Vicious Circle

12

When I was eleven years old and coming up to my twelfth birthday, I dropped a lot of heavy hints about a bike. It was a lot to ask, even if it was a second-hand one, because my dad had just been laid off from the Metal Box factory on Breeze Hill and we’d reached the point where we either had to eat dirt literally or go to one of the local loan sharks and do it figuratively.

As the day approached, it became clear that there was a big secret I wasn’t in on. Conversations between my mum and dad would stop when I came into the room, and there was a general air of silence and tension. When I asked my big brother Matt what was going on, and whether or not it had anything to do with me, he told me to fuck off out of it because he had homework to do. I concluded that the bike had been bought, and that it had probably added to the financial strain the family was already under. Selfish little shit that I was, I took that as good news.

Then, about three days before my birthday, my mum left home: my dad, John, had finally kicked her out after finding her in bed with his work colleague, Big Terry (so named to avoid confusion with the merely medium-sized Terry Seddon). She went in the middle of the night, so the first we knew was when we woke up the next morning and she wasn’t there. Dad told us she’d gone back to live with Grandma Lunt in Skelmersdale, which was a half-truth: her own mother threw her out too, since she didn’t have a job and couldn’t ‘turn up’ for her keep. She ended up going down to London looking for a job, and we didn’t see her again for three years.

So I’m prepared to admit that sometimes I ignore what’s right under my nose: I’m not always right in there with the intuitive connections and conclusions. It’s probably not overstating things to say that – sly as I undoubtedly am – I can sometimes get lost in the wood while looking at the trees.

But this time it was the world’s fault. This time reality had pitched me a spit-ball I couldn’t have seen coming.

At first I tried to slot Nicky’s nasty little revelation into what I already knew. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘When did they die?’

‘Last Saturday. Sixth of May. Somewhere between noon and six p.m. according to the pathologist’s best guess. The guy – Stephen – was shot in the face at point-blank range, and he was kneeling at the time. No sign of a struggle: he saw it coming and he took it pretty well. A good sport, obviously. With the woman it was messier: she was tied up and beaten with the leg of a chair, then shot in the stomach. And the killer took his time, because the path team put the time of her death a good three hours after the guy’s.’

‘But—’ I managed. ‘I met them two days after that – on the Monday. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Are you telling me—?’

I tailed off. I realised that a couple of lights had come on in windows across the street. This clearly wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation. I headed towards the corner. ‘The car’s over here,’ I said. ‘You can tell me as we drive.’

Nicky didn’t move. ‘I told you, Castor, I’ll take a cab. Right now the less of your company I get the better. You want to hear this, you hear it here.’

I turned to face him. ‘Can we at least get off the street?’ I asked, throwing out my arms in a shrug.

Nicky hesitated. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ he said after a couple of beats. ‘There’s a bar on Troy Town. It’s hot and cold, or at least it was the last time I looked. Come on.’

He led the way, sullenly silent. I decided to let him simmer down before I broached the subject again: I’d get more out of him that way. But the wheels inside my head were spinning without traction, the gears squealing so loud I could almost hear them. Mel and Steve died two days before I met them. So either I’d met really good fakers or the dead bodies had been wrongly identified.

But it was Tuesday now – or rather, Wednesday morning. If the cops had made a bad ID on Saturday night, they’d had ample time already by Monday to have met the Torringtons, cleared up the little misunderstanding, tipped their hats and gone on their merry way. And that would be on file. And Nicky would have seen it there.

That left the other possibility – that the people I’d met who called themselves Mel and Steve Torrington were two somebody elses entirely. In which case, why pretend? Why introduce themselves as two people who’d just died and whose murders could be the next day’s front-page news?

Because there wasn’t anyone else who I’d have said yes to. They needed me to look for Abbie’s ghost, and that lie was the only one that was certain to do the job.

We turned the corner into Troy Town – which has nothing epic or eye-catching about it apart from its name. Nicky crossed the road, and I followed. On the other side was a short row of Georgian terraces. Every second house had a flight of steps behind wrought-iron railings, leading down to a basement level below the street. Nicky descended one of these flights of steps, and as I followed I heard voices and music from ahead of me, although everything was still dark. Then he opened a door and light flooded out. Not much of it, it has to be said, and not strong: maybe ‘oozed’ is a better word than ‘flooded’.

The bar was actually in the basement of a house. It was called The Level, and it was indeed hot and cold, like Nicky had said. That meant that living and dead were equally welcome. You could smell the dead part of the equation as you came in off the street: a faint sour whiff like leaf mould, mixed with the surgical tang of formaldehyde. Seeing them wasn’t so easy: the only lighting in the room was from candles in the necks of bottles strategically positioned on tables and on shelves around the walls. There was a good-sized crowd lurking in the plentiful shadows – and a poor-sized bar, wedged into a corner of the room. I ordered a whisky, while Nicky passed. Introducing foreign organics into his system is something he tends to avoid. ‘If you’re dead, your immune system is more or less closed for business,’ he’d told me more than once. ‘No blood flow, right? No transport for antibiotics, phagocytes, any of that shit. So once you start letting infective agents in, you’re fucked, pure and simple.’ If this was a more upmarket joint, he would have ordered red wine and inhaled the scent of it: but he wouldn’t stoop to whatever the house red was in this place.

We sat down at the most remote table we could find – but in any case privacy was provided by the other conversations going on all around us. Anything we said would be lost in the general noise. The wallpaper was a virulent red and looked like flock. I reached out and ran my finger down it: it was. Maybe this place had been a curry house back in the day.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ I said, and I took a gulp of the whisky to fortify myself.

Nicky’s mood had calmed somewhat. He was still as pissed off with me as he had been, but he enjoys being the fountain of arcane wisdom almost as much as he enjoys jazz. ‘I would’ve spotted it sooner,’ he said, ‘only like I said, when it comes to murders we’ve had kind of an embarrassment of riches just lately.’

Of course. The spike in the bell-shaped curve. I suddenly remembered one of the headlines I’d read over Nicky’s shoulder on his computer monitor: HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE. Son of a bitch: it had been right in front of my eyes and I’d let it slide on past.

‘They were found in their own house,’ Nicky went on. ‘Somewhere out towards Maida Vale.’

‘Maida Vale?’ I broke in. ‘The Steve Torrington I met gave me an address on Bishop’s Avenue.’

‘What number Bishop’s Avenue?’

I dredged it up from memory. ‘Sixty-something. Sixty-two.’

‘That’s the squat, you fucking moron. And what did he give you the address for? Did he ask you over for cocktails?’

‘It was so I could send him a receipt,’ I admitted.

‘Right. Like he fucking cared where that ended up. Anyway, the real Stephen Torrington lived in Maida Vale – and he doesn’t fucking live there any more. I’ve got the address if you want it, but my advice is to stay clear.

‘Place of death was the living room: some of the furniture had been moved to clear a big space – killer with a sense for the theatrical. The entire place had been ransacked. Every drawer, every cupboard, everything hauled out and strewn over the floor. Like there’d been a search, the file notes said, but they were just guessing. With the place being so messed up, they couldn’t even tell if anything was missing. And they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the girl.’

‘Abbie,’ I breathed.

‘Yeah, her. They knew there was a kid even without going through any records on the Torringtons, because there was a room that was obviously a kid’s room. That had been turned over, too, just like the rest of the house.’

Of course it had. And some things had been taken: I knew because except for the doll’s head in my goddamn pocket they were sitting in a big black bag in my office – a gift from the guy who called himself Steve Torrington. I imagined him raking through Abbie’s things with her real parents lying murdered in the room below, and I was filled with an unreasoning rage at my own naivety. No wonder he’d sent the woman back to the car: whoever the fuck he was, he knew his own acting skills were up to the job, but he didn’t want to have to rely on hers. And he was right: he’d got the grief spot-on, mostly – except that grief isn’t usually that articulate. I should have known. I should have smelled something.

But if I had, what would I have done? Refused to take the case? Abbie was dead – that much I knew, because I’d touched her spirit across the London night. And I’d felt the choking well of unhappiness that was all she’d known back when she was alive.

Lies or not, I’d taken on this job because of her: so, fair enough, I’d see it through because of her, too. Right then I hoped that meant that somewhere along the way I’d be running into the soi-disant Steve Torrington again, so that I could salvage some of my self-respect with the judicious application of a tyre iron.

That image made me think about ‘Mel’s’ bruises. They were just there for effect, I was suddenly sure: a stage prop to engage my sympathy and maybe to explain the relative awkwardness and lack of expression in her voice. This bastard didn’t miss a trick – and he didn’t care who he hurt.

‘So what do the cops think happened?’ I asked, pulling my thoughts off that particular track with a twinge of unease.

Nicky gave a one-handed shrug. ‘They don’t know a thing,’ he said. ‘At least, nothing that’s on file as yet. They analysed the bullets six ways from breakfast, so they’ll know the gun when they find it. Guns, sorry – two different weapons. But there’s nothing in their ballistics database to say whether either of them’s ever been used in any other crimes, so that’s a dead end for now. They dusted the place for prints, got nothing apart from the ones that should have been there anyway – not even virtuals. Retrieved a few footprints, which again will only help in nailing the perps once they find them.’

‘Statements from the neighbours?’

‘Nobody saw, nobody heard. Bits of street gossip creeping in here and there, though. Some people thought it was just a matter of time. The Torringtons were lowering the tone of the place, apparently. Lots of undesirables turning up at the house all hours of the day and night. One guy in particular seen going in and out a lot: tall, well built, in a long leather coat, with two goons dancing attendance like he was God. They figured he was either a gangster or a record-company producer. Maybe both. There’s a complaint on file with social services. One of the neighbours was worried enough about all the coming and going to raise a query about whether the Torringtons might be paedophiles, farming Abbie out for abuse.’

I froze with my glass half-raised to my mouth. That would certainly explain the misery.

‘And?’ I prompted, both wanting and not wanting to hear the answer.

‘One follow-up visit, records appended to the file. I couldn’t access everything, but I gather Abbie seemed to be a healthy, normal girl. A little solemn and preoccupied, but well fed, well looked after. Room was nice, clothes were neat and tidy, she checked out okay at interview, you know the drill. “Did not display precocious knowledge of or concern with sexual matters.” No smoking pistol – not even any powder burn. Sorry to bother you, sign off, hit the road.’

‘But there was something going on there,’ I mused, grimly. ‘Lots of visitors. Some of them regulars. Turning up often enough for the neighbours to clock them and take notes. What were the Torringtons up to?’

‘Selling drugs?’ Nicky said. ‘Cosmetic surgery? I deal in data, Castor, not reading fucking fortunes. What I got, you’ve now had. As of now, that’s the entirety of what the Met have managed to nail down since Saturday night. Abbie is officially missing, her parents are indisputably dead. I know you see a lot of ghosts in the way of business. You ever been hired by them before?’

For once, Nicky didn’t even laugh at his own joke. He’d caught the edge of my sombre mood, and of course he was still choked with me for souring his arrangement with Imelda.

I took another slug of whisky, didn’t even taste it.

‘What about Peace?’ I asked. ‘You dig up anything else there?’

Nicky turned coy – the way he always does when he’s got something really eye-popping to tell me. ‘Yeah,’ he admitted, ‘a little. I don’t know how much of it is strictly relevant, though.’

‘Meaning—?’

‘Meaning it’s mostly old. Lifestyle stuff. Not the kind of intel you could use to find out where he is now.’

‘Tell me anyway,’ I suggested.

Nicky flared up, coyness giving way to the irritation that was still slow-burning underneath. ‘Castor, I am not exactly in your fan club right now. It hacks me off when you talk to me like I’m some kind of skivvy you can just—’

‘Please,’ I amended. ‘Pretty please. Pretty please with sugar on the top.’

‘Better. Well, it’s a case of the more you dig, the more you find. That charge sheet I mentioned runs to more than one page – wherever Peace lays his hat, he starts some kind of trouble. After that army tour I told you about he found a way to turn his training to good account. He became a merc – signed up with some private security firm in the Middle East that had a very nasty name for itself, but then half the board got locked up for trying to trigger a coup in Libya and he was out on his ear again.’

There was something in Nicky’s eye that told me he was saving the best till last. Under other circumstances, I might have been short enough on patience to yell him out about that: tonight I decided I’d better humour him.

‘Anything else?’ I asked, playing straight-man.

‘Yeah. Since you ask, there is.’

‘Go on.’

‘Peace filed suit back in 1999, under the jurisdiction of the state of New York. Against Anton Fanke – you remember, the Satanist guy I told you about before? – and a woman whose name appears on the affidavit as Melanie Carla Jeffers, a.k.a. Melanie Carla Silver, a.k.a Melanie Carla Torrington.’

I swore aloud, and Nicky nodded his head in agreement. ‘Yeah, it’s a peach, isn’t it? Only that’s not the part that made me prick up my ears. Get this: it’s a suit for custody. Plaintiff alleged that defendant was unfit to be a parent, and asked the court to award him guardianship rights over . . . well, you can see this coming, so there’s no point drawing it out.’

There was a roaring in my ears: I couldn’t tell how much of it was the fever, how much the adrenalin surge as my mind raced ahead to where Nicky was going.

‘A little girl named Abigail?’ I hazarded, my voice sounding hollow and fuzzy in my own ears.

‘Got it in one. Abigail Fanke, she’s called at this particular juncture.’

‘She’s Peace’s daughter.’

‘Well, he thinks she is. And the court records agree, as far as that goes, because surname notwithstanding there’s a birth certificate on record for her in Burkina Faso, thirteenth of March 1993. Mother: Melanie Carla Jeffers. Father: Dennis Peace.’

‘That’s not long after he got out of prison,’ I said.

‘Good to know you’re listening. Yeah, it is. And armed with that little titbit, I went back to the court records. Which was a bastard, because I don’t need to tell you they were all fucking handwritten. I had to call in a favour or three, but I got there in the end. Melanie Whatever-her-name-is bailed Peace out of jail, and presumably spread those bribes around. Makes more sense, I guess. Like I said before, if he’d had the money himself he could have bought off the judge before he was sentenced, for about half the price. But maybe he didn’t have any money. Maybe he needed an angel.’

‘An angel. Right.’

‘Then they have a night of passionate celebration, and nine months later little Abbie is born. Makes sense, kind of. And now he’s on the run with her – alive or dead, we don’t officially know.’

‘I know.’

‘Sure you do. Only what you didn’t know was that he stopped to murder her mother and the mother’s current boyfriend along the way. And that someone wants him badly enough to make up all this bullshit and get you on board.’

I shook my head, which was aching so badly now it felt like it might fall off. Nicky was affronted. ‘What, did I hurt your professional pride?’

‘No. But you said they wanted Peace. It’s not Peace who’s the point of this, Nicky – it’s Abbie.’

‘Well, from his point of view it’s Abbie, obviously. I mean, it looks like he killed two people to get hold of her. But the guys who are looking for him—’

‘If they’re looking for Peace, why not hire a proper detective? Why come to me?’

Nicky opened his mouth to speak, blinked, shut it again.

‘You see? There’s a whole lot of people out there who could do a better job of tracking down a man who doesn’t want to be found. But finding him wouldn’t necessarily mean finding Abbie. No, to find a ghost you need an exorcist. And that’s what they went out to get.’

I stood up, a little unsteadily.

‘Are you drunk?’ Nicky asked, with the scorn of the teetotaller.

‘No. I think I’m coming down with something.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me a bit, the shit you pour into yourself. Your body may not be a temple, Castor, but it isn’t a skip. Take it from me, if you want to live to be old, you’ll—’

‘Save it up and mail it, Nicky. I’m not in the mood. You serious about that cab?’

‘Dead serious.’

‘To coin a phrase.’

‘Funny.’

‘Whatever. Thanks for your help. The fare’s on me.’

I dropped a couple of tenners onto the table and lurched towards the door. I must have looked right then like one of The Level’s zombie customers: I sure as hell felt like one.

Approaching Matt’s car from the wrong direction, I was able to see first-hand what a mess the Catholic werewolves had made of the nearside wing. I felt bad about that: it seemed like a poor exchange for my brother’s trust. He might even have trouble with his insurance, given that I wasn’t a named driver. The only consolation was that – to the religious mind – adversity is good for the soul.

I got in and drove, trying to focus on the road ahead as dark filaments swam across my vision. Whatever was wrong with me, it seemed to be getting worse rather than better. On the other hand, it had been a hell of a night: I didn’t need to look all that far to find reasons why I might be functioning at less than a hundred per cent.

I really needed to concentrate hard on the road, but I found my mind wandering back over what Nicky had just told me. Little Abbie may not have had much happiness in her life, but she’d sure had a hell of a lot of parents. Two who’d died on Saturday night; two more who’d turned up at my office on Monday morning – and a fifth, Dennis Peace, who didn’t figure in either tally. And then there were the Catholics: the Anathemata wanted her, too – wanted her badly. I got the feeling of wheels turning within wheels, and little fires touching off bigger ones. Whatever was going on, Abbie was the key to something huge: I knew I was right about that. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to be any closer than before to figuring out what that something actually was. ‘Someone didn’t close the circle,’ the werewolf Zucker had said, charmingly mixing his metaphors, ‘and a little bird flew the nest.’ Still sounded like garbage whichever way you played it, but I was suddenly certain that the little bird was Abbie Torrington. Whatever she’d run from, it had to be bad if even being dead didn’t get you free.

It was half past one when I rolled the car into Pen’s driveway. The house was dark, which didn’t mean anything because the windows of Pen’s basement room look onto the garden, not the street: I was hoping she might still be awake so we could make our peace, knock back a glass or two of brandy and I could maybe try her out on some of the stuff Nicky had just dropped on me – see if her credulity was any more elastic than mine.

I never got the chance to find out. I’d taken about three steps towards the door when some headlights went on across the street, pinning me like a butterfly to a board. Some doors slammed, and footsteps sounded from my left and right simultaneously. I bunched my fists, preparing to go down fighting.

‘Relax, Castor.’

I did, but only a little way. It was Gary Coldwood’s voice. A moment later, he loomed out of the light like some negative Nosferatu and clapped a hand on my shoulder, a little too close to my neck. I winced. My head was throbbing so badly now, even that over-friendly touch sent spikes of pain through it.

‘Burning the candle at both ends,’ Coldwood said. ‘You look like shit.’

‘I feel like shit,’ I said. ‘It’s a set.’

He stared at me for a moment in silence. He seemed to want to say something, and it seemed to be something that needed a bit of a run-up.

‘Something about Pauley?’ I prompted him.

He looked blank. ‘About who?’

‘Robin Pauley? Drug tsar and murderer? I’m going to be a material witness at his trial, remember? You told me to look out for frighteners.’

Coldwood nodded and waved the topic brusquely away.

‘Pauley’s dead,’ he said. ‘Three of his lieutenants, too. We hauled them out of the Thames this morning. We’re thinking now that Sheehan’s murder was the first move in a gang war. Sorry, Fix. I should have told you.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, deadpan. ‘You should. And now you have. But next time you could just send me an email. Squad cars on the doorstep in the middle of the night get the neighbours talking.’

He didn’t move. He didn’t really seem to be listening. ‘We go back a long way, Fix,’ he said.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘We don’t.’

He laughed unconvincingly. ‘Hell, you’re right. We don’t, do we? But I’ve sort of come to trust you. I mean, up to a point. Bullshit aside – and you’re a great man for bullshit – I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me.’

There was another silence. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Did you come out all this way just to hug me?’

Coldwood shook his head. A woman and a man had moved in on either side of me while we spoke, and now he flicked a glance at each of them in turn. I didn’t bother to look: in the glare of the headlights, I couldn’t see much of them anyway. ‘Fix, this is Detective Sergeant Basquiat and Detective Constable Fields. They’ve got a crime scene, and they’d like you to look it over with them. Since I’m your designated liaison, they went through me. I said you’d be fine with it. But I also said, bearing in mind how late it was getting, we might have to ask you to come over in the morning.’

Coldwood’s tone had turned clipped and formal: words chosen carefully, for the record. It was that tone more than anything else that made me nod my head – also carefully, to minimise the risk of it exploding or falling off. This sounded like the kind of bad shit that has repercussions: I needed to know what it was about.

We drove west, which seemed kind of inevitable. Through Muswell Hill and Finchley, and into Hendon. There were two cars: Coldwood bundled me into the back of one and got in beside me: a uniform drove, and Fields and Basquiat followed in the second car.

‘Want to tell me what this is about?’ I asked, after a minute or so of stony silence.

Coldwood just looked at me. ‘Not yet a while,’ was all he said.

It wasn’t a long journey, but it felt like for ever. I was so tired now that my eyes kept closing by themselves, and the pain in my head had translated itself into a kind of roaring static in my ears. This had to be some kind of flu, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Pen occasionally reads the future in tea leaves, which is a tricky thing at best: a cop’s body language, though, can be a very reliable indicator of which way your immediate future is going to go, and unless I was very much mistaken I was in a shit-load of trouble.

We pulled up at last somewhere off Hendon Lane. Coldwood got out and held the door open for me. I stepped out too, only realising how overheated the car had been when the night air touched the sweat on my face.

‘In there,’ said Coldwood, pointing.

We were standing in front of a yellow-brick building that looked like some kind of church hall. The car had actually pulled up off the road itself onto a narrow apron, also paved in brick, that was obviously intended as a car park – but police incident tape had been put up across three-quarters of it, one length of which bore a large KEEP OUT notice. The building itself was clearly closed for business, as the shuttered windows and the foot-high weeds growing at the base of the walls both proclaimed. There was a signpost off to one side, and as I looked in that direction the headlights of the second police car, rolling up off the road and coming to a halt with a muted sigh of hydraulic suspension, spotlighted it neatly: Friends’ Meeting House. Well, great: it’s always nice to be among friends. The rest of the road was lined with factories and warehouses: all dark apart from the street lights, and even some of them were out, no doubt smashed by kids with good aim, a reasonable supply of half-bricks and too much free time.

Two constables stood to either side of the open door, and they nodded respectfully to Coldwood as he passed. He ignored them.

The hallway inside had no lights, but the bright yellow-white of mobile spots shone from some inner room. We went on through, shielding our eyes against the sudden glare. The echo of my footsteps immediately suggested a much larger space, even before I could get my eyes adjusted to the point where I could actually see it. Dark figures were walking backwards and forwards across an empty expanse of floor. Their footsteps crackled and rustled on thick plastic sheeting.

‘Got another bullet here, Len,’ a voice said.

‘Out of the floor?’ a second voice called back: this one belonged to a guy who either smoked way too much or had the worst case of chronic bronchitis I’d ever heard.

‘No, in this beam here – way out of the way. Shooter must’ve got a bounce before he brought the weapon into line.’

‘Okay. Measure the reflexive and mark it up.’

The room assembled itself piecemeal in front of me, my tiredness making the normal process of visual accommodation take twice as long. It was even bigger than I’d thought, because it was only the area lit up by the spots that I was seeing at first: further volumes of shadow lurked around the edges, concealing greater depths.

It was a typical church meeting house in the modern style: short on the bullying majesty that a lot of older churches have, but pretty in its way. Large amounts of pale wood, mostly in the form of beams and window trim; a symmetrical floor plan with bays every so often, so although the general shape was square there was a sense of some complex origami-like shape, outfolding from a wide, open central space. Suburban transcendence for the Ikea age. Only what was going on here now was kind of the opposite of all that: forensic science, the triumph of the rationalistic world view. Men and women in white coats tracked backwards and forwards with swabs and tape measures, typed notes into PDAs, called out to each other in clipped, unlovely jargon.

A door slammed behind me, making me turn my head. Detectives Basquiat and Fields loomed out of the night in a gust of cold air, like bad news. I saw them clearly for the first time. Basquiat was a hard-faced blonde dressed in shades of blue – from clinical all the way through to conservative. Her hair – short and straight – was pulled up from the sides in a way that looked vaguely Continental, and if anything made the lines of her face look sharper and more uncompromising. Fields was middle-aged and tending to fat, but with the sad remains of Mediterranean good looks in his dark eyes and tightly curled black hair. That he was still only a detective constable at his age suggested either some monumental fuck-up in his past or an equally monumental lack of ambition.

‘You gonna walk him through it, or what?’ Coldwood asked.

Fields looked at Basquiat, awaiting orders. ‘Why don’t you do it?’ Basquiat said, turning to Coldwood. ‘He’s your man.’

Coldwood shook his head. ‘No no no. Your crime scene,’ he pointed out, deadpan. ‘Don’t be pulling shit like that on me.’

Basquiat sighed and rolled her eyes: she flashed Coldwood a pained look that said, plainer than words, ‘Are we really going to have to do this all by the goddamn book?’ Coldwood met her stare, not giving an inch. Okay, I could see where this was going now – or part of it, anyway. Someone here had the jurisdictional blues. I played dumb, though: there’s nothing cops hate worse than a smart-mouthed civilian.

‘Over here,’ Basquiat said to me, with a peremptory gesture as though she was calling a dog to heel.

‘Thanks for looking out for me, Gary,’ I murmured to Coldwood, keeping all but the trace elements of sarcasm out of my voice.

‘Hey, you don’t know what I did for you and what I didn’t,’ Coldwood muttered back, looking angry. ‘I tried to call you earlier, but you were out all day and your mobile was busy. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Fix, but it’s meltdown out there. They had a fucking riot over in White City.’

‘I heard.’

‘The innocent have nothing to fear. Go ahead and surprise me.’

I went across to where Basquiat was standing, more or less in the centre of the room – and of the plastic sheeting. She watched me come. She really was very attractive under the strictly professional hair and outfit: and she really didn’t like me at all. Glancing down, I realised that I was treading on dead people: or at least, on the numbered plastic tags that forensics teams still use as place markers for where people died. One. Two. Three. Someone had been busy here – and fairly indiscriminate.

As I drew level with Basquiat, she pointed down at her feet. Under the plastic, a circle about five feet in diameter had been drawn on the floor in thick, grainy white chalk. Within the circle was a smaller circle, and between the two, going all the way around the ring with letters very carefully spaced, were the words VERHIEL SERAGON IRDE SABAOTH REDOCTIN. The centre of the circle was inscribed with a pentagram: the five-pointed star used in certain kinds of black magic because – supposedly – it merges the four elements of matter with the single defining reality of spirit. Makes nice jewellery for little Goth girls, too, but that’s just a happy coincidence. There were also elaborate curlicued marks in each segment of the circle between the five legs of the pentagram: they were based on Greek letters, but with a great many additional strokes.

What I noticed about this one, though, was that in spite of the care taken in drawing it, it had been pretty comprehensively messed up. The floorboards were chewed up into splinters in a long line that cut through one segment of the circle, and something brown had spilled at the centre and had then flowed out almost to the opposite edge, effacing part of the pentagram on its way. There was another plastic marker here. It was red, and bore the number 1 in spotless white.

Someone didn’t close the circle . . .

‘Saturday night,’ Basquiat said, from right beside me. ‘Some time after eight and before, say, two in the morning. A whole bunch of people were in here. We’ve got tyre tracks on the forecourt outside, footprints, scuff marks, the works. We’re guessing maybe a couple of dozen people in all, but that’s still in the air.

‘What we do know is that they didn’t just walk in off the street. Some of them had been living here for a while before that, out in the back.’ She pointed off into the dark. ‘There are six sleeping bags there, a portable latrine, a lot of canned food and a dozen or so black bags full of various kinds of domestic garbage. So let’s say we’ve got a core group doing caretaking duties here – keeping the place in order, watching out for any untoward attention. Then we’ve got a bigger group that just turns up on Saturday night for the party.’

She went down on one knee and sketched out the outline of the circle with one well-manicured hand. ‘And we can guess what kind of a party it was. This is a pseudo-Paracelsian magic circle, based on an original in the Archidoxis Magicae. Necromancy. Someone was doing black magic here, and –’ her fingers hovered over the dark brown stain at the centre of the circle ‘– it involved a sacrifice.’

Basquiat stood up again. ‘And this is where it gets interesting,’ she said, although her tone stayed level to the point of indifference. With a nod of the head, she indicated a part of the room I hadn’t even looked at: one of the bays, dark like the other corners of the room out of the spotlights’ beams. ‘An uninvited guest,’ she said. ‘Comes in from that way – or he was there all along, waiting for the right moment. There’s a window: boarded up, but someone’s pried the board away and left it propped up against the wall. He was quiet, so they didn’t hear him coming. Or maybe they were chanting. Either way, he gets up close without anyone turning to look at him. We know that, because the people who were standing here, here and here –’ she counted them off, frowning as though with the effort of memory, although the dark smears under the plastic marked the spots well enough ‘– were shot in the back.’

She turned to face me and stared at me with cold appraisal for a second or so: but then she pointed past me towards the back of the room. ‘The rest of the magic-makers start running – not away from the man with the gun, but towards him. They’re not armed themselves. Or at least, no other guns get fired as far as we can tell. All the bullets we’ve retrieved come from the same weapon – an IMI Tavor assault rifle, Israeli military issue. That’s a weapon with both semi-auto and fully automatic functions but the magazine – so I’m told – only carries thirty rounds. Doesn’t matter. This man’s not wasting them, and he’s not missing.’

Basquiat walked past me, forcing me to turn to follow her as she continued the lecture. This kind of browbeating by facts, figures and ballroom dancing is standard cop procedure. I was listening, but on a level underneath that there was a question I kept turning over and over in my mind with a kind of sick dread, more or less in time to the throbbing in my skull: what – or who – had been standing in the centre of the circle?

‘But there’s no way he’s got time to reload,’ Basquiat said, like a maths lecturer saying ‘Compute the angle.’ Her tone was still flat, but there was a kind of excitement or at least a kind of animation in her face. I could see she loved her job. And I wondered, briefly, whether a case like this might be a career-making deal for a young, upwardly mobile detective sergeant.

‘And he’s used up about six bullets just introducing himself,’ she went on, ‘so assuming he had a full clip when he came in he’s now got a couple of dozen shots left. If they rush him, which is what they’re doing, he’s in trouble. Fully automatic fire will scatter a crowd, but he doesn’t have any time to switch over and in any case anyone who doesn’t go down in that first sweep will be right on top of him and he’ll have nothing left to fight with except his bare hands.’

She scanned the floor, as if she was reading the story there. ‘Maybe he expected them to run. Maybe he’s surprised that they don’t get the message. He’s not scared, though, that’s for sure, because he walks to meet them. One – two – three.’ She pointed to a scuff mark on the floor in between two of the sheets of plastic. ‘He stops here. And then he does something very odd.’

‘He fires at the floor,’ I said. My throat was unpleasantly dry, and it came out as a croak.

Basquiat looked at me curiously. ‘That’s right,’ she said, acknowledging the point with a nod. ‘He does. And why does he do that, Mister Castor?’

I shrugged unconvincingly. I knew the answer, but I was still hoping I was wrong. ‘Warning shot?’

‘After shooting three people in the back? I don’t think so.’

Okay, what the fuck. If she was determined to make me dance . . . ‘The circle,’ I said tiredly. ‘He blasted a hole in the circle.’

‘I’m still asking why,’ said Basquiat. ‘It seems a strange thing to do. Can you shed any light on the reasoning?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, facing her stare as levelly as I could. ‘But maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m here first. It would help to know.’

Basquiat’s jaw tensed so hard that for a second I could see every muscle in her throat. ‘I’m surprised you have to ask.’ The words came out laden with something like anger, something like contempt. ‘You’re one of DS Coldwood’s regular informants – or so he says. And he uses you a lot in situations like this, isn’t that right? You tell him where someone’s died, and how they died, and how they’ve been getting along since.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s about it. So do you want a reading, detective?’

‘Not at this particular point in time, Mister Castor, no. Maybe later. What I’d like right now is an answer. How did you know that Abbie Torrington was dead?’

So there it was. It opened up inside my stomach like a pit, just waiting for one more word from Basquiat to fill it.

‘I’m an exorcist,’ I said.

‘So what, it’s a sparrow-in-the-market-place kind of deal?’ she spat, unconsciously echoing my own words to Gwillam. ‘Everyone who dies, you get to hear about it? How’s my grandad doing? Last time I checked, he was still okay, but maybe you can give me an update.’

She glared at me again. I was still trying to think of something to say when DC Fields lumbered up and handed her a note without so much as a glance in my direction. She took it, read it, and handed it back to him with a curt nod. He went away.

‘A man and a woman came into my office two days ago,’ I told Basquiat, as she turned her attention back to me. ‘They claimed to be Abbie’s parents. And they asked me to find her.’

‘To find her dead body?’ The detective’s tone was incredulous.

‘No. To find her ghost.’

It didn’t sound much better. Before Basquiat could answer, I held up my hand in a kind of surrender. ‘Just tell me, sergeant, did Abbie Torrington die inside that circle?’

‘Yes,’ said Basquiat coldly. ‘She did. Stabbed through the heart by some sick fucks playing at witches and wizards.’ She came right up close to me, dropping her voice so that her next words would just be between the two of us. ‘We’ve got her body down at the morgue right now, and you can bet we’re going over it with a fine-toothed comb. And if I find out you were one of the people who killed her, Castor, no power on Earth is going to keep me from ripping your balls off. And then reading you your rights at great length while you bleed.’

The pit filled up: I thought it would fill with grief – grief for little Abbie, cut open like a side of meat as part of a Satanist ritual – but it turned out to be anger.

‘Let me read the scene,’ I told her, biting back a lot of other words that were clustering behind my teeth, trying to get out.

‘You are dreaming, my friend,’ Basquiat snarled, shaking her head. ‘Whatever impression I may have given you earlier, you’re a suspect here. I asked Coldwood to bring you over in case you turned out to be the type who falls apart and confesses at the scene of the crime. Might have saved us some time. But since you’re not, I’ll have to see how the evidence pans out. The only reason I’m not hauling you in and sweating you right now is because Gary vouches for you – or, more precisely, because he’s got you on the books as an informant, which means there’s inter-office paperwork to be filled in before I can get Fields to kick your teeth down your throat.’

‘You let Fields do your dirty work?’ I said. ‘I’m disappointed. Used to be, when you asked a cop for some strict discipline you could at least rely on personal service.’

Basquiat had been on the point of walking away, and she already had her back to me. She swivelled on her heel and dealt me a scything, sideways punch to the head. Since my head was close to meltdown and my balance was all to fuck, I went sprawling. I heard a tuneless whistle of appreciation from one side of the room, running footsteps from the other. Looking up blearily, I saw Gary Coldwood standing over me.

‘Mister Castor tripped on the protective sheeting,’ Basquiat said to him.

‘Yeah. I saw. But I think he’s got his sea legs now. I don’t see him tripping any more.’

‘Depends if he stays around me,’ said Basquiat. She knelt down and stared into my face. ‘I use Fields to do the softening up,’ she said. ‘All the detail work I’ll do myself.’

She walked away, and Coldwood helped me back into the vertical – or something close to it.

‘Let’s get you some fresh air,’ he muttered.

We went back out through the hall onto the street. I leaned against the front of the building, feeling the world turn around me.

‘She’s got this thing about kids,’ Coldwood explained. ‘Takes it personally when they get hurt. There was a pedo out in Kingston – guy who’d done time for raping a little boy, and it looked like he might be getting back into old habits. Fell down some stairs at his house while Basquiat was over there to run some questions past him. Broke his arm, did some serious damage to his back that he might never recover from. She booked him for assault: said he attacked her and went down the stairs when she used a judo throw in self-defence. Story stank, but who cares? He did another six months. Happy ending for everyone.’

I didn’t say a word. I was taking this personally too, but I wasn’t going to start swearing any oaths of vengeance in front of a police officer. They’ve got a different set of rules for the general public.

‘Get yourself a lawyer, Fix,’ Coldwood said sadly. ‘A good one. Sooner or later, we’re going to pull you in formally, and a bad lawyer’s gonna leave you with egg on your face whatever happens.’

‘I need – a lift home,’ I said, slurring the words.

Coldwood examined me critically for a few seconds, then turned to one of the uniforms standing by the door, who were pretending not to listen.

‘Drive him back,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And get the licence number of that car he was driving. Just for the record.’

Coldwood went back inside without saying goodnight. I guess he felt he’d done me enough favours to be going on with.