Vicious Circle

“Police,” I murmured throatily.

“Routing you through, caller.”

I waited. After ten seconds or so, the silence turned into another ring tone. A man picked up. “Bowater Street police station, how can I help?”

“You can patch me through to Uxbridge Road,” I growled.

There was a fractional pause. “I’m sorry, caller, I didn’t get that. How can I help?”

“Put me through to Uxbridge Road,” I repeated. “This is an emergency.”

I waited some more. This wasn’t how emergency calls were supposed to go, but I knew that the main station on any switchboard had direct lines to all of the others. If the guy tried to pump me for information, I’d just have to leave a message with him. Otherwise . . .

“This is Uxbridge Road. Do you have a problem, sir?”

“I’ve got a message,” I said, “for Detective Sergeant Basquiat. Tell her it’s Felix Castor. Tell her I’m at St. Michael’s Church, on Du Cane Road, and that Anton Fanke is here, too. Tell her to come right now—and mob-handed.”

I hung up, and put the phone away. I’d played two wild cards now, and that ought to be enough for any hand. Whatever happened next, and whatever happened to me, I took some comfort in the thought that Fanke and his religiously inverted friends were going to have a hard time getting out of the building alive and free.

I stood up, as slowly and smoothly as I could, and slipped away between the gravestones with my knees bent so that my head wouldn’t show against the skyline. For the first ten yards or so, I was in both men’s line of sight if they chanced to turn around. I was counting on the dense shadows to hide my movements and the distant traffic noises from the street to conceal any sound I might make. All the same, I went as carefully as I could, barely lifting my feet off the ground in case they came down on a twig or a discarded Coke can and gave my presence away.

Once I got far enough around for the presbytery wall to give me cover, I relaxed a little. I straightened my back and picked up speed, reaching the wall in a few nearly normal strides. Climbing it in the dark was harder than I expected, because a good foothold at the bottom could still leave you stranded and groping seven or eight feet up, pinned to the wall with your arms splayed out like Christ’s dumb understudy. Once a loose chunk of stone slid away under my foot and fell to the ground below with an audible thump. I froze in place, straining my ears for sounds of approaching footsteps, but nobody came. I resumed the climb, teeth gritted, suddenly aware that there might be razor wire or broken glass or some other bullshit at the top of the wall that I’d seen in daylight but not registered or remembered.

There wasn’t. The stones at the top were uneven, but they were wide enough for me to stand and walk along without much difficulty. And the roof was no trouble at all: the guttering was old, of solid metal rather than uPVC, and it took my weight with a reassuring lack of give.

Leaning into the pitch of the tiles, I edged along from the back of the presbytery to the front. Now I could look around and down and see the doorway below me, a faint glow filtering out from it to light up a keystone-shaped area of gravel in pale gold. Within that lighted space, a dark blob just off center showed me where Fanke’s watchman was standing just inside the doorway, but the man himself I couldn’t see.

There was no time for bluff, finesse, or actual cleverness. All I could think of doing was to reach out and scrape the end of the gun barrel against the stone of the wall. The first time got no response, and neither did the second: traffic sounds from the street drowned the faint noise out. The third time was the charm. Below me in the dark, a darker figure stepped out and a pale face looked up. I launched myself into space.

The guy never knew what hit him, and he might never wake up to find out. As I landed on top of him I struck down hard with the butt of the gun, letting gravity and momentum add their force to mine. It smacked into his skull with a solid, slightly sickening sound and he crumpled underneath me, providing me with a much softer landing than I was expecting.

Not that I stayed down for long. I rolled and came up already moving, heading along the back wall of the church toward the corner where the lych-gate was. My feet were crunching on the gravel, but I couldn’t help that: I had to assume that the man at the gate had heard me touch down, and would want to know what the hell the commotion was about.

I reached the corner of the building just as he came around it. That worked out pretty well, because I was expecting him and he wasn’t really expecting me. He wasn’t expecting the fist that slammed into his stomach, either: he folded with a strangled, truncated grunt. I spun him round with a hand on his shoulder and slammed his head into a conveniently placed tombstone once, twice, three times. After three he looked like he’d lost interest in the altercation. I let go and he slumped bonelessly to the ground.