‘I thought we could play a little game, Nicky,’ I said, positioning the map a little better so that the section I needed was dead centre.
‘I’m not in the mood for games. I just had a physiological reaction I haven’t had since I died. My prick got a fucking visitation from the other side of the grave – your side – and I’m trying to come down from it. I want you to go now.’
I ignored him. I knew that once I told him what we were doing, he’d be into it: I just had to sell him the concept.
‘Peckham Steiner,’ I said, ‘had a big dream about a network of safe houses. Miniature, self-contained fortresses in the hearts of cities, where the living could shelter if the dead ever got their act together and tried to mount a coup.’
Nicky was unimpressed. ‘Steiner was bat-shit crazy,’ he snapped. He snatched the map off the table and started to roll it up again, with slightly shaky hands. Juliet had clearly got to him on a level that scared him very deeply.
‘“The essential element to stop the dead from entering is water,”’ I quoted. ‘You remember that? The letter he sent out to all the borough councils? “But ramparts of earth and air are also useful, de da de da, to blind their eyes and blunt their forces.”’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Nicky shoved the map back into the drawer and slammed it shut. He was scarier now than he’d been when he had the gun pointed at me, because he was less in control of himself.
‘Because it’s a big joke, right? Everyone laughs about how spectacularly Steiner lost it, and the safe houses are the funniest part. Well, here’s the punchline: he actually built one. Right here in London.’
Nicky’s response was immediate and vehement. ‘My arse,’ he said indignantly. ‘He fucking did not.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because I would’ve known about it. I know everything that happens in London. When a sparrow farts, I get to hear about it. You’re telling me I could’ve missed something that big?’
‘It was disguised as something else,’ I said.
Nicky glared at me for a long moment. Then he opened the drawer and hauled the map out again. He rolled it out across the table with a brusque gesture, and then waved at the expanse of tight brown lines on off-white paper.
‘Where?’ he demanded.
I shook my head. ‘Uh-uh. Like I said, this is a game. You have to find it for me.’
‘So it’s just bullshit. You don’t know if there’s a safe house at all?’
‘Dennis Peace is holding on to Abbie Torrington’s spirit – probably inside a gold locket that she was wearing when she died. And when I tried to raise Abbie with a tune, the contact died on me. First she was there, then – bang – she was gone. I’d never met anything like that before. There’s lots of reasons why I might not be able to find a ghost, but I’ve never had one slip away from me like that after I’ve already got the sense of it.
‘Then I went to Rosie Crucis tonight, before coming out here to you, and she said that Dennis Peace told her he was “staying with Mister Steiner”. That reads one way for me, and only one way. He’s found Steiner’s safe house. Steiner said the house could blind the eyes of the dead. Maybe it can also blindside someone living who’s looking for the dead.’
‘Sounds like a lot of maybes,’ said Nicky.
‘Indulge me, Nicky.’
He rolled his eyes and shrugged: the least convincing display of bored nonchalance I’d seen in a while. ‘Yeah, whatever. Go for it. It’s not like I need to be anywhere else. Okay, what do we know?’
I bent over the map. ‘I played the whistle for Abbie three times,’ I said, ‘in three different places. I got a vague sense of direction each time. The first one was here.’ I found Harlesden on the map, and pointed. ‘From there, it felt like she was south and west of me. Somewhere out – this way. Then I tried again from Scrubs Lane, and the feeling was just westward. Almost straight out towards the setting sun.’
‘That’s south of west,’ Nicky corrected me schoolmarmishly.
‘And then from the Hammersmith flyover it was definitely a little north of west.’
‘Ealing. Ealing Broadway. Or Hanger Hill. Or Scotch Common. Or anywhere from West Acton out to fuck knows where.’
‘Hallowed ground to all four sides,’ I quoted from memory.
‘You know how many churches there are in London, Castor? That’s about as much use as saying it’s handy for the buses.’
‘Point taken. But then there are those ramparts of water. I’m guessing that this place will have a high water table, so that the basement at least will extend down into it.’
‘More likely it’s just gonna have some kind of moat.’
‘A moat’s harder to hide, Nicky.’
‘Maybe he built it in the middle of the Brent Reservoir.’
‘Maybe. But I think Steiner wanted the safe houses to look a lot like everywhere else from the outside. They were built to withstand a siege, not to invite one.’
‘Okay.’ Nicky’s gaze was darting over the map now. ‘Gonna stand in its own grounds, anyway, though. Don’t see how you could do the ramparts of earth and air on a street of semis.’
‘Good. And it’s not going to be too far out. Steiner saw this as being like the Thames Barrier – it’s a service for London, and for Londoners.’
‘Land rises anyway when you get out too far west,’ Nicky muttered. ‘So you’d be having to dig down further to get into the water table. Steiner was a West Londoner himself, wasn’t he? From Perivale? And he always said he was gonna retire somewhere out that way.’
He fell silent, his hands tracing lines across the map, his expression deepening from a frown of concentration into something more truculent and dogged.
‘Think laterally, Nicky. It’s going to be something right under our noses.’
His right index finger came down hard on Castlebar Hill.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It is. It’s the fucking Oriflamme.’
For a moment I didn’t get it. ‘But the Oriflamme’s in—’ I started to say.
‘Not that piece-of-shit Goth dive in Soho Square, Castor. The original Oriflamme. The one that burned down.’
16
The Oriflamme had been intended as a museum when it was originally built, and it stood in the most unlikely location you could think of: in the middle of a roundabout on the B455, just off Castlebar Hill. So my readings when I was holding the doll had been pretty damn accurate: southwest from Harlesden, due west – give or take – from Du Cane Road.
But it had closed down as a museum because of the ineluctable laws of supply and demand: specifically, because demand for a museum that you had to wade through three lanes of speeding London traffic to reach was negligible – the more so because it was a museum of local industry, which meant that most of the exhibits were bullshit adverts for Hoover and Hawker-Siddeley in light disguises.
So Peckham Steiner got a bargain, which he passed on to Bourbon Bryant, who gave us – briefly – the Oriflamme. And then it burned to the ground. That was all the history I knew, apart from Nicky’s wacky conspiracy theories. But now, walking up through Cleveland Park at two in the morning with nothing but darkness at my back, I kind of wished I’d made it my business to know more.
Dead ahead of me as I crested the top of the hill was the Oriflamme – or rather, the little island of raised ground at the centre of the roundabout. The building itself was hidden from view from this angle by a small clump of trees at one edge of the island. As I got closer I could see a sign and the beginning of a path through the trees. The sign said SIR NORMAN TEBBITT MUSEUM OF LOCAL INDUSTRY: Bryant had never had it changed because he thought that was funny, although he never explained the joke to me and I never got it.
I crossed the road, which was deserted at this hour, and started along the path. It was only about ten yards long: a few steps brought me through to the clear space in the centre of the island where the ruined shell of the Oriflamme stood. I hadn’t been here in years, but now it all came back to me. There was a ring of earth about four feet high all around the building, created by digging out a trench on the inside of the ring. Bryant, or maybe Steiner himself, had had the bottom of the trench paved and the small artificial hill planted with flowers. It had seemed a reasonably clever and artful way of keeping the traffic noise at bay. Now I saw it for what it was: ramparts of earth and air. Nicky had called it on the money. But those ramparts hadn’t saved the Oriflamme from the fourth element: like the bad fairy that never got invited to the christening, fire took the place apart.