Vicious Circle

She stood up again. “And this is where it gets interesting,” she said, although her tone stayed level to the point of indifference. With a nod of the head, she indicated a part of the room I hadn’t even looked at: one of the bays, dark like the other corners of the room out of the spotlights’ beams. “An uninvited guest,” she said, “comes in from that way—or he was there all along, waiting for the right moment. There’s a window, boarded up, but someone’s pried the board away and left it propped up against the wall. He was quiet, so they didn’t hear him coming. Or maybe they were chanting. Either way, he gets up close without anyone turning to look at him. We know that, because the people who were standing here, here, and here”—she counted them off, frowning as though with the effort of memory, although the dark smears under the plastic marked the spots well enough—“were shot in the back.”

She turned to face me, stared at me with cold appraisal for a second or so, but then she pointed past me toward the back of the room. “The rest of the magic-makers start running—not away from the man with the gun, but towards him. They’re not armed themselves. Or at least, no other guns get fired as far as we can tell. All the bullets we’ve retrieved come from the same weapon—an IMI Tavor assault rifle, Israeli military issue. That’s a weapon with both semiauto and fully automatic functions, but the magazine—so I’m told—only carries thirty rounds. Doesn’t matter. This man’s not wasting them, and he’s not missing.”

Basquiat walked past me, forced me to turn to follow her as she continued the lecture. This kind of browbeating by facts, figures, and ballroom dancing is standard cop procedure. I was listening, but on a level underneath that there was a question I kept turning over and over in my mind with a kind of sick dread, more or less in time to the throbbing in my skull: What—or who—had been standing in the center of the circle?

“But there’s no way he’s got time to reload,” Basquiat said, like a maths lecturer saying “compute the angle.” Her tone was still flat, but there was a kind of excitement or at least a kind of animation in her face. I could see she loved her job. And I wondered, briefly, whether a case like this might be a career-making deal for a young, upwardly mobile detective sergeant.

“And he’s used up about six bullets just introducing himself,” she went on, “so assuming he had a full clip when he came in he’s now got a couple of dozen shots left. If they rush him, which is what they’re doing, he’s in trouble. Fully automatic fire will scatter a crowd, but he doesn’t have any time to switch over and in any case anyone who doesn’t go down in that first sweep will be right on top of him and he’ll have nothing left to fight with except his hands.”

She scanned the floor, as if she were reading the story there. “Maybe he expected them to run. Maybe he’s surprised that they don’t get the message. He’s not scared, though, that’s for sure, because he walks to meet them. One—two—three.” She pointed to a scuff mark on the floor in between two of the sheets of plastic. “He stops here. And then he does something very odd.”

“He fires at the floor,” I said. My throat was unpleasantly dry, and it came out as a croak.

Basquiat looked at me curiously. “That’s right,” she said, acknowledging the point with a nod. “He does. And why does he do that, Mr. Castor?”

I shrugged unconvincingly. I knew the answer, but I was still hoping I was wrong. “Warning shot?”

“After shooting three people in the back? I don’t think so.”

Okay, what the fuck. If she was determined to make me dance . . . “The circle,” I said, tiredly. “He blasted a hole in the circle.”

“I’m still asking why,” said Basquiat. “It seems a strange thing to do. Can you shed any light on the reasoning?”

“Maybe,” I said, facing her stare as levelly as I could. “But maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m here first. It would help to know.”

Basquiat’s jaw tensed so hard that for a second I could see every muscle in her throat. “I’m surprised you have to ask.” The words came out laden with something like anger, something like contempt. “You’re one of DS Coldwood’s regular informants—or so he says. And he uses you a lot in situations like this, isn’t that right? You tell him where someone’s died, and how they died, and how they’ve been getting along since.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s about it. So do you want a reading, detective?”

“Not at this particular point in time, Mr. Castor, no. Maybe later. What I’d like right now is an answer. How did you know that Abbie Torrington was dead?”

So there it was. It opened up inside my stomach like a pit, just waiting for one more word from Basquiat to fill it.

“I’m an exorcist,” I said.

“So what, it’s a sparrow in the marketplace kind of deal?” she spat, unconsciously echoing my own words to Gwillam. “Everyone who dies, you get to hear about it? How’s my grandad doing? Last time I checked, he was still okay, but maybe you can give me an update.”