They waited there for a while, not knowing what to do. ‘Do you think everyone who dabbles with the power of London goes to Hell?’ asked Ross. She could feel the drug surging through her brain, putting her above worries like that so she could say them out loud.

Costain shrugged. ‘Toshack said all four of us were. But I never believed that. I thought it was just a threat, another way of saying the Smiling Man was going to kill us.’ He was looking kind of hungrily at the door. He saw Ross looking at him, and his expression changed. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘We keep coming to this house,’ she said. ‘We do it in shifts if we have to. We meet this woman, and then we do whatever we have to to get the Bridge of Spikes.’

*   *   *

Quill went home to find Sarah already in bed, reading. She looked up in surprise at the bag of salt and carrier bag of clinking items he was carrying. ‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘I feel like experimenting in the bedroom tonight.’

She was horrified when he told her. She talked about getting all of them out of London right now, going to stay in a hotel in Reading or something. But Quill pointed out that, unlike with Losley, there was nothing to indicate that this intruder couldn’t find them wherever they went.

The salt-and-chalk line on the carpet and protective items on the bedpost comforted her only a little. But she got to sleep. It took Quill himself a lot longer, but he finally did.

He woke in the morning to find Sarah looking at him interrogatively. ‘Well?’ she said.

‘I don’t think anything weird happened,’ said Quill. ‘I think the defences might actually have worked.’

*   *   *

On the way in to Gipsy Hill, while stuck at the traffic lights, Quill put in a call to Forrest’s office, asking if the DCI had time after work tonight to compare notes. He’d emailed his team over breakfast, and none of them had reported incursions into their dreams, but Quill didn’t entirely trust that. He’d been so exhausted and tense last night he suspected he’d have slept through anything. Ross and Costain sounded to have renewed energy. He’d told them the next thing they should do, while continuing to pursue the prostitute Mary Arthur, was start organizing a raid on the Keel occult shop, where they might find some more defences against dream incursion. That was going to need some seriously bogus justification, so getting the main investigation back onside was a priority. Besides, now Quill had a lead to share with them.