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If you’ll excuse us, we’ll return to our labours, however futile they may ultimately turn out to be.’

‘There is one other thing we could try, though,’ I said. He was already turning his back on me, but he stopped and waited.

‘The boy,’ I said. ‘Bic.’

‘William Daniels,’ Gwillam translated.

‘Exactly. You thought he had Jesus as his co-pilot.’

‘Castor, I’ve already admitted that I was mistaken about what was happening here.’

‘But you thought that for a reason, right?’ Gwillam stared at me, waiting for me to go on.

Everyone else had their gaze on me, too, and I could feel the quickening of interest behind every pair of weary eyes: they made such a lovely audience I would have loved to take them home with me. If home was Guantánamo Bay. ‘He was the first,’ I said, impatiently. ‘The first ³ly.y mby a long way, I’m guessing. This thing found him long before it did anything to anyone else. He’s a sensitive: he’s got some sort of gift that lets him pick up what you’re thinking and feeling.

Most exorcists have got a touch of it, too, but he’s got more than most. He’s like a radio satellite pointing into inner space. And he picked up the wound demon.’

‘Is that why it came?’ the little man, Speight, demanded in his lisping voice.

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It came because of another boy. Mark Blainey, who died here a year ago. He was a self-harmer. He found wounds, or the inflicting of wounds - I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Appealing. He thought about them a lot.

He obsessed on them. He cut himself in a lot of different ways, with different kinds of objects. And somehow, somewhere along the way, this thing noticed him. It came looking for him. I heard it speak his name, when I met it in that place where it lives. It came looking for Mark, but it stayed because it found Bic. And now it’s expanded its friendship group. That’s what I think happened, anyway.’

Gwillam considered, and all eyes now shifted to him because he was the authority, the giver of truth.

That’s the trouble with the Church: it’s a top-down hierarchy where everyone does what they’re told by the guy on the next rung up. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it was me on the top rung instead of God.

‘We learned about Mark Blainey in our researches here,’ Gwillam conceded. ‘We thought him an early symptom.’"

"‘So did I, at first,’ I agreed. ‘But a nurse at the Royal London put me straight on that one. He’s not a symptom, Gwillam.

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