Vicious Circle

8

I headed back west. Switching onto the Jubilee Line, I passed within a stone’s throw of Paddington – at least, if the stone was fired out of a field mortar. At some point I’d probably have to drop in there for a word or two with Rosie Crucis. But now wouldn’t be a good time. I was still feeling a bit seedy and hung-over, and you need a full set of options to stand a chance against Jenna-Jane Mulbridge; anyhow, Rosie is more nocturnal even than Nicky.

Yeah, maybe I was just putting off the inevitable, but right now that worked for me.

So I dropped in at the office instead, and dug out some emergency supplies from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It was just a foil-backed bubble sheet with eight slightly odd-looking pills on it – white squares with rounded edges, marked with a cursive D. There’d been space for twelve pills originally, but four had already gone. The nurse who’d given them to me in the course of a brief, tempestuous relationship had said the D stood for Diclofenac, although the tablets had a couple of other active ingredients as well. ‘They’re magic,’ she said, sliding them into my breast pocket with a wicked grin. ‘Strongest painkillers you’ll ever take, but they leave you as sharp as if you’d just popped a handful of dex. Only don’t drink too much booze with them. Or . . . umm . . . go out in direct sunlight, because with this stuff in your system you’ll burn like a sausage on a grill.’

It was probably the most thoughtful present anyone had ever given me – as I’d had cause to find out when I took the other four. I swallowed two now, and the pain and stiffness in my shoulder receded almost immediately. I was back in the game.

With Nicky still fresh in my mind, I checked the answerphone in the office as well as the messages on my mobile: nothing doing on either one, so I was still on my own as far as that went. The good news, though, was that in among all the bills and other love letters from local government and national utilities, there was a heartwarmingly fat envelope with no stamp on it and just my name written in a flowing hand.

I opened it up and found a short note from Stephen Torrington, along with a cheque for a thousand pounds and a further five hundred in cash. The note just said that this was to be considered as a payment on account, and that I could send along a receipt whenever it was convenient. It occurred to me that that was going to be fairly difficult to do, because all I had by way of contact details for the Torringtons was Steve’s mobile number. I dialled it now, and he picked up on the first ring. Either he had spectacularly good reflexes or he lived with the thing in his ear.

‘Torrington.’

‘Castor,’ I said, answering in kind. ‘I got the money. Thanks.’

‘Mister Castor. No problem: as I said, we’ve got more money than we need, and nothing could possibly be better than this to spend it on.’

‘You asked for a receipt. But I don’t have your address.’

He laughed self-deprecatingly. ‘The ordinary niceties break down at a time like this. I’m sorry, I should have given you my card. And Mel’s, of course, in case I’m in a meeting or something. Send it to the house. We live on Bishop’s Avenue. Number 62.’

Nice address: London’s first gated community, in fact if not in name: millionaires and former government ministers only, and if you play the stereo too loud nobody will care because you’ve got at least two hundred yards of garden and so have they. The downside is that it’s a three-day expedition to nip next door and borrow a cup of sugar. ‘I’ll slip it in the post today,’ I said.

‘No hurry. Is there anything new to report?’

I considered lying, but again it went against the grain: if this guy was paying my wages, the least I could give him by way of value for money was the truth. ‘I think I met our Mister Peace this morning,’ I admitted.

‘Met him? But—’

‘It was a brief encounter. He was running like a bat out of Hell and I couldn’t quite keep up.’

Torrington blew out what sounded like a deep lungful of breath. ‘My God. So close! Where? Where was he hiding?’

‘The Thames Collective. It’s a houseboat on the river where London-based exorcists sometimes stay. I don’t think Peace was in residence, though: it’s a bit too public. Most likely he was just visiting. Borrowing money, maybe, I don’t know. He was seen at another exorcist haunt in Soho, too, so I guess he’s shaking the tree for something – something that’s worth the risk of being seen. Anyway, the bottom line is that even if he was staying at the Collective, the Collective just up and left. Until it comes into another mooring and I can find out where, I can’t check it out again.’

‘But you actually walked in on him? You saw him?’

‘Almost felt him, too – the tip of his boot, anyway. I’m really sorry. Next time I’ll be more—’

‘No, no.’ Torrington’s tone was sharp. ‘You’re as good as we were told you’d be, Mister Castor. You actually found your man within forty-eight hours, with little more than his name to go on – that’s nothing short of incredible. I don’t think it’ll be too long before you find him again, and I know you won’t let him take you by surprise this time. Thank you. Thank you for everything you’re doing for us. And if there’s anything else that I can provide that will make the job easier, just call me. Any time of the day or night.’

After a few more awkward pleasantries, we hung up. I wished I could live up to the Torringtons’ touching faith in me, but right then I felt like one of those poor guys in Plato’s cave, trying to make sense out of things I couldn’t see directly, just by squinting at the shadows that the fire cast on the cave wall. And to make things worse, I was standing in the goddamn fire.

I thought of Reggie Tang’s parting words, and the implication behind them. Peace was a bad lad, Bourbon Bryant had said – a bit wild and unpredictable – but all the same he seemed to have more friends in the London ghost-hunter community than I did right now: enough so that a lot of avenues I might normally have used seemed like bad ideas right then. Nicky still hadn’t got me anything beside stirring tales of the guy’s criminal past, and Rosie wouldn’t be open for business until midnight. I was meant to be having dinner with Juliet, of course, but that was more than eight hours away, so I was looking down the barrel of a wasted day unless there was something I could follow up by myself in the meantime.

And there was. It might not be directly relevant to the Torringtons’ case but it was pretty damn important to me and now was as good a time as any.

I took the Tube to Kensington and went looking for a knife-man.

‘It’s not as old as it looks,’ said Caldessa, in a quavery voice ridged with tempered steel. On the whole she made that bland comment sound pretty scathing. But then in her business old is good, and new things trying to look like they’re old are beneath contempt: lamb dressed as mutton. When I reached out my hand to take the knife back, though, she didn’t give it to me. She turned it over in her hands again and sighted along the blade in a way that was downright unsettling for such a respectable, tweed-wearing senior citizen.

My knife-man had turned out to be a woman. That was fine by me: when I’d turned up in Kensington Church Street, I’d had only the vaguest notion of what I was looking for – but I was fairly sure that this was the best place to find it. You just walk down Knightsbridge, past Kensington Gardens and hang a right, and you find yourself (predictably, maybe, given the price and provenance of the surrounding real estate) in the densest concentration of antique shops in the civilised world. Okay, some of these places are mainly dedicated to the painless extraction of the tourist dollar, which means they sell Victorian milking churns at a thousand quid a pop, but in among the purveyors of over-priced, elegant tat there’s a sprinkling of people who are well worth getting to know: fanatics with insanely narrow areas of specialisation like Belgian tea cosies of the Merovingian dynasty or left-handed field altars from the Spanish Civil War.

One of the biggest shops is Antik Ost, run by a distant relation of Pen’s whose name I have to look up and memorise again every time because it’s so damn long: Haviland Burgerman. He was my first port of call, and he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar. But he pointed me across the street to Evelyn Caldessa’s, and Caldessa had the goods.

She was something of an antique herself. Her skin had that faint, pearly-white translucency of the very old, her features were finely sculpted and her build was thinner than a stick: looking at her, you felt reasonably sure she’d ring like bone china if you flicked her with your thumb. The scarf she wore tied over her long grey hair, peasant-style, gave her an Eastern European look, but her accent was pure Roedean.

I intimated that I had something to sell, and that it fell within her area of expertise. ‘A knife. I found it among some things that belonged to my uncle.’

‘Belonged?’

‘He passed away.’

‘Oh, you poor thing.’ Space of a single heartbeat. ‘Let’s see it.’

I took out the cardboard tube, carefully slid the knife out into my palm, and handed it across to her hilt-first. Caldessa exclaimed under her breath when she saw it, then held it a long way away from her to get a better look. That blade didn’t look any nicer in daylight than it had in Soho Square after midnight: it was very much a weapon that was made for actual incision and slicing, in a context a long way away from the Sunday roast.

‘The blade is hollow-ground,’ she said. ‘That’s why it’s so thin and sharp – and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn’t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn’t have a bolster – most modern knives do.’

‘A bolster?’

‘The thickened part just above the handle.’

‘It wasn’t machine-milled, though,’ I pointed out.

She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. ‘What makes you think that?’ she asked.

I pointed. ‘When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind-marks on the steel. They’re not evenly spaced.’

Caldessa nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I’d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as persuading the buyer that he’s getting a handcrafted item.’ I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson-style, and she smiled dryly. ‘Yes, it’s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.’ She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. ‘This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

‘Now the wood . . .’ She rubbed the handle appreciatively. ‘That’s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. South-east Asian. You’d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red lustre to it. The bark is as grey as I am.

‘But here’s the give-away.’ Caldessa tapped the design at the tang end of the blade – the delicate floral motif which was the thing I was most interested in. ‘Machineetched,’ she said. ‘The electrolyte solution leaves a minute amount of staining on the steel which gets worse over the course of a few years and then stabilises unless there’s a fault in the steel itself or it wasn’t properly neutralised in the first place. In this case there’s a green sheen at the base of the major lines in the design – here. This was done with an industrial-standard etch-a-matic, using copper and bronze electrolyte and a sodium-based neutraliser. It’s letting the side down, really, because overall this is a nice piece. But –’ she laid the knife down on the counter, reversed it and slid it across to me ‘– no more than fifty years old, in my opinion. And not worth as much now as it was when it was new.’

I tapped the heel of the blade. ‘Have you ever seen this design before?’ I asked her.

She frowned. Possibly she registered that as being an unusual question to come from a tragically bereaved nephew. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not on a knife blade, in any event. I recognise the actual plant, of course.’

‘You do?’ I was impressed. ‘Why?’

‘Because I deal in antiques, dear. There’s always at least some degree of stylisation in floral motifs, so they’re easy to memorise. And they’re very useful in identification, so it’s worth the effort. This is belladonna – deadly nightshade, to give it its more poetic name. You can tell by the asymmetrical leaf pairs.’

‘Right, of course. Asymmetrical leaf pairs.’

‘With the flower coming out of the larger leaf. Look.’

It was quite distinctive, now that she mentioned it. Pretty, too. ‘But does it mean anything?’ I demanded, looking her in the face.

Caldessa looked back at me, world-weary and a little disapproving. ‘You’re not a policeman, are you, young man? I positively despise policemen. Rabid little rodents, the lot of them.’

‘I’m not a policeman, Mrs Caldessa.’

‘Just Caldessa will do, thank you very much. Very well. I’ll get my book.’

The book was called Identifying Marks in Cutlery and Metalware, by Jackman and Pollard, it was dated 1976, and it was thicker than a telephone directory. Caldessa leafed through it with one hand, holding the knife in the other and muttering to herself under her breath the whole time. There didn’t seem to be an index of any kind, although there were headings at the top of each page which consisted mainly of words like ‘inflorescence’ and ‘lanceolate’, and numbers that might have been ranges of dates.

Finally she tapped a particular design, glanced from the page to the knife and back again a great many times, and looked up to fix me with a gaze of frank puzzlement.

‘Tell me a little more about your uncle,’ she suggested.

I shrugged apologetically. ‘There is no uncle,’ I admitted, telling her what she must already know. ‘I swiped that knife from a couple of guys who were trying to perform amateur surgery on me with it. Now I’d love to know who they were.’

‘Anathemata Curialis.’

‘Not deadly nightshade? I thought you said—?’

‘No, no. The organisation that uses this design. It’s called Anathemata Curialis. Did you get a good look at the men who were trying to kill you?’

‘They weren’t men,’ I said, remembering the feline shape that had chased me across Soho Square and shuddering involuntarily.

‘That’s a very harsh judgement,’ said Caldessa sternly. ‘I’m not a believer myself, but I respect the opinions of others. Most of the time. Unless they’re ridiculous, like female circumcision.’

‘Whoa. Wait a second. What are you telling me? That this is . . . ?’

‘A religious symbol. In effect, yes. If this knife actually belonged to the two men you mentioned, then they were Catholics. Jackman and Pollard, on whose opinion I have many times staked my reputation, identify the Anathemata Curialis as a wing of the Catholic church.’

Caldessa beckoned me around the counter so that she could show me the relevant entry in the book. But seeing it in black and white didn’t really help much: I couldn’t make any sense out of this no matter whether I was reading it across, down or diagonally. The Catholic church hated and feared the undead with the same passion and enthusiasm they’d once reserved for people who said the world was round. Among the very few things I could tell you for certain about those two loup-garous was that they weren’t faithful and committed adherents to the Roman communion.

But pictures don’t lie. Or if they do, they don’t do it with such a straight face. I ran my gaze down the list. In among the names of Oxford colleges, regiments of defunct colonial armies and arriviste aristos whose forebears had puckered up and gone down on long-dead kings, there was a single entry in italic type: Anathemata Curialis, Catholic Order, disc. 1882.

‘Disc?’ I queried aloud.

‘Discontinued,’ said Caldessa. ‘Nobody has made knives with that livery since 1882.’

‘Well, now we know something that Jackman and Pollard don’t know,’ I mused grimly. Caldessa raised an eyebrow and nodded, conceding the point.

Remembering my manners, I thanked her and asked her if I could pay her for her time, but she waved the suggestion away summarily. ‘I honestly doubt you could pitch your price high enough to avoid an implied insult, dear. I’m a luxury commodity. If you ever have anything of real value to sell, you know where I am. And in the meantime, you can take this tawdry little gewgaw out of my sight.’

I put the knife back into its tube and went back out onto the street. It was the middle of the afternoon now, and the tourist crowd was thicker than it had been. Walking up towards Notting Hill Gate, I considered the logical next step – my older brother, Matthew – and tried to find reasons not to take it. If anyone could give me a labelled diagram of the innards of the Catholic hierarchy, it was him: he’s a priest, after all, and he loves his work. He’s a lot less fond of mine, though, and our conversations have a habit of disintegrating into name-calling before we even get past the small talk.

Because I was thinking about Matthew, and because thinking about Matthew tends to trigger a whole lot of other, darker thoughts, I was more or less oblivious of my surroundings. So it was a while before I noticed I was being followed. I wasn’t even sure where the realisation came from: I just caught sight of a movement in my peripheral vision, and on some level almost below consciousness I turned up a pattern-match. I had to fight the urge to turn around. Instead I crossed to a shop window and used it as a mirror – a hoary-whiskered trick that works one time out of three, tops.

This time it half-worked: I saw a tall man in a heavy black overcoat about twenty yards behind me, there for a second as the crowds parted and then gone again. But he had his shoulders hunched and his head down, so I couldn’t tell who he was, and the steep reverse angle of the window meant that in that split-second he’d already moved outside my field of vision.

I stepped into the shop and took a quick look around. More or less the same range of goods as all the other shops I’d passed, at least to my untutored eye: horse brasses abounded, along with heavy wooden furniture that it would be generous to describe as distressed, old pub signs and wrought-iron boot-scrapers. No other customers in there; the shop assistant, a guy in his twenties with the odd combination of a street-legal razor cut and a silk Nehru jacket, was reading Miller’s Price Guide for light relief. There was a smell of must and silence and church-like tranquillity. Time for hoary dodge number two. I went up to the counter, and the assistant glanced up at me with a professional smile, friendly but brisk.

‘Is there a back door out of this place?’ I asked.

The smile faded to an affronted deadpan. ‘The workrooms aren’t open to customers, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m being followed.’ I decided to elaborate, and I reached for a story that would press the right buttons for an upmarket rag-and-bone man. ‘Loan-shark muscle. They want to beat the shit out of me. I’d rather they didn’t do it at all, and you’d probably rather they didn’t do it in here. Please yourself, though.’

The assistant looked both shaken and disgusted. Fixing me with a hard stare, he picked up his mobile phone from behind the counter and gripped it tight as though it was the cure for all the world’s ills. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘you could call the police. And while we’re waiting you can tell me what not to bleed on.’

The workrooms were impressive, and they had a potent smell compounded of beeswax and shellac, but I didn’t have time to take the guided tour. The assistant led the way, glancing back at me every other step to make sure I was still there. We went along a corridor lined with wooden crates into a room dominated by a single massive workbench, chairs and occasional tables hanging on racks above it like some torture chamber for sinful furniture: through there into a storeroom stacked with cans of varnish, bales of wire wool and plate-sized tubs of Brasso.

At the far end of the storeroom there was a door which the assistant had to unlock with a key from his pocket, and then unbolt at top and bottom. He threw it open and held it for me, glaring at me as though this might still be some kind of fiendish trick. I examined the pass-not ward on the lintel of the back door as I stepped through it: hazel. ‘This is out of date,’ I told him, flicking it with the tip of my index finger. ‘It’s almost June. If you don’t want poltergeists, get a sprig of myrtle.’

He didn’t answer. The door slammed shut behind me and I was alone in an alley wide enough to take a delivery van. Not much cover, and it obviously opened right back out onto the street again. Still, we’d see what we’d see.

I went cautiously to the corner and looked out. There were enough people walking past in both directions to ensure that unless anyone was looking for me to emerge at exactly that point they’d take a while to notice me. So I had the luxury of being able to look up and down the length of the street without having to watch my back at the same time.

Nobody lurking around the doorway of the shop I’d gone into. Nobody browsing the windows of the shops to either side of it. I looked across to the other side of the street, bearing in mind that if this guy was any good he’d have chosen a place where a casual glance wouldn’t pick him out.

A casual glance didn’t. But on the second sweep, bingo, there he was. Just opposite the shop I’d gone into, there was a stand selling roasted nuts – the kind of thing that American tourists get their picture taken with, mistaking it for part of London’s rich cultural heritage because it involves both bland food and a cheeky, cheerful cockney. The man in the black coat had positioned himself close to the back of the stand where he’d be hidden from two sides, and from the other two would most likely look like someone patiently waiting to have his nuts roasted. He was a quarter on to me, so I was mostly seeing the back of his neck and I still couldn’t tell whether I’d ever met him before.

Just then, as I was staring at him and willing him to turn around, my phone started to squirm in my pocket like a living thing. There was no noise: I’d set it on ‘vibrate’ a while ago when for some reason silence had been an issue, and now I kept losing my way in the menus when I tried to turn its sound back on. But noise or no, it came out of nowhere and it made me start. And it was as though that minute movement alerted my stalker even though his eyes were elsewhere. His head jerked up and around, abruptly, triangulating on some cue that beat the hell out of me, and then his body swivelled too so that he was facing in my exact direction.

It was eerie and unsettling. So was the face, now that I got a good look at it, because it was Zucker.

Son of a bitch. These guys were tailing me around London with insolent ease. I could understand it if I was wearing a sandwich board like the deranged vegetarian who used to hang out at Oxford Circus (LESS LUST THROUGH LESS PROTEIN), but Inconspicuous is my middle name and I pride myself on the hair-trigger accuracy of my professional radar. Did they have the office staked out? Or the Collective? Where had I picked them up, and how had they got this close to me twice – or three times, counting the Oriflamme – without me spotting them?

It was a conundrum for a quieter moment. Right now, Zucker was staring directly at me across the width of the street, and even with the surging throng turning this into a game of peep-o there was no way he hadn’t seen me. I turned my back on him and fled.

When you’re playing follow-the-leader in what the military would call a broken-ground situation, the leader has all the advantages so long as he keeps his nerve. Weaving in and out of the crowd with my head down, I kept moving fast until I reached another alley, then broke free and sprinted the full length of it, coming out in Brunswick Gardens. The crowds were thicker here if anything, because there was a street market on and the road had been closed to traffic. Tinny music from someone’s wooferless boombox scraped along the air along with scents of almond essence and vanilla pods. The stalls, selling mainly antiques and collectables but also T-shirts, sweets, spices and bootleg DVDs, crowded the kerbs on either side and gave passersby a lose-lose choice between the narrow, obstacle-strewn pavement and the heaving, shop-or-drop chaos in the centre of the road.

Perfect.

I threaded my way between two stalls, crossed the street and continued on the other side. Then, fifty yards further on, I crossed back, legs bent at the knee to keep my head down, squeezing myself skilfully through the mob wherever a gap presented itself, and carried on down to the corner, where Kensington Church Street picks up again after the dog-leg. Here I inserted myself back into the more orderly crowd of antique-hunters. Okay, I’d got turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, and I’d have to go home by a different route, but I reckoned that no one on God’s Earth could have kept me in sight through that manoeuvre.

So it was kind of a bitter blow when I got onto an eastbound train at High Street Kensington and saw, walking down the steps on the other side of the barriers, that now-familiar black coat and slouching, head-down gait. The train was idling, doors open, waiting for a signal to change or for some other, more arcane London Underground augury. Packed in between a whole bunch of other straphangers and their interesting collection of armpits, all I could do was stand and watch. Zucker walked on past me without looking up, and without any sense of urgency that I could see. Then, just like on the street, he looked up – first left and then right, finally locking stares with me just as the doors hissed shut.

Our gazes met. He might have been angry, or embarrassed, or nonplussed, but he wasn’t any of those things. He just smiled, baring teeth that seemed to include a few too many canines. I smiled back, sardonically: then the doors slid open again and the smile slid off my face like lumpy custard.

Zucker took a single step towards me. He didn’t take a second one, because with the strength of panic I grabbed the guy standing next to me – a young Turk from the City, to judge by his splendid suit – by the shoulders and pushed him off the train. He collided with Zucker, who tried to step around him and then, as the young guy staggered and flailed, just flicked him out of the way, one-handed. They were only entangled for a second: then that gorgeous Alfieri homespun was down in the dirt and Zucker was stepping towards me, unencumbered.

But that second had been worth buying. The doors slammed shut again in his face and the train pulled out.

A second later the tunnel’s arch slid like a magician’s cloak across the scene, magicking it away.

I was hunter, and I was hunted. I was missing something. And if these guys were Catholics, I’d eat my tin whistle and fart the Hallelujah Chorus. To tell you the truth, the whole thing was starting to sour my mood.

So did standing on the train – Circle Line first, then Piccadilly ditto – all the way to Turnpike Lane. I felt bone-weary by this time, and there was a sort of itchy heat behind my eyes that I usually associate with the start of a fever. My left shoulder was aching again too, so that I had to grip the handrail with my right arm the whole way. By Caledonian Road it had started to cramp up on me. No doubt about it, I was a mess. I needed to go and lie down in a darkened room until my body decided to let me off the hook for the abuse I’d subjected it to over the past couple of days.

Instead of which I was looking at a dinner date with Juliet followed by tea and biscuits with Rosie Crucis. I didn’t feel up to either one of them.

As it turned out, though, I was worrying unnecessarily, because the evening was about to take a different turn in any case. I went back to Pen’s: found it empty, which was no surprise – she was probably out somewhere having a life. I took a shower to get rid of the sweat and aches, and to put on some clothes that were better suited to a social engagement with the sexiest, most debonaire hell-spawn in town. I went with a plain white shirt, a burgundy tie and a pair of black cargo pants. Oh, and a new dressing on my shoulder wound, which had been weeping slightly: pus-yellow with burgundy was a combination I didn’t think I could carry off.

Then I finally remembered the phone call I’d got earlier on and checked my messages. There weren’t any, but the missed-call alert gave me Pen’s mobile number. I called her back and got no answer, so I left her a message just saying that I’d called and that I was around for the next hour or so. Then the phone rang again about ten seconds later.

‘Fix, it’s me.’ Pen’s voice, sounding just a whisker away from hysterical. ‘I’m at the Stanger. You’ve got to get over here. It’s Rafi, Fix. It’s Rafi!’

‘What’s wrong with Rafi?’ I asked, my heart plummeting into my shoes.

‘Nothing!’ She said. ‘Nothing!’ And then tears choked out her words for a good couple of minutes.