Vicious Circle

Alphabetically, to Ben, Davey, and Lou;

chronologically, to Lou, Davey, and Ben.

They won’t stay where I put them anyway,

thank God, so either way is fine.

May the world be good enough for them.

In the UK edition of this book I thanked my editor, Darren, my agent, Meg, publicist George Walkley, desk editor Gabriella Nemeth, copy editor Nick Austin, and my wife, Lin, all of whom played crucial roles in its creation. I’m thanking them again now, but this time with a Damon Runyon–style New York accent.

And because the American edition has been through an entirely different alchemical process, I’d also like to thank Grand Central Publishing editor Jaime Levine and publicist extraordinaire Lisa Sciambra, both for making the U.S. edition happen and for all of their heroic efforts during my recent ten-city U.S. book tour (which included keeping me alive and sane). They go into the box labeled “people I feel privileged to have met.” So do Charlotte Oria, Claire Friedman and her totally amazing family (Jeff, Jeremy, and Jacob), James Sime and Kirsten Baldock, Tad Williams, Richard Morgan, Chris Golden, Alan and Jude of Borderlands, Kristine and Jeannie and their colleagues at the Encino Barnes and Noble, and Doselle Young (whom I also have to thank for one of the most memorable games of pool I’ve ever lost).

Sometimes I love this job.

T
HE
INCENSE
STICK
BURNED
WITH
AN
ORANGE
FLAME
AND
smelled of
Cannabis sativa
. In Southern Africa it grows wild: you can walk through fields of it, waist-high, the five-fronded leaves caressing you like little hands. But in London, where I live, it’s mostly encountered in the form of black, compacted lumps of soft, flaky resin. A lot of the magic’s gone by then.

Det. Sgt. Gary Coldwood gave me a downright hostile look through the tendrils of the smoke, which curled lazily up through the cavernous interior of the warehouse, the sweet smell dissipating along the aisles of sour dust. The warehouse was on the Edgware Road, on the ragged hinterlands of an old industrial estate: judging from the smashed windows outside and the rows and rows of empty shelves inside, it had been abandoned for a good few years—but Coldwood had invited me to join him and a few uniformed friends for a legally authorized search, so it was a fair bet that appearances were deceptive.

“Have you finished arsing around, Castor?” he asked, fanning the smoke irritably away from his face. I don’t know if all this tact and diplomacy is something he was born with or if he just learned it at cop school.

I nodded distantly. “Almost,” I said. “I have to intone the mantra another dozen or so times.”

Well, Jesus, you know? It was Saturday night, and I already had a heap of my own shit to cope with. When the Met calls, I answer, because they pay on the nose, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And anyway, I figure that if you give them a little showmanship they’ll be more impressed when you come up with the goods. Look, boys, I say in my own devious way, this is magic: it has to be, because it’s got smoke and mirrors. So far, Coldwood’s the only cop who’s ever called me on it, and that’s probably why we get along so well: I respect a man who can smell the bullshit through the incense.

But tonight he was in a bad mood. He hadn’t found a dead body in the warehouse, and that meant he didn’t know what he was dealing with just yet. Could be a murder, could just be their man doing a runner; and if it
was
a murder, that could be either a golden opportunity or six months of covert surveillance going up in aromatic smoke. So he wanted answers, and that made him less than usually tolerant of my sense of theater.

I murmured a few variations on
om mane padme om,
and he kicked the heel of my shoe resonantly with his Met-issue heavy-duty policeman’s boot. I was sitting on the floor in front of him with my knees drawn up, so I suppose it could have been worse.

“Just tell me if you can see anything, Castor,” he suggested. “Then you can hum away to your heart’s content.”

I got up, slowly; slowly enough for Coldwood to lose patience and wander across to see if the forensics boys had managed to shag any prints from a battered-looking desk in the far corner of the room. He really wasn’t happy: I could tell by the way his angular face—reminiscent of Dick Tracy, if Dick Tracy had joined-up eyebrows and a skin problem—had subsided onto his lower lip, forcing it out into a truculent shelf. His body language was a bit of a giveaway, too: whenever he finished waving and pointing, which he does when he gives orders, his right hand fell to the discreet shoulder holster he wore under his tan leather jacket, as if to check that it was still there. Coldwood hadn’t been an armed response unit for very long, and you could tell the novelty hadn’t worn off yet.

I ambled across the warehouse toward the door I’d come in through, away from the forensics team, watched curiously by two or three poor bloody infantry constables who were there to maintain a perimeter. Coldwood knows my tricks, and makes allowances for them, but to these guys I was obviously something of a sideshow. Ignoring them, I looked behind the filing cabinets that were ranged along the wall to the right of the door, banged on the cork notice board behind them, which had sheaves of dusty old invoices clinging to it like mangy fur, and turned the girlie calendars over to look at the bits of gray-painted cinder block they were covering. Disappointingly, there was nothing there. No hidden doors, no wall-mounted safes, not even old graffiti.

I looked down at my feet. The floor of the warehouse was bare gray cement, but just here by the notice board and the filing cabinets there was a ragged rectangle of red linoleum—a psychedelic sunburst pattern, very retro-chic unless it had been there since the seventies. I’d noticed another piece, with the same pattern, underneath the desk. Here, though, there were scuff marks in the dust where the lino had been moved in the recent past. I kicked down experimentally with my heel. There was a slightly hollow boom from underneath my feet.

“Coldwood?” I called over my shoulder.

He must have caught something in my voice—or else he’d heard the hollow note, too—because he was suddenly there at my elbow. “What?” he asked suspiciously.

I pointed down at the lino. “Something here,” I said. “Does this place have a cellar?”

Coldwood’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Not according to the plans,” he said. He beckoned to two of the plods and they came over at a half run. “Get this up,” he told them, gesturing at the lino.

They had to move the filing cabinets first, and since the cabinets were full they took a bit of manhandling. I could have helped, but I didn’t want to get into an argument about demarcation. The linoleum itself rolled up as easy as shelling peas, though, and Coldwood swore under his breath when he saw the trapdoor underneath. It was obviously something he felt his boys should have spotted first.

It was about five feet square, and it lay exactly flush with the floor on three sides. On the fourth side, the hinges were sunk a centimeter or so into the surface, but it was a professional job with the narrowest of joins so no telltale lines would be trodden into the lino above. There was a keyhole on the left-hand side: a lozenge-shaped keyhole with no widening at the shank end, so this was most likely a Sargent and Greenleaf mortice—not an easy nut to crack.

Coldwood didn’t even bother to try: he sent two of the uniforms off to get some crowbars. With a great deal of maneuvering, a few false starts, and a hail of splinters as the wood screamed and split, they finally succeeded in levering the entire lock plate out of its housing. Even then the bolt could scarcely be made to bend. The plate stood out of the trapdoor at a thirty-degree angle, rough star shapes of broken wood still gripped by its corner screws: a wounded sentry who’d been sidestepped rather than defeated. Now that their moment in the spotlight was over, the plods stood back deferentially so that the sergeant could open the trapdoor himself. Coldwood did so, with a grunt of effort because the wood of the trap turned out to be a good inch thick.

Inside, there was a space about a foot deep, separated by three vertical plywood dividers into four compartments of roughly equal size. Three of the compartments were filled with identical brown paper bags, about the size of Tate & Lyle sugar bags, all double wrapped in plastic on top of the paper: the fourth was mostly full of black
DVD
sleeves, but two small notebooks with slightly oil-stained covers were sitting off in one corner. On the cover of the top one, written in thick black felt tip, were the two words “goods in.” What the other said I couldn’t tell.

At a nod from the detective sergeant, the grab-and-dab boys fished up one of the bags and both of the notebooks with gingerly, plastic-gloved hands and took them away to the desk, looking like kids at Christmas. Coldwood was still looking at me—a look that said the time for teasing was past. He wanted the whole story.

But so did I. I don’t prostitute my talents for just anyone, especially anyone with a rank and a uniform, and when I’m dragged into a situation I know sod all about I like to play just a little coy until I find my feet. So I threw him a question by way of an answer.

“Is your man about six two, stocky, ginger-haired, wearing Armani slacks and one of those poncy collarless jackets in a sort of olive brown?”

Coldwood made a sound in his throat that might have been a laugh if laughter was in his repertoire. “That’s him,” he said. “Now stop playing Mystic Meg and tell me where he is.”

“Tell me
who
he is,” I countered.

“Fuck! Castor, you’re a civilian adviser, so just do what you’re being paid to do, okay? You don’t get to look at my fucking case notes.”

I waited. This was my fifth or sixth outing with DS Coldwood, and we’d already established a sort of routine; but like I said, he wasn’t in the best of tempers right then—hence his attempt to lead me to water and then shove my head under it.

“I could arrest you for withholding evidence and hindering an investigation,” he pointed out darkly.

“You could,” I agreed. “And I’d wish you joy proving it.”

There was a short pause. Coldwood breathed out explosively.

“His name’s Lesley Sheehan,” he said, his tone flat and his face deadpan. “He deals whatever drugs he can get his hands on, plus some nasty fetish porn on the side as a bit of a hobby. That’s probably what those DVDs are all about. He’s maybe two steps up the ladder from the mules and the street runners, and he doesn’t matter a toss. But he answers to a man named Robin Pauley, who we’d dearly love to get our hands on. So we’ve spent the last six months watching Sheehan and building up a case against him because we think we can turn him. He narced before, about ten years back, to get out of a conspiracy to murder charge. When they’ve done it once, you’ve got a bit more of a handle on them. Only now he’s gone missing and we think Pauley may have sussed what we were up to.”

“Sheehan won’t be talking now, in any case,” I said, with calm and absolute conviction.

Coldwood was exasperated. “Castor, you’re not qualified even to have a fucking opinion on—” he snarled. Then he got it. “Oh,” he muttered, followed a second or so later by a bitter “Fuck!” He was about to say something else, probably equally terse, when one of the lab rats called across to him.

“Sergeant?”

He turned, brisk and expressionless. Always deal with the matter in hand: keep your imagination holstered like your sidearm. Good copping.

“It’s heroin,” the tech boy said, with stiff formality. “More or less uncut. About ninety-five, ninety-six percent pure.”

Coldwood nodded curtly, then turned back to me.

“So I’m assuming Sheehan’s somewhere in here, is he?” he asked, for the sake of form.

I nodded, but I needed to spell it out in case he got his hopes up. “His ghost is in here,” I said. “That doesn’t mean his corpse is. I’ve told you before how this works.”

“I need to see him,” said Coldwood.

I nodded again. Of course he did.

Slipping a hand inside my trenchcoat, I took out my tin whistle. Normally it would be a Clarke Original in the key of D, but some exciting events onboard a boat a few months prior to this had left me temporarily without an instrument. The boat in question was a trim little yacht named the
Mercedes,
but if you’re thinking Henley Regatta, you’re way off the mark: “The Wreck of the Hesperus” would probably give you a better mental picture. Or maybe the
Flying Dutchman
. Anyway, as a result of that little escapade I ended up buying a Sweetone, virulently green in color, and that had become my new default instrument. It didn’t feel as ready and responsive to my hand as the old Original used to do, and it looked a bit ridiculous, but it was coming along. Give it another year or so and we’d probably be inseparable.

I put the whistle to my lips and blew G, C, A to tune myself in. I was aware that all the eyes in the room were focused on me now: Coldwood’s expressionless, most of the others bright with prurient interest—but one of the uniformed constables was definitely looking a little on the nervous side.