Vicious Circle

She shook her head without a moment’s hesitation. “No. That couldn’t happen.”

“Somebody did it to me earlier on today.”

“No,” she said again. “That may have been how it felt to you, but it was something else that was happening.”

Good enough. And food for thought. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll stop by again tomorrow, see how you’re getting on.”

“Come in the evening,” she suggested. “We can have dinner.”

That was a very appealing prospect. “On you?”

“On me.”

“You’re on. Where do you want to meet?”

“Here, I suppose. We’ll find somewhere close by—perhaps around White City. I’ll see you at eight thirty.”

I turned to leave, but then I remembered something that had slipped my mind. That twin-peaked sound: surge and fall, surge and die, like waves of some curdled liquid crawling up an unimaginable shore. I turned back.

“It didn’t come to me,” I said.

“What?”

“The noise in there. You said it would come to me, but it didn’t. You think you know what it is?”

“Oh.” Juliet gave me a slightly disappointed look, as if I were asking her for the answers on a test that was too easy to need thinking about. I shrugged, partly in mock apology, mainly just asking that she cut to the chase.

“It’s a heartbeat,” she said. “Beating about once a minute.”

Five

I WENT BACK TO THE CAR, WHICH I’D PARKED IN THE BACK lot of a wine warehouse that closed early on Mondays. It was Pen’s Mondeo, which she lets me use whenever she doesn’t need it herself. With Dylan’s Lexus currently handling most of her transport needs, I had it on semipermanent loan.

I let myself in, locked the doors behind me just in case because my attention was going to be elsewhere for a few minutes. In a Sainsbury’s bag in the front passenger seat of the car was Abbie’s doll. I took it out, held it in both hands, and closed my eyes.

And shuddered. There it was again: the fathomless ache of Abbie’s long-ago and long-sustained unhappiness, brimming behind the frail ramparts of rag-stuffed muslin. Got you, you bastard, I thought with cold satisfaction. You can throw me off the trail, but only when you know I’m on it. You can’t be on silent running all the goddamn time.

Laying the doll down on the steering wheel like a tiny Ixion, I took out my whistle and launched into the opening notes of the Abbie tune, which was still fresh in my mind.

Within seconds I got the same response as before; the same sense of something touching the music from outside, as though it was a physical skein that I was throwing over West London. Except that it was stronger this time. I was barely a quarter of a mile to the west of my office in Harlesden, but I was a good mile and a half farther south. And yes, the orientation was different—the faint tug on the web of sound coming not from over my left shoulder now but from straight ahead, from where the sun had set not long before. That made it easier to shift my attention, my focus, into that one quarter. The touch was faint, vanishingly faint, but I opened myself up to it, shutting out all distractions, tautly listening in on that one channel even as I was creating it, sustaining it, with the soft, drawn-out complaint of the tin whistle. She seemed to recede. I held a single note, almost too low to hear, the barest breath into the mouthpiece, and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees—

Suddenly a shrieking discord bit into my mind like a deftly wielded Black & Decker power drill. It came out of nowhere, slicing through my nerves, sundering thought and feeling and music so that their writhing, severed ends leaked chaos and agony. I screamed aloud, my back arcing so that my head slammed back into the headrest of the driver’s seat and my feet jammed down on the pedals as if I were trying to bring the already stationary car to a dead halt.

It only lasted for a second: less than that, maybe. Even while I was screaming, the pain was subsiding from its lunatic peak and I was slumping forward again, a puppet with its strings cut, my forehead thumping against the body of the doll that was still lying on the steering wheel in front of me.

I lay there weak and dazed for a few seconds, static fizzing and stinging through my nervous system, trying to remember where I was and why I was drooling bloody spittle onto a stuffed toy. My tongue throbbed in time to my heart, seeming too big for my mouth: I’d bitten deeply into it, and that bitter tang was my own blood. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, pulled myself together; a job that I had to tackle in easy stages.

I fished out my flask of I-can’t-believe-it’s-not cognac and unscrewed the lid with shaking hands. The first sip was medicinal: I swilled it around my bitten tongue, trying not to wince, rolled down the window, and spat out the blood. The second sip was for my jangled nerves. So were the third and fourth.