Vicious Circle (43 page)

I made coffee, just for something to do. While the water came slowly to the boil, I went and retrieved my coat from the floor. It wasn’t a cold night, but I always prefer to have my whistle where I can get to it in a hurry. Absently, I checked the contents of the pockets, finding everything where it should be—and one anomalous item, which I didn’t recognize until I pulled it out into the light: the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll, slightly chipped but miraculously still in one piece. I slid it back into the pocket hastily. I didn’t know what memories it might provoke for her, and I didn’t want to find out right then.

The coffee was instant, of course, but I poured a slug from my hip flask into each of the mugs to sweeten the pill. I brought one over to Peace and put it down on the floor next to him. He nodded a thank-you.

“So what’s the story?” I said, sitting down on the suitcase that was the closest thing to a chair I could see.

Peace sighed and shook his head. “No story. Stories make some kind of fucking sense. My life is just . . . things. Things happening. I never knew where I was going.” He looked tired and old, although I guessed he only had a couple of years on me.

“I meant about Abbie,” I said, bluntly. “She calls you dad. Is that just a figure of speech, or did you really have a part to play in making her?”

He gave me a bleak stare. “What do you think?” he asked, at last.

“I think there’s a birth certificate on file in Burkina Faso that shows you fathered a child there. But the record shows that the girl who died last Saturday night in Hendon was the daughter of a man named Stephen Torrington.”

“Yeah? Well you should go ask Stephen Torrington about that. You’ll need your whistle, though: he’s likely to want a little coaxing before he talks.”

“And her mother was a woman named Melanie—but after that it’s pick a card any card, because she seems to change her surname the way other people change their underwear.”

“When I met her it was Melanie Jeffers.”

I was going to let the subject drop, but it might do him good to talk, and it would certainly do me good to listen. “Peace,” I said, gently, “I’ve just spent three days living in a Whitehall farce where every cupboard had a cop, a Catholic, or a lunatic cultist inside it. I could get ten years just for knowing Abbie was dead when the police still thought she was alive. So could you find it in your heart to be a little less terse?”

“It’s my life, Castor.”

“Mine, too.”

We stared at each other again: this time he broke first.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Why not? Give me another shot of that metaxa, first. I hate going back over this shit. I hate the fucker I was when I did this shit.”

He seemed to have lost his reservations about swearing in front of Abbie—and she seemed not to have noticed, so maybe it wasn’t the first time. I handed him the flask, thinking he was going to top up his coffee. Instead he upended it and drank it dry, then handed it back to me with an appreciative grimace.

“That was rough,” he said.

“Didn’t seem to slow you down much.”

“Rough is what I need right now. Abbie?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“This is your story, too, and you’ve got a right to hear it. But not all of it. There’s a bit in the middle that I’m going to send you to sleep for, because—because it’s not the sort of thing a girl your age should be exposed to. Okay?”

The ghost nodded silently. Send her to sleep? I was going to watch that one with keen interest: if Peace could whistle ghosts down as well as up, and do it without risk of exorcising them altogether, he had more control of the fine-tuning than I’d ever had. I remembered the psychic smack down he’d given me the second time I tried to get a fix on Abbie. I might learn something here—assuming he lived long enough to teach me.

“You’ve probably heard a lot about me by now,” Peace said, “and you can take it for granted that most of it’s true. There’s worse, too: things that never made it into the legend because I was careful who I talked to. I’m not going into detail, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I was big for my age—bigger at fifteen than most grown men—so I came to a lot of things early and learned a lot of bad habits.

“I’m not making any excuses for myself. I did bad things because I was stupid and immature and I didn’t care all that much. Saying I was too young to know any better doesn’t make a gram of difference in my book and I don’t see why it should in yours.”

Peace hesitated, as if he was poised at the brink of a revelation he wasn’t quite ready for yet. “I’m not a saint,” I told him, by way of speeding things along. “And I’m not your confessor, either.”

He nodded, but the silence stretched a little further before he spoke again. “It was like—I went into everything just wanting to know what I could get out of it. Screwed people over in all kinds of ways and never thought about it, because people who can’t look out for themselves deserve to get taken. That’s just the way the world works.

“I must have been about twelve when I found out I had the gift. For exorcism, I mean. I’d always gambled: horses, dogs, slot machines—but my favorite game was poker and no one could beat me at it. I’d be sitting at a table with four or five other blokes, and I could look at each one of them in turn, and think—yeah, that’s what you’ve got. You’re sitting on a pair of eights, aren’t you, betting on another one in the flop. He’s got a king high, he’s got jacks over threes, and Mr. Cool over there has got sod all so I can win this.

“But after a while I found out I could do a lot more than that. Instead of just guessing the cards that people were holding, I started to see people as cards—as hands of cards. Live or dead, didn’t matter, there was a particular hand of cards that stood for that person in my mind. That’s how I bind ghosts—I deal out the right hand of cards, and then I shuffle it back into the deck. Bang. They’re gone.

“Like I said, with me everything was a means to an end. I burned ghosts for money, sure—just like I gambled for money. And sometimes if I found a ghost that was still fresh and more or less together, I’d sweat it for what it had left behind when it died that might still be around for me to pick up. Like, what were the numbers on your bank accounts, and is there a little stash of money at home that you salted away against a rainy day and that your missus doesn’t know about?”

He looked at me hard, which was probably how I was looking at him. “There wasn’t anyone I’d have spared in those days,” he said. “Man, woman, or child, I didn’t give a fuck. I did it for the cash, because I went through a lot of cash, and I did it for the hell of it. Because I could.”

He seemed to expect an answer—maybe outrage or accusation—but after going over this ground with Nicky there wasn’t much he could say that would have surprised me. I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, “you were a bad man. Maybe the worst. Let’s take that as read.”

Peace gave a bitter laugh, shook his head. “Give me a break, Castor. I wasn’t the worst, not by a million sodding miles. Maybe I kidded myself that I was, but I was a fucking babe in arms compared to some of the people I met.

“Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the forty-five medium regiment first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army—not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while, mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.

“That was how I ended up in Ouagadougou. I was making a delivery, and I got rolled. Guy says he’s already paid, then when I refuse to hand over he gets a bunch of his mates to beat the crap out of me. So I end up on the street, penniless, and having to keep my head down because the blokes who hired me won’t be interested in hearing how I lost the shit—they’ll just want their money, which I can’t give them because I haven’t got it.

“Could’ve been worse, though. Burkina Faso was the edge of the bloody world in those days—the final frontier. They’d just kicked that crooked bastard Sankara out and nobody knew from one day to the next whether there was going to be another coup or a civil war or what, so people were in the mood to take stupid risks, spend their money now before it stopped being worth anything, and generally let their hair down. My kind of place, in some ways, if you leave aside the fact that everyone was shit-poor and you could get your throat cut if you flashed a dollar bill.

“Ouagadougou was the capital city, but you wouldn’t know it. A few blocks of swanky buildings in the center, and then you turn a corner and you’re in among the shitty little shanties again. Very strange.

“One night I was in a bar and these three drunken fucks started in on a white woman who was sitting by herself. There was something a bit odd about her: she was very fancily dressed, even for the main drag, and this was the boondocks. Cocktail dress, lots of makeup although she didn’t need it. Hair up, and a necklace that was probably worth a couple of years’ wages around there. These guys tried to pick her up, and she told them to sod off, so they got nasty.

“I stood up, walked over to help. They weren’t nearly as tough as they thought they were, and anyone could see that this woman was very well-heeled: very easy on the eye, too: tall, built, lots of class. Eyes a little cold, maybe, and blue-eyed blondes have never been my thing when all’s said and done, but still—I thought if I got in good with this piece of goods, that was another door opening. Might at least get a bed for the night and my leg over, maybe get a lot more.

“But she didn’t need my help, as it transpired. Before I ever got to the table, she’d told one of these gents to keep his paws to himself, and he’d responded—being the humorous type—by grabbing hold of her breasts. His mates are roaring with laughter and he’s soaking it up, loving it. For about three seconds, give or take. Then the lady took a gun out of her handbag and blew a hole in his throat.”

He’d fallen into a slightly dreamy inflection, his eyes unfocused as he stared into a different darkness, a different night a decade and a half gone. Then he pulled himself together and snapped out of it, shaking his head in somber wonder.

“That was your mother, Abbie,” he said, looking up at the faint shade of his daughter almost with apology. “That was Mel.”

T
HERE
WAS
ANOTHER
LONG
SILENCE
.
PEACE
ISSUED
A SHUDdering breath that seemed to hurt a lot on its way out. Dead Abbie stared down at him, her eyes dark wells of sorrow and concern.

“Maybe you’d better save the rest of this story for later,” I suggested.

He shook his head sharply, just once. “It’s weighing on my mind,” he muttered. “I think I’ll feel happier once I’ve got it out.” He was still looking at Abbie. “Sweetheart,” he said, “I’m going to have to send you to sleep for the next part. There’s some stuff that . . . that I wouldn’t want . . .”

He tailed off into silence, but Abbie was already nodding. “Don’t make it too long,” she said, her voice sounding as though it was coming from a long way away. “I want to be here with you. In case anything happens.”

Peace shifted his weight so he could reach under the blanket. Tension and pain crossed his face in ripples, and his movements were slow and clumsy, but when he drew his hand out again he was holding a deck of cards, tied around with an elastic band. He flicked the band off with his index finger, one-handed, and put the deck down on the floor beside his head.

“This might take a while,” he muttered.

I watched him in fascination. So many exorcists use rhythm to do what they do, it’s always a bit of a jolt to see someone who bases their technique on some other kind of patterning. I’d never seen anyone use playing cards before.

Peace started to sort through them, still using only his left hand. It seemed to be a regular deck, except that the cards were marked—heavily marked, with different-colored inks and even with paint in a couple of places. There were scribbled words and phrases on most of the cards, along with occasional lines and crosses striking out some of the pips. The face of the queen of hearts had just been ripped out, leaving a roughly circular hole in the card that you could have put the tip of your little finger through.

But it was the three of spades that Peace found and put at the top of the deck—faceup, at first, but then he turned it and tapped it and glared at it hard. When he turned it over again, it was the ace. And Abbie blinked out like a streetlight at sunup.

Peace pocketed the deck again, or at least put it back underneath the blanket.

“Now Mel,” he said, matter-of-factly, “Mel is really bad. Deep down, bred-in-the-bone bad. I’d never met anyone like her before. I have since, but like I said, I was still more of a kid than anything back then. I mean, I thought I was the last word until I met her.” He grinned, or maybe he was just showing his teeth. “Bitch has got that whole femme fatale thing going for her. Most men love a really bad girl. At least until she’s bad to
them.
”

I might have argued with that once. Now it just made me think of Juliet, and I said nothing.

“These guys backed off sharpish. The man she’d shot wasn’t dead, amazingly. He had his hands clutched to his throat, trying to stop the blood or at least slow it down, but he still seemed to be able to breathe so I suppose she must have missed his trachea or whatever it’s called. But his feet started to slip and slide and he was obviously about to fall down, so his two mates took a hand each and they dragged him off toward the door. They threw a couple of curses at Mel, but all the fight had gone out of them.

“That was when I noticed that the barman had a copper’s nightstick in his hand: not a PC Plod effort, one of the big sidewinders that takes no fucking prisoners. He’d fished it up from some little cubbyhole under the bar, and he was walking up behind Mel with this thing under his shoulder ready to swing it up and over and crack her head open.