Vicious Circle Read online

  I fished out my flask of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not cognac and unscrewed the lid with shaking hands. The first sip was medicinal: I swilled it around my bitten tongue, trying not to wince, rolled down the window, and spat out the blood. The second sip was for my jangled nerves. So were the third and fourth.

  I suddenly realized that as I stared down between my feet, my gaze had met another pair of eyes gazing back up into mine. With a queasy jolt, I picked up the head of Abbie’s doll from the floor of the car: it must have parted company from the body when my head crashed forward into it, and it was pretty amazing that it hadn’t shattered as it fell. I slid it into the pocket of my coat, automatically. The decapitated body I dropped back into the Sainsbury’s bag, like any tidy-minded serial killer.

  I think it became official right about then, for me at least. I was in a duel of wits, and I was three-nil down. The man was good, no doubt about it. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as you’ll know if cat-skinning is your thing.

  I was looking forward to meeting him.

  And punching his teeth down his throat.

  Still shaky, I got the car moving and threaded through the side alleys back into Du Cane Road. I passed the church, heading east, and almost immediately I saw a familiar figure walking ahead of me. It was Susan Book, now wearing a long fawn-colored duffel coat but still recognizable because the hood was down and she was still looking around her every so often as if she’d heard someone call her name.

  I brought the car to a halt a few yards ahead of her and wound the window down. She began to skirt warily around it, then saw that it was me.

  “Do you need a lift?” I asked.

  She seemed surprised and a little flustered. “Well, I only live about a mile or so away,” she said. “In Royal Oak. The bus goes straight there.”

  “So do I,” I said. “Through it, anyway. It’s no trouble to drop you off.”

  She fought a brief, almost comical struggle with herself. I could see she didn’t like the idea of accepting a lift from a stranger, which was fair enough; also that she didn’t relish the wait at the bus stop with the dark coming on.

  “All right,” she said at last. “Thank you.”

  I opened the door and she climbed in. We drove in silence for a while—a sort of charged silence. She was so tense it was like a static hum in the car.

  “Have you known Miss Salazar long?” she asked at last, in a very quiet voice that I found hard to catch under the noise of the engine.

  “Juliet? No,” I admitted. “She . . . hasn’t been living around these parts very long. I’ve known her less than a year.”

  She nodded briskly, understandingly. “And you’re . . . sort of partners,” she said, and then added quickly, “in the professional sense? You work together?”

  “Not really,” I said, feeling as though I was falling in Susan’s estimation with every answer. “We did, briefly, but only while Juliet was learning the ropes. She worked alongside me for a while so she could see how the job pans out on a day-to-day basis. She’s in business for herself now, so tonight was . . . more in the nature of a consultation.”

  “Yes. I see,” said Susan, nodding again. “That must be very reassuring. Being able to call in favors from one another, I mean. Knowing that someone’s . . .” She tailed off, as though groping for the right words.

  “Got your back?” I offered.

  “Yes. Exactly. Got your back.”

  We were already at Royal Oak, and I’d pulled off the Westway onto the bottom end of the Harrow Road, seemingly without her noticing.

  “Whereabouts do you live?” I asked.

  She started, looked around her in mild surprise.

  “Bourne Terrace,” she said, pointing. “That way. First left, and then first left again.”

  I followed her directions, and we stopped in front of a tiny terraced house that was in darkness except for a single light upstairs. A garden the size of a bath mat separated it from the street. The gate was painted hospital green and had a NO HAWKERS notice on it.

  “I’d invite you in for tea,” Susan said, so stiffly that she sounded almost terrified. “Or coffee. But I live with my mother and she’d think it wasn’t proper. She has very old-fashioned ideas about things like that. She wouldn’t even be happy that I’d accepted a lift from you.”

  “Then it’ll be our secret,” I said, waiting for her to get out. She didn’t. She just sat there, staring straight ahead, her eyes wide. Then, very abruptly, she brought her hands up to her face and gave a ragged wail that held, held, and then shattered into inconsolable sobbing.

  It was so completely unexpected that for a second or so all I could do was stare. Then I started in with some vague, consoling noises, and even ventured a pat on the back: but she was lost in some private hinterland of misery where I didn’t exist. After a minute or so, I began to make out words, heaved out breathlessly in the midst of the tears.

  “I’m—I’m not—I’m not—”

  “Not what, Susan?” I asked, as mildly as I could. I didn’t know her well enough even to risk a guess at what was eating at her, but whatever it was it seemed to have bitten deep.

  “Not a—not like that. I’m not, I’m not. I’m not a les—a lesb—” The words melted again into the formless quagmire of her sobbing, but that brief flash of light had told me all I needed to know.

  “No,” I said, “you’re not.” I reached past her to hook the glove compartment open, found a pack of tissues in there, and handed one to her. “It’s not like that. Juliet just . . . does that to people. You can’t help yourself. You just fall in love with her, whether you like it or not.”

  Susan buried her face in the tissue, shaking her head violently from side to side. “Not love,” she sobbed. “Not love. I’m having c . . . carnal . . . I’m imagining . . . Oh God, what’s happening? What’s happening to me?”

  “Whatever you want to call it,” I said matter-of-factly, “looking at Juliet makes you catch it like people catch the flu. I feel it, too. Most people who ever get close to her feel it. Whatever it is, it’s not a sin.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to add to that. Maybe she was the kind of Christian who thought that gay love was always a sin, in which case she’d just have to work it through for herself. Bur straight, gay, or agnostic, what Juliet did to you came as a shock to anyone’s system. I could tell her what Miss Salazar really was—by way of a prophylactic—but it wasn’t my secret to tell and under the circumstances it might make things worse rather than better. Carnal thoughts about a same-sex demon? Susan probably wasn’t in any state to take the knock.

  I did the best I could to talk her down, and eventually she got out of the car, leaving the soggy tissue on the passenger seat. She mumbled something by way of thanks for the lift, to which she added, “Don’t tell her! Please, please don’t tell her!” Then she fled into the house.

  There probably wasn’t anything I could have said to her that would have helped. Love is a drug, like the man said. But the harshest truth of all is in the gospel of Steppenwolf rather than Roxy Music: the pusher doesn’t care whether you live or die.

  * * *

  I called the Torringtons from the car as I was driving back east across the city. Hands-free, of course; I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t put safety first. Steve picked up on the first ring, which made me wonder if he’d been sitting with his phone in his hands.

  “Mr. Castor,” he said, sounding just a touch breathless. “What news?”

  “Good news as far as it goes,” I said. “You were right, and I was wrong.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “Abbie’s not in heaven. She’s in London.”

  He exhaled, long and loud. I waited for him to speak.

  “Can you please give me a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  Maybe he covered the phone, or maybe the voices were too low to hear over the sound of the car’s engine. There was about half a minute’s silence. Then he came back on. The pitch of his voice was unsteady—like the voice of a man fighting back tears.

  “We can’t thank you enough, Mr. Castor. Do you th
ink you can find her?”

  “I’m prepared to try.”

  He gave a relieved laugh, harsh and emphatic and broken off short by some kind of psychological wind-shear. “That’s excellent news! Excellent! We’ve got every confidence in you.”

  “Mr. Torrington—”

  “Steve.”

  “Steve. I don’t want to raise your hopes. This still isn’t going to be easy, assuming I can do it at all. And I’m going to need to have some money to spread around. If you can front me two or three hundred quid to be going on with, then I can make a start on—”

  He cut me off. “Mr. Castor, my wife and I count as affluent by any standards. You’re over-finessing, if I can use a bridge metaphor. Whatever you need, we can afford it. Possibly you feel as though you’re taking advantage of our grief. From our point of view, it’s not like that at all. We’ve heard that you’re the best, and we’re grateful that you’re prepared to help us.” There was a rustle, and then the scratch-scratch-scratch of a fountain pen nib on paper. “I’m writing out a check,” he said, “for a thousand pounds. I’ll put it in the post tonight. No, better—I’ll go over to your office and drop it off myself. I’ll add some cash, too, to tide you over until this clears. If it’s more than you were planning to charge, and if that makes you uncomfortable, then please just give the rest to the charity of your choice.”

  Good enough. I should have more clients who are that respectful of my sensitivities. I asked him for Peace’s address, which turned out to be in East Sheen: not a part of the city I knew all that well, and a lot farther south than I was expecting.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said, and hung up.

  Driving on automatic pilot, I’d already caught the Westway and driven on through Marylebone past Madame Tussauds and the planetarium—which now has commerce only with stars of the daytime TV variety. I was just about to swing off north onto Albany Street. But I had another call to make, and it was in the east of the city rather than the north. So I kept on going—east all the way, heading for the distant fastnesses of Walthamstow.

  I was tired, and I still had a headache from that psychic mind-blast, but there was nothing to gain by putting this off until tomorrow. Night was always the best time to see Nicky if you wanted to get any sense out of him.

  I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be there when I got back, possibly with engine and wheels still attached. That was worth a little additional effort.

  A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centerpiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.

  It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other prewar super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened softcore porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riffraff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song—probably the “Death March from Saul.”

  It was the perfect home for him: he was also on his second time around.

  I went in around the back, up the drainpipe, and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky has added some additional barricades of his own. You can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.

  Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draft of arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swiveled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security—although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.

  The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapor at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customized air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.

  I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle—and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them were ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.

  “Nicky?” I called, opening the door a little farther with the toe of my shoe.

  No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life—or at least the integrity of my balls—in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomblike.

  I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up out of a row of malnourished, canelike plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swill. The tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it—reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.

  Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room—or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England, and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.

  “Hey, Nicky,” I called, a little irritably. “Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.”

  “Open your coat, Castor.” Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout—just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction, but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapor. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo—except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing, businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too; ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” I asked him.

  “Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.”

  “Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—”

  “Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.” The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion; whe
n he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.