Vicious Circle

I felt something else, too: a sense of puzzlement that I couldn’t quite nail down. The Torringtons had just aired so much dirty linen in front of me, and bared so many wounds—metaphorical and otherwise—that in some ways I felt I knew them a hell of a lot better than I wanted to. But at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about their relationship that I wasn’t getting; some point where I’d added two and two and got to five. Maybe it was that barbed-wire tangle of emotions I’d picked up from Mel, and the fact that fear seemed so dominant there. Not just one fear, either: all sorts of fears looping through one another. Her love for her husband was strong, too, and it came through so loud and clear it seemed almost like religious devotion. But the fear wound itself around that, too, like some kind of pathological bindweed.

Well, even if I took the job I wasn’t signing on to give them relationship therapy. No sense in worrying about it.

I went back to the sprawl of objects on the desk, but I knew as I stared down at them that I wasn’t ready yet. I needed to fortify myself for that particular journey.

* * *

Grambas looked up from his sudoku book as I walked into the café. “So,” he called out, tucking his pen behind his ear, “you got a job, Castor?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I told them I’d think about it.”

He wiped his clean hands on his dirty apron. “Yeah,” he commiserated, “must be tough, your slate being so full. Not knowing whether or not you can squeeze anything else in . . . ”

“Double coffee,” I grunted. “To go. Hold the sarcasm.”

As he was pouring the thick, black Greek coffee into a Styrofoam cup, Maya walked in with a plastic washbowl full of chipped potatoes. “Castor’s in a sour mood,” he told her.

“Yeah,” she said, “I knew that.”

“You knew it?”

“Sure.”

“How’d you know it?”

“He was awake.”

I got out of there before they could start doing old music hall numbers. The rain was letting up so I took the coffee and my Abbie hangover up to the bridge on Acton Lane, where there’s a bench that gives a view out over both the railway cutting and an overgrown, factory-backed stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Call me a hopeless romantic. That vista appeals to me somehow: London with her pants down, but still trying to keep her dignity.

I sat and sipped the hyper-caffeinated sludge, trying to rein my black mood in while bringing my nerves’ responsiveness up to a point where it might be dangerous to drive. The two goals were probably mutually exclusive, but in the absence of whisky the coffee was what I felt I needed right then.

The painful intensity of Abbie’s residual emotions had taken me by surprise. Okay, psychologically speaking, teenagers are perfect storms: when they’re sad, they’re very, very sad. But still . . . an attractive girl from an affluent, middle-class family? Parents who seemed to dote on her, and clearly couldn’t cope with her loss? What was her tragedy? What had made that tide of misery well up inside her to a point where it overflowed into her toys and left a residue that wouldn’t fade?

I wanted to know. And I guess, in the end, that was why I’d said maybe instead of no.

I finished up the coffee, which didn’t seem to have helped much, and headed back to the office. I could leave this until later, but it was on my mind now. I might as well find out how far Abbie’s orphaned treasures would take me. I wasn’t going to be thinking about much else if I put it off.

With the door closed and locked and the phone disconnected at the wall, I threw off my coat and sat down at the desk. I put my whistle down on my right-hand side, but I wasn’t ready yet to start to play. First I had to remind myself of what I was fishing for.

I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, at the same time, I picked up the cloisonné hair slide, which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.

After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle, and put it to my lips.

The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade, opening out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, or one I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB: Have you seen this girl?