Vicious Circle (13 page)

“What?”

“Occasionally I feel a very faint presence. Not in the stones themselves but close. Close, and moving, moving against itself, in fragments, like a cloud of gnats. Whatever it is, I think it’s linked to what’s inside the church—but as soon as I look towards it, it hides itself from me.”

I remembered what I’d felt as I stood waiting by the church’s front door. “Yeah,” I agreed, “I think maybe I got that, too. A scent, I mean, but not strong enough to pin down.”

I glanced over at the lych-gate: Susan Book was waiting for us there, her pale face visible through the gathering gloom.

“You want me to try?” I asked. The stuff Juliet was talking about was probably necromancy—black magic—most of which I tend to regard as a mountain of quackery and bullshit surrounding a few grains of truth. What I do is different: the expression of a talent that’s inside me, with no recitations or rituals and no steganographic mysteries. It was a sincere offer, but Juliet was shaking her head: she wasn’t asking me to do her job for her.

“I want you to tell me if I’m missing anything,” she said. “You’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have.”

That was true, as far as it went. Juliet was a good few millennia old, from what she’d told me, but she’d only been living on earth for a year and a half. There were things about the way the living, the dead, and the undead interacted on the mortal plane that she didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.

But if this
was
a demon, then her experience counted for a fuck of a lot more than mine. What could I tell her about the hell-kin, when for her hell was the old neighborhood?

I chewed it over. I liked it that she called on me when she was baffled—I liked it a lot—and I didn’t want to just turn my pockets out and show they were empty. But this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.

“Let me think about it,” I temporized. “Ask a couple of friends. Right now I can’t think of any angle you’ve missed.”

“Thank you, Castor. I’ll share the fee, of course—if this turns out to need our combined efforts.”

“The twinkle in your eye is reward enough. Although actually, since I’m here, you can do me a favor in return.”

“Go ahead.”

“In your—um—professional capacity—”

“
This
is my professional capacity now.”

“Well, yeah. Obviously. But in the old days, when you were—hunting, hunting someone specific, I mean, and they knew you were coming and tried to hide. Did you—how did you—?” It was hard to find a delicate way of putting it, but Juliet was smiling, really amused. Demons have an odd sense of humor.

“You mean, when I was raised from hell to feed on a human soul—yours, for example—how did I find you?”

I nodded. “In a nutshell.”

“I hunt by scent.”

“I knew that. What I was trying to ask was
which
scent? Was it the soul or the body that you tracked?”

“Both.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Okay,” I said. “So did you ever come across a situation where your—”

“Prey?”

“I was going to go with ‘target,’ but yeah. Where your prey knew you were coming, and managed to brush over his trail in some way. So you couldn’t smell him anymore?”

She thought about this for a moment or two, visibly turning it over in her mind.

“There are things that disguise the body’s scent,” she said. “Lots of things. For the soul—a few. Running water would hide both.”

I nodded. That much I did know. “But did you ever have a situation where you were following a trail, and the scent was strong, and then suddenly it just went cold. Completely died on you.”

She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. “No. That couldn’t happen.”

“Somebody did it to me earlier on today.”

“No,” she said again. “That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.”

Good enough. And food for thought. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.”

“Come in the evening,” she suggested. “We can have dinner.”

That was a very appealing prospect. “On you?”

“On me.”

“You’re on. Where do you want to meet?”

“Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by—perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight thirty.”

I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.

“It didn’t come to me,” I said.

“What?”

“The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?”

“Oh.” Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I were asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.

“It’s a heartbeat,” she said. “Beating about once a minute.”

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, 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 west of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half farther 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 were 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 that 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, pulled myself together; 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 realized 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-colored duffel coat but still recognizable 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.”

She 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 under the noise of the engine.

“Juliet? No,” I admitted. “She . . . hasn’t been living around these parts very long. I’ve known her less than a year.”

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 favors 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.

She started, 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.”