Vicious Circle

18

They took me to the Whittington Hospital on Highgate Hill, where I could look out of the window and see the sun setting over Karl Marx’s tomb if I wanted to depress myself even more. There’s a secure wing there that the Met use for terrorists they shoot up in the course of arrest: bars on the windows, plods on the door, and all the lumpy custard you can eat.

They thought I was in a worse way than I was, because the whack I’d taken to the side of my head had laid it open spectacularly – and, the scalp being full of shallow-lying blood vessels, I’d bled like a stuck pig. But when they put me in a wheelchair and took me for a spin down to the radiology department, it turned out there was no concussion worth talking about and no intracranial bleeding. Some people are just born lucky, I guess.

Back up on the secure ward, they wheeled me right past the door to my private room and parked me in the corridor a little further on, where I was given into the custody of two uniformed cops. I didn’t bother to try to get a conversation started: they’d have been under orders not to fraternise, and I wouldn’t have picked up anything worth knowing from them anyway.

Sitting there in one of those hospital gowns that leaves your arse hanging out, I replayed the events of the last few days with bleak self-hatred. Fanke had played me like a fiddle. Obviously he was already in place – having sidled into Pen’s comfort zone to keep an eye on Rafi, not on me. But when the shit hit the fan and the second instalment of their human sacrifice had floated away with the sweet morning dew, he improvised brilliantly.

Or was it more than just an accident that I’d never met him as Dylan Forster? Was he playing the angles even then, keeping me in reserve in case he needed a fall guy at a later stage in the proceedings?

Either way, he’d hired me to find Peace for two reasons, not one. The first was that he needed someone who knew London, and there was nobody on his squad who’d fit the bill. They might be hard as nails, but they couldn’t read the ground: they might take weeks to find Peace, and he needed the job done a whole lot quicker than that.

And the second reason was that he already had enough dead bodies on his hands to constitute a logistical problem. There were the Satanists whom Peace had gunned down at the sacrifice, which was bad enough: but there were also the Torringtons, stone-cold dead in suburbia, which was worse. Whether he’d killed Melanie himself, as I suspected, or she’d met her demise in some other way, the whole operation must have been starting to look both leakier and more high-profile than he would have liked. Why not bring in a third party – someone he could keep discreet tabs on, through Pen, without ever making direct contact himself – to carry the can if things got any worse than they already were?

Stitching me up had been on the agenda right from the start: right from before I’d ever met him.

A clatter of footsteps from further down the corridor roused me from these painful ruminations on the past into an even more painful present. DS Basquiat and her cheerful boy sidekick DC Fields were walking briskly up the corridor towards me. Basquiat had a handbag that looked like Prada slung over her shoulder and she was carrying a manila file with a white file-label that I couldn’t read. She nodded to the nearer of the two uniforms, who unlocked the door and held it open while the other one wheeled me inside.

The room was small and bare: just a table, a few chairs, and a wall-mounted shelf on which there was a battered-looking tape recorder. I recognised the set-up at once: I’ve been in police interview rooms before. Never one that had been designed as part of a hospital ward, but it made sense in the context.

Basquiat threw the file she was carrying down onto the table, hung her jacket – black, short-cut, very stylish – on the back of the chair and sat down. From her bag she took a pen, which she put down next to the file. Fields leaned against the wall, a few feet away from me. The plods withdrew, closing the door behind them.

‘Come on,’ Basquiat said to Fields, a little impatiently. ‘Lights, camera, action.’

He reached out and pressed the button on the tape recorder. ‘Whittington’s secure unit. Interview with Felix Castor,’ he said, in a declamatory voice. ‘Conducted by Detective Sergeant Basquiat with Detective Constable Fields in attendance.’ He glanced down at his watch and added the date and time.

‘I want a lawyer,’ I said. ‘I won’t be saying anything worth hearing until I get one.’

Basquiat raised an eyebrow. ‘You haven’t even been charged with anything yet,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you say that’s jumping the gun?’

‘Am I being charged with anything?’ I asked her.

‘Of course you are, Castor. You’re being charged with murder.’

‘Whose murder?’ It was a stupid question, but right then my need to know outweighed my sense of self-preservation.

‘Why?’ Fields sneered. ‘Are you losing count?’

Basquiat looked at him: not an angry look, but one that was prolonged until he looked away. The meaning was unambiguous: it was her interview, and his contributions weren’t welcome.

‘You were found in a burned-out building,’ she said, her gaze flicking back to me, ‘in the same room as a dead body. This corpse turned out to be a man known as Dennis Peace – a man whose profession appears to have been the same as yours. Exorcism. He’d been shot in the chest and abdomen. He also bore injuries from an earlier assault of some kind, but it was the chest shot that killed him, even before the stomach wound had a chance to. He choked to death on his own blood.’

I bowed my head. I’d hoped Peace might have made it somehow, but it had never seemed very likely. I felt a sour, attenuated grief for him, but the real gut-punch was Abbie. What had Fanke done with her? Had he found the locket? Of course he fucking had. He hadn’t crossed half London and murdered a man in cold blood just to walk away with the real job half-done. He had her. He had her soul. Thanks to me, he had everything he needed now to finish what he’d started.

‘We’ve talked to a few people since then,’ Basquiat went on briskly. ‘Former associates and known contacts. Reginald Tang and Gregory Lockyear, also exorcists, who used to share lodgings with Peace, were only too happy to confirm that you’d been looking for the man for the past several days. And that you’d been involved in a fight with him on board a houseboat – the Thames Collective. A woman named Carla Rees further claims that you tried to arrange a meeting with Peace, using her as a go-between.’ She was getting the names out of the file on the table, but now she pushed it away from her slightly and leaned back in her seat. She obviously didn’t need cue cards for the next part.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s all circumstantial. It helps to build up the case, that’s all. The main thing is that we’ve got your fingerprints on the gun and on a lot of other things that were in the room. A kettle. Some mugs. An empty hip flask. It looks to me like you went in there with some story, got him pissed and off his guard, and then killed him. Is that what happened, Castor? You were looking for a chance at that easy shot in the back, but then you ran out of patience and did him face to face like a mensch, yes?’

There was no way I should have answered that question: I’d been in the same situation before – although not on a murder charge, admittedly – and I knew how the game was played. Basquiat wanted to get some kind of a response out of me, and the more she could needle me the better the odds would be that I’d say something stupid and incriminate myself. But my first instinct – play safe and say nothing – ran aground on one simple, terrible fact. Time was against me. I needed Basquiat to believe me, or at least to take me seriously. I couldn’t afford the luxury of stonewalling her.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t what happened. Basquiat, how does your version account for the hits that I took? Someone gave me a couple of good hard smacks from behind, right? While I was shooting Peace in the chest? From in front? What’s wrong with this picture?’

Basquiat looked me over cursorily, as if she’d only just noticed the bruising to my face. She shrugged. ‘Nothing, as far as I can see,’ she said coldly. ‘I didn’t say you got Peace on the first pass. I assume you fought, you both did some damage, you shot him. He was a big man. He could easily have given you those colours you’re wearing.’

‘Look at them,’ I invited her, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice: if I started to think about Abbie, and what might be happening right now only a few miles away, I wasn’t going to be able to think straight – and then I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this. ‘Those marks weren’t made in any bare-hand fight: I was clubbed with a pistol butt.’

‘So?’

‘So whoever took me down was armed, too. I didn’t ambush Peace. There were other people there. I’m betting you must have found tracks outside the Oriflamme as well. You know there were other people there.’

Basquiat sat back in her seat, turning her pen with the tip of her middle finger for a second or two. Then she clicked the nib out and wrote something terse on the case sheet.

‘Peace’s prints were on the weapon too,’ Basquiat conceded, putting the pen down again. ‘Come to that, we think we know where and when he bought it. Recently, if you’re interested. At the same time as he bought the Tavor that was used at the Hendon Quaker Hall. I’ve been busy since the last time I saw your ugly face. Busy building a case.

‘Bottom line? We think the two of you were neck-deep in whatever was going on in that meeting house. Whether it was a Satanist ritual or some kind of a scam doesn’t interest me: with your background – and his – it could equally well have been either. But it didn’t go down the way it was meant to, and a whole lot of people ended up dead. Including Abbie Torrington, who we now believe was Peace’s daughter.

‘Peace ran one way and you ran another. You lost touch with him, anyway, and you spent the next few days trying to track him down. You were stupid enough to ask a lot of people a lot of questions, and to use your own name while you were doing it. You couldn’t have given us a clearer evidence trail if you’d been trying to – so thanks for that. But if you’re asking me whether it worries me that you shot Peace with his own gun, no, it doesn’t. Not at all. We found a knife on the floor a few feet away from you, and that had your fingerprints on it too, so we’re assuming that you went in with the intention of using that – but then a better opportunity presented itself and you took it.’

Basquiat quirked an eyebrow. ‘Or did he draw on you first? Was it self-defence? Maybe we can haggle about motive.’

I slammed my hand down on the table, making Field move in and loom over me with an unspoken but unmistakable threat. ‘Fuck!’ I said, louder than I intended. ‘Didn’t Reggie Tang tell you that I waded in to help Peace when he was attacked at the Thamesmead pier? I wanted to talk to him, not to kill him!’

For the first time, a flicker of something like interest – nothing so strong as doubt, not yet – passed across Basquiat’s face. She looked up at Fields.

‘Did Tang say anything about that?’ she asked him.

‘Not a word,’ said Fields, scornfully.

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I was approached by a couple who claimed to be Abbie Torrington’s parents. They wanted me to—’

‘When was this?’ Basquiat interrupted.

‘Monday. Three days ago. They wanted me to find Abbie. They told me she was already dead, but they said Peace had somehow taken her ghost – her spirit – away from them, and they wanted her back. There are other witnesses to this. A man named Grambas: he runs a kebab house on Craven Park Road. He saw these two even before I did. He gave me their phone number.’

‘By Monday the Torringtons were dead. They’d been murdered two days before, on the same evening that Abbie died.’

‘I know that. I think these two were the killers.’

‘That’s funny. I had you and Peace down for that, as well.’

‘For the love of Christ, Basquiat!’ I was starting to lose it now. ‘Are you going to put me down for Keith Blakelock and Suzie Lamplugh while you’re at it? I didn’t have any reason to kill the Torringtons, and you can’t even place me there!’

‘We’re working on that,’ Basquiat said equably. ‘We can place Peace, by the way. We’ve got his prints now. On the bodies themselves, and also on a lot of the stuff that was torn up or thrown around.’

‘He was looking for Abbie,’ I said through my clenched teeth. I had to make Basquiat believe me, and I didn’t know how. ‘But he found out that she was already gone. She’d been taken, I mean – to that meeting house, where she was going to be sacrificed. Peace got the address of the meeting house from Melanie Torrington and he went tearing off there. Either he already had the assault rifle with him or he picked it up on the way.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Fields threw in from over my shoulder, just to show that he was still listening.

‘Why do you think?’ I snapped back, without sparing him a glance. ‘Because he knew he was going to be outnumbered about thirty to fucking one, is why. And he left Melanie Torrington alive,’ I added, groping for nuggets of fact that might make Basquiat at least consider another possible scenario. ‘She was killed later, right? Later than Steve, I mean. She was murdered by a man named Fanke. Anton Fanke. He killed her because she caved in and told Peace where to find Abbie. He’s the one who’s really behind all this.’

Basquiat blew out her cheek. ‘And it’s this Fanke who killed Abbie?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Peace?’

‘Yes!’

‘And Suzie Lamplugh?’

I opened my mouth to speak but gave it up. I suddenly saw the hopelessness of the situation. It wasn’t even just regulation police-issue blinkers: Basquiat was on a moral crusade. She wanted someone to pay for the murder of Abbie Torrington, and she’d already decided that that somebody was going to be me.

But maybe that was where I needed to insert the lever. If I could make her consider the possibility, just for an instant, that someone else might have killed Abbie, then maybe I could put that same ruthless zeal to work on something positive.

‘The second gun,’ I said, pointing a finger at Basquiat. She didn’t like the finger and she nodded to Fields, who took my hand and placed it firmly – a little too firmly, maybe – down on the table. ‘The gun that killed Melanie Torrington,’ I repeated, leaning past Fields’s unattractive bulk to maintain eye contact with the sergeant.

‘What about it?’

‘You must have the forensics lot on it by now. So check it. Check it against the bullets that were sprayed around at the Oriflamme.’

‘What will that prove?’ Basquiat asked, coolly.

‘It won’t prove a damn thing. But Peace’s gun will be a match for the weapon that killed Steve Torrington. I’m betting that the second gun was present at the Oriflamme, and that you’ll find bullets in the wall behind Peace. Or maybe in the floor. I just want you to – think about it. That’s all. Think about my version of what happened. Okay, you’re going to charge me whatever I say. But check the ballistics, and if they pan out ask yourself this: was I blazing away at Peace with two guns, like some fucking cowboy? Or was someone else involved, both at the Torrington house and when Peace was killed?

‘Then if you’re in the mood, look up Anton Fanke. Find out if he’s in the country on a US passport. He’s got Abbie Torrington’s ghost, and if you don’t do your job, he’s going to kill her again – only more so. He’s going to kill her soul. That’s what’s at stake, detective sergeant. So just – think about it.’

Basquiat stared at me in silence for a moment or two. I waited. There was nothing else I could do.

‘Detective Constable Fields?’ she said at last.

‘Yes, sergeant?’

‘I’m formally charging this man – Felix Castor – with the murder of Dennis Peace. Please read him his rights.’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

Well, it had been a long shot. I wasn’t really surprised: just filled with a sick sense of absolute failure and helplessness. Basquiat stood up and busied herself with collecting her things and putting the pen back in her handbag.

‘What about my phone call?’ I demanded, talking to her back view.

She glanced around, briefly. ‘This is a hospital, Castor. They just have one of those payphones on wheels that they trundle around the wards. I’ll tell one of the duty constables to watch out for it when it comes this way. You’ll get your statutory phone call.’

‘Think about it,’ I said again.

That was a bridge too far. Basquiat dropped the file, which she’d only just picked up, and spun round to grab a double fistful of the thin fabric of my hospital gown. Her face came up to within half an inch of mine – which might have been pleasant in some circumstances but was downright threatening right then.

‘You don’t get to tell me what to do, you son of a bitch,’ she spat out. ‘In a perfect world, you’d already be dead. Or there’d be prisons in England like the ones in the States, where you’d get fucked up the arse a couple of dozen times on your first day. There isn’t anything that can happen to you that you haven’t deserved. Anything. So do not – do not frigging push me any further than you’ve pushed me already. Or I’ll get Fields to hold your head down on the ground while I kick your teeth down your throat.’

Detective Sergeant Basquiat walked out before I could think of a snappy comeback. As a matter of fact, I’m still working on it.

Back on the secure ward, I counted up my options and got as far as zero.

I was three floors up, and the windows were all barred. The lock on the door was a trifle as light as air, if I could improvise a lockpick, but the two boys in blue standing right outside were a different proposition. And even if I could figure a way to get past them, it wasn’t going to help me much once the APB went out. I’d be running for my life in a white hospital gown: no shoes, no underwear, no money, and nobody I could turn to for help even if I could get to them on foot.

There had to be another way. And I had to find it fast.

Sometime in the afternoon I hammered on the door and demanded my phone call again. The cop who I was demanding it from looked so bored and vacant it was a mystery what was keeping him awake. He said he’d see what he could do. Half an hour later I repeated the performance, with similar results.

Half an hour after that, Basquiat came back. Without Fields. One of the uniforms unlocked the door and held it open for her and she stepped in, giving him a curt nod. He closed it and locked it again behind her.

I was sitting in the one chair in the room, reading a two-year-old copy of What Car? I closed it and threw it on the bed. ‘Ford are bringing back the Escort,’ I commented. ‘That’s good news for families with exactly two-point-four kids.’

‘Shut up,’ said Basquiat. ‘Okay, you were right about the other gun, and I admit that’s an odd detail. This guy Fanke? He’s meant to be in Belgium, but we can’t raise him there. All we get is the run-around from a whole lot of nice-sounding people who say he just left or he’s just about to arrive.

‘We’ve also verified that there were at least four other men inside that burned-out club last night. I’m still working on the assumption that they were all friends of yours – but for the sake of argument, tell me about Anton Fanke. In fifty words or less.’

‘He’s a Satanist,’ I said. ‘He founded a Satanist church over in America. He raised Abbie Torrington to be a human sacrifice, but Peace was the father and when he found out what was going down he objected. Everything else that’s happened comes from that.’

‘Fanke was at the – whatever you called it? The place where we found you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You and Peace agreed to meet him there?’

‘No. He was using me as a sniffer dog.’ Basquiat looked blank, so I dropped the metaphor. ‘My landlady Pen Bruckner sent him. I called her to ask if she could bring some antibiotics for Peace’s wounds. She called Fanke because he was posing as a doctor. Or maybe he really is a doctor. Certainly some of his friends seem to be able to lay their hands on prescription drugs without too much trouble. Anyway, he told Pen he’d come along and help, and she bought it. She led Fanke right to us. Or right to Peace, which was what he’d wanted all along.’

‘Peace’s wounds.’

‘What?’

‘You said you needed medicine for Peace’s wounds. How did he get hurt?’

I hesitated. I had her taking me seriously now, at least enough to walk it through, and I didn’t want to put too much of a strain on her credulity by talking about Catholic werewolves.

‘Some guys set on him outside the Thames Collective,’ I said, evading the issue of who and why and with what implements. ‘You can ask Reggie Tang about that. He must have seen at least some of what happened from up on the deck.’

‘Okay. Say I swallow any of this, even for a moment. Where is Fanke now?’

I threw my arms wide. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Get some exorcists onto it, Basquiat. Not me, obviously: whoever else the Met calls in on murder cases. Get hold of something that belonged to Abbie and put them on her trail. Peace was blindsiding me because the Oriflamme had built-in camouflage. But she’s not in the Oriflamme any more, so she ought to be easier to find now, unless—’

I didn’t finish that sentence. Unless it was already too late, was what I meant. Unless Abbie had been used up in a repetition of last Saturday’s ritual.

Basquiat was talking again: I had to wrench my mind off that train of thought and try to stay focused. ‘Do you know where we could lay our hands on anything that belonged to Abbie?’ she was asking me.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘I do. And bear in mind, if I was guilty, I wouldn’t be telling you this – because it makes me look even guiltier.’

‘Go on.’

‘At my office, in Craven Park Road – next to that kebab house I told you about. There’s a black plastic bag, full of toys and clothes. They all—’

‘We already checked your office,’ Basquiat interrupted, waving me silent. ‘The door had been smashed in, and you’d been turned over pretty thoroughly. There was nothing there.’

Damn. I groped around for inspiration. ‘My coat,’ I said. ‘There was a doll’s head in the pocket—’ Basquiat was shaking her head. It looked as though Fanke had outthought me all along the line.

Or maybe not. I remembered the golden chain wrapped around Peace’s wrist. Wrapped tightly, and clenched firmly in that meaty fist. Clenched tightly because it had already broken when Peace tore it from around the dead girl’s neck at the meeting house.

‘When your men turned over the Oriflamme,’ I said, ‘did they find any links from a gold chain?’

Basquiat’s eyes narrowed very slightly. She shook her head.

‘Check again. They’d have to be small enough to miss. And maybe they could have fallen into a crack in the floor, or got into the seams of Peace’s clothes. That chain was hers. Abbie’s. She wore it every day of her life. And it was broken, so it could have shed a link or two during the fight . . .’

The detective sergeant stood up briskly, crossed to the door and hammered on it. ‘I’m not saying I believe you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I am saying I’ll check it.’

‘Fast,’ I told her. ‘Do it fast. I know Abbie already counts as dead in your book. But what Fanke has in mind for her is worse.’

‘I said I’ll check it.’

The door opened and she stepped through without a word.

‘Get me my phone call!’ I shouted after her. ‘Basquiat, get me my fucking phone call!’

The door slammed shut.

But this time she’d listened – and relented. Barely ten minutes later the door opened again, and an orderly in a white coat wheeled in a payphone on a trolley. He walked right out again, and the cop who’d opened the door looked at me expectantly.

‘I don’t have any money,’ I reminded him.

He looked truculent. ‘Nothing in the rules says I’ve got to sub you, you cheeky fucker,’ he grunted.

‘Detective Sergeant Basquiat will pay you back,’ I assured him. ‘And contrariwise, she’ll probably twist your bollocks off if her collar goes tits-up because you didn’t give me my statutory rights.’

The cop dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of silver, which he flung down on the floor. ‘There you go,’ he sneered, and stalked out. The key turned in the lock.

There was a Yellow Pages on a wire shelf underneath the trolley. I looked under ‘Roman Catholic church’, found nothing, but under ‘Religious Organisations’ there were a number of places that looked vaguely promising. I eventually settled on a seminary in Vauxhall. I dialled the number, and a man’s voice said, ‘Father Braithewaite’ in slightly plummy tones.

‘Good evening, father,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I need a number for a biblical research organisation which I believe is located in Woolwich. Does that ring any bells with you?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Father Braithewaite immediately. ‘The Douglas Ignatieff Trust. I should be able to obtain their number – I’ve several publications of theirs on my shelves. Just a moment.’

There was a clunk as the phone was put down, followed by a variety of other bangs, rustles and scrapes which seemed to go on for a hell of a long time. Finally, just as I was about to hang up and try somewhere else, the priest came back on the line.

‘Here it is,’ he said, and recited a number to me. Since I didn’t have any way to write it down, I asked him to repeat it and committed it to memory.

Thanking Father Braithewaite for his help, I hung up and dialled the new number. It was the right place, but all I got was a recorded voice and an invitation to leave a message on the answerphone.

Well, in for a penny. ‘This is Castor,’ I said, ‘and my message is for Father Gwillam of the Anathemata Curialis. Ask him to call me on this number. As quick as he can, because the clock’s ticking. If he’s still looking for Dennis Peace, you can tell him that the trail’s gone dead. Literally. The only way he’s going to get to Abbie Torrington now is through me.’

I hung up and settled down to sweat out the wait, hoping that they wouldn’t come and take the phone away from me before I got my answer. Also, that this wasn’t one of those cleverly doctored payphones that block incoming calls.

It wasn’t. The phone rang after about fifteen minutes and I scooped it up on the first bounce. If the cops outside the door heard the sound, they didn’t respond to it.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Mister Castor?’

I remembered the dry voice. I’d forgotten the inhuman, puritanical calm.

‘Yeah.’

‘Gwillam here. What can I do for you?’

I told him, and he laughed without any trace of humour. It was like hearing a corpse laugh.

‘And is there anything else you’d like?’ he asked, the irony in the words not making it through to the remorselessly level voice. ‘Any dead relatives of yours we can intercede for? Or we could stop along the way and pick you up some pizza . . .’

‘We’ll talk terms later, Gwillam,’ I told him, in no mood for light banter. ‘For now, just you go ahead and let the dogs out.’

I hung up, hard enough to split the plastic of the receiver.