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The mood in the room changed, as I went from potential enemy to something less easily definable."

"‘I’m calling 999,’ Tom Daniels muttered, crossing to the phone.

Jean stroked her son’s cheek again, and then stood up on legs that seemed understandably shaken. She wiped her bleary eyes with the heel of her hand.

‘You were here before,’ she said, giving me a wary, searching look. ‘Yesterday.’

‘To see Kenny Seddon,’ I confirmed.

‘He’s in the hospital. He was mugged.’

I let that word slide, although it seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the frenzied industry of Kenny’s attacker; the threshing of his flesh with a straight razor until the floor of his car filled up like a well with his blood.

‘I know,’ I admitted.

‘And you’re . . . nothing to do with the church, are you?’

‘No. I’m an exorcist.’

She nodded as though that answer confirmed something she’d already guessed. She started to say something, but that was when her husband got through to the emergency services, and his clipped answers to the standard questions cut her off short.

‘This place is sick,’ was all she said, and then she returned her attention to her unconscious son.

There wasn’t much she could do for him, but such as it was, she did it. She got John to go and get a cold flannel to drape over Bic’s forehead, although the heat of the day had faded by this time and the room actually felt a little chilly. Hedging her bets, she brought a blanket in from one of the bedrooms and covered him with it.

She fetched some pillows, too, but then seemed to have second thoughts about whether or not his head should be raised, so she made John take them back again and bring a glass of water so she could wet Bic’s lips.

By this time Tom Daniels was finished on the phone. ‘They said there’ll be an ambulance along inside of half an hour,’ he said to his wife.

‘He could be bloody well dead by then,’ she said bitterly. ‘God forbid.’

‘He’s breathing steadily,’ I pointed out. ‘And you can see his eyes moving under the lids.

I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.’

Jean picked up on the apparent contradiction, staring up at me hard from where she knelt at Bic’s head.

‘Then what did you mean before?’ she said. ‘When you said he was.’

I hesitated. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry these people and add to the problems they already had on their plate - particularly given how little I really knew about what was going on here.