Vicious Circle

17

There was another long silence. Peace issued a shuddering breath that seemed to hurt a lot on its way out. Dead Abbie stared down at him, her eyes dark wells of sorrow and concern.

‘Maybe you’d better save the rest of this story for later,’ I suggested.

He shook his head sharply, just once. ‘It’s weighing on my mind,’ he muttered. ‘I think I’ll feel happier once I’ve got it out.’ He was still looking at Abbie. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have to send you to sleep for the next part. There’s some stuff that . . . that I wouldn’t want . . .’

He tailed off into silence, but Abbie was already nodding. ‘Don’t make it too long,’ she said, her voice sounding as though it was coming from a long way away. ‘I want to be here with you. In case anything happens.’

Peace shifted his weight so he could reach under the blanket. Tension and pain crossed his face in ripples, and his movements were slow and clumsy, but when he drew his hand out again he was holding a deck of cards, secured with an elastic band. He flicked the band off with his index finger, one-handed, and put the deck down on the floor beside his head.

‘This might take a while,’ he muttered.

I watched him in fascination. So many exorcists use rhythm to do what they do, it’s always a bit of a jolt to see someone who bases their technique on some other kind of patterning. I’d never seen anyone use playing cards before.

Peace started to sort through them, still using only his left hand. It seemed to be a regular deck, except that the cards were marked – heavily marked, with different-coloured inks and even with paint in a couple of places. There were scribbled words and phrases on most of the cards, along with occasional lines and crosses striking out some of the pips. The face of the queen of hearts had just been ripped out, leaving a roughly circular hole in the card that you could have put the tip of your little finger through.

But it was the three of spades that Peace found and put at the top of the deck – face up, at first, but then he turned it and tapped it and glared at it hard. When he turned it over again, it was the ace. And Abbie blinked out like a street light at sunup.

Peace pocketed the deck again, or at least put it back underneath the blanket.

‘Now Mel,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘Mel is really bad. Deep down, bred-in-the-bone bad. I’d never met anyone like her before. I have since, but like I said, I was still more of a kid than anything back then. I mean, I thought I was the last word until I met her.’ He grinned: or maybe he was just showing his teeth. ‘Bitch has got that whole femme-fatale thing going for her. Most men love a really bad girl. At least, until she’s bad to them.’

I might have argued with that once. Now it just made me think of Juliet, and I said nothing.

‘These guys backed off sharpish. The man she’d shot wasn’t dead, amazingly. He had his hands clutched to his throat, trying to stop the blood or at least slow it down, but he still seemed to be able to breathe so I suppose she must have missed his trachea or whatever it’s called. But his feet started to slip and slide and he was obviously about to fall down, so his two mates took a hand each and they dragged him off towards the door. They threw a couple of curses at Mel, but all the fight had gone out of them.

‘That was when I noticed that the barman had a copper’s nightstick in his hand: not a PC Plod effort – one of those big sidewinders that takes no fucking prisoners. He’d fished it up from some little cubbyhole under the bar, and he was walking up behind Mel with this thing under his shoulder, ready to swing it up and over and crack her head open.

‘I picked up a beer bottle and let fly. Caught him in the mouth and almost floored him. Then Mel turned around and saw him and she got the drop on him with the gun before he could get his feet under him again and use the stick. She stood up, pressed the gun to the side of his head, and told him to kneel down. She took the stick away from him with her left hand, still holding the gun right up against his temple.

‘“You were going to hit me with this?” she said to him. “Because your friends tried to rape me and I wouldn’t play along?” He was babbling something, saying he was sorry or that he didn’t want any trouble or whatever. Mel shook her head. No excuses. No mercy.

‘She lifted the gun up, away from his skull, and she wagged it in his face like a schoolmistress wagging her finger. Then she brought her other arm back, just about halfway, and swung it down again. Smacked him in the mouth, really hard, with the nightstick. Crack.’ Peace gestured vividly. ‘Blood and teeth everywhere. He went down, crying like a baby, clutching his face and rolling away from her across the floor. But she’d had her fun now. She tossed the stick back behind the bar and turned to me as though she’d only just noticed me. “We’d better get out of here,” she said. “The police are likely to take his side.”

‘But she didn’t leave right away. She looked down at the barman again, moaning and whimpering at her feet. She seemed to like that. She gave him a measured kick in the balls, pivoting from the hip so that she was more sort of stamping on him with her heel. I suppose she wouldn’t have got much force otherwise, with open-toed shoes.

‘Then she led the way, and I followed.’

‘Was that the night that Abbie was conceived?’ I asked, breaking another reflective silence.

Peace shook his head, pulling himself out of the vivid past into the painful present with difficulty. ‘No. We did spend that night together, but Abbie – that came later. That all came later.

‘Mel was staying at the Independence, and she took me back there even though the doorman looked like he was sucking a mouthful of lemons when he saw how I was dressed.

‘She was incredible in bed: a little bit scary, even. Not just uninhibited but totally off the fucking leash. She was into bondage – degradation, submission, slave-and-master shit – and she had some games I’d never come up with in my wildest dreams. She was into drugs, too, and we were as high as Kiliman-sodding-jaro as we fucked. I’m not likely to forget that night in a hurry. I wish I could, in a lot of ways.

‘I stayed with her for a couple of weeks. Fifteen days, actually, and some odd hours. And I found out a fair bit more about the weird shit she was into. It didn’t stop with sex games. In fact, I think the weird sex was a side effect of the other stuff.’

‘The other stuff?’ I thought I knew what he meant: I just wanted to check, because it sounded like we might be getting to the point at last.

‘Black magic. She was a necromancer. And when she found out I could do the binding and loosing stuff, she couldn’t get enough of me. She used to make me raise up ghosts and bring them to watch while we were . . . you know. While we were in bed, or wherever else she chose to do it. She was a natural sensitive, so she could always see them. It used to send her right over the top – infallibly. The kind of orgasms that go into legend.’

Peace closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed them hard with the balls of his hands. His head had fallen back onto the makeshift pillow again, and he looked even paler and more exhausted than before.

‘It all got a bit intense,’ he sighed, with what sounded to me like exquisite understatement. ‘I mean, it was fun. Most of the time. But she was a bit rich for my blood, all things considered, and I didn’t like some of the people she hung out with. There was this one guy especially who used to give me the creeps. Big blond bruiser with these weird violet eyes. His name was Anton, Anton Fanke . . .’

He stopped, seeing my reaction to the name. For a moment, a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. ‘You know him?’ he demanded.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard of him. Recently. A friend of mine was looking for information on you, and his name came up.’

‘Yeah,’ Peace agreed, grimly. ‘I’m not surprised. Fanke was something really big and special in the circles Mel moved in. Carried himself like he knew it, too. Fucking arrogant son of a bitch. Charming enough, but you know that sort of charm where it’s just another way of fucking you up the arse? Like what matters is being on top the whole time, and if he can’t do it one way he’ll do it another. You don’t want to be there when the charm offensive stops, because you know it’s going to be bloody.

‘But there was no way past it. Being around Mel meant being around Fanke as well. I thought she was screwing him too, at first, but I don’t think his vices were that close to normal: he was her priest, not her boyfriend, and that was a lot harder to deal with. After two weeks I’d had just about enough.’

Peace looked up again and met my gaze, again inviting or defying me to judge him. ‘So bearing in mind what I’ve already told you about my M.O.,’ he said, with a sarcastic smile, ‘what do you think I did next?’

I shrugged and took a gulp of my coffee while I gave that one what little thought it deserved. The stuff was half-cold now, but the liquor still had a little bit of a kick to it. ‘You woke up before she did,’ I said, ‘and you cleaned her out. Took that necklace you mentioned, and whatever money you could get your hands on, and did a runner.’

Peace nodded. ‘Got it in one,’ he acknowledged, his tone a little bleak. ‘She had almost two thousand dollars, and the jewellery was worth that much again even to one of the fences down on Banfora Street. I took her stash, too. Swiped the lot and scarpered, thinking what a nasty, clever little bastard I am. I get the girl and I get the money, just like James Bond.

‘I went back to the scummy little flophouse where I was staying, and turned in for a bit more sleep. I’d never got much of that in Mel’s bed. The next thing I know, the police are smashing the door in and I’m under arrest for drug trafficking.

‘I never did figure out the ins and outs of that one. Most likely it was coincidence – or the gents I’d been working for getting their own back in a slightly subtler way than I’d have given them credit for. Maybe they’d been watching for me to go back home again, and this was a trap they would have sprung earlier if I hadn’t been otherwise engaged. But at the time, it made me wonder. It was so pat: like, I burned her, and I got burned back, twice as bad.

‘The cops took all the cash I had on me, so I had nothing left to bribe the judge with. They sent me down for two years. Could have been worse: if I’d been a local lad, I’d probably have been swinging on the end of a rope.

‘Didn’t matter much in the end, in any case. Mel came down and bought me out before I’d done a week of that time. Probably just as well, because I was already in trouble. The only white boy on the yard, and too stupid to stay out of fights. I’d taken at least one beating every day I was there, and by the time she came to get me I could barely walk.’

‘Everyone needs a guardian angel,’ I observed, downing the last of the tepid coffee.

Peace laughed. ‘Yeah. Everyone does. God forbid you should ever end up with mine.’

‘You need another drink?’ I asked him, because he’d gone quiet again, his face reflecting a parade of mostly unpleasant memories.

‘No more booze?’

‘No.’

‘Then don’t bother. Where was I?’

‘You’d just played your get-out-of-jail-free card.’

‘Not free, Castor. Nothing like free. I’d already hit the eject button on Mel once, and she wasn’t going to let me do it again. Or maybe it was Fanke who set it up, I don’t know. Anyway, the way it worked, it wasn’t exactly like I got a pardon or anything: it was more like they had me on lease, and Mel made it clear that they could send me back if I didn’t mind my manners and say my prayers at bedtime.

‘I said she was into slave games. She’d been the slave the first time around. Now it was my turn, and she really went to town. If ever a man was made to eat shit, that man was me.’

I opened my mouth to interject a question, then shut it again: better just to assume that that was a metaphor. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I’d called Pen: I reckoned another twenty – at least– before Dylan got here.

‘Tell me about Abbie,’ I suggested to Peace. I was getting a little sick of hearing about his sex life. But I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t drawing this out because of any misplaced sense of drama: there was a place in his past that he really didn’t want to revisit, and we were almost there.

‘I thought Mel was just a sort of weird life-form that lived on sex and pain,’ he murmured. ‘I never thought she had any agenda beyond what was happening right there, right then. But I underestimated her. I really did.’

Peace took another tremulous breath. His voice was getting fainter, with a breathy hoarseness around its edges that I didn’t like at all. ‘Fanke used to talk about something called a sacrifice farm,’ he said. ‘It was an idea he’d put together for himself by reading between the lines in the medieval grimoires. He’d read them all in translation, and then he’d gone back and read them all in the original languages – mostly Latin and High German – and if there was one thing he’d got hung up on, it was this idea of sacrifices. I know because I had to listen to it every time Mel had him and her other crazy friends over to play.

‘If you’re going to make a sacrifice to a god, Fanke said – to any god – then the sacrifice has to be earmarked well in advance and treated differently. It has a special status, and it gets special treatment. It lives apart. Until the time comes.

‘He went on and on about this stuff, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t fucking listen.’

Disconcertingly, Peace began to cry. I still couldn’t see his eyes: the single candle cast deep shadows, and most of his face was in one of them. But the plane of his cheek was in the light, and I saw the tears following a single, wavering track across his pitted skin.

‘So one night,’ he said, ‘Mel told me it was my turn to be on top again. And this one was going to be really special. Because this time we were going to make a baby, and we were going to do it in a brand new way.

‘She used the word transgressive a lot. We were going to transgress: we were going to breach the laws of nature. That idea seemed to get her even more excited than having an audience, but when I asked her exactly what we’d be doing, she got all shy.

‘There was a lot of crap: a lot of arcane paraphernalia, a lot of chanting. It built up and it built up and it built up, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I lost my hard-on somewhere along the way, and I almost dozed off, but she slapped me awake again. That was part of regular foreplay as far as our sex life was concerned. But then she went off-script. She stabbed herself in the stomach, with a poncey little silver dagger that had runes all up the blade, and then she got me to use the wound instead of – going in by the normal route.

‘I told her she couldn’t get pregnant that way. It wasn’t transgressive, it was just stupid and sick. And incredibly messy. She didn’t care. She wanted it. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything.

‘And as soon as we were finished she staggered over to the door and opened it, and Fanke walked in along with a couple of guys in surgical whites. They hustled Mel away, and Fanke told me I could leave. Just like that. Actually it was more like on your marks, get set, go. He said he’d removed his protection from me. The cops would be looking for me as a bail defaulter, and I’d better sod off out of the country or I’d be finishing out my sentence at the Maison d’Arrêt, without remission.’

Peace held up his hand, on which the golden locket glinted dully. He checked the clasp: a nervous tic that I suddenly realised I’d seen a couple of times before while he spoke.

‘So I went,’ he said flatly. ‘How are we doing for time, Castor?’

‘We’ve still got a while. Peace, are you telling me that that was how Abbie—?’

I let the question hang. Slowly, he nodded his head.

‘I didn’t know anything about it then. They fired the starting pistol and I was off. I’m not kidding myself, though: I’d have run even if I’d known Mel was pregnant. I’m not the nurturing type.’

There was a hectic energy in Peace’s voice now, and his face was strained like canvas on a frame. It was alarming to watch: almost as though he was coming unravelled, using himself up in this cathartic information dump so that he’d reach his own ending at the same time as he ended his story. I tried to call a halt again – for the last time.

‘Peace,’ I said, ‘I can put the rest together for myself. Get some sleep now, and I’ll wake you up when it’s time to take your medicine.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Castor,’ Peace muttered, with fierce heat. ‘You don’t know shit. You listen to me, and then you can talk, okay?’

I held up my hands in surrender. ‘Okay. But I haven’t been sitting on my hands, you know. Let me at least tell you what I’ve got already – you can save yourself some breath and use it elsewhere.’

He rolled his eyes impatiently, but I’d already started in. ‘You found out somewhere along the line that you had a kid,’ I said. ‘And maybe you got curious. You tracked Melanie down to New York, and you went out there to visit her. Abbie would have been about eight years old then. You met her, got to know her, and –’ I went out on a limb, but it felt like a safe one ‘– you gave her a gift. That locket.’

Peace grunted. ‘Fucking amazing, Holmes. What was I wearing?’

‘I’m guessing that was the first gig you ever walked into that you found it harder to walk out of,’ I said. ‘You ended up fighting for Abbie in the courts. You wanted to be her father, and not just on her birth certificate.’

I stopped because he was waving his hand backwards and forwards in an impatient ‘stop right there’ gesture. ‘I told you you didn’t know shit,’ he said, thickly. ‘The court case, that was another scam. Mel was still with Fanke, and Fanke was a big wheel by this time. Fucking multimillionaire. He’d set up the First Satanist Church of the Americas – become a guru, like the Maharishi, with tax breaks and limos and all that garbage. And there’s him and Mel living together like husband and wife, and bringing up Abbie like she’s theirs. I bumped into an old crony somewhere in Rio and got the whole story, and I thought it had to be worth trying to shake them down for some hard cash. That’s all Abbie was to me, Castor: a fucking lottery ticket.’

‘Until you met her.’

‘Until I met her. Yeah. I didn’t realise, but taking out the lawsuit let me in for all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t get out of. Depositions, procedural submissions, Christ knows. If I’d seen how much time it was going to eat up I’d never have started it.

‘But anyway, as part of all that there had to be meetings. Documented meetings, because you’ve got to go through the conciliation shit before you can go to court. And there she was, you know? Mel did all the talking, just like always, and Abbie was just sitting there, looking so sad and lost. Looking like she was waiting for a bus on a dark street, and that was where she’d been all her fucking life.’

Peace was staring at me with haunted eyes. No wonder he’d been so flip about the sins of his youth: this was what he really had on his conscience, and it must have almost eaten him alive.

‘I started talking to her. Partly because I wanted to see if I could cheer her up, partly because it seemed to piss Mel off. I bought her the locket, and a couple of other things, and I told her some bullshit stories about what I did for a living.

‘And I started to wonder – if Mel was so fucking cold to her, and if she wasn’t even Fanke’s kid, then why did they keep her around? Was it just that whole transgression thing? That Mel had managed to turn making a baby into something obscene and sick? Was Abbie a – a trophy? It didn’t make any sense.

‘And there I was in a strange city, stuck there because of this stupid court case that I didn’t even want to win – that I’d only sworn out in the first place so that Fanke would pay me to make me go away: and I had all the time in the world, and fuck all to do with it. So I started to do some digging.

‘The Satanist Church is huge over there. They’ve got their own website, their own bookshops, sodding T-shirts, car stickers, the works. HONK IF YOU’VE SEEN THE LIGHTBRINGER. Fucking morons. There was a lot there, but none of it was hard to find.

‘The website had links to articles that Fanke had written. Speeches he’d made. It was all in public domain – he wasn’t hiding it. He was still going on about sacrifice farms, and the grimoire tradition, and why the medieval alchemists got it all wrong. Oh sure, he said, they’d managed to open up some lines of communication with demons, and the demons were giving them everything they needed to turn that first contact into serious, regular trade. Only they kept getting all the details wrong. It was a communication breakdown, according to Fanke. Demons can speak all the languages that human beings ever spoke, or ever will speak, but not – you know – fluently. So they were giving out all this sales talk: you can bring the big boys up from Hell, you can be top dogs in a new world order, and all the rest of it. They were giving fucking dictation, for God’s sake. But these medieval bad-asses – these Fausts – they were mostly managing to miss the point.

‘They got it all wrong, Fanke said. All the stuff that really mattered, anyway. And the thing they fucked up worst of all – the most important thing, the engine that the whole thing ran on – was the sacrifice. Albertus Magnus raved on about rams being without blemish, and Bruno’s got a whole goddamn chapter on whether you carry the beast in or lead it on a rope, and what colour its fleece should be, and what it should have eaten and what you do with its shit if it shits during the ceremony, and on and on like some kind of instruction manual translated from Japanese into Latin by a fucking Dutchman. And all the sense of it – all the meat – that just got lost in translation.

‘So this is the gospel according to Fanke, which he posted on the internet because Mount Ararat’s a fucking long way away. To raise a major demon, you need a sacrifice that’s been dedicated from birth to the powers of darkness. From before birth. It – she – it’s – got to be linked to Hell even in the way it was conceived. Spiritually, and physically – prepared – designed—’ He groped for words.

‘Abbie.’

‘What do you fucking think?’ Peace’s voice rose in a snarl, but then it turned into a cough and he folded in on himself, trying to ride out the spasms in his throat without moving his diaphragm. ‘Yes. Abbie,’ he said when he could speak again, glaring at me with unfocused hatred. ‘The bastards brought her into the world just so they could kill her – at the right time, in the right place, with the right fucking weapon that Fanke and his mates had said a fucking blessing over and anointed with holy water and horse piss.’ He coughed again, and this time he had to shove his hand against his mouth to keep whatever it was from coming up.

‘Okay,’ I said, gently – although the anger seeping out of him like tar from a smoker’s sweat was making my skin prickle. ‘And then there’s another part I can fill in for myself. You lost the case.’ He nodded, his face still buried in his hands. ‘And you lost a shed-load of money, because Fanke counter-sued.’

‘Only to make me back off,’ Peace wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A trail of spittle hung down from his chin but he seemed not to have noticed it. His voice was a little slurred now. ‘He was telling me to go away. Behind the scenes his lawyers offered me a hundred grand if I signed a waiver saying I gave up any claim to be considered as Abbie’s father. I thought about signing it, too, and then using some of it to have him bumped off. But multimillionaires make hard targets. And if I toughed it out, I got one big advantage that they couldn’t take away from me without another long, hard fight.

‘Visiting rights, Castor. I got visiting rights.

‘It felt different now. I wanted to spend some time with Abbie. I wanted to make it up to her, because it was my fault she was in this fucking mess. I’d planted the seed, and then I’d just gone riding off into the sunset like the Lone bloody Ranger and left her to it. It was wrong. And even if it was too late to do any good, I had to at least try. Try to put it right again as far as I could.

‘I stayed in New York for nearly two years, and I saw her every other weekend courtesy of the US Court of Appeals, second circuit, Judge Harmony Gilpin presiding. They couldn’t stop me. They bankrupted me, not that that was hard, dragged me in and out of court on a new docket twice a fucking month, got the cops to roll me on some bullshit harassment charge and bust up my place. But they couldn’t stop me.

‘I got to know Abbie, and I— she was a good kid. A really good kid. She’d grown up like an animal in a cage. Never even been to school. She was meant to be having private tutors, but it never happened except on paper. There were plenty of grade-school teachers in the Satanist Church, and they were happy to sign anything that Fanke put in front of them. “Yes, I see this girl three times a week, and I teach her history, brain surgery and domestic science.” “Yes, I tutor her in beach volleyball.” I tried to get the whole outfit audited, but the lawyer I had was no good. He was the best my money could buy, but my money was chicken-shit. What I could pick up doing one-shot exorcisms on the black market.

‘Fanke had so many lawyers he had to hire a bus. He could have stonewalled me for ever – or just arranged with a few friends to have me turned into landfill. But I think he got unhappy about all the publicity. Anyway, he just upped sticks one night and pissed off to Europe.

‘There was nothing I could do to stop him. Abbie wasn’t a ward of court or anything. In theory I still had my visiting rights, but they weren’t worth a whole hell of a lot when I couldn’t find out where he was.

‘I came back to London, stony-broke. The Thames Collective took me in, so I had a roof over my head, and then I started building up a stake. Hired a detective to run Fanke to ground and get me his address. He was in Liechtenstein. He’d rented a castle and moved in with the limousines and the flunkeys and the whole circus. I went out there, but they wouldn’t let me through the door. And before I could get anything legal rolling, they moved again.

‘That became a pattern. They never settled anywhere for long enough to let me get a foothold, and after a while they got better at keeping their heads down so it was harder for me to figure out where they were. I kept the channels open, though. Kept the feelers out. And then just after the New Year – maybe four months ago now – they came to London.

‘I’d been doing my homework, Castor. I knew why they hadn’t killed Abbie. And I knew why they’d come here. It was all coming together, and I was shit-scared that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

‘They had to wait until she had her first period. That was part of Fanke’s prescription: out of the grimoires again. “She will be pure, she will be stained. She will be whole, she will be wounded. She will be woman, she will be child.” That was what he said it meant.’

‘And London?’ Even as I asked the question, the answer hit me. And the only reason I hadn’t seen it before was because I was sitting so close to it.

‘London was where he was. The demon they wanted to raise. Except that he was half-raised already, because some other shithead had tried it two years back and got it wrong, the way Fanke said amateurs always do.’

Asmodeus. Peace didn’t even need to say it. The last few pieces fell into place as I finally made the connection that my subconscious mind had made two days ago. Yeah, something else did happen on Saturday night. Rafi had his episode, as Asmodeus clawed his way up out of the oubliette, yawned and stretched.

An image came into my mind: of Rafi screaming in agony, his head thrown back, oblivious of everything except whatever it was that was tormenting him.

‘You sabotaged them,’ I said. ‘You broke the ritual before they finished it.’

‘Only just,’ growled Peace, bitterly. ‘It took me a long time to find out where they were keeping Abbie. And by the time I got to the house it was too late – they’d already taken her. But I caught Mel and some piece of piss who was fronting as her husband. And I got the drop on them.’

‘Stephen Torrington,’ I said. ‘The real Stephen Torrington. He was the guy who owned the house, right? Some English Satanist who Fanke was using as a cover?’

‘“Was” being the operative word,’ Peace spat. ‘I think his head will take more putting together than Humptyfucking-Dumpty.’

‘You killed two people, Peace. It’s not a joke.’

He scowled at me with something like resentment. ‘What are you talking about? Him I killed, yeah. Mel – I hit her. I remember hitting her. Because I had to make her tell me where Abbie was. I had to stop the whole thing before it got too far. Maybe she thought I was going to kill her, because I must have looked like some kind of a maniac. But I didn’t have the stomach for it.’

‘But – there was a woman’s body. Tied up and beaten and then shot in the stomach . . .’

But with a different gun. I suddenly remembered that odd detail from Nicky’s summary. With a different gun, and maybe as much as three hours later. That didn’t make any sense. Unless . . .

‘Did she tell you? What you needed to know?’ I asked Peace.

‘Yeah. They’d found some old Quaker meeting house in Hendon that was boarded up. It was exactly what they needed: a place where people had prayed, and sung hymns, or whatever it is that Quakers do when they let their hair down. A place where people had worshipped, anyway, because that’s one of the ingredients in the shit they do. I left her tied to a chair. If I could’ve killed her, I would have. I fucking hated her enough to do it. I just – when it came right down to it, I couldn’t pull the trigger with her looking at me. I kept thinking about Abbie. Abbie growing inside her. It made me weak.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ I said grimly. ‘Fanke finished what you started. When the cops got to the house they found two bodies, a man and a woman, and they ID’d the woman as Melanie Torrington. I think he must have figured out how you got that address, Peace – and I think he didn’t like it much. So it was really handy for him that you left her hands tied: meant he didn’t have to get into an unseemly scuffle or anything like that.’

It also meant that the blonde woman he’d brought into my office, and then considerately sent away so she didn’t have to relive her trauma, hadn’t got those bruises from Peace. She’d been beaten up just to serve as a prop and prepare the ground so Fanke could work on my tender feelings.

Peace took the news in dazed silence. It was probably just as well: right then I was full of anger and contempt for him as well as for Fanke. Peace might have been protecting his daughter, but the pair of them had been dancing this slow, smoochy dance around each other for long enough, and a lot of innocent people had got hurt because they were caught in between.

‘She deserved to die,’ Peace said, more to himself than to me. ‘After all she’d done—’

‘Maybe she did,’ I said, wearily. ‘Or maybe she was just a bare-arsed bondage freak who Fanke reeled in the same way he did you – because he needed something she had. In her case it was a womb, and an open-minded attitude to sex acts that draw blood. In yours it was functional sperm. For Christ’s sake, Peace, have you really got it that wrong? Did you think she was your enemy? Because it looks to me like you were both played by an expert.’ And so was I, I reminded myself. I had no reason to feel smug here: I’d fetched the stick and rolled over and played dead like the best of them.

Peace got angry, and that was a mistake because it started him coughing again and the pain closed down his lines of communication for the best part of a minute while he wheezed and hissed like an overfilled kettle. There was no steam, though: Peace’s fires were burning pretty low now.

‘She was a vicious, selfish bitch,’ he said, when he could speak again. ‘She got exactly what was coming to her. Don’t judge me, Castor. And don’t try to make me feel fucking guilty, because it won’t wash. I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to get Fanke.’

‘Fanke was at the house?’

‘At the meeting hall, you moron.’

Which brought us full circle, I reckoned. And since he still didn’t seem to want to shut up, I might as well check that I was right about the endgame, too. ‘You got there late,’ I said. ‘The ceremony – ritual – whatever they were doing, it was already under way.’

‘It was already finished. All bar the shouting. Thirty seconds earlier – thirty bastard seconds – and I might’ve stopped them. If Mel had just told me where Abbie was, instead of lying and squirming and lying some more. And you want me to feel sorry I set her up to be killed? Fuck that. I’m only sorry I didn’t do it myself the first night I met her.

‘They were all in costume. Dressed in black, except for Fanke who was all in red and had some kind of a crown on his head. Made him a perfect target, only – only I saw Abbie lying there, in the circle, and I lost it. I just screamed and started shooting. Walked right out into the middle of them – blam, blam, blam. If one of them had had sense enough to whack me on the back of the neck with a chalice, or one of their other bits of fucking paraphernalia, that would have been the end of it. But they closed up around Fanke like I was about to take a penalty and he was the goal. Protecting him: making sure I didn’t muss his hair with a .45 ACP. And then another bunch came at me from the side: they must have been guarding the front door, or something. So I turned and sprayed them instead.

‘I didn’t expect to be walking out of there, Castor. And Abbie was dead, so I didn’t care what happened so long as I did some serious damage. But right then something else happened, and it was as big a surprise for them as it was for me.

‘Something started to appear inside the circle. It – didn’t have any shape, at first. It was like a shadow with nothing there to cast it. Like – I dunno, like a shadow in winter, when the sun’s low in the sky, because it was enormous and stretched out and sort of distorted. Then it moved and you could see that it had hands – arms. And it started to look darker. More solid.

‘The Satanists all went crashing down on their knees like someone had sliced through their hamstrings. Hunkered right down with their arms thrown out, shouting gibberish in Latin or Greek or it might have been the Mickey Mouse Club theme tune because I honest-to-God wasn’t listening.

‘I froze. I knew what it was that they were trying to do, but seeing it was something else. It was a demon: Asmodeus, one of the soldiers of Hell. One of their fucking generals, in fact. He wasn’t really there – not solid, I mean. I could actually see the angle of the wall right through him. And the air currents were moving through him too, pulling him out of shape. But he was bending down over Abbie with this look on his face like Christmas had come early.

‘I had a light-bulb moment, Castor. The words from Fanke’s website blinked on and off in front of me like I was back in school, spelling out from flashcards. Spiritually and physically prepared. He needed her soul, as well as her body. He was going to – to eat her, to consume her, right there in front of me. I had to stop it. I had to stop it.

‘What I did next – I just did it because it felt right. The demon was more like smoke than anything else: you can’t shoot smoke. And in any case, you’re meant to aim at the base of the fire. So I switched to fully automatic and I shot the pentagram. I shot their fucking magic circle.

‘The Tavor’s a bastard on auto. It bucked in my hands and I had to lean down hard on it to keep from being thrown over backwards. But I was already so close to the thing, it was like using a pointer on a whiteboard. I swung the gun round in as small an arc as I could manage, given the angle, and a couple of arms of the pentagram got chewed to pieces. I hit a couple more of their guys, too: leg shots, because I was aiming down – and before you ask, no, I don’t give a fuck.

‘Because it worked. All Hell broke loose – no joke intended. The demon opened its mouth and it gave out with a sound I hope I never fucking hear again. Not a sound, exactly: I mean, it didn’t scream. It wasn’t even loud. But you could feel the pressure on your eardrums, on your goddamn skin, like when a plane hits turbulence and drops a few hundred feet when you’re not expecting it. It hurt. It hurt like things were tearing inside you.

‘But I was on my feet and the Satanists were on their knees. And I knew what I had to do. I ran straight forward – had to jump over one guy who was lying flat on the ground right in my way, holding onto what was left of his kneecap – got to the circle and Abbie was still lying there, blood all over her chest, her eyes wideopen. The demon, or the demon’s shadow or whatever you want to call it, was writhing around now like a fire hose that someone’s let go of, whipping this way and then another way and keeping up that silent screaming all the time.

‘I didn’t have my deck, and I wouldn’t have had time to deal out a hand of cards in any case. All I could do was call Abbie and hope that she came. I took hold of her locket, shouted out her name as loud as I could, shouted “Come with me!” or something like that, and pulled. I mean, I didn’t just yell: I called her, the way you do when you’re doing it on a job. I was calling her into the locket – at least, into the lock of her hair that was inside the locket. I was making that the anchor her ghost would attach itself to.’

Peace looked at me to make sure I understood. I nodded tersely, as though it was what I’d have done under the circumstances. The truth was, I was having a hard time believing it was even possible. Summoning a ghost into a physical object? Channelling it, as though spirit was water and you could choose which way gravity was going to run? I suppose the hair was a part of Abbie, something she already had a link to, but still . . . In other circumstances, I’d have been asking him for details and taking notes. As it was I let him go on talking, oblivious of my slightly begrudged wonder.

‘Without the cards, I didn’t have any idea if it would work – and the frigging chain was a fair bit thicker than I thought it was: I had to wrap it around my wrist and give it a good hard yank. That did it: it snapped and I ran for the door with the locket in my fist – still holding the gun in my other hand even though its magazine was empty now.

‘Just as well I kept it, too, because one of those guys with a bit more presence of mind than his mates tried to come in from the side and shut me down. He got the stock of the Tavor in his face and I kept on going.

‘My car was a long way up the street. Theirs were right outside and I didn’t have time to spike them. I just ran for it, got to the car, got inside and took off like a cat with pepper up its arse.

‘I didn’t even know if they were chasing me, at first. Then I saw some headlights behind me, and they didn’t move out of my mirror even when I took some reckless, stupid turns. So then I knew they were onto me and I had to shake them.

‘The trouble was, the car kept losing power. I was flooring the accelerator and I was actually slowing down. It was as if we were pulling a trailer full of bricks. Or a dead whale, or something. I thought the engine was going to die and leave us stranded on the street for those bastards to pick off.

‘I did the only thing I could think of. I turned my lights off and took every turn that came up, making it as hard as I could for them to keep me in sight.

‘I was desperate, and I was driving like an idiot. I took a right at the bottom of Scrubs Lane, just by the prison, you know? And it was too tight. I scraped my side against a whole row of parked cars, ripped my bumper clean off, and nearly killed some old guy who was crossing the road. The noise was incredible, and I thought we’re cooked now, good and proper.

‘But for some reason the engine cleared after that. I got her up to sixty and we belted off west. Got to here, which was where I was aiming for all along. No better place in London to hide a ghost, Castor. As you should know by now.’

I didn’t answer Peace. I was putting his story together with what I already knew.

Saturday evening. Bottom of Scrubs Lane. Fifty yards from the doors of Saint Michael’s, just as evensong was kicking into gear. It sounded like madness, but then this whole thing was shot through with insanity from start to finish. Peace had interrupted a summoning ritual for a demon. For Asmodeus. The devil-worshippers had intended to consume Abbie body and soul, but they hadn’t reckoned on her dad stepping in with an assault rifle to throw into the works by way of a spanner. Body and soul: but they’d only got one out of two.

And Asmodeus?

Asmodeus had ended up trapped halfway between there and here. One foot in Rafi’s soul, one foot in Abbie’s. That was the weight that Peace had been dragging behind him as he fled for home. He didn’t just have one spirit inside that piece of jewellery, he had two – one minnow and one big bastard of a killer whale. Until he turned the corner and hit the long straight of Du Cane Road. Then – what? I thought I could guess.

If some part of Asmodeus had been with them as they fled – attached to Abbie, or flying behind her through the London night like an invisible kite with no ribbons and no string – then when they shaved that corner the demon would have turned, too. Turned a little more slowly, maybe – and a little more widely. That would have taken him right across the south-western corner of Saint Michael’s church.

Peace dragged Asmodeus over hallowed ground, at the exact moment that a religious service was taking place. I will sing a new song unto the Lord my God. For a demon, it must have been like being hauled through a barbed-wire entanglement. No wonder Rafi screamed. No wonder he lashed out and hurt people: he was going through what you could fairly call Hell on Earth.

And finally Asmodeus got wedged solid – trapped in the stones of the church and in the nets of prayer that were rising up all around him. His link to Abbie was severed, and Peace drove on through the night, picking up speed, leaving an invisible, formless monster from Hell embedded in the fabric of Saint Michael’s like a fossilised mosquito in a lump of amber.

Except that Asmodeus was still far from defunct. His insidious will fell down on the congregation of Saint Michael’s like black rain, and their souls took the taint.

More innocents in the crossfire. Just like Abbie. Just like Rafi.

I pulled my mind back to the present and tried to recall what Peace had just said.

‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘Why did you come here, particularly? What makes this place so special?’

‘The ramparts,’ said Peace, sounding just a little smug even through his pain. ‘Earth and air you saw, right? Outside? But it’s the water that’s really clever. That brickwork is double-skin, and there’s a hollow space in between the two layers that’s lined with lead. It’s meant to be filled with water from the mains supply, with a pump to keep it circulating, but there are all sorts of holes in it now so it keeps draining away again. Whenever I felt you fishing for Abbie, I turned the pumps on and put up a wall of running water between you and her. And one time I gave you a bit of salt on your tail, too, just by the way.’

‘I remember,’ I said, a touch grimly.

Peace managed a weak laugh. ‘“Set a thief to catch a thief,” yeah? Only it doesn’t work unless you get hold of a better thief than the one you’re looking for.’

‘And yet,’ I reminded him, ‘here I am.’

‘Only because someone ratted me out. You didn’t find me by looking.’

I let that pass. If Peace wanted to have a pissing contest, he could play both sides. In any case, I thought I’d heard a car door slam somewhere out on the road – far enough away that it was at the limit of hearing. Peace didn’t seem to have noticed it, though, so maybe I was mistaken.

‘I’m going to wake Abbie up,’ he said. ‘Unless there’s anything else you want to ask me about?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m good. My bedtime-story needs are met.’

I turned my back on him, walked to the door and looked out. Nothing moved in the baleful moonlight. Behind me, there were only the small sounds of Peace dealing out a hand of cards on the bare concrete floor. When I glanced his way again Abbie was back, standing at his side as if she’d never left. I had to admit, grudgingly, that he was as good as he thought he was. They were talking in low murmurs, and I felt a definite reluctance to disturb their privacy.

I stepped out into the dark instead. If I smoked, I’d have lit a cigarette. If I’d had any booze left, I’d have had a drink. As it was there was nothing I could do but wait. I must have been wrong about the car door, because nothing was stirring.

Doctor Feelgood ought to have been here by now. Edgy and irritable, I fished out the phone again to call Pen and ask her to hurry him along. This time I noticed what I hadn’t before: there were four missed-call alerts, all from the same number: Nicky Heath’s number.

The first and second times, he hadn’t left a message. The third time he had. I played it back.

‘There’s something wrong here, Castor.’ Nicky’s voice, stiff with tension; a prolonged scraping sound in the background as he moved something heavy across the floor. ‘There’s a whole bunch of people outside. They turned up in four cars, and now they’re standing around like they’re waiting for someone. I do not fucking like this. If it’s anything to do with the shit you’re involved with, why don’t you come over here and deal with it your fucking self, okay? Call me. Fucking call me, okay? Like, now.’

My throat suddenly dry, I flicked to the last message.

‘This is a siege here, Castor!’ Nicky’s voice was a yell now, which meant he would have had to work hard to inflate his non-functional lungs. ‘They shot the cameras out. The fucking cameras! I’m blind, you understand me? They could be right outside my door, and I wouldn’t— Oh, shit!’

There was an abrupt click, and then the high-pitched single tone that means ‘message ends’. I dialled Nicky’s number with shaking hands. Nothing, for ten or twenty seconds: just silence. With a muttered curse I terminated the call and started to dial again, but before I even finished the area code I heard the sound of footsteps walking down the short path from the road.

I turned in that direction. A figure came into view a second later, stepping out of the shadows and through the narrow opening between the raised earth beds onto the driveway.

‘Over here, Doctor Forster,’ I called. The figure turned and came forward into the light.

When I got a look at his face, I experienced a momentary lurch of dissociation: then my heart jumped in my chest like a test pilot in crash webbing. I’d never met Dylan Forster, but I knew that face well enough. When I’d first met the guy, only three days before in my office, he’d introduced himself as Stephen Torrington. And now, in a sudden flash of elementary logic, it occurred to me that both of those names were as good as each other because his real name had to be something different again. I also knew now why he’d had to send someone else to look after me when I’d collapsed at Pen’s house: at that point, he couldn’t afford for me to see his face.

I thought of Peace’s Glock, which was still inside lying on the floor of the Oriflamme. But it wouldn’t have mattered even if I could have got to it. The bastard had set this up exactly the way he wanted. He already had a gun in his hand and it was pointing at my chest.

‘You want to watch that thing – or it could go off,’ I said, because I had to say something: had to get some kind of interaction going that might buy me some time while I thought of a way to distract, disarm and decapitate him.

He shook his head. ‘It won’t be going off just yet,’ he said, in an almost languid tone. Funny that Pen had never mentioned his soft, half-elided mid-Atlantic accent. The smirk playing across his lips confirmed what I already knew.

‘You’re Anton Fanke.’

He made a mock bow, saluting my way-past-theeleventh-hour leap of intuitive logic. ‘If you’d figured that out three days ago,’ he said, his tone the gentlest of sneers, ‘I might have been impressed. Check him for weapons.’

The last words weren’t addressed to me, but past me into the shadows at the side of the building. Three men who must have been standing absolutely still until then stepped out of the darkness, surrounded me and frisked me with extreme thoroughness. They didn’t look like my mental image of Satanists: they looked a lot more like my mental image of FBI agents. One of them was carrying a snub-nosed handgun, which he pressed to the base of my neck.

The other two, searching my left- and right-hand sides in rough synchrony, came up with my dagger and whistle respectively. They held them up for Fanke’s inspection.

‘Now we’ll go inside,’ Fanke said.

I took a step towards him, but the men on either side of me moved in to block me and the gun at my neck pressed a little harder. I knew I’d never get there.

‘Why Pen?’ I demanded, between my teeth. ‘What did you need her for?’

‘Rafael Ditko was the vessel,’ said Fanke, throwing out his arm towards the door of the Oriflamme in formal invitation. ‘I had to get close to him. We had our plan already in place, but if it failed – it might have been necessary to take Ditko from the Stanger clinic and kill him to release Asmodeus’s spirit from him. Pamela would have been very useful in that eventuality. As things have turned out, though, I think we’ll be just fine as we are. Wilkes, you can lead the way. You’re just marginally more expendable than Mister Castor is at this point.’

Things were coming apart fast. In desperation, I tensed to jump for Fanke as he walked towards me. He favoured me with a glance of amused contempt.

‘That would be a mistake,’ he said in a clipped tone. ‘I’d like you alive at this point, because you’re looking like a pretty good scapegoat, but don’t push me.’

Caught in his sights and those of the guy behind me, I briefly considered tackling him low and seeing if they both let fly and took each other out. But that wouldn’t even work in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Fanke was watching me closely, and he saw the moment when I stood down from the fight-or-flight precipice. ‘Inside,’ he said again. The man behind me tapped the base of my neck with his gun barrel, and I obediently followed the man that Fanke called Wilkes back into the Oriflamme. I’d half hoped that Peace might have caught something of the commotion outside and scraped together some kind of an ambush. No such luck. His head snapped around as he registered the multiple sets of footsteps. As Wilkes stepped to one side of me and the goon with the gun stepped to the other to get a clear line of sight, Peace’s gaze darted to one, then the other, then back to me. By some reflex he couldn’t control, his hand shot up to grasp hold of Abbie’s – and went right through her insubstantial form. Abbie didn’t even notice. She was staring in wordless, silent terror at the strange faces. Or maybe not so strange to her: she might be recognising them from five nights before. She might remember Fanke as the man who’d put a knife into her heart.

‘You bastard, Castor,’ Peace said, his voice a dead whisper. His second thoughts were better. He reached down and scattered the deck of cards across the floor. Abbie flickered and then disappeared, her mouth open to call out to him.

‘Don’t make this worse than it has to be,’ I said, and before anyone could stop me I stepped forward.

My eyes hadn’t had any more time to readjust to the deeper darkness inside the Oriflamme than theirs had, but I knew roughly where Peace’s Glock was. I didn’t even have to break step: I just had to flick my foot out a little to the left as if I was intercepting a pass inside the penalty box, and touch the toe of my shoe to the trigger guard.

I flicked the gun end over end through the air, and my aim was good: wasted afternoons in the old gym at Alsop’s Comprehensive School for Boys, kicking and heading a ball endlessly against the wall, had brought belated and unexpected dividends.

Peace reached up, took the Glock out of the air and fired without seeming to aim. The thunder roared directly in my ear, and a body slammed against a wall just to my right. As it slid to the floor the thunder sounded again, deafening in this shell of a room with no soft surfaces to catch and filter the sound. On my left, Fanke jerked as if stung, then brought his own gun up to return fire. I knocked it out of his hands with a scything, two-fisted swipe.

Then, just as things seemed to be going great, something hard and heavy and sickeningly solid slammed into the side of my head and my feet went out from under me.

I tried to get up, only to catch a second glancing blow on the back of my neck that took what was left of the fight out of me. More exchanges of thunder, and a shrill, prolonged scream that didn’t go in through my deadened ears but took a more direct route to my brain – or maybe to my soul, if an exorcist has one of those.

It sounded like ‘Daddy’. The word that Abbie had tried to say as she faded out. The world of the dead has very peculiar acoustics.

I raged against the dying of the light: flailed in the dark looking for purchase – something for my fuddled wits to cling to.

I came up slowly. Came together, rather, because it felt like my mind was creeping timidly in from front, back and sides to coalesce as best it could in my skull, which had obviously been dented right out of shape.

I tried to stand and was hauled up onto my knees without ceremony, even before my eyes had kicked in properly. Blearily I saw a woman’s face cross my field of vision, flick a contemptuous glance down at me, and keep on going.

A moment later, as I rediscovered the miracle of depth perception, I saw Gary Coldwood heave into view. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again with a grunt as my forehead and spine lit up with seven shades of agony. I sagged, but was held.

‘There’s—’ I tried again, waving a vague, ineffectual hand towards where Peace ought to be. ‘– Injured – needs a doctor.’

‘You worried about the other guy, Fix?’ Coldwood sounded tired and disgusted. A constable appeared beside him with a pair of handcuffs dangling in his hand, which Coldwood took with a nod. ‘You don’t have to be. Looks like you won. The other guy’s dead.’