. But she held herself stiffly, suggesting that she was still in pain, and she hadn’t healed the rents in her clothes or removed the bloodstains. And that sense of fading I’d got when I’d looked at her on the plane was even stronger now: she looked like a watercolour picture of herself that had been rained on. She wasn’t strong enough yet to take what she’d just done in her stride.

‘Shall we move on?’ she murmured.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious, and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trouser pocket, threw it down on the ground and stamped it into shards.

‘It would be easier just to kill him,’ Juliet said, at my shoulder.

‘Why bother if there’s no need?’ I countered. ‘He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s Satanists are a lot more forgiving than the home-grown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.’

I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before. But either Juliet bought my reasoning or she couldn’t be bothered to have an argument about it. She appeared at my elbow a moment later and walked on past me at a fast clip.

‘You’re too sentimental,’ she snapped back over her shoulder.

‘I know. I’m all about puppy dogs and scented letters.’

We got back into our spavined car and I turned it around with difficulty. It was hard to control with two tyres out, and the grinding noise I was hearing was probably the front axle doing something it shouldn’t.

But it stayed on the road, just about; and what the hell, it was all covered on the insurance.

We bumped and ground our way to the tiny hamlet of Caldwell, and out of it again on a road that made the previous dirt track look like a superhighway.

‘Someone told those guys we were coming,’ I said to Juliet.

‘I know.’

‘The same someone who put a tinkler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here: back in England.’

She nodded without answering. She was looking out of the window at the rolling fields, her expression distant and cold.

The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun-bleached sacking protruded like a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time.