Vicious Circle

7

In Pen’s bathroom mirror, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye because I was having to twist my head around at an angle that would have challenged Linda Blair, the ragged gash in my left shoulder looked really ugly.

‘What in the name of God have you been doing to yourself?’ Pen asked, with a certain degree of awe.

‘I had some help,’ I muttered, teeth gritted. Pain always makes me irritable: I’m sure as shit not the stuff that martyrs are made of.

My arm had started to stiffen up as I was driving, with occasional lightning strikes of pain shooting from shoulder to fingertips. After a while I was driving just with my right hand and only using my left – when I couldn’t avoid it – to change gear. And getting my coat off, when I’d finally managed to park the car, find my door keys in the wrong pocket and let myself in, had been a whole heap of fun. Luckily Pen had turned out to be home, since Dylan was on another late shift: with her help, I was able to peel the coat away from the wound, yelping in anguish as it opened again. My shirt we just cut away and dumped in the waste bin: even Persil wasn’t going to bring it up white again. Then I sat on the edge of the bath, a large whisky clutched tightly in my hand, occasionally biting back colourful expletives as Pen cleaned out the edges of the cut.

Now, examining the results in all their reflected glory, I had to admit that the wound was impressive, in a grim and grisly way. It was a broad slash about three inches long on the very top of my shoulder, exactly midway between arm and throat. Small streamers of ribboned flesh hung down on either side of it, testifying to a serrated blade or a shape that had a lot of separate points and edges to it. A throwing star, maybe, although those two loup-garous hadn’t exactly struck me as being the ninja type. That involves stealth, just to go for the obvious point.

On the whole, though, this didn’t look too bad. The fact that it was a ragged cut meant that it would knit together that much quicker, and Pen had done a thorough job of cleaning it out. All it needed now was a dressing strip and the home team were back in the game.

Pen wasn’t quite so convinced. ‘You should let Dylan look at it,’ she said. ‘If this festers, Fix, it’ll be bad news.’

‘It wasn’t exactly “Your annuity matures” to start with,’ I grumbled back gracelessly. Then, remembering my manners, ‘Thanks for patching me up. But let’s not bring Dylan into this. He might draw the wrong kind of conclusion about the circles you move in.’

‘Was it this that cut you?’ Pen asked, holding up the knife. I’d put it down on the side of the bath earlier, well out of the way. I really didn’t like to see it in her hands: that edge was just too damn perfect, and Pen was too emphatic with her gestures when she got worked up. I took it from her, quickly but gently.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This would have made a clean cut. A really clean cut. Have you seen the edge on it?’ I turned the blade edge-on to her so she could see it in all its scary beauty. That meant I was looking at the flat of the blade, and I noticed now that it had a floral motif on it: leaves in pairs, etched directly into the steel, ran from the hilt to within an inch of the point.

Pen gave the knife an ill-favoured look as I put it down again, this time on the sink-top. Then I had a better idea: I took a used toilet-roll tube which looked to be about the right width and slid the knife inside it: the broad tang stretched the cylinder enough to hold the blade rigidly in place. I was a lot less likely to lose a finger on it now.

‘I hate it when this stuff happens,’ Pen muttered, dropping blood-encrusted swabs of cotton wool into the waste bin. ‘Why do you take jobs that get you beaten up and cut open and thrown off roofs and all that macho rubbish? Aren’t there enough of the other kind?’

‘The other kind?’

‘You know what I mean. “Get that bogeyman out of my closet. Bring granny back so she can tell us where she put the rent book. Tell my Sidney I’ve remarried and there’s no room in my bed for him any more.”’

She turned her back on me to wash her hands: it looked unnervingly symbolic.

‘I can’t always tell which kind of job is which,’ I said, defensively. ‘I don’t get any special kind of pleasure out of this stuff.’

‘No,’ she agreed glumly. ‘I suppose not.’

‘How’s Rafi?’ I asked, to change the subject.

‘Still asleep.’ She turned to face me again, wet arms folded, face set. ‘I’m serious, Fix. You should just walk out of this one while walking is still an option.’

This was a disturbing development: normally when I bring Rafi up it derails the conversation for at least long enough for me to get to the door. Obviously we were starting to know each other too well.

‘The problem is, Pen, I’m working on a lot of different things right now. I can’t walk out on all of them.’ It was the plain truth for once: I really didn’t know which job Puss and Boots had been sent to frighten me away from. The answer could be right there in what they’d said to me, but I was buggered if I could dig it out. ‘Someone didn’t close the circle, and a little bird flew the nest.’ That didn’t sound like Coldwood’s drug barons. It might refer to the thing in the church, but there was nothing birdlike – or little, for that matter – in the presence I’d sensed there. Abigail Torrington? Maybe. But she hadn’t flown anywhere: she’d been flat-out stolen.

What it came down to was that I didn’t have enough information just then even to guess who wanted shot of me, still less why. But it didn’t matter in any case: because the part of me that’s stubborn and intractable and bloody-minded – which is not a small part, by any means – was determined to stay with this until I knew what it was about. Pen read that conclusion in my face and shrugged, giving up in disgust.

‘Just remember I told you so,’ she said. ‘So I don’t have to say it later on when something ten times worse happens to you.’

‘I’ll sleep on it,’ I said. Then I gave her a hug and retreated to my room at the top of the house, which normally gives me a bit more perspective on the world.

Tonight I was too bone-weary to think. But before I surrendered to gravity and sleep, I called Nicky. He didn’t sound very happy to hear from me.

‘Christ, Castor. What is it, three hours? Even Buddy Bolden doesn’t give you the right to ask for fucking miracles.’

‘I’m not looking for a progress report, Nicky. I was just wondering if you happen to know where the Collective is moored right now.’

‘Thamesmead,’ he said, without a pause. ‘Thamesmead West. Pier 17, just down from the Artillery Museum.’ Yeah, that would be the sort of information a paranoid zombie would have at his well-preserved fingertips.

‘Who’s on board?’

‘No, Who’s on first.’

‘Ha ha ha.’

‘I’m not the society pages, Castor. Last I heard, Reggie Tang was over there. Couple of guys from South London I don’t know from fucking Adam. It’s nine-tenths empty, like always.’

‘Thanks, Nicky.’

‘Yeah, you’re very welcome. We live to serve. Since you’re here, though, there are a couple of things I can tell you about your man Peace.’

I pricked up my ears. ‘Go on.’

‘When I’m trying to get a handle on someone I don’t know, I go on the principle of cherchez le dirt. In Peace’s case, I’m telling you, you could open up a pig farm.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, just for starters, he’s done time.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I was a little disappointed, but it was something. At least it was something if it was recent: ex-cons have got their own networks in the real world, and you can crash them sometimes if you know where to start from. ‘So how long was he pleasuring Her Majesty for, then?’

‘Uh-uh. Wrong time. Or rather, wrong place. This was in Burkina Faso – French West Africa. He got himself hauled in for drugs possession, pissed off the magistrate and ended up being sent down for two years. Then he managed to grease the right palms, which he could have done for half the price before the conviction, and walked out on a procedural pardon. He was only inside for a week or so.’

‘And this was—?’

‘1992. The year that Unforgiven got the Best Picture Oscar – but that son of a bitch Pacino scooped Best Actor, and for what? Scent of a Woman, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Thanks, Nicky.’ I cut him off before he could run through the list of top-grossing movies – which would be bound to lead in to some conspiracy theory that he was currently shaping. None of this stuff was any good to me: it was all too long ago. Even if Peace had made some good friends in Ouagadougou State Prison, and they’d all moved to London when they’d got out, I couldn’t pick up a trail that was well over a decade cold. It was a dead end. ‘You got anything else?’

‘I’ve got plenty.’ Nicky sounded hurt – as though I was impugning the quality of his intel. ‘The West Africa thing, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This guy was a real hellraiser in his youth – into all kinds of shit, invariably up to his eyeballs. Did a stint in the army – Royal Artillery – then bought himself out about a day or so ahead of a dishonourable discharge and did the usual street shit for a while. Added a few column inches to his charge sheet along the way – breaking and entering, public affray, felonious assault. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn’t.’

‘No more spells in jail, though?’

‘Nope. He moved around too much. Jet-setting lifestyle, you know? The world was his fucking playground. He was in the States for a while and he got mixed up with Anton Fanke’s crowd.’

‘Anton Fanke? Who’s that?’

‘What, you never heard of the Satanist Church of the Americas?’ Nicky sounded incredulous.

‘Obviously not,’ I said.

‘Fanke’s one of these religious bootboys, like the Bhagwan or Sun Myung Moon. Only his religion happens to be devil-worship. You know the type – gets a million grunts to sell flowers at major airports so he can run a fleet of limos and live in a mansion in upstate New York.’

‘Got it. So Peace is a Satanist?’

‘Dunno. Maybe. I’m just saying his name was linked with Fanke’s. There was some court case they were both involved in, way back. I haven’t managed to shag the details yet.’

It was a disturbing thought. If the Torringtons were right, Peace was mainly concerned with using Abbie’s ghost as leverage to restart a dead relationship. But if he was into necromancy, all bets were off.

‘Thanks, Nicky,’ I said. ‘Keep up the good work.’

‘Yeah, well, you bought a lot of goodwill. Makes a change.’

He hung up.

I really didn’t want to think right then about the implications of what he’d told me, or about the weird, circuitous threats and warnings that the werewolves had been doling out. Truth to tell, this had been about as stressful a Monday as I could remember. I tumbled into bed, already half-unconscious, and slept it all away.

I had some really nasty dreams, involving men who mewed like cats and jumped out at me from a variety of unexpected angles, and a little girl who was walking through a maze of grey stone with church bells ringing up ahead of her. Mercifully, the details didn’t stay with me when I woke up.

The headache did, though. It felt like a really bad hangover, but casting my mind back over the night before it didn’t seem to me like I’d over-indulged: I could only remember the whisky I’d swallowed to dull the edge of the pain while Pen scrubbed out my wound with TCP and lavender soap.

The wound. It felt uncomfortably hot, but not particularly painful. I prodded it gingerly, and flexed my arm in various directions to see how much traverse it had. There was a little bit of stiffness, but all things considered it didn’t feel nearly as bad as it had the night before. If I were a concert pianist, I’d probably have been worried: being the human wreck I am, I figured it would all come out in the wash.

It was about six in the morning, and Pen was still asleep: at least, there was no sound from the basement except for the occasional creaking and rattling as Edgar or Arthur stirred on his perch and shrugged his bony shoulders. Like rust, ravens never sleep. I went through into the kitchen and made some coffee, then drank three cups of it while I flicked through Pen’s A to Z and worked out a route to Thamesmead. There was no sense in driving – I’d have to go through the Blackwall Tunnel or take the Woolwich Ferry, both hassles that I can do without at the best of times. The smart option was to go to Waterloo and then take an overground train to Woolwich Dockyard. From there I could walk it.

A brisk wind had come up in the night and swept the thunderheads away to someplace else, so it was sunny but fresh as I walked to Turnpike Lane Tube station, and my head started to feel a little clearer. I was glad of the change in the weather for another reason, too: shredded at seam and shoulder, and crusted brown with blood on the left-hand side of the collar, my paletot was hors de combat for the time being. I was wearing the only other coat I owned that had enough pockets for all my paraphernalia: a fawn trenchcoat with a button-down yoke which makes me feel like an exhibit in some museum installation about the evolution of the private detective.

Since I’d got such an early start on the day, I couldn’t get a cheap Travelcard, so I just took a single. I didn’t know where I’d be going after I left the Collective. Maybe Paddington, and Rosie Crucis: it depended on whether I found any leads I could actually use.

Bourbon had said that Dennis Peace used to be a rubber duck. In trade jargon, that meant only one thing: an exorcist who chose for professional reasons to live on water rather than on dry land. It’s something we all try out, at some point, if only to get a decent night’s sleep: no ghosts can cross running water, and the morbid sensitivities that keep us in business are all anaesthetised for once. Takes a certain kind of personality to live with it long-term, though: I always end up feeling like I’m trussed up inside a plastic bag, my own breath condensing on me as cold sweat.

The Collective is a floater community on the Thames. Everybody in my world knows it, everybody’s been there, but that doesn’t mean you can necessarily find it when you want to: like the Oriflamme, the Collective is a movable feast. Come to think of it, there’s another link between the two, although it’s an accidental and tendentious one along the lines of ‘how many degrees of separation are you away from Kevin Bacon?’ Only for ‘Kevin Bacon’ read ‘Peckham Steiner’.

Steiner is one of the few flamboyant legends of our reclusive and insular profession. He was an exorcist before the fashion really got going: by which I mean before the huge upsurge of apparitions and manifestations in the last decade of the old millennium turned people like me into a key industry. Specialising in spiritual eradications for the rich and famous, Steiner garnered a certain amount of fame (or at least notoriety) for himself along the way – along with a shedload of money. An American heiress was in it somewhere, if I remember rightly: her dead ex-husbands had been giving her all kinds of grief until Steiner sent them on to their last judgement, and out of gratitude she left him the bulk of her fortune when she died. Her kids from all three marriages sued, and the case dragged on for years, but as far as I know none of them ever managed to lay a legal finger on him. By that time, anyway, he had three books out, a movie deal for his life story and a controlling share in ENSURETM, a company that made ghost-breaking equipment and consumables. He retired at forty-six, richer than God.

Unfortunately, he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe the instability had always been there, or maybe it was the pressures of the job and then the explosive derepression of having enough money to remake yourself and the world closer to your expectations. I mean, look what that did to Michael Jackson.

I met him once – Steiner, I mean, not Jacko – and it was a scary thing to see. By that time I’d already read a couple of his books, and I’d come to respect (although not actually to like) the cold, clever mind that was on show in them. But when I got to talk to him, it was as though that mind had deliquesced and then solidified again in a different, largely non-functional shape.

It was at some weird party or other in a London hotel that was hosting a conference on Perspectives on the Afterlife. Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, an exorcist-turned-academic who’d taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when I was still very wet behind the ears, had blagged a ticket for me and insisted that I came along: the chance of meeting Steiner had swung it.

From what I can still recall of that conversation, he was already well on the way to becoming the surly, crazed recluse that everybody now remembers him as. He talked about the dead and the living as though they were two armies in the field, with himself as some kind of commander marshalling the forces of the warm-blooded. He looked the part, too, I have to admit: spirit-level straight, unyielding as stone, his grey hair cropped close to his scalp. And if Steiner was a general, he seemed to feel that the exorcists were his crack troops: an elite commando unit trained to take anything the enemy could throw at us. The enemy? I hedged at first, sure that there was some subtlety I was missing: but there wasn’t. ‘The dead,’ he said. ‘And the undead. The ones that want to supplant us and take the world away from us.’

Even back then, when I was blasting unquiet spirits without qualm or question, I still couldn’t see the situation quite like that. Apart from anything else, it only seemed to lead in one direction, to a door marked ‘Abandon hope’. Out of some half-hearted attempt to keep up my end of the conversation I asked Steiner how it was possible to fight a war where any casualty in your own forces became a recruit for the other side.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded, frowning at me over a glass of champagne which he was clutching tightly enough to make me nervous.

I made the best fist of it that I could, which wasn’t all that good because most of my concentration was tied up in looking round for an escape route: this was as big a disillusionment as finding out that the reason Father Christmas smells like Johnny Walker is because he’s your dad in a fake beard and a red mac. ‘I mean we’re all going to die, Mister Steiner. If the dead do hate the living, they don’t have to fight us: they only have to wait. In the end, everyone goes the same way, right? If life is an army, everyone deserts sooner or . . .’

Steiner’s glare made me falter into silence. I knew damn well, looking into those mad, uncompromising baby blues, that if we had been in a war zone he’d have had me shot right there and then for bringing aid and comfort to the enemy. Since we were at a party, he didn’t have that option: he was visibly weighing up alternatives.

‘Fuck off and kill yourself, then,’ he growled at last. Then he turned and walked away, shouldering aside some of the great and good who’d gathered around so that they could be seen and photographed with him.

After that, the stages of Steiner’s decline were charted with endless fascination by the ghost-hunting community. From seeing himself as general and commander-in-chief, he came more and more to see himself as a prominent target. If the ghosts – and their servants and satraps, the were-kin, the demons and the zombies – were engaged in a war against the living, then sooner or later they were bound to try to strike at the people who were leading the campaign on the other side: the exorcists. He started to take elaborate precautions for his own safety, and the first – highly publicised – step he took was to buy a yacht. Since the dead can’t usually cross running water, Steiner had decided that he’d make sure he was surrounded by running water most of the time, and only step onto dry land when there was no way of avoiding it. He suggested in a couple of interviews that this might be the lifestyle of the future: he imagined itinerant populations, floating cities built on decommissioned aircraft carriers and oil tankers.

But crazy though he was, I guess he realised somewhere along the way that the idea of relocating whole urban populations onto houseboats would be a hard sell. Something else – some other measure, achievable but effective – was going to be needed, so that when the inevitable assault came and the evil dead overran the land the living would have somewhere to retreat to. A visionary to the last, Steiner proposed a series of safe houses, ingeniously designed, which would stand ‘with hallowed ground to all four sides, behind elemental ramparts of earth and air and water’. Houses built on this design, he said, would blind the eyes and blunt the forces of the dead. The first design used actual moats: the later ones had double walls with the water flowing between them invisibly in plumbed-in metal tanks. The earth and air parts I’m not so sure about. He sent the designs to the housing departments of all the London boroughs, and offered his services as an adviser free if they’d commit themselves to a building programme.

As far as I know, none of the boroughs ever responded – not even with a po-faced ‘Your letter has been received and taken under advisement.’ Steiner raged impotently: even with his millions, there was no way he could do this on his own.

There was an upside to his madness, though: he still saw the exorcists – especially the London exorcists – as his boys, his special charges. He gave Bourbon Bryant the premises that became the Oriflamme, because he loved the idea of ghostbusters meeting up and sharing ideas. (He was probably also working on the principle that there’s strength in numbers.) And when he died, he left his yacht to a trust with Bryant as the first president, changing its name in his will to the Thames Collective. Money from his estate would be diverted to keeping it seaworthy and in a reasonable state of repair, and any London exorcist would have the right to live there at need for as long as they liked, with berths being strictly rotated if too many people took up the offer at the same time.

To begin with, it looked like that might actually be a problem: a whole lot of people liked the idea of living for free in a luxury yacht. But the Collective wasn’t as luxurious as all that: to increase the number of berths, Steiner had had the big staterooms subdivided with plasterboard partitions, so living space was cramped and somewhat rough-and-ready. There’d been problems with the administration of the trust, too: the idea was that London-based exorcists would volunteer for one- or two-year stretches so that the burden wouldn’t fall too heavily on a small group. But not many, even of the people who wanted to live on the Collective, were enthused by the idea of devoting any of their time to running it. It was also hard to define who was eligible, because anyone could say they were an exorcist with no more proof than a letterhead or a shingle. In a welter of resentment, recrimination and mutual backstabbing, the trust more or less imploded. The Collective still existed, but the money that should have kept it in good repair was legally frozen and it was falling apart in melancholy slow motion. It went from berth to berth along the Thames, bringing down the tone wherever it stopped and so always unwelcome even though it could pay its way. The people who lived on it now tended to be people who were only staying in the city for a short while, or who had no other options.

What did I know about Reggie Tang? Just barely north of nothing. He was a rising star of the kind that old dogs like me watch suspiciously and from a distance: rumoured to be a very quick study, a bit on the hot-tempered side and very handy in a fight. His dad had been some sort of broker in Hong Kong before the handover; he was a Buddhist, or so I’d heard; and he was active on the gay scene. That was pretty much it. I’d only ever met him once, and the bulk of that had been a frank exchange of views: a shouting match, in other words, on the theme of how far any of the medieval grimoires could be said to be worth a rat’s arse when it came to defining the names and natures of demons. Reggie thought the Liber Juratus Honorii was the dog’s bollocks: I thought it was the most feebleminded piece of crap I’d ever set eyes on. We didn’t get much further than the is-isn’t-is stage of the discussion, though, because we were both passing-out drunk. I was hoping he’d remember that evening fondly, or at least still have at least a vague idea of who I was. Otherwise the best I could hope for here was the cold shoulder.

I found the Collective exactly where Nicky had said it would be, at the end of a pier just down from the Artillery Museum – but getting on board turned out to be a bit more problematic because the only way to get onto the pier was through a locked gate with a nasty tangle of razor wire on top of it. I took a look at the lock. The keyhole was a very distinctive shape: an asterisk, more or less, with seven radiating lines which were all the same length and thickness except for the one going vertically downward from the centre, which was both longer and slightly wider than the rest. It was a French design, and I was never likely to forget it once I’d met it because the company that made it was named Pollux – and Castor and Pollux are the twins that make up the constellation Gemini. More to the point, I could crack the thing in a minute flat.

But when I rummaged through the pockets of the trenchcoat I came up empty. I’d transferred my whistle, obviously, and a couple of other bits and pieces that had survived my close encounter with the two loup-garous the night before: but I hadn’t remembered to take any of my lockpicks.

So all I could do was hammer on the gate and shout, and then wait until somebody heard me. It was a harsh blow to my professional pride.

Eventually, though, I got a response. There were approaching footsteps and then the gate rattled as someone unlocked it from the far side. It swung open, and a face I didn’t know appeared in the gap.

It was a face you couldn’t do much about, like it or not, except maybe commiserate with the owner. It was pale and flat and had the slight greyness of unbaked dough. The messiest tangle of spiky light-brown hair I’d ever seen stood up on top of it like couch grass on a sand dune. You couldn’t tell whether the body attached to a face like that would be young, old, or somewhere in between: the furthest you’d want to go would be to say that it was – on the balance of probabilities – male.

‘Morning,’ I said, with a winning smile. ‘Is Reggie in?’

The face just stared. I considered the possibility that it was on the end of a pole rather than a neck. But then the guy opened the door a fraction more and I could see for myself that he was alive and intact. He was the same height as me but skinny as a rake: he was dressed in ragged jeans and an op-art T-shirt, and on his feet he wore novelty slippers in the shape of Gromit the dog. ‘Reggie?’ he said, sounding slightly baffled, as if he was hearing the name for the first time. There was an Essex lilt to his voice.

‘Yeah, Reggie Tang. You’re from the Collective, right? I heard he was living there right now.’

The guy didn’t concede the point by so much as a nod. After a loaded pause, he said ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Felix Castor.’ I stuck out my hand. He shook it without much interest, but the momentary emotional flash I got while our hands were touching had some odd harmonics in it: unease, resentment, and something like alarm.

There was no trace of any of that in his voice, which was disengaged if not downright lugubrious. ‘Greg Lockyear,’ he said. ‘So you’re Castor? Heard your name, here and there. Lot of people seem to reckon you.’ His gaze went down to my feet as he said this, as if he was checking my shoes against health-and-safety standards, and then back up to meet mine.

‘Reggie’s inside,’ he said, sounding resigned now. ‘Come on in.’

He turned and led the way along the pier to the Collective’s gangplank. The ship had been a floating mansion once: now she was a wreck. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I could see there were at least that many years’ worth of dirt on her sides. Lower down there was a slimy ring of algae, and below that, winking redly up at me as the water slopped against the hull, a little rust. At this rate the Collective wasn’t going to last out too many more winters.

Lockyear went on board and I followed him – along a short companionway and then sharp left into a stairwell that led down to the lower level of the deckhouse. ‘Mind the steps,’ he called out, without looking back. ‘One of them’s loose.’ The warning came a fraction of a second too late: a plank turned under my heel and I just about managed to avoid going over on my face. I was starting to feel a little bit like an Egyptian tomb robber.

The deckhouse was about the only space on board the Collective that was still the same size and shape as it had started out. It was on two levels, connected by a spiral staircase in carefully matched dark woods, and it still had a sort of faded elegance about it. Very faded: the original leather and built-in tables and couches were sort of overwhelmed now by boot-lockers and cupboard units from the provisional wing of MFI – and there was a smell of stale grease in the air from the galley in the corner, which had an arc of smoke-blackened ceiling above it like the hovering spirit of fried meals long since past. The only other door out of the room was there, and it was half off its hinges. The balcony rails edging the deckhouse’s upper level, about eight feet above us, were missing in places, so that a casual promenade could become a life-or-death affair if you didn’t look where you were going.

There was a kind of breakfast bar in the galley area, with a counter bolted to the wall and a few high stools scattered along its length. The same tastefully blended cherry and walnut panelling decorated the area around the bar, showing up the rest of the room for the tip it now was. The guy sitting there, tucking into a sausage-andegg breakfast, was Reggie Tang. Actually, he wasn’t so much tucking into it as playing with it. He looked up as I came in, and he gave me a cold nod as he shoved the plate away from him decisively. He did cold very well, being the spitting image of Bruce Lee circa Enter the Dragon. He was ten years my junior. Since he was wearing only a vest and a pair of boxers, I could see that he was in taut, wiry good shape.

‘Sorry,’ he said, standing up. ‘I know the face, so I’m assuming we’ve met somewhere. But I can’t remember your name.’ I’d forgotten his voice until I heard it again now: it was deep and vibrant, with an almost musical lilt to it.

‘No reason why you should,’ I said. ‘We only met the once. I’m Felix Castor. I’m sorry if I disturbed your breakfast.’

Reggie shrugged easily. ‘Place is meant to be open to our kind all the time. Part of the deal. Castor, yeah, it’s starting to come back to me now. You’re a Scouser, aren’t you? Part of the North-South brain drain. Good to see you again.’

He took the hand I offered and gave it a firm, brief shake. Nothing readable there, but I hadn’t expected there to be: he looked like the sort of guy who kept his emotions pretty tightly locked down. He nodded me towards a couch that was stacked with old newspapers, magazines and unopened mail. ‘Grab a seat. You looking to sign in?’

I sat down, shoving some of the old letters aside. Behind me, Lockyear crossed to the galley. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he picked up a still-smoking cigarette from an ashtray there, half-raised it to his lips, but then seemed to change his mind and stubbed it out without taking a drag. ‘Not right now,’ I said. ‘Actually, I was hoping to get a little free advice.’

‘Advice?’

‘Yeah. You know, tap the whisper line.’

Reggie smiled at my coy phrasing. ‘Well, go for it. We’re happy to help if we can, aren’t we, Greg?’

‘Sure. Happy to,’ Lockyear echoed. He sat down at the breakfast bar, a long way from Reggie’s unfinished breakfast.

‘Thanks. The fact is, I’m looking for someone.’

‘Someone I know?’

I nodded. ‘Could be, yeah. Someone who used to live here, anyway, but maybe not during your time. Guy name of Dennis Peace.’

Reggie frowned in thought, as if he was running that name through his memory banks. ‘Peace. No, doesn’t ring any bells. You know a Dennis Peace, Greg?’

Lockyear looked round at the sound of his name, his expression the same mildly astonished double take I’d seen him use outside. I was reminded of Stan Laurel, although maybe that was just the hair. He stubbed the cigarette out again, absently, in spite of the fact that it was already dead. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know Peace. Well, I used to know him. He lived here for about six months of last year. Bastard never cooked once. Why? What’s he done?’

This was addressed to Reggie, but Reggie turned to me because obviously that was my question to answer if it was anybody’s.

I decided to tell the truth, as far as I could. It’s not like exorcism as a profession generates a whole huge heap of fellow feeling, but I didn’t want to try to extort any information out of these guys by selling them some tired line about Peace owing me money or whatever. That sort of thing will inevitably turn around and bite you in the arse sooner or later. ‘Someone hired me to find him,’ I said. ‘He’s meant to have a kid with him. A little girl, who – well, who isn’t his. She was abducted from her parents’ house: Peace was there the day it happened, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. So her parents think maybe he took her. I want to see if that’s what happened. And if it is, I’m being paid to get the kid back.’

Reggie said nothing, just kept looking at me with a gambler’s deadpan.

‘Well, I never met the man,’ I conceded, responding to the scepticism in that look. ‘This is just a job, and it could all be bullshit as far as I know. Sooner I find him, sooner I find out.’

‘Sounds like a job for the police,’ Reggie observed. He was standing over me, watching me more closely than the occasion seemed to call for: having offered me a seat, he made no move to sit down himself.

‘Yeah, I guess it would be, if the girl was alive. But she’s dead.’

‘All the more reason—’

‘I mean, she was already dead when he took her.’

Reggie gave the kind of slanted nod that means ‘hell of a story’. ‘There are some very nasty people out there,’ he observed. ‘A lady takes a terrible risk.’

I recognised the quote and let it pass. ‘Does anyone make a note of forwarding addresses when someone leaves here?’ I asked, giving a tottering pile of envelopes a meditative tap.

‘The Trust does. But we’re not the Trust.’

There was definitely an edge in Reggie’s voice now. I could see that we were heading for a point at which he was going to give up the unequal struggle between mood and manners and tell me to sod off. But I was feeling a little bloody-minded myself now – maybe because of the headache, which was back worse than ever – and I wasn’t quite ready to back off. I looked across at Greg Lockyear, who was now leaning forward with his elbows on the counter and looking out across the Thames towards the Gallions Point marina as if it was the most riveting thing he’d ever seen. A conviction started to grow in me.

‘Greg,’ I said, leaning out past Reggie to get a better line of sight. ‘You keep in touch with Peace at all, after he left here?’

Reggie didn’t like the fact that I’d just done an end-play around him, and Greg – when he turned his dazed-rabbit eyes my way – didn’t look all that happy to be back in the conversation. This was making friends and influencing people the Felix Castor way. ‘No,’ Greg said, shaking his head emphatically. ‘No, I never really got on with him all that well. Glad to see the back of him, to be honest.’

‘Any clues as to where he was going? Or did anyone ever visit him while he was here? Anyone who might have put him up afterwards, I mean?’

Greg looked out of the window again, as if checking an autocue, then back at me. ‘No.’

I turned my attention back to Tang. ‘Who else is staying here, Reggie?’ I asked. ‘I mean, besides you two?’

Reggie folded his arms. ‘Nobody.’

‘And you’ve been staying here since—?’

‘Castor, you said you came here looking for advice. You really think acting like a cop is going to get you any?’

‘Well, you said you were happy to help. I’m just taking you at your word.’

‘Okay. I think we helped you enough now. So my new word is sod off out of it.’

‘That’s more of a phrase,’ I pointed out, reasonably. ‘I’m not a cop, Reggie.’

‘You think I’m simple? I said you were acting like one.’

‘Not even that. A cop would be picking up on all your bullshit and shoving it back in your face to see if you blink.’

There was a moment’s – or maybe just half a moment’s – tense silence. ‘What bullshit?’ Reggie demanded.

‘Well, let’s see. You’re a Buddhist, but when I come in you’re sitting in front of a plate full of sausage, eggs and bacon. You can’t bring yourself to actually touch the stuff, but you do your best to pretend it’s yours. And Mister Potato Face over there had the same problem with the fag, so it’s fair to assume that somewhere nearby there’s a chain-smoking carnivorous mate of yours who doesn’t want to be introduced to me for some inexplicable—’

It was just as well that Reggie’s eyes flicked upwards. Like an idiot, I’d been watching the door at the back of the galley, but seeing that tell-tale glance I rolled off the couch a split-second before a burly form crashed down feet first from above and two size-ten boots thumped into the space where I’d just been sitting.

I hit the floor and rolled, fetching up against Reggie’s feet. He jumped back hastily, proving that his Bruce Lee looks were all window dressing, but the guy with the roomy footwear was a bit more aggressive. He strode across to me, lifted me up by my lapels with surprisingly little effort and slammed me into the wall.

‘Hold on to him!’ he bellowed.

Reggie and Greg rushed to comply, taking an arm each. I could have fought back, but only at the expense of a few more hard knocks. I figured the time for that would come.

The man standing in front of me, rubbing right fist into left palm, looked like hard knocks were a daily fact of life for him. He was big enough to be covered by building regulations, and his hard, craggy face bore a couple of days’ growth of stubble. His hair was sand-blond, his complexion sandpaper-rough. There were deep shadows under his eyes, as dark as bruises. He must have been fairly handsome once, in a weather-beaten, roughly chiselled out, oversized kind of way. Now, in middle age, he looked like someone who was just starting to feel the pull of gravity and letting it get to him – psychologically, if not physically. He was wearing one of those shades-of-grey urban combat jackets over a green turtleneck sweater and olive-drab trousers tucked into those intimidating Dixon of Dock Green boots. An incongruous flash of gold from his wrist caught my eye: he was wearing a bracelet. But before I could take in the details he reached out and grasped my cheeks in his hand, tilting my head up so our stares met.

He glared at me – a warning glare.

‘I got your message,’ he said. ‘That was you, yeah? At the Oriflamme? So you wanted to talk to me. Well, here I am. What do you want to talk about?’

‘Abbie Torrington,’ I suggested.

That was meant to be an opening gambit, but it got a more spectacular reaction than I was expecting. Dennis Peace gave a wordless roar and punched me in the stomach. I saw the punch coming and threw myself backwards as far as I could into Reggie and Greg, trying to ride with it. Even so, it was like standing in the path of a cannon ball. The pain was incredible, and I folded up with a feeble hiccup of displaced air. I sagged, but Reggie and Greg held on so I didn’t actually fall.

‘You don’t – you don’t even talk about her!’ Peace bellowed. ‘You don’t even – you bastard, you think I’m going to let you—? Who’s paying you? Who’s fucking sent you here?’

He grabbed a handful of my hair and jerked my head up again – but not before I took a closer look at that bracelet and saw it for what it was: a heart-shaped locket on a golden chain, wrapped twice around his muscular wrist.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked again.

‘Her – her mother,’ I wheezed.

‘Well, you tell that bitch she’s never seeing Abbie again in this world or any fucking other. That’s over. It’s over! I would’ve – I would’ve – I’ll kill before I let that coldhearted bastard—’

He ran out of words, his face flushed so deep a red it looked like he was about to bust a major artery. He brandished his fist at me again, but didn’t go for a second punch. He took a long, shuddering breath, visibly struggling to get himself back under some kind of control. I remembered that he was popping speed: that’s not generally conducive to moments of calm reflection.

Then things took a turn for the worse. Peace flicked his jacket away from his body on the left-hand side and pulled a handgun out of his belt. He shoved it hard up against my cheek.

‘Take it easy, Den,’ Reggie Tang murmured anxiously.

‘Shut up, Reggie,’ Peace growled. He looked at me with a sort of agonised hatred. He seemed to be working himself up to something, and I opened my mouth to try to head it off. Before I could speak, his free hand shot forward, balled into a fist. I didn’t have time to move – just to close my eyes. A splintering, rending sound came from just to my left. Opening my eyes, I turned my head a fraction and saw the gaping hole that Peace had just punched in the decorative fascia above the breakfast bar. He curled and unfolded his fingers three times: as far as I could see, he hadn’t even broken any skin.

‘If I ever see you again,’ he said to me, a fraction calmer now, ‘I’ll kill you. I mean it. I’ll kill you. Don’t come looking for me unless you’re ready to cut my throat while I’m asleep, because that’s the only way you’re getting her. And don’t assume I’m asleep just because I’ve got my fucking – eyes – closed.’

He punctuated these last three words with three sharp jabs of the gun barrel into my face. He flicked a glance at Reggie, and then at Greg. ‘Give me five minutes,’ he said, ‘and then let him go.’

Reggie nodded. Greg just blinked. Peace was already heading for the wide-open spaces in any case, tucking the gun back into his belt, and he didn’t look back as he ducked to clear the low door.

Well, now. I liked these odds better.

I drooped a little in Reggie and Greg’s grip, making them take a little more of my weight. Irritably they hauled me upright, which meant that they were off balance when I came up with them and shoved backwards. We all lurched against the bulkhead together. I dragged my arm clear of Greg’s grip and punched Reggie hard in the throat. He gave a choking gurgle and staggered sideways into the breakfast bar, letting go his hold on my other arm as both his hands flew to his neck. I didn’t need the arm, though, because I was already taking Greg out with a sharp butt to the bridge of the nose.

I was out through the door before either of them could recover enough to mount a counter-attack, but by the time I got up the stairs and out into the companionway Peace was already legging it down the gangplank. He turned on the quayside and looked back at me.

He kicked the gangplank away just as I got to it, and it tumbled end over end into the Thames, hitting the Collective’s hull with a series of hollow metallic booms like a clock chiming the hour inside a coffin. The distance to the shore was only ten feet or so, but I had to back a few steps to get a run-up, and meanwhile the guy was already having it away on his toes.

I made the jump, and I landed with both feet under me – but then a moment’s dizziness, coming out of nowhere, made me stagger and almost fall backwards into the river. I pulled myself together and took off after my quarry, who’d reached the pier’s gate by now and was hauling it open.

To my horror I saw him take the key out of the near side of the lock and throw it towards the water. Then he was through and slamming the gate shut behind him a second before I reached it. I dragged down on the handle but the damn thing didn’t budge.

Damn damn damn damn damn! No lockpicks, no time, and the razor wire on top of the gate looked like the most serious kind of bad news. I cast around for some object I could use to smash the lock, and saw the key: it had landed on the edge of the pier, a couple of inches short of the water.

I snatched it up, put it in the lock and turned. Running out onto the street, I looked left just in time to see Peace’s burly figure disappear around a corner fifty yards away. As I started in pursuit, a car roared past me, heading in the same direction and accelerating: it was a battered-looking Grand Cherokee, covered in dried mud and looking faintly military. With a jolt of alarm, I saw that there were two men in the front seats, the passenger a man so tall that he was folded over on himself, his raised knees showing in the window. Even from a single high-speed glimpse, Po was unmistakable.

I put on a fresh spurt of speed, but they still reached the corner well before me and disappeared around it with a whump-chunk sound as the car rocked and yawed on its wheelbase. When I got there, I saw Peace running hell for leather along a narrow stretch of road where the pavement all but vanished. Faceless low-rise office blocks hemmed him in on both sides, with no alleys or breaks that he could duck into. Up ahead of him, though, the street opened out on one side onto the broad asphalted plain of a car park. It was laid out as a maze-like grid of two-foothigh concrete bollards, some of which were linked by chains.

The jeep was only a few feet behind Peace when he reached the first of the bollards. He jumped right over it like a hurdler and kept on going: the jeep was forced to swerve wide, back out onto the street, first of all keeping pace with him and then accelerating past him. When it got to the far end of the open space it swerved to a pinwheeling halt and the passenger door was thrown open.

Po clambered out, at first human but unfolding as he moved into something that looked like it had never had a mother. His arms elongated and thickened and he bent from the waist to lay them on the ground. His mouth gaped, and kept on gaping, deforming into a fang-ringed muzzle like the maw of a shark. I’d been right after all about him being an exotic, but he was no gorilla. He was a hyena, or something that had been a hyena once: and even on all fours like this he was as high at the shoulder as a man.

Peace saw that he’d been outflanked, stopped at a skid, turned and went into full reverse, his arms and legs pumping. Po loped after him, slow at first but gathering speed. Meanwhile the jeep heeled around, its passenger door still flapping and banging, and headed back down the street towards me. Again it came alongside Peace and then accelerated past him. If it hadn’t been for the bollards it could have just moved in and cut him off. As it was, the driver had to brake again and jump out himself. It was the other man I’d met last night – Zucker, the one with the deep, growly voice and the fondness for sharp edges. I was barely twenty yards away now, and running towards him, but he only had eyes for his quarry. He jogged forward to meet Peace, completing the pincer movement.

But Peace turned in a wide arc, heading for the back of the car park where a high wooden fence separated it from the water-sports dealership it presumably served. The fence looked too high to climb, but Peace’s two pursuers saw the danger that he might somehow slip away from them and pushed themselves harder, narrowing his lead.

I reached the jeep, and saw from the slight vibration of the bonnet that the engine was still running. Without even thinking about what I was doing, I jumped in and backed it out onto the street.

Peace was almost at the fence: the two were-kin were only a few yards behind him. I gunned the engine, slammed it into second and roared forward. The two bollards directly in front of me were linked by one of the chains: I hit it full-on and it parted with a crunch, the loose ends snapping away like steel whips to either side. I kept on going, swerving to avoid the barriers where I could, smashing straight through them when I had to. Something caught in one of the front wheels and the jeep started to lean to the right: I turned the wheel frantically to compensate.

Up ahead of me, Peace had reached the fence, and he tensed for a leap that would take him some of the way up the side of it. Before he could, Po closed the last few yards and was on him in a frenzy of claws. They both went down. There were two gunshots, so close together that the second sounded like the echo of the first. Peace kicked Po away from him – a pretty amazing feat in itself – and scrambled up again. The were-thing was hurt, blood on its face seeming to blind it so that although it swiped out with one obscenely long clawed forelimb it missed Peace by a good few inches.

Zucker was closing fast. Seeing how bad the odds were about to get, Peace turned and made a powerful leap, hitting the fence about four feet off the ground and hauling himself up with his hands. Close behind, Po gathered himself on his haunches to do the same thing – but his leap would bring Peace off the wall in the way a cat would claw down a low-flying bird. At the same time, Zucker was groping in his pocket, probably for his knife. One way or another, Peace didn’t have a chance in hell of making it to the top.

I clamped my hand down on the horn: the harsh, diminuendo blat of sound made the loup-garous turn, and they saw their own car bearing down on them: four thousand pounds of metal, give or take, tearing out its engine as I pushed it up to fifty in second gear.

It was too late now for Po to tackle Peace. Instead, he and Zucker grabbed tarmac on either side as I accelerated past them. At the last moment, I pulled the wheel hard over. I hit the fence full-on, about ten feet to the left of where Peace was still scrambling up: hit it, and went straight through it onto a paved forecourt where the remains of the fence rained down around me as splintered flotsam.

The front tyres blew and the jeep settled like a broken steer, its front bumper hitting the ground in a shower of sparks. That took care of a lot of my speed, which was good as far as it went, but a second later the air bag inflated, slamming me backwards in my seat and pinning my arms. A secondary impact after that told me I’d smashed into something else that I hadn’t even seen.

I lay there dazed. There was a wailing sound in my ears, and for a chilling moment I thought I must have hit someone – but then I realised it was an alarm of some kind going off.

Forcing myself to move despite the aches and the shock of impact, I managed to get my hand into my pocket and groped around until I found my penknife. On the third try, I succeeded in puncturing the air bag: then I had to wait until it had deflated far enough for me to slide out from under it.

Staggering out of the remains of the jeep, I saw that I’d actually slammed into another car on the forecourt of the sports shop. It had been a very nice electric-blue BMW: it still was, except for the front third, which was twisted scrap.

Amazingly, nobody was coming to see what the noise was. The shop hadn’t opened yet, and neither had any of the offices on the street behind me.

There was no sign of Peace, nor of the two loup-garous. I took that as a good sign, because if they’d brought him down they’d still be right there questioning him or beating him up or eating his remains.

There was nothing I could do except make myself scarce before someone came along to investigate the noise and the shattered fence. I headed back towards the Collective. I was in the right mood now to have another round with Reggie bastard Tang and his gormless little friend, and see if I couldn’t shake some more information out of them.

But when I got back to Pier 17, all my well-chosen phrases died on my lips as I stared, nonplussed, across a widening swathe of water towards the Collective’s receding stern rail. The gap was a good ten yards already, and the ship was heading out into the river at a slow, shuddering two knots.

Reggie was standing up on deck, a black silk jacket thrown on over his vest and pants, his hands thrust deep into the pockets. He favoured me with an unfriendly, appraising stare.

‘Go on home, man,’ he said, sounding stern and sad. ‘Have some fucking self-respect and go on home.’

For one crazy moment I actually contemplated trying to make that jump. I’d have ended up trapped in the viscous Thames sludge until someone came and got me with a block and tackle and a tow bar. Instead, I stood and watched the ship out of sight around the next bend. Reggie stayed up on deck the whole time, watching me as though he wanted to be sure I didn’t try anything. After a while, Greg Lockyear came and stood next to him, a hand on his shoulder. Then the graceless curve of Ferry Approach intervened, the Collective slid out of sight, and I was left alone on the pier, looking – if I can get technical for just a moment – like a complete fuckwit.