Vicious Circle

“She ran back into the bedroom and locked the door. Her bag was in there, and her mobile was in the bag, so she was going to call the police. But she didn’t get the chance. Peace pushed the door in with his shoulder—the lock was a flimsy little thing and it just tore right out of the wood. He—he beat—”

Throughout this recitation, Torrington had been getting more and more agitated. Now he faltered into silence, trembling. I stood up, with some idea of offering him a glass of water, but he waved me away: he didn’t want my solicitude.

“He beat her,” he said. “You saw her face? Her back and side and her left arm all look the same. And then he ransacked the room. Pulling out drawers and tipping the contents onto the floor, hauling all the clothes out of the wardrobes. When Mel tried to reach for her phone again he stamped on it—smashed it into pieces. If she hadn’t snatched her hand away he’d have crushed that, too.

“He seemed to be looking for something, and not finding it. And he was getting more and more frustrated, more and more out of control. Eventually he just turned and walked out of the room again. Mel ran after him, and saw him going into Abbie’s room.

“We’d never . . . never changed anything in there. Mel tackled him again when he started wrecking Abbie’s things, and he turned on her in a rage. He started to strangle her.

“Then he threw her down on the bed, and she thought that he was going to rape her. But he didn’t. He just went on searching. And this time he must have found what he was looking for, because he left. Mel was too terrified by now to try to stop him a third time. But as soon as she heard the door slam she called the police, and then she went down onto the stairs to tend to me.”

“You said the police weren’t involved,” I pointed out.

He gave a bitter snort that might have been intended as a laugh. “I said the police weren’t looking for Abbie,” he corrected me. “We hadn’t even realized . . . We told them about the assault, the damage, and we said we could identify the man who’d done it. They said they’d issue a warrant, and we’d hear in due course. Then when they’d gone, and we were trying to put the place back into some kind of order, we noticed . . . that Abbie wasn’t there. But we thought she’d just been frightened away by the noise, and the violence, and she’d come back later.

“By the evening, we were really starting to miss her. She didn’t answer when we called, and we couldn’t feel her the way we usually do. Because she was gone. It was Abbie he was looking for. And he’d taken her. Somehow he’d taken her away with him.”

He fell silent, gripping the neck of the bag tightly in both white-knuckled hands. And the silence lengthened, because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

I’d never even heard of a ghost being kidnapped before. It sounded so unlikely, so grotesque, that I still resisted the idea. Ghosts can’t be packaged and shipped like groceries or worn and carried like accessories. Mostly they can’t move at all outside of a fixed compass. Someone here had to be the voice of reason, and it was asking too much to expect that degree of detachment from Torrington himself.

“You assume he took her,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “It could be, as I said, that she left because her time here was—”

“Peace called Mel.” There was a tremor in Torrington’s voice, and he was still looking down at the black bag, still holding on to it as though it were some kind of lifeline. “About two hours later. He wasn’t making much sense, but he said ‘You’ll have to come back to me now, won’t you? Because you can’t have her if you don’t have me. We’ll all be together.’ She didn’t know what he was talking about. She hung up. She just hung up. And afterwards we realized. We knew.”

Okay, that was something pretty hefty in the way of circumstantial evidence. My mind flicked off onto an irresistible tangent. Could it be done? Could it be slickly, smoothly done? Breaking and entering, and grand theft spiritual? Ghosts—most ghosts—haunt a particular place. It might be the place where they died, or where they were buried, or it could just be some spot to which they had strong associations in life. That’s their anchor. They can move a little way away from it: in some cases a couple of hundred yards, but except in a few special cases like the little girl ghosts I set free at the Stanger, I’ve never heard of it being more. So how would you take a ghost away from its anchor and walk away with it? Maybe . . . yeah, maybe there was a way that I could see. But I knew for a fact that it was something I couldn’t do myself.

I was getting dangerously interested. The very weirdness of the situation appealed to my varied and prurient curiosities. But I generally hold to Dirty Harry’s dictum that a man should know his limitations.