Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

I did the best I could to talk her down, and eventually she got out of the car, leaving the soggy tissue on the passenger seat. She mumbled something by way of thanks for the lift, to which she added, ‘Don’t tell her! Please, please don’t tell her!’ Then she fled into the house.

There probably wasn’t anything I could have said to her that would have helped. Love is a drug, like the man said. But the harshest truth of all is in the gospel of Steppenwolf rather than in Roxy Music: the pusher doesn’t care whether you live or die.

I called the Torringtons from the car as I was driving back east across the city. Hands-free, of course: I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t put safety first. Steve picked up on the first ring, which made me wonder if he’d been sitting with his phone in his hands.

‘Mister Castor,’ he said, sounding just a touch breathless. ‘What news?’

‘Good news as far as it goes,’ I said. ‘You were right, and I was wrong.’

‘Meaning—?’

‘Abbie’s not in Heaven. She’s in London.’

He exhaled, long and loud. I waited for him to speak.

‘Can you please give me a moment?’

‘Of course.’

Maybe he covered the phone, or maybe the voices were too low to hear over the sound of the car’s engine. There was about half a minute’s silence. Then he came back on. The pitch of his voice was unsteady – like the voice of a man fighting back tears.

‘We can’t thank you enough, Mister Castor. Do you think you can find her?’

‘I’m prepared to try.’

He gave a relieved laugh, harsh and emphatic and broken off short by some kind of psychological wind-shear. ‘That’s excellent news! Excellent! We’ve got every confidence in you.’

‘Mister Torrington—’

‘Steve.’

‘Steve. I don’t want to raise your hopes. This still isn’t going to be easy, assuming I can do it at all. And I’m going to need to have some money to spread around. If you can front me two or three hundred quid to be going on with, then I can make a start on—’

He cut me off. ‘Mister Castor, my wife and I count as affluent by any standards. You’re over-finessing, if I can use a bridge metaphor. Whatever you need, we can afford it. Possibly you feel as though you’re taking advantage of our grief. From our point of view, it’s not like that at all. We’ve heard that you’re the best, and we’re grateful that you’re prepared to help us.’ There was a rustle, and then the scratch-scratch-scratch of a fountain-pen nib on paper. ‘I’m writing out a cheque,’ he said. ‘For a thousand pounds. I’ll put it in the post tonight. No, better – I’ll go over to your office and drop it off myself. I’ll add some cash, too, to tide you over until this clears. If it’s more than you were planning to charge, and if that makes you uncomfortable, then please just give the rest to the charity of your choice.’

Good enough. I should have more clients who are that respectful of my sensitivities. I asked him for Peace’s address, which turned out to be in East Sheen: not a part of the city I knew all that well, and a lot further south than I was expecting.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said, and hung up.

Driving on automatic pilot, I’d already rejoined the Westway and driven on through Marylebone past Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium – which now has commerce only with stars of the daytime-TV variety. I was just about to swing off north onto Albany Street. But I had another call to make, and it was in the east of the city rather than the north. So I kept on going – east all the way, heading for the distant fastnesses of Walthamstow.

I was tired, and I still had a headache from that psychic mind-blast, but there was nothing to gain by putting this off until tomorrow. Night was always the best time to see Nicky if you wanted to get any sense out of him.

I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be still there when I got back, possibly even with engine and wheels attached. That was worth a little additional effort.

A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centrepiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.

It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other pre-war super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members-only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened soft-core porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riff-raff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song – probably the Death March from Saul.

It was the perfect home for him: he too was on his second time around.

I went in around the back, up the drainpipe and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky had added some additional barricades of his own: you can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.

Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draught of Arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swivelled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security – although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.

The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapour at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry-ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customised air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.

I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle – and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them are ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.

‘Nicky?’ I called, opening the door a little further with the toe of my shoe.

No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life – or at least the integrity of my balls – in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomb-like.

I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up from a row of malnourished, cane-like plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swill: the tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it – reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.