Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Mel says she screamed at that point, and Dennis looked up at her. That may have saved my life, because he forgot all about me and went after her. He climbed over me and went on up the stairs. And he said – I know this is hearsay evidence, Mister Castor, but I doubt any of this will ever come to court – he said “You’re coming back to me, bitch. You’re going to beg to come back to me.”

‘She ran back into the bedroom and locked the door. Her bag was in there, and her mobile was in the bag, so she was going to call the police. But she didn’t get the chance. Peace pushed the door in with his shoulder – the lock was a flimsy little thing and it just tore right out of the wood. He – he beat—’

Throughout this recitation, Torrington had been getting more and more agitated. Now he faltered into silence, trembling. I stood up, with some idea of offering him a glass of water, but he waved me away: he didn’t want my solicitude.

‘He beat her,’ he said. ‘You saw her face? Her back and side and her left arm all look the same. And then he ransacked the room. Pulling out drawers and tipping the contents onto the floor, hauling all the clothes out of the wardrobes. When Mel tried to reach for her phone again he stamped on it – smashed it into pieces. If she hadn’t snatched her hand away he’d have crushed that too.

‘He seemed to be looking for something, and not finding it. And he was getting more and more frustrated, more and more out of control. Eventually he just turned and walked out of the room again. Mel ran after him, and saw him going into Abbie’s room.

‘We’d never . . . never changed anything in there. Mel tackled him again when he started wrecking Abbie’s things, and he turned on her in a rage. He started to strangle her.

‘Then he threw her down on the bed, and she thought that he was going to rape her. But he didn’t. He just went on searching. And this time he must have found what he was looking for, because he left. Mel was too terrified by now to try to stop him a third time. But as soon as she heard the door slam she called the police, and then she went down onto the stairs to tend to me.’

‘You said the police weren’t involved,’ I pointed out.

Steve gave a bitter snort that might have been intended as a laugh. ‘I said the police weren’t looking for Abbie,’ he corrected me. ‘We hadn’t even realised . . . We told them about the assault, the damage, and we said we could identify the man who’d done it. They said they’d issue a warrant, and we’d hear in due course. Then when they’d gone, and we were trying to put the place back into some kind of order, we noticed . . . that Abbie wasn’t there. But we thought she’d just been frightened away by the noise, and the violence, and she’d come back later.

‘By the evening we were really starting to miss her. She didn’t answer when we called, and we couldn’t feel her the way we usually do. Because she was gone. It was Abbie that Peace was looking for. And he’d taken her. Somehow he’d taken her away with him.’

Steve Torrington fell silent, gripping the neck of the bag tightly in both white-knuckled hands. And the silence lengthened, because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

I’d never even heard of a ghost being kidnapped before. It sounded so unlikely, so grotesque, that I still resisted the idea. Ghosts can’t be packaged and shipped like groceries or worn and carried like accessories. Mostly they can’t move at all outside of a fixed compass. Someone here had to be the voice of reason, and it was asking too much to expect that degree of detachment from Torrington himself.

‘You assume he took her,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. ‘It could be, as I said, that she left because her time here was—’

‘Peace called Mel.’ There was a tremor in Torrington’s voice, and he was still looking down at the black bag, still holding on to it as though it was some kind of lifeline. ‘About two hours later. He wasn’t making much sense, but he said “You’ll have to come back to me now, won’t you? Because you can’t have her if you don’t have me. We’ll all be together.” She didn’t know what he was talking about. She hung up. She just hung up. And afterwards we realised. We knew.’

Okay, that was something pretty hefty in the way of circumstantial evidence. My mind flicked off onto an irresistible tangent. Could it be done? Could it be slickly, smoothly done? Breaking and entering, and grand theft spiritual? Ghosts – most ghosts – haunt a particular place. It might be the place where they died, or where they were buried, or it could just be some spot to which they had strong associations in life. That’s their anchor. They can move a little way away from it: in some cases a couple of hundred yards, but except in a few special cases like the little girl ghosts I set free at the Stanger, I’ve never heard of it being more. So how would you take a ghost away from its anchor and walk away with it? Maybe . . . yeah, maybe there was a way that I could see. But I knew for a fact that it was something I couldn’t do myself.

I was getting dangerously interested. The very weirdness of the situation appealed to my varied and prurient curiosities. But I generally hold to Dirty Harry’s dictum that a man should know his limitations.

‘I still think the police are your best option,’ I said. ‘They can find Peace a lot easier than I can. And I think they’ll take a complaint seriously. He broke into your house, after all, and he threatened you.’

Torrington was staring at me with a bleak, slightly accusing expression on his face. He knew when he was being snowed.

‘And what if they do find him?’ he asked, his voice harsh. ‘Will they find Abbie, too? Can they bring her back for us?’

He had me there. All I could do was shrug, which felt pusillanimous even to me. Okay, he was right. Even a relatively good cop like Coldwood, if something like this fell into his lap, would be helpless running a search for something he couldn’t see, hear or touch: especially a cop, because there’s that whole blind-deaf-and-dumb pragmatism thing I already mentioned. Conversely, if I was anywhere close to where Abbie was, I’d at least have ways of knowing I was close, and maybe taking a bearing. So there was a chance that I could help these people: a chance that I’d be able to run Peace down, and that I’d know what I was looking for when I saw it. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was there: and if this didn’t count as a spiritual service, then what the Hell did?

On the other hand, bringing Abbie back was going to be a much tougher proposition than finding her: I doubted I’d be able to appeal to Peace’s better nature, assuming he even had one. And since I didn’t know exactly how you went about kidnapping a ghost, I didn’t know how you went about bringing her safely home, either. And then there was all the collateral stuff: I’d have to check the Torringtons’ story out as far as I could before I got any distance into this. And I’d have to decide what the hell I should charge them, because this fell way outside even the fuzzy logic of my usual tariff.

Once I start coming up with commonsensical points like that, it usually means I’m trying to talk myself out of something I’ve already decided to do. But this time, reality reasserted itself. There was no point in taking on a job I couldn’t do and adding to the Torringtons’ trauma by building up their hopes and then kicking them down again.

Steve Torrington was still looking at me, so I had to say something.

‘Well,’ I temporised, ‘you’ve probably got a point there. But if it comes to that, I don’t know if I can be of any more use to you than the police could.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘How could you know, until you’ve tried?’