Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

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 in a number in the dark, using the raised bump on the number five 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 the details 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 Saint 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 me stranded and groping seven or eight feet up, pinned to the wall with my 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 which 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 on 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-centre showed me where Fanke’s watchman was standing 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 out the faint noise. 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 maybe he would 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 towards 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 my 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. With luck, whatever was happening in there was taking place 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 Saint 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 taking off 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.