Vicious Circle

1

The incense stick burned with an orange flame and smelled of Cannabis sativa. In Southern Africa it grows wild: you can walk through fields of it, waist-high, the five-fronded leaves caressing you like little hands. But in London, where I live, it’s mostly encountered in the form of compacted black lumps of soft, flaky resin. A lot of the magic’s gone by then.

Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood gave me a downright hostile look through the tendrils of the smoke, which curled lazily up through the cavernous interior of the warehouse, the sweet smell dissipating along the aisles of sour dust. The warehouse was on the Edgware Road, on the ragged hinterlands of an old industrial estate: judging from the smashed windows outside and the rows and rows of empty shelves inside, it had been abandoned for a good few years – but Coldwood had invited me to join him and a few uniformed friends for a legally authorised search, so it was a fair bet that appearances were deceptive.

‘Have you finished arsing around, Castor?’ he asked, fanning the smoke irritably away from his face. I don’t know if all this tact and diplomacy is something he was born with or if he just learned it at cop school.

I nodded distantly. ‘Almost,’ I said. ‘I have to intone the mantra another dozen or so times.’

Well, Jesus, you know? It was Saturday night, and I already had a heap of my own shit to cope with. When the Met calls, I answer, because they pay on the nose, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And anyway, I figure that if you give them a little showmanship they’ll be more impressed when you come up with the goods. Look, boys, I say in my own devious way, this is magic: it has to be, because it’s got smoke and mirrors. So far, Coldwood’s the only cop who’s ever called me on it, and that’s probably why we get along so well: I respect a man who can smell the bullshit through the incense.

But tonight he was in a bad mood. He hadn’t found a dead body in the warehouse, and that meant he didn’t know what he was dealing with just yet. Could be a murder, could just be their man doing a runner: and if it was a murder, that could be either a golden opportunity or six months of covert surveillance going up in aromatic smoke. So he wanted answers, and that made him less than usually tolerant of my sense of theatre.

I murmured a few variations on om mane padme om, and he kicked the heel of my shoe resonantly with his Met-issue heavy-duty policeman’s boot. I was sitting on the floor in front of him with my knees drawn up, so I suppose it could have been worse.

‘Just tell me if you can see anything, Castor,’ he suggested. ‘Then you can hum away to your heart’s content.’

I got up, slowly: slowly enough for Coldwood to lose patience and wander across to see if the forensics boys had managed to shag any prints from a battered-looking desk in the far corner of the room. He really wasn’t happy: I could tell by the way his angular face – reminiscent of Dick Tracey, if Dick Tracey’d had joined-up eyebrows and a skin problem – had subsided onto his lower lip, forcing it out into a truculent shelf. His body language was a bit of a give-away, too: whenever he finished waving and pointing, which he does when he gives orders, his right hand fell to the discreet shoulder holster he wore under his tan leather jacket, as if to check that it was still there. Coldwood hadn’t been an armed response unit for very long, and you could tell the novelty hadn’t worn off yet.

I ambled across the warehouse towards the door I’d come in through, away from the forensics team, watched curiously by two or three poor-bloody-infantry constables who were there to maintain a perimeter. Coldwood knows my tricks, and makes allowances for them, but to these guys I was obviously something of a sideshow. Ignoring them, I looked behind the filing cabinets that were ranged along the wall to the right of the door, banged on the cork noticeboard behind them, which had sheaves of dusty old invoices clinging to it like mangy fur, and turned the girlie calendars over to look at the bits of grey-painted breeze-block they were covering. Disappointingly, there was nothing there. No hidden doors, no wall-mounted safes: not even old graffiti.

I looked down at my feet. The floor of the warehouse was bare grey cement, but just here by the noticeboard and the filing cabinets there was a ragged rectangle of red linoleum – a psychedelic sunburst pattern, very retro-chic unless it had been there since the 1970s. I’d noticed another piece, with the same pattern, underneath the desk. Here, though, there were scuff marks in the dust where the lino had been moved in the recent past. I kicked down experimentally with my heel. There was a slightly hollow boom from underneath my feet.

‘Coldwood?’ I called over my shoulder.

He must have caught something in my voice – or else he’d heard the hollow note, too – because he was suddenly there at my elbow. ‘What?’ he asked suspiciously.

I pointed down at the lino. ‘Something here,’ I said. ‘Does this place have a cellar?’

Coldwood’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Not according to the plans,’ he said. He beckoned to two of the plods and they came over at a half-run. ‘Get this up,’ he told them, gesturing at the lino.

They had to move the filing cabinets first, and since the cabinets were full they took a bit of manhandling. I could have helped, but I didn’t want to get into an argument about demarcation. The linoleum itself rolled up as easy as shelling peas, though, and Coldwood swore under his breath when he saw the trapdoor underneath. It was obviously something he felt his boys should have spotted first.

It was about five feet square, and it lay exactly flush with the floor on three sides. On the fourth side, the hinges were sunk a centimetre or so into the surface, but it was a professional job with the narrowest of joins so no telltale lines would be trodden into the lino above. There was a keyhole on the left-hand side: a lozenge-shaped keyhole with no widening at the shank end, so this was most likely a Sargent and Greenleaf mortice – not an easy nut to crack.

Coldwood didn’t even bother to try: he sent two of the uniforms off to get some crowbars. With a great deal of manoeuvring, a few false starts, and a hail of splinters as the wood screamed and split, they finally succeeded in levering the entire lock plate out of its housing. Even then the bolt could scarcely be made to bend. The plate stood out of the trapdoor at a thirty-degree angle, rough star-shapes of broken wood still gripped by its corner screws: a wounded sentry who’d been sidestepped rather than defeated. Now that their moment in the spotlight was over, the plods stood back deferentially so that the sergeant could open the trapdoor himself. Coldwood did so, with a grunt of effort because the wood of the trap turned out to be a good inch thick.

Inside, there was a space about a foot deep, separated by three vertical plywood dividers into four compartments of roughly equal size. Three of the compartments were filled with identical brown-paper bags, about the size of Tate and Lyle sugar bags, all double-wrapped in plastic on top of the paper: the fourth was mostly full of black DVD sleeves, but two small notebooks with slightly oil-stained covers were sitting off in one corner. On the cover of the top one, written in thick black felt-tip capitals, were the two words GOODS IN. What the other said I couldn’t tell.

At a nod from the detective sergeant, the grab-and-dab boys gingerly fished up one of the bags and both of the notebooks with plastic-gloved hands and took them away to the desk, looking like kids at Christmas. Coldwood was still looking at me – a look that said the time for teasing was past. He wanted the whole story.

But so did I. I don’t prostitute my talents for just anyone, especially anyone with a rank and a uniform, and when I’m dragged into a situation I know sod all about I like to play just a little coy until I find my feet. So I threw him a question by way of an answer.

‘Is your man about six-two, stocky, ginger-haired, wearing Armani slacks and one of those poncey collarless jackets in a sort of olive brown?’

Coldwood made a sound in his throat that might have been a laugh if laughter was in his repertoire. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘Now stop playing Mystic Meg and tell me where he is.’

‘Tell me who he is,’ I countered.

‘Fuck! Castor, you’re a civilian adviser, so just do what you’re being paid to do, okay? You don’t get to look at my fucking case notes.’

I waited. This was my fifth or sixth outing with DS Coldwood, and we’d already established a sort of routine. But like I said, he wasn’t in the best of tempers right then – hence his attempt to lead me to water and then shove my head under it.

‘I could arrest you for withholding evidence and hindering an investigation,’ he pointed out darkly.

‘You could,’ I agreed. ‘And I’d wish you joy proving it.’

There was a short pause. Coldwood breathed out explosively.

‘His name’s Leslie Sheehan,’ he said, his tone flat and his face deadpan. ‘He deals whatever drugs he can get his hands on, plus some nasty fetish porn on the side as a bit of a hobby. That’s probably what those DVDs are all about. He’s maybe two steps up the ladder from the mules and the street runners, and he doesn’t matter a toss. But he answers to a man named Robin Pauley, who we’d dearly love to get our hands on. So we’ve spent the last six months watching Sheehan and building up a case against him because we think we can turn him. He narked before, about ten years back, to get out of a conspiracy-to-murder charge. When they’ve done it once, you’ve got a bit more of a handle on them. Only now he’s gone missing and we think Pauley may have sussed what we were up to.’

‘Sheehan won’t be talking now, in any case,’ I said, with calm and absolute conviction.

Coldwood was exasperated. ‘Castor, you’re not qualified even to have a fucking opinion on—’ he snarled. Then he got it. ‘Oh,’ he muttered, followed a second or so later by a bitter ‘Fuck!’ He was about to say something else, probably equally terse, when one of the lab rats called across to him.

‘Sergeant?’

He turned, brisk and expressionless. Always deal with the matter in hand: keep your imagination holstered like your side arm. Good copping.

‘It’s heroin,’ the tech boy said, with stiff formality. ‘More or less uncut. About ninety-five, ninety-six per cent pure.’

Coldwood nodded curtly, then turned back to me.

‘So I’m assuming Sheehan’s somewhere in here, is he?’ he asked, for the sake of form.

I nodded, but I needed to spell it out in case he got his hopes up. ‘His ghost is in here,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean his corpse is. I’ve told you before how this works.’

‘I need to see him,’ said Coldwood.

I nodded again. Of course he did.

Slipping a hand inside my greatcoat, I took out my tin whistle. Normally it would be a Clarke Original in the key of D, but some exciting events on board a boat a few months prior to this had left me temporarily without an instrument. The boat in question was a trim little yacht named the Mercedes, but if you’re thinking Henley Regatta you’re way off the mark: the wreck of the Hesperus would probably give you a better mental picture. Or maybe the Flying Dutchman. Anyway, as a result of that little escapade I ended up buying a Sweetone, virulently green in colour, and that had become my new default instrument. It didn’t feel as ready and responsive to my hand as the old Original used to, and it looked a bit ridiculous, but it was coming along. Give it another year or so and we’d probably be inseparable.

I put the whistle to my lips and blew G, C, A to tune myself in. I was aware that all the eyes in the room were focused on me now: Coldwood’s expressionless, most of the others bright with prurient interest – but one of the uniformed constables was definitely looking a little on the nervous side.

The trouble with what I was about to do was that it doesn’t always work: at best it’s fifty-fifty. There’s something about a rationalistic world view that arms you against seeing or hearing anything that would contradict it – like mermaids, say; or flying pigs; or ghosts. Overall, about two people in three can see at least some of the dead, but even then it depends a lot on mood and situation: and in certain professions that ratio drops to something very close to zero. Policemen and scientists cluster somewhere near the bottom of the league table.

I didn’t know what I was going to play until I blew the first notes. It might have been nothing much: just the skeleton of a melody, or an atonal riff with a rough-hewn kind of a pattern to it. It turned out to be a Micah Hinson number called ‘The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea’ – I’d seen Hinson perform at some café in Hammersmith, and I found something powerfully satisfying in the lilting harshness of his voice and the hammering, inescapable repetitions of his lyrics. But even without that, the song appealed to me for the title alone.

Nothing seemed to happen at first: but then, from my point of view nothing was going to. Hopefully the perspective from where Coldwood was standing was starting to look a bit different. Just before I hit the second chorus there was a gasp from one of the forensics officers over by the desk. Good. Then another one cried out aloud, and pointed, and I knew the plangent little tune had done the trick.

What they were pointing at was a man who was standing on nothing very much, in the exact centre of the well which the trapdoor had covered. He’d always been there, perfectly visible to me from the moment I’d walked in: but Coldwood’s boys had been walking past him and through him without so much as a premonitory shudder and a muttered ‘Hail Mary’, so I’d felt safe in assuming that I was the only one who could see him.

But the music had changed all that. This tune – at this time, in this place, played in this tempo and all the rest of it – was for me a description of the ghost. It’s a knack I’ve got: not just to see the dead, but to perceive them with a sense that’s nine-tenths hearing, one-tenth something I can only describe as else. I can catch the essence of a ghost in music, and once I’ve caught it there are other things I can do with it. One of them, which I’d discovered fairly recently and spectacularly, was to make other people see it, too.

So now the music was bringing this dead man inside the perceptual orbit of Coldwood and his coppers – which meant that they were seeing Sheehan’s ghost materialise out of that proverbially popular substance, thin air. The plods gaped, and the men in white coats visibly bridled and tensed as they saw this piece of superstition and unreason made manifest before their eyes. Coldwood has a more pragmatic cast of mind: he walked right up close to the ghost and began his examination. It stared at him with mournful, frightened eyes.

Leslie Sheehan clearly hadn’t been dead for very long, and he hadn’t had time yet to get used to the idea. He’d come here because ‘here’ was a place he had strong associations with – or possibly he’d just stayed here because this was where he’d died: but in either case, now that he’d materialised here that seemed to be the upper limit of his capabilities for the time being. He couldn’t reinsert himself into life because his phantasmal body couldn’t lift or move or touch any physical objects, and wouldn’t even reliably do what his phantasmal mind told it to. Some ghosts got trapped into re-enacting their deaths for the whole of eternity: others just stood, as Sheehan was doing now, looking lost and frightened – defeated and broken down by the no-longer-avoidable fact of their own mortality. He was aware of us, on some level, and his stare followed Coldwood as the sergeant squatted down on his haunches to get a better look at some detail that had caught his eye. But it was as if Sheehan was frozen to the spot: he couldn’t form the decision or the desire to move from where he was.

Coldwood pointed to the ligature around Sheehan’s bare forearm. ‘He was shooting up,’ he said, sounding disgruntled. ‘Stupid bastard’s gone and jolted himself over. Why didn’t he do it on his own fucking time?’

‘That was what I thought, too,’ I agreed. ‘But if you take a look at the back view you’ll probably want to amend that diagnosis.’

Coldwood favoured me with another expressive look. But he got up and strolled around the pathetic figure, where he stared with some surprise at the back of Sheehan’s head – or, to be more accurate, at the place where it had been. It mostly wasn’t there any more. The shade of Leslie Sheehan lost interest in the sergeant as soon as he passed out of sight: he lifted his hands and stared at them for a moment, then frowned and looked around as if he was trying to remember where his car keys were.

‘You’re the expert,’ I said, ‘but I’m guessing a bullet wound from a gun pressed against his temple just in front of the ear, angled a little backwards. If he was shot from behind, presumably most of his face would be an exit wound.’

‘It wasn’t a gun,’ muttered Coldwood. ‘It was one of those captive-bolt efforts they use to kill cows.’ He pointed. ‘The whole of the left side of the head has caved in, and most of the bone has stayed in the wound. You don’t get that pattern of damage with a high-velocity— hey, if you chuck up in here I’m having you on an effing charge!’

The last words weren’t addressed to me but to the uniformed copper who’d been looking a little peaky earlier. From where he was standing, the poor sod had an intimate perspective on some of Sheehan’s most private parts – the ones that had formerly been inside his skull. It didn’t seem to be agreeing with him much at all. At a curt nod from Coldwood he ran for the door.

Coldwood turned his attention back to me. ‘Where’s the body?’ he asked. ‘The real, physical body? Where can we find him?’

‘I don’t have a bastard clue,’ I answered truthfully. ‘I can ask him, if you like. But you might as well ask him yourself. He can see you. He could see you even when you couldn’t see him.’

‘But you’re the expert,’ he echoed me, with deft sarcasm.

‘Being an exorcist isn’t quite the same as being a detective,’ I shot back, deadpan. ‘I don’t have a badge I can wave at him – and it’s really difficult to kick the shit out of a man who’s already dead. But I’ll give it a go, if you leave me alone with him. I’m not doing it in front of your mob.’

Coldwood chewed that one over for a long moment. ‘Okay,’ he said, but he thrust a warning finger under my nose. ‘Touch the evidence and I’ll gut you, Castor. Understand me?’

‘I don’t need drugs,’ I said. ‘I can get high on death.’

With a muttered profanity, Coldwood signalled to his team to withdraw. It was nice and quiet after they’d gone, and I decided to let the new mood settle in for a minute or two before I tackled Mister Sheehan. I slipped my whistle into the purpose-built pocket I’d sewn into the lining of my coat – I go for a Russian army greatcoat because it hides a multitude of sins – and in another pocket nearby found a silver hip flask which was full of extremely rough Greek brandy. I took a swig and it expanded inside me like a fire inside a derelict building. It’s not good. Really not good at all. But at moments like this it bridges a gap and keeps me moving.

With a second mouthful swilling around my gums, I took another look at the calendars. Just the usual lad-mag soft porn: Abbie what’s-her-name, Suzie something else. But Sheehan’s tastes ran to material that was less vanilla, Coldwood had said. Well, he’d given up the pleasures of the flesh now, that was for damn sure. After doing this job for a decade or so, I still don’t know much about the afterlife – but I’m willing to lay long odds that the dead don’t get their end away very much.

There was no point in putting it off any more: Sheehan’s memory was probably as truncated as what was left of his head, so he must have forgotten Coldwood’s merry marching band by now. I pocketed the flask again and walked over to where the ghost was standing – his feet a few inches above the brown-paper bags, roughly where the floor had been. Like therapy, death reveals your deepest instincts: he was guarding his stash.

‘So,’ I said to him, conversationally. ‘You’re dead, then. How’s that working out?’

His eyes flicked over me, lingered, wandered off again. He was having a hard time staying focused, which perhaps wasn’t all that surprising.

‘Must have been a shock,’ I offered. ‘One moment you’re walking along, not a care in the world. The next some guy gets a headlock on you, drags you into an alley and ker-chunk: you’ve got daylight hitting your eyes from the back.’

Sheehan frowned and made a formless gesture with his right hand. His lips moved.

‘Takes a while even to realise what’s happened to you,’ I went on, commiserating. ‘You think, well, that was bad but here I am, thank God. And then the hours go by, and the doubts start to set in. Why am I still just standing here? How did I get here in the first place? What do I do next?

‘And the truth is, mate, you don’t get to do anything. Not now. Doing things is a luxury that the living have. The dead – well, mostly they just get to watch.’

Sheehan’s eyes widened. I didn’t know if that was my words getting past his guard or just the dim stirrings of memory in whatever he was using now for a mind. His hands twitched again, and this time when he spoke I could hear a dry whisper, like wind through grass.

‘Poor – poor –’

Self-pity is something you often get from the dead, and it’s not like you can really blame them for it. It doesn’t look like any of the options are all that attractive: even Heaven, if you take the majority view, is a state of oneness with God and perpetual praise of His goodness which must wear pretty thin after the first few hours, let alone the rest of eternity. On the other hand, this guy was a pusher and a porn merchant and fuck alone knew what else: I wasn’t wasting any sympathy, because you never know when you’re going to run out.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s very much a crock of shit. Some bastard really stiffed you, Sheehan. It’s almost worth believing in Hell so you can have the comfort of imagining him roasting in it.’

‘Poor – poor – poor –’

‘You said that. I agreed.’

‘Pauley!’ The name was barely audible, but I’ve got good ears and I was listening on all frequencies.

‘Pauley.’ I turned my back on him: best to distract him as little as possible now, because his attention deficit was probably only going to get worse. ‘Pauley topped you, did he? Well, that’s friends for you. Did it hurt, or was it all over too quick for you to notice?’

A long silence; then a hoarse, almost voiceless whisper. ‘H–h–hurt. Hurt me.’

‘Was this over at your place, then?’ I asked, my tone so relentlessly neutral that I must have sounded bored to death with the whole subject. ‘Knock on the door, bang, you’re dead, kind of thing? Or were you out on the town?’

There was a very long silence. I let it stretch. It sounded like the kind of silence that might have a pay-off at the end of it. ‘Bronze,’ Sheehan whispered. ‘Bronze.’ He made a sound like a moan stretched thin and hung up to cure – a moan with no bass to it, because the dead tend to have trouble hitting the low notes. ‘Buried.’

The silence after that final exhalation was different. When I turned around, I knew what I’d see: Sheehan was gone. Exhausted by the effort of speech, his physical manifestation had faded into random motes in the air: not matter, nor energy, nor anything that anyone had managed to trap or measure. He’d be back, given that he had nowhere else to go. But it wouldn’t be soon.

I went to the door and stepped outside onto the narrow ribbon of asphalt that separated the warehouse from the street. The only cars parked there were Coldwood’s tax-deductible Primera and three regular pig wagons. Coldwood was off to one side by himself, talking on his mobile phone. The plods and the back-room boys were in two separate cliques, responding atavistically to each other’s pheromones. There was a brisk wind coming down from the north, but at least it wasn’t raining any more. The sun was setting behind the brutalist high-rises of Colindeep Lane, and a huge mass of gun-grey cloud was pouring across the sky behind it like water down a drain.

Coldwood finished his conversation, put his phone away and came over to me. ‘Anything?’ he asked, in a tone that expected so little it couldn’t possibly be disappointed.

‘He fingered Pauley,’ I said. Coldwood’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. ‘At least, I think he did. And when I asked him where he died he said “bronze”. Then “buried”.’

‘Brondesbury,’ Coldwood translated. ‘Brondesbury Auto Parts. Christ, that’d be a bloody kiss on the cheek from God. If the body’s still there—’ He was already heading for his car at a fast stroll, dialling as he went. The uniformed coppers turned to follow him with their stares, awaiting orders with a sort of stolid urgency unique to the boys in blue, but Coldwood was talking on the phone again. ‘The bodywork place,’ he was snapping. ‘The one in Brondesbury Park. Get over there now. Yeah. Yes, get a warrant. But don’t wait. Get the place surrounded and don’t let any bugger in or out!’

‘I take it this is good news,’ I said to Coldwood’s back as he hauled the car door open. Sliding into the driver’s seat he spared me a microsecond glance. ‘That shop is in Pauley’s name,’ he said, with a nasty smile. ‘We’ve already got probable cause. If we can get a search warrant, and if the body’s still there, we can raid all of his other gaffs and really get some action going.’ His gaze snapped from me to a uniformed constable who’d just stepped up behind me – the one who’d had to run outside to be sick. ‘MacKay, take Castor’s statement and fax it on to DC Tennant at Luke Street.’ The car window was already sliding closed as he said it, making any reply redundant. Then Coldwood was out onto the road and gone, trailing a whiff of tortured rubber.

Having my statement taken was very much adding insult to injury, but it was an invitation of the kind that’s hard to refuse. I went over the events of the evening while Constable MacKay wrote them down in laborious longhand, culminating in what Sheehan’s ghost had said to me when I interrogated him in my official capacity as ghostbuster general. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sang-froid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckoned he had the right stuff to be an officer.

Nothing wrong with his observational skills, though: after a while, he noticed that I was getting fidgety, and that there was an edge creeping into my tone when I was repeating myself for the third or fourth time on some minor detail like where I’d been standing when I said X or Y.

‘Got somewhere else you need to be?’ he asked aggressively.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That’s it exactly.’

‘Oh, right. Hot, is she?’ He favoured me with the kind of pruriently suggestive leer that cops and squaddies get issued on day one along with their boots.

I really wasn’t in the mood. ‘It’s a he,’ I said. ‘He’s a demonically possessed psychopath, and he tends to run a core temperature about eight degrees higher than the bog standard ninety-eight point four. So yeah, I think you could safely say he’s hot.’

MacKay put his notebook away, giving me a stare of truculent suspicion: he’d felt the breeze of something going over his head, and he didn’t like it. ‘Well, I don’t think we need anything else from you right now,’ he said, sternly. ‘The sergeant will probably be in touch again later on, though, so you keep yourself available, yeah?’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll contact him on the astral plane.’

‘Eh?’ The suspicion had turned to frank alarm.

‘Skip it,’ I muttered over my shoulder as I walked away. It wasn’t MacKay’s fault that my Saturday night was up the Swanee. That was down to nobody but me, which is never as much consolation as it ought to be.

The weekend is meant to be a time when you unwind from the stresses of the week that’s gone and recharge your batteries for the shit-storm to come. But not for me; not tonight. The place I was going on to now made this God-spurned dump look positively cosy.