Vicious Circle (2 page)

The trouble with what I was about to do was that it doesn’t always work: at best it’s fifty-fifty. There’s something about a rationalistic world view that arms you against seeing or hearing anything that would contradict it—like mermaids, say, or flying pigs or ghosts. Overall about two people in three can see at least some of the dead, but even then it depends a lot on mood and situation, and in certain professions that ratio drops to something very close to zero. Policemen and scientists cluster somewhere near the bottom of the league table.

I didn’t know what I was going to play until I blew the first notes. It might have been nothing much: just the skeleton of a melody, or an atonal riff with a rough-hewn kind of a pattern to it. It turned out to be a Micah Hinson number called “The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea”—I’d seen Hinson perform at some café in Hammersmith, and I found something powerfully satisfying in the lilting harshness of his voice and the hammering, inescapable repetitions of his lyrics. But even without that, the song appealed to me for the title alone.

Nothing seemed to happen at first, but then from my point of view, nothing was going to. Hopefully the perspective from where Coldwood was standing was starting to look a bit different. Just before I hit the second chorus there was a gasp from one of the forensics officers over by the desk. Good. Then another one cried out aloud, and pointed, and I knew the plangent little tune had done the trick.

What they were pointing at was a man who was standing on nothing very much, in the exact center of the well that the trapdoor had covered. He’d always been there, perfectly visible to me from the moment I’d walked in, but Coldwood’s boys had been walking past him and through him without so much as a premonitory shudder and a muttered Hail Mary, so I’d felt safe in assuming that I was the only one who could see him.

But the music had changed all that. This tune—at this time, in this place, played in this tempo, and all the rest of it—was for me a description of the ghost. It’s a knack I’ve got: not just to see the dead, but to perceive them with a sense that’s nine-tenths hearing, one-tenth something I can only describe as
else
. I can catch the essence of a ghost in music, and once I’ve caught it there are other things I can do with it. One of them, which I’d discovered fairly recently and spectacularly, was to make other people see it, too.

So now the music was bringing this dead man inside the perceptual orbit of Coldwood and his coppers—which meant that they were seeing Sheehan’s ghost materialize out of that proverbially popular substance, thin air. The plods gaped, and the men in white coats visibly bridled and tensed as they saw this piece of superstition and unreason made manifest before their eyes. Coldwood has a more pragmatic cast of mind: he walked right up close to the ghost and began his examination. It stared at him with mournful, frightened eyes.

Lesley Sheehan clearly hadn’t been dead for very long, and he hadn’t had time yet to get used to the idea. He’d come here because this was a place he had strong associations to—or possibly he’d just stayed here because this was where he’d died—but in either case, now that he’d materialized that seemed to be the upper limit of his capabilities for the time being. He couldn’t reinsert himself into life because his phantasmal body couldn’t lift or move or touch any physical objects, and wouldn’t even reliably do what his phantasmal mind told it to. Some ghosts got trapped into reenacting their deaths for the whole of eternity; others just stood, as Sheehan was doing now, looking lost and frightened—defeated and broken down by the no-longer-avoidable fact of their own mortality. He was aware of us, on some level, and his eyes followed Coldwood as the sergeant squatted down on his haunches to get a better look at some detail that had caught his eye. But it was as if he were frozen to the spot: he couldn’t form the decision or the desire to move from where he was.

Coldwood pointed to the ligature around Sheehan’s bare forearm. “He was shooting up,” he said, sounding disgruntled. “Stupid bastard’s gone and jolted himself over. Why didn’t he do it on his own fucking time?”

“That was what I thought, too,” I agreed. “But if you take a look at the back view you’ll probably want to amend that diagnosis.”

Coldwood favored me with another expressive look, but he got up and strolled around the pathetic figure, where he stared with some surprise at the back of Sheehan’s head—or to be more accurate, at the place where it had been. It mostly wasn’t there anymore. The shade of Lesley Sheehan lost interest in the sergeant as soon as he passed out of sight: he lifted his hands and stared at them for a moment, then frowned and looked around as if he were trying to remember where his car keys were.

“You’re the expert,” I said, “but I’m guessing a bullet wound from a gun pressed against his temple just in front of the ear, angled a little backwards. If he was shot from behind, presumably most of his face would be an exit wound.”

“It wasn’t a gun,” muttered Coldwood. “It was one of those captive-bolt efforts they use to kill cows.” He pointed. “The whole of the left side of the head has caved in, and most of the bone has stayed in the wound. You don’t get that pattern of damage with a high-velocity—Hey, if you chuck up in here I’m having you on an effing charge!”

The last words weren’t addressed to me, but to the uniformed copper who’d been looking a little peaky earlier. From where he was standing, the poor sod had an intimate perspective on some of Sheehan’s most private parts—the ones that had formerly been inside his skull. It didn’t seem to be agreeing with him much at all. At a curt nod from Coldwood he ran for the door.

Coldwood turned his attention back to me. “Where’s the body?” he asked. “The real, physical body? Where can we find him?”

“I don’t have a bastard clue,” I answered truthfully. “I can ask him, if you like. But you might as well ask him yourself. He can see you. He could see you even when you couldn’t see him.”

“But you’re the expert,” he echoed me, with deft sarcasm.

“Being an exorcist isn’t quite the same as being a detective,” I shot back, deadpan. “I don’t have a badge I can wave at him—and it’s really difficult to kick the shit out of a man who’s already dead. But I’ll give it a go, if you leave me alone with him. I’m not doing it in front of your mob.”

Coldwood chewed that one over for a long moment. “Okay,” he said, but he thrust a warning finger under my nose. “Touch the evidence and I’ll gut you, Castor. Understand me?”

“I don’t need drugs,” I said. “I can get high on death.”

With a muttered profanity, Coldwood signaled to his team to withdraw. It was nice and quiet after they’d gone, and I decided to let the new mood settle in for a minute or two before I tackled Mr. Sheehan. I slipped my whistle into the purpose-built pocket I’d sewn into the lining of my coat—I go for a Russian army greatcoat because it hides a multitude of sins—and in another pocket nearby found a silver hip flask that was full of extremely rough Greek brandy. I took a swig, and it expanded inside me like a fire inside a derelict building. It’s not good. Really not good at all. But at moments like this it bridges a gap and keeps me moving.

With a second mouthful swilling around my gums, I took another look at the calendars. Just the usual lad mag soft porn: Abbie whatshername, Suzie something else. But Sheehan’s tastes ran to material that was less vanilla, Coldwood had said. Well, he’d given up the pleasures of the flesh now, that was for damn sure. After doing this job for a decade or so, I still don’t know much about the afterlife—but I’m willing to lay long odds that the dead don’t get their end away very much.

There was no point in putting it off anymore: Sheehan’s memory was probably as truncated as what was left of his head, so he must have forgotten Coldwood’s merry marching band by now. I pocketed the flask again and walked over to where the ghost was standing—his feet a few inches above the brown paper bags, roughly where the floor had been. Like therapy, death reveals your deepest instincts: he was guarding his stash.

“So,” I said to him, conversationally. “You’re dead, then. How’s that working out?”

His eyes flicked over me, lingered, wandered off again. He was having a hard time staying focused, which perhaps wasn’t all that surprising.

“Must have been a shock,” I offered. “One moment you’re walking along, not a care in the world. The next some guy gets a headlock on you, drags you into an alley and
ker-chunk:
you’ve got daylight hitting your eyes from the back.”

Sheehan frowned, made a formless gesture with his right hand. His lips moved.

“Takes a while even to realize what’s happened to you,” I went on, commiserating. “You think, well that was bad but here I am, thank God. And then the hours go by, and the doubts start to set in. Why am I still just standing here? How did I get here in the first place? What do I do next?

“And the truth is, mate, you don’t get to do anything. Not now. Doing things is a luxury that the living have. The dead—well, mostly they just get to watch.”

Sheehan’s eyes widened. I didn’t know if that was my words getting past his guard or just the dim stirrings of memory in whatever he was using now for a mind. His hands twitched again, and this time when he spoke I could hear a dry whisper, like wind through grass.

“Poor—poor—”

Self-pity is something you often get from the dead, and it’s not like you can really blame them for it. It doesn’t look like any of the options are all that attractive; even heaven, if you take the majority view, is a state of oneness with God and perpetual praise of his goodness, which must wear pretty thin after the first few hours, let alone the rest of eternity. On the other hand, this guy was a pusher and a porn merchant and fuck alone knew what else: I wasn’t wasting any sympathy, because you never know when you’re going to run out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s very much a crock of shit. Some bastard really stiffed you, Sheehan. It’s almost worth believing in hell so you can have the comfort of imagining him roasting in it.”

“Poor—poor—poor—”

“You said that. I agreed.”

“Pauley!” The name was barely audible, but I’ve got good ears and I was listening on all frequencies.

“Pauley.” I turned my back on him: best to distract him as little as possible now, because his attention deficit was probably only going to get worse. “Pauley topped you, did he? Well that’s friends for you. Did it hurt, or was it all over too quick for you to notice?”

A long silence; then a hoarse, almost voiceless whisper. “H-h-hurt. Hurt me.”

“Was this over at your place, then?” I asked, my tone so relentlessly neutral I must have sounded bored to death with the whole subject. “Knock on the door,
bang,
you’re dead, kind of thing? Or were you out on the town?”

There was a very long silence. I let it stretch. It sounded like the kind of silence that might have a payoff at the end of it. “Bronze,” Sheehan whispered. “Bronze.” He made a sound like a moan stretched thin and hung up to cure—a moan with no bass to it, because the dead tend to have trouble hitting the low notes. “Buried.”

The silence after that final exhalation was different. When I turned around, I knew what I’d see: Sheehan was gone. Exhausted by the effort of speech, his physical manifestation had faded into random motes in the air: not matter, nor energy, nor anything that anyone had managed to trap or measure. He’d be back, given that he had nowhere else to go, but it wouldn’t be soon.

I went to the door and stepped outside onto the narrow ribbon of asphalt that separated the warehouse from the street. The only cars parked there were Coldwood’s tax-deductible Primera and three regular black-and-whites. Coldwood was off to one side by himself, talking on his cellphone. The plods and the backroom boys were in two separate cliques, responding atavistically to each other’s pheromones. There was a brisk wind coming down from the north, but at least it wasn’t raining anymore. The sun was setting behind the brutalist high-rises of Colindeep Lane, and a huge mass of gun-gray cloud was pouring across the sky behind it like water down a drain.

Coldwood finished his conversation, put his phone away, and came over to me. “Anything?” he asked, in a tone that expected so little it couldn’t possibly be disappointed.

“He fingered Pauley,” I said. Coldwood’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “At least, I think he did. And when I asked him where he died he said ‘bronze.’ Then ‘buried.’ ”

“Brondesbury,” Coldwood translated. “Brondesbury Auto Parts. Christ, that’d be a bloody kiss on the cheek from God. If the body’s still there—” He was already heading for his car at a fast stroll, dialing as he went. The uniformed coppers turned to follow him with their eyes, awaiting orders with a sort of stolid urgency unique to the boys in blue, but Coldwood was talking on the phone again. “The bodywork place,” he was snapping. “The one in Brondesbury Park. Get over there now. Yeah. Yes, get a warrant. But don’t wait. Get the place surrounded and don’t let any bugger in or out!”

“I take it this is good news,” I said to Coldwood’s back as he hauled the car door open. Sliding into the driver’s seat he spared me a micro-second glance. “That shop is in Pauley’s name,” he said, with a nasty smile. “We’ve already got probable cause. If we can get a search warrant, and if the body’s still there, we can raid all of his other gaffs and really get some action going.” His gaze snapped from me to a uniformed constable who’d just stepped up behind me—the one who’d had to run outside to be sick. “MacKay, take Castor’s statement and fax it on to DC Tennant at Luke Street.” The car window was already sliding closed as he said it, making any reply redundant. Then Coldwood was out onto the road and gone, trailing a whiff of tortured rubber.

Having my statement taken was very much adding insult to injury, but it was an invitation of the kind that’s hard to refuse. I went over the events of the evening while Constable MacKay wrote them down in laborious longhand, culminating in what Sheehan’s ghost had said to me when I interrogated him in my official capacity as ghostbuster general. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sangfroid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckoned he had the right stuff to be an officer.