Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

I really needed to concentrate hard on the road, but I found my mind wandering back over what Nicky had just told me. Little Abbie may not have had much happiness in her life, but she’d sure had a hell of a lot of parents. Two who’d died on Saturday night; two more who’d turned up at my office on Monday morning – and a fifth, Dennis Peace, who didn’t figure in either tally. And then there were the Catholics: the Anathemata wanted her, too – wanted her badly. I got the feeling of wheels turning within wheels, and little fires touching off bigger ones. Whatever was going on, Abbie was the key to something huge: I knew I was right about that. Unfortunately, I didn’t seem to be any closer than before to figuring out what that something actually was. ‘Someone didn’t close the circle,’ the werewolf Zucker had said, charmingly mixing his metaphors, ‘and a little bird flew the nest.’ Still sounded like garbage whichever way you played it, but I was suddenly certain that the little bird was Abbie Torrington. Whatever she’d run from, it had to be bad if even being dead didn’t get you free.

It was half past one when I rolled the car into Pen’s driveway. The house was dark, which didn’t mean anything because the windows of Pen’s basement room look onto the garden, not the street: I was hoping she might still be awake so we could make our peace, knock back a glass or two of brandy and I could maybe try her out on some of the stuff Nicky had just dropped on me – see if her credulity was any more elastic than mine.

I never got the chance to find out. I’d taken about three steps towards the door when some headlights went on across the street, pinning me like a butterfly to a board. Some doors slammed, and footsteps sounded from my left and right simultaneously. I bunched my fists, preparing to go down fighting.

‘Relax, Castor.’

I did, but only a little way. It was Gary Coldwood’s voice. A moment later, he loomed out of the light like some negative Nosferatu and clapped a hand on my shoulder, a little too close to my neck. I winced. My head was throbbing so badly now, even that over-friendly touch sent spikes of pain through it.

‘Burning the candle at both ends,’ Coldwood said. ‘You look like shit.’

‘I feel like shit,’ I said. ‘It’s a set.’

He stared at me for a moment in silence. He seemed to want to say something, and it seemed to be something that needed a bit of a run-up.

‘Something about Pauley?’ I prompted him.

He looked blank. ‘About who?’

‘Robin Pauley? Drug tsar and murderer? I’m going to be a material witness at his trial, remember? You told me to look out for frighteners.’

Coldwood nodded and waved the topic brusquely away.

‘Pauley’s dead,’ he said. ‘Three of his lieutenants, too. We hauled them out of the Thames this morning. We’re thinking now that Sheehan’s murder was the first move in a gang war. Sorry, Fix. I should have told you.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, deadpan. ‘You should. And now you have. But next time you could just send me an email. Squad cars on the doorstep in the middle of the night get the neighbours talking.’

He didn’t move. He didn’t really seem to be listening. ‘We go back a long way, Fix,’ he said.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘We don’t.’

He laughed unconvincingly. ‘Hell, you’re right. We don’t, do we? But I’ve sort of come to trust you. I mean, up to a point. Bullshit aside – and you’re a great man for bullshit – I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me.’

There was another silence. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Did you come out all this way just to hug me?’

Coldwood shook his head. A woman and a man had moved in on either side of me while we spoke, and now he flicked a glance at each of them in turn. I didn’t bother to look: in the glare of the headlights, I couldn’t see much of them anyway. ‘Fix, this is Detective Sergeant Basquiat and Detective Constable Fields. They’ve got a crime scene, and they’d like you to look it over with them. Since I’m your designated liaison, they went through me. I said you’d be fine with it. But I also said, bearing in mind how late it was getting, we might have to ask you to come over in the morning.’

Coldwood’s tone had turned clipped and formal: words chosen carefully, for the record. It was that tone more than anything else that made me nod my head – also carefully, to minimise the risk of it exploding or falling off. This sounded like the kind of bad shit that has repercussions: I needed to know what it was about.

We drove west, which seemed kind of inevitable. Through Muswell Hill and Finchley, and into Hendon. There were two cars: Coldwood bundled me into the back of one and got in beside me: a uniform drove, and Fields and Basquiat followed in the second car.

‘Want to tell me what this is about?’ I asked, after a minute or so of stony silence.

Coldwood just looked at me. ‘Not yet a while,’ was all he said.

It wasn’t a long journey, but it felt like for ever. I was so tired now that my eyes kept closing by themselves, and the pain in my head had translated itself into a kind of roaring static in my ears. This had to be some kind of flu, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Pen occasionally reads the future in tea leaves, which is a tricky thing at best: a cop’s body language, though, can be a very reliable indicator of which way your immediate future is going to go, and unless I was very much mistaken I was in a shit-load of trouble.

We pulled up at last somewhere off Hendon Lane. Coldwood got out and held the door open for me. I stepped out too, only realising how overheated the car had been when the night air touched the sweat on my face.

‘In there,’ said Coldwood, pointing.

We were standing in front of a yellow-brick building that looked like some kind of church hall. The car had actually pulled up off the road itself onto a narrow apron, also paved in brick, that was obviously intended as a car park – but police incident tape had been put up across three-quarters of it, one length of which bore a large KEEP OUT notice. The building itself was clearly closed for business, as the shuttered windows and the foot-high weeds growing at the base of the walls both proclaimed. There was a signpost off to one side, and as I looked in that direction the headlights of the second police car, rolling up off the road and coming to a halt with a muted sigh of hydraulic suspension, spotlighted it neatly: Friends’ Meeting House. Well, great: it’s always nice to be among friends. The rest of the road was lined with factories and warehouses: all dark apart from the street lights, and even some of them were out, no doubt smashed by kids with good aim, a reasonable supply of half-bricks and too much free time.

Two constables stood to either side of the open door, and they nodded respectfully to Coldwood as he passed. He ignored them.

The hallway inside had no lights, but the bright yellow-white of mobile spots shone from some inner room. We went on through, shielding our eyes against the sudden glare. The echo of my footsteps immediately suggested a much larger space, even before I could get my eyes adjusted to the point where I could actually see it. Dark figures were walking backwards and forwards across an empty expanse of floor. Their footsteps crackled and rustled on thick plastic sheeting.

‘Got another bullet here, Len,’ a voice said.

‘Out of the floor?’ a second voice called back: this one belonged to a guy who either smoked way too much or had the worst case of chronic bronchitis I’d ever heard.

‘No, in this beam here – way out of the way. Shooter must’ve got a bounce before he brought the weapon into line.’

‘Okay. Measure the reflexive and mark it up.’