Then what I thought was the reflection of our spinner turned out to be the emergency lights on an ambulance and we all learned just how good the upgraded four-wheel disk brakes really were—the answer being good enough. If there’d been one installed I’d have been eating the air bag. Instead I had a savage bruise across my chest from the seat belt, but I didn’t even notice that until later because I was out the door and running across the junction and up Sherwood Street fast enough to keep pace with the ambulance. It stopped, I didn’t.

One side of Sherwood Street has an arcade in the rather sad 1950s ceramic-tiled fashion that, having been designed to resemble a public convenience, was perhaps justifiably used by half-cut members of the public who got caught short late at night. As far as the Murder Team could reconstruct it later, it looked like the penis eater had been planning to take her latest victim into the shadows for an impromptu snog and vasectomy.

I found Ash prostrate in the center of a circle of concerned citizens, two of whom were trying to comfort him while he writhed around on the pavement. There was blood on him, on the concerned citizens, and on half a yard of iron spike that was stuck through his shoulder.

I got myself some room by shouting “Police!” at people and tried to get him into recovery position.

“Ash,” I said. “I told you to stay away from her.”

Ash stopped thrashing long enough to get a good look at me.

“Peter,” he said. “The bitch stuck me with a railing.”

Chapter 6 - The Empress of Pleasure

THE MEN and women of the London Ambulance Service are not prone to hysterics, given that they spend their days scraping up the victims of fatal car accidents, suicide attempts both successful and botched, and members of the public who’ve “fallen” in front of a train. Those are called “one-unders,” incidentally. I once asked whether a couple under a train would be a “two-under” but apparently that’s a “two one-under.” Anyway, a daily routine consisting of pain and misfortune tends to breed steady and pragmatic personalities. In short, just the kind of person you want staffing your ambulance in the middle of the night. The paramedic in the ambulance who picked up Ash was a middle-aged woman with short practical hair and a New Zealand accent. But a couple of minutes into the ride I could see that her composure was beginning to slip.

“The bitch,” yelled Ash. “The bitch stabbed me with a railing.”

About two feet torn from a rather nice bit of Victorian wrought-ironwork, judging by the precisely milled orthogonal cross section. To my untrained eye it looked as if it had gone right through his heart. That hadn’t stopped Ash from thrashing around and yelling.

“Hold him down,” shouted the paramedic.