There was nothing unusual about these sights. London, like the rest of the world, had been playing host to the walking, waking dead for about a decade now; and London, like the rest of the world, had adapted pretty well, all things considered. If a ghost minded its own business, you ignored it; if it became a nuisance, you hired an exorcist to drive it away. You steered clear of zombies unless they were family or close friends, and you put wards on the doors of your house because you knew there were other things abroad in the night that had never been alive in the conventional sense, and an ounce of prevention is worth a metric ton of cure.

So, yeah, this was the new status quo. And for me it’s a living, so it would be a bit hypocritical if I complained about it. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion - the fear - that the status quo was changing. Maybe it was just that drunk-dream about the new note I couldn’t make my whistle play, or maybe it was the stuff I’d learned on the Salisbury estate about how human souls - given the right conditions - can metastatise into demons, in much the same way that axolotls can become salamanders. What with one thing and another, the ground didn’t feel too solid under my feet right then.

And being preoccupied with weighty metaphysical questions, I let my guard down like a total fuckwit.

I was walking past the high wall of someone’s backyard, which was topped with an ornamental layer of broken glass to deter casual visitors. That gave me the only warning I got. Something moved - the merest flick of dark-on-dark at the very limit of my vision - and there was a faint, brittle sound from above my head as one of the shards of glass was broken off clean. Then a great weight hit me squarely between the shoulder blades and I pitched forward, the pavement coming up to meet me.

I managed to turn a little as I fell, meeting the cracked grey paving slabs with my shoulder rather than my face. That was the most I could manage though. I still got the wind knocked clean out of me, and a second later a boot hammered into my midriff to seal the deal. I lay there on the ground, curled around my pain, trying to pull my scattered wits together enough to move.

There was the sound of a footstep right beside my head. ‘You see? You see that?’ a harsh voice grated. Actually it didn’t sound like a voice at all; it sounded like someone trying to scrape up a tune by sliding one saw blade across another. ‘Even in this fucking weather, he wears the coat. I think the concept of mercy killing applies here.’