Vicious Circle

“I still think the police are your best option,” I said. “They can find Peace a lot easier than I can. And I think they’ll take a complaint seriously. He broke into your house, after all, and he threatened you.”

Torrington was staring at me with a bleak, slightly accusing expression on his face. He knew when he was being snowed.

“And what if they do find him?” he asked, his voice harsh. “Will they find Abbie, too? Can they bring her back for us?”

He had me there. All I could do was shrug, which felt pusillanimous even to me. Okay, he was right. Even a relatively good cop like Coldwood, if something like this fell into his lap, would be helpless running a search for something he couldn’t see, hear, or touch—especially a cop, because there’s that whole blind-deaf-and-dumb pragmatism thing I already mentioned. Conversely, if I was anywhere close to where Abbie was, I’d at least have ways of knowing I was close, and maybe taking a bearing. So there was a chance that I could help these people: a chance that I’d be able to run down Peace, and that I’d know what I was looking for when I saw it. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was there; and if this didn’t count as a spiritual service, then what the hell did?

On the other hand, bringing Abbie back was going to be a much tougher proposition than finding her: I doubted I’d be able to appeal to Peace’s better nature, assuming he even had one. And since I didn’t know exactly how you went about kidnapping a ghost, I didn’t know how you went about bringing her safely home, either. And then there was all the collateral stuff: I’d have to check out the Torringtons’ story as far as I could before I got any distance into this. And I’d have to decide what the hell I should charge them, because this fell way outside even the fuzzy logic of my usual tariff.

Once I start coming up with commonsensical points like that, it usually means I’m trying to talk myself out of something I’ve already decided to do. But this time, reality reasserted itself. There was no point in taking on a job I couldn’t do, and adding to the Torringtons’ trauma by building up their hopes and then kicking them down again.

Steve Torrington was still looking at me, so I had to say something.

“Well,” I temporized, “you’ve probably got a point there. But if it comes to that, I don’t know if I can be of any more use to you than the police could.”

“No,” he agreed. “How could you know, until you’ve tried?”

Which was throwing the ball back into my court with a vengeance. I tried to lob it back. “It’s not that straightforward, Mr. Torrington. Not like changing a car tire, or—” I cast around for a metaphor, found it close to hand “—or measuring you for a suit. Maybe if I had some of her things. I mean, if I could see her room, or—”

As if he’d been waiting for this moment, Steve hefted the black bin-liner and put it down on the desk between us. “These are the things she cared most about,” he said, and he looked at me with the slightest hint of smugness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a solicitor, after all. Methodical mind, focused mainly on how the rules of any situation work and what the precedents are. He’d done his research.

I gave him a nod, half-admiring, half-resigned. He emptied the bag carefully onto the desk.

There was quite a lot there: enough so that I wondered what was left behind in Abbie’s room. Books, CDs, scrunchies, T-shirts; a cloisonné hair slide with a sort of Celtic knot design; teddy bears and dolls; a pair of very elaborate trainers; some posters of male celebrities I didn’t recognize, torn at the corners where the Blu-Tack hadn’t yielded quickly enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: the desiderata of a young girl’s truncated life. If I was in the right mood, I could probably pick out the items that had meant most to Abbie—the ones that would provide the strongest link to her. But the mood is a skittish thing, and getting into it is never easy for me when there are other people around.

So I picked something up, not quite at random. A Victorian doll of the kind where the head is made out of porcelain while the body is stitched and stuffed, its relatively unfinished look hidden by a sewn-on dress. It had the unsettling, subtly aggressive blankness of a lot of old dolls, and it was in a near-terminal state of disrepair. The head was only attached to the body by a few loops of stitching, most of which had already come away. If I wasn’t careful with it, I’d decapitate it without even trying.

A childhood toy seemed the best bet: emotions are always strongest when you’re young. Not that Abbie had lived to get old.

I closed my eyes and listened to the doll. That’s the only way I can put it: it’s not like I was expecting the thing to talk to me. But it’s a kind of synesthesia, I guess: I don’t have a mind’s eye, I have a mind’s ear. It takes a while, usually, but if I focus my mind and shut out all distractions then most things have a tune, or at least a note or two, attached to them.