Vicious Circle (22 page)

The front tires 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 backward 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 realized 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, or 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 toward 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 toward 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 undershirt and pants, his hands thrust deep into the pockets. He favored 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 sometime in August, when the heat turned it back into dust again. 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.

I
HEADED
BACK
WEST
.
SWITCHING
ONTO
THE
JUBILEE
LINE
, I passed within a stone’s throw of Paddington. At some point I’d probably have to drop in there for a word or two with Rosie Crucis. But now wouldn’t be a good time. I was still feeling a bit seedy and hungover, and you need a full set of options to stand a chance against Jenna-Jane Mulbridge; anyhow, Rosie is more nocturnal even than Nicky.

Yeah, maybe I was just putting off the inevitable, but right now that worked for me.

So I dropped in at the office instead, and dug out some emergency supplies from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It was just a foil-backed bubble sheet with eight slightly odd-looking pills on it—white squares with rounded edges, marked with a cursive “D.” There’d been space for twelve pills originally, but four had already gone. The nurse who’d given them to me in the course of a brief, tempestuous relationship had said the “D” stood for “Diclofenac,” although the tablets had a couple of other active ingredients as well. “They’re magic,” she said, sliding them into my breast pocket with a wicked grin. “Strongest painkillers you’ll ever take, but they leave you as sharp as if you’d just popped a handful of dex. Only don’t drink too much booze with them. Or . . . um . . . go out in direct sunlight, because with this stuff in your system you’ll burn like a sausage on a grill.”

It was probably the most thoughtful present anyone had ever given me—as I’d had cause to find out when I took the other four. I swallowed two now, and the pain and stiffness in my shoulder receded almost immediately. I was back in the game.

With Nicky still fresh in my mind, I checked the answerphone in the office as well as the messages on my cellphone: nothing doing on either one, so I was still on my own as far as that went. The good news, though, was that in among all the bills and other love letters from local government and national utilities, there was a heartwarmingly fat envelope with no stamp on it and just my name written in a flowing hand.

I opened it up and found a short note from Stephen Torrington, along with a check for a thousand pounds and a further five hundred in cash. The note just said that this was to be considered as a payment on account, and that I could send along a receipt whenever it was convenient. It occurred to me that that was going to be fairly difficult to do, because all I had by way of contact details for the Torringtons was Steve’s mobile number. I dialed it now, and he picked up on the first ring. Either he had spectacularly good reflexes or he lived with the thing in his ear.

“Torrington.”

“Castor,” I said, answering in kind. “I got the money. Thanks.”

“Mr. Castor. No problem: as I said, we’ve got more money than we need, and nothing could possibly be better than this to spend it on.”

“You asked for a receipt. But I don’t have your address.”

He laughed self-deprecatingly. “The ordinary niceties break down at a time like this. I’m sorry, I should have given you my card. And Mel’s, of course, in case I’m in a meeting or something. Send it to the house. We live on Bishop’s Avenue. Number sixty-two.”

Nice address. London’s first gated community, in fact if not in name: millionaires and former government ministers only, and if you play the stereo too loud nobody will care because you’ve got at least two hundred yards of garden and so have they. The downside is that it’s a three-day expedition to nip next door and borrow a cup of sugar. “I’ll slip it in the post today,” I said.

“No hurry. Is there anything new to report?”

I considered lying, but again it went against the grain: if this guy was paying my wages, the least I could give him by way of value for money was the truth. “I think I met our Mr. Peace this morning,” I admitted.

“Met him? But—”

“It was a brief encounter. He was running like a bat out of hell and I couldn’t quite keep up.”

Torrington blew out what sounded like a deep lungful of breath. “My God. So close! Where? Where was he hiding?”

“The
Thames Collective
. It’s a houseboat on the river where London-based exorcists sometimes stay. I don’t think Peace was in residence, though: it’s a bit too public. Most likely he was just visiting. Borrowing money, maybe, I don’t know. He was seen at another exorcist haunt in Soho, too, so I guess he’s shaking the tree for something—something that’s worth the risk of being seen. Anyway, the bottom line is that even if he was staying at the
Collective,
the
Collective
just up and left. Until it comes into another mooring and I can find out where, I can’t check it out again.”

“But you actually walked in on him? You saw him?”

“Almost felt him, too—the tip of his boot, anyway. I’m really sorry. Next time I’ll be more—”

“No, no.” Torrington’s tone was sharp. “You’re as good as we were told you’d be, Mr. Castor. You actually found your man within forty-eight hours, with little more than his name to go on—that’s nothing short of incredible. I don’t think it’ll be too long before you find him again, and I know you won’t let him take you by surprise this time. Thank you. Thank you for everything you’re doing for us. And if there’s anything else that I can provide that will make the job easier, just call me. Any time of the day or night.”

After a few more awkward pleasantries, we hung up. I wished I could live up to the Torringtons’ touching faith in me, but right then I felt like one of those poor guys in Plato’s cave, trying to make sense out of things I couldn’t see directly, just by squinting at the shadows that the fire cast on the cave wall. And to make things worse, I was standing in the goddamn fire.

I thought of Reggie Tang’s parting words, and the implication behind them. Peace was a bad lad, Bourbon Bryant had said—a bit wild and unpredictable—but all the same he seemed to have more friends in the London ghost-hunter community than I did right now: enough so that a lot of avenues I might normally have used seemed like bad ideas right then. Nicky still hadn’t gotten me anything beside stirring tales of the guy’s criminal past, and Rosie wouldn’t be open for business until midnight. I was meant to be having dinner with Juliet, of course, but that was more than eight hours away, so I was looking down the barrel of a wasted day unless there was something I could follow up by myself in the meantime.

And there was. It might not be directly relevant to the Torringtons’ case but it was pretty damn important to me and now was as good a time as any.

I took the tube to Kensington and went looking for a knife man.

“It’s not as old as it looks,” said Caldessa, in a quavery voice ridged with tempered steel. On the whole she made that bland comment sound pretty scathing. But then in her business old is good, and new things trying to look like they’re old are beneath contempt: lamb dressed as mutton. When I reached out my hand to take the knife back, though, she didn’t give it to me. She turned it over in her hands again and sighted along the blade in a way that was downright unsettling for such a respectable, tweed-wearing senior citizen.

My knife man had turned out to be a woman. That was fine by me: when I’d turned up in Kensington Church Street, I’d only had the vaguest notion of what I was looking for—but I was fairly sure that this was the best place to find it. You just walk down Knightsbridge past Kensington Gardens and hang a left, and you find yourself (predictably, maybe, given the price and provenance of the surrounding real estate) in the densest concentration of antique shops in the civilized world. Okay, some of these places are mainly dedicated to the painless extraction of the tourist dollar, which means they sell Victorian milking churns at a thousand quid a pop, but in among the purveyors of overpriced, elegant tat there’s a sprinkling of people who are well worth getting to know: fanatics with insanely narrow areas of specialization like Belgian tea cozies of the Merovingian dynasty or left-handed field altars from the Spanish Civil War.

One of the biggest shops is Antik Ost, run by a distant relation of Pen’s whose name I have to look up and memorize again every time because it’s so damn long: Haviland Burgerman. He was my first port of call, and he cheerfully admitted that his knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar. But he pointed me across the street to Evelyn Caldessa’s, and Caldessa had the goods.

She was something of an antique herself. Her skin had that faint, pearly-white translucency of the very old, her features were finely sculpted, and her build was thinner than a stick. Looking at her, you felt reasonably sure she’d ring like bone china if you flicked her with your thumb. The scarf she wore tied over her long gray hair, peasant-style, gave her an Eastern European look, but her accent was pure prep school.

I intimated that I had something to sell, and that it fell within her area of expertise. “A knife. I found it among some things that belonged to my uncle.”

“Belonged?”

“He passed away.”

“Oh you poor thing.” Space of a single heartbeat. “Let’s see it.”

I took out the cardboard tube, carefully slid the knife out into my palm, and handed it across to her hilt-first. She exclaimed under her breath when she saw it, then held it a long way away from her to get a better look. That blade didn’t look any nicer in daylight than it had in Soho Square after midnight. It was very much a weapon that was made for actual incision and slicing, in a context far from the Sunday roast.

“The blade is hollow-ground,” she said. “That’s why it’s so thin and sharp—and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn’t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn’t have a bolster—most modern knives do.”

“A bolster?”

“The thickened part just above the handle.”

“It wasn’t machine-milled, though,” I pointed out.

She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

I pointed. “When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind marks on the steel. They’re not evenly spaced.”

She nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I’d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. “That’s true,” she said. “Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Such as persuading the buyer that he’s getting a handcrafted item.” I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson style, and she smiled dryly. “Yes, it’s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.” She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. “This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

“Now the wood . . .” She rubbed the handle appreciatively. “That’s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. Southeast Asian. You’d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red luster to it. The bark is as gray as I am.