Vicious Circle

“Well, now we know something that Jackman and Pollard don’t know,” I mused grimly. Caldessa raised an eyebrow and nodded, conceding the point.

Remembering my manners, I thanked her and asked her if I could pay her for her time, but she waved the suggestion away summarily. “I honestly doubt you could pitch your price high enough to avoid an implied insult, dear. I’m a luxury commodity. If you ever have anything of real value to sell, you know where I am. And in the meantime, you can take this tawdry little gewgaw out of my sight.”

I put the knife back into its tube and went back out onto the street. It was the middle of the afternoon now, and the tourist crowd was thicker than it had been. Walking up toward Notting Hill Gate, I considered the logical next step—my older brother, Matthew—and tried to find reasons not to take it. If anyone could give me a labeled diagram of the innards of the Catholic hierarchy, it was him: he’s a priest, after all, and he loves his work. He’s a lot less fond of mine, though, and our conversations have a habit of disintegrating into name-calling before we even get past the small talk.

Because I was thinking about Matthew, and because thinking about Matthew tends to trigger a whole lot of other, darker thoughts, I was more or less oblivious of my surroundings. So it was a while before I noticed I was being followed. I wasn’t even sure where the realization came from: I just caught sight of a movement in my peripheral vision, and on some level almost below consciousness I turned up a pattern match. I had to fight the urge to turn around. Instead I crossed to a shop window and used it as a mirror—a hoary-whiskered trick that works one time out of three, tops.

This time it half-worked: I saw a tall man in a heavy black overcoat about twenty yards behind me, there for a second as the crowds parted and then gone again. He had his shoulders hunched and his head down, so I couldn’t tell who he was, and the steep reverse angle of the window meant that in that split second he’d already moved outside of my field of vision.

I stepped into the shop and took a quick look around. More or less the same range of goods as all the other shops I’d passed, at least to my untutored eye: horse brasses abounded, along with heavy wooden furniture that it would be generous to describe as distressed, old pub signs, and wrought-iron boot-scrapers. No other customers in there; the shop assistant, a guy in his twenties with the odd combination of a street-legal razor cut and a silk Nehru jacket, was reading Miller’s Price Guide for light relief. There was a smell of must and silence and churchlike tranquillity. Time for hoary dodge number two. I went up to the counter, and the assistant glanced up at me with a professional smile, friendly but brisk.

“Is there a back door out of this place?” I asked.

The smile faded to an affronted deadpan. “The workrooms aren’t open to customers, I’m afraid.”

“I’m being followed.” I decided to elaborate, and I reached for a story that would press the right buttons for an up-market rag-and bone-man. “Loan shark muscle. They want to beat the shit out of me. I’d rather they didn’t do it at all, and you’d probably rather they didn’t do it in here. Please yourself, though.”

The assistant looked both shaken and disgusted. Fixing me with a hard stare, he picked up his cellphone from behind the counter and gripped it tight as though it were the cure for all the world’s ills. “Yeah,” I agreed, “you could call the police. And while we’re waiting you can tell me what not to bleed on.”

The workrooms were impressive, and they had a potent smell compounded of beeswax and shellac, but I didn’t have time to take the guided tour. The assistant led the way, glancing back at me every other step to make sure I was still there. We went along a corridor lined with wooden crates into a room dominated by a single massive workbench, chairs, and occasional tables hanging on racks above it like some torture chamber for sinful furniture. Then through there into a storeroom stacked with cans of varnish, bales of wire wool, plate-size tubs of Brasso.

At the far end of the storeroom there was a door that he had to unlock with a key from his pocket, and then unbolt at top and bottom. He threw it open and held it for me, glaring at me as though this might still be some kind of fiendish trick. I examined the pass-not ward on the lintel of the back door as I stepped through it: hazel. “This is out of date,” I told him, flicking it with the tip of my index finger. “It’s almost June. If you don’t want poltergeists, get a sprig of myrtle.”

He didn’t answer. The door slammed shut behind me and I was alone in an alley wide enough to take a delivery van. Not much cover, and it obviously opened right back out onto the street again. Still, we’d see what we’d see.