Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

A maître d’ whose suavity was a little dented by Juliet’s black-eyed gaze seated us in the window – no doubt seeing what kind of effect she was likely to have on the passing trade. As soon as he’d left, she reached into her pocket and took out a thick wad of paper, which she unfolded and put down on the table between us.

‘Patterson, Alfred,’ she said, fanning the sheets out. ‘Heffer, Laurence. Heffer, John. Jones, Kenneth. Montgomery, Lily.’

It was a sheaf of photocopied pages, all in the same format . Each one had a passport-sized photo in the top right-hand corner: mostly men, a few women, all ordinary to the point of banality. The faces stared up at me with the terrified solemnity you’d expect from people whose lives had just body-swerved away from them into insanity and despair.

‘These are police SIR sheets,’ I said.

Juliet nodded, looking at the menu.

‘How did you get hold of them?’

‘A nice young constable at Oldfield Lane ran them off for me.’

I thought very carefully about the wording of the next question. ‘Did you bribe him, or—?’

‘I let him hold my hand.’

A waiter had started to hover: he was barely more than a kid, with ginger curls and plump, freckled cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off Juliet. Of course, better men than me have fallen at that hurdle. I looked up and tapped the table with my fingertip: after a moment he turned with a slight effort to meet my gaze, as if he was unwilling to acknowledge that I was there. ‘Can I get you any drinks to start with?’ he asked, in an artificially bright tone.

‘I’ll take a whiskey,’ I said. ‘A bourbon if you’ve got it.’

‘We’ve got Jack Daniels and Blanton’s.’

‘Blanton’s. Thanks. On the rocks.’

‘Bloody Mary,’ said Juliet, predictably. The waiter tore himself away from us with difficulty and trotted off, looking back over his shoulder at her a couple of times before he disappeared from view.

I went back to the incident forms. Some of them I vaguely recognised from the news articles I’d seen open on Nicky’s desktop last night. Alfred Patterson was charged with strangling a complete stranger with his own tie in an office off the Uxbridge Road where he used to work. The two Heffers, father and son, had apparently raped and murdered an eighty-year-old woman and then thrown her body into the Regent’s Canal. Some of them were new, though. Lily Montgomery had been arrested and remanded after police were called to a loud domestic: they found her sitting on the sofa quietly knitting next to her dead husband, who had choked to death on his own blood after his throat had been perforated with two sharp objects entering from different sides. Her knitting needles were oozing half-congealed blood all over the baby booties she was making for her niece, Samantha, aged eleven months, but she didn’t seem to have noticed.

There were more. A couple of dozen, at least. After a while I just skimmed them, noting place and time while avoiding the noxious, heartbreaking details in the Summary box.

The waiter came back with our drinks. He almost spilled my bourbon in my lap because of the problem he was having with his eyes, which still kept being wrenched back to Juliet’s face and body whenever he let his concentration slip for more than half a second. We gave our food orders, but it was kind of a triumph of hope over experience: the kid wasn’t writing anything down, and nothing was going to stick in his mind except the curve of Juliet’s breast where it showed through the ragged tear in her shirt.

He hobbled away again, and I shook my head at her. ‘Can’t you let him off the hook?’ I asked.

She arched an eyebrow, mildly affronted. ‘He’s eighteen,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing anything – that’s all natural.’

‘Oh. Well, could you maybe go into reverse or something? Pour some psychic ice water over him? It’ll only improve the service.’

‘“Go into reverse.”’ Juliet’s tone dripped with scorn. ‘You mean, suppress desire instead of arousing it?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘I’ll leave that to you.’

‘Ow.’ I mimed a gun with my right hand, shot myself through the heart. That brutal directness, so easily mistaken for sadism, is one of the things I like best about Juliet. She’s a good corrective to my own natural sentimentality and trusting good nature.

I turned my attention back to the SIR sheets, going through them a little more carefully this time.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I get the point. They’re all local, and the odds against this many violent incidents in such a small—’

I stopped because she was shaking her head very firmly.

‘Well, what?’

‘This.’ She tapped the bottom sheet, which I’d somehow managed to miss because it was in a different format and seemed to be just a list of names. I’d vaguely assumed it was an index of some kind, since some of the names were the same as the ones on the incident forms. Now I looked again, and the penny dropped. If the bourbon hadn’t already been exquisitely sour, it would have curdled in my stomach.

The list, which had been produced on a manual typewriter with the help of a small lake of Tipp-Ex, was headed with the single word Congregants .

‘Holy shit,’ I murmured.

‘No, Castor. Un holy shit. That’s the point.’

‘These people all go to church at Saint Michael’s?’

Juliet nodded.

‘And now they’ve all turned into homicidal maniacs.’

‘That’s a question of semantics.’

‘Is it?’

‘If you call it insanity, you assume they’ve lost the ability to make moral judgements.’

‘Raping pensioners? Knit one, pearl one, puncture windpipe? What do you think they’ve lost?’

‘Their conscience. Whatever evil was inside them already has been given free rein. Whatever desires they feel, they satisfy by the simplest and most direct means they can find. If it’s lust, they rape. If it’s anger, they murder. If it’s greed, they pillage a shopping mall.’

‘So you think those people at the Whiteleaf—?’

‘I don’t think . I checked.’

Juliet reached into the same bottomless pocket, brought out a small clutch of wallets and billfolds and let them fall onto the table. I suddenly remembered her on her knees next to one of the men she’d felled: I thought she’d been checking him for a pulse, but obviously she’d been frisking him.

‘Jason Mills,’ she said. ‘Howard Loughbridge. Ellen Roederer.’

I checked the list, but I already knew what I’d find there.

‘And Susan Book,’ I added, just to show that I was keeping up.

‘And Susan Book. Of course.’

Our food arrived. The waiter drew the process out as long as he could, his stare all over Juliet from every angle he could decently manage. I sat on my impatience until he’d gone.

‘So what are you saying?’ I asked. ‘All these people were in church on Saturday, when . . . whatever it was that happened, happened? And it somehow turned off all their inhibitions? All their civilised scruples? Made them into puppets that can only respond to their own desires?’

Helping herself to some mee goreng that she hadn’t ordered, Juliet nodded curtly. ‘They’re possessed,’ she said.

‘What, all of them?’

‘All of them. Do you read the Bible much, Castor?’

‘Not when there’s anything good on the TV.’

‘Commentaries and concordances? Textual exegesis?’

‘To date, never.’

‘So do you know what the Jewish position on Christ is?’

I shrugged impatiently, really not wanting to sit through what looked like it might be a very circuitous analogy. ‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘They probably think he got in with the wrong crowd.’