Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the 45 medium regiment, first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army – not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while: mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.

‘That was how I ended up in Ouagadougou. I was making a delivery, and I got rolled. Guy says he’s already paid, then when I refuse to hand over he gets a bunch of his mates to beat the crap out of me. So I end up on the street, penniless, and having to keep my head down because the blokes who hired me won’t be interested in hearing how I lost the shit – they’ll just want their money, which I can’t give them because I haven’t got it.

‘Could’ve been worse, though. Burkina Faso was the edge of the bloody world in those days – the final frontier. They’d just kicked that crooked bastard Sankara out and nobody knew from one day to the next whether there was going to be another coup or a civil war or what, so people were in the mood to take stupid risks, spend their money now before it stopped being worth anything, and generally let their hair down. My kind of place, in some ways, if you leave aside the fact that everyone was shitpoor and you could get your throat cut if you flashed a dollar bill.

‘Ouagadougou was the capital city, but you wouldn’t know it. A few blocks of swanky buildings in the centre, and then you turn a corner and you’re in among the shitty little shanties again. Very strange.

‘One night I was in a bar and these three drunken fucks started in on a white woman who was sitting by herself. There was something a bit odd about her: she was very fancily dressed, even for the main drag, and this was the boondocks. Cocktail dress, lots of make-up although she didn’t need it. Hair up, and a necklace that was probably worth a couple of years’ wages around there. These guys tried to pick her up, and she told them to sod off, so they got nasty.

‘I stood up and walked over to help. They weren’t nearly as tough as they thought they were, and anyone could see that this woman was very well-heeled – very easy on the eye, too: tall, built, lots of class. Eyes a little cold, maybe, and blue-eyed blondes have never been my thing when all’s said and done, but still – I thought if I got in good with this piece of goods, that was another door opening. Might at least get a bed for the night and my leg over: maybe get a lot more.

‘But she didn’t need my help, as it transpired. Before I ever got to the table, she’d told one of these gents to keep his paws to himself, and he’d responded – being the humorous type – by grabbing hold of her breasts. His mates are roaring with laughter and he’s soaking it up, loving it. For about three seconds, give or take. Then the lady took a gun out of her handbag and blew a hole in his throat.’

Peace had fallen into a slightly dreamy inflection, his eyes unfocused as he stared into a different darkness, a different night a decade and a half gone. Then he pulled himself together and snapped out of it, shaking his head in sombre wonder.

‘That was your mother, Abbie,’ he said, looking up at the faint shade of his daughter almost with apology. ‘That was Mel.’

There was another long silence. Peace issued a shuddering breath that seemed to hurt a lot on its way out. Dead Abbie stared down at him, her eyes dark wells of sorrow and concern.

‘Maybe you’d better save the rest of this story for later,’ I suggested.

He shook his head sharply, just once. ‘It’s weighing on my mind,’ he muttered. ‘I think I’ll feel happier once I’ve got it out.’ He was still looking at Abbie. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have to send you to sleep for the next part. There’s some stuff that . . . that I wouldn’t want . . .’

He tailed off into silence, but Abbie was already nodding. ‘Don’t make it too long,’ she said, her voice sounding as though it was coming from a long way away. ‘I want to be here with you. In case anything happens.’

Peace shifted his weight so he could reach under the blanket. Tension and pain crossed his face in ripples, and his movements were slow and clumsy, but when he drew his hand out again he was holding a deck of cards, secured with an elastic band. He flicked the band off with his index finger, one-handed, and put the deck down on the floor beside his head.

‘This might take a while,’ he muttered.

I watched him in fascination. So many exorcists use rhythm to do what they do, it’s always a bit of a jolt to see someone who bases their technique on some other kind of patterning. I’d never seen anyone use playing cards before.

Peace started to sort through them, still using only his left hand. It seemed to be a regular deck, except that the cards were marked – heavily marked, with different-coloured inks and even with paint in a couple of places. There were scribbled words and phrases on most of the cards, along with occasional lines and crosses striking out some of the pips. The face of the queen of hearts had just been ripped out, leaving a roughly circular hole in the card that you could have put the tip of your little finger through.

But it was the three of spades that Peace found and put at the top of the deck – face up, at first, but then he turned it and tapped it and glared at it hard. When he turned it over again, it was the ace. And Abbie blinked out like a street light at sunup.

Peace pocketed the deck again, or at least put it back underneath the blanket.

‘Now Mel,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘Mel is really bad. Deep down, bred-in-the-bone bad. I’d never met anyone like her before. I have since, but like I said, I was still more of a kid than anything back then. I mean, I thought I was the last word until I met her.’ He grinned: or maybe he was just showing his teeth. ‘Bitch has got that whole femme-fatale thing going for her. Most men love a really bad girl. At least, until she’s bad to them. ’

I might have argued with that once. Now it just made me think of Juliet, and I said nothing.

‘These guys backed off sharpish. The man she’d shot wasn’t dead, amazingly. He had his hands clutched to his throat, trying to stop the blood or at least slow it down, but he still seemed to be able to breathe so I suppose she must have missed his trachea or whatever it’s called. But his feet started to slip and slide and he was obviously about to fall down, so his two mates took a hand each and they dragged him off towards the door. They threw a couple of curses at Mel, but all the fight had gone out of them.

‘That was when I noticed that the barman had a copper’s nightstick in his hand: not a PC Plod effort – one of those big sidewinders that takes no fucking prisoners. He’d fished it up from some little cubbyhole under the bar, and he was walking up behind Mel with this thing under his shoulder, ready to swing it up and over and crack her head open.

‘I picked up a beer bottle and let fly. Caught him in the mouth and almost floored him. Then Mel turned around and saw him and she got the drop on him with the gun before he could get his feet under him again and use the stick. She stood up, pressed the gun to the side of his head, and told him to kneel down. She took the stick away from him with her left hand, still holding the gun right up against his temple.

‘“You were going to hit me with this?” she said to him. “Because your friends tried to rape me and I wouldn’t play along?” He was babbling something, saying he was sorry or that he didn’t want any trouble or whatever. Mel shook her head. No excuses. No mercy.