Vicious Circle

It was about six in the morning, and Pen was still asleep: at least, there was no sound from the basement except for the occasional creaking and rattling as Edgar or Arthur stirred on his perch and shrugged his bony shoulders. Like rust, ravens never sleep. I went through into the kitchen and made some coffee, then drank three cups of it while I flicked through Pen’s A–Z and worked out a route to Thamesmead. There was no sense driving—I’d have to go through the Blackwall Tunnel or take the Woolwich Ferry, both hassles that I can do without at the best of times. The smart option was to go to Waterloo and then take an overground train to Woolwich Dockyard. From there I could walk it.

A brisk wind had come up in the night and swept the thunderheads away to someplace else, so it was sunny but fresh as I walked to Turnpike Lane tube station, and my head started to feel a little clearer. I was glad of the change in the weather for another reason, too: shredded at seam and shoulder, and crusted brown with blood on the left-hand side of the collar, my paletot was hors de combat for the time being. I was wearing the only other coat I owned that had enough pockets for all my paraphernalia: a fawn trenchcoat with a button-down yoke that makes me feel like an exhibit in some museum installation about the evolution of the private detective.

Since I’d gotten such an early start on the day, I couldn’t get a Travelcard, so I just took a single. I didn’t know where I’d be going after I left the Collective. Maybe Paddington and Rosie Crucis: it depended on whether I found any leads I could actually use.

Bourbon said that Dennis Peace used to be a rubber duck. In trade jargon, that meant only one thing: an exorcist who chose for professional reasons to live on water rather than on dry land. It’s something we all try out, at some point, if only to get a decent night’s sleep: no ghosts can cross running water, and the morbid sensitivities that keep us in business are all anesthetized for once. Takes a certain kind of personality to live with it long term, though: I always end up feeling like I’m trussed up inside of a plastic bag, my own breath condensing on me as cold sweat.

The Collective is a floater community on the Thames. Everybody in my world knows it, everybody’s been there, but that doesn’t mean you can necessarily find it when you want to: like the Oriflamme, the Collective is a movable feast. Come to think of it, there’s another link between the two, although it’s an accidental and tendentious one along the lines of “how many degrees of separation are you away from Kevin Bacon?” Only for Kevin Bacon read “Peckham Steiner.”

Steiner is one of the few flamboyant legends of our reclusive and insular profession. He was an exorcist before the fashion really got going: by which I mean before the huge upsurge of apparitions and manifestations in the last decade of the old millennium turned people like me into a key industry. Specializing in spiritual eradications for the rich and famous, he garnered a certain amount of fame (or at least notoriety) for himself along the way—along with a shedload of money. An American heiress was in it somewhere, if I remember rightly. Her dead ex-husbands had been giving her all kinds of grief until Steiner sent them on to their last judgment, and out of gratitude she left him the bulk of her fortune when she died. Her kids from all three marriages sued, and the case dragged on for years, but as far as I know none of them ever managed to lay a legal finger on him. By that time, anyway, he had three books out, a movie deal for his life story, and a controlling share in ENSURE, a company that made ghost-breaking equipment and consumables. He retired at forty-six, richer than God.

Unfortunately, he was also crazier than a shithouse rat. Maybe the instability had always been there, or maybe it was the pressures of the job and then the explosive de-repression of having enough money to remake yourself and the world closer to your expectations. I mean, look what that did to Michael Jackson.

I met him once—Steiner, I mean, not Jacko—and it was a scary thing to see. By that time I’d already read a couple of his books, and I’d come to respect (although not actually to like) the cold, clever mind that was on show in them. But when I got to talk to him, it was as though that mind had deliquesced and then solidified again in a different, largely nonfunctional shape.

It was at some weird party or other in a London hotel that was hosting a conference on Perspectives on the After-Life. Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, an exorcist-turned-academic who’d taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when I was still very wet behind the ears, had blagged a ticket for me and insisted that I come along: the chance of meeting Steiner had swung it.