Pen snorted derisively. ‘Try two weeks,’ she suggested. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, doesn’t it?’

I wouldn’t describe the mill I’d just been through - was still going through - as ‘enjoying myself’, but I didn’t bother to argue. ‘Are the police looking for Rafi too?’ I asked, calling a spade a spade.

Pen shrugged. ‘They must be,’ she said bleakly. ‘His fingerprints were all over Imelda’s house. Mostly in other people’s blood.’ Her face crumpled momentarily, and tears welled up in her eyes. I moved forward to hug her, but she warded me off with one hand, not ready or willing to take comfort from me. ‘I don’t know how this can end now,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He killed her, Fix. He killed Imelda.’

‘Asmodeus killed Imelda,’ I amended.

‘And Rafi did too. It was his hands that Asmodeus used. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t want to do it. When they catch him, they’ll lock him away for life.’ She wiped away the tears with furious energy before they could fall.

I couldn’t think of anything consoling to say. Everything she’d said was true, and she hadn’t said the worst of it. Even if London’s finest dropped the ball, and Rafi somehow got away without being had up for murder, being welded to Asmodeus was a life sentence in itself.

Back when I first met Rafael Ditko, at college in Oxford, I really didn’t know what the hell to make of him: he was a bum, essentially, but a bum with his own inimitable style. A mature student from the Czech Republic, he was older than the rest of our little circle by three years and some small change, and he had a spectacular impact on all of us: on Pen more than anyone, because she’d fallen in love with him more or less at first sight, and then had to watch while he bedded every other girl we knew, weaving his way in and out between their official boyfriends with no call-out charge and no waiting.

He was the sort of guy who never paid for a round, never cleaned up his own messes, always called the tune but left someone else to settle accounts with the piper. By rights we should probably have hated him, but he had that knack - that mix of rakish good looks, ineffable charm and perfectly faked sincerity - that makes other people love you and want to carry your burdens for you. He was destined for a happy, directionless life probably full of other people’s sofas and other people’s wives: nature had adapted and equipped him for that evolutionary niche.