Vicious Circle Read online

  Two constables stood to either side of the open door, and they nodded respectfully to Coldwood as he passed. He ignored them.

  The hallway inside had no lights, but the bright yellow-white of mobile spots shone from some inner room. We went on through, shielding our eyes against the sudden glare. The echo of my footsteps immediately suggested a much larger space, even before I could get my eyes adjusted to the point where I could actually see it. Dark figures were walking backward and forward across an empty expanse of floor. Their footsteps crackled and rustled on thick plastic sheeting.

  “Got another bullet here, Len,” a voice said.

  “Out of the floor?” a second voice called back. This one belonged to a guy who either smoked way too much or had the worst case of chronic bronchitis I’d ever heard.

  “No, in this beam here—way out of the way. Shooter must’ve got a bounce before he brought the weapon into line.”

  “Okay. Measure the reflexive and mark it up.”

  The room assembled itself piecemeal in front of me, my tiredness making the normal process of visual accommodation take twice as long. It was even bigger than I’d thought, because it was only the area lit up by the spots that I was seeing at first: further volumes of shadow lurked around the edges, concealing greater depths.

  It was a typical church meeting house in the modern style: short on the bullying majesty that a lot of older churches have, but pretty in its way. Large amounts of pale wood, mostly in the form of beams and window trim; a symmetrical floor plan with bays every so often, so although the general shape was square there was a sense of some complex, origamilike shape, outfolding from a wide, open central space. Suburban transcendence for the Ikea age. Only what was going on here now was kind of the opposite of all that: forensic science, the triumph of the rationalistic worldview. Men and women in white coats tracked backward and forward with swabs and tape measures, typed notes into PDAs, called out to each other in clipped, unlovely jargon.

  A door slammed behind me, making me turn my head. Detectives Basquiat and Fields loomed out of the night in a gust of cold air, like bad news. I saw them clearly for the first time. Basquiat was a hard-faced blonde dressed in shades of blue—from clinical all the way through to conservative. Her hair—short and straight—was pulled up from the sides in a way that looked vaguely continental, and if anything made the lines of her face look sharper and more uncompromising. Fields was middle-aged and tending to fat, but with the sad remains of Mediterranean good looks in his dark eyes and tightly curled black hair. That he was still a detective constable at his age suggested either some monumental fuck-up in his past or an equally monumental lack of ambition.

  “You gonna walk him through it, or what?” Coldwood asked.

  Fields looked at Basquiat, awaiting orders. “Why don’t you do it?” Basquiat said, turning to Coldwood. “He’s your man.”

  Coldwood shook his head. “No, no, no. Your crime scene,” he pointed out, deadpan. “Don’t be pulling shit like that on me.”

  Basquiat sighed, rolled her eyes, flashed Coldwood a pained look that said plainer than words “Are we really going to have to do this all by the goddamn book?” Coldwood met her stare, not giving an inch. Okay, I could see where this was going now—or part of it, anyway. Someone here had the jurisdictional blues. I played dumb, though: there’s nothing cops hate worse than a smart-mouthed civilian.

  “Over here,” Basquiat said to me, with a peremptory gesture as though she were calling a dog to heel.

  “Thanks for looking out for me, Gary,” I murmured to Coldwood, keeping all but the trace elements of sarcasm out of my voice.

  “Hey, you don’t know what I did for you and what I didn’t,” Coldwood muttered back, looking angry. “I tried to call you earlier, but you were out all day and your mobile was busy. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Fix, but it’s meltdown out there. They had a fucking riot over in White City.”

  “I heard.”

  “The innocent have nothing to fear. Go ahead and surprise me.”

  I went across to where Basquiat was standing, more or less in the center of the room—and of the plastic sheeting. She watched me come. She really was very attractive under the strictly professional hair and outfit; and she really didn’t like me at all. Glancing down, I realized that I was treading on dead people: or at least, on the numbered plastic tags that forensics teams still use as place markers for where people died. One. Two. Three. Someone had been busy here—and fairly indiscriminate.

  As I drew level with her, she pointed down at her feet. Under the plastic, a circle about five feet in diameter had been drawn on the floor in thick, grainy white chalk. Within the circle was a smaller circle, and between the two, going all the way around the ring with letters very carefully spaced, were the words VERHIEL SERAGON IRDE SABAOTH REDOCTIN. The center of the circle was inscribed with a pentagram: the five-pointed star used in certain kinds of black magic because, supposedly, it merges the four elements of matter with the single defining reality of spirit. Makes nice jewelry for little Goth girls, too, but that’s just a happy coincidence. There were also elaborate curlicued marks in each segment of the circle between the five legs of the pentagram: they were based on Greek letters, but with a great many additional strokes.

  What I noticed about this one, though, was that in spite of the care taken in drawing it, it had been pretty comprehensively messed up. The floorboards were chewed up into splinters in a long line that cut through one segment of the circle, and something brown had spilled at the center, which then flowed out almost to the opposite edge, effacing part of the pentagram on its way. There was another plastic marker here. It was red, and bore the number “1” in spotless white.

  Someone didn’t close the circle.

  “Saturday night,” Basquiat said, from right beside me. “Sometime after eight and before, say, two in the morning. A whole bunch of people came in here. We’ve got tire tracks on the forecourt outside and a whole bunch of footprints. We’re guessing maybe a couple of dozen people in all, but that’s still in the air.

  “What we do know is that they didn’t just walk in off the street. Some of them had been living here for a while before that, out in the back.” She pointed off into the dark. “There are six sleeping bags there, a portable latrine, a lot of canned food, and a dozen or so black bags full of various kinds of domestic garbage. So let’s say we’ve got a core group doing caretaking duties here—keeping the place in order, watching out for any untoward attention. Then we’ve got a bigger group that just turns up on Saturday night for the party.”

  She went down on one knee, sketched out the outline of the circle with one well-manicured hand. “And we can guess what kind of a party it was. This is a pseudo-Paracelsian magic circle, based on an original in the Archidoxis Magicae. Necromancy. Someone was doing black magic here, and”—her fingers hovered over the dark brown stain at the center of the circle—“it involved a sacrifice.”

  She stood up again. “And this is where it gets interesting,” she said, although her tone stayed level to the point of indifference. With a nod of the head, she indicated a part of the room I hadn’t even looked at: one of the bays, dark like the other corners of the room out of the spotlights’ beams. “An uninvited guest,” she said, “comes in from that way—or he was there all along, waiting for the right moment. There’s a window, boarded up, but someone’s pried the board away and left it propped up against the wall. He was quiet, so they didn’t hear him coming. Or maybe they were chanting. Either way, he gets up close without anyone turning to look at him. We know that, because the people who were standing here, here, and here”—she counted them off, frowning as though with the effort of memory, although the dark smears under the plastic marked the spots well enough—“were shot in the back.”

  She turned to face me, stared at me with cold appraisal for a second or so, but then she pointed past me toward the back of the room. “The rest of the magic-makers start running—not away from the man with the gun, but towards him. They’re not armed themselves. Or at least, no other guns ge
t fired as far as we can tell. All the bullets we’ve retrieved come from the same weapon—an IMI Tavor assault rifle, Israeli military issue. That’s a weapon with both semiauto and fully automatic functions, but the magazine—so I’m told—only carries thirty rounds. Doesn’t matter. This man’s not wasting them, and he’s not missing.”

  Basquiat walked past me, forced me to turn to follow her as she continued the lecture. This kind of browbeating by facts, figures, and ballroom dancing is standard cop procedure. I was listening, but on a level underneath that there was a question I kept turning over and over in my mind with a kind of sick dread, more or less in time to the throbbing in my skull: What—or who—had been standing in the center of the circle?

  “But there’s no way he’s got time to reload,” Basquiat said, like a maths lecturer saying “compute the angle.” Her tone was still flat, but there was a kind of excitement or at least a kind of animation in her face. I could see she loved her job. And I wondered, briefly, whether a case like this might be a career-making deal for a young, upwardly mobile detective sergeant.

  “And he’s used up about six bullets just introducing himself,” she went on, “so assuming he had a full clip when he came in he’s now got a couple of dozen shots left. If they rush him, which is what they’re doing, he’s in trouble. Fully automatic fire will scatter a crowd, but he doesn’t have any time to switch over and in any case anyone who doesn’t go down in that first sweep will be right on top of him and he’ll have nothing left to fight with except his hands.”

  She scanned the floor, as if she were reading the story there. “Maybe he expected them to run. Maybe he’s surprised that they don’t get the message. He’s not scared, though, that’s for sure, because he walks to meet them. One—two—three.” She pointed to a scuff mark on the floor in between two of the sheets of plastic. “He stops here. And then he does something very odd.”

  “He fires at the floor,” I said. My throat was unpleasantly dry, and it came out as a croak.

  Basquiat looked at me curiously. “That’s right,” she said, acknowledging the point with a nod. “He does. And why does he do that, Mr. Castor?”

  I shrugged unconvincingly. I knew the answer, but I was still hoping I was wrong. “Warning shot?”

  “After shooting three people in the back? I don’t think so.”

  Okay, what the fuck. If she was determined to make me dance . . . “The circle,” I said, tiredly. “He blasted a hole in the circle.”

  “I’m still asking why,” said Basquiat. “It seems a strange thing to do. Can you shed any light on the reasoning?”

  “Maybe,” I said, facing her stare as levelly as I could. “But maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m here first. It would help to know.”

  Basquiat’s jaw tensed so hard that for a second I could see every muscle in her throat. “I’m surprised you have to ask.” The words came out laden with something like anger, something like contempt. “You’re one of DS Coldwood’s regular informants—or so he says. And he uses you a lot in situations like this, isn’t that right? You tell him where someone’s died, and how they died, and how they’ve been getting along since.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s about it. So do you want a reading, detective?”

  “Not at this particular point in time, Mr. Castor, no. Maybe later. What I’d like right now is an answer. How did you know that Abbie Torrington was dead?”

  So there it was. It opened up inside my stomach like a pit, just waiting for one more word from Basquiat to fill it.

  “I’m an exorcist,” I said.

  “So what, it’s a sparrow in the marketplace kind of deal?” she spat, unconsciously echoing my own words to Gwillam. “Everyone who dies, you get to hear about it? How’s my grandad doing? Last time I checked, he was still okay, but maybe you can give me an update.”

  She glared at me again. I was still trying to think of something to say when DC Field lumbered up and handed her a note without so much as a glance in my direction. She took it, read it, and handed it back to him with a curt nod. He went away.

  “A man and a woman came into my office two days ago,” I told Basquiat, as she turned her attention back to me. “They claimed to be Abbie’s parents. And they asked me to find her.”

  “To find her dead body?” The detective’s tone was incredulous.

  “No. To find her ghost.”

  It didn’t sound much better. Before Basquiat could answer, I held up my hand in a kind of surrender. “Just tell me, sergeant, did Abbie Torrington die inside that circle?”

  “Yes,” said Basquiat coldly. “She did. Stabbed through the heart by some sick fucks playing at witches and wizards.” She came right up close to me, dropping her voice so that her next words would just be between the two of us. “We’ve got her body down at the morgue right now, and you can bet we’re going over it with a fine-toothed comb. And if I find out you were one of the people who killed her, Castor, no power on earth is going to keep me from ripping your balls off. And then reading you your rights at great length while you bleed.”

  The pit filled up. I thought it would fill with grief—grief for little Abbie, cut open like a side of meat as part of a satanist ritual—but it turned out to be anger.

  “Let me read the scene,” I told her, biting back a lot of other words that were clustering behind my teeth, trying to get out.

  “You are dreaming, my friend,” Basquiat snarled, shaking her head. “Whatever impression I may have given you earlier, you’re a suspect here. I asked Coldwood to bring you over in case you turned out to be the type who falls apart and confesses at the scene of the crime. Might have saved us some time. But since you’re not, I’ll have to see how the evidence pans out. The only reason I’m not hauling you in and sweating you right now is because Gary vouches for you—or more precisely, because he’s got you on the books as an informant, which means there’s interoffice paperwork to be filled in before I can get Fields to kick your teeth down your throat.”

  “You let Fields do your dirty work?” I said. “I’m disappointed. Used to be, when you asked a cop for some strict discipline, you could at least rely on personal service.”

  Basquiat had been on the point of walking away, and she already had her back to me. She swiveled on her heel and dealt me a scything, sideways punch to the head. Since my head was close to meltdown and my balance was all to fuck, I went sprawling. I heard a tuneless whistle of appreciation from one side of the room, running footsteps from the other. Looking up blearily, I saw Gary Coldwood standing over me.

  “Mr. Castor tripped on the protective sheeting,” Basquiat said to him.

  “Yeah. I saw. But I think he’s got his sea legs now. I don’t see him tripping anymore.”

  “Depends if he stays around me,” said Basquiat. She knelt down, stared into my face. “I use Fields to do the softening up,” she said. “All the detail work I’ll do myself.”

  She walked away, and Coldwood helped me back onto the vertical—or something close to it.

  “Let’s get you some fresh air,” he muttered.

  We went back out through the hall onto the street. I leaned against the front of the building, feeling the world turn around me.

  “She’s got this thing about kids,” Coldwood explained. “Takes it personally when they get hurt. There was a pedo out in Kingston—guy who’d done time for raping a little boy, and it looked like he might be getting back into old habits. Fell down some stairs at his house while Basquiat was over there to run some questions past him. Broke his arm, did some serious damage to his back that he might never recover from. She booked him for assault: said he attacked her and went down the stairs when she used a judo throw in self-defense. Story stank, but who cares? He did another six months. Happy ending for everyone.”