Vicious Circle Page 43

  The door slammed shut.

  But this time she’d listened—and relented. Barely ten minutes later the door opened again, and an orderly in a white coat wheeled in a payphone on a trolley. He walked right out again, and the cop who’d opened the door looked at me expectantly.

  “I don’t have any money,” I reminded him.

  He looked truculent. “Nothing in the rules says I’ve got to sub you, you cheeky fucker,” he grunted.

  “Detective Sergeant Basquiat will pay you back,” I assured him. “And contrariwise, she’ll probably twist your bollocks off if her collar goes tits-up because you didn’t give me my statutory rights.”

  He dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of silver, which he flung down on the floor. “There you go,” he sneered, and stalked out. The key turned in the lock.

  There was a yellow pages on a wire shelf underneath the trolley. I looked under “Roman Catholic church,” found nothing, but under “Religious organizations” there were a number of places that looked vaguely promising. I eventually settled on a seminary in Vauxhall. I dialed the number, and a man’s voice said “Father Braithewaite,” in slightly plummy tones.

  “Good evening, father,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me. I need a number for a Biblical research organization, which I believe is located in Woolwich. Does that ring any bells with you?”

  “Yes indeed,” said Father Braithewaite immediately. “The Ignatieff Trust. I should be able to obtain their number—I’ve several publications of theirs on my shelves. Just a moment.”

  There was a clunk as the phone was put down, followed by a variety of other bangs, rustles, and scrapes which seemed to go on for a hell of a long time. Finally, just as I was about to hang up and try somewhere else, the priest came back on the line.

  “Here it is,” he said, and recited a number to me. Since I didn’t have any way to write it down, I asked him to repeat it and committed it to memory.

  Thanking him for his help, I hung up and dialed the new number. It was the right place, but all I got was a recorded voice and an invitation to leave a message on the answerphone.

  Well, in for a penny. “This is Castor,” I said, “and my message is for Father Gwillam of the Anathemata Curialis. Ask him to call me on this number. As quick as he can, because the clock’s ticking. If he’s still looking for Dennis Peace, you can tell him that the trail’s gone dead. Literally. The only way he’s going to get to Abbie Torrington now is through me.”

  I hung up, and settled down to sweat out the wait, hoping that they wouldn’t come and take the phone away from me before I got my answer. Also, that this wasn’t one of those cleverly doctored payphones that block incoming calls.

  It wasn’t. The phone rang after about fifteen minutes and I scooped it up on the first bounce. If the cops outside the door heard the sound, they didn’t respond to it.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Mr. Castor?”

  I remembered the dry voice. I’d forgotten the inhuman, puritanical calm.

  “Yeah.”

  “Gwillam here. What can I do for you?”

  I told him, and he laughed without any trace of humor. It was like hearing a corpse laugh.

  “And is there anything else you’d like?” he asked, the irony in the words not making it through to the remorselessly level voice. “Any dead relatives of yours we can intercede for? Or we could stop along the way and pick you up some pizza . . .”

  “We’ll talk terms later, Gwillam,” I told him, in no mood for light banter. “For now, just you go ahead and let the dogs out.”

  I hung up, hard enough to split the plastic of the receiver.

  Nineteen

  I’M NOT GOOD AT WAITING. I NEVER HAVE BEEN. I’VE MET people who can switch into Zen mode when there’s nothing going on and just mentally hibernate until the toast pops up. I tend to be punching the walls after a while—or in the absence of walls, other people.

  Basquiat had left me my watch, which was either a rare sign of humanity or the most insidious and refined torture. I looked at it often enough over the next few hours to wear a hole in the glass.

  The day dragged on, like a glacier fingernailing its way down a mountain. I couldn’t settle to the car reviews again, so I found myself leaning on the windowsill looking out across Highgate Hill, where the sun, shot down in terrible slo-mo, made the sky over Marx’s tomb flare a deep enough red to have satisfied even him.

  Maybe that red sky was an omen of some kind—happy shepherds notwithstanding. Just before the sun touched the horizon there was a sound like the clapping of God’s hands, followed by an endlessly prolonged scream-cough-scream of breaking glass.

  The fire alarms went off all over the building, including one just outside my door that drowned out any sounds from farther away. I felt the vibrations of running footsteps, though; then immediately afterward there were shouts in the corridor outside. I heard some kind of bellowed challenge or warning, cut short as something hit the door with enough force to pop the top hinge.

  The door leaned inward an inch or so, and then a second impact made it topple forward into the room, crashing down a few inches from my startled face. One of the uniformed constables came down with it, obviously unconscious even though his glazed eyes were still half-open. Even though it was the one who’d tossed his small change onto the floor so I had to grovel for it, I still felt a twinge of compassion for him. But it passed.

  The werewolves, Zucker and Po, stepped over the body. Zucker was in human form—or what passed for human form with him. Po was a monstrous tower of flesh, the remains of a torn shirt still clinging to his barrel-like torso in strips here and there. An unfeasible array of yellow-white fangs bristled in his face, drawing my gaze so completely that the other features became a sliding blur as he lumbered past me to check that the unfortunate cop wasn’t likely to get up again soon.

  Zucker flashed me a scary smile.

  “We were in the neighborhood,” he said. “Thought we’d drop in.”

  “And me without a cake,” I mourned.

  “We don’t eat cake. You got anything you need to pick up on the way?”

  I shook my head. I’d have dearly loved to get my own clothes back, but I had no idea where Basquiat would have stashed them. I was just going to have to get by.

  Po loomed over me, and Zucker flicked him an appraising glance. “You know that Olympic event where people walk really fast?” he asked me.

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Well that’s what you’ve got to do. If you run, my friend here is apt to knock you down, step on your head and rip your guts out. It’s his way. But we are in a hurry. So—as fast as you can without running.”

  He turned and led the way out of the room. I followed, and Po brought up the rear like a walking wall. Except that walls mostly have graffiti rather than spines, fangs, and slavering jaws.

  The other cop was slumped out in the corridor, the scattered pages of a pink racing paper bearing silent witness against him. Not that he’d have had a much better chance if he’d seen the loup-garous coming: I had a suspicion that you’d need something on the scale of a howitzer even to slow Po down.

  The alarms were still screaming, filling the air to the exclusion of everything else. I was sort of assuming that they were a default distress signal, but I realized as we reached the short flight of steps at the end of the corridor that the building was actually on fire. At least, the level below us was full of smoke that hung heavily in the air in visible layers, and there was an acrid, chemical smell that took a lot of the fun out of breathing.

  We came down into an open space lined with chairs—a waiting area of some kind for one of the Whittington’s specialist units. Zucker hesitated, then pointed to the far side of the room and headed off in that direction. I followed, at a constrained jog-trot. I didn’t want Po trampling me under from behind, and I wanted still less for him to get a mental image of me as a rubber bone.

  There were three sets of lift doors in a row. Zucker pressed the down buttons on all three, and the middle one slid open immediately
. Po pushed me forward and I staggered in. Zucker glanced off to the left and right, then backed in himself and hit the ground floor button.

  “If the power goes, we’ll fry in here,” I told him, the thought genuinely making my stomach turn over slightly. I’ve got just a touch of claustrophobia that surfaces every now and again when I’m in enclosed spaces with semihuman monsters that smell like old, damp carpets.

  “Not a problem,” Zucker said tersely. “Trust me.”

  The doors slid open again and we came out fast into a wide corridor, Zucker still taking point. The ground floor was like some kind of vision of hell. The smoke was thicker here, shutting my line of sight down to my own arm’s length, and the chemical stench was worse. There were a whole lot of other sounds now beneath the wail of the alarm: screams, shouted orders, the scrape and thud of booted feet. No footsteps from behind me, though. I looked round, and saw that Po’s feet were as bare as mine. The last vestiges of his clothes had sloughed away now, and with them whatever laughably slim chance there’d been of him passing for human. Even if he got his errant flesh under control, he’d be stark bollock naked.

  I collided with a wheelchair that was just sitting in the corridor, almost went over on my face. Po snarled warningly: he clearly took my breaking stride as a provocative act. “How are we getting out of here?” I called out to Zucker, who was a good few yards ahead of us on account of not having to worry about losing major limbs and organs.

  “Trust in God,” he suggested. I looked at him curiously, but he was forging on down the broad corridor without looking behind, so that all I could see was the back of his head. There was no trace of irony in his tone.

  “Not usually an option for me.”

  “But now you’re in His hands.”

  A pair of large doors were in front of us. Zucker kicked them open and went on through, into an atrium of some kind. The higher ceiling made the fumes dance in hypnotic convection currents like curdled milk in coffee. My head was spinning, my stomach heaving. Neither of the loup-garous seemed to be affected at all.

  I lost sight of Zucker almost at once, but he hadn’t gone far. When I stepped through after him his hand shot out of the fug and gripped my wrist. His voice sounded close to my ear.

  “Stay close to me,” he muttered. “If we have to leave you behind, we’ve been told it’s okay to kill you. Po is hoping it pans out that way, but I prefer to stick to the script as far as possible.”

  It occurred to me to wonder what Zucker looked like when he made the change into his animal form. He obviously had a lot more self-control than his partner. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when that self-control snapped.

  He hauled me after him into the thunder-gray semidark. I presumed that Po was still with us, but I couldn’t see him anymore. I couldn’t see anything. It seemed like the whole place was ablaze, although I suddenly realized I hadn’t seen any flames, felt any heat.

  Suddenly a face loomed out of the smoke: a security guard, in full uniform, wielding a futile torch that did nothing but reflect off the churning billows. The guard saw us as we saw him, and opened his mouth to yell.

  Po leapt more or less directly over my head, landing full on the guy’s chest. He went down hard. Then Zucker was on top of Po, grappling with him. “Leave him!” he snapped. “Leave him, brother! Let God find him out! Let God judge!” There were grunts, and scuffling, and then a full-throated roar from Po.

  For a moment I thought I could give them the slip. That would make life a lot simpler. But stepping sideways in the stinking gloom, with the shrilling of the alarm still jangling my thoughts, I bumped straight into a wall. Then the alarm stopped, abruptly, leaving the appalling vacuum of silence to rush in and claim the space where it had been. After-echoes died away and were swallowed in the deadening fog.

  Zucker’s arm clamped down on my shoulder, whatever altercation he’d had with Po presumably settled.

  “It’s this way,” he said again, with an undertone of warning.

  We moved forward. There was something cold and granular underfoot: for a moment I wasn’t sure what it was, then I heard the crunch from under Zucker’s boots and realized that I was walking on broken glass. “Fuck!” I protested. Zucker hissed me silent. My voice sounded indecently loud in the sudden hush.

  Two eyes opened in the fog ahead of us: gleaming yellow eyes, about seven feet apart. An engine revved. Zucker waved, and the eyes flashed: headlights, on full beam. But we were still inside the building.

  More indistinct figures were staggering through the gloom off to our right. Someone shouted, and I saw the flash of another flashlight beam. Zucker snapped his fingers, and before I even figured out that it was a signal, Po scooped me off my feet. He ran behind Zucker, around to the left, past the lights. The side of a vehicle slid by us, dull white, and two metallic clangs sounded one after the other. Then I was thrown down, not onto the glass-strewn floor of the atrium but into the back of some kind of van. The two loup-garous piled in after me and we backed at reckless speed, Zucker pulling the doors closed with a deafening crash, then swung around with a squeal of tires.

  “Mach two,” Zucker bellowed, pounding twice on the roof with the heel of his hand.

  And we tore away so fast that I was thrown over onto my face again just as I’d finally managed to get up on my hands and knees. A siren gave a mournful, oddly truncated whoop-whoop-whoop as the driver shoved down hard on the accelerator, making the speed limit a distant memory.

  I twisted my head around; took in the gurney with its wheel locks, the medical kit on the wall, the oxygen cylinder strapped down solid in its recess. We were in an ambulance. The sneaky bastards had hijacked an ambulance.

  There was a third man lounging in a fold-down seat next to the gurney. He was stocky, with a pugnacious, peeled-red face and the kind of hair that—although long and even luxuriant—starts a good couple of inches below the crown of the head, leaving a shiny circular landing area for mosquitoes. He was wearing a biker’s jacket and a pair of torn jeans that looked as though the rips had all happened by accident rather than being installed at the factory, and he was holding a gun with a silencer so long it suggested desperate overcompensation. It was pointing at my head.

  “I’m Sallis,” he said, in a voice as raw as his face. “I’ll be your stewardess for this evening, and if you so much as fucking move I’ll be putting a really slow .22 hollow-point into your skull. They’ll have to pour what’s left of your brain out through your nose.”

  “What’s the movie?” I asked him, and he prodded my cheek with the end of the silencer barrel as if to say that he didn’t appreciate my trying to move in on his stand-up act.

  “You just lie there,” Zucker elaborated, sounding a little more relaxed now that the hard part—for him, anyway—was over. The ambulance was lurching from side to side as we banked and turned in the narrow streets, so the loup-garou had to grip a handrail to keep from being bounced off his feet: it made him seem more human, somehow. “You don’t say a word to anyone in here, including me. The next words you speak will be when you’re asked a direct question. Okay? Just nod.”

  I shrugged. It felt fairly quaint to be threatened with a gun when Po was squatting beside me like a bag full of muscles with a decorative motif of teeth.

  “That wasn’t a nod,” said Zucker sternly.

  “You didn’t say Simon says,” I pointed out.

  Sallis kicked me in the ribs, but for all the tough talk they were clearly under orders not to bring me in either dead or too badly creased. I was banking on that—on the fact that Gwillam would want to debrief me before he made any last judgments about my disposal. Otherwise I might have minded my manners a little more, and tried to leave a better impression.

  * * *

  I had plenty of time, as we drove on at breakneck speed through the gathering dark, to figure it out. There’d never been any fire, of course. Just a lot of smoke grenades that the loup-garous had chucked out of the ambulance’s doors as they’d crashed through the large picture windows that fronted the A&E block. The chemic
al smell was a cocktail of formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and maybe launch gases if they’d actually fired the fucking things from a mortar.