Vicious Circle

“What do you fucking think?” His voice rose in a snarl, but then it turned into a cough and he folded in on himself, trying to ride out the spasms in his throat without moving his diaphragm. “Yes, Abbie,” he said when he could speak again, glaring at me with unfocused hatred. “The bastards brought her into the world just so they could kill her—at the right time, in the right place, with the right fucking weapon that Fanke and his mates had said a fucking blessing over and anointed with holy water and horse piss.” He coughed again, and this time he had to shove his hand against his mouth to keep whatever it was from coming up.

“Okay,” I said, gently—although the anger seeping out of him like tar from a smoker’s sweat was making my skin prickle. “And then there’s another part I can fill in for myself. You lost the case.” He nodded, his face still buried in his hands. “And you lost a shedload of money, because Fanke countersued.”

“Only to make me back off,” Peace wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A trail of spittle hung down from his chin but he seemed not to have noticed it. His voice was a little slurred now. “He was telling me to go away. Behind the scenes his lawyers offered me a hundred grand if I signed a waiver saying I gave up any claim to be considered as Abbie’s father. I thought about signing it, too, and then using some of it to have him bumped off. But multimillionaires make hard targets. And if I toughed it out, I got one big advantage that they couldn’t take away from me without another long, hard fight.

“Visiting rights, Castor. I got visiting rights.

“It felt different now. I wanted to spend some time with her. I wanted to make it up to her, because it was my fault she was in this fucking mess. I’d planted the seed, and then I’d just gone riding off into the sunset like the Lone bloody Ranger and left her to it. It was wrong. And even if it was too late to do any good, I had to at least try. Try to put it right again as far as I could.

“I stayed in New York for nearly two years, and I saw her every other weekend courtesy of the U.S. Court of Appeals, second circuit, Judge Harmony Gilpin presiding. They couldn’t stop me. They bankrupted me, not that that was hard, dragged me in and out of court on a new docket twice a fucking month, got the cops to roll me on some bullshit harassment charge and bust up my place. But they couldn’t stop me.

“I got to know her, and I—she was a good kid. A really good kid. She’d grown up like an animal in a cage. Never even been to school. She was meant to be having private tutors, but it never happened except on paper. There were plenty of grade-school teachers in the Satanist Church, and they were happy to sign anything that Fanke put in front of them. ‘Yes, I see this girl three times a week, and I teach her history, brain surgery, and domestic science.’ ‘Yes, I tutor her in beach volleyball.’ I tried to get the whole outfit audited, but the lawyer I had was no good. He was the best my money could buy, but my money was chicken shit. What I could pick up doing one-shot exorcisms on the black market.

“Fanke had so many lawyers he had to hire a bus. He could have stonewalled me forever—or just arranged with a few friends to have me turned into landfill. But I think he got unhappy about all the publicity. Anyway he just upped sticks one night and pissed off to Europe.

“There was nothing I could do to stop him. Abbie wasn’t a ward of the court or anything. In theory I still had my visiting rights, but they weren’t worth a whole hell of a lot when I couldn’t find out where he was.

“I came back to London, stony broke. The Thames Collective took me in, so I had a roof over my head, and then I started building up a stake. Hired a detective to run Fanke to ground and get me his address. He was in Liechtenstein. He’d rented a castle and moved in with the limousines and the flunkies and the whole circus. I went out there, but they wouldn’t let me through the door. And before I could get anything legal rolling, they moved again.

“That became a pattern. They never settled anywhere for long enough to let me get a foothold, and after a while they got better at keeping their heads down so it was harder for me to figure out where they were. I kept the channels open, though. Kept the feelers out. And then just after the New Year—maybe four months ago now—they came to London.

“I’d been doing my homework, Castor. I knew why they hadn’t killed her. And I knew why they’d come here. It was all coming together, and I was shit-scared that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

“They had to wait until she had her first period. That was part of Fanke’s prescription: out of the grimoires again. ‘She will be pure, she will be stained. She will be whole, she will be wounded. She will be woman, she will be child.’ That was what he said it meant.”