Vicious Circle

16

The Oriflamme had been intended as a museum when it was originally built, and it stood in the most unlikely location you could think of: in the middle of a roundabout on the B455, just off Castlebar Hill. So my readings when I was holding the doll had been pretty damn accurate: southwest from Harlesden, due west – give or take – from Du Cane Road.

But it had closed down as a museum because of the ineluctable laws of supply and demand: specifically, because demand for a museum that you had to wade through three lanes of speeding London traffic to reach was negligible – the more so because it was a museum of local industry, which meant that most of the exhibits were bullshit adverts for Hoover and Hawker-Siddeley in light disguises.

So Peckham Steiner got a bargain, which he passed on to Bourbon Bryant, who gave us – briefly – the Oriflamme. And then it burned to the ground. That was all the history I knew, apart from Nicky’s wacky conspiracy theories. But now, walking up through Cleveland Park at two in the morning with nothing but darkness at my back, I kind of wished I’d made it my business to know more.

Dead ahead of me as I crested the top of the hill was the Oriflamme – or rather, the little island of raised ground at the centre of the roundabout. The building itself was hidden from view from this angle by a small clump of trees at one edge of the island. As I got closer I could see a sign and the beginning of a path through the trees. The sign said SIR NORMAN TEBBITT MUSEUM OF LOCAL INDUSTRY: Bryant had never had it changed because he thought that was funny, although he never explained the joke to me and I never got it.

I crossed the road, which was deserted at this hour, and started along the path. It was only about ten yards long: a few steps brought me through to the clear space in the centre of the island where the ruined shell of the Oriflamme stood. I hadn’t been here in years, but now it all came back to me. There was a ring of earth about four feet high all around the building, created by digging out a trench on the inside of the ring. Bryant, or maybe Steiner himself, had had the bottom of the trench paved and the small artificial hill planted with flowers. It had seemed a reasonably clever and artful way of keeping the traffic noise at bay. Now I saw it for what it was: ramparts of earth and air. Nicky had called it on the money. But those ramparts hadn’t saved the Oriflamme from the fourth element: like the bad fairy that never got invited to the christening, fire took the place apart.

The building was dark, as I’d expected it to be. If Peace was inside, he certainly wasn’t keen to advertise the fact. I walked over to the door, which I couldn’t see because the whole front of the building was in deep shadow. The street lights were on the far side of the trees, and only a faint orange glow penetrated into the central clearing.

There was no door: just a gaping hole in the brickwork. But as I went forward, one step at a time, into the deeper darkness within, my hands touched something at chest height that was cold and smooth and slightly damp. I explored it gingerly, finding that it extended both up and down, and out to both sides. It was a plastic curtain, suspended over the doorway to keep out the wind. Wet with early-morning condensation, it had an unpleasant, clammy feel.

If I pushed through it, I’d be announcing my arrival to anyone who was inside. Given the way Peace had reacted to my presence on board the Collective, and his promise about what would happen the next time we met, that didn’t seem like such a great idea.

I circled the building instead, looking for another way in. I had to watch my footing: in the aftermath of the fire, all that was left of the interior fixtures and fittings had been hauled out and dumped wherever there was room, and fly-tippers had added to the mess since, so the shell of the Oriflamme now had an additional rampart of rusting ironwork and rotting mattresses.

That worked in my favour, though, because as I went around to the back of the building I saw a possible way in. The rubbish was thickest and deepest here, piled against the wall to a height of ten feet or so – and at its apex it came to within spitting distance of an upstairs window, which like the front door had blown out and was now open to the night in a slack-jawed yawn. The only question was whether the mound of black bin bags, old fridges and wheelless bike frames would take my weight.

I climbed onto the lower margins of the scree, carefully, wishing I’d brought a torch so I could see what I was stepping in. The bin bags gave and squished under me, but they didn’t slide and I was able to keep my balance. Step by step, very slowly, and sideways on so that I could anchor myself on my trailing leg, I ascended the slope. There was a nasty moment halfway up when the whole mass settled a few inches under my weight and I almost slipped. But by that time I was close enough to the wall of the building to lean forward and rest the palms of my hands against it for a few seconds, until the rubbish-mountain found a new point of equilibrium.

After that, I made it to the top without incident, sat on the windowsill and swung my legs over it one at a time. I was in.

I was about to step down off the sill into the pitch-black room beyond, but natural caution made me lower one leg first to test the ground. This turned out to be a wise precaution, because there wasn’t any. The floor of the room must have collapsed during the blaze, so there was nothing underneath me but a twelve-foot drop back down to the ground floor and probably a broken ankle. Or two.

I sat on the sill and let my eyes adjust to the dark. It wasn’t absolute, of course: on this higher level, more of the light from the street lamps made it through the foliage, and the interior of the room was lit up, after a minute or so, by a faint wash of orange light. It was enough to show me that the beams had survived when the floorboards gave in: I could tightrope-walk along a beam to the door and see whether or not there were any stairs.

It still wasn’t a pleasant prospect, but I didn’t have any better ideas. Lowering my weight onto a beam that led directly across to the door, I tentatively let go of the sill with my hands and found my balance. This expedition was turning into a laugh riot.

The room wasn’t big: three steps would bring me to the open doorway and the deeper darkness beyond. I took the first one okay, and the second. The third became problematic because the beam gave an audible crack under me and shifted slightly. I abandoned Plan A and dived for the door, catching it in a tight embrace just as the beam sagged and parted, sending a clattering storm of sooty fragments into the void beneath.

There were no floorboards on the other side of the doorway either, so I was hugging a fat beam, charred in the middle but seemingly sound, while my legs dangled into emptiness.

‘You can let go,’ said a gruff voice from down there. ‘There’s a cement floor about eight feet underneath you. So long as you land on your feet, you should do okay. Throw your weight wrong and you’ll bust a leg at best, but I guess that’s the price you pay for breaking and entering.’

‘Think – you could manage – a stirrup?’ I panted, slightly winded.

The voice gave a sound between a snort of laughter and a throat-clearing hack. ‘I think you better do as you’re told,’ it said. ‘If you just dangle there like a Chinese lantern, I’m going to put some holes in you so the light shows through better.’

‘What light?’ I ground out, still holding on tight.

The voice sighed, long and deep and slightly ragged. Then a second voice that raised the hairs on the back of my neck said, ‘Give him some light, Dad.’ It was a little girl’s voice, distant and faint but perfectly clear. Abbie’s voice. I craned my head sideways to see over my hunched shoulder, but it was still too dark to make out anything in the room below.

Something scratched against something else, and a neon line wrote itself across the dark, blossoming abruptly into the flare of a match. The light dipped, guttered, and twinned itself momentarily into two yellow-white eyes. Then, as the candle caught and spread a meagre glow across the scene, Peace flicked the match away. It died as it fell.

He was lying on the ground a few feet to my left, a blanket spread over him. And he was pointing that fucking handgun straight at me. Maybe the candle illuminated one or two other details of the room below me, but for some reason the gun was the thing that drew my attention.

‘Drop,’ Peace suggested again. ‘I’m running out of patience here.’

I dropped, more or less straight, and managed to keep my balance when I hit the ground. The gun stayed with me all the way: at least, I assume it did. Either way it was pointing directly at my chest when I straightened up and turned to look at Peace again.

He looked as though he’d fared badly since we’d met on board the Collective. There was a ragged wound across his face, from his left temple down across the bridge of his nose to his right cheek: a heraldic bend sinister drawn in red so deep that in this light it might as well have been black. The rest of his face around that dark line was as white as milk. The hand that held the gun seemed to tremble slightly, as if it was hard work for him to keep it aimed straight.

Abbie stood behind him, almost lost in the shadows. She was little more than a shadow herself, the candlelight shining through her to highlight the rough texture of the brick wall in grainy lines of white and soot-black. She stared at me with curiosity – but calmly, without any trace of fear. Given how she’d died, that was impressive: a lot of ghosts never tear themselves free from the emotions they were feeling when they crossed over. The moment of their death becomes their destiny and their eternal rest. Or lack of it.

Because I was looking for it, I saw the glint of gold on Peace’s wrist. I couldn’t make out the shape with any clarity, but I knew what it was: he was wearing Abbie’s gold locket as a bracelet on his right arm, just as he had been before. He wasn’t taking any chances of being separated from her.

The room was a gutted shell, the walls and floor blackened. It was empty apart from the rough bivouac that Peace had set up there: a Calor gas stove, a suitcase, a bucket for a latrine. There was a sour smell in the air, redolent of old sweat and recent pain. Riding over it without hiding it at all was the sweeter scent of sandalwood incense.

I put my hands in the air, fingers spread to show that they were empty.

‘You know who hired me?’ I said.

‘Probably better than you do,’ Peace answered, his voice hard. He had me on that one.

‘I’m not working for them any more.’

The gun and the hand that held it still trembled almost imperceptibly, like a strong branch on a gusty day; but it still stayed pointed at my heart. ‘That’s probably what I’d say,’ Peace observed, ‘if I was standing where you’re standing. Speaking of which, I think you should sit down. On your hands. On second thoughts, take the coat off first and fling it over by the wall. Don’t want you pulling any surprises out of there while we’re talking.’

I shrugged my coat off slowly and unthreateningly: I’d heard enough about Peace’s rep by now to believe he meant business. Abbie was watching all this in absolute silence – the kind of silence that only the dead can manage, since they don’t breathe and they don’t fidget. Her dark gaze was solemn and alert: she was a very unusual ghost. I hoped I’d live long enough to get better acquainted.

‘If I was still trying to bring you in,’ I said, as I lowered the coat to the ground and shoved it away with my foot, ‘do you think I’d have come alone? That wouldn’t make any sense. I’d just tell them I’d found you, claim the fee and walk away.’

‘Maybe.’ Peace’s face clenched for a moment in a spasm of pain, which he did his best to hide. ‘If you were sure you had found us. And if you were sure they’d keep their end of whatever deal you’ve made.’

‘I don’t make deals with demons. Or their working partners.’

Peace smiled grimly. ‘Sorry, friend. On the face of the evidence, that’s exactly what you did. Sit down.’

Again, I was punctilious about doing exactly what I was told. I was fairly sure by this time that that blanket was hiding something a lot worse than the damage to Peace’s face, and I was starting to worry about what he’d do if he felt himself losing consciousness. He certainly wouldn’t want to leave me hanging around as an extant threat. That added a certain urgency to the task of talking him around.

‘When I asked your connection at the other Oriflamme to pass on a message for me,’ I said, ‘I meant it. All I’ve been looking for is a chance to talk to you.’

‘Carla? Yeah, that was a cute touch. But by the time she called me I already knew they had an exorcist sniffing after me. I saw you coming, remember? You tried to get a fix on Abbie and I shut you down.’

‘Three times,’ I acknowledged. ‘Nicely done. The second time you almost shoved my brain out of the back of my head. How’d you do that one?’

‘We’re not swapping recipes,’ Peace said, grimly. ‘The way I read this, you’re trying to find reasons why I shouldn’t kill you. Just to let you know, your score is still on zero.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Well, let me know if any of these makes the cut. One, you’ve been hurt really badly – probably when those two werewolves caught up with you – and you need help. On top of that, I think you’ve been awake since Saturday night keeping up whatever psychic defences you’ve got so no one else will try to find Abbie the way I did: that’s why you needed to score the uppers from Carla. Sooner or later you’re going to crash, big time: I’d put my money on sooner. If you don’t trust me, you’ve still got to find someone you do trust – and you’ve got to do it fast.

‘Two, after you tried to use me as a crash-mat at the Collective, you saw me running interference with the loup-garous. That jeep that went through the fence, and knocked the big one off his feet – that was me. So how does that square with me being the enemy? The truth is that I started to smell a whole bag of rats as soon as I took this job on: ever since then I’ve been trying to find out what’s really going down.’

I paused for breath. Peace had kept his poker face on throughout the whole of that recital: I wasn’t getting to him.

‘Is there a three?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘there’s a three. You’ve got a hell of a reputation, Dennis. Everyone says you’re a hard man who’s done a lot of bad things. Even Bourbon Bryant warned me not to piss you off, and he never has a harsh word to say about anyone.’ Peace was staring hard at me and I met that stare head-on. ‘But tell me this,’ I said, quietly. ‘Are you really prepared to kill an unarmed man in front of Abbie, and let her watch while he bleeds out? Because if you are, I think I’m all out of cards.’

We carried on playing blink-chicken for a moment or two longer, but I had nothing else to say so I let him win: it was Peace’s call now. I looked up at the black void beyond the candlelight’s meagre reach, and waited for him to make it. After a long silence, he lowered his arm and set the gun down on the floor. I glanced at him again. A smile spread slowly across his face: a bleak, strained smile that was painful to look at.

‘You’ve got balls, Castor,’ he said.

Peace gave the gun a shove, and it slid across the floor towards me. It didn’t get very far: the soot-streaked concrete was too rough and uneven. But it crossed the magical midway point where I’d be able to get to it before he did – assuming he could even move.

I stood up, stepped over the gun and walked across to him. I squatted down beside him, on the opposite side of the blanket from Abbie, who continued to stare at us both in silence. I felt her solemn, calm attention like a physical pressure on the back of my neck: the light touch of cold fingertips.

Peace stared up into my face, which must have looked a bit sinister lit from below by a single candle.

‘You’ve got a bit of a reputation yourself,’ he said, letting his head fall back onto the rolled-up jacket he was using as a pillow. ‘Let’s see if you can live up to it.’ This close up, his face looked a lot paler and a lot more strained: or maybe he was just done with pretending now. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead and cheek that gleamed dully in the candlelight.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

‘What you said. The were-fucks caught up with me again a couple of miles further on – pardon my French, Abbie. I got one of them with a knife: clever little gadget I bought in Algiers, with a chasing of silver up the blade. He won’t be doing any ballroom dancing for a while. But I had to get in close to do it, and he—’ Peace gestured at his ruined face.

‘Is that the worst of it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘This is the worst of it. Look away, Abbie.’

The ghost of Abbie Torrington shook her head, but it was a protest rather than a refusal. She turned her back on us, her movements once again unaccompanied by the slightest sound. As soon as she was facing the wall, Peace pulled the blanket aside. It was hard, at first, to make out what I was looking at: it looked for a moment like a 1970s tank top with a complicated pattern on it. Then I realised that it was his bare flesh: not so bare as all that, though, because his torso was rucked and rutted with half-healed cuts and flaking scabs. The predominant colour was furious red, but there was yellow in there too: some of the wounds had gone massively septic.

‘Christ!’ I muttered involuntarily.

‘Yeah, by all means say a blessing over it. Might even help.’

That was wishful thinking, though: religious nostrums do have some degree of power over demons and the undead, but only when they’re wielded by someone who actually believes in them. A prayer from me would be about as much use as one of those little stamps with Jesus on them that they used to give out at Sunday school: the Royal Mail doesn’t accept them, so the message never gets delivered.

‘You don’t need a blessing,’ I told Peace. ‘You need a doctor.’

Peace twisted his head away from me to stare at his daughter’s ghost. ‘Abbie,’ he growled sternly, ‘don’t you be trying to take a peek – it’s not a game we’re playing here.’

Then he looked back at me. ‘No doctors,’ he said vehemently, trying to sit up and not quite managing it. ‘You don’t know who you’re up against. Any 999 call gets logged – any call to a GP surgery likewise. Even if you could get someone to come out here and ask no questions, he’d still get to know about it and he’d be down on me before you could fill the fucking prescription.’ There was a brief pause, and then he added as he let his head sink back down heavily onto the rolled-up jacket, ‘Pardon my French, Abbie.’

He pulled the blanket back up to cover the horrific landscape of his wounds. ‘You can turn round again now, sweetheart,’ he muttered, but Abbie seemed not to have heard. Her insubstantial figure, barely etched on the darkness, remained staring away from us into the corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. I didn’t want to speculate about what she was seeing there.

I thought about my own infection. That had come from a single cut, and it had laid me out like ten quids’ worth of loose change in a sock. It was a miracle that Peace was still conscious at all. It also occurred to me to wonder how it was that the loup-garous hadn’t been able to follow his scent the way they’d followed mine. Maybe the faint smell of incense had something to do with that, but I was willing to bet that Peace had ways of blindsiding them just as he’d done to me. He was a foxy bastard, no doubt about it: but now he had his leg in the trap and his options were running out.

‘Peace,’ I said, ‘you’re right about the call-logging, but take it from me that this is going to get worse, not better. I think you’ll most likely die if you won’t let anyone treat you.’

He absorbed that in silence, thinking it through.

‘Carla,’ he muttered at last. ‘Go and see Carla. Get me some more speed. I’ll ride the bastard out.’ He closed his eyes, and for a moment it looked as though he was sinking into a doze, but then he bared his teeth in a grimace, letting out a long, ragged breath. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t, will I?’ His eyes snapped open again and fixed me with a fierce glare. ‘I can’t die, Castor. I can’t. If I die, then they’ll . . .’ He hesitated, his gaze flicking to Abbie and then back to me. ‘I can’t leave her alone.’

I nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I might be able to get you what you need without going through a hospital or a practice. Can I use my mobile?’

‘To call who?’ I saw his fists clench: even without the gun, and even in the ravaged state he was in now, he was still a force to be reckoned with. I didn’t want to have to argue with him.

‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A very old friend. My landlady, in fact. Who by a very happy coincidence is currently doing the nasty with a doctor. She’s also got healing hands on her own account. Holistic medicine, kind of thing. So this is a two-for-one deal.’ That phrase made me think of Susan Book – she’d said something similar about Juliet and me – and for a moment I felt a premonitory qualm.

Peace, on the other hand, relaxed slightly as he saw a way of squaring the circle.

‘And she can be trusted?’

‘Absolutely. She’s not even capable of telling a lie. It’s against her religion.’

‘God-botherer?’ Peace’s lip curled back in distaste, and he waved a hand over his midriff to indicate what the blanket now hid. ‘Those fucking Catholics did this to me.’

‘No, Pen’s sort of a religion of one these days,’ I said. ‘Believe me, she’s not going to shop you to the Anathemata.’

Peace gave a very faint nod, surrendering the point as though he was too weak to hammer it out any more. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Call her. But tell her to make sure nobody follows her. If she’s that close to you, they could be watching her too.’

I called Pen at home. The phone rang six times, and then the answering machine kicked in. ‘Hi, this is Pamela Bruckner. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .’ Pen picked up as the message was still playing, to my great relief. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice sounding fuzzy with sleep.

‘Pen, it’s me. Sorry to wake you, but this is a bit of an emergency.’

‘Fix? Where are you? It’s—’

‘Two in the morning. I know, I know. Listen, you remember the state I was in when you found me on the doorstep? Well, I’m with someone else who’s had a bigger dose of the same thing, and he’s in a really bad way. Did that little Scottish guy leave any of those antibiotics lying around?’

‘I don’t think so. But I can call Dylan. Where are you?’

‘Way out west. Call him now and then call me back, okay?’

‘Okay.’

She hung up. Pen gets the point quickly, bless her, and she doesn’t waste words. I turned back to Peace. ‘Do you want me to meet her somewhere else?’ I asked. ‘She can pass the drugs on to me without finding out where you and Abbie are.’

‘You said she might be able to do some good herself,’ he reminded me.

‘Yeah, I did say that.’

‘Then let her come.’

Peace closed his eyes again, his breath coming quick and shallow now. He’d been holding on by pure willpower, and it was starting to falter now that he’d put himself in my hands. Not good: not good at all.

I felt a sensation like the epidermal prickling you get with pins and needles, and glanced up to find Abbie’s wraith-like form hovering beside me.

‘Will my dad be okay?’ she asked, her voice touching my ear without stirring the still air.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’s in a bad way. It’s not so much the wounds, it’s the infection.’

‘Make him better,’ Abbie whispered, sounding younger than her fourteen years. She’d never be older now.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, my own voice barely louder than hers.

The phone rang, smacking me out of unpleasant thoughts. It was Pen. I turned away from Abbie and Peace to take the call.

‘Dylan said he’d come himself,’ she told me. ‘He’s at home. He says he’s got some vancomycin there, but he’s not giving it away without seeing the patient. So if you tell me where you are, I can tell him and he can come and meet you.’

Chinese Whispers is a lousy game at the best of times. Peace had said it was okay to tell Pen: he hadn’t given me permission to bring in any third parties.

I glanced around and saw that Peace still had his eyes closed.

‘Peace,’ I called. He didn’t respond. I called again, but he seemed to be sleeping. At any rate, his eyes were still closed.

I thought it through, and decided that I didn’t have a choice. Without antibiotics, he wasn’t going to see the night out. I put the phone back to my ear.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do you know Castlebar Hill?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe Dylan does.’

‘If not, he can look it up on a map. Where are you on Castlebar Hill?’

‘There’s a roundabout. I’m there.’

‘On the roundabout?’

‘Yeah. It’s a big one. You have to park up on one of the side streets and walk in. There’s a building – the remains of a building. It burned down a few years back.’

‘And that’s where you are? At two in the morning?’

‘Don’t start.’

‘Okay. I’ve told him it’s an emergency. He’ll get there as quick as he can.’

‘We’re not going anywhere. Thanks, Pen.’

‘You can pay me back by telling me the whole story.’

‘If I survive it, I will.’

She hung up again and I pocketed the phone. I sat down on the floor beside Peace, with nothing to do now but wait. The dead girl walked across to stand over me, her feet not quite touching the ground. For ghosts, most things come down to memory and routine. They behave as though they still have flesh but all they’ve really got are habits. She stared down at her father, himself more dead than alive, and the expression on her face was hard to bear.

‘Help’s on the way,’ I said.

Abbie nodded. ‘I don’t want him to die,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want anything to hurt him.’

All I could do was nod in my turn.

Peace stirred, woke from his shallow sleep, and looked up at me in momentary dislocation. Almost he reached for his gun: then he seemed to remember who I was and what was going on. ‘There’s coffee,’ he muttered thickly, pointing to a small stash of packets and jars up against the wall near the gas burner. ‘And bottled water.’

I made coffee, just for something to do. While the water came slowly to the boil, I went and retrieved my coat from the floor. It wasn’t a cold night, but I always prefer to have my whistle where I can get to it in a hurry. Absentmindedly, I checked the contents of the pockets, finding everything where it should have been – and one anomalous item, which I didn’t recognise until I pulled it out into the light: the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll, slightly chipped but miraculously still in one piece. I slid it back into the pocket hastily: I didn’t know what memories it might provoke for her, and I didn’t want to find out right then.

The coffee was instant, of course, but I poured a slug from my hip flask into each of the mugs to sweeten the pill. I brought one over to Peace and put it down on the floor next to him. He nodded a thank-you.

‘So what’s the story?’ I said, sitting down on the suitcase which was the closest thing to a chair I could see.

Peace sighed and shook his head. ‘No story. Stories make some kind of fucking sense. My life is just . . . things. Things happening. I never knew where I was going.’ He looked tired and old, although I guessed he only had a couple of years on me.

‘I meant about Abbie,’ I said, bluntly. ‘She calls you Dad. Is that just a figure of speech, or did you really have a part to play in making her?’

He gave me a bleak stare. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, at last.

‘I think there’s a birth certificate on file in Burkina Faso that shows you fathered a child there. But the record shows that the girl who died last Saturday night in Hendon was the daughter of a man named Stephen Torrington.’

‘Yeah? Well, you should go ask Stephen Torrington about that. You’ll need your whistle, though: he’s likely to want a little coaxing before he talks.’

‘And her mother was a woman named Melanie – but after that it’s pick-a-card-any-card, because she seems to change her surname the way other people change their underwear.’

‘When I met her it was Melanie Jeffers.’

I was going to let the subject drop, but I reckoned that it might do Peace good to talk: and it would certainly do me good to listen. ‘Peace,’ I said gently, ‘I’ve just spent three days living in a Whitehall farce where every cupboard had a cop, a Catholic or a lunatic cultist inside it. I could get ten years just for knowing Abbie was dead when the police still thought she was alive. So could you find it in your heart to be a little less terse?’

‘It’s my life, Castor.’

‘Mine too.’

We stared at each other again: this time he broke first.

‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘Why not? Give me another shot of that brandy first. I hate going back over this shit. I hate the fucker I was when I did this shit.’

Peace seemed to have lost his reservations about swearing in front of Abbie – and, anyway, she seemed not to have noticed, so maybe it wasn’t the first time. I handed him the flask, thinking he was going to top up his coffee. Instead he upended it and drank it dry, then handed it back to me with an appreciative grimace.

‘That was rough,’ he said.

‘Didn’t seem to slow you down much.’

‘Rough is what I need right now. Abbie?’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘This is your story too, and you’ve got a right to hear it. But not all of it. There’s a bit in the middle that I’m going to send you to sleep for, because – because it’s not the sort of thing a girl your age should be exposed to. Okay?’

The ghost nodded silently. Send her to sleep? I was going to watch that one with keen interest: if Peace could whistle ghosts down as well as up, and do it without risk of exorcising them altogether, he had more control of the fine-tuning than I’d ever had. I remembered the psychic smackdown he’d given me the second time I tried to get a fix on Abbie. I might learn something here – assuming he lived long enough to teach me.

‘You’ve probably heard a lot about me by now,’ Peace said, ‘and you can take it for granted that most of it’s true. There’s worse, too: things that never made it into the legend because I was careful who I talked to. I’m not going into detail, but you know the sort of thing I mean: I was big for my age – bigger at fifteen than most grown men – so I came to a lot of things early and learned a lot of bad habits.

‘I’m not making any excuses for myself. I did bad things because I was stupid and immature and I didn’t care all that much. Saying I was too young to know any better doesn’t make a gram of difference in my book and I don’t see why it should in yours.’

Peace hesitated, as if he was poised at the brink of a revelation he wasn’t quite ready for yet. ‘I’m not a saint,’ I told him, by way of speeding things along. ‘And I’m not your confessor, either.’

He nodded, but the silence stretched a little further before he spoke again. ‘It was like – I went into everything just wanting to know what I could get out of it. Screwed people over in all kinds of ways and never thought about it, because people who can’t look out for themselves deserve to get taken. That’s just the way the world works.

‘I must have been about twelve when I found out I had the gift. For exorcism, I mean. I’d always gambled: horses, dogs, slot machines – but my favourite game was poker and no one could beat me at it. I’d be sitting at a table with four or five other blokes, and I could look at each one of them in turn, and think – yeah, that’s what you’ve got. You’re sitting on a pair of eights, aren’t you, betting on another one in the flop. He’s got a king high, he’s got jacks over threes, and Mister Cool over there has got sod all so I can win this.

‘But after a while I found out I could do a lot more than that. Instead of just guessing the cards that people were holding, I started to see people themselves as cards – as hands of cards. Live or dead, didn’t matter, there was a particular hand of cards that stood for that person in my mind. That’s how I bind ghosts – I deal out the right hand of cards, and then I shuffle it back into the deck. Bang. They’re gone.

‘Like I said, with me everything was a means to an end. I burned ghosts for money, sure – just like I gambled for money. And sometimes if I found a ghost that was still fresh and more or less together, I’d sweat it for what it had left behind when it died that might still be around for me to pick up. Like, what were the numbers on your bank accounts, and is there a little stash of money at home that you salted away against a rainy day and that your missus doesn’t know about?’

Peace looked at me hard, which was probably how I was looking at him. ‘There wasn’t anyone I’d have spared in those days,’ he said. ‘Man, woman or child, I didn’t give a fuck. I did it for the cash, because I went through a lot of cash, and I did it for the hell of it. Because I could.’

He seemed to expect an answer – maybe outrage or accusation – but after going over this ground with Nicky there wasn’t much he could say that would have surprised me. I shrugged. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you were a bad man. Maybe the worst. Let’s take that as read.’

Peace gave a bitter laugh and shook his head. ‘Give me a break, Castor. I wasn’t the worst, not by a million sodding miles. Maybe I kidded myself that I was, but I was a fucking babe in arms compared with some of the people I met.

‘Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the 45 medium regiment, first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army – not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while: mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.

‘That was how I ended up in Ouagadougou. I was making a delivery, and I got rolled. Guy says he’s already paid, then when I refuse to hand over he gets a bunch of his mates to beat the crap out of me. So I end up on the street, penniless, and having to keep my head down because the blokes who hired me won’t be interested in hearing how I lost the shit – they’ll just want their money, which I can’t give them because I haven’t got it.

‘Could’ve been worse, though. Burkina Faso was the edge of the bloody world in those days – the final frontier. They’d just kicked that crooked bastard Sankara out and nobody knew from one day to the next whether there was going to be another coup or a civil war or what, so people were in the mood to take stupid risks, spend their money now before it stopped being worth anything, and generally let their hair down. My kind of place, in some ways, if you leave aside the fact that everyone was shitpoor and you could get your throat cut if you flashed a dollar bill.

‘Ouagadougou was the capital city, but you wouldn’t know it. A few blocks of swanky buildings in the centre, and then you turn a corner and you’re in among the shitty little shanties again. Very strange.

‘One night I was in a bar and these three drunken fucks started in on a white woman who was sitting by herself. There was something a bit odd about her: she was very fancily dressed, even for the main drag, and this was the boondocks. Cocktail dress, lots of make-up although she didn’t need it. Hair up, and a necklace that was probably worth a couple of years’ wages around there. These guys tried to pick her up, and she told them to sod off, so they got nasty.

‘I stood up and walked over to help. They weren’t nearly as tough as they thought they were, and anyone could see that this woman was very well-heeled – very easy on the eye, too: tall, built, lots of class. Eyes a little cold, maybe, and blue-eyed blondes have never been my thing when all’s said and done, but still – I thought if I got in good with this piece of goods, that was another door opening. Might at least get a bed for the night and my leg over: maybe get a lot more.

‘But she didn’t need my help, as it transpired. Before I ever got to the table, she’d told one of these gents to keep his paws to himself, and he’d responded – being the humorous type – by grabbing hold of her breasts. His mates are roaring with laughter and he’s soaking it up, loving it. For about three seconds, give or take. Then the lady took a gun out of her handbag and blew a hole in his throat.’

Peace had fallen into a slightly dreamy inflection, his eyes unfocused as he stared into a different darkness, a different night a decade and a half gone. Then he pulled himself together and snapped out of it, shaking his head in sombre wonder.

‘That was your mother, Abbie,’ he said, looking up at the faint shade of his daughter almost with apology. ‘That was Mel.’