Vicious Circle Read online

  He fell silent, his hands tracing lines across the map, his expression deepening from a frown of concentration into something more truculent and dogged.

  “Think laterally, Nicky. It’s going to be something right under our noses.”

  His right index finger came down hard on Castlebar Hill.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It is. It’s the fucking Oriflamme.”

  For a moment I didn’t get it. “But the Oriflamme’s in—” I started to say.

  “Not that piece-of-shit Goth dive in Soho Square, Castor. The original Oriflamme. The one that burned down.”

  Sixteen

  THE ORIFLAMME HAD BEEN INTENDED AS A MUSEUM WHEN it was originally built, and it stood in the most unlikely location you could think of: in the middle of a roundabout on the B455, just off Castlebar Hill. So my readings when I was holding the doll had been pretty damn accurate: southwest from Harlesden, due west—give or take—from Du Cane Road.

  But it had closed down as a museum because of the ineluctable laws of supply and demand. Specifically, because demand for a museum that you had to wade through three lanes of speeding London traffic to reach was negligible—the more so because it was a museum of local industry, which meant that most of the exhibits were bullshit adverts for Hoover and Hawker Siddeley in light disguises.

  So Peckham Steiner got a bargain, which he passed on to Bourbon Bryant, who gave us—briefly—the Oriflamme. And then it burned to the ground. That was all the history I knew, apart from Nicky’s wacky conspiracy theories. But now, walking up through Cleveland Park at two in the morning with nothing but darkness at my back, I kind of wished I’d made it my business to know more.

  Dead ahead of me as I crested the top of the hill was the Oriflamme—or rather, the little island of raised ground at the center of the roundabout. The building itself was hidden from view from this angle by a small clump of trees at one edge of the island. As I got closer I could see a sign and the beginning of a path through the trees. The sign said SIR NORMAL TEBBITT MUSEUM OF LOCAL INDUSTRY. Bryant had never had it changed because he thought that was funny, although he never explained the joke to me and I never got it.

  I crossed the road, which was deserted at this hour, and started along the path. It was only about ten yards long: a few steps brought me through to the clear space in the center of the island where the ruined shell of the Oriflamme stood. I hadn’t been here in years, but now it all came back to me. There was a ring of earth about four feet high all around the building, created by digging out a trench on the inside of the ring. Bryant, or maybe Steiner himself, had had the bottom of the trench paved, the small artificial hill planted with flowers. It had seemed a reasonably clever and artful way of keeping the traffic noise at bay. Now I saw it for what it was: ramparts of earth and air. Nicky had called it on the money. But those ramparts hadn’t saved the Oriflamme from the fourth element: like the bad fairy that never got invited to the christening, fire took the place apart.

  The building was dark, as I’d expected it to be. If Peace was inside, he certainly wasn’t keen to advertise the fact. I walked over to the door, which I couldn’t see because the whole front of the building was in deep shadow. The streetlights were on the far side of the trees, and only a faint orange glow penetrated into the central clearing.

  There was no door: just a gaping hole in the brickwork. But as I went forward, one step at a time, into the deeper darkness within, my hands touched something cold and smooth and slightly damp at chest height. I explored it gingerly, finding that it extended both up and down, and out to both sides. It was a plastic curtain, suspended over the doorway to keep out the wind. Wet with early morning condensation, it had an unpleasant, clammy feel.

  If I pushed through it, I’d be announcing my arrival to anyone who was inside. Given the way Peace had reacted to my presence on board the Collective, and his promise about what would happen the next time we met, that didn’t seem like such a great idea.

  I circled the building instead, looking for another way in. I had to watch my footing; in the aftermath of the fire, all that was left of the interior fixtures and fittings had been hauled out and dumped wherever there was room, and fly-tippers had added to the mess since, so the shell of the Oriflamme now had an additional rampart of rusting ironwork and rotting mattresses.

  That worked in my favor, though, because as I went around to the back of the building I saw a possible way in. The rubbish was thickest and deepest here, piled against the wall to a height of ten feet or so—and at its apex it came to within spitting distance of an upstairs window, which like the front door had blown out and was now open to the night in a slack-jawed yawn. The only question was whether the mound of black bin bags, old fridges, and wheel-less bike frames would take my weight.

  I climbed onto the lower margins of the scree, carefully, wishing I’d brought a flashlight so I could see what I was stepping in. The bin bags gave and squished under me, but they didn’t slide and I was able to keep my balance. Step by step, very slowly, and sideways on so that I could anchor myself on my trailing leg, I ascended the slope. There was a nasty moment halfway up when the whole mass settled a few inches under my weight and I almost slipped. But by that time I was close enough to the wall of the building to lean forward and rest the palms of my hands against it for a few seconds, until the rubbish mountain found a new point of equilibrium.

  After that, I made it to the top without incident, sat on the windowsill and swung my legs over it one at a time. I was in.

  I was about to step down off the sill into the pitch-black room beyond, but natural caution made me lower one leg first to test the ground. This turned out to be a wise precaution, because there wasn’t any. The floor of the room must have collapsed during the blaze, so there was nothing underneath me but a twelve-foot drop back down to the ground floor and probably a broken ankle or two.

  I sat on the sill and let my eyes adjust to the dark. It wasn’t absolute, of course: on this higher level, more of the light from the street lamps made it through the foliage, and the interior of the room was lit up, after a minute or so, by a faint wash of orange light. It was enough to show me that the beams had survived when the floorboards gave in. I could tightrope walk along a beam to the door and see whether or not there were any stairs.

  It still wasn’t a pleasant prospect, but I didn’t have any better ideas. Lowering my weight onto a beam that led directly across to the door, I tentatively let go of the sill with my hands and found my balance. This expedition was turning into a laugh riot.

  The room wasn’t big: three steps would bring me to the open doorway and the deeper darkness beyond. I took the first one okay, and the second. The third became problematic because the beam gave an audible crack under me and shifted slightly. I abandoned plan A and dived for the door, catching it in a tight embrace just as the beam sagged and parted, sending a clattering storm of sooty fragments into the void beneath.

  There were no floorboards on the other side of the doorway either, so I was hugging a fat beam, charred in the middle but seemingly sound, while my legs dangled into emptiness.

  “You can let go,” said a gruff voice from down there. “There’s a cement floor about eight feet underneath you. So long as you land on your feet, you should do okay. Throw your weight wrong and you’ll bust a leg at best, but I guess that’s the price you pay for breaking and entering.”

  “Think—you could manage—a stirrup?” I panted, slightly winded.

  The voice gave a sound between a snort of laughter and a throat-clearing hack. “I think you better do as you’re told,” it said. “If you just dangle there like a Chinese lantern, I’m going to put some holes in you so the light shows through better.”

  “What light?” I ground out, still holding on tight.

  The voice sighed, long and deep and slightly ragged. Then a second voice that raised the hairs on the back of my neck said, “Give him some light, Dad.” It was a little girl’s voice, distant and faint but perfectly clear. Abbie’s voice. I craned my head sideways to s
ee over my hunched shoulder, but it was still too dark to make out anything in the room below.

  Something scratched against something else, and a neon line wrote itself across the dark, blossoming abruptly into the flare of a match. The light dipped, guttered, twinned itself momentarily into two yellow-white eyes. Then, as the candle caught and spread a meager glow across the scene, Peace flicked the match away. It died as it fell.

  He was lying on the ground a few feet to my left, a blanket spread over him. And he was pointing that fucking handgun straight at me. Maybe the candle illuminated one or two other details of the room below me, but for some reason the gun was the thing that drew my attention.

  “Drop,” Peace suggested again. “I’m running out of patience here.”

  I dropped, more or less straight, and managed to keep my balance when I hit the ground. The gun stayed with me all the way: at least, I assume it did. Either way it was pointing directly at my chest when I straightened up and turned to look at Peace again.

  He looked as though he’d fared badly since we met on board the Collective. There was a ragged wound across his face, from his left temple down across the bridge of his nose to his right cheek: a heraldic bend sinister drawn in red so deep that in this light it might as well be black. The rest of his face around that dark line was as white as milk. The hand that held the gun seemed to tremble slightly, as if it was hard work for him to keep it aimed straight.

  Abbie stood behind him, almost lost in the shadows. She was little more than a shadow herself, the candlelight shining through her to highlight the rough texture of the brick wall in grainy lines of white and soot black. She stared at me with curiosity—but calmly, without any trace of fear. Given how she’d died, that was impressive: a lot of ghosts never tear themselves free from the emotions they were feeling when they crossed over. The moment of their death becomes their destiny and their eternal rest. Or lack of it.

  Because I was looking for it, I saw the glint of gold on Peace’s wrist. I couldn’t make out the shape with any clarity, but I knew what it was: he was wearing Abbie’s gold locket as a bracelet on his right arm, just as he had been before. He wasn’t taking any chances of being separated from her.

  The room was a gutted shell, the walls and floor blackened. It was empty apart from the rough bivouac that Peace had set up there: a Calor gas stove, a suitcase, a bucket for a latrine. There was a sour smell in the air, redolent of old sweat and recent pain. Riding over it without hiding it at all was the sweeter scent of sandalwood incense.

  I put my hands in the air, fingers spread to show that they were empty.

  “You know who hired me?” I said.

  “Probably better than you do,” Peace answered, his voice hard. He had me on that one.

  “I’m not working for them anymore.”

  The gun and the arm that held it still trembled almost imperceptibly, like a strong branch on a gusty day, but it still stayed pointed at my heart. “That’s probably what I’d say,” Peace observed, “if I was standing where you’re standing. Speaking of which, I think you should sit down. On your hands. On second thoughts take the coat off first and fling it over by the wall. Don’t want you to be pulling any surprises out of there while we’re talking.”

  I shrugged my coat off slowly and unthreateningly; I’d heard enough about Peace’s rep by now to believe he meant business. Abbie was watching all this in absolute silence—the kind of silence that only the dead can manage, since they don’t breathe and they don’t fidget. Her dark gaze was solemn and alert: she was a very unusual ghost. I hoped I’d live long enough to get better acquainted.

  “If I was still trying to bring you in,” I said, as I lowered the coat to the ground and shoved it away with my foot, “do you think I’d have come alone? That wouldn’t make any sense. I’d just tell them I’d found you, claim the fee, and walk away.”

  “Maybe.” Peace’s face clenched for a moment in a spasm of pain, which he did his best to hide. “If you were sure you had found us. And if you were sure they’d keep their end of whatever deal you’ve made.”

  “I don’t make deals with demons. Or their working partners.”

  Peace smiled grimly. “Sorry, friend. On the face of the evidence, that’s exactly what you did. Sit down.”

  Again, I was punctilious about doing exactly what I was told. I was fairly sure by this time that that blanket was hiding something a lot worse than the damage to Peace’s face, and I was starting to worry about what he’d do if he felt himself losing consciousness. He certainly wouldn’t want to leave me hanging around as an extant threat. That added a certain urgency to the task of talking him around.

  “When I asked your connection at the other Oriflamme to pass on a message for me,” I said, “I meant it. All I’ve been looking for is a chance to talk to you.”

  “Carla? Yeah, that was a cute touch. But by the time she called me I already knew they had an exorcist sniffing after me. I saw you coming, remember? You tried to get a fix on Abbie and I shut you down.”

  “Three times,” I acknowledged. “Nicely done. The second time you almost shoved my brain out of the back of my head. How’d you do that one?”

  “We’re not swapping recipes,” Peace said, grimly. “The way I read this, you’re trying to find reasons why I shouldn’t kill you. Just to let you know, your score is still on zero.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well let me know if any of these make the cut. One, you’ve been hurt really badly—probably when those two werewolves caught up with you—and you need help. On top of that, I think you’ve been awake since Saturday night keeping up whatever psychic defenses you’ve got so no one else will try to find Abbie the way I did; that’s why you needed to score the uppers from Carla. Sooner or later you’re going to crash, big time: I’d put my money on sooner. If you don’t trust me, you’ve still got to find someone you do trust—and you’ve got to do it fast.

  “Two, after you tried to use me as a crash mat at the Collective, you saw me running interference with the loup-garous. That Jeep that went through the fence, and knocked the big one off his feet, that was me. So how does that square with me being the enemy? The truth is that I started to smell a whole bag of rats as soon as I took this job on: ever since then I’ve been trying to find out what’s really going down.”

  I paused for breath. He’d kept his poker face on throughout the whole of that recital. I wasn’t getting to him.

  “Is there a three?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “there’s a three. You’ve got a hell of a reputation, Dennis. Everyone says you’re a hard man who’s done a lot of bad things. Even Bourbon Bryant warned me not to piss you off, and he never has a harsh word to say about anyone.” Peace was staring hard at me and I met that stare head-on. “But tell me this,” I said, quietly. “Are you really prepared to kill an unarmed man in front of Abbie, and let her watch while he bleeds out? Because if you are, I think I’m all out of cards.”

  We carried on playing blink-chicken for a moment or two longer, but I had nothing else to say so I let him win: it was Peace’s call now. I looked up at the black void beyond the candlelight’s meager reach, and waited for him to make it. After a long silence, he lowered his arm and set the gun down on the floor. I glanced at him again. A smile spread slowly across his face: a bleak, strained smile that was painful to look at.

  “You’ve got balls, Castor,” he said.

  He gave the gun a shove, and it slid across the floor toward me. It didn’t get very far: the soot-streaked concrete was too rough and uneven. But it crossed the magical midway point where I’d be able to get to it before he did—assuming he could even move.

  I stood up, stepped over the gun, and walked across to him. I squatted down beside him, on the opposite side of the blanket from Abbie, who continued to stare at us both in silence. I felt her solemn, calm attention like a physical pressure on the back of my neck, the light touch of cold fingertips.

  Peace stared up into my face, which must have looked a bit sinister lit from below by a single candle.

  * * *

  “You’ve got a
bit of a reputation yourself,” he said, letting his head fall back onto the rolled up jacket he was using as a pillow. “Let’s see if you can live up to it.” This close up, his face looked a lot paler and a lot more strained; or maybe he was just done with pretending now. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead and cheek that gleamed dully in the candlelight.