Sefton had been tempted to ask Joe’s opinion as to what might make him look the part tonight, but that would have only made Joe worry, without saying he was worried. In the end he’d chosen a battered leather jacket he’d had at the back of the wardrobe, which he’d got from a second-hand shop, so probably qualified as vintage. The inner pockets were thick enough that the flask containing silver goo didn’t feel continually cold against his chest. He put the vanes the bloke at the New Age fair had attacked Quill with in the other one. He still had no idea how to use them as a weapon, but they might be a useful sensor. He put the jacket on over a bland polo shirt. He was meant to look as if he didn’t give a damn. His character had been established as in your face at the shop, so in your face he would remain. It was quite crowded by the time he arrived. He didn’t look for Costain and Ross, and didn’t find them. He’d waited across the street until he’d seen beardy waistcoat, his mental shorthand for the bloke from the occult shop, enter, and followed. There he was now, at the bar, talking to a very severe-looking young woman. She was the real thing – the most interesting by far of all those who’d arrived. She wore a black dress so old that the seams and creases were white. Her hair was a black mop, tufts in all directions, completely unstyled. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she looked sour, with great rings of sleeplessness under her eyes. Beardy waistcoat was looking shocked at her, shaking his head in mute astonishment at whatever she’d just said to him. Sefton went straight to them, but then made sure to stop when beardy saw him, as if registering only in that moment that the man had company. Beardy waved him over.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said. ‘What are you having?’ He wanted to get Sefton away from the woman, whom it seemed he’d just met, but was already having difficulties with.

‘Who’s the cunt with the sun tan?’ she said. Her accent was full-on Eliza Doolittle, and Sefton actually had to restrain a laugh. Wow. That sort of old-fashioned racism? Was this how it was going to be tonight? He let the other half of what he felt hearing that, the sudden bleak anger, show on his face.

The man shook his head. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. She was like that with me, too. Would you please just—?’

‘What?’ The woman looked calm and empty as she said it. She was, weirdly, taking no pleasure in this. She seemed utterly sober. ‘He’s a fucking nigger.’

‘What the fuck?’ said Sefton.

‘I-I think maybe it’s—’