Vicious Circle

Then I found Du Cane Road, and the little cross that marked St. Michael’s. The car park where I’d made my second attempt, earlier this evening, was about a hundred yards farther up the road. I’d been facing into the setting sun, and that was where the response had come from—until I was hit with that little psychic cluster bomb that left me with a hole in my tongue and a ringing in my ears like a peal of bells in Hades.

Due west. I drew in the second line, out through Acton, Ealing, and Drayton Green to the rolling hills of the Brent Valley Golf Course. No way Peace would be hiding Abbie there, though: the green fees were astronomical.

The two lines intersected over a huge swathe of West Acton and North Ealing. I’d drawn them wide on purpose, of course, because this wasn’t rocket science or any other damn science worthy of the name: it was just me, extrapolating hopefully from a messy and inadequate data set.

And that metaphor made me think of Nicky again.

Which made me remember the crumpled piece of printout paper in my pocket, with his handwriting on it.

The Oriflamme.

I looked at my watch. Only eleven, so the joint would still be hopping. And maybe Peace would think he’d hurt me worse than he had with his little psychic overload ambush. There was nothing like stealing a march on the opposition.

Six

THERE WAS A BROAD FLIGHT OF STONE STEPS UP FROM THE street, the stairwell separated off from the pavement by wrought-iron railings with the arms of the borough of Camden worked into them—complete with the pious motto Non sibi sed toti, usually translated as “I hope you brought enough for everyone.” I guess at some time in its recent past this place had been a government building of some kind.

Not anymore, though, clearly. The two bruisers who checked me at the top of the steps didn’t have the look or the dress sense of any civil servants I’d ever seen, and probably didn’t have much of a future in local government unless Camden one day decided to open up a gorilla-wrangling department.

They weren’t checking me for weapons or concealed booze, although there was a perfunctory frisking of my pockets and linings: mainly they were verifying that I was alive, and more or less human by the yardsticks they were using. First they made me clench a silver coin tightly in my hand for a few seconds and looked to see if I showed any reaction to the metal, then they took my pulse in a rough-and-ready way at throat and wrist. There’s something a bit off-putting about having a guy who’s three inches taller than you, with the build of a wrestler, pressing his thumb against your windpipe. It’s one reason why I don’t drink at exorcist hangouts more often.

Another reason is that I’m an unsociable bastard who hates shoptalk worse than dental surgery.

The Oriflamme is the exorcists’ hangout par excellence, in case you hadn’t guessed that already: or at least it was in its first incarnation. Back then, it stood in the center of a roundabout on Castlebar Hill, in a building that was formerly a museum and then went through various changes of ownership before settling into the hands of the famous Peckham Steiner—a father figure for all London exorcists, so long as you had a drunk, abusive father who was only on nodding terms with sanity.

Steiner then made a gift of the place to his good friend Bill Bryant, better known by the semi-affectionate nickname of Bourbon. It was a very long way from anywhere, but it had a kind of dank, heavy atmosphere of its own and a reputation as the place to be seen if you were looking to make a name for yourself in the trade, so it limped along from year to year in spite of the lousy location. But then about three years ago, somebody burned it to the ground. It was a firebomb attack, mercifully when the place was closed, and it did the job nicely. The barman’s cat survived, but apart from that they didn’t save so much as an ashtray.

Nicky has a whole bunch of theories about who did it and why, and every so often he tries to tell me some of them. I usually manage to get clear before he reaches the part where Satanists are taking over the government, but sometimes it’s a close call.

Meanwhile, in one of those ironies that dog our profession, the Oriflamme rose from the dead—or at least the name did. A guy named McPhail, who as far as I know had never had anything to do with the place on Castlebar Hill, had his own vision of a place that would sort of be the exorcists’ version of a gentlemen’s club—with a bar, a lounge, poste restante facilities, a place where you could crash if you were just in the city for a couple of days, baths, the whole works.