Vicious Circle

The bar was actually in the basement of a house. It was called The Level, and it was indeed hot and cold, like Nicky said. That meant that living and dead were equally welcome. You could smell the dead part of the equation as you came in off the street: a faint sour whiff like leaf mold, mixed with the surgical tang of formaldehyde. Seeing them wasn’t so easy; the only lighting in the room was from candles in the necks of bottles strategically positioned on tables and on shelves around the walls. There was a good-size crowd lurking in the plentiful shadows—and a poor-size bar, wedged into a corner of the room. I ordered a whisky, Nicky passed. Introducing foreign organics into his system is something he tends to avoid. “If you’re dead, your immune system is more or less closed for business,” he’d told me more than once. “No blood flow, right? No transport for antibiotics, phagocytes, any of that shit. So once you start letting infective agents in, you’re fucked, pure and simple.” If this was a more up-market place, he would have ordered red wine and inhaled the scent of it, but he wouldn’t stoop to whatever the house red was in this place.

We sat down at the most remote table we could find—but privacy was provided by the other conversations going on all around us. Anything we said would be lost in the general noise. The wallpaper was a virulent red and looked like flock. I reached out and ran my finger down it: it was. Maybe this place had been a curry house back in the day.

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said, and I took a gulp of the whisky to fortify myself.

Nicky’s mood had calmed somewhat. He was still as pissed with me as he had been, but he enjoys being the fountain of arcane wisdom almost as much as he enjoys jazz. “I would’ve spotted it sooner,” he said, “only like I said, when it comes to murders we’ve had kind of an embarrassment of riches just lately.”

Of course. The spike in the bell-shaped curve. I suddenly remembered one of the headlines I’d read over Nicky’s shoulder on his computer monitor: HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE. Son of a bitch, it had been right in front of my eyes and I’d let it slide on past.

“They were found in their own house,” Nicky went on. “Somewhere out towards Maida Vale.”

“Maida Vale?” I broke in. “The Steve Torrington I met gave me an address on Bishop’s Avenue.”

“What number Bishop’s Avenue?”

I dredged it up from memory. “Sixty-something. Sixty-two.”

“That’s the squat, you fucking moron. And what did he give you the address for? Did he ask you over for cocktails?”

“It was so I could send him a receipt,” I admitted.

“Right. Like he fucking cared where that ended up. Anyway, the real Stephen Torrington lived in Maida Vale—and he doesn’t fucking live there anymore. I’ve got the address if you want it, but my advice is to stay clear.

“Place of death was the living room; some of the furniture had been moved to clear a big space—killer with a sense for the theatrical. The entire place had been ransacked. Every drawer, every cupboard, everything hauled out and strewn over the floor. Like there’d been a search, the file notes said, but they were just guessing. With the place being so messed up, they couldn’t even tell if anything was missing. And they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the girl.”

“Abbie,” I breathed.

“Yeah, her. They knew there was a kid even without going through any records on the Torringtons, because there was a room that was obviously a kid’s room. That had been turned over, too, just like the rest of the house.”

Of course it had. And some things had been taken. I knew because except for the doll’s head in my goddamn pocket they were sitting in a big black bag in my office—a gift from the guy who called himself Steve Torrington. I imagined him raking through Abbie’s things with her real parents lying murdered in the room below, and I was filled with an unreasoning rage at my own naiveté. No wonder he’d sent the woman back to the car: whoever the fuck he was, he knew his own acting skills were up to the job, but he didn’t want to have to rely on hers. And he was right; he’d got the grief spot-on, mostly—except that grief isn’t usually that articulate. I should have known. I should have smelled something.

But if I had, what would I have done? Refused to take the case? Abbie was dead—that much I knew, because I’d touched her spirit across the London night. And I’d felt the choking well of unhappiness that was all she knew back when she was alive.

Lies or not, I’d taken this job on because of her: so fair enough, I’d see it through because of her, too. Right then I hoped that meant that somewhere along the way I’d be running into the soi-disant Steve Torrington again, so that I could salvage some of my self-respect with the judicious application of a tire iron.