Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

But it was Tuesday now – or rather, Wednesday morning. If the cops had made a bad ID on Saturday night, they’d had ample time already by Monday to have met the Torringtons, cleared up the little misunderstanding, tipped their hats and gone on their merry way. And that would be on file. And Nicky would have seen it there.

That left the other possibility – that the people I’d met who called themselves Mel and Steve Torrington were two somebody elses entirely. In which case, why pretend? Why introduce themselves as two people who’d just died and whose murders could be the next day’s front-page news?

Because there wasn’t anyone else who I’d have said yes to. They needed me to look for Abbie’s ghost, and that lie was the only one that was certain to do the job.

We turned the corner into Troy Town – which has nothing epic or eye-catching about it apart from its name. Nicky crossed the road, and I followed. On the other side was a short row of Georgian terraces. Every second house had a flight of steps behind wrought-iron railings, leading down to a basement level below the street. Nicky descended one of these flights of steps, and as I followed I heard voices and music from ahead of me, although everything was still dark. Then he opened a door and light flooded out. Not much of it, it has to be said, and not strong: maybe ‘oozed’ is a better word than ‘flooded’.

The bar was actually in the basement of a house. It was called The Level, and it was indeed hot and cold, like Nicky had said. That meant that living and dead were equally welcome. You could smell the dead part of the equation as you came in off the street: a faint sour whiff like leaf mould, mixed with the surgical tang of formaldehyde. Seeing them wasn’t so easy: the only lighting in the room was from candles in the necks of bottles strategically positioned on tables and on shelves around the walls. There was a good-sized crowd lurking in the plentiful shadows – and a poor-sized bar, wedged into a corner of the room. I ordered a whisky, while Nicky passed. Introducing foreign organics into his system is something he tends to avoid. ‘If you’re dead, your immune system is more or less closed for business,’ he’d told me more than once. ‘No blood flow, right? No transport for antibiotics, phagocytes, any of that shit. So once you start letting infective agents in, you’re fucked, pure and simple.’ If this was a more upmarket joint, he would have ordered red wine and inhaled the scent of it: but he wouldn’t stoop to whatever the house red was in this place.

We sat down at the most remote table we could find – but in any case privacy was provided by the other conversations going on all around us. Anything we said would be lost in the general noise. The wallpaper was a virulent red and looked like flock. I reached out and ran my finger down it: it was. Maybe this place had been a curry house back in the day.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ I said, and I took a gulp of the whisky to fortify myself.

Nicky’s mood had calmed somewhat. He was still as pissed off with me as he had been, but he enjoys being the fountain of arcane wisdom almost as much as he enjoys jazz. ‘I would’ve spotted it sooner,’ he said, ‘only like I said, when it comes to murders we’ve had kind of an embarrassment of riches just lately.’

Of course. The spike in the bell-shaped curve. I suddenly remembered one of the headlines I’d read over Nicky’s shoulder on his computer monitor: HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE. Son of a bitch: it had been right in front of my eyes and I’d let it slide on past.

‘They were found in their own house,’ Nicky went on. ‘Somewhere out towards Maida Vale.’

‘Maida Vale?’ I broke in. ‘The Steve Torrington I met gave me an address on Bishop’s Avenue.’

‘What number Bishop’s Avenue?’

I dredged it up from memory. ‘Sixty-something. Sixty-two.’

‘That’s the squat, you fucking moron. And what did he give you the address for ? Did he ask you over for cocktails?’

‘It was so I could send him a receipt,’ I admitted.

‘Right. Like he fucking cared where that ended up. Anyway, the real Stephen Torrington lived in Maida Vale – and he doesn’t fucking live there any more. I’ve got the address if you want it, but my advice is to stay clear.

‘Place of death was the living room: some of the furniture had been moved to clear a big space – killer with a sense for the theatrical. The entire place had been ransacked. Every drawer, every cupboard, everything hauled out and strewn over the floor. Like there’d been a search, the file notes said, but they were just guessing. With the place being so messed up, they couldn’t even tell if anything was missing. And they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the girl.’

‘Abbie,’ I breathed.

‘Yeah, her. They knew there was a kid even without going through any records on the Torringtons, because there was a room that was obviously a kid’s room. That had been turned over, too, just like the rest of the house.’

Of course it had. And some things had been taken: I knew because except for the doll’s head in my goddamn pocket they were sitting in a big black bag in my office – a gift from the guy who called himself Steve Torrington. I imagined him raking through Abbie’s things with her real parents lying murdered in the room below, and I was filled with an unreasoning rage at my own naivety. No wonder he’d sent the woman back to the car: whoever the fuck he was, he knew his own acting skills were up to the job, but he didn’t want to have to rely on hers. And he was right: he’d got the grief spot-on, mostly – except that grief isn’t usually that articulate. I should have known. I should have smelled something.

But if I had, what would I have done? Refused to take the case? Abbie was dead – that much I knew, because I’d touched her spirit across the London night. And I’d felt the choking well of unhappiness that was all she’d known back when she was alive.

Lies or not, I’d taken on this job because of her: so, fair enough, I’d see it through because of her, too. Right then I hoped that meant that somewhere along the way I’d be running into the soi-disant Steve Torrington again, so that I could salvage some of my self-respect with the judicious application of a tyre iron.

That image made me think about ‘Mel’s’ bruises. They were just there for effect, I was suddenly sure: a stage prop to engage my sympathy and maybe to explain the relative awkwardness and lack of expression in her voice. This bastard didn’t miss a trick – and he didn’t care who he hurt.

‘So what do the cops think happened?’ I asked, pulling my thoughts off that particular track with a twinge of unease.

Nicky gave a one-handed shrug. ‘They don’t know a thing,’ he said. ‘At least, nothing that’s on file as yet. They analysed the bullets six ways from breakfast, so they’ll know the gun when they find it. Guns, sorry – two different weapons. But there’s nothing in their ballistics database to say whether either of them’s ever been used in any other crimes, so that’s a dead end for now. They dusted the place for prints, got nothing apart from the ones that should have been there anyway – not even virtuals. Retrieved a few footprints, which again will only help in nailing the perps once they find them.’

‘Statements from the neighbours?’

‘Nobody saw, nobody heard. Bits of street gossip creeping in here and there, though. Some people thought it was just a matter of time. The Torringtons were lowering the tone of the place, apparently. Lots of undesirables turning up at the house all hours of the day and night. One guy in particular seen going in and out a lot: tall, well built, in a long leather coat, with two goons dancing attendance like he was God. They figured he was either a gangster or a record-company producer. Maybe both. There’s a complaint on file with social services. One of the neighbours was worried enough about all the coming and going to raise a query about whether the Torringtons might be paedophiles, farming Abbie out for abuse.’