Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

It wasn’t an exorcism – nothing like. It’s just the most basic kind of nature magic, an elemental ward that has efficacy for about three weeks of the year, so long as it’s been properly cut and blessed. To the dead, whether they’re in the body or out of it, getting too close to a ward is like touching a mains cable: it hurts a fuck of a lot.

The zombie hit the floor hard, and lay there jerking spastically with his eyes wide open. One of his arms, flailing out, hit the leg of the woman who’d been reading Cosmo : she jumped aside to avoid the contact.

‘I really don’t want any trouble,’ I told the room in general.

‘Yeah,’ said Nicky from the doorway. ‘That’s fucking plain to see.’

Behind him, Imelda gave a yelp of dismay and stormed past him into the room, knocking him aside. She’s a big woman, with fists like hams: it would take a lot more than a myrtle switch to take her down. ‘Castor!’ she bellowed. ‘You have no right! You have no right! You get out of my house now, or I swear I’ll call the police on you.’

‘Hey, he was the one wanted to fight,’ I said. ‘I was happy with the Reader’s Digest .’

Kneeling down beside the still-shuddering zombie, she laid her hand on his forehead and shot me a glare of pure contempt. He quietened under her hand.

‘Then you deal with him like a man,’ she said. ‘Not like a cockroach.’

‘I just used a—’ I began.

‘I know what you used,’ Imelda snapped. ‘You swatted him with a stand-not like you’d swat a bug, because you couldn’t win the fight any other way. You’re just a goddamn coward. Now you get out of my house before I throw you out.’

That was a much more serious threat than the one about phoning the police. Imelda would never ask the man to fight her battles for her: but she really could pick me up and throw me, and the way I felt right then I might not survive. I put up my hands in surrender and left the room, hearing Nicky behind me apologising on my behalf and assuring her I’d never come round here again.

Little Lisa was out in the hallway, leaning against the wall. She grinned at me, wickedly amused.

‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.

‘You beat that big lych-man,’ she said scornfully, ‘but you couldn’t beat my mum.’

‘Can you ?’ I asked.

She shook her head vigorously. ‘Fuck, no.’

‘Well, there you go.’

I waited for Nicky in the yard, but when he came out he walked right on past me. ‘The car’s out in the street,’ I said, falling into step with him.

‘Fuck you, Castor,’ he snapped, speeding up. ‘I’ll take a frigging cab.’

‘Look, the guy was going to fold me into a paper plane, Nicky. I’m sorry. But I did what I had to do.’

‘You know what it would mean for me if Imelda decides I’m bad news? The only other guy I know who can do what she does lives in Glasgow . I am fucking screwed if she gets mad at me. I wish to Christ I’d told you to wait until tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I already said I was sorry. What did you have to tell me, anyway? What is it that couldn’t wait?’

We were out in the street by this time. Nicky slammed the yard door shut with a bang that resounded across the street – in this neighbourhood, not a wonderful idea.

‘What couldn’t wait?’ he echoed sarcastically. ‘You’ve been fed a line, is what. I wanted to tell you you’re running on pure bullshit. This kid Abbie Torrington – you said her parents hired you to find her?’

‘Right,’ I agreed, a little unnerved by his savagery. ‘Get to the point, Nicky.’

He rounded on me and thrust his face into mine.

‘The point is you had me chasing my own fucking tail, looking through morgue records and autopsy reports and fuck knows what else. And it’s all a waste of time because the kid’s not dead.’

Nicky hit the punchline with grim satisfaction.

‘The kid’s only missing. It’s the parents who are dead.’

When I was eleven years old and coming up to my twelfth birthday, I dropped a lot of heavy hints about a bike. It was a lot to ask, even if it was a second-hand one, because my dad had just been laid off from the Metal Box factory on Breeze Hill and we’d reached the point where we either had to eat dirt literally or go to one of the local loan sharks and do it figuratively.

As the day approached, it became clear that there was a big secret I wasn’t in on. Conversations between my mum and dad would stop when I came into the room, and there was a general air of silence and tension. When I asked my big brother Matt what was going on, and whether or not it had anything to do with me, he told me to fuck off out of it because he had homework to do. I concluded that the bike had been bought, and that it had probably added to the financial strain the family was already under. Selfish little shit that I was, I took that as good news.

Then, about three days before my birthday, my mum left home: my dad, John, had finally kicked her out after finding her in bed with his work colleague, Big Terry (so named to avoid confusion with the merely medium-sized Terry Seddon). She went in the middle of the night, so the first we knew was when we woke up the next morning and she wasn’t there. Dad told us she’d gone back to live with Grandma Lunt in Skelmersdale, which was a half-truth: her own mother threw her out too, since she didn’t have a job and couldn’t ‘turn up’ for her keep. She ended up going down to London looking for a job, and we didn’t see her again for three years.

So I’m prepared to admit that sometimes I ignore what’s right under my nose: I’m not always right in there with the intuitive connections and conclusions. It’s probably not overstating things to say that – sly as I undoubtedly am – I can sometimes get lost in the wood while looking at the trees.

But this time it was the world’s fault. This time reality had pitched me a spit-ball I couldn’t have seen coming.

At first I tried to slot Nicky’s nasty little revelation into what I already knew. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘When did they die?’

‘Last Saturday. Sixth of May. Somewhere between noon and six p.m. according to the pathologist’s best guess. The guy – Stephen – was shot in the face at point-blank range, and he was kneeling at the time. No sign of a struggle: he saw it coming and he took it pretty well. A good sport, obviously. With the woman it was messier: she was tied up and beaten with the leg of a chair, then shot in the stomach. And the killer took his time, because the path team put the time of her death a good three hours after the guy’s.’

‘But—’ I managed. ‘I met them two days after that – on the Monday. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Are you telling me—?’

I tailed off. I realised that a couple of lights had come on in windows across the street. This clearly wasn’t the best place to be having this conversation. I headed towards the corner. ‘The car’s over here,’ I said. ‘You can tell me as we drive.’

Nicky didn’t move. ‘I told you, Castor, I’ll take a cab. Right now the less of your company I get the better. You want to hear this, you hear it here.’

I turned to face him. ‘Can we at least get off the street?’ I asked, throwing out my arms in a shrug.

Nicky hesitated. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ he said after a couple of beats. ‘There’s a bar on Troy Town. It’s hot and cold, or at least it was the last time I looked. Come on.’

He led the way, sullenly silent. I decided to let him simmer down before I broached the subject again: I’d get more out of him that way. But the wheels inside my head were spinning without traction, the gears squealing so loud I could almost hear them. Mel and Steve died two days before I met them. So either I’d met really good fakers or the dead bodies had been wrongly identified.