How to Make Friends with Demons by Graham Joyce Page A

wired?"

    "I couldn't tell," I confessed. "Otto doesn't think so. There's something under his coat but I've no idea what it is."

    I could hear an audio loop playing from behind the Land Rover. Seamus and Otto were talking. They had a video link, too. I realised they'd monitored every movement and every word when I'd been with Seamus. The tea arrived. Two plastic cups.

    "Keep him talking." The commander said. "That's all I want you to do."

    The tea was so hot it was burning my fingers through the thin plastic cups. I nodded and turned back towards the railings, trying not to spill the tea. Then I saw a white flash of light and was almost knocked backwards off my feet, spilling the tea every which way. A deafening bang sucked all subsequent sound out of the square and a twist of braided, black smoke funnelled up into the air.

    Electronic car alarms, triggered by the blast, squealed everywhere. From somewhere an old-fashioned hammer-bell was clanging and policemen were running in all directions. My knees had buckled under me. The air reeked of something like ammonia. I tried to get up but my knees seemed to turn to slush and I went sprawling.

    Antonia ran over to me, to help me up. We both looked back at the spot where Seamus and Otto had been. The railings where Seamus had chained himself were twisted horribly. A black ball-cloud hung over the spot, hardly seeming to move: it was like the air had been shocked into stillness. Antonia looked at me hard, searching, searching. Her own eyes were grey storms.

    Alarms were still warning, uselessly; police were still running to and fro; and people in the crowd behind the Victoria statue were screaming. For some reason I looked at the palace guard beyond the sandbags in his grey coat and bearskin hat.

    He'd moved. They're not supposed to move. But he'd moved.

     

Chapter 12
    The police officers at the scene told us to stay exactly where we were, but it was Antonia who said to hell with that, and we slipped away in all the confusion. "If we don't go now," she'd said to me, "we'll be kept here and interviewed for hours."

    I admire that. I admire someone who can make a decision in a moment of universal panic.

    Antonia came home with me. She was anxious to see that I was all right. We walked back towards Pimlico where we managed to pick up a cab. When we got to my house, Antonia put the kettle on. But I said I'd had enough of tea for one evening and I opened a superior Pfeifer Vineyard Pinot Noir, guzzling it, which was ridiculous. I invited Antonia to have a glass before I drank it all myself, it being rather special.

    "I wouldn't know the difference," she said.

    "Of course you would," I said crossly. "People are always pretending not to know the difference between muck and brass."

    She smiled faintly and accepted a glass.

    "Why on Earth would he kill Otto, too?" I said.

    "You sure the thing wasn't detonated accidentally?"

    I looked hard at her. Antonia had moving crinkles, what people call laughter lines—rivulets made by tear-tracks more like—around her eyes. She also looked like she needed a good bath. I mean a real good soaking in hot, soapy water. She'd aggregated to herself the ingrained filth of the long-term homeless.

    That's what I wanted to do for Antonia: take off her clothes and soak her in my bath, and sponge her very gently and slowly until she would stand up and the water would run from her body and this crust, this carapace of dirt and twisted care and worn-out compassion would crack open and fall from her pink, naked body and I could put a towel around her and keep her with me, here, where we could turn our backs on all of it and she could join me in my retreat from life.

    Antonia got up and started inspecting my lounge, studying the prints hanging on the wall, sipping from her wine glass, touching objects around the room. "You live very well here, don't you?"

    Was this my big chance to ask her to come down off her cross and live with me? Antonia was