Vicious Circle Page 41

  My throat suddenly dry, I flicked to the last message.

  “This is a siege here, Castor!” Nicky’s voice was a yell now, which meant he would have had to work hard to inflate his nonfunctional lungs. “They shot the cameras out. The fucking cameras! I’m blind, you understand me? They could be right outside my door, and I wouldn’t—oh shit!”

  There was an abrupt click, and then the high-pitched, single tone that means “message ends.” I dialed Nicky’s number with shaking hands. Nothing, for ten or twenty seconds: just silence. With a muttered curse I terminated the call and started to dial again, but before I even finished the area code I heard the sound of footsteps walking down the short path from the road.

  I turned in that direction. A figure came into view a second later, stepping out of the shadows and through the narrow opening between the raised earth beds onto the driveway.

  “Over here, Dr. Forster,” I called, and the figure turned, came forward into the light.

  When I got a look at his face, I experienced a momentary lurch of dissociation: then my heart jumped in my chest like a test pilot in crash webbing. I’d never met Dylan Forster, but I knew that face well enough. When I’d first met the guy, only three days before in my office, he’d introduced himself as Stephen Torrington. And now, in a sudden flash of elementary logic, it occurred to me that both of those names were as good as each other because his real name had to be something different again. I also knew now why he’d had to send someone else to look after me when I collapsed at Pen’s house; at that point, he couldn’t afford for me to see his face.

  I thought of Peace’s Glock, which was still inside lying on the floor of the Oriflamme. But it wouldn’t have mattered even if I could have got to it. The bastard had set this up exactly the way he wanted. He already had a gun in his hand and it was pointing at my chest.

  “You want to watch that thing, or it could go off,” I said, because I had to say something, had to get some kind of interaction going that might buy me some time while I thought of a way to distract, disarm, and decapitate him.

  He shook his head. “It won’t be going off just yet,” he said, in an almost languid tone. Funny that Pen had never mentioned his soft, half-elided mid-Atlantic accent. The smirk playing across his lips confirmed what I already knew.

  “You’re Anton Fanke.”

  He made a mock bow, saluting my way-past-the-eleventh-hour leap of intuitive logic. “If you’d figured that out three days ago,” he said, his tone the gentlest of sneers, “I might have been impressed. Check him for weapons.”

  The last words weren’t addressed to me, but past me into the shadows at the side of the building. Three men who must have been standing absolutely still until then stepped out of the darkness, surrounded me, and frisked me with extreme thoroughness. They didn’t look like my mental image of satanists: they looked a lot more like my mental image of FBI agents. One of them was carrying a snub-nosed handgun, which he pressed to the base of my neck.

  The other two, searching my left- and right-hand sides in rough synchrony, came up with my dagger and whistle respectively. They held them up for Fanke’s inspection.

  “Now we’ll go inside,” Fanke said.

  I took a step toward him, but the men on either side of me moved in to block me and the gun at my neck pressed a little harder. I knew I’d never get there.

  “Why Pen?” I demanded, between my teeth. “What did you need her for?”

  “Rafael Ditko was the vessel,” said Fanke, throwing out his arm toward the door of the Oriflamme in formal invitation. “I had to get close to him. We had our plan already in place, but if it failed—it might have been necessary to take Ditko from the Stanger clinic and kill him to release Asmodeus’s spirit from him. Pamela would have been very useful in that eventuality. As things have turned out though, I think we’ll be just fine as we are. Wilkes, you can lead the way. You’re just marginally more expendable than Mr. Castor is at this point.”

  Things were coming apart fast. In desperation, I tensed to jump for Fanke as he walked toward me. He favored me with a glance of amused contempt.

  “That would be a mistake,” he said in a clipped tone. “I’d like you alive at this point, because you’re looking like a pretty good scapegoat, but don’t push me.”

  Caught in his sights and those of the guy behind me, I briefly considered tackling him low and seeing if they both let fly and took each other out. But that wouldn’t even work in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

  Fanke was watching me closely, and he saw the moment when I stood down from the fight-or-flight precipice. “Inside,” he said again. The man behind me tapped the base of my neck with his gun barrel, and I obediently followed the man he’d called Wilkes back into the Oriflamme. I’d half-hoped that Peace might have caught something of the commotion outside and scraped together some kind of an ambush. No such luck. His head snapped around as he registered the multiple sets of footsteps. As Wilkes stepped to one side of me and the goon with the gun stepped to the other to get a clear line of sight, Peace’s gaze darted to one, then the other, then back to me. By some reflex he couldn’t control, his hand shot up to grasp hold of Abbie’s—and went right through her insubstantial form. Abbie didn’t even notice. She was staring in wordless, silent terror at the strange faces. Or maybe not so strange to her: she might be recognizing them from five nights before. She might remember Fanke as the man who’d put a knife into her heart.

  “You bastard, Castor,” Peace said, his voice a dead whisper. His second thoughts were better. He reached down and scattered the deck of cards across the floor. Abbie flickered and then disappeared, her mouth open to call out to him.

  “Don’t make this worse than it has to be,” I said, and before anyone could stop me I stepped forward.

  My eyes hadn’t had any more time to readjust to the deeper darkness inside the Oriflamme than theirs had, but I knew roughly where Peace’s Glock was. I didn’t even have to break step: just flick my foot out a little to the left as if I were intercepting a pass inside the penalty box, and touch the toe of my shoe to the trigger guard.

  I flicked the gun end-over-end through the air, and my aim was good: wasted afternoons in the old gym at Alsop’s Comprehensive School for Boys, kicking and heading a ball endlessly against the wall, brought belated and unexpected dividends.

  Peace reached up, took the Glock out of the air and fired without seeming to aim. The thunder roared directly in my ear, and a body slammed against a wall just to my right. As it slid to the floor the thunder sounded again, deafening in this shell of a room with no soft surfaces to catch and filter the sound. On my left, Fanke jerked as if stung, then brought his own gun up to return fire. I knocked it out of his hands with a scything, two-fisted swipe.

  Then just as things seemed to be going great, something hard and heavy and sickeningly solid slammed into the side of my head and my feet went out from under me.

  I tried to get up, only to catch a second glancing blow on the back of my neck that took what was left of the fight out of me. More exchanges of thunder, and a shrill, prolonged scream that didn’t go in through my deadened ears but took a more direct route to my brain, or maybe to my soul if exorcists have one of those.

  It sounded like “Daddy.” The word that Abbie had tried to say as she faded out. The world of the dead has very peculiar acoustics.

  * * *

  I raged against the dying of the light: flailed in the dark looking for purchase, something for my fuddled wits to cling to.

  I came up slowly. Came together, rather, because it felt like my mind was creeping timidly in from front, back, and sides to coalesce as best it could in my skull, which had obviously been dented right out of shape.

  I tried to stand up and was hauled up onto my knees without ceremony, even before my eyes had kicked in properly. Blearily I saw a woman’s face cross my field of vision, flick a contemptuous glance down at me, keep on going.

  A moment later, as I rediscovered the miracle of depth perception, I saw Gary Coldwood heave into view. I opened my mouth to speak, cl
osed it again with a grunt as my forehead and spine lit up with seven shades of agony. I sagged, but was held.

  “There’s”—I tried again, waving a vague, ineffectual hand toward where Peace ought to be—“injured—needs a doctor.”

  “You worried about the other guy, Fix?” Coldwood sounded tired and disgusted. A constable appeared beside him with a pair of handcuffs dangling in his hand, which Coldwood took with a nod. “You don’t have to be. Looks like you won. The other guy’s dead.”

  Eighteen

  THEY TOOK ME TO THE WHITTINGTON HOSPITAL ON HIGHgate Hill, where I could look out of the window and see the sun setting over Karl Marx’s tomb if I wanted to depress myself even more. There’s a secure wing there that the Met use for terrorists they shoot up in the course of arrest: bars on the windows, plods on the door, and all the lumpy custard you can eat.

  They thought I was in a worse way than I was, because the whack I’d taken to the side of my head had laid it open spectacularly—and the scalp being full of shallow-lying blood vessels, I’d bled like a stuck pig. But when they put me in a wheelchair and took me for a spin down to the radiology department, it turned out there was no concussion worth talking about and no intracranial bleeding. Some people are just born lucky, I guess.

  Back up on the secure ward, they wheeled me right past the door to my private room and parked me in the corridor a little farther on, where I was given into the custody of two uniformed cops. I didn’t bother to try to get a conversation started: they’d be under orders not to fraternize, and I wouldn’t pick up anything worth knowing from them anyway.

  Sitting there in one of those hospital gowns that leaves your arse hanging out, I replayed the events of the last few days with bleak self-hatred. Fanke had played me like a fiddle. Obviously he was already in place—having sidled into Pen’s comfort zone to keep an eye on Rafi, not on me. But when the shit hit the fan and the second installment of their human sacrifice floated away with the sweet morning dew, he improvised brilliantly.

  Or was it more than just an accident that I’d never met him as Dylan Forster? Was he playing the angles even then, keeping me in reserve in case he needed a fall guy at a later stage in the proceedings?

  Either way, he’d hired me on to find Peace for two reasons, not one. The first was that he needed someone who knew London, and there was nobody on his squad who’d fit the bill. They might be hard as nails, but they couldn’t read the ground: they might take weeks to find Peace, and he needed the job done a whole lot quicker than that.

  And the second reason was that he already had enough dead bodies on his hands to constitute a logistical problem. There were the satanists who Peace had gunned down at the sacrifice, which was bad enough, but there were also the Torringtons, stone-cold dead in suburbia, which was worse. Whether he’d killed Melanie himself, as I suspected, or she’d met her demise in some other way, the whole operation must have been starting to look both leakier and more high profile than he would have liked. Why not bring in a third party—someone he could keep discreet tabs on, through Pen, without ever making direct contact himself—to carry the can if things got any worse than they already were?

  Stitching me up was on the agenda right from the start: right from before I ever met him.

  A clatter of footsteps from farther down the corridor roused me from these painful ruminations on the past into an even more painful present. DS Basquiat, and her cheerful boy sidekick DC Fields, were walking briskly up the corridor toward me. Basquiat had a handbag slung over her shoulder that looked like Prada, and she was carrying a manila file with a white file label that I couldn’t read. She nodded to the nearer of the two uniforms, who unlocked the door and held it open while the other one wheeled me inside.

  The room was small and bare: just a table, a few chairs, and a wall-mounted shelf on which there was a battered-looking tape recorder. I recognized the setup at once: I’ve been in police interview rooms before. Never one that’s been designed as part of a hospital ward, but it made sense in the context.

  Basquiat threw the file she was carrying down onto the table, hung her jacket—black, short-cut, very stylish—on the back of the chair, and sat down. From her bag she took a pen, which she put down next to the file. Fields leaned against the wall, a few feet away from me. The plods withdrew, closing the door behind them.

  “Come on,” Basquiat said to Fields, a little impatiently. “Lights, camera, action.”

  He reached out and pressed the button on the tape recorder. “Whittington’s secure unit. Interview with Felix Castor,” he said, in a declamatory voice. “Conducted by Detective Sergeant Basquiat with Detective Constable Fields in attendance.” He glanced down at his watch and added the date and time.

  “I want a lawyer,” I said. “I won’t be saying anything worth hearing until I get one.”

  Basquiat raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t even been charged with anything yet,” she said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s jumping the gun?”

  “Am I being charged with anything?” I asked her.

  “Of course you are, Castor. You’re being charged with murder.”

  “Whose murder?” It was a stupid question, but right then my need to know outweighed my sense of self-preservation.

  “Why?” Fields sneered. “Are you losing count?”

  Basquiat looked at him, not an angry look, but one that was prolonged until he looked away. The meaning was unambiguous: it was her interview, and his contributions weren’t welcome.

  “You were found in a burned-out building,” she said, her gaze flicking back to me, “in the same room as a dead body. This turned out to be a man known as Dennis Peace—a man whose profession appears to have been the same as yours. Exorcism. He’d been shot in the chest and abdomen. He also bore injuries from an earlier assault of some kind, but it was the chest shot that killed him, even before the stomach wound had a chance to. He choked to death on his own blood.”

  I bowed my head. I’d hoped Peace might have made it somehow, but it had never seemed very likely. I felt a sour, attenuated grief for him, but the real gut-punch was Abbie. What had Fanke done with her? Had he found the locket? Of course he fucking had. He hadn’t crossed half of London and murdered a man in cold blood just to walk away with the real job half-done. He had her. He had her soul. Thanks to me, he had everything he needed now to finish what he’d started.

  “We’ve talked to a few people since then,” Basquiat went on briskly. “Former associates and known contacts. Reginald Tang and Gregory Lockyear, also exorcists, who used to share lodgings with Peace, were only too happy to confirm that you’d been looking for the man for the past several days. And that you’d been involved in a fight with him on board a houseboat—the Thames Collective. A woman named Carla Rees further claims that you tried to arrange a meeting with Peace, using her as a go-between.” She was getting the names out of the file on the table, but now she pushed it away from her slightly and leaned back in her seat. She obviously didn’t need cue cards for the next part.

  “Of course,” she said, “that’s all circumstantial. It helps to build up the case, that’s all. The main thing is that we’ve got your fingerprints on the gun and on a lot of other things that were in the room. A kettle. Some mugs. An empty brandy flask. It looks to me like you went in there with some story, got him pissed and off his guard, and then killed him. Is that what happened, Castor? You were looking for a chance at that easy shot in the back, but then you ran out of patience and did him face-to-face like a mensch, yes?”

  There was no way I should have answered that question. I’ve been in the same situation before—although not on a murder charge, admittedly—and I know how the game is played. Basquiat wanted to get some kind of a response out of me, and the more she could needle me the better the odds would be that I’d say something stupid and incriminate myself. But my first instinct—play safe and say nothing—ran aground on one simple, terrible fact. Time was against me. I needed Basquiat to believe me, or at least to take me seriously. I couldn’t afford the luxury of stonewalling her.