Vicious Circle (45 page)

“Until you met her.”

“Until I met her. Yeah. I didn’t realize, but taking out the lawsuit let me in for all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t get out of. Depositions, procedural submissions, Christ knows. If I’d seen how much time it was going to eat up I’d never have started it.

“But anyway, as part of all that there had to be meetings. Documented meetings, because you’ve got to go through the conciliation shit before you can go to court. And there she was, you know? Mel did all the talking, just like always, and Abbie was just sitting there, looking so sad and lost. Looking like she was waiting for a bus on a dark street, and that was where she’d been all her fucking life.”

He was staring at me with haunted eyes. No wonder he’d been so flip about the sins of his youth: this was what he really had on his conscience, and it must have almost eaten him alive.

“I started talking to her. Partly because I wanted to see if I could cheer her up, partly because it seemed to piss Mel off. I bought her the locket, and a couple of other things, and I told her some bullshit stories about what I did for a living.

“And I started to wonder—if Mel was so fucking cold to her, and if she wasn’t even Fanke’s kid, then why did they keep her around? Was it just that whole transgression thing? That Mel had managed to turn making a baby into something obscene and sick? Was Abbie a—a trophy? It didn’t make any sense.

“And there I was in a strange city, stuck there because of this stupid court case that I didn’t even want to win—that I’d only sworn out in the first place so that Fanke would pay me to make me go away. And I had all the time in the world, and fuck all to do with it. So I started to do some digging.

“The Satanist Church is huge over there. They’ve got their own Web site, their own bookshops, sodding T-shirts, car stickers, the works.
HONK
IF
YOU’VE
SEEN
THE
LIGHTBRINGER
. Fucking morons. There was a lot there, but none of it was hard to find.

“The Web site had links to articles that Fanke had written. Speeches he’d made. It was all in public domain—he wasn’t hiding it. He was still going on about sacrifice farms, and the grimoire tradition, and why the medieval alchemists got it all wrong. Oh sure, he said, they’d managed to open up some lines of communication with demons, and the demons were giving them everything they needed to turn that first contact into serious, regular trade. Only they kept getting all the details wrong. It was a communication breakdown, according to Fanke. Demons can speak all the languages that human beings ever spoke, or ever will speak, but not—you know—fluently. So they were giving out all this sales talk: you can bring the big boys up from hell, you can be top dogs in a new world order, and all the rest of it. They were giving fucking dictation, for God’s sake. But these medieval badasses—these Fausts—they were mostly managing to miss the point.

“They got it all wrong, Fanke said. All the stuff that really mattered, anyway. And the thing they fucked up worst of all—the most important thing, the engine that the whole thing ran on—was the sacrifice. Albertus Magnus raved on about rams being without blemish, and Bruno’s got a whole goddamn chapter on whether you carry the beast in or lead it on a rope, and what color its fleece should be, and what it should have eaten and what you do with its shit if it shits during the ceremony, and on and on like some kind of instruction manual translated from Japanese into Latin by a fucking Dutchman. And all the sense of it—all the meat—that just got lost in translation.

“So this is the gospel according to Fanke, which he posted on the Internet because Mt. Ararat’s a fucking long way away. To raise a major demon, you need a sacrifice that’s been dedicated from birth to the powers of darkness. From
before
birth. It—she—it’s—got to be linked to hell even in the way it was conceived. Spiritually, and physically—prepared—designed—” He groped for words.

“Abbie.”

“What do you fucking think?” His voice rose in a snarl, but then it turned into a cough and he folded in on himself, trying to ride out the spasms in his throat without moving his diaphragm. “Yes, Abbie,” he said when he could speak again, glaring at me with unfocused hatred. “The bastards brought her into the world just so they could kill her—at the right time, in the right place, with the right fucking weapon that Fanke and his mates had said a fucking blessing over and anointed with holy water and horse piss.” He coughed again, and this time he had to shove his hand against his mouth to keep whatever it was from coming up.

“Okay,” I said, gently—although the anger seeping out of him like tar from a smoker’s sweat was making my skin prickle. “And then there’s another part I can fill in for myself. You lost the case.” He nodded, his face still buried in his hands. “And you lost a shedload of money, because Fanke countersued.”

“Only to make me back off,” Peace wheezed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. A trail of spittle hung down from his chin but he seemed not to have noticed it. His voice was a little slurred now. “He was telling me to go away. Behind the scenes his lawyers offered me a hundred grand if I signed a waiver saying I gave up any claim to be considered as Abbie’s father. I thought about signing it, too, and then using some of it to have him bumped off. But multimillionaires make hard targets. And if I toughed it out, I got one big advantage that they couldn’t take away from me without another long, hard fight.

“Visiting rights, Castor. I got visiting rights.

“It felt different now. I wanted to spend some time with her. I wanted to make it up to her, because it was my fault she was in this fucking mess. I’d planted the seed, and then I’d just gone riding off into the sunset like the Lone bloody Ranger and left her to it. It was wrong. And even if it was too late to do any good, I had to at least try. Try to put it right again as far as I could.

“I stayed in New York for nearly two years, and I saw her every other weekend courtesy of the U.S. Court of Appeals, second circuit, Judge Harmony Gilpin presiding. They couldn’t stop me. They bankrupted me, not that that was hard, dragged me in and out of court on a new docket twice a fucking month, got the cops to roll me on some bullshit harassment charge and bust up my place. But they couldn’t stop me.

“I got to know her, and I—she was a good kid. A really good kid. She’d grown up like an animal in a cage. Never even been to school. She was meant to be having private tutors, but it never happened except on paper. There were plenty of grade-school teachers in the Satanist Church, and they were happy to sign anything that Fanke put in front of them. ‘Yes, I see this girl three times a week, and I teach her history, brain surgery, and domestic science.’ ‘Yes, I tutor her in beach volleyball.’ I tried to get the whole outfit audited, but the lawyer I had was no good. He was the best my money could buy, but my money was chicken shit. What I could pick up doing one-shot exorcisms on the black market.

“Fanke had so many lawyers he had to hire a bus. He could have stonewalled me forever—or just arranged with a few friends to have me turned into landfill. But I think he got unhappy about all the publicity. Anyway he just upped sticks one night and pissed off to Europe.

“There was nothing I could do to stop him. Abbie wasn’t a ward of the court or anything. In theory I still had my visiting rights, but they weren’t worth a whole hell of a lot when I couldn’t find out where he was.

“I came back to London, stony broke. The
Thames Collective
took me in, so I had a roof over my head, and then I started building up a stake. Hired a detective to run Fanke to ground and get me his address. He was in Liechtenstein. He’d rented a castle and moved in with the limousines and the flunkies and the whole circus. I went out there, but they wouldn’t let me through the door. And before I could get anything legal rolling, they moved again.

“That became a pattern. They never settled anywhere for long enough to let me get a foothold, and after a while they got better at keeping their heads down so it was harder for me to figure out where they were. I kept the channels open, though. Kept the feelers out. And then just after the New Year—maybe four months ago now—they came to London.

“I’d been doing my homework, Castor. I knew why they hadn’t killed her. And I knew why they’d come here. It was all coming together, and I was shit-scared that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

“They had to wait until she had her first period. That was part of Fanke’s prescription: out of the grimoires again. ‘She will be pure, she will be stained. She will be whole, she will be wounded. She will be woman, she will be child.’ That was what he said it meant.”

“And London?” Even as I asked the question, the answer hit me. And the only reason I hadn’t seen it before was because I was sitting so close to it.

“London was where he was. The demon they wanted to raise. Except that he was half-raised already, because some other shithead had tried it two years back and gotten it wrong, the way Fanke said amateurs always do.”

Asmodeus. Peace didn’t even need to say it. The last few pieces fell into place as I finally made the connection that my subconscious mind had made two days ago. Yeah, something else
did
happen on Saturday night. Rafi had his episode, as Asmodeus clawed his way up out of the oubliette, yawned, and stretched.

An image came into my mind: of Rafi screaming in agony, his head thrown back, oblivious of everything except whatever it was that was tormenting him.

“You sabotaged them,” I said. “You broke the ritual before they finished it.”

“Only just,” growled Peace, bitterly. “It took me a long time to find out where they were keeping her. And by the time I got to the house it was too late—they’d already taken her. But I caught Mel and some piece of piss who was fronting as her husband. And I got the drop on them.”

“Stephen Torrington,” I said. “The real Stephen Torrington. He was the guy who owned the house, right? Some English satanist who Fanke was using as a cover?”

“ ‘Was’ being the operative word,” Peace spat. “I think his head will take more putting together than Humpty fucking Dumpty.”

“You killed two people, Peace. It’s not a joke.”

He scowled at me with something like resentment. “What are you talking about? Him I killed, yeah. Mel—I hit her. I remember hitting her. Because I had to make her tell me where Abbie was. I had to stop the whole thing before it got too far. Maybe she
thought
I was going to kill her, because I must have looked like some kind of a maniac. But I didn’t have the stomach for it.”

“But—there was a woman’s body. Tied up and beaten and then shot in the stomach . . .”

But with a different gun. I suddenly remembered that odd detail from Nicky’s summary. With a different gun, and maybe as much as three hours later. That didn’t make any sense. Unless . . .

“Did she tell you? What you needed to know?” I asked Peace.

“Yeah. They’d found some old Quaker meeting house in Hendon that was boarded up. It was exactly what they needed: a place where people had prayed, and sung hymns, or whatever it is that Quakers do when they let their hair down. A place where people had worshipped, anyway, because that’s one of the ingredients in the shit they do. I left her tied to a chair. If I could’ve killed her, I would have. I fucking hated her enough to do it. I just—when it came right down to it, I couldn’t pull the trigger with her looking at me. I kept thinking about Abbie. Abbie growing inside her. It made me weak.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” I said grimly. “Fanke finished what you started. When the cops got to the house they found two bodies, a man and a woman, and they ID’d the woman as Melanie Torrington. I think he must have figured out how you got that address, Peace—and I think he didn’t like it much. So it was really handy for him that you left her hands tied: meant he didn’t have to get into an unseemly scuffle or anything like that.”

It also meant that the blonde he’d brought into my office, and then considerately sent away so she didn’t have to relive her trauma, hadn’t gotten those bruises from Peace. She was beaten up just to serve as a prop and prepare the ground so Fanke could work on my tender feelings.

Peace took the news in dazed silence. It was probably just as well: right then I was full of anger and contempt for him as well as for Fanke. He might have been protecting his daughter, but the pair of them had been dancing this slow, smoochy dance around each other for long enough, and a lot of innocent people had gotten hurt because they were caught in between.

“She deserved to die,” Peace said, more to himself than to me. “After all she’d done—”

“Maybe she did,” I said, wearily. “Or maybe she was just a bare-arsed bondage freak who Fanke reeled in the same way he did you—because he needed something she had. In her case it was a womb, and an open-minded attitude to sex acts that draw blood. In yours it was functional sperm. For Christ’s sake, Peace, have you really gotten it that wrong? Did you think she was your enemy? Because it looks to me like you were both played by an expert.” And so was I, I reminded myself. I had no reason to feel smug here: I’d fetched the stick and rolled over and played dead like the best of them.

Peace got angry, and that was a mistake because it started him coughing again and the pain closed down his lines of communication for the best part of a minute while he wheezed and hissed like an overfilled kettle. There was no steam, though: Peace’s fires were burning pretty low now.

“She was a vicious, selfish bitch,” he said, when he could speak again. “She got exactly what was coming to her. Don’t judge me, Castor. And don’t try to make me feel fucking guilty, because it won’t wash. I’m only sorry I didn’t manage to get Fanke.”

“Fanke was at the house?”

“At the meeting hall, you moron.”

Which brought us full circle, I reckoned. And since he still didn’t seem to want to shut up, I might as well check that I was right about the endgame, too. “You got there late,” I said. “The ceremony—ritual—whatever they were doing, it was already under way.”

“It was already finished. All bar the shouting. Thirty seconds earlier—thirty bastard seconds—and I might’ve stopped them. If Mel had just told me where she was, instead of lying and squirming and lying some more. And you want me to feel sorry I got her killed? Fuck that. I’m only sorry I didn’t top her the first night I met her.