Vicious Circle Read online

  I sat down, just inside the door, and picked up a Reader’s Digest. Flicking through it, I found an article about a possible enhanced role for walnuts in the treatment of colonic cancer, and started to read. The great thing about the Reader’s Digest is that it exists outside of space and time as we know them: mystics and ecstatics read it to achieve a trance state deeper than normal meditative techniques allow.

  Sadly, though, I wasn’t going to be allowed to attain a lower consciousness tonight. Over the top of the magazine, I saw a man’s broad torso heave into view.

  “You’re alive,” said a harsh voice, through a bellowslike soughing of breath.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, without looking up. “I’m working on it, though. You know how it is.”

  “The fuck you doing here, you blood-warm piece of shit?” This was said more vehemently, and the waft of fetid breath made me wince.

  “I’m waiting for a friend,” I said mildly.

  There was a heavy pause, and then: “Wait outside.”

  I looked up. The guy must have been a real holy terror back when he was still counted among the living, and if anything he was even scarier now that he was dead. He stood about six two, and it was mostly muscle: the kind of sculpted, highly defined muscle you get from working out. And his arms were bare and his T-shirt was tight, so you got to see the muscles sliding against one another when he moved like tectonic plates. His bald head glistened—not with sweat, obviously, so I guessed it must have been with oil of some kind. He was a thanato-narcissist, in love with his own defunct flesh and keeping it polished up like a museum piece.

  But I’d been pushed around enough for one night: enough, and heading inexorably toward more than enough.

  “I’m fine right here,” I said, and returned to the good news about walnuts.

  He smacked the magazine out of my hands. “No,” he growled. “You’re not. ’Cause if you stay here, I’m gonna rip your tongue out.”

  I glanced around the room, took in the reactions from the rest of Imelda’s dead clientele. They seemed a little uneasy about what was happening—but then, Imelda’s services aren’t cheap. Most of them looked to be a lot more well-heeled than this sad piece of worm-food, and they probably had that whole middle-class anxiety about making a scene. That was good news for me: it meant they were less likely to mob me and tear my arms and legs off if this went badly.

  “Okay, sport,” I murmured. I stood up and he squared off against me, waiting for me to throw the first punch. He was sure enough of his own strength to know that nothing I could swing would put him down, and having allowed me an ineffectual tap at his chin he could dismantle me at his leisure.

  I had the myrtle twig wrapped twice around my hand. I just slapped it to his forehead and spat out the words “hoc fugere.” He shot backward as fast if I’d stuck a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  It wasn’t an exorcism—nothing like. It’s just the most basic kind of nature magic, an elemental ward that has efficacy for about three weeks of the year, so long as it’s been properly cut and blessed. To the dead, whether they’re in the body or out of it, getting too close to a ward is like touching a main cable: it hurts a fuck of a lot.

  The zombie hit the floor hard, and lay there jerking spastically with his eyes wide open. One of his arms, flailing out, hit the leg of the woman who’d been reading Cosmo. She jumped aside to avoid the contact.

  “I really don’t want any trouble,” I told the room in general.

  “Yeah,” said Nicky from the doorway. “That’s fucking plain to see.”

  Behind him, Imelda gave a yelp of dismay and stormed past him into the room, knocking him aside. She’s a big woman, with fists like hams: it would take a lot more than a myrtle switch to take her down. “Castor!” she bellowed. “You have no right! You have no right! You get out of my house now, or I swear I’ll call the police on you.”

  “Hey, he was the one wanted to fight,” I said. “I was happy with the Reader’s Digest.”

  Kneeling down beside the still-shuddering zombie, she laid her hand on his forehead and shot me a glare of pure contempt. He quieted under her hand.

  “Then you deal with him like a man,” she said. “Not like a cockroach.”

  “I just used a—” I began.

  “I know what you used,” she snapped. “You swatted him with a stay-not like you’d swat a bug, because you couldn’t win the fight any other way. You’re just a goddamn coward. Now you get out of my house before I throw you out.”

  That was a much more serious threat than the one about phoning the police. Imelda would never ask the man to fight her battles for her, but she really could pick me up and throw me, and the way I felt right then I might not survive. I put up my hands in surrender and left the room, hearing Nicky behind me apologizing on my behalf and assuring her I’d never come round here again.

  Little Lisa was out in the hallway, leaning against the wall. She grinned at me, wickedly amused.

  “What’s the joke?” I asked.

  “You beat that big lych man,” she said scornfully, “but you couldn’t beat my mom.”

  “Can you?” I asked.

  She shook her head vigorously. “Fuck, no.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  I waited for Nicky in the yard, but when he came out he walked right on past me. “The car’s out in the street,” I said, falling into step with him.

  “Fuck you, Castor,” he snapped, speeding up. “I’ll take a frigging cab.”

  “Look, the guy was going to fold me into a paper plane, Nicky. I’m sorry. But I did what I had to do.”

  “You know what it would mean for me if Imelda decides I’m bad news? The only other guy I know who can do what she does lives in Glasgow. I am fucking screwed if she gets mad at me. I wish to Christ I’d told you to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I already said I was sorry. What did you have to tell me, anyway? What is it that couldn’t wait?”

  We were out in the street by this time. He slammed the yard door shut with a bang that resounded across the street—in this neighborhood, not a wonderful idea.

  “What couldn’t wait?” he echoed, sarcastically. “You’ve been fed a line, is what. I wanted to tell you you’re running on pure bullshit. This kid Abbie Torrington—you said her parents hired you to find her?”

  “Right,” I agreed, a little unnerved by his savagery. “Get to the point, Nicky.”

  He rounded on me, thrust his face into mine.

  “The point is you had me chasing my own fucking tail, looking through morgue records and autopsy reports and fuck knows what else. And it’s all a waste of time because the kid’s not dead.”

  He hit the punchline with grim satisfaction.

  “The kid’s only missing. It’s the parents who are dead.”

  Twelve

  WHEN I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD, AND COMING UP TO MY twelfth birthday, I dropped a lot of heavy hints about a bike. It was a lot to ask, even if it was a secondhand one, because my dad had just been laid off from the metal box factory on Breeze Hill and we’d reached the point where we either had to eat dirt literally or go to one of the local loan sharks and do it figuratively.

  As the day approached, it became clear that there was a big secret I wasn’t in on. Conversations between my mum and dad would stop when I came into the room, and there was a general air of silence and tension. When I asked my big brother Matt what was going on, and whether or not it had anything to do with me, he told me to fuck off out of it because he had homework to do. I concluded that the bike had been bought, and that it had probably added to the financial strain the family was already under. Selfish little shit that I was, I took that as good news.

  Then about three days before my birthday, my mum left home. My dad, John, had finally kicked her out after finding her in bed with his work colleague, Big Terry (so named to avoid confusion with the merely medium-size Terry Seddon). She went in the middle of the night, so the first we knew was when we woke up the next morning and she wasn’t there. Dad told us she’d gone back to live with Grandma Lunt in Skelmer
sdale, which was a half-truth: her own mother threw her out, too, since she didn’t have a job and couldn’t “turn up” for her keep. She ended up going down to London looking for a job, and we didn’t see her again for three years.

  So I’m prepared to admit that sometimes I ignore what’s right under my nose: I’m not always right in there with the intuitive connections and conclusions. It’s probably not overstating things to say that—sly as I undoubtedly am—I can sometimes get lost in the wood while looking at the trees.

  But this time it was the world’s fault. This time reality had pitched me a spitball I couldn’t have seen coming.

  At first I tried to slot Nicky’s nasty little revelation into what I already knew. “When?” I asked. “When did they die?”

  “Last Saturday. Sixth of May. Somewhere between noon and six p.m. according to the pathologist’s best guess. The guy—Stephen—was shot in the face at point-blank range, and he was kneeling at the time. No sign of a struggle: He saw it coming and he took it pretty well. A good sport, obviously. With the woman it was messier: She was tied up and beaten with the leg of a chair, then shot in the stomach. And the killer took his time, because the path team put the time of death a good three hours after the guy.”

  “But—” I managed. “I met them two days after that—on the Monday. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Are you telling me—?”

  I tailed off. I realized that a couple of lights had come on in windows across the street. This clearly wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation. I headed toward the corner. “The car’s over here,” I said. “You can tell me as we drive.”

  Nicky didn’t move. “I told you, Castor, I’ll take a cab. Right now the less of your company I get, the better. You want to hear this, you hear it here.”

  I turned to face him. “Can we at least get off the street?” I asked, throwing out my arms in a shrug.

  Nicky hesitated. “I’ll give you five minutes,” he said after a couple of beats. “There’s a bar on Troy Town. It’s hot and cold, or at least it was the last time I looked. Come on.”

  He led the way, sullenly silent. I decided to let him simmer down before I broached the subject again: I’d get more out of him that way. But the wheels inside my head were spinning without traction, the gears squealing so loud I could almost hear them. Mel and Steve died two days before I met them. So either I met really good fakers or the dead bodies had been wrongly identified.

  But it was Tuesday now—or rather, Wednesday morning. If the cops had made a bad ID on Saturday night, they’d had ample time already by Monday to have met the Torringtons, cleared up the little misunderstanding, tipped their hats, and gone on their merry way. And that would be on file. And Nicky would have seen it there.

  That left the other possibility—that the people I’d met who called themselves Mel and Steve Torrington were two somebody elses entirely. In which case, why pretend? Why introduce themselves as two people who’d just died and whose murders could be the next day’s front-page news?

  Because there wasn’t anyone else who I’d have said yes to. They needed me to look for Abbie’s ghost, and that lie was the only one that was certain to do the job.

  We turned the corner into Troy Town—which has nothing epic or eye-catching about it apart from its name. Nicky crossed the road, and I followed. On the other side was a short row of Georgian terraces. Every second house had a flight of steps behind wrought-iron railings, leading down to a basement level below the street. Nicky descended one of these flights of steps, and as I followed I heard voices and music from ahead of me, although everything was still dark. Then he opened a door and light flooded out. Not much of it, it has to be said, and not strong: maybe “oozed” is a better word than flooded.

  The bar was actually in the basement of a house. It was called The Level, and it was indeed hot and cold, like Nicky said. That meant that living and dead were equally welcome. You could smell the dead part of the equation as you came in off the street: a faint sour whiff like leaf mold, mixed with the surgical tang of formaldehyde. Seeing them wasn’t so easy; the only lighting in the room was from candles in the necks of bottles strategically positioned on tables and on shelves around the walls. There was a good-size crowd lurking in the plentiful shadows—and a poor-size bar, wedged into a corner of the room. I ordered a whisky, Nicky passed. Introducing foreign organics into his system is something he tends to avoid. “If you’re dead, your immune system is more or less closed for business,” he’d told me more than once. “No blood flow, right? No transport for antibiotics, phagocytes, any of that shit. So once you start letting infective agents in, you’re fucked, pure and simple.” If this was a more up-market place, he would have ordered red wine and inhaled the scent of it, but he wouldn’t stoop to whatever the house red was in this place.

  We sat down at the most remote table we could find—but privacy was provided by the other conversations going on all around us. Anything we said would be lost in the general noise. The wallpaper was a virulent red and looked like flock. I reached out and ran my finger down it: it was. Maybe this place had been a curry house back in the day.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” I said, and I took a gulp of the whisky to fortify myself.

  Nicky’s mood had calmed somewhat. He was still as pissed with me as he had been, but he enjoys being the fountain of arcane wisdom almost as much as he enjoys jazz. “I would’ve spotted it sooner,” he said, “only like I said, when it comes to murders we’ve had kind of an embarrassment of riches just lately.”

  Of course. The spike in the bell-shaped curve. I suddenly remembered one of the headlines I’d read over Nicky’s shoulder on his computer monitor: HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE. Son of a bitch, it had been right in front of my eyes and I’d let it slide on past.

  “They were found in their own house,” Nicky went on. “Somewhere out towards Maida Vale.”

  “Maida Vale?” I broke in. “The Steve Torrington I met gave me an address on Bishop’s Avenue.”

  “What number Bishop’s Avenue?”

  I dredged it up from memory. “Sixty-something. Sixty-two.”

  “That’s the squat, you fucking moron. And what did he give you the address for? Did he ask you over for cocktails?”

  “It was so I could send him a receipt,” I admitted.

  “Right. Like he fucking cared where that ended up. Anyway, the real Stephen Torrington lived in Maida Vale—and he doesn’t fucking live there anymore. I’ve got the address if you want it, but my advice is to stay clear.

  “Place of death was the living room; some of the furniture had been moved to clear a big space—killer with a sense for the theatrical. The entire place had been ransacked. Every drawer, every cupboard, everything hauled out and strewn over the floor. Like there’d been a search, the file notes said, but they were just guessing. With the place being so messed up, they couldn’t even tell if anything was missing. And they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the girl.”

  “Abbie,” I breathed.

  “Yeah, her. They knew there was a kid even without going through any records on the Torringtons, because there was a room that was obviously a kid’s room. That had been turned over, too, just like the rest of the house.”

  Of course it had. And some things had been taken. I knew because except for the doll’s head in my goddamn pocket they were sitting in a big black bag in my office—a gift from the guy who called himself Steve Torrington. I imagined him raking through Abbie’s things with her real parents lying murdered in the room below, and I was filled with an unreasoning rage at my own naiveté. No wonder he’d sent the woman back to the car: whoever the fuck he was, he knew his own acting skills were up to the job, but he didn’t want to have to rely on hers. And he was right; he’d got the grief spot-on, mostly—except that grief isn’t usually that articulate. I should have known. I should have smelled something.