Vicious Circle Read online

  “This is great. You gonna lend me some bodyguards, then?”

  “Yeah sure, Castor. Out of the same budget that I use for your company car and your health benefits. Look, I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m just saying watch yourself. It’s just about possible he’ll try to put the frighteners on you. Are you around tomorrow?”

  “Depends. What for?”

  “At some point I’m gonna want you back at that warehouse. I want to set up a walk-through of how we think Sheehan died, and see if the ghost reacts in any way.”

  “How time sensitive is it?” I asked.

  “Right now? Probably not very. We’re still waiting on some of the forensics results. Why? You thinking of staying in and washing your hair?”

  “I’m on another job.”

  Coldwood’s laugh was short and explosive. “Then we’re truly living in the last days. What case is this?”

  “I’m looking for a girl.”

  “You’re doing missing persons now?”

  “No, she’s a dead girl. Name of Abigail Torrington. It’s a long story.”

  “Then keep it. I hate long stories. Call me when you’re free, okay?”

  He cut me off as abruptly as he’d picked up. I fished out Pen’s old London A-Z from the back of a cupboard and opened it up on the kitchen table. I also found a highlighter pen, which was exactly what I needed. I flicked through to the page that had Harlesden on it, cracking the spine ruthlessly so it would lie flat on the table. It was about five years out of date in any case: I’d buy her a new one when I picked up Steve Torrington’s friendly envelope full of cash and checks.

  I drew a cross in Craven Park Road, roughly where my office was. That was where I first picked up Abbie’s doll, and I’d been facing the window, which was sort of . . . north. Or so. The trace—the sense of something responding when I played my little tune—had come from behind me, to the left. I drew a broad, ragged line with the highlighter that took in Park Royal, a long stretch of Western Avenue, Hanger Hill, and Ealing . . . I had to stop somewhere, so I decided to make the M4 elevated section my rough-and-ready boundary marker.

  Then I found Du Cane Road, and the little cross that marked St. Michael’s. The car park where I’d made my second attempt, earlier this evening, was about a hundred yards farther up the road. I’d been facing into the setting sun, and that was where the response had come from—until I was hit with that little psychic cluster bomb that left me with a hole in my tongue and a ringing in my ears like a peal of bells in Hades.

  Due west. I drew in the second line, out through Acton, Ealing, and Drayton Green to the rolling hills of the Brent Valley Golf Course. No way Peace would be hiding Abbie there, though: the green fees were astronomical.

  The two lines intersected over a huge swathe of West Acton and North Ealing. I’d drawn them wide on purpose, of course, because this wasn’t rocket science or any other damn science worthy of the name: it was just me, extrapolating hopefully from a messy and inadequate data set.

  And that metaphor made me think of Nicky again.

  Which made me remember the crumpled piece of printout paper in my pocket, with his handwriting on it.

  The Oriflamme.

  I looked at my watch. Only eleven, so the joint would still be hopping. And maybe Peace would think he’d hurt me worse than he had with his little psychic overload ambush. There was nothing like stealing a march on the opposition.

  Six

  THERE WAS A BROAD FLIGHT OF STONE STEPS UP FROM THE street, the stairwell separated off from the pavement by wrought-iron railings with the arms of the borough of Camden worked into them—complete with the pious motto Non sibi sed toti, usually translated as “I hope you brought enough for everyone.” I guess at some time in its recent past this place had been a government building of some kind.

  Not anymore, though, clearly. The two bruisers who checked me at the top of the steps didn’t have the look or the dress sense of any civil servants I’d ever seen, and probably didn’t have much of a future in local government unless Camden one day decided to open up a gorilla-wrangling department.

  They weren’t checking me for weapons or concealed booze, although there was a perfunctory frisking of my pockets and linings: mainly they were verifying that I was alive, and more or less human by the yardsticks they were using. First they made me clench a silver coin tightly in my hand for a few seconds and looked to see if I showed any reaction to the metal, then they took my pulse in a rough-and-ready way at throat and wrist. There’s something a bit off-putting about having a guy who’s three inches taller than you, with the build of a wrestler, pressing his thumb against your windpipe. It’s one reason why I don’t drink at exorcist hangouts more often.

  Another reason is that I’m an unsociable bastard who hates shoptalk worse than dental surgery.

  The Oriflamme is the exorcists’ hangout par excellence, in case you hadn’t guessed that already: or at least it was in its first incarnation. Back then, it stood in the center of a roundabout on Castlebar Hill, in a building that was formerly a museum and then went through various changes of ownership before settling into the hands of the famous Peckham Steiner—a father figure for all London exorcists, so long as you had a drunk, abusive father who was only on nodding terms with sanity.

  Steiner then made a gift of the place to his good friend Bill Bryant, better known by the semi-affectionate nickname of Bourbon. It was a very long way from anywhere, but it had a kind of dank, heavy atmosphere of its own and a reputation as the place to be seen if you were looking to make a name for yourself in the trade, so it limped along from year to year in spite of the lousy location. But then about three years ago, somebody burned it to the ground. It was a firebomb attack, mercifully when the place was closed, and it did the job nicely. The barman’s cat survived, but apart from that they didn’t save so much as an ashtray.

  Nicky has a whole bunch of theories about who did it and why, and every so often he tries to tell me some of them. I usually manage to get clear before he reaches the part where Satanists are taking over the government, but sometimes it’s a close call.

  Meanwhile, in one of those ironies that dog our profession, the Oriflamme rose from the dead—or at least the name did. A guy named McPhail, who as far as I know had never had anything to do with the place on Castlebar Hill, had his own vision of a place that would sort of be the exorcists’ version of a gentlemen’s club—with a bar, a lounge, poste restante facilities, a place where you could crash if you were just in the city for a couple of days, baths, the whole works.

  He didn’t have any premises—or collateral—but he did have the kind of can-do attitude that you usually associate with serial killers and corrupt politicians. He stole the name from Bourbon Bryant (who threatened to sue but didn’t have the money for a cab to the courthouse, let alone a lawyer) and set up shop in Soho Square. The rumor was that he was squatting rather than paying for a lease, and I could believe it: rents are so high in Soho these days, even the homeless guys sleeping in doorways are paying a grand a month.

  I walked on up the steps, having passed muster as a warm body with no passengers, and went in through a door that was as thickly decorated with wards and sigils as a wedding car is with ribbons and old tin cans. That took me straight into a large bar area that had probably had more atmosphere back when it was a rent office or whatever. Lighting was provided by a dozen or so bounce spotlights at floor level around the edges of the room, pointed up at the ceiling: a nice idea, but spoiled by the fact that most of the people in the room were standing or sitting close to the spots and blocking off most of the light. Huge shadows came and went on the ceiling, and light levels rose and fell from one second to the next as people shifted in their seats or stood up to get the next round in.

  The bar itself was a rough barricade of packing cases with tarpaulins over them, off in one corner of the room. They were serving beer by the bottle, wine and spirits by the unmeasured slug—enough in itself to get the place closed down if anyone from Customs and Excise stopped in for a quick one. Of co
urse, most revenue men have a very faint pulse in the first place, so they probably wouldn’t get past the bouncers.

  The clientele were colorfully mixed. I spotted half a dozen people I vaguely knew in the seething mass at the bar, and a few more sitting in quiet corners in intense tęte-ŕ-tętes with strangers who could have been clients, partners, or paid informers. I was looking for someone specific, though, and I saw him at last, leaning against a pillar on the far side of the room, all on his lonesome. Bourbon Bill himself, the owner of the original Oriflamme that had died in the flames and been reborn as this un-phoenixlike shithole. He was wearing a leather jacket over a red shirt and black denims that looked as though they might date from the American Civil War; Doc Martens of a similar vintage graced his feet. He was nursing a nearly empty shot glass while taking occasional slugs from a hip flask in his inside pocket. I swung around by way of the bar, picked up two large shots of whisky, and came up on him from behind.

  I pushed one of the glasses into his free hand, clinked the other one against it. “Cheers, Bill,” I said, as he looked around.

  “Felix Castor.” He sounded surprised. “Unexpected privilege. You don’t seem to get out much these days.” He raised the glass and downed it in one. He drank whisky like other men drink water, and as far as I know he only used water for brushing his teeth. He could have gone through a half bottle tonight already, depending on how early he started, but there was no indication at all in his voice or in the way he was standing. His fondness for booze wasn’t a great asset in a bar owner—former bar owner, I should say—but his incomparable ability to deal with it definitely was. More than one man who’d tried to drink him under the table had been carried away on top of it.

  “I get out as much as I ever did, Bourbon,” I said. “I just don’t like to get drunk in the company of ghost-hunters. It feels like I’m still on the clock, somehow.”

  “That’s your rep, Fix.” He grinned, but it didn’t last. His face settled back down into its habitual dour lines: he was someone whom life had kicked in the balls, and he still wore the expression that comes after the initial pain of impact has subsided. He’d always had a basset hound kind of face, now it was more deeply seamed than ever, and his complexion matched his crest of wood-ash hair. “You used to come out to the real Oriflamme, though, time was. Couple of nights a week, if I remember rightly.”

  I nodded. “Then I got myself an office. Biggest mistake I ever made.”

  “I hear you, brother.” He laughed ruefully, shook his head. “Biggest mistake for me was going up to Scotland for my brother’s wedding. Came back to a pile of cinders and a bill from the fire brigade. Three years on and I still don’t have a blind clue who did it.”

  “Any progress on that front?”

  “Not recently. Had a lead a couple of months back, might come to something. Most likely not. I’m patient. Got a sort of a Zen mentality, these days. You know, flowing with the water.”

  “That’s not Zen. That’s Tao.”

  “Whatever. I don’t let stuff get to me. But when I find those motherless bastards, I’m going to take their effing teeth out with pliers.” His expression changed, became suddenly more animated in a slightly unhealthy way. “Why are you asking, anyway? Did you hear something? I’m offering a reward for information, you know.”

  “If I hear anything, I’ll pass it on,” I assured him hastily. “Bugger the reward. No, I came down here looking for someone else. Maybe you can point him out to me, if he’s here.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Dennis Peace.”

  “Yeah, I know Peace.” That was why I’d gone straight over to Bourbon when I saw he was here: he knew everybody. “Seems like he’s flavor of the month all of a sudden. You want to do some business with him?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Then what?”

  “I need to contact him on behalf of a client. He may have taken something that doesn’t belong to him.”

  “Hah.” Bourbon didn’t look altogether surprised about this mission statement. “Well, maybe so. Wouldn’t be the first time, I’ve got to admit. He was always a bit of a wild boy. I remember him coming into the bar one night and talking about knife fights. I called him on one story because it sounded like he was talking shite. So he rolled up his shirt and showed me his scars. Jesus fucking wept! He looked like Boris Karloff had chopped him up and stitched him back together again.”

  “Did he pick a fight with someone and lose?” I asked, trying to pin down that echo.

  “He picked a fight with Stig Matthews. They both lost. Both ended up in hospital.”

  Yeah, that was what I’d heard. Two men trading punches until they both fell down, with broken noses and half-pulped faces: the sort of thing that gives even machismo a bad name.

  “I thought he was trying to be good just lately, though,” Bourbon said reflectively. “Starting to quiet down a bit. That’s what people tell me, anyway. He come back from America a changed man, they say. But I can’t help you anyway, Fix. He’s not here.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Well I saw him walk out about half an hour back. Looking a bit rough, I have to say—like he hadn’t slept in a while. He bought some FFs from Carla, and popped a couple right there. Then he was off again. Didn’t even stay for a drink.”

  Damn. I’d been that close. But a miss is as good as a mile. “Is Carla still here?” I asked. Bourbon looked around the room for a few seconds, then pointed to a formidable-looking redhead sitting close to the bar, in intense conversation with a bare-armed bald guy so heavily tattooed that it was hard to make out his facial expression. In other company, he might have made you feel a little nervous: next to Carla he sort of faded into the background.

  “Thanks, Bourbon. So Peace used to be a regular at the old place. You know anything else about him?”

  “There’s a difference between what I hear and what I know, Fix. Peace is the sort of man that people like to tell stories about—but you know how it is. A lot of those stories used to be told about other people before and they’ll be told about someone else after. All I know—know for sure—is that he used to be a rubber duck a while back. He was part of the collective. Not anymore, though; he got fed up with all the arguments. And I think he told me he’s a friend of Rosie Crucis, although as far as I know he wasn’t part of the team that raised her.”

  “You’re right. He wasn’t.”

  “Oh yeah, that was you and Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, wasn’t it? The Sussex Gardens Resurrectionists. That’s all I can think of. Never saw him in anyone’s company except his own. He’s almost as antisocial as you.”

  “Tell me some of the stories, then.”

  He grimaced. “I’d just as soon not, Fix, if it’s all the same to you. Not my style.”

  “Sorry I asked, then. Thanks, Bourbon. I owe you one.”

  “You bought me one. Just don’t go in half-cocked, okay? Peace is a nasty piece of work, in some respects, but in my experience he plays straight with people who play straight with him. On the other hand, if you piss him off he can be a right bastard.”

  “Shit, he really is like me. Have a good one, Bourbon.”

  “You, too, Fix.”

  I strolled over toward Carla’s end of the bar, watching her out of the corner of my eye while I ordered another drink. I don’t like hitting people up if I don’t already know them: the law of unintended consequences applies with big, spiky knobs on. I could have asked Bourbon to make an introduction, but why the hell should I drag him into my shit when he’s got shit enough of his own?

  Biding my time, I ordered another drink. By the time it came, Carla had finished her conversation with the illustrated man. Money had changed hands, and so had a little brown paper bag that had been folded many times and taped shut. The guy took off for the street door looking happy and excited—at least, as far as I could tell under all the paintwork.

  FFs, Bourbon had said, by which I presumed he meant fast-forwards, rather than, say, back issues of the Fantastic Four comic book. So Peace had an amphetamine habit. Well, he wouldn’t be the first exorcist to keep his pencils
sharp with chemical assistance—or the last. Interesting that he’d looked so wiped, though: could be that was an after-effect of fielding all my various attempts to raise Abbie’s spirit, as well as hitting that screamer back my way earlier in the day. Maybe if I kept up the pressure there, I’d get through his guard.