Vicious Circle

23

In the secure unit at the Whittington, I’d at least had a magazine – along with a phone on a trolley, all the small change I could pick up off the floor and a werewolf-themed cabaret. In the remand cells at the Uxbridge Road cop shop, all I had were the clothes I stood up in, minus belt and jacket.

The graffiti on the cell wall were varied and imaginative, but even they palled after a while. Kicking on the door got no response except for muffled swear words from the guy in the cell next door, who muttered and raved to himself in a variety of different voices in between times. Even the cockroaches, bred in the wild and proud of spirit, refused to race. After three hours or so I began to understand why they’d taken the belt: if I’d still had it, I’d have hanged myself. Alternatively, if there’d been any sheets on the cot bunk, I’d have slept.

Basquiat arrived some time towards morning, with Fields tagging along as usual to hold her coat and feed her straight lines. The guard on duty unlocked the door for her and signed her in, then set one of the interview tape recorders down on the floor and left, giving her a respectful nod.

She left the tape recorder where it was, though, signalling for me to sit down on my bunk while she took the edge of the table and Fields stood by the door, ignored.

‘So,’ she said.

I waited for something more solid to go on.

‘A burning church full of dead men in black gowns. Another one, in red, lying dead outside. And you, kneeling next to a woman who’s been tied up with duct tape.’

‘I admit that looks fairly suspicious at first glance,’ I said.

Basquiat smiled coldly. ‘Just a little, yeah. But then we start to look at the small print. The guy in red checks out as Anton Fanke, so I guess he got tired of Belgium.’

‘A man who’s tired of Belgium . . .’

‘Don’t get smart, Castor. I like you better when you’re scared and desperate. And besides, I didn’t get to the good part yet. Fanke was carrying a gun that my friends in ballistics greeted like a long-lost friend. It’s the one that killed Melanie Torrington. And one of the corpses in the church had a knife with Abigail Torrington’s blood on the blade. A whole lot of fingerprints, including Fanke’s – but not yours.

‘So my case against you for those earlier murders starts to look a little shaky. I’ve still got you for Peace, of course – you at the scene of the crime, and your prints on the gun that killed him. But that duct-taped woman has been telling us all kinds of things about the late Mister Fanke. Stuff that you wouldn’t believe.’

The mention of Pen made me wince. ‘I think I’d believe most of it,’ I said.

‘Yeah, maybe you would at that. Anyway, it seems like he was looking for Peace even before you were – looking in some of the same places, like that club in Soho Square. So maybe your story about him hiring you to do his legwork makes a little more sense now.’

The first thing that Bourbon Bryant had said to me when I’d asked him about Peace: seems like he’s flavour of the month all of a sudden. Why the hell hadn’t I made the connection and asked him who else had been sniffing around?

‘And he’s got more of a motive, because he and Peace had some kind of legal skirmish a few years back, and it turns out Peace has been chasing him all around Europe ever since. Something about parental visiting rights to a little girl named Abigail Jeffers. Was that—?’

‘—Abigail Torrington. Yeah, it was.’

‘Thought so. Otherwise we’d have been talking about a hell of a lot of weird coincidences. So Fanke murdered Abbie, but Peace – what? I’m a little hazy on this part.’

‘The idea was to do more than just murder her, Basquiat. She was going to be used up, body and soul, to bring the demon Asmodeus onto the mortal plane. But Peace stepped in before Fanke could finish the ritual – broke the circle and took away Abbie’s ghost. Her spirit. That was what Fanke was looking for. And that was what he took away with him after he killed Peace.’

‘So last night’s gig at Saint Michael’s was in the nature of an action replay?’

‘You could call it that.’

‘I did call it that, Castor. The question is, what would you call it?’

‘Well, since they both ended in violent fiascos and a lot of dead bodies, I guess “action replay” is as good as anything.’

Basquiat scowled, clearly not appreciating the beating about the bush. She opened her mouth, but I forestalled her. ‘Yeah, Fanke was trying to finish what he started. He had the locket with Abbie’s hair in it – the physical anchor for her ghost. He was going to burn it, inside another magic circle. That would have been enough.’

‘But it didn’t happen.’

‘No.’

‘Because—?’

And that was about as far as I wanted to take it. ‘There was an interruption,’ I said, deadpan. ‘An all-singing, all-dancing interruption, as I’m sure you know by now. A dozen or so men with sub-machine guns, a couple of loup-garous in a really bad mood, and most of the cast from The Producers over on Drury Lane. I don’t know how many DOAs you ended up with—’

‘Forty-two,’ Basquiat threw in quietly.

‘— but I’m sure there were enough to convince you that this wasn’t a one-man show.’

Basquiat blew out her cheek reflectively. ‘All these show-business metaphors. You got stars in your eyes?’

‘A guy can dream.’ I was getting the impression from all this that the detective sergeant’s opinion of me had warmed somewhat. One way or another, she seemed to have decided – like Gwillam, although for very different reasons – that I was on the side of the angels after all.

But she still had a job to do. She stood up from the edge of the table where she’d been leaning and threw a nod to Fields. He flexed his muscles in a way that was frankly threatening for a moment, but all he did was to lift the tape recorder off the floor and set it down in the centre of the table.

‘Body count of forty-two,’ Basquiat said again, sounding apologetic. ‘I’ve got to do this by the book. But unless you do something stupid like confess, you’ll be out of here sometime tomorrow.’

Fields pressed the RECORD button, so all I could do in reply was nod.

‘Detective Sergeant Basquiat and Detective Constable Fields,’ Fields intoned, ‘interviewing Felix Castor, Friday, May twelfth, 6.32 a.m.’

And they did, for the better part of an hour, but on the whole it was friendly fire. A couple of times I almost nodded off. The only time it got edgy was when the talk turned to how I’d got out of the secure unit at the Whittington. Two cops had been badly injured in that fracas, and then there was the security guard that Po had taken down: fortunately Zucker had stepped in before that particular incident got out of hand. (A memory of Po with a Satanist’s head between his jaws intervened at this point, and once again I gave thanks to the god I don’t believe in.) On top of that there had been a lot of property damage and a whole lot of people had got the shit scared out of them. But the commando-style operation that Gwillam had mounted at Saint Michael’s inclined Basquiat to buy my story that the raid on the hospital had been a kidnapping rather than a rescue, so she wasn’t putting any of that directly down to me.

When they’d talked me through the past seven days of my life, and I’d unburdened myself of everything I was going to, Fields turned off the tape recorder and took out the cassette, which he labelled and pocketed. Basquiat headed for the door and hammered on it. She turned back to me as the key turned in the lock and the door opened.

‘Anything I can get you?’ she asked.

‘My tin whistle, if you’ve still got it,’ I said. ‘It would be with the stuff I had on me when you arrested me the first time.’

She pulled a face and shrugged. ‘What with everything that went down over there, I don’t think it ever got claimed. It must still be there – along with your clothes and everything – but Christ knows where. I don’t have time to go looking for it right now, or anyone I can send.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I can work around it. Thanks for everything, detective sergeant.’

‘Including knocking you on your arse the first time I met you? You’re welcome, Castor. Have a good one.’

Basquiat went out, Fields trailing along behind her like a broad-beamed freighter behind a tug. I listened to their footsteps retreat up the corridor, and then to the cell-block door being slid to on its runners.

Once I was certain they weren’t coming back, I leaned forward and put my hand down inside my sock. It was easy to find the little lock of hair because it had been itching the Hell out of me ever since I’d put it down there. It had been back in the church, around about the time when the bullets had started flying: I’d thrown myself down between the pews while the Satanists and Gwillam’s holy crusaders had been getting physical with each other, and I’d reasoned that this might be a good time for Abbie and the locket to part company. Empty, the locket might be as useful to me as a swinging watch is to a hypnotist: something pretty and shiny that the rubes can look at while you do what you need to do.

And when Gwillam made his play, I was proved right. I was just lucky that he hadn’t checked the goods before he left – probably because of the approaching sirens.

As I’ve already said, it’s always easier for me to do my little party trick if I’ve got a tin whistle in my hands. But the whistle is just a channel: the music comes from within me, and I can make it on my own if I have to. Particularly if, as now, I was dealing with a ghost I already knew pretty well.

Sitting on the edge of the bunk, I closed my eyes and whistled the tune that, for me, had become synonymous with Abbie. I started low and let the sound build as it seemed to want to, gradually but inexorably. The guy in the next cell yelled a protest, but he was outside the infolded loop of reality that joined me to the tune, so whatever he said fell on my ears like an abstract pattern, then fell away again in unheeded fragments.

Abbie materialised in front of me, about a foot above the ground, and so slowly that at first she was like a trick of the light – like one of those accidental objects that can only be seen from one angle when the light falls just right. It wasn’t surprising: after all she’d been through in her life, and then in her death, I could understand her not wanting to be dragged up by her heels one more time. When she saw me, her reluctance became even greater: she fought against my call, fading out into near-invisibility time after time, but coming back each time a little more sharply defined, a little more vivid and visible, as my sense of her straightened and I tied the knots of my calling around her soul.

‘Let me go!’ she cried, in a thin voice that seemed to come across vast distances. ‘Let me go!’

I stopped whistling at last and paused a moment or two to get my breath back. It had been as hard work as any tune I’d ever played, except for one: and I wasn’t up to thinking about Rafi right then.

‘That’s what I intend to do, Abbie,’ I assured her. ‘But first I want to tell you how your dad died. What you missed. So you’ll understand.’

She was staring at me, her phantom fists clenched in tension and defiance. I told her how the ambush at the Oriflamme had played out, and how Dennis Peace had died defending her against her wicked stepfather. She didn’t look as though she believed me – but then, the last two times she’d seen me it had been while I was standing right alongside Fanke in circumstances that stank all the way up to Heaven.

Then I told Abbie about the church, and why I’d put my hand into the fire. I showed her my burned fingers to prove my point, and I think perhaps she did believe me then. At any rate she forgot her hate and fear and grieved for her father, with dry eyes because ghosts can’t cry. Sometimes they can mimic tears they cried in life, but they have no moisture of their own.

‘Perhaps you’ll see your dad again,’ I told her, offering her the only crumb of consolation I could think of. ‘If there’s something after this life, and after this death, then I bet he’ll find you there if anybody can. He hasn’t let anything stop him so far.’

Abbie didn’t respond. Turning slightly as though in a wind I couldn’t feel, she cast her gaze around the narrow confines of the cell. It wasn’t the first prison she’d seen in her brief, constricted life: with any luck, though, it would be the last.

I started to whistle again. Not the summoning this time, and not the exorcism, but the unbinding: I whistled the notes that would set her free from the lock of hair to go where she would, unmolested by the Fankes and Gwillams of this sublunary sinkhole.

But Abbie didn’t leave. I guess there wasn’t anywhere she could think of to go: anywhere where she would have felt safe, or wanted. The only man who had ever loved her or tried to make her happy was dead. She could go back to the Oriflamme and wait for him there, but not everyone rises, and when they do you can’t always tell where they’ll go. It was a long shot. All that was left to her now were long shots.

I thought through the options. You don’t get to have a happy ending when you’re dead: this was just damage limitation, nothing more.

‘Goodbye, Abbie,’ I said, standing up and shifting my ground to face east. Not towards Mecca: towards somewhere else entirely, on the other side of the city. ‘Goodbye, and good luck. I hope it all works out for you.’

I whistled again, a tune I hadn’t played for a good long while now: ‘Henry Martin’. An electric prickle played down my arms to the tips of my fingers.

The Charles Stanger clinic was a good few miles away, but ghosts – when they travel at all – aren’t limited to light speed. All the same, I’d got through two complete renditions of the song and was well into the third before I felt their presence stealing up on me, approaching on some vector that had nothing to do with north, south, east or west. I didn’t look around: I felt, in some weird way, as though the dead girls might not take to Abbie if they saw me talking to her – as though the taint of the living might cling to her and make her seem alien to them.

There was a whispering of sound that had no words in it I could make out. Then there was silence, and the silence lengthened. The feeling of their nearness faded from me, leaving behind a more acute awareness of how cold the stone was under my stockinged feet, and how stale the air smelled.

When the last echoes of the tune had died from the air and from my mind, I turned around again.

I was alone in the cell – and more tired than I’d ever been.