Vicious Circle

She hung up again and I pocketed the phone. I sat down on the floor beside Peace, with nothing to do now but wait. The dead girl walked across to stand over me, her feet not quite touching the ground. For ghosts, most things come down to memory and routine. They behave as though they still have flesh but all they’ve really got is habits. She stared down at her father, himself more dead than alive, and the expression on her face was hard to bear.

“Help’s on the way,” I said.

Abbie nodded. “I don’t want him to die,” she whispered. “I don’t want anything to hurt him.”

All I could do was nod in my turn.

Peace stirred and woke from his shallow sleep, looked up at me in momentary dislocation. Almost he reached for his gun: then he seemed to remember who I was and what was going on. “There’s coffee,” he muttered thickly, pointing to a small stash of packets and jars up against the wall near the gas burner. “And bottled water.”

I made coffee, just for something to do. While the water came slowly to the boil, I went and retrieved my coat from the floor. It wasn’t a cold night, but I always prefer to have my whistle where I can get to it in a hurry. Absently, I checked the contents of the pockets, finding everything where it should be—and one anomalous item, which I didn’t recognize until I pulled it out into the light: the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll, slightly chipped but miraculously still in one piece. I slid it back into the pocket hastily. I didn’t know what memories it might provoke for her, and I didn’t want to find out right then.

The coffee was instant, of course, but I poured a slug from my hip flask into each of the mugs to sweeten the pill. I brought one over to Peace and put it down on the floor next to him. He nodded a thank-you.

“So what’s the story?” I said, sitting down on the suitcase that was the closest thing to a chair I could see.

Peace sighed and shook his head. “No story. Stories make some kind of fucking sense. My life is just . . . things. Things happening. I never knew where I was going.” He looked tired and old, although I guessed he only had a couple of years on me.

“I meant about Abbie,” I said, bluntly. “She calls you dad. Is that just a figure of speech, or did you really have a part to play in making her?”

He gave me a bleak stare. “What do you think?” he asked, at last.

“I think there’s a birth certificate on file in Burkina Faso that shows you fathered a child there. But the record shows that the girl who died last Saturday night in Hendon was the daughter of a man named Stephen Torrington.”

“Yeah? Well you should go ask Stephen Torrington about that. You’ll need your whistle, though: he’s likely to want a little coaxing before he talks.”

“And her mother was a woman named Melanie—but after that it’s pick a card any card, because she seems to change her surname the way other people change their underwear.”

“When I met her it was Melanie Jeffers.”

I was going to let the subject drop, but it might do him good to talk, and it would certainly do me good to listen. “Peace,” I said, gently, “I’ve just spent three days living in a Whitehall farce where every cupboard had a cop, a Catholic, or a lunatic cultist inside it. I could get ten years just for knowing Abbie was dead when the police still thought she was alive. So could you find it in your heart to be a little less terse?”

“It’s my life, Castor.”

“Mine, too.”

We stared at each other again: this time he broke first.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Why not? Give me another shot of that metaxa, first. I hate going back over this shit. I hate the fucker I was when I did this shit.”

He seemed to have lost his reservations about swearing in front of Abbie—and she seemed not to have noticed, so maybe it wasn’t the first time. I handed him the flask, thinking he was going to top up his coffee. Instead he upended it and drank it dry, then handed it back to me with an appreciative grimace.

“That was rough,” he said.

“Didn’t seem to slow you down much.”

“Rough is what I need right now. Abbie?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“This is your story, too, and you’ve got a right to hear it. But not all of it. There’s a bit in the middle that I’m going to send you to sleep for, because—because it’s not the sort of thing a girl your age should be exposed to. Okay?”

The ghost nodded silently. Send her to sleep? I was going to watch that one with keen interest: if Peace could whistle ghosts down as well as up, and do it without risk of exorcising them altogether, he had more control of the fine-tuning than I’d ever had. I remembered the psychic smack down he’d given me the second time I tried to get a fix on Abbie. I might learn something here—assuming he lived long enough to teach me.