Contents

ABOUT THE BOOK

When a violent outbreak of fires plunges his city into chaos, Thomas Fool, commander of Hell’s Information Men, finds himself outsmarted by a shadowy new department called the Evidence.

Sent away to Heaven on a diplomatic mission he discovers murder has come to paradise, yet no one is willing to admit it.

As tension mount on both sides of the afterlife, can Fool solve the ultimate paradox?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in Manchester and lives in a farmhouse in Cumbria, in the United Kingdom. He is the author of The Devil’s Detective and many short stories, including the collections Lost Places, Quiet Houses, and Strange Gateways.

PROLOGUE

It was a building, and it had burned.

‘How many does this make it?’

Fool ignored the question, lifting his hands to his face and rubbing, and the skin of his palms smelled of soot and scorched flesh.

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, dropping his hands from the exhaustion that his head had become. How many fires have there been in the previous days and weeks? he wondered, and then stopped wondering and tried to remember. I should know, he thought, I’m an Information Man. I should act like one and not like the Fool I was. So, how many? Certainly five, when he sifted through his mind he found that many, but possibly more. Almost certainly more. He was tired, the images in his head jumbling, blurring together, at least five but more, definitely more. Six, maybe seven, or even eight. Buildings, burned and damaged.

‘It’s eight,’ said Marianne at his side and Fool turned to her, focusing, pulling himself back to now, looking at her with his officer’s eyes. She was young, only several months old despite her adulthood, freshly harvested from Limbo and made into one of the new Information Men, and she was already beginning to understand her role. She was already good.

‘Eight, yes,’ he said, ‘this is the eighth. And the links between them?’

‘Fire,’ Marianne replied immediately, ‘obviously. Fires that have been set, that haven’t happened accidentally.’

‘And?’ It was unfair, really. Fool didn’t have any great insight; even after the previous seven investigations, he was simply hoping that her eyes might have seen the ground differently than his own. She was smart and sharp, and only rarely did she act around him as the other human Information Men did, with that irritating deference. Now, however, she looked at him without speaking, unable to answer, shoulders hunching slightly into a shrug. Sighing, he turned away from her and looked at the burned thing at his front and thought back, over the whole fucking smoking mess of the investigation. Eight fires, eight things burned to soot and spindle and ragged chaos, and what did he know?

Mr Tap crouched in the corner and watched, impassive.

Fool’s officers, his troops as the Bureaucracy now insisted on calling them, were distracting him, pushing and poking and talking. Each time he tried to focus on the details the sound of them shifted his attention, or one of them would amble into his eyeline and he would lose the threads that were starting to form behind his eyes. They weren’t helping, weren’t finding clues, assuming there were any to find; they were simply creating more chaos, more disorder, blurring the narrative the building was trying to tell him. ‘Out,’ he said finally, waving his hand at the door.

‘Sir?’ asked one of the demons, its black uniform hanging awkwardly over a body that appeared to be formed solely of twists and kinks. Fool could hear the disgust in its voice. This little demon, part of a lineage of the infliction of pain and suffering, was taking orders from a human, and it hated it; hated it. Never mind, it would learn, or it would be taken away. That was how things were now.

‘Out,’ said Fool again, this time more loudly, jabbing his finger at the doorway. ‘All of you. Wait outside.’

Fool watched as his Men left, their feet and claws leaving puffs of ash behind them, weapons and bags clanking, until they were finally gone and an almost-silence seeped back in around him. Only Mr Tap remained, still in the corner, still crouched and watching. Its skin seemed slick in the hazy light, its mouth open and tasting the air. Fool, as instructed, tried to ignore it and turned back into the dead structure and tried to read its corpse.

The problem now was the same as that first time, when he had been sent to an outbuilding burned away to shadow and grime. He saw it, it was there around him and in front of him, but the fires made things jumbled and he didn’t know how to investigate them; he’d never had to before. There was little or no information here, nothing to link the burned places besides the fires themselves. Fool understood, to some degree anyway, how to investigate the deaths of humans and even the deaths of demonkind, but the burning of buildings? He didn’t know where to start.

Maybe that’s the trick, little Fool, he thought. Treat this not as something new, something separate, but as a variation of what you know, what you learned investigating the Fallen. Treat it not as a burning building but as simply another death, the death of a building where the weapon was not claw or rock or tooth, but fire. The death of a building, its murder. He could investigate murder, had learned that trick over the last months, his understanding of the how and the why growing as he became more skilled. This is murder, he thought. Look at it that way, little Fool, and see it with an investigator’s eyes. So, what could this new Fool, born over the previous months out of death and pain and loss, see?

The fire had been set by humans. Fool had seen enough flame from demon and angel to know that those fires were different, they were either directed and specific or all-encompassing, and this was not. It had spread evenly, he thought, starting in the far corner where the damage was most severe and reaching around almost to here, by the door, before petering out. It had moved constantly, burning hard but slow, sinking its teeth through to the centre of the wooden walls and posts carefully and patiently and worrying at the building until it came apart.

Fool walked to the corner where the fire had started. Pieces of the roof lay scattered on the floor, all but consumed. He kicked them aside, revealing a pile of greasy ash in the corner. Kneeling down, he sifted through it with a sliver of wood, working his way slowly into its still-warm heart. What few fragments he could identify were the remains of twigs and branches, piled together to create a womb for the fire’s first stuttering breaths. This was a fire created and tended by a man or woman, fed fuel and brought to life with patience and care.

Clever Fool, he thought, working out where it started. What use is that? And the answer was, as ever, No use at all.

He went through to the rear room, to the bodies.

There were four of them, lying under the room’s only window. All four were long dead, their bodies charred into brittle, black memories by the heat. The flames had pulled them into fetal curls, clenching their arms in front of them and drawing their legs up into tight-kneed angles, their skin split and resplit. Fool crouched over the first corpse, feeling the sick warmth still radiating from it, and as he watched some internal flame still cooking through the dead body’s flesh escaped, splitting away a flap of skin across one of its shoulder blades and flickering briefly before dying. The flap was curved like a smile, its edges crusting away, and it breathed out a tiny puff of air that smelled of the roasting meat they were sometimes served for their meals as it yawned to reveal muscles and fat that had been dried out to the consistency and colour of old leather.

‘They couldn’t escape,’ said Marianne from behind him, her voice toneless. She had returned, unable to keep away, the officer in her overcoming the orders he had given.

‘No. The fire was set at the front of the house; it must have been burning fiercely by the time these poor bastards realised what was happening.’ It was impossible at first to tell if the bodies were of men or women, so badly damaged were they. It was only when he rolled one over that he saw the victim was male, which meant they were all male; men and women didn’t live in the same houses in Hell.

‘It must be an awful way to die,’ said Marianne. Fool, who had seen enough terrible death in Hell to understand that there was little to decide between various types of awfulness, said nothing.

‘Why didn’t they run?’ asked Marianne, her voice still toneless but now brittle and hopeless and starting to crack. He looked at her, slim in her black uniform, hair shaved close to her head so that the shape of her skull shone through her stubble like a secret inner reality. He reached out, intending to put a hand on her shoulder, to try to reassure, but dropped it. What could he say that would make this better? Nothing. Better to take refuge in facts, and the trail that facts opened out before them.

‘By the time they realised things were burning, I’d imagine it would have been too late, that the flames already had the house in their grip.’ He thought of thick, clinging smoke filling the rooms, and his lungs clenched in a little itch of sympathy. The fire had eaten the workers as surely as any demon might, leaving nothing Fool could use.

‘They came here but it was too late, the glass was too thick to break or they were too weak to break it. They died together.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Do? We look around. We see what’s here and what’s not, we see if it points anywhere. We investigate.’ But not using the bodies, he thought, not this time. There was no point in sending these corpses for questioning, there simply wasn’t enough left for Hand or Tidyman to talk to.

By the end of the day he had to accept that there was nothing new, no trails or clues, there was simply Fool and Marianne and the other Information Men moving around a murdered building holding in its heart murdered men, and Fool was again their witness and the recorder of their fate even though he still had no idea why he had been sent to investigate this particular crime. It was how Hell worked, even now, layer upon layer and each reshaping what was above and below; the Bureaucracy gave instruction, not explanation, and expected him to fill the gaps in a structure whose outlines he could rarely see. All he could do was look and guess and report, and hope that the patterns of Hell, the language he was supposed to understand, might become clear to him at some point.

The murder of four humans, and the murder of another building, and still he understood so little.

He knew one thing, though, from the earlier fires, the ones they had arrived at while they were still burning: fire had a voice, it talked in a constant bitter mutter, the sound of something chewing its own teeth, a one-sided conversation that babbled as the flames burrowed deep into wooden frames around now-glassless windows and ate warping doors buckling in their mounts. And as the fire talked and drew itself on, it cleaned, leaving no spore or trail that Fool could track or read, and in doing so it became for him a thing of frustration and anger. Its glowing red heart beat in a rhythm Fool could see but had no way to understand, and as he stood in this latest burned place he thought, I will make sense of you soon, and hoped he wasn’t lying to himself.

‘Is this how it always is?’ asked Mr Tap, finally straightening up, standing. It was tall, its head scraping against the low beams of the ragged building, its skin a mess of ridges and furrows in which the drifting ash had caught. Tiny worms wriggled along the furrows and gnawed on the ash.

‘Sometimes,’ replied Fool.

‘I came to observe the great Fool,’ said Mr Tap, ‘so I might learn how to be an investigator, but now I wonder if you have anything to actually teach me?’

‘Note it all,’ Fool said to Marianne, ignoring the jibe, and started out of the building. Mr Tap followed, kicking thick clouds of ash up as it walked.

‘Perhaps, Fool, you aren’t as good as I’ve been led to believe.’

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Fool. Don’t respond except with deference, don’t rise, don’t argue. Fool had no idea why he had been told to take Mr Tap with him; the instruction had been in the canister that morning along with the details of the fire and deaths. It was another of Hell’s jobs, another task, to take this tall, skinny demon with its warped and melted face and uneven eyes with him and to answer any questions it might have.

‘And will you make any arrests today? Or possibly shoot any of my brethren?’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure, Fool? You have a reputation for that, after all. Fool the demon killer, I’ve heard you called, Fool the slaughterer.’

‘I’m sure.’ Voice still flat and uninflected.

‘And you know nothing?’

‘Nothing useful, not at this point.’

‘Then perhaps I can help, yes?’ Mr Tap stopped and bent, scooped up a clawful of burned material, and placed it in its mouth. Chewing, it spoke through the black mess that dripped around its teeth.

‘It doesn’t taste like demon, Fool,’ the demon said and then stopped. When it resumed chewing, it did so more slowly, and when it spoke again its voice was also slower, more thoughtful. Fool had the sudden idea that it had originally intended to condescend to him, to prove its superiority, but had then found something unexpected.

‘It’s human but it tastes strange, Fool. Sharper, more bitter. Why is that?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t eat the crime scenes, I’m not sure how they should taste,’ said Fool and immediately regretted the flippancy.

‘Perhaps you should,’ said Mr Tap and grinned, revealing row after row of crooked teeth like warped nails. Wet ash like black mud spilled from its mouth and fell to the ground, smearing its chest as it fell. More of those tiny bugs burrowed into the mess, so that the demon’s chest rippled slightly as they ate. It leaned in close to Fool and whispered, breath burned and sour, ‘All these fires, Fool, and you haven’t got a thing to tell us. You aren’t anything, Fool, are you? You have this position bought by the slaughter of demons, you think you are important, but you are not, Fool, and you should watch. Watch carefully, Fool, because I am coming.’

With that the demon strode past Fool and left the remains of the building. Fool followed after a moment, trying to ignore the looks on the faces of the Information Men outside as he emerged. They had all heard Mr Tap, of course; the demon’s whisper had been a staged one, loud enough to cut the air on blades of sibilance and threat. Fool was now the Commander of the Information Office of Hell, in charge of all the new Information Men, but the demon Information Men still looked at him like he was shit to be eaten or scraped off their feet, and most of the human Men still looked at him as though he was something unclear, to be deferred to or stared at in equal measure.

Nothing changes, he thought as he walked away, Marianne following. Above them the spires of Heaven gleamed in Hell’s sky, clouds swirling around the white towers, their light falling to the earth in glimmering waves like delicate rain. Fool looked up at the city, thinking of angels that fell and demons that walked in his shadow and crouched in the corners, and felt small and alone and weighed down.

Somewhere in the distance there was a terrible low ripping sound and a leap of orange as something else caught aflame. As Fool and the others turned to watch, tongues of fire reached into the sky as though to scorch Heaven’s feet before falling back, muttering angrily.

Starting towards where the new fire was birthing, Thomas Fool, Commander of the Information Office of Hell, thought, It’s an irony, of course. Hell, the place is flames, is burning and I don’t know why.

ONE

The transport pulled to a halt before the building, and for a moment, Fool simply sat and looked at it. It was small, old, its paint peeling, nestling back against a series of smaller hills covered in a thick mess of scrub and trees, and its front door was open and its windows were broken. The glass was still lying along the sides of the building, he saw, its broken faces clean, catching the morning light and spitting it back towards him. Newly broken windows, he thought as he exited the transport, waving a hand backwards to halt the emergence of the other Information Men he had brought with him.

The canister had arrived that morning wrapped with tangled red and two yellow threads, one bright and the other paler. As far as he could make out from the guide to thread colours in the New Information Man’s Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell, ten fat leather-bound volumes filled with dense, tightly packed script setting out the rules in a layering of clause and sub-clause and counter-clause that had been issued to him to replace his old Guide as part of the growing of the Information Office, it meant that several murders had taken place and that the deaths were quick rather than prolonged – no torture or eating of the corpses, at least. He had nodded to himself then, almost relieved to be back investigating murder rather than one of the increasing number of fires that had been burning recently and slightly disgusted at himself for the relief, and put on his uniform jacket and buckled the holster and the gun it contained to his leg. This was murder, and murder he understood.

Out of the vehicle, he could smell the blood. The scent of it was baking in the day’s growing heat, thickening into veins drifting through the air that Fool felt like he could touch if only he reached out and pressed his fingers together. He moved through it, going first to the corner of the building. There were fresh scratches on the wall, scrabbles under the window that meant . . . what? Something had clambered up the side of the building to the window, broken the glass, and entered that way. Several somethings, he thought; there were similar marks below each of the three windows on this side. When he crossed the front of the building and looked at the three windows on the other side, he found the same things there. At least six, then, he thought, and finally waved his troops from the transport.

‘You,’ he said, pointing to a demon whose name he couldn’t remember but who he knew could sketch, ‘go and draw the marks under the windows.’ He could look at them later, set them side by side to look for hints about what might have made them.

‘You and you,’ to two other demons, ‘go and see if there’s anyone about, anyone who saw anything. Marianne and the rest of you, with me.’ Then, taking a deep breath, he led the woman and the remainder of his troops inside, to where the dead were waiting for him.

Inside, the stink of blood was far stronger, curdled like overboiled soup. It was dark despite the six windows and the gas lamps strung along the wall in fixed brackets. The flames, sputtering, added the scents of burning tallow and wick to the miasma. The glow the lanterns gave out was sallow and weak, even with the flow of gas set at its highest, giving shape to the shadows filling the room rather than banishing them.

The space that lay before Fool was long, stretching back from the entrance, and he realised that the building was cut back into one of the hills, its rear end burrowing into the earth like a grub. Down the centre of its length were two long rows of trestle tables, surfaces scarred and pitted. Wooden racks lined the walls, simple frames filled with folded clothes and piled bolts of rough linen. Needles and threads and large bobbins of twine on stands were spaced regularly down the centre of the trestles, knots of frayed twine like old snakeskins gathering dust on the floor under them. Chairs were pushed up under the tables, the spaces in front of them neat. Fool saw that the needles were connected to the table with thin chains, delicate locks threaded through the needles’ eyes and the chains’ links.

It was a Seamstress House. His uniform came from a factory like this one, all the uniforms did, all Hell’s inhabitants’ smocks and trousers and thin underwear did. Working in a Seamstress House was considered to be a good job because it was generally warm and safe. He wondered if the dead had had a chance to appreciate the irony of that, and doubted it.

The first body was seated halfway down the table; it was a man and he had been decapitated. His head had been placed on the table, turned so that it was looking back at the body it had come from, and the floor and chair and table were thick with drying blood. The body was rigid, the left hand still clamped around a needle and the right around a piece of cloth now soaked red. The man was naked. Beyond him, a second figure was sprawled on the floor, another man, judging by the hairiness of the part of the back and single arm that were visible. Whatever he had been stitching together had fallen on him and covered him like a shroud, reminding Fool of the grey tarpaulins the porters used to take bodies to the Questioning House or the Flame Garden. Patches of blood showed through the material, odd blooms like the petals of a flower he hadn’t seen before. He didn’t bother to peel the cloth back; there were other bodies to investigate, two or three of them on either side of the tables and more beyond them.

The worst were gathered in a pile at the far end of the table: a tangled mess of naked limbs and blood and pieces of material. The attack had happened towards the end of the night shift, had caught only the straggler workers, those who hadn’t finished their jobs for that shift and hadn’t yet been allowed to leave. There was space at the tables for at least fifty workers, but Fool could see only nine or ten distinct bodies in total, counting torsos to find the tally. All of them were naked, and his first thought was that they had been stripped after death until he remembered that nudity was a condition of working for the seamstresses to prevent the theft of material. He had been to a Seamstress House once before, somewhere on the other side of the industrial area. He had visited during the day and had found it unbearably hot, the air dry and hard to inhale because of the dust of tiny fibres hanging in the atmosphere, but still a better place than most of Hell. At least it’s covered, he had thought, at least they’re not wet and cold. Most of the workers’ hands had been bleeding, he remembered, covered in cuts and peeling dry skin and punctures that left spots across the clothes they were stitching. The supervisor, a painfully thin woman, had told him that was normal even as she beat the workers’ shoulders with a flat stick for getting blood on the garments they sewed. Everything we wear is bound in blood, he remembered thinking, little bloody Fool. Despite their bleeding hands and the beatings, most of the workers had looked, if not happy, then at least less miserable than the heavy-industry workers or farmhands.

Calling Marianne to his side, pulling her away from her study of the table and what lay under it, but noting her interest and hoping he’d remember to ask her about it later, Fool said, ‘So. Tell me.’

Marianne looked around, visibly gathered herself, and said, ‘Whatever happened here happened quickly. There’s no blood near the door, meaning that the dead hadn’t had time to run. Something came in through the windows fast and savaged the workers, tore them apart.’

She paused, waiting. He nodded at her, encouraging her to go on, thinking, She saw the windows. Good. She’s getting sharp, seeing it clearly, learning to understand the story.

‘It was fast and brutal but not about torture. The dead have been killed but not too badly mistreated.’

‘Apart from being murdered?’

‘Apart from being murdered,’ she replied, ignoring his sarcasm, the ghost of a smile twitching across her face and then vanishing. ‘There are bodies at the back of the room, piled, but there’s still no sign of mutilation or torture, they were simply killed.’

‘Were they driven to the back of the room and slaughtered like cattle, or did they simply run that way because the other direction was towards their attackers?’

‘Neither. They were killed close to where they were sitting or standing, then piled at the back. There’s blood beneath the table where there are no bodies, and bloody footprints on the floor.’

‘Human?’

‘No. Maybe. No, I don’t think so, they’re distorted, smeared, but I still think demon, although what sort I can’t tell.’

‘Good, you’ve done well,’ he said, then turned to the rest of the troops and called out.

‘This is a Seamstress House, a place of sewing and repairs. Look around, see what’s here, decide whether it should be, and if it shouldn’t, or it looks wrong in any way, tell me. Do you understand?’

There were muttered responses and the Information Men began to spread out, scattering through the space and peering about themselves in exaggerated shows of looking around. So far, apart from Marianne, who was now back to looking beneath the table, few of the demons or humans that had been given a role as Information Men showed any aptitude for the tasks it entailed, simply carrying out Fool’s orders in stolid silence. They could sketch, some of them; others took accurate notes, could encourage people to talk, or even managed to drag information from the demons that walked Hell’s streets, but it was still Fool who collated everything, tried to discern the patterns that lay below the surface.

Fool went to the pile of bodies at the end of the room, trying to take in the whole scene as he did so, trying to let it talk to him. As Marianne had said, the bodies were, by Hell’s standards, not badly abused. Most seemed to have been beheaded or torn apart, but there was something almost surgical about the injuries; there were no defensive wounds and little sign that the bodies had been interfered with following their deaths. They had simply fallen where they stood or sat, set upon by assailants who murdered them and moved on. Even the pile of dead flesh seemed to have been created more as a convenience than anything, the shoving together of the dead so that a walkway around the end of the table was still passable. A small horde of flies droned about the splashes of part-coagulated blood in noisy hunger, landing and alighting in delicate waves. Streaks and gashes through the liquid might have been made by the feet of the attackers, but if so, it would be impossible to gain any knowledge about them as the blood had seeped back in before drying, the edges of the marks furred and unreadable.

What else? There had to be more, more openings leading away from this initial scene, paths that he could follow.

The dead were all naked and few, so he knew it had occurred at the end of the shift. He could find the time the shift usually finished and pinpoint the violence to sometime around then. What else? There was more, there was always more, it was what he had learned these last months, more trails unfurling from every point that he could try to track his way along. There were blood streaks under the windows and on the frames, so the assailants had left the building the same way they had come in. Why? What would be the purpose in that? Coming in that way Fool could almost understand, it would be shocking, fear carried on the sound of breaking glass, but leaving that way? It made little sense. ‘Think, little Fool,’ he said aloud, ignoring the look the nearest Information Man gave him, ‘think.’

These were workers, sewing the clothes that they all wore, naked so that no thefts could occur and, he suspected, to rob these workers of what little dignity and safety their job might offer them. What had the supervisor in the last place like this he had been told him? About clothes?

No, not told him, shown him, her seniority marked out by the fact that she had been clothed, that she was not a worker and therefore not naked. He looked again at the corpses and saw that all were bare, clothed only in blood and flies. Workers, but no supervisor. Had the supervisor fled? How could he? The swiftness of the attack, the carnage around him, seemed to show that no one had escaped. Fool tilted one of the gas lanterns, casting its light about him as widely as he could. How long had the dead been dead? An hour? At least that. The blood was crusty and dry at the edge of the pools, but in the centre of the mass it was still thickly sticky where the flies landed and lifted off, so no longer than three or four hours. The tube had arrived at the office around two hours ago, so between two and four hours, he thought.

There was no more blood in the room, nothing near the door, just these overlapping pools that formed a single irregular mess across the factory floor. What else was there? Racks of finished clothing along either side, their contents folded neatly, next to fresh cloth rolled around huge poles and piles of cut fabric awaiting stitching. An open tub containing new bobbins of thread, another next to it containing the empty bobbin centres. If he couldn’t see, could he listen?

No. It was pointless, the distant thrum of heavy machinery and the sound of his Information Men, demon and human both, cluttered the room. He had to keep looking.

There was nothing, just the racks, each four shelves high containing pile after identical pile of folded articles of clothing with separate sections for the bolts of cloth.

Identical? No, the rack closest to him was different, wasn’t completely neat. The clothes on the lowest shelf were ruffled up, bunched into a lump towards the wall at its rear. Nearby, a chair lay on its side and a whistle was on the floor by the chair, its bell cracked. The chair was bigger than those by the long table, had a padded seat and arms. Not a worker’s chair, but a supervisor’s one. So where was the supervisor?

Fool approached the rack and crouched by it, staring at the bulge of messy clothes. From out of a shadowy gap, a pale eye stared at him, and then the mound took a hoarse breath.

Fool started and fell back off his haunches and onto his arse, hand jerking automatically towards his gun. The mound took another breath, the clothes shifting slightly. The inhalation sounded as though it was coming from a long way underwater, was thick and phlegmy.

‘Who’s that?’ said Fool, finally wresting his gun loose from its holster. His hand was shaking, the barrel of the gun jerking back and forth as though unable to decide where to focus its attention. The mound shifted again, the top piece of clothing slipping, gliding sideways. It slithered off the shelf and to the floor, revealing the top of a head, hair thin and tangled and dark. Fool scrambled around, flapping back his Men, wanting them to stay away. ‘On with your work,’ he said loudly, but most ignored him, standing and watching him with thick, uninterested eyes.

Fool turned back to the mound, crouching again. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, knowing it wasn’t okay, this was Hell and things were never okay. He put his gun away, holding both hands out in front of him in a gesture that he hoped was unthreatening, safe and secure.

There was another soggy inhalation. The eye blinked and something at the base of the mound began to move, pushing out from the inside, knocking the clothes aside. A hand emerged, pale and old, the skin dry and cracking. Fool took it and the hand clenched tight; carefully, he began to knock the remaining clothing aside.

It was an old man. He had crawled onto the shelf and wedged himself against the wall at its rear, pulling the thin jackets and trousers up over himself. Fool brought the man into the room’s dirty light, seeing as he did so that his face was pale and greasy with sweat, froth bubbling at his lips with each shallow, moist breath. He tried to speak but what emerged was a long, low groan. His eyes stuttered, leaping from Fool to a place over Fool’s shoulder and then back again, and the fear in them was clear.

‘It’s okay,’ Fool repeated, ‘they’re gone.’ He looked over his shoulder, the fear in the old man’s eyes contagious, suddenly convinced that he’d see some demon swooping down towards him, but the room was empty. He leaned in, wrapping his free arm around the man and taking as gentle a hold as he could. The man groaned again as Fool began to pull him out, and the man began to tremble.

It wasn’t a uniform tremble; it was as though each part of the man was reacting to a different pressure, shivering at a different rate. Fool felt the man’s heartbeat under thin ribs, its rhythm ragged and loping. The man’s eyes rolled again and, close to, Fool smelled breath that was sour and harsh. More spittle bubbled over his lips as he tried to breathe and he tightened his grip on Fool’s hand. His skin was rough and hard, calluses grating against Fool’s palm, nails tearing into the skin on the back of his hand, more injuries, the tales of Hell written in crescents of his blood. Fool tugged again, wincing as the man groaned a second time and clenched his fingers tighter, and then managed to drag him free from the shelf.

He was tiny, a skin and bone person, and he was dying. His breath was coming in shorter and shorter bursts, his skin yellowing almost as Fool watched. His other hand came up and pulled at Fool’s jacket, fingers dragging at the material and then falling away. His knuckles struck the floor with a dull, grisly crunch. People in Hell didn’t die like this in front of Fool, and he had no idea how to react or whether there was anything he could do. He dealt with the dead, not the living, not the almost-dead.

The man’s face was colouring further, becoming a darker red, veins bulging in his neck and visible across his scalp through his thin hair. He opened his mouth, breath rattling, liquid slathering his lips, eyes terrified and pained. Fool wished he could do something, that he had some skills or knowledge that would be useful. The man’s eyes jumped from Fool’s face and looked along the room, then came back.

‘What did you see?’ asked Fool, the Information Man in him taking over. ‘What was it?’

The man exhaled, his lips working, chewing at the words but failing to form them. He was trying, though, his tongue licking out and trying to remove the spittle from around his mouth, his throat clenching and unclenching. It was painful to watch. He tried again, gulping at the air and then exhaling, tongue and lips writhing around words that the air from his lungs was too weak to create.

Do something, stupid Fool, do something now or he’ll be gone, thought Fool, brushing the man’s hair back from a brow that seemed both feverish and clammy at the same time. The man’s eyes rolled again, carried on rolling, the pupils contracting and expanding as though he was trying to focus on Fool but failing, his vision slipping to some other depth, some other place.

The trembles were spreading more widely across the man’s body, becoming shudders, rippling out from some place inside him and shaking him apart. It was coming quicker and quicker now, this thing. Was this what death was like when it was allowed to occur naturally? Fool wondered. Was this what it was like shriven of the terrors of Hell and the freedom of Heaven and its host of angels? Was this freedom, to be able to die like this?

And ultimately, did it matter? That wasn’t the job, the deaths were the job, the deaths and the reasons for them. Fool needed answers.

‘Hold on,’ said Fool, brushing back the man’s hair again, trying to soothe him. ‘Please, try to hold on.’

Behind him, one of the Information Men said something and there was laughter. Fool looked back over his shoulder, saw the speaker was a demon whose name he did not know, and decided that, when they were finished here, the demon was finished as an Information Man. He pointed at one of his other troops and said, ‘Bring water. Now.’

A moment later, the man brought Fool a glass of cloudy, warm water, which he held to the supervisor’s lips, gently tipping it into his mouth and letting the liquid roll down his throat around the struggling exhalations.

‘What did you see?’ asked Fool. The man grimaced, tongue darting out wetly and lips pulling back from teeth that were little more than brown stubs.

‘Please,’ said Fool, trickling a little more water into the man’s mouth. The man was calmer but his breathing was still shallow and uneven, choppy, its smell wretched; he was still dying. The man blinked and tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. He nodded at Fool gently.

‘Thank you,’ the old man said, the words stretched and half formed, almost unrecognisable. He lifted a hand and stroked Fool’s face, his touch like being caressed by twigs wrapped in parchment.

‘What did you see? Can you describe them to me? Please?’

The old man nodded again, took a deep breath, and then let it out. A terrible shudder racked him as he exhaled, almost shaking him loose from Fool’s hold, the words ‘They danced’ slipping past Fool on a tide of torn and stinking air.

‘What did?’ asked Fool. ‘What danced? What?’ The old man did not reply, his body shivering violently until it became stilled and limp. Cradled in Fool’s arms, he died and was gone, more anonymous flesh, more death.

‘Fuck,’ said Fool. ‘Fuck and shit.’ He let the man’s corpse down to the floor slowly, freeing his arms from the man’s tight grip, and then sat back on his haunches.

Fool looked at the piled dead around him, and then back at the man’s corpse. He’d need more men with tarpaulins and stretchers. The corpse might talk; Tidyman or Hand might get something from it yet. From him, Fool amended.

It was as he was walking to the pneumatic tube in the corner of the room to send a message to the porters that Fool heard the noise. A scream from outside, a crash, and then the babble of voices that Fool had come to know only too well these last weeks.

The Evidence was coming.

TWO

If the door to the Seamstress House had not been open, they’d have kicked it in and entered in a rush of sound and splinters, Fool was sure of that. It was, he had come to realise over these last weeks, how the Evidence operated – grand gestures, visible, thrusting themselves in front of everything so that they became the foreground of Hell in those moments, everything else falling to scenery. The Evidence was the expression on the face of the new Hell, one of scrutiny without pity and judgement without thought. And now, they were at Fool’s crime scene.

Even without a door to crash through they contrived to make an entrance. First their shadows appeared in the doorway, three of them, stretching across the factory floor and creeping up the edge of long tables, as the sound of their gibbering swelled. Behind the shadows and noise shapes formed against Hell’s glaring light, furred at the edges at first and then sharpening into solidity. They were small, bristling, and hopping, two shapes dragging a third between them. The other Information Men stepped back from them, Fool saw, pressing themselves into the racks so that there was no way they could be accused of getting in the Evidence’s way. Although the Evidence held equivalent rank to the Information Men, there was no doubt who had the power, who had Hell’s favour. There was no doubt who would be noticed if a conflict occurred, and what that notice might mean.

The Evidence was the latest development in the ranks of Hell, one that had emerged from the Bureaucracy almost fully formed with little fanfare, as though they had been standing on some sideline merely waiting for their call. A message had arrived one day several weeks previously in a tube without a ribbon, dropping into Fool’s office with a sound like teeth clicking together on air, a missed bite. The message inside the canister read simply, There is a new department. They are the Evidence. They will investigate. Fool wasn’t sure whether the Information Office was equal to the Evidence, whether as Commander of the Information Office he should have some authority over them, but he knew that in reality he had no control over them at all.

Worse, he was as frightened of them as the rest of his troops were.

The first time Fool had seen the Evidence was several days after the arrival of the canister that heralded their formation. They had come to the crime scene he was investigating. He had been trying to determine where the murderer of a Genevieve had entered and left the room the body had been found in, when the door had crashed open and two demons had entered.

They strode through the crime scene as though it wasn’t there, driving a wedge through the room until they came to a halt in front of Fool. The first was smaller, coming up to just above Fool’s waist, and was nearly naked except for a cloth hanging around its waist that covered its groin. After peering at him for a moment, it grunted and turned away, muttering as it went around the room, pulling furniture away from the walls and tearing up the grimy floor covering, throwing pieces of it over its shoulders. When one of the Information Men got in its way, he was pushed aside and then snarled at when he protested. The little demon had huge tusks that pushed their way out from behind lips that were torn and scratched by the teeth, and strings of bloody saliva ran down its chin and dripped to the floor.

The second Evidence Man was Mr Tap.

The demon seemed even taller, as though its new role had increased it, its head bowing to prevent it from banging against the ceiling. It was thin, terribly thin, like corpse branches and decayed bones wrapped in leathery skin, and its face was warped as though it had existed in some vast heat, melting and then resetting as the flesh dripped down so that its three eyes were unevenly spaced and its mouth was a thin slit in which Fool could just make out the hundreds of needle teeth ridged in uneven rows that descended into its throat and that moved in waves as it spoke.

‘Hello, Fool,’ it said, coming over, its voice like dusty ratchets grinding. ‘I told you I’d come back.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good, Fool, good. It’s important you know me. It’s important that you understand that my word, Fool, my word is absolute and you can trust me. It’s important that you understand that I am everything and that you are nothing. I am Mr Tap, Fool, and I am head of the Evidence.’

‘“The head”?’ repeated Fool, watching as behind Mr Tap the other demon crashed away from them and carried on destroying the crime scene. ‘And that’s the body?’

‘One of them, one of many, Fool, with me as brain and guide. The head of the Evidence,’ said Mr Tap.

‘Good for you,’ said Fool, ‘and I’m Commander of the Information Office of Hell.’

‘You are,’ said Mr Tap, leaning in very close to Fool’s face so that his watery, sour eyes filled Fool’s vision. ‘You’re Commander of the Information Office, commander of facts and details, but I am the head of the things that are coming, Fool, the head of what is already here. The Evidence is mine, Fool, all of the Evidence is mine. I intend to put those valuable things, those facts and details I learned watching you, to good use in running it. After all, I had lessons from a master, didn’t I?’ And then it turned, ignoring Fool and watching the thing it had brought with it.

The littler demon went to the body and yanked it up, wrenching it so hard that the dead boy’s head crunched dully against the wall. The demon licked the dead flesh, sucking at the blood that was coagulating on the boy’s skin.

‘What—’ Fool said, but Mr Tap interrupted him, reaching out a long arm and wrapping a thin, rough hand around Fool’s neck without looking at him. Fool’s hand, dropping without thought to his gun, was immediately gripped in the demon’s other claw, tight enough to leave marks that lasted into the next day. Mr Tap finally turned back to Fool and pushed its face close to his, close enough that Fool could smell its breath, smell the rank odour of excrement and blood wafting from its mouth, see the striations across its skin and the tiny worms wriggling within them, tearing into each other. At the lowest edge of his vision he could see the teeth in Mr Tap’s mouth undulating back and forth, more worms writhing in the narrow gaps between them.

Mr Tap peered at him for a moment as though he was a piece of half-chewed food that he had discovered on his fingers, and then it spoke. ‘We are the Evidence,’ it said, ‘and we will find the things that need to be found, and you will not ever stand in our way unless you want us to find you. Unless you want me to find you.’

Its voice rasped, as though the hundreds of teeth lining its throat and mouth were tearing the words before they emerged from it, and it was hot, a heat that came off its flesh in waves like dry sweat. Mr Tap squeezed Fool’s throat just a little tighter so that he felt the pressure against his breathing and then the demon let go, turning back to its little companion and watching it with a smile on its face that seemed oddly delicate and soft, Fool and the others now dismissed. Burning with embarrassment and anger but knowing he could do nothing, Fool had left Mr Tap’s little demon to its search and returned to the Information House.

And now they were in the Seamstress House.

Mr Tap wasn’t with them, which was how things generally were; it was as though, that first time, it had attended so that it could impose itself on Fool and the others, but since then it had been seen only on rare occasions and had mostly left its Evidence Men, as Fool supposed they must be called, to investigate for themselves. Only, they didn’t investigate, they simply tore things apart and reached conclusions that made little or no sense, and then executed justice on the spot.

Fool had seen them take people from the street for infractions of minor rules, things buried in the pages of the new Guide that Fool managed to find reference to only after searching carefully. People had been vanished for things like walking in front of a demon without acknowledging it or wearing the wrong type of clothing for that day or showing disrespect by having a dirty face or hands, for the infringement of rules that they didn’t even know existed. Where before the people of Hell had feared its lack of justice, the violence that came and went without check, now they feared the laws themselves.

Fool wasn’t even sure what the Evidence Men were, demons or something else. Certainly, they were solid when they needed to be, but he had heard stories of them leaning out of the shadows, emerging from thick walls or closed doorways, and grasping people, leaning back and vanishing and taking the person with them. Were they ghosts, or something between ghost and demon? He supposed it didn’t matter, not really; they were real, actual, whether or not they were solid all the time.

There were two of them today, dragging a semi-conscious human between them. It was a man, his hair hanging down in front of his face and blood seeping from an ugly gash that ran across his scalp. A flap of skin hung down, revealing the white and pink fleck of bloodied bone. They dragged the man before Fool and looked at him expectantly.

‘What?’ asked Fool.

‘Did it,’ one said, its voice liquid through blood and spittle and tusk.

‘Did what?’

‘This,’ said the thing, jerking its head in a tight circle to indicate the dead flesh scattered around them.

‘No, this was done by something that wasn’t human. Besides, there were lots of attackers, not one man,’ said Fool and pointed at the piled dead at the rear of the room. ‘And a man couldn’t do this.’

‘Not alone?’ said the Evidence Man, and turned back to the drooping human still held tight in its grasp. It leaned in so that its face was close to the man’s head and said, ‘Who?’

The man mumbled, tried to raise his head, lifting a face that was battered and swollen to his questioner. One of his eyes was a protruding, angry swollen bulge that wept blood.