Vicious Circle

3

Harlesden is like Kilburn without the scenic beauty – it’s the stamping ground of Jamaican gangsters with itchy trigger fingers, predatory minicab drivers whose cars are their offices, and a great nation of feral cats. Oh, and zombies: for some reason, those who’ve risen in the body seem to congregate in large numbers on the deserted streets of the soon-to-be-demolished Stonehouse Estate. It’s a setting that shows them off to very good advantage.

My office is in Craven Park Road, next to the Grambas Kebab House – or rather, my door is next to their door. The actual room where I conduct my meagre and occasional business is on the first floor, directly over Grambas’s eternally bubbling deep-friers. On bad days I can see an intimation of Hell in that image.

At this time the sign over the door still read F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS, but these days that’s a pretty outrageous lie. I’m not quite as free and easy as I used to be about toasting ghosts: I can’t even remember the last time I did it, which on the whole is probably a good thing. But a man needs to have some stock-in-trade, and God didn’t give me the shoulders or the temperament for hard labour. So I’d finally taken a step that I’d been considering for a while now – and it looked like today would be the day that made it official.

At ten on a rain-sodden May morning, Grambas hadn’t even hefted the first doner yet. I knocked on his door and waited, wondering if he was awake. I got my answer when the window above and to the right of my head opened and a shiny bald head was thrust out of it. A pair of watery brown eyes stared down at me, taking their time to focus. To the waist, which mercifully was as far as I could see, Grambas was naked.

‘Fuck,’ he said thickly. ‘It never stops. Come back at noon, Castor.’

‘Throw me down the keys,’ I suggested. ‘I only need to get that package out of the lock-up.’

He sighed heavily, nodded and withdrew. The keys came flying out of the window a few moments later, and I almost went under the wheels of an ice-cream van as I stepped backwards to catch them. I went into the alley alongside the shop and let myself into the backyard through a door whose hinges were only held together by rust. The lock-up, though, has a stout steel-reinforced door and three padlocks: Grambas knows his neighbours well, and though he forgives them their vices he doesn’t see a need to finance them.

I took the padlocks off and left them hanging open in their eye-bolts. It comes naturally to me to assess the professional credentials of any locks I encounter: I learned lock-picking from a master, and though the world has moved on into realms of electronic key-matching and double-redundant combination codes, I’m still okay with the bog-standard stuff that most people use. One of these three locks was generic, without even a manufacturer’s mark; the second was a venerable Squire, and the third was a sexy little beast from the Master Lock titanium series. Numbers one and two I could have handled without a key any day of the week, but for number three I’d have needed a very long run-up indeed. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it, but there’d have had to be a damn good reason why I was trying.

Inside, the lock-up was obsessively, immaculately clean. One wall was piled almost to the ceiling with neatly stacked boxes: on the other side, three chest freezers stood in a row like coffins. My package lay on the floor in the middle, with the single word CASTOR scrawled across it in thick black marker pen. It was five feet long, one foot broad and only an inch or so thick. I picked it up, and borrowed Grambas’s toolbox on my way out. Mine consists of three spanners and a ball of string, and I last saw it in 1998. I snapped the padlocks back on again behind me and went back around to the street.

I’d had the new sign made to the exact measurements of the old one, so this was a job that was just about within the scope of my meagre DIY skills. I could even use the same screws, apart from one that had rusted through and therefore snapped off as I was getting it out. In spite of that minor setback, and the rain coming on heavier while I worked, within the space of about ten minutes F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS had become FELIX CASTOR SPIRITUAL SERVICES. I looked at it with a certain satisfaction. It was a circumlocution I was stealing from a dead man, but hey, he’d died trying to kill me and he’d thieved from me on occasion too, so I wasn’t going to beat myself up about that. The important thing was that I wasn’t an offence to the Trades Descriptions Act any more. Now I just had to sit back and wait for the clients to start pouring in.

As to what spiritual services were, exactly, I’d worry about that some other time. I was sure I’d know them when I saw them.

When I took Grambas’s toolbox back round to the yard, he was coming out of the lock-up carrying a gallon drum of frying oil in each hand. He stopped when he saw me, and put them down. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘You got a customer. Two, in fact.’

I raised my eyebrows. That was a novelty these days. ‘When?’ I demanded.

‘This morning. About seven o’clock. They were standing in the rain out there when Maya came back from the wholesaler. She felt sorry for them. In fact, she wouldn’t stop feeling sorry for them and she wouldn’t shut up about it, so in the end I put some pants on and went down. They were still there, waiting for you to show. I told them they should leave a number and I’d call them when you turned up.’ He dug in his pocket and fished out a table napkin, which he handed to me. There was a phone number written across it in Grambas’s lopsided, up-and-down handwriting.

‘What did they look like?’ I asked him.

‘Wet.’

In the office I did the usual triage on the utilities bills and the usual ruthless cull on the rest of the mail, most of which was of the kind where you can tell it’s a scam or a speeding fine without even opening the envelope. The phone messages took longer, and some of those I had to follow up with calls of my own, but none of them were what you could call work. Not paying work, anyway. There was one from Coldwood asking me to call him, but I decided I’d put that off until later in the day. There was one from Pen, telling me that Coldwood had called the house, too, about five minutes after I left.

And there was one from Juliet.

‘Hello, Felix.’ I was rummaging in the filing cabinet, but that voice – plucking on the bass strings of my nervous system – brought me upright and turned me around to face the phone as though she might actually be there. ‘I want your advice on something. It’s a little unusual, and I’d like you to see it for yourself. You’d have to get over to Acton, though, so I’ll understand if you say no. Call me.’

I did. Juliet, I should point out, is only a professional acquaintance of mine. True, I’d crawl on my belly to Jerusalem to turn that business relationship into something more torrid and sweat-streaked, but so would any other man who met her and I’d guess more than half of the women. She’s a succubus (retired): getting people aroused and not thinking straight is part of how her species hunts and feeds.

Call return didn’t work, but I had Juliet’s number written down on a card that I carried in my wallet: like I said earlier, I almost never used it, because there was almost never any point. She stayed – nominally – in a room at a women’s refuge in Paddington. (It had struck me as odd, at first, but it made a crazy kind of sense: men had abused her and controlled her until she got out from under and devoured them body and soul.) In reality, though, the room was just a place where she stored her few belongings: she didn’t need to sleep, and she liked the open air, so she never spent much time there herself.

Her phone rang for long enough for me to consider giving up, but it’s rare enough to get a ring tone rather than the busy signal, so I held out. It’s not really her phone at all: it’s in the communal kitchen of the refuge, shared by all two dozen or so of the residents. After a minute or so it was finally picked up: by Juliet herself, so my luck was in again. I made a mental note to buy a lottery ticket.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘What’s the deal?’

‘Oh, hello, Felix. Thanks for getting back to me.’

‘Well, I’m still your sensei, right? Can’t leave you running around on your own out there.’

This was one of the more ridiculous aspects of our relationship. Juliet – her real name is Ajulutsikael – had originally been raised from Hell to kill and devour me because I was asking awkward questions that a pimp named Damjohn didn’t want answered. But then she decided that living on Earth was preferable to going home to the arse-end of Hell, so she bailed out on the job and let me live – on condition that I taught her the exorcism game. So I found myself giving a work-experience placement and tax advice to an entity several thousands of years old, who if she ever got the munchies during the working day could suck my soul out through any bodily orifice or appurtenance she chose. It had been interesting. Many years from now I might even get an unbroken night’s sleep again.

‘So is this work, or what is it?’ I went on, pushing those memories firmly back down into the fetid oubliette of my subconscious.

‘I have a commission,’ she said, sidestepping the question. ‘At a church in West London. Saint Michael’s, on Du Cane Road – it’s right opposite Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘And—?’

‘And I’d like a second opinion on something.’

‘Are you being deliberately oblique and mysterious?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll come on over when I’m done here. Is around six okay?’

‘Perfect. Thank you, Felix. It’s been a long time. I look forward to seeing you.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Likewise. Catch you later, Jules.’

I hung up. Damn if I wasn’t sweating. Just her voice, and I was sweating.

I had to get my mind onto another track. Remembering Grambas’s napkin I took it out of my pocket: the numbers were slightly smeared by raindrops from when he’d passed it to me in the yard, but they were still legible. The first digits were 07968, so it was obviously a mobile.

I dialled.

‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, hesitant and over-careful, as if he expected bad news.

‘This is Felix Castor,’ I said. ‘You called by my office this morning.’

‘Mister Castor!’ The sudden excitement added a whole new palette of colours to the guy’s voice. I wish I could have that effect on some of the women I meet. ‘Thank you for getting back to us. Thanks so much. Are you at your office now?’

‘Yes, I am. If you’d like to arrange an appointment—’

‘We’ll be right there. I’m sorry, I mean can we come and see you now? We’re very close by. Would that be convenient?’

I considered a face-saving lie: it’s never a great idea to let a client see that you’re instantly available, because they draw all sorts of inferences about your case load. On the other hand, it didn’t sound like I’d be having to work too hard to sell myself here.

So: ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Come on over.’

They introduced themselves as Melanie and Stephen Torrington – Mel and Steve. Nice people. I could see why Grambas’s fiancée, Maya, had instinctively sympathised. They both looked to be in their late thirties, well dressed and well groomed, affluent but not making a whole big thing out of it. Actually, there might have been one other thing that triggered the sympathy, and I was surprised that Grambas hadn’t mentioned it. The whole of the left side of Melanie’s face was a purple mass of bruising, her eye swollen half out of its socket.

Stephen was tall and blond with a rich tan that could even have been natural, although he sure as hell hadn’t gotten it in Harlesden: his slate-grey eyes could have given his face a hard cast, but the expression – self-effacing, open, slightly nervous – took a lot of the edge off it. He wore a nicely cut dark-grey suit – too nice, and with too good a hang, to have come off the rack – and a sky-blue tie with a lacquered tiepin in the shape of a judge’s gavel. He also had a black plastic bin-liner full of something or other, clutched tightly in both hands so that he had to put it down to shake my hand. The bin-liner didn’t exactly go with the ensemble, but I figured we’d get to it in due course. And the handshake, which I’d hoped might give me some measure of the man underneath the tan, told me almost nothing. Sometimes whatever sense it is that lets me spy on the dead lets me overhear the emotions of the living, too, through skin-to-skin contact. From Stephen Torrington I got nothing but a burning thread of determination that overrode everything else.

Melanie was also blonde, and also tall – a match made in Heaven, obviously, or at least at some very exclusive country club on the way to Heaven – and judging from the intact side, she had a beautifully sculpted face with aristocratic cheekbones and vivid blue eyes dusted with flecks of a lighter shade, like highlights. The ugly, swollen tissue on the left side sort of ruined the effect, though. She looked as though she’d been in a bad car accident – or as though someone had bounced her off a wall.

Like Steve, she was immaculately dressed and exuded wealth and status. Like him, she seemed to be locked inside a sarcophagus of dense emotion that I felt would have rung aloud if I’d tapped it with a finger. She kept her arms rigidly folded, hugging herself as if for comfort. The handshake here revealed complex, overlapping skeins of positive and negative affect: fear, pride, shame, ferocious love, more fear – a cat’s cradle of emotions that shouldn’t make it into each other’s company.

Steve said he was a solicitor for a family firm in Stoke Newington – not quite a partner, but almost there. Melanie was a barrister, which was how they’d met. They’d been married for eighteen years. This paltry small talk was as stiff and awkward as if I’d been asking them where and how they’d contracted syphilis.

Things were going to be awkward in other ways too: with three people in it, my office was already feeling a little crowded. Add to that the fact that the milk I’d left in the portable fridge had soured, turned green and mutated into a new life form since the last time I was here, and I’d had to hide the fungus-sprouting mugs behind the filing cabinet, and my professional façade was hanging even more askew than it usually does: once I’d got them sitting down I couldn’t even offer them coffee.

Straight down to business, then.

‘What can I do for you?’ I asked.

‘Our daughter,’ Mel mumbled, her voice slurred and thickened slightly by the swelling on the left side of her jaw. Having said that, she seemed to run out of words.

‘Abbie.’ Steve took up the account. ‘Abigail. She’s gone missing.’ Where Mel’s voice had been carefully, rigidly flat, his was so full of formless emotion it almost sounded strangled. He fished in his wallet and took out something small and rectangular, which he handed to me. I took it and flipped it over so it was right side up for me: it was a photograph, passport-sized, of a girl. About thirteen or fourteen years old, judging by face and build; long, straight blonde hair of the kind that gets called ‘flyaway’ on shampoo bottles; an awkward, apologetic smile. Around her neck, a gold pendant in the shape of a heart. There was something in her eyes . . . something a little sad and haunted. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe my memory inserted that nuance, in the light of what happened afterwards.

‘I’m really sorry to hear that,’ I said, meaning it about as much as anyone does in those circumstances. These were just strangers, after all, and Abigail was just a name. ‘How long ago?’

That’s a stupid habit I’ve got: when I can’t think of anything else to say, I start in with the questions like a doctor looking to make a diagnosis.

Steve looked to Mel to answer, and again she seemed hard put to it to frame words. ‘Saturday,’ she said, hesitantly, as if picking her way across some inner minefield. ‘The day before yesterday. That was the last time we saw her, and there was – something else that happened then. Something that we think might be connected.’ I registered the ‘might’, which seemed a little odd, and I was about to pin that one down, when Steve spoke up again.

‘We want you to find her for us, Mister Castor.’

I’d already jumped to a different conclusion, and I had my mouth open on the first words of a speech I’d made a hundred times before, so I was caught a little off balance. I closed my mouth, looking from the man to the woman and back again while I tried to think of something else to say.

Most people in the Torringtons’ position would be looking for some kind of reassurance that Abigail was still on the right side of the grave: that’s a service that a lot of exorcists offer, whether they can make good on the promise or not. I was about to say yes: yes, I’d look for Abbie’s spirit, try to find out if it was still inside her body, but with a whole long string of caveats and provisos – because even with the wind at my back and the right kind of focus object I can only find a spirit if it’s there to be found. Some people depart very quickly after death and never come back, so only the sloppiest of cowboy operators assumes that the absence of a ghost is proof positive that someone is still alive.

Anyway, that had all gone out the window. Now I had a different proposition on my plate – and a different set of options. I could still take the job on, if I was so inclined. There are ways of finding living people which are (putting this as neutrally as I can) only open to members of my profession: but I don’t tend to use them. Rafi aside, I don’t traffic with demons, and I don’t raise the dead so that I can shake them down for information. Generally speaking, if someone’s sleeping quietly in the grave I leave them there. That’s the closest thing I have to an ethical standard.

So that left the other option: letting the Torringtons down without too much of a bump.

‘I don’t normally do missing-persons work,’ I said. It sounded lame, I knew, and it sounded cold. I tried again. ‘You’ve called the police, I’m sure, and they’re already doing all they can. What I could add to that would be – minimal, and pretty haphazard. I think maybe you ought to see what they can turn up before you start putting out feelers of your own. Or at least, you should discuss it with the officer who’s in charge of the case. I know that’s cold comfort, but they do know what they’re doing.’

Into the strained silence that followed, Mel made the lips-parting sound that means someone is about to speak: but then she didn’t.

Steve filled the gap. ‘There is no police investigation,’ he said, looking like he was biting down on something bitter.

I blinked. ‘There isn’t? Well then, I’d say that’s the first thing you need to—’

‘Abbie is already dead.’

Ever the consummate professional, I didn’t actually allow my jaw to unravel all the way to the ground. It took a little effort, though, and there was a strained pause during which the statement just hung in the air, disturbing and palpable. ‘You’d better run that by me again,’ I said at last.

Melanie shook her head, as if her mind was automatically refusing – even while she spoke – to go back over this ground again. ‘She died on a school trip to Cumbria, last summer,’ she said, her voice if anything even deader and harder than before. ‘An accident. Three girls fell into a river – Abbie, and two of her friends. It was in spate. The current was very strong.’

‘They were swept away before anyone could get to them.’ Steve picked up the narrative, sounding angry; but it sounded like an old anger, much rehearsed now and very much sick of itself. ‘They shouldn’t have been anywhere near the water in the first place. They had no chance. No chance at all.’

They both fell into silence, looking away from me and from each other: I could see that this was still raw, after most of a year. It would probably still be raw after most of a life. ‘But she came back,’ I prompted. I was starting to get the picture now: it was a bleak and sad one, executed mainly in greys – but then, I don’t get to see many that are in bright primaries.

Steve nodded. ‘Yes, she came back. About three months later. We were in her room.’

‘Cleaning out her things?’ I hazarded, but he shook his head fiercely. ‘Just sitting. In her room. And I – I suddenly felt that we weren’t alone. That somebody had come in, and was standing quite close to us. I couldn’t see anything, but I just knew.’ He smiled a very faint, very tired smile. ‘I turned to Mel, and said “Can you feel it?” Something like that. She thought I’d gone mad. But then she nodded. Yes. She was getting it too.

‘That was what it was like, at first. You just had to stand in a certain spot, and you could sense her. It was almost as though you could smell her breath. And about a week after that we started seeing her. Always out of the corner of our eye, at first – never when we actually turned to look at her. It was as though she was coming back to us slowly, from a long way away. We kept waiting, and she kept getting closer. Then we could hear her voice, some nights, calling out goodnight to us from her room when we were getting into bed. We shouted goodnight back, as though—’

He paused, and Mel came in on cue. I got the impression, just for a moment, that they’d told this story before, and I wondered if they’d tried out many other exorcists before they got to me. ‘—As though she was still alive. As though nothing had happened.’

‘It seemed to be the best way to make her stay,’ said Steve. ‘I’d stand at the sink, in the evening, washing up from dinner, and she’d start up a conversation from behind me. I didn’t look around. I chatted back to her. Told her about what was happening at work, and – and with her friends. Told her jokes.’

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again and stared at me as if he was expecting some kind of a challenge. After a moment, a single tear made its slow, meandering way down his cheek. He looked like a man who’d find it hard to cry, and I felt, just for a moment, the guilty twinge of a reluctant voyeur. ‘I know how strange this must sound, Mister Castor,’ Steve Torrington said. ‘But having her back was what stopped us from falling apart after losing her. We went back to being a family again.’ He shrugged – a minuscule twitch of his shoulders that spoke volumes. I could see exactly how that would work. And given all the other places that ghosts can end up haunting, the bosom of the family seemed close enough to Heaven to make no difference.

Which was maybe the point, a clinical, dispassionate voice pointed out from the back of my mind. For ghosts, happiness is a double-edged proposition.

I put it as gently as I could. ‘Sometimes – I’d even say often – what keeps the dead here on Earth is a feeling that there’s something they still have to do. Other times it’s just the fear and pain of passing over, or some other strong emotion like anger.’ I was trying to present this to them in a particular way, so that they could see it as what it was – a kind of happy ending. ‘It usually tends to be something negative, anyway. Most ghosts are hurting, on some level. I think – if you made Abbie feel as safe and welcome and loved as you probably did – she may just have gone on to whatever comes next.’ I wouldn’t bring Heaven into the equation: I’m an atheist myself, as I think I may already have mentioned – mostly because I can’t handle the contradiction of an omnipotent God coming up with a world as badly thrown together as this one. A couple of CORGI-approved gas fitters could have done a better job. ‘She may be somewhere else now – somewhere where she should have gone to straight away, after she died. The extra time you had with her was a gift, and, you know, a comfort – but it was never going to last. The dead aren’t that durable, most of the time.’

I stopped. Steve was shaking his head very emphatically – almost angrily – but he didn’t speak. Instead he turned to look expectantly at Mel, whose stare was fixed on the desk. Evidently this part of the story fell to her; and evidently she knew it.

‘There’s something else,’ she said, and swallowed hard. ‘I met a man. Three years ago.’ She darted a quick glance at me, to see how much I’d infer just from those words. I stared back at her, deadpan. I prefer to have the i-dotting and t-crossing done for me. ‘He was . . . a client. Someone I was representing.’

‘A man in your line of business,’ Steve supplied.

‘An exorcist?’

‘Yes, exactly. An exorcist.’

Mel was looking at Steve with a curious expression now: tense, supplicating, submissive. I wondered whether he’d given her that bruise in the course of a marital disagreement that had turned ugly. Three years ago . . . did that count as ancient history or current affairs in this marriage? He didn’t look like the wife-beater type. But then, most wife-beaters don’t.

As if to shame me for having those suspicions, his arm curled around her shoulders and he drew her close, kissing her on the top of her head because the side of her face that was closest to him was the bruised side.

‘You don’t have to put yourself through this,’ he said softly – so softly I could barely hear him. ‘I’m not blaming you. You know I’m not blaming you?’

Mel nodded, gaze on the ground.

‘Do you want to go and wait in the car?’

She nodded again, and he removed his arm, kissing her again.

Mel stood. ‘I hope . . .’ she said, flashing a wild look at me. ‘I hope you can help us, Mister Castor.’ Then she gave a jerky shrug, turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

A heavy silence fell. I decided to let Torrington break it.

‘The man’s name was Dennis Peace,’ he said at last, his tone mild – but mild with an undertow. ‘Perhaps you know him?’

I shook my head. Maybe a vague echo, but ghostbusters aren’t that community-minded. And even when we do meet up, we don’t always bother to exchange names or sniff each other’s backsides. The echo was an interesting one, though: something about a fight that ended badly. I’d have to try to pin it down later because Steve was still talking.

‘He was being sued over an exorcism that had gone wrong: the ghost wasn’t bound properly, and it did a lot of damage to the house it was in. He said it had “gone geist”, and that that happens sometimes, no matter how careful you are.’

Firmer ground again: I welcomed it like an old friend. ‘That’s why it’s in the standard contract,’ I agreed. ‘The exorcist is responsible for any damage he directly causes, but not for the damage that the ghost does in the course of the binding. It should have been open-and-shut, provided he’d given them a contract in the first place.’ I was a fine one to talk: I never bothered with any of that legal paraphernalia myself, although I knew only too well how important it could be to have a safety net if things went bad.

‘If there’d been a contract, I’m sure everything would have been fine, as you say. Mister Peace preferred to work on a handshake, I gather, so it was a lot tougher than it seemed. Anyway, Mel ended up representing him, and she decided to plead custom and practice: the plaintiff had employed another exorcist before, knew the standard terms, et cetera. She didn’t win.

‘But she did spend a lot of time with Peace, while she was preparing the case.’ There was a hardness in Torrington’s tone now. ‘I think, from what she’s said since, that she enjoyed talking to him because he belonged to a world she’d never seen before. He was almost like an action hero in some Hollywood blockbuster. She – was attracted to him, and they had a relationship. Briefly. It was the only time. The only time, ever. I’m absolutely convinced of that. And she knew even while she was doing it that it couldn’t be right. She ended it after about two months. There was a scene – a very unpleasant, traumatic one – but in the end Peace accepted that she didn’t want to see him again. And then, when it was all over and she had time to think about what she’d done—’ There was a long pause. ‘She told me all about it, and she asked me to forgive her. Which I did. Absolutely. Because she’d been absolutely honest. We agreed that we’d never even talk about it again.’

I waited. There was presumably a point to this story, but I couldn’t see what it was yet.

‘After Abbie died – I mean, after she came back—’ Steve’s voice dropped again, so that I had to strain to hear it. ‘Mel made the mistake of calling Dennis to ask him what we should do.’

‘Why was that a mistake?’ I asked.

‘Because he took it as a hint that she wanted to get back together with him again.’ Steve laughed, shaking his head incredulously. ‘Our daughter had just died, and she was close to a breakdown, and he was asking her to meet up with him. He booked a hotel room in Paddington. He suggested Mel should tell me he was going to hold a seance for Abbie, and then spend the night there with him. She told him to go and fuck himself.’ The guttural harshness in Steve’s voice came out of nowhere, but it seemed to fit the mood of the moment. He blinked very quickly a few times, as if fighting another outburst of tears. ‘But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He kept on calling her. He booked appointments with her at chambers, which she had to cancel. Then he waited for her after work a few nights. He said they had to talk about their relationship, where it was going. She told him they didn’t have a relationship. She told him to leave her alone. He threatened to tell me what had happened between them, but of course she’d already done that, long before.’

Steve locked stares with me again. ‘As time went on, Mel began to be afraid that Peace was having some kind of psychological breakdown,’ he said, his mouth quirking down at the corners as if with distaste. ‘She was afraid.’

He did something bizarre at this point: he reached down, opened the neck of the black bag and peered inside, as if checking its contents gave him some kind of reassurance. Then he closed it again and carried on talking as if nothing had happened.

‘Mel never hid any of this from me. And when it got to this stage I got one of my colleagues to send him a letter on the firm’s paper, telling him that we’d get an injunction against him if he didn’t leave Mel alone. In the old days that would have meant a court order, but I was pretty sure I could actually nail him with an ASBO – which would have meant prison if he didn’t play nicely.

‘But he wouldn’t get the message. He called Mel again, at work and at home, and I knew I was going to have to put my money where my mouth was. We’d already complained to the police, which had got us precisely nowhere, but at least it meant we had a case number. With that and an incident log, you can apply for a court order on your own initiative, so that’s what I did.

‘But then on Saturday – two days ago – he turned up at the house. He seemed drunk. Out of control. But most drunks I’ve seen are lethargic so perhaps he was high on something else. When I opened the door he pushed past me – he’s a much bigger, heavier man than I am – and demanded to talk to Mel. I picked up the phone to call the police: he ripped it out of the wall. Then he headed for the stairs. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and I was a little slow to react. But I went after him, and I tackled him.

‘Mel was upstairs, in the bedroom, and she heard all this row – Peace shouting, me shouting back, all the thuds and scuffles. She ran out onto the landing and she saw us on the stairs, wrestling with each other. She saw me go down. I’m not much of a fighter, despite my build, and even if I was I couldn’t fight the way he fought. He punched me in the stomach, then kicked me in the same place when I went down. Kicked me again and again, until my muscles seemed to lock and I couldn’t make myself breathe in. And the pain – I think I passed out.

‘Mel says she screamed at that point, and Dennis looked up at her. That may have saved my life, because he forgot all about me and went after her. He climbed over me and went on up the stairs. And he said – I know this is hearsay evidence, Mister Castor, but I doubt any of this will ever come to court – he said “You’re coming back to me, bitch. You’re going to beg to come back to me.”

‘She ran back into the bedroom and locked the door. Her bag was in there, and her mobile was in the bag, so she was going to call the police. But she didn’t get the chance. Peace pushed the door in with his shoulder – the lock was a flimsy little thing and it just tore right out of the wood. He – he beat—’

Throughout this recitation, Torrington had been getting more and more agitated. Now he faltered into silence, trembling. I stood up, with some idea of offering him a glass of water, but he waved me away: he didn’t want my solicitude.

‘He beat her,’ he said. ‘You saw her face? Her back and side and her left arm all look the same. And then he ransacked the room. Pulling out drawers and tipping the contents onto the floor, hauling all the clothes out of the wardrobes. When Mel tried to reach for her phone again he stamped on it – smashed it into pieces. If she hadn’t snatched her hand away he’d have crushed that too.

‘He seemed to be looking for something, and not finding it. And he was getting more and more frustrated, more and more out of control. Eventually he just turned and walked out of the room again. Mel ran after him, and saw him going into Abbie’s room.

‘We’d never . . . never changed anything in there. Mel tackled him again when he started wrecking Abbie’s things, and he turned on her in a rage. He started to strangle her.

‘Then he threw her down on the bed, and she thought that he was going to rape her. But he didn’t. He just went on searching. And this time he must have found what he was looking for, because he left. Mel was too terrified by now to try to stop him a third time. But as soon as she heard the door slam she called the police, and then she went down onto the stairs to tend to me.’

‘You said the police weren’t involved,’ I pointed out.

Steve gave a bitter snort that might have been intended as a laugh. ‘I said the police weren’t looking for Abbie,’ he corrected me. ‘We hadn’t even realised . . . We told them about the assault, the damage, and we said we could identify the man who’d done it. They said they’d issue a warrant, and we’d hear in due course. Then when they’d gone, and we were trying to put the place back into some kind of order, we noticed . . . that Abbie wasn’t there. But we thought she’d just been frightened away by the noise, and the violence, and she’d come back later.

‘By the evening we were really starting to miss her. She didn’t answer when we called, and we couldn’t feel her the way we usually do. Because she was gone. It was Abbie that Peace was looking for. And he’d taken her. Somehow he’d taken her away with him.’

Steve Torrington fell silent, gripping the neck of the bag tightly in both white-knuckled hands. And the silence lengthened, because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

I’d never even heard of a ghost being kidnapped before. It sounded so unlikely, so grotesque, that I still resisted the idea. Ghosts can’t be packaged and shipped like groceries or worn and carried like accessories. Mostly they can’t move at all outside of a fixed compass. Someone here had to be the voice of reason, and it was asking too much to expect that degree of detachment from Torrington himself.

‘You assume he took her,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. ‘It could be, as I said, that she left because her time here was—’

‘Peace called Mel.’ There was a tremor in Torrington’s voice, and he was still looking down at the black bag, still holding on to it as though it was some kind of lifeline. ‘About two hours later. He wasn’t making much sense, but he said “You’ll have to come back to me now, won’t you? Because you can’t have her if you don’t have me. We’ll all be together.” She didn’t know what he was talking about. She hung up. She just hung up. And afterwards we realised. We knew.’

Okay, that was something pretty hefty in the way of circumstantial evidence. My mind flicked off onto an irresistible tangent. Could it be done? Could it be slickly, smoothly done? Breaking and entering, and grand theft spiritual? Ghosts – most ghosts – haunt a particular place. It might be the place where they died, or where they were buried, or it could just be some spot to which they had strong associations in life. That’s their anchor. They can move a little way away from it: in some cases a couple of hundred yards, but except in a few special cases like the little girl ghosts I set free at the Stanger, I’ve never heard of it being more. So how would you take a ghost away from its anchor and walk away with it? Maybe . . . yeah, maybe there was a way that I could see. But I knew for a fact that it was something I couldn’t do myself.

I was getting dangerously interested. The very weirdness of the situation appealed to my varied and prurient curiosities. But I generally hold to Dirty Harry’s dictum that a man should know his limitations.

‘I still think the police are your best option,’ I said. ‘They can find Peace a lot easier than I can. And I think they’ll take a complaint seriously. He broke into your house, after all, and he threatened you.’

Torrington was staring at me with a bleak, slightly accusing expression on his face. He knew when he was being snowed.

‘And what if they do find him?’ he asked, his voice harsh. ‘Will they find Abbie, too? Can they bring her back for us?’

He had me there. All I could do was shrug, which felt pusillanimous even to me. Okay, he was right. Even a relatively good cop like Coldwood, if something like this fell into his lap, would be helpless running a search for something he couldn’t see, hear or touch: especially a cop, because there’s that whole blind-deaf-and-dumb pragmatism thing I already mentioned. Conversely, if I was anywhere close to where Abbie was, I’d at least have ways of knowing I was close, and maybe taking a bearing. So there was a chance that I could help these people: a chance that I’d be able to run Peace down, and that I’d know what I was looking for when I saw it. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was there: and if this didn’t count as a spiritual service, then what the Hell did?

On the other hand, bringing Abbie back was going to be a much tougher proposition than finding her: I doubted I’d be able to appeal to Peace’s better nature, assuming he even had one. And since I didn’t know exactly how you went about kidnapping a ghost, I didn’t know how you went about bringing her safely home, either. And then there was all the collateral stuff: I’d have to check the Torringtons’ story out as far as I could before I got any distance into this. And I’d have to decide what the hell I should charge them, because this fell way outside even the fuzzy logic of my usual tariff.

Once I start coming up with commonsensical points like that, it usually means I’m trying to talk myself out of something I’ve already decided to do. But this time, reality reasserted itself. There was no point in taking on a job I couldn’t do and adding to the Torringtons’ trauma by building up their hopes and then kicking them down again.

Steve Torrington was still looking at me, so I had to say something.

‘Well,’ I temporised, ‘you’ve probably got a point there. But if it comes to that, I don’t know if I can be of any more use to you than the police could.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘How could you know, until you’ve tried?’

Which was throwing the ball back into my court with a vengeance. I tried to lob it back. ‘It’s not that straightforward, Mister Torrington. Not like changing a car tyre, or –’ I cast around for a metaphor, found it close to hand ‘– or measuring you for a suit. Maybe if I had some of her things. I mean, if I could see her room, or—’

As if he’d been waiting for this moment, Steve hefted the black bin-liner and put it down on the desk between us. ‘These are the things she cared most about,’ he said, and he looked at me with the slightest hint of smugness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a solicitor, after all. Methodical mind, focused mainly on how the rules of any situation work and what the precedents are. He’d done his research.

I gave him a nod, half admiring, half resigned. He emptied the bag out carefully onto the desk.

There was quite a lot there: enough so that I wondered what was left behind in Abbie’s room. Books, CDs, scrunchies, T-shirts; a cloisonné hair slide with a sort of Celtic knot design; teddy bears and dolls; a pair of very elaborate trainers: some posters of male celebrities I didn’t recognise, torn at the corners where the Blu-Tack hadn’t yielded quickly enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: the desiderata of a young girl’s truncated life. If I was in the right mood, I could probably pick out the items that had meant most to Abbie – the ones that would provide the strongest link to her. But the mood is a skittish thing, and getting into it is never easy for me when there are other people around.

So I picked something up, not quite at random. A Victorian doll of the kind where the head is made out of porcelain while the body is stitched and stuffed, its relatively unfinished look hidden by a sewn-on dress. It had the unsettling, subtly aggressive blankness of a lot of old dolls, and it was in a near-terminal state of disrepair. The head was only attached to the body by a few loops of stitching, most of which had already come away. If I wasn’t careful with it, I’d decapitate it without even trying.

A childhood toy seemed the best bet: emotions are always strongest when you’re young. Not that Abbie had lived to get old.

I closed my eyes and listened to the doll. That’s the only way I can put it: it’s not like I was expecting the thing to talk to me. But it’s a kind of synaesthesia, I guess: I don’t have a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s ear. It takes a while, usually, but if I focus my mind and shut out all distractions then most things have a tune, or at least a note or two, attached to them.

This time it didn’t take a while: it didn’t take any time at all. Raw emotion hit me like a wall. I must have gasped, because Steve was staring at me with surprise and concern – and maybe, underneath that, with something like distaste.

Abbie’s emotions when she held her rag-stuffed friend must have been enormously powerful: powerful enough to linger there, like a recording, for me to pick up. Or maybe the power came from the sheer simplicity, because there was really only one impression there: desperate, aching unhappiness, so deep it was like being at the bottom of a well without knowing how you’d fallen into it.

It took an effort not to throw back my head and howl: if I’d been alone that’s probably what I would have done, because emotion that strong, even when it’s somebody else’s to start with, throws you off balance in all kinds of surprising ways if you can’t vent it somehow.

It took an equally intense effort to put the doll down again: it seemed welded to my hands. After I’d done it, I took a few seconds to recover before I tried to talk.

So Torrington got in first. ‘Is there anything there?’ he asked.

I nodded wordlessly.

‘A – a trail you can follow?’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said. It came out more brusquely than I intended – probably the after-effect of all that black misery, still sloshing around my system, but in any case I’m lousy at the bedside-manner stuff: I hate having to explain myself, even to intelligent people who can meet me more than halfway. I tried, anyway. ‘I’m reading old emotions, not current ones. I’m not reaching out to Abbie wherever she is now, just . . . getting a sense of her, as she was when she was alive. But yes, there’s something there. Enough so that I’ll recognise her if I ever see her, or get close to her. It’s a start.’

‘A start?’ Steve repeated. Solicitors know the importance of a contract, even when it’s just a verbal one.

‘Can I keep this stuff overnight?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

I nodded, feeling a weight settle on me that was different from the weight of Abbie’s emotion. ‘Then here’s what I’m offering, if you’re still interested. I don’t know if I can bring Abbie back to you. Like I said, that depends where she is. If her spirit’s gone on to the next station on the line, whatever you want to call that, then nobody can find her for you and nobody can get to where she is. But I may be able to give you an answer to that question – let you know what the odds are. And if she is still around – still with us – then there are a few things we can try. If she isn’t . . .’ I shrugged. ‘Well, at least you’ll know where you stand. Is that any use to you, or would you rather shop elsewhere?’

Torrington was nodding emphatically, and he started to discuss payment – which most prospective clients get to at a much earlier stage of the conversation. I decided to dodge that issue for now, because I still wasn’t sure how far I could run with this. If I did hit a brick wall I’d want to just tell them that and get away clean: the hassle of returning a deposit would add all kinds of awkwardness to a situation that was already nasty enough. ‘You can pay me if I decide to take the case on,’ I said.

Torrington looked alarmed. ‘But you said—’

‘This first part is just triage. Just – testing the ground. Let’s keep it on that basis for now. There’s no point you laying any money down, in case I come up with a blank. But if you leave it with me overnight, we can talk some more tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to go over this stuff a bit more thoroughly.’

Torrington took the hint and stood up to leave.

‘Should I call you in the morning?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got your number,’ I countered. ‘I’ll call you.’ Looking into his eyes, caught in the headlights of his grief, I relented slightly. ‘Tonight. I’ll try to call you tonight. I should have a bit more information for you then.’

I saw him to the door and he started down the stairs. Before he reached the bottom he looked back, as if conscious that I was still watching. Caught out, I closed the door. There’s something magnetic about tragedy. What I was doing was the equivalent of slowing down on the motorway to watch a wreck on the opposite carriageway. I felt a brief twinge of unease and self-disgust.

I felt something else, too: a sense of puzzlement that I couldn’t quite nail down. The Torringtons had just aired so much dirty linen in front of me, and bared so many wounds – metaphorical and otherwise – that in some ways I felt I knew them a hell of a lot better than I wanted to. But at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about their relationship that I wasn’t getting; some point where I’d added two and two and got to five. Maybe it was that barbed-wire tangle of emotions I’d picked up from Mel, and the fact that fear seemed so dominant there. Not just one fear, either: all sorts of fears looping through one another. Her love for her husband was strong, too, and it came through so loud and clear it seemed almost like religious devotion. But the fear wound itself around that, too, like some kind of pathological bindweed.

Well, even if I took the job I wasn’t signing on to give them relationship therapy. No sense in worrying about it.

I went back to the sprawl of objects on the desk, but I knew as I stared down at them that I wasn’t ready yet. I needed to fortify myself for that particular journey.

Grambas looked up from his sudoku book as I walked into the café. ‘So,’ he called out, tucking his pen behind his ear, ‘you got a job, Castor?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe. I told them I’d think about it.’

He wiped his clean hands on his dirty apron. ‘Yeah,’ he commiserated, ‘must be tough, your slate being so full. Not knowing whether or not you can squeeze anything else in . . .’

‘Double coffee,’ I grunted. ‘To go. Hold the sarcasm.’

As he was pouring the thick black Greek coffee into a styrofoam cup, Maya walked in with a plastic washbowl full of chipped potatoes. ‘Castor’s in a sour mood,’ he told her.

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I knew that.’

‘You knew it?’

‘Sure.’

‘How’d you know it?’

‘He was awake.’

I got out of there before they could start doing old music-hall numbers. The rain was letting up so I took the coffee and my Abbie-hangover up to the bridge on Acton Lane, where there’s a bench that gives a view out over both the railway cutting and an overgrown, factory-backed stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Call me a hopeless romantic, but that vista appeals to me somehow: London with her pants down, but still trying to keep her dignity.

I sat and sipped the hyper-caffeinated sludge, trying to rein in my black mood while bringing my nerves’ responsiveness up to a point where it might be dangerous to drive. The two goals were probably mutually exclusive, but in the absence of whisky the coffee was what I felt I needed right then.

The painful intensity of Abbie’s residual emotions had taken me by surprise. Okay, psychologically speaking, teenagers are perfect storms: when they’re sad, they’re very, very sad. But still . . . an attractive girl from an affluent middle-class family? Parents who seemed to dote on her, and clearly couldn’t cope with her loss? What was her tragedy? What had made that tide of misery well up inside her to a point where it overflowed into her toys and left a residue that wouldn’t fade?

I wanted to know. And I guess, in the end, that was why I’d said maybe instead of no.

I finished up the coffee, which didn’t seem to have helped much, and headed back to the office. I could leave this until later, but it was on my mind now. I might as well find out how far Abbie’s orphaned treasures would take me. I wasn’t going to be thinking about much else if I put it off.

With the door closed and locked and the phone disconnected at the wall, I threw off my coat and sat down at the desk. I put my whistle down on my right-hand side, but I wasn’t ready yet to start to play. First I had to remind myself of what I was fishing for.

I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, I picked up at the same time the cloisonné hair slide which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.

After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle and put it to my lips.

The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade it opened out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, nor one that I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB: have you seen this girl?

In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning: but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.

There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete – just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle: what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.

The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.

But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response – like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions – satisfaction, excitement, unease – in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger; pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.

And then, in an instant, it was gone.

Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.

I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.

Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound – from over my left shoulder, which was away to the south-west somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.

But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, came the sudden, instantaneous collapse – followed by a great deal of nothing at all.

A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear roused too early and in a foul mood. But God forbid I should jump to any conclusions. I gave it a rest and filed some long-dead paperwork to get my mind back into neutral.

Half an hour later I tried again, building from first principles. I started with the doll just like before, bracing myself as I prepared to dip first my toe, and then the rest of me, into that cold ocean of unhappiness – but the tide was out. This time when I held the unlovely toy in my hands there was nothing there: no emotional trace at all. Amazed and disconcerted, I picked up a teddy bear, a pair of trainers, a book. Finally I buried my hands in the sprawl of teenage treasure trove, fingers spread wide, touching as many different things at once as I could manage. They were all cold and inert.

And now it was the conclusions that were jumping on me.

That just couldn’t happen. The residual emotions we leave in the things we touch aren’t like fingerprints: they can be overlaid with stronger, later impressions, but they can’t be wiped clean. Or at least, that’s what I’d always assumed. But somebody had just done it: killed the psychic trail, pulled the rug out from under me and left me sitting on my arse in the middle of nowhere. And once again I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have any idea how that could be done.

Kidnapping ghosts. Blind-siding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.

Yeah, that shallow.

On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.