Vicious Circle

They thought I was in a worse way than I was, because the whack I’d taken to the side of my head had laid it open spectacularly—and the scalp being full of shallow-lying blood vessels, I’d bled like a stuck pig. But when they put me in a wheelchair and took me for a spin down to the radiology department, it turned out there was no concussion worth talking about and no intracranial bleeding. Some people are just born lucky, I guess.

Back up on the secure ward, they wheeled me right past the door to my private room and parked me in the corridor a little farther on, where I was given into the custody of two uniformed cops. I didn’t bother to try to get a conversation started: they’d be under orders not to fraternize, and I wouldn’t pick up anything worth knowing from them anyway.

Sitting there in one of those hospital gowns that leaves your arse hanging out, I replayed the events of the last few days with bleak self-hatred. Fanke had played me like a fiddle. Obviously he was already in place—having sidled into Pen’s comfort zone to keep an eye on Rafi, not on me. But when the shit hit the fan and the second installment of their human sacrifice floated away with the sweet morning dew, he improvised brilliantly.

Or was it more than just an accident that I’d never met him as Dylan Forster? Was he playing the angles even then, keeping me in reserve in case he needed a fall guy at a later stage in the proceedings?

Either way, he’d hired me on to find Peace for two reasons, not one. The first was that he needed someone who knew London, and there was nobody on his squad who’d fit the bill. They might be hard as nails, but they couldn’t read the ground: they might take weeks to find Peace, and he needed the job done a whole lot quicker than that.

And the second reason was that he already had enough dead bodies on his hands to constitute a logistical problem. There were the satanists who Peace had gunned down at the sacrifice, which was bad enough, but there were also the Torringtons, stone-cold dead in suburbia, which was worse. Whether he’d killed Melanie himself, as I suspected, or she’d met her demise in some other way, the whole operation must have been starting to look both leakier and more high profile than he would have liked. Why not bring in a third party—someone he could keep discreet tabs on, through Pen, without ever making direct contact himself—to carry the can if things got any worse than they already were?

Stitching me up was on the agenda right from the start: right from before I ever met him.

A clatter of footsteps from farther down the corridor roused me from these painful ruminations on the past into an even more painful present. DS Basquiat, and her cheerful boy sidekick DC Fields, were walking briskly up the corridor toward me. Basquiat had a handbag slung over her shoulder that looked like Prada, and she was carrying a manila file with a white file label that I couldn’t read. She nodded to the nearer of the two uniforms, who unlocked the door and held it open while the other one wheeled me inside.

The room was small and bare: just a table, a few chairs, and a wall-mounted shelf on which there was a battered-looking tape recorder. I recognized the setup at once: I’ve been in police interview rooms before. Never one that’s been designed as part of a hospital ward, but it made sense in the context.

Basquiat threw the file she was carrying down onto the table, hung her jacket—black, short-cut, very stylish—on the back of the chair, and sat down. From her bag she took a pen, which she put down next to the file. Fields leaned against the wall, a few feet away from me. The plods withdrew, closing the door behind them.

“Come on,” Basquiat said to Fields, a little impatiently. “Lights, camera, action.”

He reached out and pressed the button on the tape recorder. “Whittington’s secure unit. Interview with Felix Castor,” he said, in a declamatory voice. “Conducted by Detective Sergeant Basquiat with Detective Constable Fields in attendance.” He glanced down at his watch and added the date and time.

“I want a lawyer,” I said. “I won’t be saying anything worth hearing until I get one.”

Basquiat raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t even been charged with anything yet,” she said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s jumping the gun?”

“Am I being charged with anything?” I asked her.

“Of course you are, Castor. You’re being charged with murder.”

“Whose murder?” It was a stupid question, but right then my need to know outweighed my sense of self-preservation.

“Why?” Fields sneered. “Are you losing count?”

Basquiat looked at him, not an angry look, but one that was prolonged until he looked away. The meaning was unambiguous: it was her interview, and his contributions weren’t welcome.