Vicious Circle

It was hard to believe, from that bloodless face and voice, that he had a sense of humor at all, but I played along, nodding as if I understood and approved. I did approve, in a way: when a guy starts off by telling you how tough he is, in my experience he’s mostly overfinessing because he’s actually got the moral fiber of a blancmange and he doesn’t want you to suss him right out of the gate. It gave me something to work from, at least.

“So tell me a joke,” I suggested.

“Perhaps I will.” His gaze flicked past my shoulder and I knew without looking that he wasn’t alone. A second later, that guess was confirmed as a boot scraped on gravel a few feet behind me. “I’ve found out a lot about you in the last two days,” Gwillam observed, almost absently. He looked away again across the river of traffic, narrowing his eyes as the smoky breeze played across his face. “You’ve got something of a name for yourself, and from what I’m hearing the name is not fool. So I’m wondering why exactly you’re doing this.”

His words stirred up echoes of an earlier conversation, and I suddenly got an inkling of who I might see if I turned and looked behind me.

“Why I’m doing what, exactly?” I asked, understudying sweet little Buttercup.

Gwillam frowned and breathed out deeply through his nose, but the level tone of his voice didn’t change by an inch or an ounce. “I’m not a fool, either, Castor. It will do nothing good for my mood if you try to play me for one.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bear that in mind.” I don’t have the patience for fishing at the best of times. I could never be bothered sitting by the ice hole for hours on end when you could just chuck in a grenade and have done with it. “You want to know what I’m doing over at the church, and whose heart is beating in there. You’re wondering what that heartbeat has got to do with all this shit that’s going down in West London right now, including the riot tonight. Maybe you’d also like to know who Juliet Salazar is and where she figures in all this. Right so far?”

He gave me the kind of pained, wondering stare you’d give to an aged relative who’d just tried to put their underpants on over their head.

“I was talking about the girl,” he said, very quietly. “The little girl you just made your heartfelt promise to. Unless that was a different little girl. Perhaps this is a hobby of yours.”

Just for a second I had a sense of events accelerating away from me in a direction I wasn’t braced for—like I might go sprawling on my face and lose what was left of my dignity. I really didn’t feel too good now: my head was spinning, and there was a smell in my nostrils like the very faintest hint of rotten meat.

“The girl?” I repeated.

Gwillam looked just a little irritated, as if the edge was starting to wear off his patience. Compared to the robotic calm he’d shown up until now, it was almost a relief. “Abigail Torrington,” he said. “Or Abigail Jeffers. Whichever you prefer.”

“Oh, that girl.” I tried to sound as if everything was falling into place now, although I felt like I was treading water in lead-soled diving boots. I filed the other name away for future reference: that was something, at least. “But that’s just a missing person case. Unless you’ve got some other reason to be looking for Dennis Peace? Is that what this is all about? Is Abbie a means to an end?”

Gwillam frowned sternly, two straight-edged vertical lines appearing in the center of his forehead. “Peace is completely irrelevant,” he said. “Obviously we appreciate what he did, but his motives being what they are, we can’t trust him to follow through. No, it’s Abigail we need to find. And we need to find her before anybody else does. We’re not prepared to consider any other possibility. After all you’ve seen since Saturday, you ought to know exactly what’s at stake.”

I played this back at various speeds, without much luck. “It’s funny,” I said, giving it up. “All the words you’re saying make perfect sense, but somehow when you put them all together it comes out as shite. Why should Abbie matter to anyone besides her parents? Or is this a question of the sparrow that falls in the marketplace? Do you guys look out for every lost soul that comes down the pike? I mean, that’s inspiring, but it’s also a little hard to—”

I stopped because a heavy hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I was twisted around about ninety degrees to the left. I found myself staring into a hostile face dominated by a massive barricade of eyebrow.

“Show respect,” said the loup-garou sternly, showing me his teeth.