And doesn’t that seem like a long time ago, I thought glumly.

‘I asked myself what you’d do,’ Pen said, returning unexpectedly to my last question. She shot me a look of the kind that’s usually called old-fashioned. ‘What you’d do if you weren’t totally stewed, I mean.’

I took both the compliment and the insult on the chin. ‘And?’ I prompted.

‘I decided you might try a bit of lateral thinking. Who’d know about demons?’

‘Other demons?’

‘And users. And people who want to be users. I’ve been going round the two-finger clubs, blagging my way into other people’s conversations. And the reason I stayed out all night is because I got an invite back to a house party down in Surrey where they were meant to be doing a summoning. Only it turned out it was just a bunch of ponced-up ovates who couldn’t find their arses with a map and a photofit picture.’

She stopped, registering my shocked expression. ‘What?’ she asked defensively.

I was both impressed with her grasp of the lingo and appalled at what she’d been doing. Only exorcists apply the term ‘user’ primarily to people who summon demons rather than people who ingest chemicals to get happy. The two-finger clubs, in the same trade-specific argot, are satanist dives - so called because the satanists like to draw their pentagrams with two arms pointing upwards and three down - symbolically rejecting the Holy Trinity. An ovate is the lowest rank in the Druidic Gorsedd, but when applied to the satanist churches it also means a wanker who can’t draw a magic circle without making it look like an Easter egg - which if you’re a demon-worshipper sends entirely the wrong kind of message.

‘You don’t want to mess with those people,’ I told Pen, meaning it. ‘In among the harmless tosspots there are some real nasty pieces of work. People who’ve hung around with Hell-kin long enough to go native.’

‘Those were the ones I was hoping to meet,’ Pen answered impatiently. ‘Don’t baby me, Fix. I know what I’m doing.’ She took a sip of her brandy and scowled at the glass as if it had done her some mortal hurt. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘it didn’t work. I didn’t get to meet any of the big operators. Oh, there are rumours everywhere. The infernal messiah has been born at last, and he’s incubating inside the Centrepoint tower. Someone’s drawing a socking great magic circle around the whole of London by joining up the white lines on the M25. The bishops of all the satanist churches are meeting over in Kensington Palace for the biggest summoning ever seen. But you could tell when you tried to pin them down to specifics that it was all bollocks. Most of the people I was talking to knew less about what was really going on than I did.’

‘What is going on?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve been out of the loop for a few days.’