‘Then he threw her down on the bed, and she thought that he was going to rape her. But he didn’t. He just went on searching. And this time he must have found what he was looking for, because he left. Mel was too terrified by now to try to stop him a third time. But as soon as she heard the door slam she called the police, and then she went down onto the stairs to tend to me.’
‘You said the police weren’t involved,’ I pointed out.
Steve gave a bitter snort that might have been intended as a laugh. ‘I said the police weren’t looking for Abbie,’ he corrected me. ‘We hadn’t even realised . . . We told them about the assault, the damage, and we said we could identify the man who’d done it. They said they’d issue a warrant, and we’d hear in due course. Then when they’d gone, and we were trying to put the place back into some kind of order, we noticed . . . that Abbie wasn’t there. But we thought she’d just been frightened away by the noise, and the violence, and she’d come back later.
‘By the evening we were really starting to miss her. She didn’t answer when we called, and we couldn’t feel her the way we usually do. Because she was gone. It was Abbie that Peace was looking for. And he’d taken her. Somehow he’d taken her away with him.’
Steve Torrington fell silent, gripping the neck of the bag tightly in both white-knuckled hands. And the silence lengthened, because I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.
I’d never even heard of a ghost being kidnapped before. It sounded so unlikely, so grotesque, that I still resisted the idea. Ghosts can’t be packaged and shipped like groceries or worn and carried like accessories. Mostly they can’t move at all outside of a fixed compass. Someone here had to be the voice of reason, and it was asking too much to expect that degree of detachment from Torrington himself.
‘You assume he took her,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. ‘It could be, as I said, that she left because her time here was—’
‘Peace called Mel.’ There was a tremor in Torrington’s voice, and he was still looking down at the black bag, still holding on to it as though it was some kind of lifeline. ‘About two hours later. He wasn’t making much sense, but he said “You’ll have to come back to me now, won’t you? Because you can’t have her if you don’t have me. We’ll all be together.” She didn’t know what he was talking about. She hung up. She just hung up. And afterwards we realised. We knew.’
Okay, that was something pretty hefty in the way of circumstantial evidence. My mind flicked off onto an irresistible tangent. Could it be done? Could it be slickly, smoothly done? Breaking and entering, and grand theft spiritual? Ghosts – most ghosts – haunt a particular place. It might be the place where they died, or where they were buried, or it could just be some spot to which they had strong associations in life. That’s their anchor. They can move a little way away from it: in some cases a couple of hundred yards, but except in a few special cases like the little girl ghosts I set free at the Stanger, I’ve never heard of it being more. So how would you take a ghost away from its anchor and walk away with it? Maybe . . . yeah, maybe there was a way that I could see. But I knew for a fact that it was something I couldn’t do myself.
I was getting dangerously interested. The very weirdness of the situation appealed to my varied and prurient curiosities. But I generally hold to Dirty Harry’s dictum that a man should know his limitations.
‘I still think the police are your best option,’ I said. ‘They can find Peace a lot easier than I can. And I think they’ll take a complaint seriously. He broke into your house, after all, and he threatened you.’
Torrington was staring at me with a bleak, slightly accusing expression on his face. He knew when he was being snowed.
‘And what if they do find him?’ he asked, his voice harsh. ‘Will they find Abbie, too? Can they bring her back for us?’
He had me there. All I could do was shrug, which felt pusillanimous even to me. Okay, he was right. Even a relatively good cop like Coldwood, if something like this fell into his lap, would be helpless running a search for something he couldn’t see, hear or touch: especially a cop, because there’s that whole blind-deaf-and-dumb pragmatism thing I already mentioned. Conversely, if I was anywhere close to where Abbie was, I’d at least have ways of knowing I was close, and maybe taking a bearing. So there was a chance that I could help these people: a chance that I’d be able to run Peace down, and that I’d know what I was looking for when I saw it. It wasn’t a good chance, but it was there: and if this didn’t count as a spiritual service, then what the Hell did?
On the other hand, bringing Abbie back was going to be a much tougher proposition than finding her: I doubted I’d be able to appeal to Peace’s better nature, assuming he even had one. And since I didn’t know exactly how you went about kidnapping a ghost, I didn’t know how you went about bringing her safely home, either. And then there was all the collateral stuff: I’d have to check the Torringtons’ story out as far as I could before I got any distance into this. And I’d have to decide what the hell I should charge them, because this fell way outside even the fuzzy logic of my usual tariff.
Once I start coming up with commonsensical points like that, it usually means I’m trying to talk myself out of something I’ve already decided to do. But this time, reality reasserted itself. There was no point in taking on a job I couldn’t do and adding to the Torringtons’ trauma by building up their hopes and then kicking them down again.
Steve Torrington was still looking at me, so I had to say something.
‘Well,’ I temporised, ‘you’ve probably got a point there. But if it comes to that, I don’t know if I can be of any more use to you than the police could.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘How could you know, until you’ve tried?’
Which was throwing the ball back into my court with a vengeance. I tried to lob it back. ‘It’s not that straightforward, Mister Torrington. Not like changing a car tyre, or –’ I cast around for a metaphor, found it close to hand ‘– or measuring you for a suit. Maybe if I had some of her things. I mean, if I could see her room, or—’
As if he’d been waiting for this moment, Steve hefted the black bin-liner and put it down on the desk between us. ‘These are the things she cared most about,’ he said, and he looked at me with the slightest hint of smugness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a solicitor, after all. Methodical mind, focused mainly on how the rules of any situation work and what the precedents are. He’d done his research.
I gave him a nod, half admiring, half resigned. He emptied the bag out carefully onto the desk.
There was quite a lot there: enough so that I wondered what was left behind in Abbie’s room. Books, CDs, scrunchies, T-shirts; a cloisonné hair slide with a sort of Celtic knot design; teddy bears and dolls; a pair of very elaborate trainers: some posters of male celebrities I didn’t recognise, torn at the corners where the Blu-Tack hadn’t yielded quickly enough. It was an embarrassment of riches: the desiderata of a young girl’s truncated life. If I was in the right mood, I could probably pick out the items that had meant most to Abbie – the ones that would provide the strongest link to her. But the mood is a skittish thing, and getting into it is never easy for me when there are other people around.
So I picked something up, not quite at random. A Victorian doll of the kind where the head is made out of porcelain while the body is stitched and stuffed, its relatively unfinished look hidden by a sewn-on dress. It had the unsettling, subtly aggressive blankness of a lot of old dolls, and it was in a near-terminal state of disrepair. The head was only attached to the body by a few loops of stitching, most of which had already come away. If I wasn’t careful with it, I’d decapitate it without even trying.
A childhood toy seemed the best bet: emotions are always strongest when you’re young. Not that Abbie had lived to get old.