Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

As far as I know, none of the boroughs ever responded – not even with a po-faced ‘Your letter has been received and taken under advisement.’ Steiner raged impotently: even with his millions, there was no way he could do this on his own.

There was an upside to his madness, though: he still saw the exorcists – especially the London exorcists – as his boys, his special charges. He gave Bourbon Bryant the premises that became the Oriflamme, because he loved the idea of ghostbusters meeting up and sharing ideas. (He was probably also working on the principle that there’s strength in numbers.) And when he died, he left his yacht to a trust with Bryant as the first president, changing its name in his will to the Thames Collective . Money from his estate would be diverted to keeping it seaworthy and in a reasonable state of repair, and any London exorcist would have the right to live there at need for as long as they liked, with berths being strictly rotated if too many people took up the offer at the same time.

To begin with, it looked like that might actually be a problem: a whole lot of people liked the idea of living for free in a luxury yacht. But the Collective wasn’t as luxurious as all that: to increase the number of berths, Steiner had had the big staterooms subdivided with plasterboard partitions, so living space was cramped and somewhat rough-and-ready. There’d been problems with the administration of the trust, too: the idea was that London-based exorcists would volunteer for one- or two-year stretches so that the burden wouldn’t fall too heavily on a small group. But not many, even of the people who wanted to live on the Collective , were enthused by the idea of devoting any of their time to running it. It was also hard to define who was eligible, because anyone could say they were an exorcist with no more proof than a letterhead or a shingle. In a welter of resentment, recrimination and mutual backstabbing, the trust more or less imploded. The Collective still existed, but the money that should have kept it in good repair was legally frozen and it was falling apart in melancholy slow motion. It went from berth to berth along the Thames, bringing down the tone wherever it stopped and so always unwelcome even though it could pay its way. The people who lived on it now tended to be people who were only staying in the city for a short while, or who had no other options.

What did I know about Reggie Tang? Just barely north of nothing. He was a rising star of the kind that old dogs like me watch suspiciously and from a distance: rumoured to be a very quick study, a bit on the hot-tempered side and very handy in a fight. His dad had been some sort of broker in Hong Kong before the handover; he was a Buddhist, or so I’d heard; and he was active on the gay scene. That was pretty much it. I’d only ever met him once, and the bulk of that had been a frank exchange of views: a shouting match, in other words, on the theme of how far any of the medieval grimoires could be said to be worth a rat’s arse when it came to defining the names and natures of demons. Reggie thought the Liber Juratus Honorii was the dog’s bollocks: I thought it was the most feebleminded piece of crap I’d ever set eyes on. We didn’t get much further than the is-isn’t-is stage of the discussion, though, because we were both passing-out drunk. I was hoping he’d remember that evening fondly, or at least still have at least a vague idea of who I was. Otherwise the best I could hope for here was the cold shoulder.

I found the Collective exactly where Nicky had said it would be, at the end of a pier just down from the Artillery Museum – but getting on board turned out to be a bit more problematic because the only way to get onto the pier was through a locked gate with a nasty tangle of razor wire on top of it. I took a look at the lock. The keyhole was a very distinctive shape: an asterisk, more or less, with seven radiating lines which were all the same length and thickness except for the one going vertically downward from the centre, which was both longer and slightly wider than the rest. It was a French design, and I was never likely to forget it once I’d met it because the company that made it was named Pollux – and Castor and Pollux are the twins that make up the constellation Gemini. More to the point, I could crack the thing in a minute flat.

But when I rummaged through the pockets of the trenchcoat I came up empty. I’d transferred my whistle, obviously, and a couple of other bits and pieces that had survived my close encounter with the two loup-garous the night before: but I hadn’t remembered to take any of my lockpicks.

So all I could do was hammer on the gate and shout, and then wait until somebody heard me. It was a harsh blow to my professional pride.

Eventually, though, I got a response. There were approaching footsteps and then the gate rattled as someone unlocked it from the far side. It swung open, and a face I didn’t know appeared in the gap.

It was a face you couldn’t do much about, like it or not, except maybe commiserate with the owner. It was pale and flat and had the slight greyness of unbaked dough. The messiest tangle of spiky light-brown hair I’d ever seen stood up on top of it like couch grass on a sand dune. You couldn’t tell whether the body attached to a face like that would be young, old, or somewhere in between: the furthest you’d want to go would be to say that it was – on the balance of probabilities – male.

‘Morning,’ I said, with a winning smile. ‘Is Reggie in?’

The face just stared. I considered the possibility that it was on the end of a pole rather than a neck. But then the guy opened the door a fraction more and I could see for myself that he was alive and intact. He was the same height as me but skinny as a rake: he was dressed in ragged jeans and an op-art T-shirt, and on his feet he wore novelty slippers in the shape of Gromit the dog. ‘Reggie?’ he said, sounding slightly baffled, as if he was hearing the name for the first time. There was an Essex lilt to his voice.

‘Yeah, Reggie Tang. You’re from the Collective , right? I heard he was living there right now.’

The guy didn’t concede the point by so much as a nod. After a loaded pause, he said ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Felix Castor.’ I stuck out my hand. He shook it without much interest, but the momentary emotional flash I got while our hands were touching had some odd harmonics in it: unease, resentment, and something like alarm.

There was no trace of any of that in his voice, which was disengaged if not downright lugubrious. ‘Greg Lockyear,’ he said. ‘So you’re Castor? Heard your name, here and there. Lot of people seem to reckon you.’ His gaze went down to my feet as he said this, as if he was checking my shoes against health-and-safety standards, and then back up to meet mine.

‘Reggie’s inside,’ he said, sounding resigned now. ‘Come on in.’

He turned and led the way along the pier to the Collective ’s gangplank. The ship had been a floating mansion once: now she was a wreck. I hadn’t seen her in six years, and I could see there were at least that many years’ worth of dirt on her sides. Lower down there was a slimy ring of algae, and below that, winking redly up at me as the water slopped against the hull, a little rust. At this rate the Collective wasn’t going to last out too many more winters.

Lockyear went on board and I followed him – along a short companionway and then sharp left into a stairwell that led down to the lower level of the deckhouse. ‘Mind the steps,’ he called out, without looking back. ‘One of them’s loose.’ The warning came a fraction of a second too late: a plank turned under my heel and I just about managed to avoid going over on my face. I was starting to feel a little bit like an Egyptian tomb robber.