Vicious Circle Read online

  It was hard to believe, from that bloodless face and voice, that he had a sense of humor at all, but I played along, nodding as if I understood and approved. I did approve, in a way: when a guy starts off by telling you how tough he is, in my experience he’s mostly overfinessing because he’s actually got the moral fiber of a blancmange and he doesn’t want you to suss him right out of the gate. It gave me something to work from, at least.

  “So tell me a joke,” I suggested.

  “Perhaps I will.” His gaze flicked past my shoulder and I knew without looking that he wasn’t alone. A second later, that guess was confirmed as a boot scraped on gravel a few feet behind me. “I’ve found out a lot about you in the last two days,” Gwillam observed, almost absently. He looked away again across the river of traffic, narrowing his eyes as the smoky breeze played across his face. “You’ve got something of a name for yourself, and from what I’m hearing the name is not fool. So I’m wondering why exactly you’re doing this.”

  His words stirred up echoes of an earlier conversation, and I suddenly got an inkling of who I might see if I turned and looked behind me.

  “Why I’m doing what, exactly?” I asked, understudying sweet little Buttercup.

  Gwillam frowned and breathed out deeply through his nose, but the level tone of his voice didn’t change by an inch or an ounce. “I’m not a fool, either, Castor. It will do nothing good for my mood if you try to play me for one.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll bear that in mind.” I don’t have the patience for fishing at the best of times. I could never be bothered sitting by the ice hole for hours on end when you could just chuck in a grenade and have done with it. “You want to know what I’m doing over at the church, and whose heart is beating in there. You’re wondering what that heartbeat has got to do with all this shit that’s going down in West London right now, including the riot tonight. Maybe you’d also like to know who Juliet Salazar is and where she figures in all this. Right so far?”

  He gave me the kind of pained, wondering stare you’d give to an aged relative who’d just tried to put their underpants on over their head.

  “I was talking about the girl,” he said, very quietly. “The little girl you just made your heartfelt promise to. Unless that was a different little girl. Perhaps this is a hobby of yours.”

  Just for a second I had a sense of events accelerating away from me in a direction I wasn’t braced for—like I might go sprawling on my face and lose what was left of my dignity. I really didn’t feel too good now: my head was spinning, and there was a smell in my nostrils like the very faintest hint of rotten meat.

  “The girl?” I repeated.

  Gwillam looked just a little irritated, as if the edge was starting to wear off his patience. Compared to the robotic calm he’d shown up until now, it was almost a relief. “Abigail Torrington,” he said. “Or Abigail Jeffers. Whichever you prefer.”

  “Oh, that girl.” I tried to sound as if everything was falling into place now, although I felt like I was treading water in lead-soled diving boots. I filed the other name away for future reference: that was something, at least. “But that’s just a missing person case. Unless you’ve got some other reason to be looking for Dennis Peace? Is that what this is all about? Is Abbie a means to an end?”

  Gwillam frowned sternly, two straight-edged vertical lines appearing in the center of his forehead. “Peace is completely irrelevant,” he said. “Obviously we appreciate what he did, but his motives being what they are, we can’t trust him to follow through. No, it’s Abigail we need to find. And we need to find her before anybody else does. We’re not prepared to consider any other possibility. After all you’ve seen since Saturday, you ought to know exactly what’s at stake.”

  I played this back at various speeds, without much luck. “It’s funny,” I said, giving it up. “All the words you’re saying make perfect sense, but somehow when you put them all together it comes out as shite. Why should Abbie matter to anyone besides her parents? Or is this a question of the sparrow that falls in the marketplace? Do you guys look out for every lost soul that comes down the pike? I mean, that’s inspiring, but it’s also a little hard to—”

  I stopped because a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I was twisted around about ninety degrees to the left. I found myself staring into a hostile face dominated by a massive barricade of eyebrow.

  “Show respect,” said the loup-garou sternly, showing me his teeth.

  “Po.” Gwillam’s tone was mild, but very efficacious. The huge loup-garou let go of my shoulder and stood back, almost like a soldier called to attention. I could see Zucker now, standing over by the Civic as if they thought I might cut and run and they were ready for the possibility. Their own car—another off-roader, even bigger than the Jeep—was pulled up onto the curb about a hundred yards or so farther down. They’d walked the rest of the way under the cover of my playing.

  Gwillam didn’t look concerned, either for my well-being or about the possibility that I might abscond. I guess he just wanted to have his say more than he wanted to see me get my throat ripped out.

  He nodded to the loup-garou at my side, acknowledging the swift obedience with silent approval, then turned his attention back to me.

  “Pythagoras is meant to have made a clever comment about levers,” he murmured. “Levers, and moving the world. I was never entirely convinced—it sounds a little too post-Enlightenment to me. But I’m sure you know the one I mean.” He stared at me expectantly for a moment. Being in no mood to play straight man, I stared right back. “Well,” Gwillam went on, “that’s what the little dead girl is. A lever large enough to move the world. Which is a troubling thought, to me at least. Because insofar as I have a preference, I’d like the world to stay where it is.”

  This was still about as clear as Mississippi mud. Time for another grenade, I thought.

  “Are you just speaking for yourself?” I asked him. “Or for the Catholic Church as a whole? Which, incidentally, has to be a fucking sight more catholic than I thought it was, given who it’s employing.”

  There was a moment’s silence, during which Gwillam just stared at me, nonplussed. Then he nodded, not at me but at Po. And then an explosion of pain in my left side made me crumple and fall, thudding against the crash barrier on the way down. A kidney punch, administered with finely measured force, designed to cause spectacular agony but stop short of actual rupture.

  It was a long time before I tuned into my surroundings again—half a minute, maybe, but I’m not the best judge. Given that for a lot of that time I was struggling to suck in a breath without moving a single muscle on my left-hand side, it felt a fair bit longer to me.

  “You were warned once,” said Gwillam, his voice sounding hollow and distant. “But from what Zucker and Po said, I was afraid that you might not have taken the warning seriously enough.”

  I still couldn’t get enough breath to answer—which might have been for the best, since the words uppermost in my mind right then were “fuck you.” As I knelt there, folded up around my pain, something cold and hard was pressed against the back of my neck.

  “We are serious,” Gwillam said, quietly but with very precise, almost stilted emphasis. “We don’t take life lightly, but we’re empowered to do so, if the need arises. Right now, killing you seems to me to be very definitely the lesser of two evils.”

  “And yet . . . ,” I grunted, wincing as the effort of speech tugged at muscles that weren’t quite ready to move again, “. . . I can’t help noticing . . . I’m still alive.”

  “Yes.”

  The pressure on my neck disappeared, and a moment later there was the unmistakeable sound of a safety being pulled back, with a slight catch along the way, into the on position. The son of a bitch had had the gun cocked. If he’d sneezed at the wrong moment he could have blown my head off. I looked up, moving my head as little as possible, to find him sliding the gun back into a shoulder holster. Meeting my gaze, he shook his head.

  “We were watching you at the mall,” he said. “At that point, killing you was very definitely part of my night
’s work. But then I saw you and the woman—is she a woman?—dealing with the possessed and saving the hostages. I’ll admit that wasn’t what I was expecting—and it made me a little uneasy. You see, if I’m going to turn Zucker and Po loose on you, I’d rather do it with a clear conscience.”

  “They didn’t seem to be on the leash last night,” I wheezed.

  “At that time, they were under orders not to kill you. Hurting you wasn’t particularly discouraged. Castor, I’m going to ask you again, and probably for the last time. Whose side are you on in this?”

  If I’d had more notice of that question, I might have given it some thought and come up with a cute, ambivalent answer. As it was, I didn’t hesitate.

  “Abbie Torrington’s side.”

  Gwillam made a sound that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle. “That’s even possible,” he said. “If so, those stories about you not being a fool may just about be true. Although it’s still more likely that someone is playing you the way you play that whistle.”

  He went quiet for long enough that I thought he’d finished.

  “If I stand up,” I asked, risking a very slow and very gradual glance over my shoulder, “will this asshole knock me down again?”

  Gwillam went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “You were ahead of us at the Collective,” he said. “That was . . . impressive. Do you have any other leads on where Peace is hiding the girl?”

  Well, I had about a half of one, and I was keeping it to myself. I got a hand up on the crash barrier and began to lever myself back up onto my feet. My teeth were clenched shut with the effort, so of course I couldn’t answer Gwillam’s question.

  He sighed again, sounding like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  “If I tell you to find your reverse gear and back out of this—say until you hit China—is there any chance that you’ll do it?”

  It’s probably a sin to lie to a priest, and I’ve got enough sins on my conscience already without going out looking for new ones. I just shook my head once: more than once would have been pushing it, given that I’d only just got myself back on the vertical.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Gwillam sadly. “But I’m telling you anyway. It’s by way of being an acknowledgment of what you did tonight. A professional courtesy, let’s say. It’s the last you’re going to get. Good night, Castor—and good-bye.”

  He made the sign of the cross over me—not threateningly, or ironically, but deadpan serious. Then he signed to the two werewolves and they fell in to either side of him as he walked back to the car.

  As they drove away Zucker misjudged the angle—or maybe, got it exactly right—and scraped along the passenger side of Matt’s Civic with a sound like the shriek of a neutered elephant. Then he accelerated into the eastbound traffic and within a few seconds their taillights had merged with the rest of the river.

  * * *

  Imelda Probert, better known as the Ice-Maker, lives in a squalid little third-floor flat in Peckham, in a block whose brickwork has been painted black in some sort of abortive experiment with stealth technology. The door off the street is boarded up, so you go in around the side through a yard that’s like an urban elephants’ graveyard, strewn with the rusting, wheelless hulks of expired cars. It’s something of a conundrum, given how much hard cash the Ice-Maker must pull down, week in and week out. After all, she offers a specialized and much sought-after service. But then again, I guess by the same token she doesn’t have to worry about bringing in the passing trade: people who need her, find her.

  Before I went in, I checked an additional piece of equipment that I’d picked up along the way. It was a sprig of myrtle, borrowed from a graveyard. Myrtle for May: if I’d been on the ball, I should have had some already, then I wouldn’t have to shinny up cemetery walls after midnight. I whispered a blessing to it, feeling like a fraud as I always do when I’m mucking about with things that laypeople would call magic.

  The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer—two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with “dead-drunk guy facedown in his own vomit.” But I didn’t meet anybody on the way up, and when I knocked on the door on the third floor—the only door that wasn’t covered over with plywood and nailed shut—the sound echoed through the building with telling hollowness.

  After a few seconds, the door was opened by a skinny black girl of about sixteen or so, whose eyes were each, individually, bigger than her whole face. I only knew she was a girl by the pigtails: the hard, hatchet face was one-size-fits-all, and the black jeans and manga-chick T-shirt were unisex.

  “Yeah?” she said.

  “Friend of Nicky’s,” I told her.

  She frowned at me with truculent suspicion. “You got a pulse?”

  I checked. “I do, but it’s running kind of slow. Is that a deal-breaker?”

  She swiveled her head and looked behind her into the flat. “Mom,” she called. “There’s a live man out here.”

  “Is he police?” a much deeper voice answered from somewhere inside. “If he’s police, Lisa, you tell him to go fuck himself because I paid already.”

  The moppet turned her face to me again. “Mom says if you’re police, you can—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I got it. I’m not police. The name’s Castor. If Nicky Heath is in there, I’m here to see him and give him a ride home.”

  She called out over her shoulder, keeping her eyes on me this time in case I tried to steal something. It would have had to be the door or one of the walls: there was nothing else on the landing, not even carpet to cover the warped floorboards. “He says he’s Castor and he’s gonna give Nicky a ride.”

  “Oh, Castor.” There was edgy disapproval in the voice, and I knew exactly why. “Yeah, you show him into the parlor, Lisa. He can just hold his horses until I’m done here.”

  Rolling her eyes to show what she thought of these instructions, Lisa flung the door open. Showing me into the parlor meant pointing to a door off the narrow entrance hall to the left as she took off in the opposite direction herself. There was a door right at the end of the hall where I could see Imelda’s back as she labored over her latest patient. She was singing to herself, a gospel song, most likely, but it was under her breath and from this distance I couldn’t make out either the words or the tune.

  I’d been here before, about two years back, so I knew the drill. I also knew that Imelda didn’t like me very much: exorcists were bad for business. Sending me into the parlor to wait was a piece of calculated sadism, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do about it, so I just took a deep breath, held it, and walked in.

  The Ice-Maker is basically just a faith-healer with a very specialized clientele: a clientele whom no other doctor, whether alternative or vanilla, is likely to want to poach. She deals exclusively with zombies, and she claims, by laying-on of hands, to slow the processes of decay almost to a standstill. I always thought it was bullshit, but Nicky goes to her twice a month without fail—and he’s been dead a long while now, so I respect his judgment on matters of physical decomposition. Her monicker—Ice-Maker—comes from her boast that her hands are as good as a deep-freeze in terms of keeping dead meat fresh.

  But the smell in the parlor, I have to say, was one of sour-sweet decay, deeply ingrained. Like I said, this wasn’t my first visit, so I knew what to expect, but it still hit me like a wall and almost knocked me down. I went on inside, and six or seven of the walking dead glanced up to appraise the newcomer. The sitting dead, actually, since the room was laid out like a doctor’s waiting room with chairs all around three walls, and most of the chairs were taken. There were even magazines: a chalk-faced woman in the corner with a small hole in the flesh of her cheek was flicking through a vintage copy of Cosmo.

  Zombies don’t breathe, so sharp intakes of breath were out of the question; and there wasn’t a stand-up piano to tinkle and plunk its way into shocked silence as I walked in. All the same, though, I could feel the tension. The zombies who’d already looked up to clock me carried on staring: the others, catching the mood, glanced up to see what was happening.