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he was fine, the next—well, you saw. He started screaming, and when Karen tried to calm him he lashed out at her. We’re lucky she wasn’t killed.”
    I nodded dumbly at that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Webb wasn’t expecting an answer, though. “Castor,” he said, “this brings forward a discussion we were going to have to have in any case. When we took Ditko on, we did so in the belief that we could help him. We clearly can’t. He needs dedicated facilities of a kind that we can’t offer.”
    I looked down at Pen. She wasn’t hearing this, fortunately. “There aren’t any dedicated facilities for what Rafi’s got,” I pointed out, but that was bullshit and he knew it. There just weren’t any that I wanted to deliver him to.
    “There’s the MOU ,” Webb said.
    “Rafi’s not a lab rat.”
    “He’s not mentally ill, either. He doesn’t belong here.”
    “We’ve got a contract,” I pointed out, playing my ace.
    Webb trumped it. “ ‘Voidable where the welfare of staff or other inmates is at stake,’ ” he quoted from memory. “I don’t think there’s any argument about that.”
    I shrugged. “We’ll talk.”
    Webb shook his head. “No, we won’t. Make alternative arrangements, Castor. You have twenty-eight days.”
    “You’re all heart, Webb,” I croaked. “You’ll have to toughen up or people will start taking advantage of you.”
    He gave me an austere, contemptuous look. “Nobody can say you didn’t try,” he said coldly.

----

    Out in the grounds the moon was up, full and huge, turning everything into a Mercurochrome photograph of itself. I took a turn through the rose garden, enjoying the peace and quiet. It was only relative: there were still some shouts and moans from inside the building, but after Rafi’s endless, agonizing foghorn howl it sounded a lot like silence. Rafi was sleeping now, but Pen wouldn’t let anyone else touch him for the time being. I thought I’d give them half an hour, then go back inside and see if I was needed.
    I leaned against the sundial and looked down a trellised avenue canopied with sweet-smelling blooms. It didn’t frame much of a view, though: just a high fence with an inward-tilting fringe of razor wire at the top, and beyond that the six lanes of the North Circular, where even at this hour a steady river of headlights flowed on by.
    Alternative arrangements. That was really easy for Webb to say, especially with the gods of the small print on his side. Not so easy to do, though: not unless I wanted to take the route that Webb had suggested, and give Rafi over to the tender mercies of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s in Paddington. But that was a last-ditch, desperation kind of thing, and I didn’t think we were quite there yet. Much as I respected my old sparring partner Jenna-Jane Mulbridge on an intellectual level, I knew better than anyone that she had some shortcomings where bedside manner was concerned. And that her heart and human feelings were in long-term storage underneath a crossroads somewhere.
    While I was still propping up the sundial, making the place look untidy, three small figures loped out of the foliage about fifty yards away and flitted across the lawn in absolute silence. They were in a triangle formation, with the largest of the three in front, the other two flanking and following her. There were some trees on the far side of the lawn, but trees didn’t slow them down: they raced on unheeding, their slender bodies sliding through wood as though wood were air. When they got to the wall that separated the Stanger from Coldfall Wood, the girl in the lead—she was about thirteen, or rather had been that age when she died—stopped and looked across at me. She tossed back a full head of ash-blond hair and gave me a wave. I waved back. Then she turned and walked on through the wall, where her two younger companions had already gone on before her.
    These were the ghosts of three little girls