Vicious Circle

Nicky glared at me for a long moment, then he opened the drawer and hauled the map out again. He rolled it out across the table with a brusque gesture, and then waved at the expanse of tight brown lines on off-white paper.

“Where?” he demanded.

I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Like I said, this is a game. You have to find it for me.”

“So it’s just bullshit. You don’t know if there’s a safe house at all?”

“Dennis Peace is holding on to Abbie Torrington’s spirit—probably inside a gold locket that she was wearing when she died. And when I tried to raise Abbie with a tune, the contact died on me. First she was there, then bang, she was gone. I’d never met anything like that before. There’s lots of reasons why I might not be able to find a ghost, but I’ve never had one slip away from me like that after I’ve already got the sense of it.

“Then I went to Rosie Crucis tonight, before coming out here to you, and she said that Dennis Peace told her he was ‘staying with Mr. Steiner.’ That reads one way for me, and only one way. He’s found Steiner’s safe house. Steiner said the house could blind the eyes of the dead. Maybe it can also blindside someone living who’s looking for the dead.”

“Sounds like a lot of maybes,” said Nicky.

“Indulge me, Nicky.”

He rolled his eyes, shrugged: the least convincing display of bored nonchalance I’d seen in a while. “Yeah, whatever. Go for it. It’s not like I need to be anywhere else. Okay, what do we know?”

I bent over the map. “I played the whistle for Abbie three times,” I said, “in three different places. I got a vague sense of direction each time. The first one was here.” I found Harlesden on the map, and pointed. “From there, it felt like she was south and west of me. Somewhere out—this way. Then I tried again from Scrubs Lane, and the feeling was just westward. Almost straight out towards the setting sun.”

“That’s south of west,” Nicky corrected me schoolmarmishly.

“And then from the Hammersmith overpass it was definitely a little north of west.”

“Ealing. Ealing Broadway. Or Hanger Hill. Or Scotch Common. Or anywhere from West Acton out to fuck knows where.”

“ ‘Hallowed ground to all four sides,’ ” I quoted from memory.

“You know how many churches there are in London, Castor? That’s about as much use as saying it’s handy for the buses.”

“Point taken. But then there are those ramparts of water. I’m guessing that this place will have a high water table, so that the basement at least will extend down into it.”

“More likely it’s just gonna have some kind of moat.”

“A moat’s harder to hide, Nicky.”

“Maybe he built it into the middle of the Brent Reservoir.”

“Maybe. But I think Steiner wanted the safe houses to look a lot like everywhere else from the outside. They were built to withstand a siege, not to invite one.”

“Okay.” His eyes were darting over the map now. “Gonna stand in its own grounds, anyway, though. Don’t see how you could do the ramparts of earth and air on a street of semis.”

“Good. And it’s not going to be too far out. Steiner saw this as being like the Thames Barrier—it’s a service for London, and for Londoners.”

“Land rises anyway when you get out too far west,” Nicky muttered. “So you’d be having to dig down further to get into the water table. Steiner was a West Londoner himself, wasn’t he? From Perivale? And he always said he was gonna retire somewhere out that way.”

He fell silent, his hands tracing lines across the map, his expression deepening from a frown of concentration into something more truculent and dogged.

“Think laterally, Nicky. It’s going to be something right under our noses.”

His right index finger came down hard on Castlebar Hill.

“You’re right,” he said. “It is. It’s the fucking Oriflamme.”

For a moment I didn’t get it. “But the Oriflamme’s in—” I started to say.

“Not that piece-of-shit Goth dive in Soho Square, Castor. The original Oriflamme. The one that burned down.”

Sixteen

THE ORIFLAMME HAD BEEN INTENDED AS A MUSEUM WHEN it was originally built, and it stood in the most unlikely location you could think of: in the middle of a roundabout on the B455, just off Castlebar Hill. So my readings when I was holding the doll had been pretty damn accurate: southwest from Harlesden, due west—give or take—from Du Cane Road.

But it had closed down as a museum because of the ineluctable laws of supply and demand. Specifically, because demand for a museum that you had to wade through three lanes of speeding London traffic to reach was negligible—the more so because it was a museum of local industry, which meant that most of the exhibits were bullshit adverts for Hoover and Hawker Siddeley in light disguises.

So Peckham Steiner got a bargain, which he passed on to Bourbon Bryant, who gave us—briefly—the Oriflamme. And then it burned to the ground. That was all the history I knew, apart from Nicky’s wacky conspiracy theories. But now, walking up through Cleveland Park at two in the morning with nothing but darkness at my back, I kind of wished I’d made it my business to know more.