Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

My office is in Craven Park Road, next to the Grambas Kebab House – or rather, my door is next to their door. The actual room where I conduct my meagre and occasional business is on the first floor, directly over Grambas’s eternally bubbling deep-friers. On bad days I can see an intimation of Hell in that image.

At this time the sign over the door still read F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS, but these days that’s a pretty outrageous lie. I’m not quite as free and easy as I used to be about toasting ghosts: I can’t even remember the last time I did it, which on the whole is probably a good thing. But a man needs to have some stock-in-trade, and God didn’t give me the shoulders or the temperament for hard labour. So I’d finally taken a step that I’d been considering for a while now – and it looked like today would be the day that made it official.

At ten on a rain-sodden May morning, Grambas hadn’t even hefted the first doner yet. I knocked on his door and waited, wondering if he was awake. I got my answer when the window above and to the right of my head opened and a shiny bald head was thrust out of it. A pair of watery brown eyes stared down at me, taking their time to focus. To the waist, which mercifully was as far as I could see, Grambas was naked.

‘Fuck,’ he said thickly. ‘It never stops. Come back at noon, Castor.’

‘Throw me down the keys,’ I suggested. ‘I only need to get that package out of the lock-up.’

He sighed heavily, nodded and withdrew. The keys came flying out of the window a few moments later, and I almost went under the wheels of an ice-cream van as I stepped backwards to catch them. I went into the alley alongside the shop and let myself into the backyard through a door whose hinges were only held together by rust. The lock-up, though, has a stout steel-reinforced door and three padlocks: Grambas knows his neighbours well, and though he forgives them their vices he doesn’t see a need to finance them.

I took the padlocks off and left them hanging open in their eye-bolts. It comes naturally to me to assess the professional credentials of any locks I encounter: I learned lock-picking from a master, and though the world has moved on into realms of electronic key-matching and double-redundant combination codes, I’m still okay with the bog-standard stuff that most people use. One of these three locks was generic, without even a manufacturer’s mark; the second was a venerable Squire, and the third was a sexy little beast from the Master Lock titanium series. Numbers one and two I could have handled without a key any day of the week, but for number three I’d have needed a very long run-up indeed. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it, but there’d have had to be a damn good reason why I was trying.

Inside, the lock-up was obsessively, immaculately clean. One wall was piled almost to the ceiling with neatly stacked boxes: on the other side, three chest freezers stood in a row like coffins. My package lay on the floor in the middle, with the single word CASTOR scrawled across it in thick black marker pen. It was five feet long, one foot broad and only an inch or so thick. I picked it up, and borrowed Grambas’s toolbox on my way out. Mine consists of three spanners and a ball of string, and I last saw it in 1998. I snapped the padlocks back on again behind me and went back around to the street.

I’d had the new sign made to the exact measurements of the old one, so this was a job that was just about within the scope of my meagre DIY skills. I could even use the same screws, apart from one that had rusted through and therefore snapped off as I was getting it out. In spite of that minor setback, and the rain coming on heavier while I worked, within the space of about ten minutes F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS had become FELIX CASTOR SPIRITUAL SERVICES. I looked at it with a certain satisfaction. It was a circumlocution I was stealing from a dead man, but hey, he’d died trying to kill me and he’d thieved from me on occasion too, so I wasn’t going to beat myself up about that. The important thing was that I wasn’t an offence to the Trades Descriptions Act any more. Now I just had to sit back and wait for the clients to start pouring in.

As to what spiritual services were , exactly, I’d worry about that some other time. I was sure I’d know them when I saw them.

When I took Grambas’s toolbox back round to the yard, he was coming out of the lock-up carrying a gallon drum of frying oil in each hand. He stopped when he saw me, and put them down. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘You got a customer. Two, in fact.’

I raised my eyebrows. That was a novelty these days. ‘When?’ I demanded.

‘This morning. About seven o’clock. They were standing in the rain out there when Maya came back from the wholesaler. She felt sorry for them. In fact, she wouldn’t stop feeling sorry for them and she wouldn’t shut up about it, so in the end I put some pants on and went down. They were still there, waiting for you to show. I told them they should leave a number and I’d call them when you turned up.’ He dug in his pocket and fished out a table napkin, which he handed to me. There was a phone number written across it in Grambas’s lopsided, up-and-down handwriting.

‘What did they look like?’ I asked him.

‘Wet.’

In the office I did the usual triage on the utilities bills and the usual ruthless cull on the rest of the mail, most of which was of the kind where you can tell it’s a scam or a speeding fine without even opening the envelope. The phone messages took longer, and some of those I had to follow up with calls of my own, but none of them were what you could call work. Not paying work, anyway. There was one from Coldwood asking me to call him, but I decided I’d put that off until later in the day. There was one from Pen, telling me that Coldwood had called the house, too, about five minutes after I left.

And there was one from Juliet.

‘Hello, Felix.’ I was rummaging in the filing cabinet, but that voice – plucking on the bass strings of my nervous system – brought me upright and turned me around to face the phone as though she might actually be there. ‘I want your advice on something. It’s a little unusual, and I’d like you to see it for yourself. You’d have to get over to Acton, though, so I’ll understand if you say no. Call me.’

I did. Juliet, I should point out, is only a professional acquaintance of mine. True, I’d crawl on my belly to Jerusalem to turn that business relationship into something more torrid and sweat-streaked, but so would any other man who met her and I’d guess more than half of the women. She’s a succubus (retired): getting people aroused and not thinking straight is part of how her species hunts and feeds.

Call return didn’t work, but I had Juliet’s number written down on a card that I carried in my wallet: like I said earlier, I almost never used it, because there was almost never any point. She stayed – nominally – in a room at a women’s refuge in Paddington. (It had struck me as odd, at first, but it made a crazy kind of sense: men had abused her and controlled her until she got out from under and devoured them body and soul.) In reality, though, the room was just a place where she stored her few belongings: she didn’t need to sleep, and she liked the open air, so she never spent much time there herself.

Her phone rang for long enough for me to consider giving up, but it’s rare enough to get a ring tone rather than the busy signal, so I held out. It’s not really her phone at all: it’s in the communal kitchen of the refuge, shared by all two dozen or so of the residents. After a minute or so it was finally picked up: by Juliet herself, so my luck was in again. I made a mental note to buy a lottery ticket.