Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

Basquiat threw the file she was carrying down onto the table, hung her jacket – black, short-cut, very stylish – on the back of the chair and sat down. From her bag she took a pen, which she put down next to the file. Fields leaned against the wall, a few feet away from me. The plods withdrew, closing the door behind them.

‘Come on,’ Basquiat said to Fields, a little impatiently. ‘Lights, camera, action.’

He reached out and pressed the button on the tape recorder. ‘Whittington’s secure unit. Interview with Felix Castor,’ he said, in a declamatory voice. ‘Conducted by Detective Sergeant Basquiat with Detective Constable Fields in attendance.’ He glanced down at his watch and added the date and time.

‘I want a lawyer,’ I said. ‘I won’t be saying anything worth hearing until I get one.’

Basquiat raised an eyebrow. ‘You haven’t even been charged with anything yet,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you say that’s jumping the gun?’

‘ Am I being charged with anything?’ I asked her.

‘Of course you are, Castor. You’re being charged with murder.’

‘Whose murder?’ It was a stupid question, but right then my need to know outweighed my sense of self-preservation.

‘Why?’ Fields sneered. ‘Are you losing count?’

Basquiat looked at him: not an angry look, but one that was prolonged until he looked away. The meaning was unambiguous: it was her interview, and his contributions weren’t welcome.

‘You were found in a burned-out building,’ she said, her gaze flicking back to me, ‘in the same room as a dead body. This corpse turned out to be a man known as Dennis Peace – a man whose profession appears to have been the same as yours. Exorcism. He’d been shot in the chest and abdomen. He also bore injuries from an earlier assault of some kind, but it was the chest shot that killed him, even before the stomach wound had a chance to. He choked to death on his own blood.’

I bowed my head. I’d hoped Peace might have made it somehow, but it had never seemed very likely. I felt a sour, attenuated grief for him, but the real gut-punch was Abbie. What had Fanke done with her? Had he found the locket? Of course he fucking had. He hadn’t crossed half London and murdered a man in cold blood just to walk away with the real job half-done. He had her. He had her soul. Thanks to me, he had everything he needed now to finish what he’d started.

‘We’ve talked to a few people since then,’ Basquiat went on briskly. ‘Former associates and known contacts. Reginald Tang and Gregory Lockyear, also exorcists, who used to share lodgings with Peace, were only too happy to confirm that you’d been looking for the man for the past several days. And that you’d been involved in a fight with him on board a houseboat – the Thames Collective . A woman named Carla Rees further claims that you tried to arrange a meeting with Peace, using her as a go-between.’ She was getting the names out of the file on the table, but now she pushed it away from her slightly and leaned back in her seat. She obviously didn’t need cue cards for the next part.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s all circumstantial. It helps to build up the case, that’s all. The main thing is that we’ve got your fingerprints on the gun and on a lot of other things that were in the room. A kettle. Some mugs. An empty hip flask. It looks to me like you went in there with some story, got him pissed and off his guard, and then killed him. Is that what happened, Castor? You were looking for a chance at that easy shot in the back, but then you ran out of patience and did him face to face like a mensch, yes?’

There was no way I should have answered that question: I’d been in the same situation before – although not on a murder charge, admittedly – and I knew how the game was played. Basquiat wanted to get some kind of a response out of me, and the more she could needle me the better the odds would be that I’d say something stupid and incriminate myself. But my first instinct – play safe and say nothing – ran aground on one simple, terrible fact. Time was against me. I needed Basquiat to believe me, or at least to take me seriously. I couldn’t afford the luxury of stonewalling her.

‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t what happened. Basquiat, how does your version account for the hits that I took? Someone gave me a couple of good hard smacks from behind, right? While I was shooting Peace in the chest? From in front? What’s wrong with this picture?’

Basquiat looked me over cursorily, as if she’d only just noticed the bruising to my face. She shrugged. ‘Nothing, as far as I can see,’ she said coldly. ‘I didn’t say you got Peace on the first pass. I assume you fought, you both did some damage, you shot him. He was a big man. He could easily have given you those colours you’re wearing.’

‘Look at them,’ I invited her, trying to keep the urgency out of my voice: if I started to think about Abbie, and what might be happening right now only a few miles away, I wasn’t going to be able to think straight – and then I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this. ‘Those marks weren’t made in any bare-hand fight: I was clubbed with a pistol butt.’

‘So?’

‘So whoever took me down was armed, too. I didn’t ambush Peace. There were other people there. I’m betting you must have found tracks outside the Oriflamme as well. You know there were other people there.’

Basquiat sat back in her seat, turning her pen with the tip of her middle finger for a second or two. Then she clicked the nib out and wrote something terse on the case sheet.

‘Peace’s prints were on the weapon too,’ Basquiat conceded, putting the pen down again. ‘Come to that, we think we know where and when he bought it. Recently, if you’re interested. At the same time as he bought the Tavor that was used at the Hendon Quaker Hall. I’ve been busy since the last time I saw your ugly face. Busy building a case.

‘Bottom line? We think the two of you were neck-deep in whatever was going on in that meeting house. Whether it was a Satanist ritual or some kind of a scam doesn’t interest me: with your background – and his – it could equally well have been either. But it didn’t go down the way it was meant to, and a whole lot of people ended up dead. Including Abbie Torrington, who we now believe was Peace’s daughter.

‘Peace ran one way and you ran another. You lost touch with him, anyway, and you spent the next few days trying to track him down. You were stupid enough to ask a lot of people a lot of questions, and to use your own name while you were doing it. You couldn’t have given us a clearer evidence trail if you’d been trying to – so thanks for that. But if you’re asking me whether it worries me that you shot Peace with his own gun, no, it doesn’t. Not at all. We found a knife on the floor a few feet away from you, and that had your fingerprints on it too, so we’re assuming that you went in with the intention of using that – but then a better opportunity presented itself and you took it.’

Basquiat quirked an eyebrow. ‘Or did he draw on you first? Was it self-defence? Maybe we can haggle about motive.’

I slammed my hand down on the table, making Field move in and loom over me with an unspoken but unmistakable threat. ‘Fuck!’ I said, louder than I intended. ‘Didn’t Reggie Tang tell you that I waded in to help Peace when he was attacked at the Thamesmead pier? I wanted to talk to him, not to kill him!’

For the first time, a flicker of something like interest – nothing so strong as doubt, not yet – passed across Basquiat’s face. She looked up at Fields.

‘Did Tang say anything about that?’ she asked him.

‘Not a word,’ said Fields, scornfully.