Vicious Circle

15

‘What do I look like?’ Nicky demanded, throwing out his arms indignantly. ‘A fucking flophouse? Beds for all, extra blankets on request?’

‘It’ll just be for a day or two, Nicky. Maybe less than that. She could just wake up of her own accord, any time, and walk out of here.’

‘Take your demon slut somewhere else, Castor. You already fucked my life up more than enough for one week.’

We were in the main auditorium of the cinema, where Nicky keeps the pump and the generator for his air-conditioning rig. I’ve never been able to work out the intricacies of his power-swapping and volt-laundering, but somehow he manages to keep about a thousand cubic metres at a well-chilled four degrees Celsius without making a needle tremble anywhere in the whole national grid. I think there’s a hamster in a wheel somewhere, running its little heart out.

But tonight there was some kind of a hiccup somewhere in the system, and Nicky was on his back underneath the pump mechanism tending to its innards with a spanner and an oxyacetylene torch. The torch looked like a frilled lizard, because Nicky had fitted a reflective collar to its neck to minimise the heat splashing back against his body as he worked. He was fresh from Imelda’s healing hands, but still – a degree or two here and there, it all added up in the end in terms of life expectancy. Life-afterdeath expectancy, I should say.

I tried a different tack. ‘Look, she can probably afford to pay you. Let’s say a hundred a night. I’ll get her to settle up as soon as she’s awake.’

‘Yeah? Be cheaper to dangle me off a footbridge by my entrails, wouldn’t it? You forget, I did your research for you on this: I know more about how dangerous Ajulutsikael is than you do. Pass me that masking tape.’

I kicked it across the floor to within reach of his hand. He fished it up without thanks.

‘A hundred and fifty a night,’ I suggested.

‘You’re not getting it, are you, Castor? I don’t trust her and I don’t want her around. I take my physical safety pretty seriously. You think I want some psychotic demon whore waking up grouchy in my guest bedroom?’

‘Do you even have a guest bedroom, Nicky?’

‘Nope. Good point.’

‘Maybe she could pay you in information.’

‘About what, Castor?’

Inspiration sailed past me like a dust mote in the frigid air, and I caught it on the fly. ‘About what comes next,’ I said. It was grotesquely manipulative, but I was getting a little tired of the way people kept saying no to me.

Nicky rolled out from under the pump to stare at me with a mixture of definite interest and deep suspicion. ‘What was that?’

I blew out my cheek and shrugged. ‘Well, I mean to say, you’re good at postponing the inevitable, Nicky – nobody better – but you’re gonna drop off the edge sooner or later. Wouldn’t you like to know where you’re likely to fetch up?’

He found a roll of kitchen towel, hauled off a length and started to wipe his soot-stained fingers on it. He kept his eyes on what he was doing, knowing that his poker face isn’t all that great. ‘I’d still be scared she’d rip my balls off and wear them as earrings,’ he said sourly.

‘Do you have a storeroom with a good strong door and a padlock?’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘So she doesn’t need to eat or drink, or use the bathroom. You could just lock her up until I get back.’

There was a long silence as Nicky carried on with his ablutions.

‘Yeah,’ he said eventually, sounding as casual as he could. ‘Okay. On that understanding. You take her down into the basement and lock her up in the film store. You collect her when you’re ready. I don’t have to touch her or go near her in between. Then after she wakes up we have a talk, with you riding shotgun. I get . . . let’s say five questions. With straight answers. And I get to define what a straight answer is. Fair?’

I nodded. ‘Fair,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and bring her in.’ I turned and headed back up the aisle.

‘Hey, I read where they found the kid’s body,’ Nicky called after me. ‘So you were right after all – she really was dead the whole time. Should’ve known better than to call you on a ghost issue. One thing you maybe didn’t know, though, because it’s in a closed file I hacked into while I was in the neighbourhood.’

I stopped and stared back down the aisle at him. All the seats had been removed long ago, so neat lines of bolts stretched away from me on all sides like a field sown with scrap iron instead of seeds.

‘In which neighbourhood?’ I asked.

‘The neighbourhood of Mapstack – the Met’s internal version of the Interpol’s big data-exchange system. It’s usually worth a look, just for laughs. These people have no idea how the world works – how the little details connect up. They try to draw links between crimes, but they only work in straight lines so they miss it. They miss everything but fucking methodology. Like the real criminals – I mean, the ones who are so big you never even see them – can’t vary their repertoire.’

‘Abbie Torrington,’ I reminded him, derailing that particular paranoid rant before it could get up a head of steam.

Nicky peered out from under the pump, a little truculent at being interrupted. ‘The body was disturbed after death. Like, about a minute or so after death, when she could still bleed. Someone scraped the back of her neck hard enough to break the skin.’

I tried that on for size, although my mind was full of so much shit right then that it was hard to bring it into focus. ‘You mean, someone drew something across her neck? Something with a rough surface?’

‘Like that, yeah. All along the back of her neck and up the left side, stopping just under the chin.’

A second pass with the knife? Take her head off after stabbing her through the heart? Could be. But then the big man with the machine gun comes stomping in, and bodies are hitting the floor on all sides. So maybe there’s no time to finish the job, and all you’re left with is a dotted line that says CUT HERE.

I shook my head. No. Not like that. One thing you can rely on lunatic Satanist cultists to do is to keep their tools sharp. If you’re making a human sacrifice, you don’t just take a bread knife out of the drawer and hope it’s got enough of an edge on it to cut through bone. Your knives are part of a sacrament: so you kiss them and you cuddle them and you stroke them with a whetstone until the edge sings to you.

‘Something was pulled off her neck,’ I told Nicky. ‘Something that she was wearing.’

‘What sort of something?’

‘A locket on a chain.’

‘Would also work. Have to be yanked off with a lot of force, though.’

I remembered Dennis Peace’s fist smashing through the woodwork on board the Thames Collective, an inch from my face.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was.’

I went and got Juliet from the car, chewing this over on the way. It was a sideways leap of logic – or maybe several parallel leaps – but I had a feeling that I knew at least some of what had gone down. Peace goes to the meeting house on a rescue mission. Somehow he’s found out what’s going to take place there, and who’s going to be involved – possibly by beating it out of Melanie Torrington before he killed her. But he arrives too late. Abbie’s already dead.

Too late? Or just in the nick of time?

Peace aims his gun at the chalk circle on the floor: chews a good third of it to matchwood. Then, as the cultists scream and run or whatever it is they’re doing, he goes in and snatches the locket from around Abbie’s neck.

If he can’t save her body, he can at least save her spirit. But he needs something physical for it to cling to.

I must have been in this game too long, because that all sounded like it made some kind of sense. For an exorcist, used to dealing with things of the spirit as if they were cold, hard facts, there was a naked, inexorable logic to it. Most ghosts have an anchor: they can survive without one, as I’d proved when I cut loose the dead kids at the Charles Stanger clinic and set them free to roam the night. But in the white-hot panic of the moment – the moment of her death – in a strange place, surrounded by strangers, Abbie’s soul would cling to something it knew. Peace was good at his job: he knew either how to identify that something or how to influence it.

The rest was just mechanics, because the decision wouldn’t take a heartbeat. You wouldn’t want your child’s soul to stay in the company of the bastards who’d just killed her. And it was always possible that you might be saving her from something worse.

Because the Satanists were still looking for Abbie, even though she was dead. Obviously something hadn’t quite worked out as planned. Something that had been started needed to be finished – and whatever it was, it was a big enough issue that the Catholic church had brought its big, excommunicated guns in.

That was as far as I could take it right then. I still felt that I was missing something that was right under my nose, and the something was probably the missing link that tied Rafi and Asmodeus and Saint Michael’s church into all this, but I had more immediate fish that needed frying. I carried Juliet down into Nicky’s basement under his directions, and into a cupboard the size of an aircraft hangar. It was full of all kinds of stuff that Nicky has acquired over the years: paintings and sculptures, his precious record collection, and for reasons I’ve never understood (because zombies don’t eat) a vast amount of canned food. Maybe he had some idea of using it for barter after some future holocaust.

He spread a couple of blankets on the floor, one on top of the other, and I put her down on top of them as gently as I could. Nicky stared at her, nonplussed.

‘I got no hormones any more, Castor,’ he told me, in a tone that sounded a little tight and nervy. ‘Adrenalin, testosterone, dopamine . . . nothing. The relevant organs all stopped pumping. Not to mention the fact that my blood is a jellied mass.’

‘I know. So?’

‘So how come when I look at her I get a hard-on?’

‘Magic, I guess. That’s the demonic thing she does.’

He tossed me the keys, then backed away with his hands cupped protectively over his crotch. ‘Lock her up,’ he muttered, and he turned and left.

I knelt down beside Juliet and lowered my head until my mouth was close to her ear. ‘Hang on in there, Jules,’ I whispered.

I went out and closed the door. I had to lean my shoulder into it: this cupboard had been the film store, and since old film stock is only slightly less explosive than sweaty gelignite the walls and door were flame-proof and blast-proof. It was a good place to store Juliet’s physical form until the rest of her came back to it: I’d be getting to work on that as soon as I could.

I found Nicky up in the projection booth, taking a PH reading from his plants. I ignored him and crossed to the plan chest where he keeps his maps and books: being a conspiracy addict, his reference section is better than the British Library’s, and I already knew he had a set of 1:1000 maps of London in there. I took out the Ealing-Acton one and spread it out on the chest, sweeping a couple of books and a Newton’s-cradle desk-toy onto the floor.

Nicky jumped up from his kneeling position next to the hydroponic tank and crossed the room at a run. ‘Hey, Castor!’ he protested. ‘Leave my shit alone.’

‘I thought we could play a little game, Nicky,’ I said, positioning the map a little better so that the section I needed was dead centre.

‘I’m not in the mood for games. I just had a physiological reaction I haven’t had since I died. My prick got a fucking visitation from the other side of the grave – your side – and I’m trying to come down from it. I want you to go now.’

I ignored him. I knew that once I told him what we were doing, he’d be into it: I just had to sell him the concept.

‘Peckham Steiner,’ I said, ‘had a big dream about a network of safe houses. Miniature, self-contained fortresses in the hearts of cities, where the living could shelter if the dead ever got their act together and tried to mount a coup.’

Nicky was unimpressed. ‘Steiner was bat-shit crazy,’ he snapped. He snatched the map off the table and started to roll it up again, with slightly shaky hands. Juliet had clearly got to him on a level that scared him very deeply.

‘“The essential element to stop the dead from entering is water,”’ I quoted. ‘You remember that? The letter he sent out to all the borough councils? “But ramparts of earth and air are also useful, de da de da, to blind their eyes and blunt their forces.”’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Nicky shoved the map back into the drawer and slammed it shut. He was scarier now than he’d been when he had the gun pointed at me, because he was less in control of himself.

‘Because it’s a big joke, right? Everyone laughs about how spectacularly Steiner lost it, and the safe houses are the funniest part. Well, here’s the punchline: he actually built one. Right here in London.’

Nicky’s response was immediate and vehement. ‘My arse,’ he said indignantly. ‘He fucking did not.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because I would’ve known about it. I know everything that happens in London. When a sparrow farts, I get to hear about it. You’re telling me I could’ve missed something that big?’

‘It was disguised as something else,’ I said.

Nicky glared at me for a long moment. Then he opened the drawer and hauled the map out again. He rolled it out across the table with a brusque gesture, and then waved at the expanse of tight brown lines on off-white paper.

‘Where?’ he demanded.

I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. Like I said, this is a game. You have to find it for me.’

‘So it’s just bullshit. You don’t know if there’s a safe house at all?’

‘Dennis Peace is holding on to Abbie Torrington’s spirit – probably inside a gold locket that she was wearing when she died. And when I tried to raise Abbie with a tune, the contact died on me. First she was there, then – bang – she was gone. I’d never met anything like that before. There’s lots of reasons why I might not be able to find a ghost, but I’ve never had one slip away from me like that after I’ve already got the sense of it.

‘Then I went to Rosie Crucis tonight, before coming out here to you, and she said that Dennis Peace told her he was “staying with Mister Steiner”. That reads one way for me, and only one way. He’s found Steiner’s safe house. Steiner said the house could blind the eyes of the dead. Maybe it can also blindside someone living who’s looking for the dead.’

‘Sounds like a lot of maybes,’ said Nicky.

‘Indulge me, Nicky.’

He rolled his eyes and shrugged: the least convincing display of bored nonchalance I’d seen in a while. ‘Yeah, whatever. Go for it. It’s not like I need to be anywhere else. Okay, what do we know?’

I bent over the map. ‘I played the whistle for Abbie three times,’ I said, ‘in three different places. I got a vague sense of direction each time. The first one was here.’ I found Harlesden on the map, and pointed. ‘From there, it felt like she was south and west of me. Somewhere out – this way. Then I tried again from Scrubs Lane, and the feeling was just westward. Almost straight out towards the setting sun.’

‘That’s south of west,’ Nicky corrected me schoolmarmishly.

‘And then from the Hammersmith flyover it was definitely a little north of west.’

‘Ealing. Ealing Broadway. Or Hanger Hill. Or Scotch Common. Or anywhere from West Acton out to fuck knows where.’

‘Hallowed ground to all four sides,’ I quoted from memory.

‘You know how many churches there are in London, Castor? That’s about as much use as saying it’s handy for the buses.’

‘Point taken. But then there are those ramparts of water. I’m guessing that this place will have a high water table, so that the basement at least will extend down into it.’

‘More likely it’s just gonna have some kind of moat.’

‘A moat’s harder to hide, Nicky.’

‘Maybe he built it in the middle of the Brent Reservoir.’

‘Maybe. But I think Steiner wanted the safe houses to look a lot like everywhere else from the outside. They were built to withstand a siege, not to invite one.’

‘Okay.’ Nicky’s gaze was darting over the map now. ‘Gonna stand in its own grounds, anyway, though. Don’t see how you could do the ramparts of earth and air on a street of semis.’

‘Good. And it’s not going to be too far out. Steiner saw this as being like the Thames Barrier – it’s a service for London, and for Londoners.’

‘Land rises anyway when you get out too far west,’ Nicky muttered. ‘So you’d be having to dig down further to get into the water table. Steiner was a West Londoner himself, wasn’t he? From Perivale? And he always said he was gonna retire somewhere out that way.’

He fell silent, his hands tracing lines across the map, his expression deepening from a frown of concentration into something more truculent and dogged.

‘Think laterally, Nicky. It’s going to be something right under our noses.’

His right index finger came down hard on Castlebar Hill.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It is. It’s the fucking Oriflamme.’

For a moment I didn’t get it. ‘But the Oriflamme’s in—’ I started to say.

‘Not that piece-of-shit Goth dive in Soho Square, Castor. The original Oriflamme. The one that burned down.’