Vicious Circle

“Yeah,” he said eventually, sounding as casual as he could. “Okay. On that understanding. You take her down into the basement, lock her up in the film store. You collect her when you’re ready. I don’t have to touch her or go near her in between. Then after she wakes up we have a talk, with you riding shotgun. I get . . . let’s say five questions. With straight answers. And I get to define what a straight answer is. Fair?”

I nodded. “Fair,” I said. “I’ll go bring her in.” I turned and headed back up the aisle.

“Hey, I read where they found the kid’s body,” Nicky called after me. “So you were right after all—she really was dead the whole time. Should’ve known better than to call you on a ghost issue. One thing you maybe didn’t know, though, because it’s in a closed file I hacked into while I was in the neighborhood.”

I stopped, stared back down the aisle at him. All the seats had been removed long ago, so neat lines of bolts stretched away from me on all sides like a field sown with scrap iron instead of seeds.

“In which neighborhood?” I asked.

“The neighborhood of Mapstack—the Met’s internal version of the Interpol’s big data exchange system. It’s usually worth a look, just for laughs. These people have no idea how the world works—how the little details connect up. They try to draw links between crimes, but they only work in straight lines so they miss it. They miss everything but fucking methodology. Like the real criminals—I mean, the ones who are so big you never even see them—can’t vary their repertoire.”

“Abbie Torrington,” I reminded him, derailing that particular paranoid rant before it could get a head of steam up.

Nicky peered out from under the pump, a little truculent at being interrupted. “The body was disturbed after death. Like, about a minute or so after death, when she could still bleed. Someone scraped the back of her neck hard enough to break the skin.”

I tried that on for size, although my mind was full of so much shit right then that it was hard to bring it into focus. “You mean, someone drew something across her neck? Something with a rough surface?”

“Like that, yeah. All along the back of her neck and up the left side, stopping just under the chin.”

A second pass with the knife? Take her head off after stabbing her through the heart? Could be. But then the big man with the machine gun comes stomping in, and bodies are hitting the floor on all sides. So maybe there’s no time to finish the job, and all you’re left with is a dotted line that says “Cut here.”

I shook my head. No. Not like that. One thing you can rely on lunatic satanic cultists to do is to keep their tools sharp. If you’re making a human sacrifice, you don’t just take a bread knife out of the drawer and hope it’s got enough of an edge on it to cut through bone. Your knives are part of a sacrament: so you kiss them and you cuddle them and you stroke them with a whetstone until the edge sings to you.

“Something was pulled off her neck,” I told Nicky. “Something she was wearing.”

“What sort of something?”

“A locket on a chain.”

“Would also work. Have to be yanked off with a lot of force, though.”

I remembered Dennis Peace’s fist smashing through the woodwork on board the Thames Collective, an inch from my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

I went and got Juliet from the car, chewing this over on the way. It was a sideways leap of logic—or maybe several parallel leaps—but I had a feeling that I knew at least some of what had gone down. Peace goes to the meeting house on a rescue mission. Somehow he’s found out what’s going to take place there, and who’s going to be involved—possibly by beating it out of Melanie Torrington before he killed her. But he arrives too late. Abbie’s already dead.

Too late? Or just in the nick of time?

He aims his gun at the chalk circle on the floor: chews a good third of it to matchwood. Then as the cultists scream and run, or whatever it is they’re doing, he goes in and snatches the locket from around Abbie’s neck.

If he can’t save her body, he can at least save her spirit. But he needs something physical for it to cling to.

I must have been in this game too long, because that all sounded like it made some kind of sense. For an exorcist, used to dealing with things of the spirit as if they were cold, hard facts, there was a naked, inexorable logic to it. Most ghosts have an anchor: they can survive without one, as I’d proved when I cut loose the dead kids at the Charles Stanger clinic and set them free to roam the night. But in the white-hot panic of the moment—the moment of her death—in a strange place, surrounded by strangers, Abbie’s soul would cling to something it knew. Peace was good at his job: he knew either how to identify that something or how to influence it.