A heavy silence fell. I decided to let Torrington break it.
‘The man’s name was Dennis Peace,’ he said at last, his tone mild – but mild with an undertow. ‘Perhaps you know him?’
I shook my head. Maybe a vague echo, but ghostbusters aren’t that community-minded. And even when we do meet up, we don’t always bother to exchange names or sniff each other’s backsides. The echo was an interesting one, though: something about a fight that ended badly. I’d have to try to pin it down later because Steve was still talking.
‘He was being sued over an exorcism that had gone wrong: the ghost wasn’t bound properly, and it did a lot of damage to the house it was in. He said it had “gone geist”, and that that happens sometimes, no matter how careful you are.’
Firmer ground again: I welcomed it like an old friend. ‘That’s why it’s in the standard contract,’ I agreed. ‘The exorcist is responsible for any damage he directly causes, but not for the damage that the ghost does in the course of the binding. It should have been open-and-shut, provided he’d given them a contract in the first place.’ I was a fine one to talk: I never bothered with any of that legal paraphernalia myself, although I knew only too well how important it could be to have a safety net if things went bad.
‘If there’d been a contract, I’m sure everything would have been fine, as you say. Mister Peace preferred to work on a handshake, I gather, so it was a lot tougher than it seemed. Anyway, Mel ended up representing him, and she decided to plead custom and practice: the plaintiff had employed another exorcist before, knew the standard terms, et cetera. She didn’t win.
‘But she did spend a lot of time with Peace, while she was preparing the case.’ There was a hardness in Torrington’s tone now. ‘I think, from what she’s said since, that she enjoyed talking to him because he belonged to a world she’d never seen before. He was almost like an action hero in some Hollywood blockbuster. She – was attracted to him, and they had a relationship. Briefly. It was the only time. The only time, ever. I’m absolutely convinced of that. And she knew even while she was doing it that it couldn’t be right. She ended it after about two months. There was a scene – a very unpleasant, traumatic one – but in the end Peace accepted that she didn’t want to see him again. And then, when it was all over and she had time to think about what she’d done—’ There was a long pause. ‘She told me all about it, and she asked me to forgive her. Which I did. Absolutely. Because she’d been absolutely honest. We agreed that we’d never even talk about it again.’
I waited. There was presumably a point to this story, but I couldn’t see what it was yet.
‘After Abbie died – I mean, after she came back—’ Steve’s voice dropped again, so that I had to strain to hear it. ‘Mel made the mistake of calling Dennis to ask him what we should do.’
‘Why was that a mistake?’ I asked.
‘Because he took it as a hint that she wanted to get back together with him again.’ Steve laughed, shaking his head incredulously. ‘Our daughter had just died, and she was close to a breakdown, and he was asking her to meet up with him. He booked a hotel room in Paddington. He suggested Mel should tell me he was going to hold a seance for Abbie, and then spend the night there with him. She told him to go and fuck himself.’ The guttural harshness in Steve’s voice came out of nowhere, but it seemed to fit the mood of the moment. He blinked very quickly a few times, as if fighting another outburst of tears. ‘But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He kept on calling her. He booked appointments with her at chambers, which she had to cancel. Then he waited for her after work a few nights. He said they had to talk about their relationship, where it was going. She told him they didn’t have a relationship. She told him to leave her alone. He threatened to tell me what had happened between them, but of course she’d already done that, long before.’
Steve locked stares with me again. ‘As time went on, Mel began to be afraid that Peace was having some kind of psychological breakdown,’ he said, his mouth quirking down at the corners as if with distaste. ‘She was afraid.’
He did something bizarre at this point: he reached down, opened the neck of the black bag and peered inside, as if checking its contents gave him some kind of reassurance. Then he closed it again and carried on talking as if nothing had happened.
‘Mel never hid any of this from me. And when it got to this stage I got one of my colleagues to send him a letter on the firm’s paper, telling him that we’d get an injunction against him if he didn’t leave Mel alone. In the old days that would have meant a court order, but I was pretty sure I could actually nail him with an ASBO – which would have meant prison if he didn’t play nicely.
‘But he wouldn’t get the message. He called Mel again, at work and at home, and I knew I was going to have to put my money where my mouth was. We’d already complained to the police, which had got us precisely nowhere, but at least it meant we had a case number. With that and an incident log, you can apply for a court order on your own initiative, so that’s what I did.
‘But then on Saturday – two days ago – he turned up at the house. He seemed drunk. Out of control. But most drunks I’ve seen are lethargic so perhaps he was high on something else. When I opened the door he pushed past me – he’s a much bigger, heavier man than I am – and demanded to talk to Mel. I picked up the phone to call the police: he ripped it out of the wall. Then he headed for the stairs. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and I was a little slow to react. But I went after him, and I tackled him.
‘Mel was upstairs, in the bedroom, and she heard all this row – Peace shouting, me shouting back, all the thuds and scuffles. She ran out onto the landing and she saw us on the stairs, wrestling with each other. She saw me go down. I’m not much of a fighter, despite my build, and even if I was I couldn’t fight the way he fought. He punched me in the stomach, then kicked me in the same place when I went down. Kicked me again and again, until my muscles seemed to lock and I couldn’t make myself breathe in. And the pain – I think I passed out.
‘Mel says she screamed at that point, and Dennis looked up at her. That may have saved my life, because he forgot all about me and went after her. He climbed over me and went on up the stairs. And he said – I know this is hearsay evidence, Mister Castor, but I doubt any of this will ever come to court – he said “You’re coming back to me, bitch. You’re going to beg to come back to me.”
‘She ran back into the bedroom and locked the door. Her bag was in there, and her mobile was in the bag, so she was going to call the police. But she didn’t get the chance. Peace pushed the door in with his shoulder – the lock was a flimsy little thing and it just tore right out of the wood. He – he beat—’
Throughout this recitation, Torrington had been getting more and more agitated. Now he faltered into silence, trembling. I stood up, with some idea of offering him a glass of water, but he waved me away: he didn’t want my solicitude.
‘He beat her,’ he said. ‘You saw her face? Her back and side and her left arm all look the same. And then he ransacked the room. Pulling out drawers and tipping the contents onto the floor, hauling all the clothes out of the wardrobes. When Mel tried to reach for her phone again he stamped on it – smashed it into pieces. If she hadn’t snatched her hand away he’d have crushed that too.
‘He seemed to be looking for something, and not finding it. And he was getting more and more frustrated, more and more out of control. Eventually he just turned and walked out of the room again. Mel ran after him, and saw him going into Abbie’s room.
‘We’d never . . . never changed anything in there. Mel tackled him again when he started wrecking Abbie’s things, and he turned on her in a rage. He started to strangle her.