Vicious Circle (54 page)

I was completely hidden where I sat by the deep shadows under the tree and by the unrelieved blackness of the night. Not only was it dark of the moon but it was a clear night, so there were no clouds to bounce back the muddied radiance of the streetlights. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t much that you can see by starlight.

Two of the three men—at least, their height suggested they were men—went on around to the vestry door, the third stationed himself at the gate, either on guard duty or maybe carrying out some more ceremonial function.

The men had brought crowbars with them, but they didn’t need them because the vestry door was still hanging on one hinge from Juliet’s assault on it the night before. They pushed it all the way open and stepped inside.

By this time, more people were filing silently in through the gate, past the man on watch. Some of them were carrying sports bags or shoulder bags: one carried a long case of some kind slung across his back that looked as though it could contain a fishing rod. It was a regular field-and-stream meet, to judge by appearances.

I counted about two dozen of them in all as they trickled past in twos and threes over the next ten minutes or so. They must be staggering their arrival so that anybody passing in the street would be less likely to pay them any attention. It had probably been the same drill the week before, at the Quaker meeting house. Discretion is the watchword of the modern necromancer: mustn’t upset the neighbors, or you’ll never be invited back. I wondered, fleetingly, what sort of people thought it was a great idea to spend their weekends murdering children to hasten the rule of hell on earth, but I gave it up pretty quickly. The less I knew about them the better I liked it.

Fanke himself, when he arrived, was unmistakeable. It wasn’t that his build was so distinctive: it was the fawning servility of the men who walked at his side, or rather a couple of paces behind him on either hand, and the way the guard on the gate bowed low as he passed. He didn’t deign to notice this act of self-abasement: he sailed on by, his arrogance ringing him like a visible halo. I fingered the gun again. If I’d been sure that Fanke’s death would have stopped the ritual, and if I’d had more confidence in my aim, I would have emptied the clip at him. But it would have been depressing to do that and miss, and then to have to watch while the bastards got their infernal groove on. No, the gun was more useful in my hands as a deterrent than as an actual weapon; so long as I didn’t use it, nobody would guess what a lousy shot I was.

When the last few stragglers had made their way inside, the guard on the gate pulled it to and tied it off with a short length of rope, or maybe wire—from my vantage point I couldn’t quite see. I was hoping and expecting him to join his friends at the altar, but he didn’t. He leaned against the wall, peering out into the street through the crack where the gate hung slightly loose on its new moorings. Glancing across toward the presbytery, I thought I saw the faintest hint of movement in the darkness just inside the doorway. Then the lights went on in the nave and the man standing there was outlined clearly.

Two guards. No clear line of sight between them, but I couldn’t approach either one without revealing my position to the other. And I really didn’t want Fanke knowing I was there before I was ready to face him. So I had to take these guys out, quietly, without raising an alarm inside the church—and I had to do it fast, before the ritual got too far along to be stopped.

I considered a few variations on thrown stones and improvised diversions before I finally noticed that there was a way up onto the presbytery roof. From where I was, I could carry on around to the far right, shinny up onto the far wall of the cemetery and from there onto the sloping slates. If they took my weight, I could get in close to the guy in the doorway without the one at the gate seeing me coming.

Okay, so that was the plan—if I could call it that without breaching the trades descriptions act. But before I put it into action, there was one more thing I had to do. I took Paul’s mobile out and keyed out a number in the dark, using the raised bump on the number “5″ to guide my thumb. The ring tone sounded loud in my ear—but only in my ear, thank God.

“Emergency. Which service, please?” A woman’s voice, brisk and impersonal.

“Police,” I murmured throatily.

“Routing you through, caller.”

I waited. After ten seconds or so, the silence turned into another ring tone. A man picked up. “Bowater Street police station, how can I help?”

“You can patch me through to Uxbridge Road,” I growled.

There was a fractional pause. “I’m sorry, caller, I didn’t get that. How can I help?”

“Put me through to Uxbridge Road,” I repeated. “This is an emergency.”

I waited some more. This wasn’t how emergency calls were supposed to go, but I knew that the main station on any switchboard had direct lines to all of the others. If the guy tried to pump me for information, I’d just have to leave a message with him. Otherwise . . .

“This is Uxbridge Road. Do you have a problem, sir?”

“I’ve got a message,” I said, “for Detective Sergeant Basquiat. Tell her it’s Felix Castor. Tell her I’m at St. Michael’s Church, on Du Cane Road, and that Anton Fanke is here, too. Tell her to come right now—and mob-handed.”

I hung up, and put the phone away. I’d played two wild cards now, and that ought to be enough for any hand. Whatever happened next, and whatever happened to me, I took some comfort in the thought that Fanke and his religiously inverted friends were going to have a hard time getting out of the building alive and free.

I stood up, as slowly and smoothly as I could, and slipped away between the gravestones with my knees bent so that my head wouldn’t show against the skyline. For the first ten yards or so, I was in both men’s line of sight if they chanced to turn around. I was counting on the dense shadows to hide my movements and the distant traffic noises from the street to conceal any sound I might make. All the same, I went as carefully as I could, barely lifting my feet off the ground in case they came down on a twig or a discarded Coke can and gave my presence away.

Once I got far enough around for the presbytery wall to give me cover, I relaxed a little. I straightened my back and picked up speed, reaching the wall in a few nearly normal strides. Climbing it in the dark was harder than I expected, because a good foothold at the bottom could still leave you stranded and groping seven or eight feet up, pinned to the wall with your arms splayed out like Christ’s dumb understudy. Once a loose chunk of stone slid away under my foot and fell to the ground below with an audible
thump
. I froze in place, straining my ears for sounds of approaching footsteps, but nobody came. I resumed the climb, teeth gritted, suddenly aware that there might be razor wire or broken glass or some other bullshit at the top of the wall that I’d seen in daylight but not registered or remembered.

There wasn’t. The stones at the top were uneven, but they were wide enough for me to stand and walk along without much difficulty. And the roof was no trouble at all: the guttering was old, of solid metal rather than uPVC, and it took my weight with a reassuring lack of give.

Leaning into the pitch of the tiles, I edged along from the back of the presbytery to the front. Now I could look around and down and see the doorway below me, a faint glow filtering out from it to light up a keystone-shaped area of gravel in pale gold. Within that lighted space, a dark blob just off center showed me where Fanke’s watchman was standing just inside the doorway, but the man himself I couldn’t see.

There was no time for bluff, finesse, or actual cleverness. All I could think of doing was to reach out and scrape the end of the gun barrel against the stone of the wall. The first time got no response, and neither did the second: traffic sounds from the street drowned the faint noise out. The third time was the charm. Below me in the dark, a darker figure stepped out and a pale face looked up. I launched myself into space.

The guy never knew what hit him, and he might never wake up to find out. As I landed on top of him I struck down hard with the butt of the gun, letting gravity and momentum add their force to mine. It smacked into his skull with a solid, slightly sickening sound and he crumpled underneath me, providing me with a much softer landing than I was expecting.

Not that I stayed down for long. I rolled and came up already moving, heading along the back wall of the church toward the corner where the lych-gate was. My feet were crunching on the gravel, but I couldn’t help that: I had to assume that the man at the gate had heard me touch down, and would want to know what the hell the commotion was about.

I reached the corner of the building just as he came around it. That worked out pretty well, because I was expecting him and he wasn’t really expecting me. He wasn’t expecting the fist that slammed into his stomach, either: he folded with a strangled, truncated grunt. I spun him round with a hand on his shoulder and slammed his head into a conveniently placed tombstone once, twice, three times. After three he looked like he’d lost interest in the altercation. I let go and he slumped bonelessly to the ground.

So far so good. I rolled him on his back, gun in hand, to make sure he wasn’t faking it. He was deeply unconscious, his slack mouth trailing blood and saliva from one corner. There was blood on the crown of his head, too.

Well, what the hell. In the absence of the Lord, vengeance would just have to be mine.

I went to the foot of the oak tree and retrieved the film canisters, then crossed back to the presbytery door, skirting around the body of the first guard. I weighed up the idea of moving the bodies off the path, in among the graves, but a clock was ticking inside my head. In any case, the windows of the church were stained glass: nobody was going to see the downed men unless they came in through the lych-gate and walked around to enter the church from the back. And if they did that they’d have the drop on me already.

I listened for a moment at the door, then slipped inside. The presbytery itself was empty, as I’d expected it to be. I crossed to the other door, which led into the church. It stood open. A distant murmur of voices came through it, and the
clop-clop
whisper of soft but echoing footsteps, but from this vantage point there was nothing to see; the chancel was deserted, as I’d hoped it would be. Hopefully whatever was happening in there, it was in the nave close to the high altar.

There was a carpet in the vestry, for soft, priestly feet: before stepping out into the chancel, I kicked off my shoes. I didn’t want the excellent acoustics of St. Michael’s to betray me before I had a chance to set my stall out.

The stone was so cold I almost gave myself away even more embarrassingly, by yelling out. It felt like some parasitic plant of the frozen tundra was growing up through the soles of my feet into my trembling legs. I regretted the shoes now, but it was too late for that.

I stole along the chancel to the big box junction where it met the main drag of the nave. The light was coming from one end of the cavernous space—the altar end, as I’d guessed: satanists are all about transgression, bless their little hearts. They’re so fucking predictable it’s not even funny. So where I was, there was a fair amount of deep shadow, and I felt reasonably confident that if I peered round the angle of the wall I wouldn’t be seen.

They were still setting up. The robed figures were moving chairs around to make a broad, bare space just below the altar. One of them—Fanke himself, judging by the red robes that Peace had already described to me—was on his knees in the center of the space, and a scratching, rasping sound gave me a strong hint as to what he was doing: drawing the vicious circle.

So one way and another, the kiddies were all entertained. If they’d already started intoning and dancing in a ring, I’d have fired a warning shot into somebody’s back and gone in like thunder—an action replay of Peace’s moment of glory the week before—but as it was I took the time to set up my little ace in the hole. I went down on all fours; or rather on all threes, because I was hugging the film canisters to my chest with my left arm, tightly enough so they couldn’t scrape against each other and give me away. I crab-scuttled out of the shadows of the chancel and across to the nearest row of pews, sliding in amongst them with as little sound as I could manage. Then I set down my burden with elaborate caution, and unpacked.

As already noted, old movie film is pretty much the most flammable thing on earth. With a Molotov cocktail you need a bottle, a piece of rag, all sorts of paraphernalia. Movie film just burns, turning instantly into boiling plastic, searing smoke, and blue-white flame like the flame of a dirty blowtorch: drop a match on it and you’d better be somewhere else when it hits.

By way of a fuse I used a votive candle that I’d picked up from the floor on my way down the transept: it was one of the ones that had rolled and scattered when I knocked the table over the night before. The thing was an inch and a half thick, but I broke it in my hands, muffling the sound inside my jacket, and pulled away the solid, almost translucent chunks of it to leave the shiny, rigid wand of the wick itself—a makeshift taper, stiff and saturated with solid wax.

The nature of the sounds I was hearing from the front of the church had changed now. The footsteps had ceased, and a rhythmic chanting had begun. I hoped the satanist liturgy was as prolix as the regular one; I needed a couple of minutes more.

I slid the film canisters open, found the ends, and hauled out a foot or so of each, which I tied together like the five intertwined tails of the rat king in the old folk legend. I slid the lower end of my taper in among them, balanced so that it stood nearly upright, then lit the business end. It burned brightly at first, then started to fade almost at once as the chill and the hate locked in the stones began to focus on the little point of light. I watched it with glowering suspicion for a moment or two, but it steadied. I couldn’t be sure that it would last long enough to burn all the way down to the film, but it was the best I could do.