Pharaoh watches as he rolls the hammer between his palms. Stares through the dirty curtains. She can just make out the rear tyre of her car.

‘Didn’t work, did it? Apparently she didn’t believe hard enough. She’d angered the spirits. Sold her bath salts that would cleanse her third eye. A fucking snip at fifteen K.’

Pharaoh eases herself back in the chair. ‘You must have noticed her spending …’

He shakes his head. ‘Not until after. She was office manager. Paid out the company accounts. Took out credit cards and didn’t tell me. Not until the very end, by which time it was too late to get her proper help. She was dying. And that was when her mystical healer told her he could find her a new vessel. For just eighty thousand pounds he could ensure that while her body expired, she would become nothing but positive energy – that she would be forever around me, forever with me, a perfect painless consciousness that would know nothing but joy and light …’

‘Jesus,’ mutters Pharaoh.

‘Psychic Serena was first. I gave her the chance, of course. Let her prove herself. Simple test – she had to ask the cards about me. About what was in my soul. And if she got it right, I’d know she was the real thing, and I’d let it be. She got it wrong. Told me I was a kind man who was at a crossroads, and that I should do the thing that my instinct told me to. So I did. Did the same to her boyfriend, when I tracked him down. And then Evangeline died. It wasn’t a pretty thing. Not beautiful. But she convinced herself she was going to be a ball of pure white light. Told me she would come back. Be there around me. Said I would feel her presence. Told me to ask the cards. She would send me signs.’

‘How many?’ asks Pharaoh, her mouth dry.

‘I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I think I’ve hurt somebody and then I realize I can’t have because I’ve been at home the whole time. Other times I wake up and I’m already hurting someone.’

‘The crystal?’ asks Pharaoh, watching, almost hypnotized, as he hefts the hammer.

‘Powerful protection, the labradorite,’ says Brimley, nastily. ‘I don’t want to cost anybody their immortal soul. I just end this life, you see. The labradorite … well, if they’re genuine, that allows them to become like Evangeline, you see. It keeps the black auras away. I’m freeing them. And if they’re con artists, if they don’t really believe what they are selling … well, I will confess to a certain pleasure at splitting their lying fucking tongues and hammering one of their silly crystals right through their beating hearts.’

Pharaoh sits perfectly still. Brimley’s lips are moving, as if in conversation with a voice in his head. He twitches a little. Grabs at the air.

Pharaoh glances down. On the coffee table is a red glass bowl, filled with an array of beads. She looks past Brimley.