Vicious Circle Read online

  Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. “There you go,” I said. “No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.”

  “Christ Jesus, Nicky!”

  “I told you—this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest to God not taking any risks.” His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognized from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.

  I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place; what there was—keys, wallet, Swiss army penknife with things for getting stones out of horses’ hooves—I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidized silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. “Just one hand,” Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this was a weapon—and it had his name on it.

  I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled. I knew Nicky’s eyes would follow it, the way your eyes would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch. I grabbed it right below the rim.

  I stood up in one smooth movement, and the bucket toppled: the tree that was rooted in it went over, too, toppling its neighbor and starting a chain reaction that sounded like the swish of a thousand canes. And Nicky was standing in line like he was waiting for a spanking. Without a gasp or a whoof or a yell—because again he hadn’t laid in any spare breath for it—he went sprawling. His head hit the wall with a dull thud, but that wouldn’t slow him down much. From off to my right, though, there came a different sound: a metal-on-stone clatter, quickly swallowed. That seemed like the better bet, so I made a lunge even before I saw where the gun had ended up, in the spreading pool of sludge from the overturned buckets. Nicky had managed to disentangle himself from the undergrowth and he was scrambling on all fours in the same direction. Being at ground level already he got there first, but my foot came down on his wrist just as his fingers closed on the gun.

  “I’m not putting my full weight down,” I pointed out. “If I do, something’s going to break.”

  Nicky has a morbid fear of physical trauma: being dead already, he doesn’t have any way of repairing it. All the systems that in a living body would reknit flesh and bone and channel away infection are nonstarters in a walking cadaver. He dropped the gun in great haste and I scooped it up. It was old and heavy—but someone had been looking after it and I had no doubt at all that it would work, even covered in thick brown slurry. Not knowing how to put the safety back on or eject the clip, I aimed it at Nicky instead. He threw his hands up, desperately scrambling back across the floor on his backside.

  “Easy! Easy, Castor! I won’t heal! I won’t heal!”

  “Easy? You fucking bushwhacked me, you maniac!”

  “I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to kill me.”

  “What?” I lowered the gun, pained and exasperated. “Nicky, you’re already dead. Did you forget that? Killing you would be fucking futile.”

  “To damage me, then.” He was trying to get his legs under him and stand up without using his hands, which were still high in the air.

  “Damage you. Right.” I crossed to the window and tried to open it. Nothing doing: the sash was nailed down solid. I smashed it instead, raising a wail of indignation from Nicky, and dropped the gun out of the window onto the weed-choked sprawl of asphalt that used to be the cinema’s car park—a party favor for the next courting couple who decided to take a walk through the long grass.

  Then I turned to face him again. He lowered his hands and came across to look out of the window, then favored me with a resentful scowl. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a butcher’s apron over his usual Zegna suit. It was an odd and unsettling combination, even though the stains on it were mulch-green and mud-brown rather than bloodred.

  You know what you’re getting with Nicky, most of the time. He was paranoid even before he died, and if anything that event had only reinforced his conviction that the universe was out to get him. So I wasn’t really surprised by any of this: just morbidly curious as to what exactly had triggered it.

  “Why the fuck would I want to damage you?” I asked him. “No, let me rephrase that. I want to damage you all the time—but why would I choose today to de-repress?”

  He was sullen and defensive. “Why does anybody choose a particular time to freak out? All I know is that a lot of people are choosing now. Did that get by you somehow? I thought you had this big umbilical thing going with London. Tuned in to the . . . zeitgeist. City geist. Whatever. So if a whole lot of Londoners eat poison and lose their minds, I thought there was a chance you might get brainsick, too. But I guess today you were receiving on other wavelengths.” He could see that none of this meant anything to me—and also that I was starting to look a little pissed off—so he came in again from a slightly less oblique angle. “You know how many murders there are in London in the average year, Castor?”

  “Nope. I don’t. I know we’re behind New York but trying harder.”

  Out of nowhere he put on a smug look that I instantly recognized—the look he gets when he’s dealing out arcane knowledge from undisclosed sources. “About a hundred and fifty. Worst year on record, a hundred and ninety-three. There was a big spike last year, but generally the rate stands nice and steady at two point four per annum per hundred thousand head of population. Say, one every couple of days, or just over. Know how many there were last night?”

  “Again, no.”

  “Seven. Plus two arguables, and six old-school tries. And that’s not counting in the rapes, the mutilations, the aggravated assaults. Sick shit for all the family, in a dozen different flavors. I’m telling you, Castor, we’re way, way over to the right of the bell-shaped curve.” He glanced off across the room, nodded toward the computer workstation. “Take a look.”

  I shot him a wary glance, but at least he wasn’t armed now, and we seemed to be back on comfortable territory—wild conspiracy theories and tortured statistics. I walked over to the computer and glanced at the two monitors that he’s got set up kitty-corner-wise in the corner of the room. A whole lot of files were open on the desktop, and most of them were stories from Internet news feeds.

  UXBRIDGE MAN SLAIN WITH OWN TIE

  WOMAN IN REGENT’S CANAL WAS MURDERED, POLICE SAY

  HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE

  SHOOT-OUT AT TESCO METRO

  It did seem to have been a bad day—especially given that it was a Sunday, when most people in London are traditionally sleeping off hangovers or washing their cars. I took hold of the mouse and minimized some of the windows: there were more stories behind them, stacked one on top of another in an infinite regression of atrocities.

  “You see?” said Nicky. “A sensible man takes precautions.”

  “How would you know?” I countered. “So what, you think London lost its collective mind last night?”

  “Well, it certainly looked into the abyss. And the abyss gazes also, know what I mean?”

  “Right. So you get yourself a gun. How do you know you’re part of the solution rather than part of the problem, Nicky?”

  He frowned,
stopped in his tracks. “What?”

  “There’s an outbreak of murder and mayhem. You get scared, decide to make sure you don’t end up on the wrong end of it, and the next thing you know, you’re waving automatic weapons at close friends. There’s such a thing as friendly fire, you moron.”

  “Friendly—?” He thought this over, looking like he’d sucked on a lemon and discovered that he still had some functional taste buds. He got sullen and defensive. “Hey, don’t you fuck with my head, Castor—it’s not funny. Whatever the hell happened, these killings were geographically clustered, okay? So we’re talking a chemical or bacteriological agent, or something like that—something dispersed in either air or water. I don’t drink water. I don’t metabolize oxygen. There’s no logical way I could be infected.”

  I nodded understandingly, mainly to make him shut up. “Nicky, seven murders in one night is one for the record books—but only until some industrious soul takes it up to eight. It’s like every other summer is the hottest summer on record.”

  “That’s just because of global warming.”

  “Right. And this is because of global rabies. That’s how records work, Nicky: they keep going up because they can’t go down. Anyway, leaving all this bullshit aside for a moment, I’m going to need a favor.”

  He didn’t unbend: clearly it hurt his pride that I’d out-paranoided him with my “part of the problem” remark. “I’m not in the mood to do you any favors, Castor. You stamped on my wrist. You realize what I’d have to go through to repair a bone? I got no antibodies. I got no fucking white cells. I’ve just got my own two hands.”

  “I brought you a present.”

  “Like I care.” I was going to count the seconds, but the pause was too short. “What is it?”

  My relationship with Nicky is based on several distinct layers of ruthless pragmatism. Being dead, and risen again in the flesh (I’m avoiding the contentious term “zombie,” which these days the government is calling hate-speech) Nicky doesn’t get about as much as he used to. He prefers to keep his body chilled to a level where the processes of organic decay can be slowed to a manageable minimum. He still has a subtle aroma of formaldehyde and foie gras, but he takes the edge off it with Old Spice aftershave, and since most other dead-alive people I’ve met smell like a freezer full of spoiled meat, that’s quite impressive.

  But his limited mobility means that in some respects now he has to rely on the kindness of strangers—those comparatively rare strangers who don’t find the company of the dead uncongenial. So whenever I want something from him, I bring him a little gift to sweeten the deal. He likes fine French reds of hard-to-find vintages (he just inhales the aroma, like one of Yeats’s ghosts) and hen’s-tooth-rare early jazz recordings: getting hold of that stuff without bankrupting myself in the process is an ongoing challenge. Tonight, though, I had a winner. I handed it over without a word—a vulcanite disc in a stiff cardboard sleeve, one side of the label marked up with postage stamps to the value of three cents. Nicky turned it over in his hands, read the recto side of the label and said nothing for a while. Then he said “Fuck, Castor. How big a favor are you looking for?”

  It was something a fair bit rarer than a hen’s tooth: a recording of Buddy Bolden, the tragically unhinged trumpeter who—by some accounts, anyway—single-handedly turned New Orleans ragtime into jazz. The A side was “Make Me a Pallet.” There wasn’t any B side, which under the circumstances didn’t really matter. Bolden is popularly supposed to have left no recordings of his work, but I’ve got sources who don’t take no for an answer.

  “It’s two favors.”

  “Go on.”

  “Number one is easy. I want you to get me some background on an accidental death. A girl named Abigail Torrington—time frame somewhere over the summer of last year. She drowned on a school trip. Some other kids died at the same time.”

  He sat down at the desk and typed a few of the details down in a notepad program.

  “Okay. So far, that’s a Ronco Twenty Golden Greats favor. What makes it a Buddy Bolden favor? Shit, I think you did crack one of my wrist bones, you jumpy bastard.”

  “Number two is a bit more open-ended. I’m looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. A man named Dennis Peace.”

  “How are you spelling ‘Peace’?”

  “Like the kind you’ve got to give a chance to. Guy’s an exorcist, and from what I know already he’s pretty damn good at it. Anything you can get me will trim the odds a bit more in my favor—and believe me when I say I’m taking all the help I can get here.”

  “Anything else you can give me? Last known address? Social security number? Known associates?”

  I gave him the East Sheen address that Steve Torrington had given me over the phone. “That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Except that he was in a malpractice case a few years back—on the receiving end.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell him about what had happened when I tried to locate Peace through Abbie’s toys. But that would have entailed a hell of a lot more explanation than I wanted to get into right then.

  “I’ll stop by tomorrow,” I said. “You can either give me a progress report or stick an assault rifle up my nose. If you get anything juicy before then, call me, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll call you.”

  “Oh, and one more thing, since we’re on the subject. Where did that crummy retread of the Oriflamme open up?”

  “The exorcist bar?” Nicky sneered. “Like I’d be caught dead there.” It was a weak joke, and I didn’t do anything to encourage it. “Over in the West End,” Nicky said, when he saw I wasn’t rising to the bait. “Soho Square.” He scribbled the address for me on a piece of printout paper, put it into my hand. “Didn’t you once describe the Oriflamme as a busman’s holiday?”

  “Yeah, I did. And now I’m trying to catch a bus conductor.”

  I left him to it. Under the circumstances, I felt I was ahead of the game just coming away without any freshly minted holes in me.

  I went back to Pen’s, where I found a note from Pen on my bed telling me that Coldwood had called again and asking me to feed the animals again: she was going to visit Rafi, she said, and then head on out to Dylan’s flat afterward to help him unwind after another late shift. Well, I thought resignedly, if you’re going to play doctors and nurses you were onto a winner with an orthopedic surgeon.

  Doling out liver to the ravens and pellets to the rats took up about half an hour. When I was done, and cleaned up again, I called Coldwood on the mobile number he’d given me—a much better option than going through the station switchboard.

  He picked up immediately, and he didn’t bother with small talk. “I’ve been trying to reach you all fucking day,” he said. “Brondesbury Auto Parts: there was blood all over the shop, and it was a match with Sheehan’s.”

  Brondesbury Auto Parts? Sheehan? It took me a moment or two to work out what he was talking about, then I remembered the bleak, empty warehouse out on the Edgware Road, and the pathetic ghost with half its head missing.

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Well, congratulations.”

  “Premature. We arrested Pauley, but he made bail. That’s why I called. Your name hasn’t been mentioned anywhere, but your statement was what bought us the warrant: Pauley’s got very big ears, and friends in a lot of fucking unlikely places. So watch your back, okay?”

  “Seriously?” I was surprised and not pleasantly. It’s been tried on a few times, but evidence from spiritual conversations has never been accepted in a court case. Not in England, anyway. I never dreamed this druglord might have anything to gain by topping me.

  “Seriously. If he can get the warrant invalidated, he can stop the case coming to court. One way of doing that is to put you out of action and then allege conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy?”

  “To pervert the course of justice. It’s just a form of words. He says you were in our pocket, a judge looks at the warrant submission, they get a verdict. If it goes their way he’s got a get-out-of-jail-free card, because all our sodding evidence is inadmissible.”