Vicious Circle

He held out for a moment longer, but I kept staring at him implacably and he folded. He found a remote from somewhere and aimed it at the set: the whisper of sound became a just about audible mumble. “—are feared to be dead, although it’s obviously the hostages who are the immediate concern right now. The police have surrounded the Whiteleaf shopping precinct, and they’ve closed off Bloemfonten Road at both the north and south ends. Now they’re waiting to see if there are any demands. But since they don’t even know who they’re dealing with, or whether the motive is political or something else entirely, it’s far to early to say whether we can expect—”

I lost the rest of the sentence, because I suddenly caught another glimpse of what I thought I’d seen before: a pale, familiar face in the ragged-edged hole in the glass—leaning out from some anonymous strip-lighted space, with two male faces behind her, one of them holding what looked to be a kitchen knife.

It was Susan Book, the verger at St. Michael’s Church.

I turned to Matty.

“I need a car,” I said. “Did you drive here?”

To my surprise, he reached into his pocket and handed me the keys. He’d seen my face as I was staring at the screen, and I guess it didn’t leave him with any questions.

“It’s a Honda Civic,” he said. “Dark blue. On Prince’s Avenue.”

“Thanks.” I gave him a nod, grateful that he wasn’t wasting my time by asking for explanations. “For the loan, and for the information. Shall I bring the car back here or—?”

“There’s a Carmelite convent over in Hadley Wood. You can leave it there. The sisters know me.”

A predictable joke about the Biblical sense of that word died on my lips as I stared into his solemn, concerned face.

“Or leave it somewhere else, if you have to,” he said. “Explain to me later, Felix. If there’s something important hanging on this, you’d better go.”

I went.

Ten

IDROVE BACK UP COLNEY HATCH LANE LIKE A BAT OUT OF some part of hell where life was particularly cheap, took a hair-raising left onto the North Circular, and accelerated to eighty. That took me past the Stanger, and I thought fleetingly of the incredible change that Rafi had undergone.

Why now? What had happened to trigger it? Were the forces that seemed to have driven so many Londoners over the edge into murderous insanity only one half of some cosmic seesaw that had also tipped Rafi back into his right mind? And was either end of the seesaw connected with the sudden interest that the Anathemata were taking in me? The link there was Peace. I was looking for him, and they were, too. So were they only following me to get to him, or was there some other reason why I couldn’t spit without hitting them? And given what Matty had said about their attitude to the undead, what were they doing handing out stake-out jobs to the likes of Po and Zucker in the first place?

I pulled my attention back to the job at hand. Whatever was going down in White City, I needed some more information before I walked into it, that was for damned sure; otherwise what I didn’t know could end up hurting me quite a lot. I didn’t even know what I was going to do when I got there. I just had a feeling, maybe activated by seeing Susan Book in the middle of all the bad craziness, that this was somehow connected to what Nicky had described: the wave of murder and mayhem that had swept through West London on Saturday night. That part of the city was the epicenter of something very nasty, something subterranean, that broke the surface as a murder here and a rape there—and now as a riot. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a link.

I turned on the radio, one-handed, and after a few wild stabs in the dark found the channel search button. Samples of pop, reggae, advertising jingles, and the occasional solemn BBC voice washed around my ears as I realized that I didn’t even know exactly where I was headed. Bloemfonten Road. I didn’t know at all, but the announcer on the TV news had said it had a north and a south end, so we were probably talking about either a turning off the Westway or one of the maze of streets around the stadium. I just had to hope that once I got close enough I could find my way by following the flames and the sirens.

The road was reasonably clear at first, and I made good time—but the traffic was bound to start piling up once I got to Hanger Lane, and in any case there was a quicker route down through Willesden to Scrubs Lane. I realized as I turned off onto the Harrow Road that I was going to drive within a hundred yards or so of my office. Well, Pen was always telling me I should spend more time there.