Vicious Circle

Like Steve, she was immaculately dressed and exuded wealth and status. Like him, she seemed to be locked inside a sarcophagus of dense emotion that I felt would have rung aloud if I’d tapped it with a finger. She kept her arms rigidly folded, hugging herself as if for comfort. The handshake here revealed complex, overlapping skeins of positive and negative affect: fear, pride, shame, ferocious love, more fear—a cat’s cradle of emotions that shouldn’t make it into each other’s company.

Steve said he was a solicitor for a family firm in Stoke Newington—not quite a partner, but almost there. Melanie was a barrister, which was how they’d met. They’d been married for eighteen years. This paltry small talk was as stiff and awkward as if I’d been asking them where and how they contracted syphilis.

Things were going to be awkward in other ways, too: with three people in it, my office was already feeling a little crowded. Add to that the fact that the milk I’d left in the portable fridge had soured, turned green, and mutated into a new life form since the last time I was here, and I’d had to hide the fungus-sprouting mugs behind the filing cabinet, and my professional facade was hanging even more askew than it usually does. Once I’d got them sitting down I couldn’t even offer them coffee.

Straight down to business, then.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

“Our daughter,” Mel mumbled, her voice slurred and thickened slightly by the swelling on the left side of her jaw. Having said that, she seemed to run out of words.

“Abbie,” Steve took up. “Abigail. She’s gone missing.” Where Mel’s voice had been carefully, rigidly flat, his was so full of formless emotion it almost sounded strangled. He fished in his wallet and took out something small and rectangular, which he handed to me. I took it and flipped it over so it was right-side up for me: it was a photograph, passport-size, of a girl. About thirteen or fourteen years old, judging by face and build; long, straight blond hair of the kind that gets called “flyaway” on shampoo bottles; an awkward, apologetic smile. Around her neck, a gold pendant shaped like a teardrop. There was something in her eyes . . . something a little sad and haunted. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe my memory inserted that nuance, in the light of what happened afterward.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said, meaning it about as much as anyone does in those circumstances. These were just strangers, after all, and Abigail was just a name. “How long ago?”

That’s a stupid habit I’ve got: when I can’t think of anything else to say, I start in with the questions like a doctor looking to make a diagnosis.

Steve looked to Mel to answer, and again she seemed hard put to it to frame words. “Saturday,” she said, hesitantly, as if picking her way across some inner minefield. “The day before yesterday. That was the last time we saw her, and there was—something else that happened then. Something that we think might be connected.” I registered the “might,” which seemed a little odd, and I was about to pin that one down, when Steve spoke up again.

“We want you to find her for us, Mr. Castor.”

I’d already jumped to a different conclusion, and I had my mouth open on the first words of a speech I’d made a hundred times before, so I was caught a little off balance. I closed my mouth, looked from the man to the woman and back again while I tried to think of something else to say.

Most people in the Torringtons’ position would be looking for some kind of reassurance that Abigail was still on the right side of the grave: that’s a service that a lot of exorcists offer, whether they can make good on the promise or not. I was about to say yes: yes, I’d look for Abbie’s spirit, try to find out if it was still inside her body, but with a whole long string of caveats and provisos—because even with the wind at my back and the right kind of focus object I can only find a spirit if it’s there to be found. Some people depart very quickly after death and never come back, so only the sloppiest of cowboy operators assumes that the absence of a ghost is proof positive that someone is still alive.

Anyway, that had all gone out the window. Now I had a different proposition on my plate—and a different set of options. I could still take the job on, if I was so inclined. There are ways of finding living people that are (putting this as neutrally as I can) only open to members of my profession, but I don’t tend to use them. Rafi aside, I don’t traffic with demons, and I don’t raise the dead so that I can shake them down for information. Generally speaking, if someone’s sleeping quietly in the grave I leave them there. That’s the closest thing I have to an ethical standard.

So that left the other option: letting the Torringtons down without too much of a bump.