Night had fallen completely by the time she parked across the road from her block of flats, a row of white-painted town houses labeled improbably as Grove Mansions. The driver’s-side door was being its usual recalcitrant self. Greta banged it shut without bothering with the lock and let herself into the building. She was only going to be here for a few minutes to collect some spare clothes and some more tools and books, and anyway no one in their right mind would want to steal the Mini. The one time it had been lifted, years ago, the thief had promptly left it just a few streets away, in apparent disgust.
Her ground-floor flat was a mess, as usual, clothes hanging over chairs, books and papers stacked on every horizontal surface. It was the kind of impersonal, abstract clutter left by somebody who lived alone and didn’t use the place for much of anything other than eating or sleeping, who spent the majority of her life somewhere else. Greta’s limited housekeeping instincts were applied almost entirely to her clinic; by the time she got home at night, she didn’t have the energy to face tidying up or doing anything more complicated in the kitchen than microwaving frozen dinners. There was a certain weary sense of guilt that accompanied these solo meals, generally consumed at the kitchen table or cross-legged on the bed, hunched over whatever book she was reading at the time. Lecturing her patients on healthy eating habits always felt more than a little hypocritical.
The prospect of staying at Ruthven’s house and eating Ruthven’s reliably excellent cooking was therefore a particularly attractive one, even if the reason for her stay was both worrisome and unpleasant. It didn’t take her long to throw a couple of changes of clothes into an overnight bag and grab her toothbrush and comb. The mental picture of the luxurious spare bedrooms at the Embankment house rose again, and Greta made a face at her thoroughly inelegant pajamas. Whenever she stayed with Ruthven, she always felt vaguely as if she ought to be draped in lace and ruffles, or possibly diaphanous peignoirs, whatever they were, in order to live up to the surroundings; and then inevitably felt rather frivolous for minding the fact that she couldn’t.
Her phone was still blessedly silent as she headed back down the stairs. She took it out and looked at the screen, in case she’d turned off the ringer by mistake, but nobody had called or texted her. She knew that Ruthven would have gotten in touch if Sir Francis took a turn for the worse, but she couldn’t help worrying while he was still above eighty-four degrees. To be entirely honest, she couldn’t help worrying about him in general. This was not a situation she had ever seen precedent for, and she simply didn’t know what sort of clinical course to expect. And there was Fass to consider, too, although she was pretty sure this latest exacerbation wouldn’t turn into anything seriously worrisome now that he was back on his meds, if only he would be sensible about it.
Not that he ever had been, of course. She could remember her father shouting at him twenty years ago for doing precisely the same passively self-destructive things for which she currently found herself shouting at him, with roughly similar levels of success. Fastitocalon’s attitude had appealed powerfully to Greta during her early-teen sulky rebellious stage. Now it just exasperated her, in an affectionate sort of way. It was a little strange, being the one to do the shouting, which she avoided thinking about more than she could help.
She was still considering Fastitocalon as a role model for moody fourteen-year-olds when she got back to the car and let herself in. There was an unpleasant sharp and acrid sort of smell, sort of like something burning, and she wondered for a moment if the engine could have somehow overheated on the way up here without her noti—
At this point her thought process cut off absolutely, because something in the backseat rustled, and something very, very cold and sharp was suddenly pressed against the side of her neck.
Greta went completely still. The world seemed to have slowed down to half its normal speed and developed an eerie, glassy clarity. Her blood roared distantly in her ears.
“What do you want?” she said, and was surprised to hear her voice sounding steady and calm. Whoever was holding the sharp thing against her neck was also breathing heavily, as if with effort. The sharp smell had an undertone of rancid saltiness, like something pickled that had gone fulsomely rotten in a dark cellar corner.
“Thou hast done evil above all that were before thee, above all thy sins, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards; thou hast visited the dwellings of the wicked and given succour, thou hast wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord,” he said, and the knife pressed a little closer.
Beyond the sound of her own heartbeat Greta was aware of the faint ticking of the clock in the dashboard, the sounds of traffic on the main road, a hundred yards away; it might as well have been on the moon. She was entirely alone, more alone than she had ever been in her life. There is no one who can help me, she thought, feeling herself skidding closer to the edge of some mental precipice. No one at all.
Dimly, in another part of her mind, the thought surfaced for a moment and flicked its tail: What evil? I’m not the one holding a knife to someone’s throat.
“This is the punishment of the sword, that ye may know there is a judgment,” the man went on. The voice sounded to her as if its owner couldn’t be older than his early twenties, reciting something learned by heart, and Greta wondered who had done the teaching, and why.
Her hand, in the darkness, still held the bundle of keys. Now, very slowly, very slowly indeed, her fingers began to move, even as her mind raced. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, still surprised at just how calm she sounded. “Who sent you?”
He hissed, a gust of rancid breath against her cheek, and the blade he was holding against her throat twitched. “In the name of the Lord God, the Sword of Holiness casts you from the surface of this world,” he said in her ear. “Into unending torment and the eternal fire.”
The Sword of Holiness, she thought. The Sword of Holiness, not the Rosary Ripper, and it is a group of them, Varney’s three attackers and God knows how many more. She wondered if the ten people who had been featured on the newscast had heard those words, too, before they died—the Sword of Holiness casts you from the surface of this world—and in that moment Greta’s determination froze solid and immovable. She would not be the eleventh, if she had any say in the matter.
Her fingers closed in the darkness around a small squat cylinder, hooked to the same ring as the keys to her house and the Harley Street premises. Her heart thudded rapidly in her chest as she turned the little cylinder between fingers and thumb, hoping desperately that it was still good after spending a year being bounced around in her purse. Everything was still so clear and so slow. Like being inside cold, thick, heavy glass.
She had to make him lean as close as possible, if this was going to work, get his face right down next to her shoulder. “I don’t understand,” she said, and her voice was as small as she could make it. “What do you mean? What have I done?”