Vicious Circle (26 page)

A sudden absence of street sounds in the background made it clear that we’d gone back to the studio, as a second voice, female this time but with the same titillated solemnity, took up the story—or rather, hijacked it away into rarefied realms of speculation about terrorist cells and soft economic targets. I tuned it out. This wasn’t about terrorism, I felt that in my guts: it was about Nicky’s bell-shaped curve. And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you’re not going to like the answer.

My phone went off and I took it in case it was Pen, wanting to know where the hell I’d scooted off to in such a hurry. But it wasn’t.

“Hey,” said Nicky. “Catch you at a bad moment?”

The Civic was an automatic: I could manage with just the one hand, but I had enough to concentrate on without shooting the breeze with Nicky on top of it all.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

“Sure. You watching TV?”

“I was. Now I’m listening to the radio.”

“Interesting times, eh? Call me when you’ve got a moment. But make it quick. This shit you need to hear. Actually don’t call me, because I’m going out to the Ice-Maker’s. You can meet me down there.”

“Peckham? Nicky, it’s been a long day—”

“Fine. Wait until tomorrow. It’s your call. But if I were you, I’d want this particular dish served hot.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I’d almost reached the Westway, which meant I had to be getting close to the action now. I slowed just a little as I came around the underpass, in case I ran into any of those police roadblocks. Nothing to see, but as I passed White City Stadium I caught sight of the flashing lights of the black-and-whites a couple of hundred yards up the road. Okay, “X” presumably marked the spot. I took the first left, then a right—past a closed-up nursery school whose deserted swings and climbing frames leaped into the bleaching glow of my headlights: in the harsh light they were divorced from their functions in a way that was frankly sinister, looking more or less like the contents of a torture chamber.

I was counting off the distance roughly in my head, but long before I got to the next intersection I could see exactly what I was aiming for. Up ahead of me was a wall of red brick that was already familiar from the TV news bulletin: the giveaway, though, was the wide strip-sign hanging out over the road, which proclaimed
WHITELEAF
SHOPPING
centre in an italic font with plenty of scrolling. Heavy coils of smoke hung above and around it, wearing out their welcome in the damp, still spring air.

I turned off the lights and pulled over. Up ahead of me the street was packed with people: cops in uniform, ambulance crews, passers-by who’d stopped to watch the drama play itself out. I walked up, skirting the edges of the crowd as I looked for a way to move in a little closer without drawing unwelcome attention to myself. I didn’t have any definite plans past that point, except that I wanted to get inside the building and take a look for myself at what was going down in there. And that I wanted Susan the verger to get out of this intact, with all her doubts and hesitations. A modest enough goal, I thought. The police could sort out the rest of it: that was what they were paid for.

But the crowd was a solid wedge, and even if I could get past them there was a police cordon all around this face of the building. To the right that cordon stretched all the way up the street back as far as I could see—probably all the way to the roadblock on the Westway. On the other side the houses came right up to the wall of the shopping center, the last one facing it at an oblique angle like a dinghy that had collided with an ocean liner and been knocked spinning. I was going to have to try elsewhere.

That last house offered a possibility, though. It had a strip of garden to the side, bordering right up against the wall of the shopping center. I slipped in through the gate, trying to look like I owned the place, and trotted around to the side. There was a fence at the back that was low enough to vault over; then another strip of garden, helpfully shielded from the house it belonged to by a clothesline full of washing. Unfortunately there was a stout, hatchet-faced brunette in the midst of the washing, presumably evacuating it to the safety of the house. She had two or three clothes pegs in her mouth, but she gaped when she saw me and they fell out. Her shriek of surprise and protest pursued me across the narrow lawn to the higher brick wall on the far side. I took a flying jump and scrambled up using elbows and feet.

I found I was looking down into a delivery bay where a dozen or so lorries in red and silver livery were parked. No sign of any police cars, or any rioters for that matter. Straight ahead of me there was a loading bay, and its corrugated steel rolling door was only three-quarters shut. That’s an open invitation to a thief. I jumped down lightly on the farther side, hearing a woman’s voice behind me yell, “There was a man, Arthur! There was a man in the yard!” and a male voice truculently reply “What effing man? I can’t see a man.”

I glanced around to make sure there was nobody in sight, then crossed quickly to the loading bay. There was a lorry drawn up there, its back doors wide open and its loading ramp lowered. An overturned pallet nearby had spilled brown cardboard boxes across the concrete apron in front of the rolling door. Whoever had been working here had downed tools pretty abruptly; hopefully that meant they’d fled when the riot started, but it was also possible that they were among the hostages inside. I wondered belatedly what the hell I was getting myself into here, but it seemed a little late to start having second thoughts. Probably the trick is to rule out stunts like this at the first-thoughts stage.

The rolling door would probably lift if I got my hands underneath it and pulled, but there was no way of telling how much noise it would make. Instead, I went down on hands and knees and went under it.

If someone had been waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have been an easy target as I crawled through on all fours and scrambled to my feet again on the far side: this wasn’t exactly covert infiltration. But the room I found myself in, long and narrow, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side with boxes and crates, was thankfully devoid of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with broken pieces of furniture. I stood still for a moment or two, listening, but the silence was absolute. All the action was clearly happening somewhere else.

But as I moved forward into the room, I started to become aware of a whole range of sounds almost at the limits of my hearing: dull thumps and muffled shouts, softened by the distance, so that if you closed your eyes you could almost convince yourself you were listening to a cricket match on the village green.

There was no door at the farther end of the room—just a square arch that led out into a larger warehouse space. I threaded my way cautiously through this, the back of my neck prickling every time I passed a darkened aisle. I came across an elevator shaft big enough to take me and the Civic I’d rode in on, but the elevator itself was elsewhere: the gaping doors opened onto a vertical corridor of gray cinder blocks whose bottom I couldn’t see. I kept on going, until finally a pair of black rubberized swing doors let me out into a tiled corridor. The posters on the wall here, advertising designer jeans at less than half price and three hundred top-up minutes with every new phone, told me that I wasn’t backstage anymore: I was in the mall itself.

I expected the corridor to bring me out into the central arcade, but I’d got myself turned around somehow and I ended up in a blunt cul-de-sac facing the toilets and an “I speak your weight” machine. The noises were fainter here, but as I turned around to go back the way I’d come my other sense—the one I use in my professional capacity—went haywire. Something was coming down the corridor toward me, and I didn’t need any pricking in my thumbs to tell me that it was wicked. It was dead, or it was undead, or it was something worse, and whatever it was, it was heading straight toward me. Another second would bring it around the bend in the corridor and right into my line of sight.

Since there was nowhere else to go, I took a silent step backward, pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilet, and slid inside. If the thing was already on my trail, then it would certainly follow me inside—but at least now I had a few seconds to prepare a suitable reception.

My own silver dagger is barely more than a fruit parer: I keep it, like the chalice, mainly for ritual occasions. But the knife that the loup-garou had dropped the night before was still in my outside pocket. I took it out and slid the cardboard sleeve off the wickedly sharp blade. Then I took up position behind the door and waited.

Footsteps echoed hollowly on the tiling outside, coming toward me, and then stopped. There was a silence, which stretched agonizingly: I imagined the thing, whatever it was, standing in the corridor just on the other side of the door, its own senses straining as it tried to decide whether I’d gone for the gents or the distaff side.

Then the door opened, and I tensed to lunge at whatever came into view when it swung closed again. The only thing that stopped me was a sigh, which sounded both long-suffering and a little disappointed.

“Castor.”

False-footed, I let the knife fall to my side. Juliet pulled the door back toward the closed position a little way, and stared at me around the edge of it. Under a floor-length coat of black leather she was dressed in bloodred silk: a rose in a gloved fist. In the medieval
Romance of the Rose,
floral metaphors were used as a way of smuggling smut past the vigilant eyes of the church. I thought of roses opening, and had to wrench my mind back brutally from pathways that would take up too much time, and leave me too far off balance.

“I thought so,” Juliet said.

As always when I feel like an idiot, I went on the offensive. “You thought so? What about that infallible sense of smell of yours? You should have seen me coming a mile off.”

“Too many other smells about,” muttered Juliet, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, as if to make the point. “There’s something else walking around in this building, and it’s a lot bigger and ranker than you are.”

“I suppose I should take that as a compliment.”

“Take it however you like.” I suddenly realized that she was rigidly tense: the muscles in her neck standing proud of her alabaster flesh like filigreed ropes, and her posture stiff with readiness. The last time I’d seen her like this, she was hunting me; whatever she was hunting now, I felt sorry both for it and for anyone else who got in the way.

“So where are they?” I asked her. She shot a glance at me as if she was surprised to find that I was still there. “The hostages,” I clarified. “And the rioters?”

Juliet glanced up at the ceiling. “Up there,” she said. “Almost directly above us.”

“How do you want to play this? And what are you even doing here in the first place? Did you see Susan Book on the TV news?”

She shook her head, frowning momentarily as if I’d accused her of something faintly indecent. “No,” she said tersely. “But if I had, it would have been that much clearer a confirmation. This is all connected to what happened at St. Michael’s. I’m certain of it. I’m getting the same sense here that I got there—the scent that faded when I tried to focus on it. This thing has broken cover. If I can get close to it, I’ll be able to see it for what it is.”

I digested that statement with some difficulty, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. Having important conversations in the toilet is very much a girl thing.

“Look,” I said, “we don’t really have the faintest idea what’s going on here.” She seemed about to interrupt, but I plowed on. “All we know is that there are some people up on the mezzanine tearing the place apart, and some other people who got in the way of that. You could be right: maybe there is something making that happen, and maybe it’s the same something that’s setting up house over at the church. Doesn’t really matter in any case. Now that we’re here, the best thing we can do is pull our little playmate out of the line of fire and then get the hell out before the police start to lob in the tear gas.”

Juliet shook her head irritably. “I’m only interested in finding the thing that brought me here. The thing I’m smelling. By all means rescue Book, if you want to. I can’t see how she’s relevant.”

“She’s in love with you,” I told her.

“What?”

“Well, in lust, I mean. She’s got a bad dose of that stuff you dish out, anyway, and being as how she’s both devout and straight she doesn’t have any idea how to handle it. You mean to say you didn’t notice how she looks at you?”

“I tune that information out,” Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. “You’re not asking me to feel—whatever it’s called—guilt about this, are you?”

“No.” It was my turn to be impatient. “But think about it. She might not have gotten herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.”

“Her emotions are no business of yours—or of mine.”

“Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.”

Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously. She still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got an idea that might get the both of us what we want. Let me show you something.”

I stepped past her, pulled the door open, and went back out into the corridor. She followed me as I retraced my steps to the warehouse, and I showed her the open elevator shaft.

“No use to me,” I said. “But I thought maybe you could . . .”

“Yes,” said Juliet. “I could. But why should I?”

“You want to look for your demon, and you don’t want to be watching your back all the time in case these nutcases stick a knife in it—especially not when the siege might turn into a firefight at any moment. So it makes sense if we clean up first and look around afterwards.”