Someone didn’t close the circle . . .
‘Saturday night,’ Basquiat said, from right beside me. ‘Some time after eight and before, say, two in the morning. A whole bunch of people were in here. We’ve got tyre tracks on the forecourt outside, footprints, scuff marks, the works. We’re guessing maybe a couple of dozen people in all, but that’s still in the air.
‘What we do know is that they didn’t just walk in off the street. Some of them had been living here for a while before that, out in the back.’ She pointed off into the dark. ‘There are six sleeping bags there, a portable latrine, a lot of canned food and a dozen or so black bags full of various kinds of domestic garbage. So let’s say we’ve got a core group doing caretaking duties here – keeping the place in order, watching out for any untoward attention. Then we’ve got a bigger group that just turns up on Saturday night for the party.’
She went down on one knee and sketched out the outline of the circle with one well-manicured hand. ‘And we can guess what kind of a party it was. This is a pseudo-Paracelsian magic circle, based on an original in the Archidoxis Magicae. Necromancy. Someone was doing black magic here, and –’ her fingers hovered over the dark brown stain at the centre of the circle ‘– it involved a sacrifice.’
Basquiat stood up again. ‘And this is where it gets interesting,’ she said, although her tone stayed level to the point of indifference. With a nod of the head, she indicated a part of the room I hadn’t even looked at: one of the bays, dark like the other corners of the room out of the spotlights’ beams. ‘An uninvited guest,’ she said. ‘Comes in from that way – or he was there all along, waiting for the right moment. There’s a window: boarded up, but someone’s pried the board away and left it propped up against the wall. He was quiet, so they didn’t hear him coming. Or maybe they were chanting. Either way, he gets up close without anyone turning to look at him. We know that, because the people who were standing here, here and here –’ she counted them off, frowning as though with the effort of memory, although the dark smears under the plastic marked the spots well enough ‘– were shot in the back.’
She turned to face me and stared at me with cold appraisal for a second or so: but then she pointed past me towards the back of the room. ‘The rest of the magic-makers start running – not away from the man with the gun, but towards him. They’re not armed themselves. Or at least, no other guns get fired as far as we can tell. All the bullets we’ve retrieved come from the same weapon – an IMI Tavor assault rifle, Israeli military issue. That’s a weapon with both semi-auto and fully automatic functions but the magazine – so I’m told – only carries thirty rounds. Doesn’t matter. This man’s not wasting them, and he’s not missing.’
Basquiat walked past me, forcing me to turn to follow her as she continued the lecture. This kind of browbeating by facts, figures and ballroom dancing is standard cop procedure. I was listening, but on a level underneath that there was a question I kept turning over and over in my mind with a kind of sick dread, more or less in time to the throbbing in my skulclass="underline" what – or who – had been standing in the centre of the circle?
‘But there’s no way he’s got time to reload,’ Basquiat said, like a maths lecturer saying ‘Compute the angle.’ Her tone was still flat, but there was a kind of excitement or at least a kind of animation in her face. I could see she loved her job. And I wondered, briefly, whether a case like this might be a career-making deal for a young, upwardly mobile detective sergeant.
‘And he’s used up about six bullets just introducing himself,’ she went on, ‘so assuming he had a full clip when he came in he’s now got a couple of dozen shots left. If they rush him, which is what they’re doing, he’s in trouble. Fully automatic fire will scatter a crowd, but he doesn’t have any time to switch over and in any case anyone who doesn’t go down in that first sweep will be right on top of him and he’ll have nothing left to fight with except his bare hands.’
She scanned the floor, as if she was reading the story there. ‘Maybe he expected them to run. Maybe he’s surprised that they don’t get the message. He’s not scared, though, that’s for sure, because he walks to meet them. One – two – three.’ She pointed to a scuff mark on the floor in between two of the sheets of plastic. ‘He stops here. And then he does something very odd.’
‘He fires at the floor,’ I said. My throat was unpleasantly dry, and it came out as a croak.
Basquiat looked at me curiously. ‘That’s right,’ she said, acknowledging the point with a nod. ‘He does. And why does he do that, Mister Castor?’
I shrugged unconvincingly. I knew the answer, but I was still hoping I was wrong. ‘Warning shot?’
‘After shooting three people in the back? I don’t think so.’
Okay, what the fuck. If she was determined to make me dance . . . ‘The circle,’ I said tiredly. ‘He blasted a hole in the circle.’
‘I’m still asking why,’ said Basquiat. ‘It seems a strange thing to do. Can you shed any light on the reasoning?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, facing her stare as levelly as I could. ‘But maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m here first. It would help to know.’
Basquiat’s jaw tensed so hard that for a second I could see every muscle in her throat. ‘I’m surprised you have to ask.’ The words came out laden with something like anger, something like contempt. ‘You’re one of DS Coldwood’s regular informants – or so he says. And he uses you a lot in situations like this, isn’t that right? You tell him where someone’s died, and how they died, and how they’ve been getting along since.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s about it. So do you want a reading, detective?’
‘Not at this particular point in time, Mister Castor, no. Maybe later. What I’d like right now is an answer. How did you know that Abbie Torrington was dead?’
So there it was. It opened up inside my stomach like a pit, just waiting for one more word from Basquiat to fill it.
‘I’m an exorcist,’ I said.
‘So what, it’s a sparrow-in-the-market-place kind of deal?’ she spat, unconsciously echoing my own words to Gwillam. ‘Everyone who dies, you get to hear about it? How’s my grandad doing? Last time I checked, he was still okay, but maybe you can give me an update.’
She glared at me again. I was still trying to think of something to say when DC Fields lumbered up and handed her a note without so much as a glance in my direction. She took it, read it, and handed it back to him with a curt nod. He went away.
‘A man and a woman came into my office two days ago,’ I told Basquiat, as she turned her attention back to me. ‘They claimed to be Abbie’s parents. And they asked me to find her.’
‘To find her dead body?’ The detective’s tone was incredulous.
‘No. To find her ghost.’
It didn’t sound much better. Before Basquiat could answer, I held up my hand in a kind of surrender. ‘Just tell me, sergeant, did Abbie Torrington die inside that circle?’
‘Yes,’ said Basquiat coldly. ‘She did. Stabbed through the heart by some sick fucks playing at witches and wizards.’ She came right up close to me, dropping her voice so that her next words would just be between the two of us. ‘We’ve got her body down at the morgue right now, and you can bet we’re going over it with a fine-toothed comb. And if I find out you were one of the people who killed her, Castor, no power on Earth is going to keep me from ripping your balls off. And then reading you your rights at great length while you bleed.’
The pit filled up: I thought it would fill with grief – grief for little Abbie, cut open like a side of meat as part of a Satanist ritual – but it turned out to be anger.