Vicious Circle

5

I went back to the car, which I’d parked in the back lot of a wine warehouse that closed early on Mondays. It was Pen’s Mondeo, which she lets me use whenever she doesn’t need it herself. With Dylan’s Lexus currently handling most of her transport needs, I had it on semipermanent loan.

I let myself in and locked the doors behind me just in case because my attention was going to be elsewhere for a few minutes. In a Sainsbury’s bag in the front passenger seat of the car was Abbie’s doll. I took it out, held it in both hands and closed my eyes.

And shuddered. There it was again: the fathomless ache of Abbie’s long-ago and long-sustained unhappiness, brimming behind the frail ramparts of rag-stuffed muslin. Got you, you bastard, I thought with cold satisfaction. You can throw me off the trail, but only when you know I’m on it. You can’t be on silent running all the goddamn time.

Laying the doll down on the steering wheel like a tiny Ixion, I took out my whistle and launched into the opening notes of the Abbie tune, which was still fresh in my mind.

Within seconds I got the same response as before; the same sense of something touching the music from outside, as though it was a physical skein that I was throwing over West London. Except that it was stronger this time. I was barely a quarter of a mile to the east of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half further south. And yes, the orientation was different – the faint tug on the web of sound coming not from over my left shoulder now but from straight ahead, from where the sun had set not long before. That made it easier to shift my attention, my focus, into that one quarter. The touch was faint, vanishingly faint, but I opened myself up to it, shutting out all distractions, tautly listening in on that one channel even as I was creating it, sustaining it, with the soft drawn-out complaint of the tin whistle. She seemed to recede. I held a single note, almost too low to hear, the barest breath into the mouthpiece, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees—

Suddenly a shrieking discord bit into my mind like a deftly wielded Black & Decker power drill. It came out of nowhere, slicing through my nerves, sundering thought and feeling and music so that their writhing, severed ends leaked chaos and agony. I screamed aloud, my back arcing so that my head slammed back into the headrest of the driver’s seat and my feet jammed down on the pedals as if I was trying to bring the already stationary car to a dead halt.

It only lasted for a second: less than that, maybe. Even while I was screaming, the pain was subsiding from its lunatic peak and I was slumping forward again, a puppet with its strings cut, my forehead thumping against the body of the doll which was still lying on the steering wheel in front of me.

I lay there weak and dazed for a few seconds, static fizzing and stinging through my nervous system, trying to remember where I was and why I was drooling bloody spittle onto a stuffed toy. My tongue throbbed in time to my heart, seeming too big for my mouth: I’d bitten deeply into it, and that bitter tang was my own blood. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and pulled myself together: that was a job that I had to tackle in easy stages.

I fished out my flask of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-cognac and unscrewed the lid with shaking hands. The first sip was medicinal: I swilled it around my bitten tongue, trying not to wince, rolled down the window and spat out the blood. The second sip was for my jangled nerves. So were the third and fourth.

I suddenly realised that as I stared down between my feet my gaze had met another pair of eyes gazing back up into mine. With a queasy jolt, I picked up the head of Abbie’s doll from the floor of the car: it must have parted company from the body when my head crashed forward into it, and it was pretty amazing that it hadn’t shattered as it fell. I slid it into the pocket of my coat, automatically. The decapitated body I dropped back into the Sainsbury’s bag, like any tidy-minded serial killer.

I think it became official right about then, for me at least. I was in a duel of wits, and I was three-nil down. The man was good, no doubt about it. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, as you’ll know if cat-skinning is your thing.

I was looking forward to meeting him.

And punching his teeth down his throat.

Still shaky, I got the car moving and threaded through the side alleys back into Du Cane Road. I passed the church, heading east, and almost immediately I saw a familiar figure walking ahead of me. It was Susan Book, now wearing a long fawn-coloured duffel coat but still recognisable because the hood was down and she was still looking around her every so often as if she’d heard someone call her name.

I brought the car to a halt a few yards ahead of her and wound the window down. She began to skirt warily around it, then saw that it was me.

‘Do you need a lift?’ I asked.

She seemed surprised and a little flustered. ‘Well, I only live about a mile or so away,’ she said. ‘In Royal Oak. The bus goes straight there.’

‘So do I,’ I said. ‘Through it, anyway. It’s no trouble to drop you off.’

Susan fought a brief, almost comical struggle with herself. I could see she didn’t like the idea of accepting a lift from a stranger, which was fair enough: also that she didn’t relish the wait at the bus stop with the dark coming on.

‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you.’

I opened the door and she climbed in. We drove in silence for a while – a sort of charged silence. She was so tense it was like a static hum in the car.

‘Have you known Miss Salazar long?’ she asked at last, in a very quiet voice that I found hard to catch over the noise of the engine.

‘Juliet? No,’ I admitted. ‘She . . . hasn’t been living around these parts very long. But she’s someone who makes a strong first impression.’

She nodded briskly, understandingly. ‘And you’re . . . sort of partners,’ she said, and then added quickly, ‘in the professional sense? You work together?’

‘Not really,’ I said, feeling as though I was falling in Susan’s estimation with every answer. ‘We did, briefly, but only while Juliet was learning the ropes. She worked alongside me for a while so she could see how the job pans out on a day-to-day basis. She’s in business for herself now, so tonight was . . . more in the nature of a consultation.’

‘Yes. I see,’ said Susan, nodding again. ‘That must be very reassuring. Being able to call in favours from one another, I mean. Knowing that someone’s . . .’ she tailed off, as though groping for the right words.

‘Got your back?’ I offered.

‘Yes. Exactly. Got your back.’

We were already at Royal Oak and I’d pulled off the Westway onto the bottom end of the Harrow Road, seemingly without her noticing.

‘Whereabouts do you live?’ I asked.

Susan started, and looked around her in mild surprise.

‘Bourne Terrace,’ she said, pointing. ‘That way. First left, and then first left again.’

I followed her directions, and we stopped in front of a tiny terraced house that was in darkness except for a single light upstairs. A garden the size of a bath mat separated it from the street: the gate was painted hospital green and had a NO HAWKERS notice on it.

‘I’d invite you in for tea,’ Susan said, so stiffly that she sounded almost terrified. ‘Or coffee. But I live with my mother and she’d think it wasn’t proper. She has very old-fashioned ideas about things like that. She wouldn’t even be happy that I’d accepted a lift from you.’

‘Then it’ll be our secret,’ I said, waiting for her to get out. She didn’t. She just sat there, staring straight ahead, her eyes wide. Then, very abruptly, she brought her hands up to her face and gave a ragged wail that held, held, and then shattered into inconsolable sobbing.

It was so completely unexpected that for a second or so all I could do was stare. Then I started in with some vague consoling noises, and even ventured a pat on the back: but she was lost in some private hinterland of misery where I didn’t exist. After a minute or so, I began to make out words, heaved out breathlessly in the midst of the tears.

‘I’m – I’m not – I’m not –’

‘Not what, Susan?’ I asked, as mildly as I could. I didn’t know her well enough even to risk a guess at what was eating at her, but whatever it was it seemed to have bitten deep.

‘Not a – not like that. I’m not, I’m not. I’m not a les – a lesb—’ The words melted again into the formless quagmire of her sobbing, but that brief flash of light had told me all I needed to know.

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not.’ I reached past her to hook the glove compartment open, found a pack of tissues in there and handed one to her. ‘It’s not like that. Juliet just . . . does that to people. You can’t help yourself. You just fall in love with her, whether you like it or not.’

Susan buried her face in the tissue, shaking her head violently from side to side. ‘Not love,’ she sobbed. ‘Not love. I’m having c-carnal . . . I’m imagining . . . Oh God, what’s happening? What’s happening to me?’

‘Whatever you want to call it,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘looking at Juliet makes you catch it like people catch the flu. I feel it too. Most people who ever get close to her feel it. Whatever it is, it’s not a sin.’

I couldn’t think of anything to add to that. Maybe Susan Book was the kind of Christian who thought that gay love was always a sin, in which case she’d just have to work it through for herself. But straight, gay, or agnostic, what Juliet did to you came as a shock to anyone’s system. I could tell Susan what Miss Salazar really was – by way of a prophylactic – but it wasn’t my secret to tell and under the circumstances it might make things worse rather than better. Carnal thoughts about a same-sex demon? Susan probably wasn’t in any state to take the knock.

I did the best I could to talk her down, and eventually she got out of the car, leaving the soggy tissue on the passenger seat. She mumbled something by way of thanks for the lift, to which she added, ‘Don’t tell her! Please, please don’t tell her!’ Then she fled into the house.

There probably wasn’t anything I could have said to her that would have helped. Love is a drug, like the man said. But the harshest truth of all is in the gospel of Steppenwolf rather than in Roxy Music: the pusher doesn’t care whether you live or die.

I called the Torringtons from the car as I was driving back east across the city. Hands-free, of course: I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t put safety first. Steve picked up on the first ring, which made me wonder if he’d been sitting with his phone in his hands.

‘Mister Castor,’ he said, sounding just a touch breathless. ‘What news?’

‘Good news as far as it goes,’ I said. ‘You were right, and I was wrong.’

‘Meaning—?’

‘Abbie’s not in Heaven. She’s in London.’

He exhaled, long and loud. I waited for him to speak.

‘Can you please give me a moment?’

‘Of course.’

Maybe he covered the phone, or maybe the voices were too low to hear over the sound of the car’s engine. There was about half a minute’s silence. Then he came back on. The pitch of his voice was unsteady – like the voice of a man fighting back tears.

‘We can’t thank you enough, Mister Castor. Do you think you can find her?’

‘I’m prepared to try.’

He gave a relieved laugh, harsh and emphatic and broken off short by some kind of psychological wind-shear. ‘That’s excellent news! Excellent! We’ve got every confidence in you.’

‘Mister Torrington—’

‘Steve.’

‘Steve. I don’t want to raise your hopes. This still isn’t going to be easy, assuming I can do it at all. And I’m going to need to have some money to spread around. If you can front me two or three hundred quid to be going on with, then I can make a start on—’

He cut me off. ‘Mister Castor, my wife and I count as affluent by any standards. You’re over-finessing, if I can use a bridge metaphor. Whatever you need, we can afford it. Possibly you feel as though you’re taking advantage of our grief. From our point of view, it’s not like that at all. We’ve heard that you’re the best, and we’re grateful that you’re prepared to help us.’ There was a rustle, and then the scratch-scratch-scratch of a fountain-pen nib on paper. ‘I’m writing out a cheque,’ he said. ‘For a thousand pounds. I’ll put it in the post tonight. No, better – I’ll go over to your office and drop it off myself. I’ll add some cash, too, to tide you over until this clears. If it’s more than you were planning to charge, and if that makes you uncomfortable, then please just give the rest to the charity of your choice.’

Good enough. I should have more clients who are that respectful of my sensitivities. I asked him for Peace’s address, which turned out to be in East Sheen: not a part of the city I knew all that well, and a lot further south than I was expecting.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, and hung up.

Driving on automatic pilot, I’d already rejoined the Westway and driven on through Marylebone past Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium – which now has commerce only with stars of the daytime-TV variety. I was just about to swing off north onto Albany Street. But I had another call to make, and it was in the east of the city rather than the north. So I kept on going – east all the way, heading for the distant fastnesses of Walthamstow.

I was tired, and I still had a headache from that psychic mind-blast, but there was nothing to gain by putting this off until tomorrow. Night was always the best time to see Nicky if you wanted to get any sense out of him.

I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be still there when I got back, possibly even with engine and wheels attached. That was worth a little additional effort.

A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centrepiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.

It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other pre-war super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members-only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened soft-core porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riff-raff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song – probably the Death March from Saul.

It was the perfect home for him: he too was on his second time around.

I went in around the back, up the drainpipe and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky had added some additional barricades of his own: you can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.

Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draught of Arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swivelled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security – although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.

The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapour at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry-ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customised air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.

I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle – and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them are ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.

‘Nicky?’ I called, opening the door a little further with the toe of my shoe.

No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life – or at least the integrity of my balls – in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomb-like.

I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up from a row of malnourished, cane-like plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swill: the tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it – reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.

Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room – or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.

‘Hey, Nicky.’ I called, a little irritably. ‘Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.’

‘Open your coat, Castor.’ Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout – just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapour. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo – except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too: ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.

‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’ I asked him.

‘Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.’

‘Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—’

‘Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.’ The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion: when he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.

Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. ‘There you go,’ I said. ‘No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.’

‘Christ Jesus, Nicky!’

‘I told you – this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest-to-God not taking any risks.’ His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognised from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.

I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place: what there was – keys, wallet, Swiss Army penknife with thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves – I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidised silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. ‘Just one hand,’ Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this was a weapon – and it had his name on it.

I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled: I knew Nicky’s gaze would follow it, the way your stare would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch: I grabbed it right in under the rim.

I stood up in one smooth movement, and the bucket toppled: the tree that was rooted in it went over too, knocking against its neighbour and starting a chain reaction that sounded like the swish of a thousand canes. And Nicky was standing in line like he was waiting for a spanking. Without a gasp or a whoof or a yell – because again he hadn’t laid in any spare breath for it – he went sprawling. His head hit the wall with a dull thud, but that wouldn’t slow him down much. From off to my right, though, there came a different sound: a metal-on-stone clatter, quickly swallowed. That seemed like the better bet, so I made a lunge even before I saw where the gun had ended up in the spreading pool of sludge from the overturned buckets. Nicky had managed to disentangle himself from the undergrowth and he was scrambling on all fours in the same direction. Being at ground level already he got there first, but my foot came down on his wrist just as his fingers closed on the gun.

‘I’m not putting my full weight down,’ I pointed out. ‘If I do, something’s going to break.’

Nicky has a morbid fear of physical trauma: being dead already, he doesn’t have any way of repairing it. All the systems which in a living body would re-knit flesh and bone and channel away infection are non-starters in a walking cadaver. He released his grip on the gun in great haste and I scooped it up. It was old and heavy but someone had been looking after it and I had no doubt at all that it would work, even covered in thick brown slurry. Not knowing how to put the safety back on or eject the clip, I aimed it at Nicky instead. He threw his hands up, desperately humping back across the floor on his backside.

‘Easy! Easy, Castor! I won’t heal! I won’t heal!’

‘Easy? You fucking bushwhacked me, you maniac!’

‘I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to kill me.’

‘What?’ I lowered the gun, pained and exasperated. ‘Nicky, you’re already dead. Did you forget that? Killing you would be fucking futile.’

‘To damage me, then.’ He was trying to get his legs under himself and stand up without using his hands, which were still high in the air.

‘Damage you. Right.’ I crossed to the window and tried to open it. Nothing doing: the sash was nailed down solid. I smashed it instead, raising a wail of indignation from Nicky, and dropped the gun out of the window onto the weed-choked sprawl of asphalt that used to be the cinema’s car park – a party favour for the next courting couple who decided to take a walk through the long grass.

Then I turned to face Nicky again. He lowered his hands and came across to look out of the window, then favoured me with a resentful scowl. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a butcher’s apron over his usual Zegna suit. It was an odd and unsettling combination, even though the stains on it were mulch-green and mud-brown rather than blood-red.

You know what you’re getting with Nicky, most of the time: he was paranoid even before he died, and if anything that event had only reinforced his conviction that the universe was out to get him. So I wasn’t really surprised by any of this: just morbidly curious as to what exactly had triggered it.

‘Why the fuck would I want to damage you?’ I asked him. ‘No, let me rephrase that. I want to damage you all the time – but why would I choose today to de-repress?’

He was sullen and defensive. ‘Why does anybody choose a particular time to freak out? All I know is that a lot of people are choosing now. Did that get by you somehow? I thought you had this big umbilical thing going with London. Tuned in to the . . . Zeitgeist. City geist. Whatever. So if a whole lot of Londoners eat poison and lose their minds, I thought there was a chance you might get brainsick too. But I guess today you were receiving on other wavelengths.’ He could see that none of this meant anything to me – and also that I was starting to look a little pissed-off – so he came in again from a slightly less oblique angle. ‘You know how many murders there are in London in the average year, Castor?’

‘Nope. I don’t. I know we’re behind New York but trying harder.’

Out of nowhere he put on a smug look that I instantly recognised – the look he gets when he’s dealing out arcane knowledge from undisclosed sources. ‘About a hundred and fifty. Worst year on record, a hundred and ninety-three. There was a big spike last year, but generally the rate stands nice and steady at two-point-four per annum per hundred thousand head of population. Say, one every couple of days, or just over. Know how many there were last night?’

‘Again, no.’

‘Seven. Plus two arguables, and six old-school tries. And that’s not counting in the rapes, the mutilations, the aggravated assaults. Sick shit for all the family, in a dozen different flavours. I’m telling you, Castor, we’re way, way over to the right of the bell-shaped curve.’ He glanced off across the room and nodded towards the computer workstation. ‘Take a look.’

I shot him a wary glance, but at least he wasn’t armed now; and we seemed to be back on comfortable territory – wild conspiracy theories and tortured statistics. I walked over to the computer and glanced at the two monitors that he’d got set up kitty-corner-wise in the corner of the room. A whole lot of files were open on the desktop, and most of them were stories from internet news feeds.

UXBRIDGE MAN SLAIN WITH OWN TIE

WOMAN IN REGENT’S CANAL WAS MURDERED, POLICE SAY

HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE

SHOOT-OUT AT TESCO METRO

It did seem to have been a bad day – especially given that it was a Sunday, when most people in London are traditionally sleeping off hangovers or washing their cars. I took hold of the mouse and minimised some of the windows: there were more stories behind them, stacked one on top of another in an infinite regression of atrocities.

‘You see?’ said Nicky. ‘A sensible man takes precautions.’

‘How would you know?’ I countered. ‘So what, you think London lost its collective mind last night?’

‘Well, it certainly looked into the abyss. And the abyss gazes also, know what I mean?’

‘Right. So you get yourself a gun. How do you know you’re part of the solution rather than part of the problem, Nicky?’

He frowned and stopped in his tracks. ‘What?’

‘There’s an outbreak of murder and mayhem. You get scared, decide to make sure you don’t end up on the wrong end of it; and the next thing you know, you’re waving automatic weapons at close friends. There’s such a thing as friendly fire, you moron.’

‘Friendly—?’ He thought this over, looking like he’d sucked on a lemon and discovered that he still had some functional taste buds. He got sullen and defensive. ‘Hey, don’t you fuck with my head, Castor – it’s not funny. Whatever the hell happened, these killings were geographically clustered, okay? So we’re talking a chemical or bacteriological agent, or something like that – something dispersed in either air or water. I don’t drink water. I don’t metabolise oxygen. There’s no logical way I could be infected.’

I nodded understandingly, mainly to make him shut up. ‘Nicky, seven murders in one night is one for the record books – but only until some industrious soul takes it up to eight. It’s like every other summer is the hottest summer on record.’

‘That’s just because of global warming.’

‘Right. And this is because of global rabies. That’s how records work, Nicky: they keep going up because they can’t go down. Anyway, leaving all this bullshit aside for a moment, I’m going to need a favour.’

He didn’t unbend: clearly it hurt his pride that I’d outparanoided him with my ‘part of the problem’ remark. ‘I’m not in the mood to do you any favours, Castor. You stamped on my wrist. You realise what I’d have to go through to repair a bone? I got no antibodies. I got no fucking white cells. I’ve just got my own two hands.’

‘I brought you a present.’

‘Like I care.’ I was going to count the seconds, but the pause was too short. ‘What is it?’

My relationship with Nicky is based on several distinct layers of ruthless pragmatism. Being dead, and risen again in the flesh (I’m avoiding the contentious term ‘zombie’, which these days the government is calling hate-speech) Nicky doesn’t get about as much as he used to. He prefers to keep his body chilled to a level where the processes of organic decay can be slowed to a manageable minimum. He still has a subtle aroma of formaldehyde and foie gras, but he takes the edge off it with Old Spice aftershave, and since most other dead-alive people I’ve met smell like a freezer full of spoiled meat, that’s quite impressive.

But his limited mobility means that in some respects now he has to rely on the kindness of strangers – those comparatively rare strangers who don’t find the company of the dead uncongenial. So whenever I want something from him, I bring him a little gift to sweeten the deal. He likes fine French reds of hard-to-find vintages (he just inhales the aroma, like one of Yeats’s ghosts) and hen’s-tooth-rare early jazz recordings: getting hold of that stuff without bankrupting myself in the process is an ongoing challenge. Tonight, though, I had a winner. I handed it over without a word – a vulcanite disc in a stiff cardboard sleeve, one side of the label marked up with postage stamps to the value of three cents. Nicky turned it over in his hands, read the recto side of the label and said nothing for a while. Then he said, ‘Fuck, Castor. How big a favour are you looking for?’

It was something a fair bit rarer than a hen’s tooth: a recording of Buddy Bolden, the tragically unhinged trumpeter who – by some accounts, anyway – single-handedly turned New Orleans ragtime into jazz. The A side was ‘Make Me a Pallet’. There wasn’t any B side, which under the circumstances didn’t really matter. Bolden is popularly supposed to have left no recordings of his work, but I’ve got sources who don’t take no for an answer.

‘It’s two favours.’

‘Go on.’

‘Number one is easy. I want you to get me some background on an accidental death. A girl named Abigail Torrington – time frame somewhere over the summer of last year. She drowned on a school trip. Some other kids died at the same time.’

He sat down at the desk and typed a few of the details down in a notepad programme.

‘Okay. So far, that’s a Ronco Twenty Golden Greats favour. What makes it a Buddy Bolden favour? Shit, I think you did crack one of my wrist bones, you jumpy bastard.’

‘Number two is a bit more open-ended. I’m looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. A man named Dennis Peace.’

‘How are you spelling “Peace”?’

‘Like the kind you’ve got to give a chance to. Guy’s an exorcist, and from what I know already he’s pretty damn good at it. Anything you can get me will trim the odds a bit more in my favour – and believe me when I say I’m taking all the help I can get here.’

‘Anything else you can give me? Last known address? NHI number? Known associates?’

I gave him the East Sheen address that Steve Torrington had given me over the phone. ‘That’s pretty much all I’ve got. Except that he was in a malpractice case a few years back – on the receiving end.’ I hesitated, wondering if I should tell him about what had happened when I’d tried to locate Peace through Abbie’s toys. But that would have entailed a hell of a lot more explanation than I wanted to get into right then.

‘I’ll stop by tomorrow,’ I said. ‘You can either give me a progress report or stick an assault rifle up my nose. If you get anything juicy before then, call me, okay?’

‘Sure. I’ll call you.’

‘Oh, and one more thing, since we’re on the subject. Where did that crummy retread of the Oriflamme open up?’

‘The exorcist bar?’ Nicky sneered. ‘Like I’d be caught dead there.’ It was a weak joke, and I didn’t do anything to encourage it. ‘Over in the West End,’ Nicky said when he saw I wasn’t rising to the bait. ‘Soho Square.’ He scribbled the address for me on a piece of printout paper and put it into my hand. ‘Didn’t you once describe the Oriflamme as a busman’s holiday?’

‘Yeah, I did. And now I’m trying to catch a bus conductor.’

I left him to it. Under the circumstances, I felt I was ahead of the game just coming away without any freshly minted holes in me.

I went back to Pen’s, where I found a note from her on my bed telling me that Coldwood had called again and asking me to feed the animals: she was going to visit Rafi, she said, and then head on out to Dylan’s flat afterwards to help him unwind after another late shift. Well, I thought resignedly, if you’re going to play doctors and nurses you were onto a winner with an orthopaedic surgeon.

Doling out liver to the ravens and Harlan Teklad to the rats took up about half an hour. When I was done, and cleaned up again, I called Coldwood on the mobile number he’d given me – a much better option than going through the station switchboard.

He picked up immediately, and he didn’t bother with small talk. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you all fucking day,’ he said. ‘Brondesbury Auto Parts: there was blood all over the shop, and it was a match with Sheehan’s.’

Brondesbury Auto Parts? Sheehan? It took me a moment or two to work out what he was talking about: then I remembered the bleak, empty warehouse out on the Edgware Road, and the pathetic ghost with half its head missing.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. Well, congratulations.’

‘Premature. We arrested Pauley, but he made bail. That’s why I called. Your name hasn’t been mentioned anywhere, but your statement was what bought us the warrant: Pauley’s got very big ears, and friends in a lot of fucking unlikely places. So watch your back, okay?’

‘Seriously?’ I was surprised, and not pleasantly. It’s been tried a few times, but evidence from spiritual conversations has never been accepted in a court case. Not in England, anyway. I never dreamed this drug lord might have anything to gain by topping me.

‘Seriously. If he can get the warrant invalidated, he can stop the case coming to court. One way of doing that is to put you out of action and then allege conspiracy.’

‘Conspiracy?’

‘To pervert the course of justice. It’s just a form of words. He says you were in our pocket, a judge looks at the warrant submission, they get a verdict. If it goes their way he’s got a get-out-of-jail-free card, because all our sodding evidence is inadmissible.’

‘This is great. You gonna lend me some bodyguards, then?’

‘Yeah, sure, Castor. Out of the same budget that I use for your company car and your health benefits. Look, I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m just saying watch yourself. It’s just about possible he’ll try to put the frighteners on you. Are you around tomorrow?’

‘Depends. What for?’

‘At some point I’m gonna want you back at that warehouse. I want to set up a walk-through of how we think Sheehan died, and see if the ghost reacts in any way.’

‘How time-sensitive is it?’ I asked.

‘Right now? Probably not very. We’re still waiting on some of the forensics results. Why? You thinking of staying in and washing your hair?’

‘I’m on another job.’

Coldwood’s laugh was short and explosive. ‘Then we’re truly living in the last days. What case is this?’

‘I’m looking for a girl.’

‘You’re doing missing persons now?’

‘No, she’s a dead girl. Name of Abigail Torrington. It’s a long story.’

‘Then keep it. I hate long stories. Call me when you’re free, okay?’

He cut me off as abruptly as he’d picked up. I fished out Pen’s old London A to Z from the back of a cupboard and opened it up on the kitchen table. I also found a high-lighter pen, which was exactly what I needed. I flicked through to the page that had Harlesden on it, cracking the book’s spine ruthlessly so it would lie flat on the table. It was about five years out of date in any case: I’d buy her a new one when I picked up Steve Torrington’s friendly envelope full of cash and cheques.

I drew a cross in Craven Park Road, roughly where my office was. That was where I first picked up Abbie’s doll, and I’d been facing the window, which was sort of . . . north. Or so. The trace – the sense of something responding when I played my little tune – had come from behind me, to the left. I drew a broad, ragged line with the high-lighter that took in Park Royal, a long stretch of Western Avenue, Hanger Hill and Ealing . . . I had to stop somewhere, so I decided to make the M4 elevated section my rough-and-ready boundary marker.

Then I found Du Cane Road, and the little cross that marked Saint Michael’s. The car park where I’d made my second attempt, earlier this evening, was about a hundred yards further up the road. I’d been facing into the setting sun, and that was where the response had come from – until I was hit with that little psychic cluster bomb that left me with a hole in my tongue and a ringing in my ears like a peal of bells in Hades.

Due west. I drew in the second line, out through Acton, Ealing and Drayton Green to the rolling hills of the Brent Valley Golf Course. No way Peace would be hiding Abbie there, though: the green fees were astronomical.

The two lines intersected over a huge swathe of West Acton and North Ealing. I’d drawn them wide on purpose, of course, because this wasn’t rocket science or any other damn science worthy of the name: it was just me, extrapolating hopefully from a messy and inadequate data set.

And that metaphor made me think of Nicky again.

Which made me remember the crumpled piece of printout paper in my pocket, with his handwriting on it.

The Oriflamme.

I looked at my watch. Only eleven, so the joint would still be hopping. And maybe Peace would think he’d hurt me worse than he had with his little psychic-overload ambush. There was nothing like stealing a march on the opposition.