Vicious Circle

It wasn’t a long journey, but it felt like forever. 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 must 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 shitload 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 realizing 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 streetlights, 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 backward and forward 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.”

The room assembled itself piecemeal in front of me, my tiredness making the normal process of visual accommodation take twice as long. It was even bigger than I’d thought, because it was only the area lit up by the spots that I was seeing at first: further volumes of shadow lurked around the edges, concealing greater depths.

It was a typical church meeting house in the modern style: short on the bullying majesty that a lot of older churches have, but pretty in its way. Large amounts of pale wood, mostly in the form of beams and window trim; a symmetrical floor plan with bays every so often, so although the general shape was square there was a sense of some complex, origamilike shape, outfolding from a wide, open central space. Suburban transcendence for the Ikea age. Only what was going on here now was kind of the opposite of all that: forensic science, the triumph of the rationalistic worldview. Men and women in white coats tracked backward and forward with swabs and tape measures, typed notes into PDAs, called out to each other in clipped, unlovely jargon.

A door slammed behind me, making me turn my head. Detectives Basquiat and Fields loomed out of the night in a gust of cold air, like bad news. I saw them clearly for the first time. Basquiat was a hard-faced blonde dressed in shades of blue—from clinical all the way through to conservative. Her hair—short and straight—was pulled up from the sides in a way that looked vaguely continental, and if anything made the lines of her face look sharper and more uncompromising. Fields was middle-aged and tending to fat, but with the sad remains of Mediterranean good looks in his dark eyes and tightly curled black hair. That he was still a detective constable at his age suggested either some monumental fuck-up in his past or an equally monumental lack of ambition.

“You gonna walk him through it, or what?” Coldwood asked.

Fields looked at Basquiat, awaiting orders. “Why don’t you do it?” Basquiat said, turning to Coldwood. “He’s your man.”

Coldwood shook his head. “No, no, no. Your crime scene,” he pointed out, deadpan. “Don’t be pulling shit like that on me.”