I suddenly had the terrifying conviction that a piece of Ginny Parris was clinging to the lifeline of my tune to keep from tumbling off into the abyss of whatever-comes-next. So I kept the lifeline going for as long as I could, feeling her getting further and further away from me in some direction that doesn’t really have a name. It was a strain now to maintain that contact. I felt a trickle of sweat on my forehead, and my heart was racing.

I played her until she was gone.

And in her absence, in the spaces through which her soul had trickled away, I sensed a second presence. It was even fainter than hers had been, but for very different reasons.

Dogs hunt in packs, bark their lungs out and stink the place up like a roomful of wet carpets. Cats hunt alone, in silence; crouch low to let no silhouette show above the skyline; bury their droppings so the prey won’t know where they’ve been hunting. The scariest predators are the ones you don’t see until their jaws snap shut on your throat, and so it is too with the predators of the spirit world.

I sat in the silent room, breathing in the stench of death, and waited for my heartbeat to slow back to a sustainable seventy-some beats a minute. It took a long time.

When I felt up to it, I climbed to my feet and went to the door. There was no sign of Gary on the narrow landing or in the stairwell, but a copper at the bottom of the stairs, by the street door, had obviously been briefed to give him a shout when I surfaced. He looked out into the street and called something that I didn’t hear.

Gary appeared shortly after and came up to join me. ‘What did you get?’ he asked bluntly. Then before I could answer he raised a hand to shush me, fished in his pocket and came up with a digital voice recorder - an Olympus DS-50, his favourite toy from last year. He clicked the record button, held it to his mouth like a telephone. ‘Witness name is Felix Castor,’ he said. ‘Time . . .’ consulting his watch ‘. . . 1.17 a.m. Place, flat 3C, 129 Cadogan Terrace, SW2. Witness - a practising exorcist - was called in by investigating officer in CI capacity.’

He held the recorder out in my direction.

‘Talk me through it, Castor.’

‘You can forget your loup-garou hypothesis,’ I muttered, pushing the device away again.

Gary’s interest quickened. He shot me a stare that would have cost him plenty at the poker table.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘She didn’t answer the summoning. There were . . . pieces of her all over the place, but they didn’t add up to anything. She hadn’t just been killed, she’d been shredded.’

Gary’s eyes flicked involuntarily to the corpse.