Vicious Circle (58 page)

“As opposed to killing both you and your demon whore, which I so clearly could? Yes. Take it. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”

He was right there. I threw the locket across to him and he caught it one-handed. Juliet’s eyes narrowed, but that was the only move she made: the only move she
could
make.

Gwillam signaled to his men—a clockwise rotation of his index finger in the air that clearly meant “pack up the tents.” They started to file away in good order, two of them carrying Zucker, just as the stained glass windows to either side of the church door blew out in party-colored shards, vomiting smoke and fire up into the night.

Gwillam went last of all, and he lingered for a moment as if there was something else on his mind.

“I told you that we investigated Ditko, two years ago—very shortly after you signed him in at the Charles Stanger clinic,” he said.

“Yeah. You told me that.”

“It might make you feel a little better about your part in all of this if I tell you something we found out at that time.” I didn’t say anything that could have been interpreted as “oh, do tell” but he went on anyway, looking at me thoughtfully. “Fanke had a mistress back then—dead now. In his sexual liaisons he’s always favored the young and stupid. He seems—seemed, I should say—to take a certain pleasure in imprinting his own will on people too weak or vapid to resist.

“Her name was Jane—plain Jane—but she’d rechristened herself Guinevere when she joined the satanist church. Obviously she was living out some romantic fantasy of her own. Most people still called her Jane, in spite of all her efforts, but Rafael Ditko was introduced to her as Guinevere and usually shortened it to Ginny.”

Memory sideswiped me like a truck.
Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?

“My Christ!” I breathed.

Gwillam nodded, seeing that I’d made the connection. “When Ditko raised Asmodeus that night, it was a move in a game—a game that Fanke was playing against God. Abbie Torrington was another such move. Perhaps she was originally destined to be sacrificed on a different altar, to a different devil. But Ditko failed, and you . . . well, you did what you did. He chose his own path, of course, but your choices were made for you a long time ago, Castor. You’re one of heaven’s soldiers, too, whether you believe that or not. You’re the brand that he takes from the fire, already burning, to smite his foes. Perhaps when he’s done with you there’ll still be something left to save.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I snarled. As clever ripostes go, I had to admit, it lacked something. Actually, it lacked pretty much everything.

Gwillam turned and walked away, his steps ringing on the cobbles until the
whoop
of approaching sirens drowned them out. It sounded like Detective Sergeant Basquiat had finally checked her messages.

I took out my whistle and played a few bars for Juliet, ragged and halting: the notes that cut the strings Gwillam had laid on her. When she could, she turned to face me, her gaze deep and searching.

“Debriefing comes later,” I said. “No smutty double meanings intended. Right now, if I were you, I’d be somewhere else.”

She glanced at the first of the police cars as it turned the corner and came belting toward us. Then, in the glare of its headlights, she turned back to me and nodded once, as if to say that there’d be answers she’d insist on.

When the cars rattled to a halt on the cobbles to either side of me, I was the last man standing.

I
N
THE
SECURE
UNIT
AT
WHITTINGTON’S
,
I’D
AT
LEAST
HAD
a magazine—along with a phone on a wheely trolley, all the small change I could pick off the floor, and a werewolf-themed cabaret. In the remand cells at the Uxbridge Road cop shop, all I had was the clothes I stood up in, minus belt and jacket.

The graffiti on the cell wall were varied and imaginative, but even they palled after a while. Kicking on the door got no response except for muffled swear words from the guy in the cell next door, who muttered and raved to himself in a variety of different voices in between times. Even the cockroaches, bred in the wild and proud of spirit, refused to race. After three hours or so, I began to understand why they’d taken the belt: if I’d still had it, I’d have hanged myself. Alternatively, if there’d been any sheets on the cot bunk, I’d have slept.

Basquiat arrived some time toward morning, with Field tagging along as usual to hold her coat and feed her straight lines. The guard on duty unlocked the door for her and signed her in, then set one of the interview tape recorders down on the floor and left, giving her a respectful nod.

She left the tape recorder where it was, though, signaling for me to sit down on my bunk while she took the edge of the table and Field stood by the door, ignored.

“So,” she said.

I waited for something more solid to go on.

“A burning church full of dead men in black gowns. Another one, in red, lying dead outside. And you, kneeling next to a woman who’s been tied up with duct tape.”

“I admit that looks fairly suspicious at first glance,” I said.

Basquiat smiled coldly. “Just a little, yeah. But then we start to look at the small print. The guy in red checks out as Anton Fanke, so I guess he got tired of Belgium.”

“A man who’s tired of Belgium . . .”

“Don’t get smart, Castor. I like you better when you’re scared and desperate. And besides, I didn’t get to the good part yet. Fanke was carrying a gun that my friends in ballistics greeted like a long-lost friend. It’s the one that killed Melanie Torrington. And one of the corpses in the church had a knife with Abigail Torrington’s blood on the blade. A whole lot of fingerprints, including Fanke’s—but not yours.

“So my case against you for those earlier murders starts to look a little shaky. I’ve still got you for Peace, of course—you at the scene of the crime, and your prints on the gun that killed him. But that duct-taped woman has been telling us all kinds of things about the late Mr. Fanke. Stuff that you wouldn’t believe.”

The mention of Pen made me wince. “I think I’d believe most of it,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe you would at that. Anyway, it seems like he was looking for Peace even before you were—looking in some of the same places, like that club in Soho Square. So maybe your story about him hiring you to do his legwork makes a little more sense now.”

The first thing that Bourbon Bryant had said to me when I asked him about Peace:
Seems like he’s flavor of the month all of a sudden
. Why the hell hadn’t I made the connection, and asked him who else had been sniffing around?

“And he’s got more of a motive, because he and Peace had some kind of legal skirmish a few years back, and it turns out Peace has been chasing him all around Europe ever since. Something about parental visiting rights to a little girl named Abigail Jeffers. Was that—?”

“Abigail Torrington. Yeah, it was.”

“Thought so. Otherwise we’d have been talking about a hell of a lot of weird coincidences. So Fanke murdered Abbie, but Peace—what? I’m a little hazy on this part.”

“The idea was to do more than just murder her, Basquiat. She was going to be used up, body and soul, to bring the demon Asmodeus onto the mortal plane. But Peace stepped in before Fanke could finish the ritual—broke the circle and took away Abbie’s ghost. Her spirit. That was what Fanke was looking for. And that was what he took away with him after he killed Peace.”

“So last night’s gig at St. Michael’s was in the nature of an action replay?”

“You could call it that.”

“I
did
call it that, Castor. The question is, what would you call it?”

“Well, since they both ended in violent fiascos and a lot of dead bodies, I guess ‘action replay’ is as good as anything.”

Basquiat scowled, clearly not appreciating the beating about the bush. She opened her mouth, but I forestalled her. “Yeah, Fanke was trying to finish what he started. He had the locket with Abbie’s hair in it—the physical anchor for her ghost. He was going to burn it, inside another magic circle. That would have been enough.”

“But it didn’t happen.”

“No.”

“Because—?”

And that was about as far as I wanted to take it. “There was an interruption,” I said, deadpan. “An all-singing, all-dancing interruption, as I’m sure you know by now. A dozen or so men with machine guns, a couple of loup-garous in a really bad mood, and most of the cast from
The Producers
over on Drury Lane. I don’t know how many DOAs you ended up with—”

“Forty-two,” Basquiat threw in quietly.

“—but I’m sure there were enough to convince you that this wasn’t a one-man show.”

Basquiat blew out her cheek reflectively. “All these show business metaphors. You got stars in your eyes?”

“A guy can dream.” I was getting the impression from all this that the detective sergeant’s opinion of me had warmed somewhat. One way or another, she seemed to have decided—like Gwillam, although for very different reasons—that I was on the side of the angels after all.

But she still had a job to do. She stood up from the edge of the table where she’d been leaning and threw a nod to Field. He flexed his muscles in a way that was frankly threatening for a moment, but all he did was to lift the tape recorder off the floor and set it down in the center of the table.

“Body count of forty-two,” Basquiat said, sounding apologetic. “I’ve got to do this by the book. But unless you do something stupid like confess, you’ll be out of here sometime tomorrow.”

Field pressed the record button, so all I could do in reply was nod.

“Detective Sergeant Basquiat and Detective Constable Field,” Field intoned, “interviewing Felix Castor, Friday, May twelfth, 6:32 a.m.”

And they did, for the better part of an hour, but on the whole it was friendly fire. A couple of times I almost nodded off. The only time it got edgy was when the talk turned to how I’d gotten out of the secure unit at the Whittington. Two cops had been badly injured in that fracas, and then there was the security guard that Po had taken down. Fortunately, Zucker had stepped in before that particular incident got out of hand. A memory of Po with a satanist’s head between his jaws intervened at this point, and once again I gave thanks to the god I don’t believe in. On top of that there was a lot of property damage and a whole lot of people got the shit scared out of them. But the commando-style operation that Gwillam had mounted at St. Michael’s inclined Basquiat to buy my story that the raid on the hospital had been a kidnapping rather than a rescue, so she wasn’t putting any of that directly down to me.

When they’d talked me through the past seven days, and I’d unburdened myself of everything I was going to, Field turned off the tape recorder and took out the tape, which he labeled and pocketed. Basquiat headed for the door and hammered on it. She turned back to me as the key turned in the lock and the door opened.

“Anything I can get you?” she asked.

“My tin whistle, if you’ve still got it,” I said. “It would be with the stuff I had on me when you arrested me the first time.”

She pulled a face and shrugged. “What with everything that went down over there, I don’t think it ever got claimed. It must still be there—along with your clothes and everything—but Christ knows where. I don’t have time to go looking for it right now, or anyone I can send.”

“Never mind,” I said. “I can work around it. Thanks for everything, detective sergeant.”

“Including knocking you on your arse the first time I met you? You’re welcome, Castor. Have a good one.”

She went out, Field trailing along behind her like a broad-beamed freighter behind a tug. I listened to their footsteps retreat up the corridor, and then to the cell bock door being slid to on its runners.

Once I was certain they weren’t coming back, I leaned forward and put my hand down inside my sock. It was easy to find the little lock of hair because it had been itching the hell out of me ever since I’d put it down there. It was back in the church, around about the time when the bullets started flying. I threw myself down between the pews while the satanists and Gwillam’s holy crusaders got physical with each other, and I reasoned that this might be a good time for Abbie and the locket to part company. Empty, the locket might be as useful to me as a swinging watch is to a hypnotist: something pretty and shiny that the rubes can look at while you do what you need to do.

And when Gwillam made his play, I was proved right. I was just lucky that he hadn’t checked the goods before he left—probably because of the approaching sirens.

As I’ve already said, it’s always easier for me to do my little party trick if I’ve got a tin whistle in my hands. But the whistle is just a channel: the music comes from within me, and I can make it on my own if I have to. Particularly if, as now, I was dealing with a ghost I already knew pretty well.

Sitting on the edge of the bunk, I closed my eyes and whistled the tune that, for me, had become synonymous with Abbie. I started low and let the sound build as it seemed to want to, gradually but inexorably. The guy in the next cell yelled a protest, but he was outside the infolded loop of reality that joined me to the tune, so whatever he said fell on my ears like an abstract pattern, fell away again in unheeded fragments.

Abbie materialized in front of me, about a foot above the ground, and so slowly that at first she was like a trick of the light—like one of those accidental objects that can only be seen from one angle when the light falls just right. It wasn’t surprising: after all she’d been through in her life, and then in her death, I could understand her not wanting to be dragged up by her heels one more time. When she saw me, her reluctance became even greater. She fought against my call, fading out into near invisibility time after time, but coming back each time a little more sharply defined, a little more vivid and visible, as my sense of her straightened and I tied the knots of my calling around her soul.