Vicious Circle Read online

  He locked eyes with me again. “As time went on, she began to be afraid that Peace was having some kind of psychological breakdown,” he said, his mouth quirking down at the corners as if with distaste. “She was afraid.”

  He did something bizarre at this point: he reached down, opened the neck of the black bag and peered inside, as if checking its contents gave him some kind of reassurance. Then he closed it again and carried on talking as if nothing had happened.

  “Mel never hid any of this from me. And when it got to this stage I got one of my colleagues to send him a letter on the firm’s paper, telling him that we’d get an injunction against him if he didn’t leave Mel alone. In the old days that would have meant a court order, but I was pretty sure I could actually nail him with an antisocial behavior order—which would have meant prison if he didn’t play nicely.

  “But he wouldn’t get the message. He called Mel again, at work and at home, and I knew I was going to have to put my money where my mouth was. We’d already complained to the police, which had gotten us precisely nowhere, but at least it meant we had a case number. With that and an incident log, you can apply for a court order on your own initiative, so that’s what I did.

  “But then on Saturday—two days ago—he turned up at the house. He seemed drunk. Out of control. But most drunks I’ve seen are lethargic so perhaps he was high on something else. When I opened the door he pushed past me—he’s a much bigger, heavier man than I am—and demanded to talk to Mel. I picked up the phone to call the police: he ripped it out of the wall. Then he headed for the stairs. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and I was a little slow to react. But I went after him, and I tackled him.

  “Mel was upstairs, in the bedroom, and she heard all this row—Peace shouting, me shouting back, all the thuds and scuffles. She ran out onto the landing and she saw us on the stairs, wrestling with each other. She saw me go down. I’m not much of a fighter, despite my build, and even if I was I couldn’t fight the way he fought. He punched me in the stomach, then kicked me in the same place when I went down. Kicked me again and again, until my muscles seemed to lock and I couldn’t make myself breathe in. And the pain—I think I passed out.

  “Mel says she screamed at that point, and Dennis looked up at her. That may have saved my life, because he forgot all about me and went after her. He climbed over me and went on up the stairs. And he said—I know this is hearsay evidence, Mr. Castor, but I doubt any of this will ever come to court—he said ‘You’re coming back to me, bitch. You’re going to beg to come back to me.’

  “She ran back into the bedroom and locked the door. Her bag was in there, and her mobile was in the bag, so she was going to call the police. But she didn’t get the chance. Peace pushed the door in with his shoulder—the lock was a flimsy little thing and it just tore right out of the wood. He—he beat—”

  Throughout this recitation, Torrington had been getting more and more agitated. Now he faltered into silence, trembling. I stood up, with some idea of offering him a glass of water, but he waved me away: he didn’t want my solicitude.

  “He beat her,” he said. “You saw her face? Her back and side and her left arm all look the same. And then he ransacked the room. Pulling out drawers and tipping the contents onto the floor, hauling all the clothes out of the wardrobes. When Mel tried to reach for her phone again he stamped on it—smashed it into pieces. If she hadn’t snatched her hand away he’d have crushed that, too.

  “He seemed to be looking for something, and not finding it. And he was getting more and more frustrated, more and more out of control. Eventually he just turned and walked out of the room again. Mel ran after him, and saw him going into Abbie’s room.

  “We’d never . . . never changed anything in there. Mel tackled him again when he started wrecking Abbie’s things, and he turned on her in a rage. He started to strangle her.

  “Then he threw her down on the bed, and she thought that he was going to rape her. But he didn’t. He just went on searching. And this time he must have found what he was looking for, because he left. Mel was too terrified by now to try to stop him a third time. But as soon as she heard the door slam she called the police, and then she went down onto the stairs to tend to me.”

  “You said the police weren’t involved,” I pointed out.

  He gave a bitter snort that might have been intended as a laugh. “I said the police weren’t looking for Abbie,” he corrected me. “We hadn’t even realized . . . We told them about the assault, the damage, and we said we could identify the man who’d done it. They said they’d issue a warrant, and we’d hear in due course. Then when they’d gone, and we were trying to put the place back into some kind of order, we noticed . . . that Abbie wasn’t there. But we thought she’d just been frightened away by the noise, and the violence, and she’d come back later.

  “By the evening, we were really starting to miss her. She didn’t answer when we called, and we couldn’t feel her the way we usually do. Because she was gone. It was Abbie he was looking for. And he’d taken her. Somehow he’d taken her away with him.”

  He fell silent, gripping the neck of the bag tightly in both white-knuckled hands. And the silence lengthened, because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  I’d never even heard of a ghost being kidnapped before. It sounded so unlikely, so grotesque, that I still resisted the idea. Ghosts can’t be packaged and shipped like groceries or worn and carried like accessories. Mostly they can’t move at all outside of a fixed compass. Someone here had to be the voice of reason, and it was asking too much to expect that degree of detachment from Torrington himself.

  “You assume he took her,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “It could be, as I said, that she left because her time here was—”

  “Peace called Mel.” There was a tremor in Torrington’s voice, and he was still looking down at the black bag, still holding on to it as though it were some kind of lifeline. “About two hours later. He wasn’t making much sense, but he said ‘You’ll have to come back to me now, won’t you? Because you can’t have her if you don’t have me. We’ll all be together.’ She didn’t know what he was talking about. She hung up. She just hung up. And afterwards we realized. We knew.”

  Okay, that was something pretty hefty in the way of circumstantial evidence. My mind flicked off onto an irresistible tangent. Could it be done? Could it be slickly, smoothly done? Breaking and entering, and grand theft spiritual? Ghosts—most ghosts—haunt a particular place. It might be the place where they died, or where they were buried, or it could just be some spot to which they had strong associations in life. That’s their anchor. They can move a little way away from it: in some cases a couple of hundred yards, but except in a few special cases like the little girl ghosts I set free at the Stanger, I’ve never heard of it being more. So how would you take a ghost away from its anchor and walk away with it? Maybe . . . yeah, maybe there was a way that I could see. But I knew for a fact that it was something I couldn’t do myself.

  I was getting dangerously interested. The very weirdness of the situation appealed to my varied and prurient curiosities. But I generally hold to Dirty Harry’s dictum that a man should know his limitations.

  “I still think the police are your best option,” I said. “They can find Peace a lot easier than I can. And I think they’ll take a complaint seriously. He broke into your house, after all, and he threatened you.”

  Torrington was staring at me with a bleak, slightly accusing expression on his face. He knew when he was being snowed.

  “And what if they do find him?” he asked, his voice harsh. “Will they find Abbie, too? Can they bring her back for us?”

  He had me there. All I could do was shrug, which felt pusillanimous even to me. Okay, he was right. Even a relatively good cop like Coldwood, if something like this fell into his lap, would be helpless running a search for something he couldn’t see, hear, or touch—especially a cop, because there’s that whole blind-deaf-and-dumb pragmatism thing I already mentioned. Conversely, if I was anywhere close to where Abbie was, I’d at least have ways of knowing
I was close, and maybe taking a bearing. So there was a chance that I could help these people: a chance that I’d be able to run down Peace, and that I’d know what I was looking for when I saw it. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was there; and if this didn’t count as a spiritual service, then what the hell did?

  On the other hand, bringing Abbie back was going to be a much tougher proposition than finding her: I doubted I’d be able to appeal to Peace’s better nature, assuming he even had one. And since I didn’t know exactly how you went about kidnapping a ghost, I didn’t know how you went about bringing her safely home, either. And then there was all the collateral stuff: I’d have to check out the Torringtons’ story as far as I could before I got any distance into this. And I’d have to decide what the hell I should charge them, because this fell way outside even the fuzzy logic of my usual tariff.

  Once I start coming up with commonsensical points like that, it usually means I’m trying to talk myself out of something I’ve already decided to do. But this time, reality reasserted itself. There was no point in taking on a job I couldn’t do, and adding to the Torringtons’ trauma by building up their hopes and then kicking them down again.

  Steve Torrington was still looking at me, so I had to say something.

  “Well,” I temporized, “you’ve probably got a point there. But if it comes to that, I don’t know if I can be of any more use to you than the police could.”

  “No,” he agreed. “How could you know, until you’ve tried?”

  Which was throwing the ball back into my court with a vengeance. I tried to lob it back. “It’s not that straightforward, Mr. Torrington. Not like changing a car tire, or—” I cast around for a metaphor, found it close to hand “—or measuring you for a suit. Maybe if I had some of her things. I mean, if I could see her room, or—”

  As if he’d been waiting for this moment, Steve hefted the black bin-liner and put it down on the desk between us. “These are the things she cared most about,” he said, and he looked at me with the slightest hint of smugness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a solicitor, after all. Methodical mind, focused mainly on how the rules of any situation work and what the precedents are. He’d done his research.

  I gave him a nod, half-admiring, half-resigned. He emptied the bag carefully onto the desk.

  There was quite a lot there: enough so that I wondered what was left behind in Abbie’s room. Books, CDs, scrunchies, T-shirts; a cloisonné hair slide with a sort of Celtic knot design; teddy bears and dolls; a pair of very elaborate trainers; some posters of male celebrities I didn’t recognize, torn at the corners where the Blu-Tack hadn’t yielded quickly enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: the desiderata of a young girl’s truncated life. If I was in the right mood, I could probably pick out the items that had meant most to Abbie—the ones that would provide the strongest link to her. But the mood is a skittish thing, and getting into it is never easy for me when there are other people around.

  So I picked something up, not quite at random. A Victorian doll of the kind where the head is made out of porcelain while the body is stitched and stuffed, its relatively unfinished look hidden by a sewn-on dress. It had the unsettling, subtly aggressive blankness of a lot of old dolls, and it was in a near-terminal state of disrepair. The head was only attached to the body by a few loops of stitching, most of which had already come away. If I wasn’t careful with it, I’d decapitate it without even trying.

  A childhood toy seemed the best bet: emotions are always strongest when you’re young. Not that Abbie had lived to get old.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the doll. That’s the only way I can put it: it’s not like I was expecting the thing to talk to me. But it’s a kind of synesthesia, I guess: I don’t have a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s ear. It takes a while, usually, but if I focus my mind and shut out all distractions then most things have a tune, or at least a note or two, attached to them.

  This time it didn’t take a while: it didn’t take any time at all. Raw emotion hit me like a wall. I must have gasped, because Steve was staring at me with surprise and concern—and maybe, underneath that, with something like distaste.

  Abbie’s emotions when she held her foam-stuffed friend must have been enormously powerful: powerful enough to linger there, like a recording, for me to pick up. Or maybe the power came from the sheer simplicity, because there was really only one impression there: desperate, aching unhappiness, so deep it was like being at the bottom of a well without knowing how you’d fallen into it.

  It took an effort not to throw back my head and howl. If I’d been alone that’s probably what I would have done, because emotion that strong, even when it’s somebody else’s to start with, throws you off balance in all kinds of surprising ways if you can’t vent it somehow.

  It was an equally intense effort to put the doll down again: it seemed welded to my hands. After I’d done it, I took a few seconds to recover before I tried to talk.

  So Torrington got in first. “Is there anything there?” he asked.

  I nodded wordlessly.

  “A—a trail you can follow?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said. It came out more brusquely than I intended—probably the after-effect of all that black misery, still sloshing around my system, but in any case I’m lousy at the bedside manner stuff. I hate having to explain myself, even to intelligent people who can meet me more than halfway. I tried anyway. “I’m reading old emotions, not current ones. I’m not reaching out to Abbie wherever she is now, just . . . getting a sense of her, as she was when she was alive. But yes, there’s something there. Enough so that I’ll recognize her if I ever see her, or get close to her. It’s a start.”

  “A start?” Steve repeated. Solicitors know the importance of a contract, even when it’s just a verbal one.

  “Can I keep this stuff overnight?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  I nodded, feeling a weight settle on me that was different from the weight of Abbie’s emotion. “Then here’s what I’m offering, if you’re still interested. I don’t know if I can bring Abbie back to you. Like I said, that depends where she is. If her spirit’s gone on to the next station on the line, whatever you want to call that, then nobody can find her for you and nobody can get to where she is. But I may be able to give you an answer to that question—let you know what the odds are. And if she is still around—still with us—then there are a few things we can try. If she isn’t . . .” I shrugged. “Well, at least you’ll know where you stand. Is that any use to you, or would you rather shop elsewhere?”

  Torrington was nodding emphatically, and he started to discuss payment—which most prospective clients get to at a much earlier stage of the conversation. I decided to dodge that issue for now, because I still wasn’t sure how far I could run with this. If I did hit a brick wall I’d want to just tell them that and get away clean: the hassle of returning a deposit would add all kinds of awkwardness to a situation that was already nasty enough. “You can pay me if I decide to take the case on,” I said.

  Torrington looked alarmed. “But you said—”

  “This first part is just triage. Just—testing the ground. Let’s keep it on that basis for now. There’s no point you laying any money down in case I come up with a blank. But if you leave it with me overnight, we can talk some more tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to go over this stuff a bit more thoroughly.”

  Torrington took the hint and stood up to leave.

  “Should I call you in the morning?” he asked.

  “I’ve got your number,” I countered. “I’ll call you.” Looking into his eyes, caught in the headlights of his grief, I relented slightly. “Tonight. I’ll try to call you tonight. I should have a bit more information for you then.”