Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Which was throwing the ball back into my court with a vengeance. I tried to lob it back. ‘It’s not that straightforward, Mister Torrington. Not like changing a car tyre, or –’ I cast around for a metaphor, found it close to hand ‘– or measuring you for a suit. Maybe if I had some of her things. I mean, if I could see her room, or—’

As if he’d been waiting for this moment, Steve hefted the black bin-liner and put it down on the desk between us. ‘These are the things she cared most about,’ he said, and he looked at me with the slightest hint of smugness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a solicitor, after all. Methodical mind, focused mainly on how the rules of any situation work and what the precedents are. He’d done his research.

I gave him a nod, half admiring, half resigned. He emptied the bag out carefully onto the desk.

There was quite a lot there: enough so that I wondered what was left behind in Abbie’s room. Books, CDs, scrunchies, T-shirts; a cloisonné hair slide with a sort of Celtic knot design; teddy bears and dolls; a pair of very elaborate trainers: some posters of male celebrities I didn’t recognise, torn at the corners where the Blu-Tack hadn’t yielded quickly enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: the desiderata of a young girl’s truncated life. If I was in the right mood, I could probably pick out the items that had meant most to Abbie – the ones that would provide the strongest link to her. But the mood is a skittish thing, and getting into it is never easy for me when there are other people around.

So I picked something up, not quite at random. A Victorian doll of the kind where the head is made out of porcelain while the body is stitched and stuffed, its relatively unfinished look hidden by a sewn-on dress. It had the unsettling, subtly aggressive blankness of a lot of old dolls, and it was in a near-terminal state of disrepair. The head was only attached to the body by a few loops of stitching, most of which had already come away. If I wasn’t careful with it, I’d decapitate it without even trying.

A childhood toy seemed the best bet: emotions are always strongest when you’re young. Not that Abbie had lived to get old.

I closed my eyes and listened to the doll. That’s the only way I can put it: it’s not like I was expecting the thing to talk to me. But it’s a kind of synaesthesia, I guess: I don’t have a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s ear. It takes a while, usually, but if I focus my mind and shut out all distractions then most things have a tune, or at least a note or two, attached to them.

This time it didn’t take a while: it didn’t take any time at all. Raw emotion hit me like a wall. I must have gasped, because Steve was staring at me with surprise and concern – and maybe, underneath that, with something like distaste.

Abbie’s emotions when she held her rag-stuffed friend must have been enormously powerful: powerful enough to linger there, like a recording, for me to pick up. Or maybe the power came from the sheer simplicity, because there was really only one impression there: desperate, aching unhappiness, so deep it was like being at the bottom of a well without knowing how you’d fallen into it.

It took an effort not to throw back my head and howl: if I’d been alone that’s probably what I would have done, because emotion that strong, even when it’s somebody else’s to start with, throws you off balance in all kinds of surprising ways if you can’t vent it somehow.

It took an equally intense effort to put the doll down again: it seemed welded to my hands. After I’d done it, I took a few seconds to recover before I tried to talk.

So Torrington got in first. ‘Is there anything there?’ he asked.

I nodded wordlessly.

‘A – a trail you can follow?’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said. It came out more brusquely than I intended – probably the after-effect of all that black misery, still sloshing around my system, but in any case I’m lousy at the bedside-manner stuff: I hate having to explain myself, even to intelligent people who can meet me more than halfway. I tried, anyway. ‘I’m reading old emotions, not current ones. I’m not reaching out to Abbie wherever she is now, just . . . getting a sense of her, as she was when she was alive. But yes, there’s something there. Enough so that I’ll recognise her if I ever see her, or get close to her. It’s a start.’

‘A start?’ Steve repeated. Solicitors know the importance of a contract, even when it’s just a verbal one.

‘Can I keep this stuff overnight?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’

I nodded, feeling a weight settle on me that was different from the weight of Abbie’s emotion. ‘Then here’s what I’m offering, if you’re still interested. I don’t know if I can bring Abbie back to you. Like I said, that depends where she is. If her spirit’s gone on to the next station on the line, whatever you want to call that, then nobody can find her for you and nobody can get to where she is. But I may be able to give you an answer to that question – let you know what the odds are. And if she is still around – still with us – then there are a few things we can try. If she isn’t . . .’ I shrugged. ‘Well, at least you’ll know where you stand. Is that any use to you, or would you rather shop elsewhere?’

Torrington was nodding emphatically, and he started to discuss payment – which most prospective clients get to at a much earlier stage of the conversation. I decided to dodge that issue for now, because I still wasn’t sure how far I could run with this. If I did hit a brick wall I’d want to just tell them that and get away clean: the hassle of returning a deposit would add all kinds of awkwardness to a situation that was already nasty enough. ‘You can pay me if I decide to take the case on,’ I said.

Torrington looked alarmed. ‘But you said—’

‘This first part is just triage. Just – testing the ground. Let’s keep it on that basis for now. There’s no point you laying any money down, in case I come up with a blank. But if you leave it with me overnight, we can talk some more tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to go over this stuff a bit more thoroughly.’

Torrington took the hint and stood up to leave.

‘Should I call you in the morning?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got your number,’ I countered. ‘I’ll call you.’ Looking into his eyes, caught in the headlights of his grief, I relented slightly. ‘Tonight. I’ll try to call you tonight. I should have a bit more information for you then.’

I saw him to the door and he started down the stairs. Before he reached the bottom he looked back, as if conscious that I was still watching. Caught out, I closed the door. There’s something magnetic about tragedy. What I was doing was the equivalent of slowing down on the motorway to watch a wreck on the opposite carriageway. I felt a brief twinge of unease and self-disgust.

I felt something else, too: a sense of puzzlement that I couldn’t quite nail down. The Torringtons had just aired so much dirty linen in front of me, and bared so many wounds – metaphorical and otherwise – that in some ways I felt I knew them a hell of a lot better than I wanted to. But at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about their relationship that I wasn’t getting; some point where I’d added two and two and got to five. Maybe it was that barbed-wire tangle of emotions I’d picked up from Mel, and the fact that fear seemed so dominant there. Not just one fear, either: all sorts of fears looping through one another. Her love for her husband was strong, too, and it came through so loud and clear it seemed almost like religious devotion. But the fear wound itself around that, too, like some kind of pathological bindweed.