‘You don’t need a blessing,’ I told Peace. ‘You need a doctor.’
Peace twisted his head away from me to stare at his daughter’s ghost. ‘Abbie,’ he growled sternly, ‘don’t you be trying to take a peek – it’s not a game we’re playing here.’
Then he looked back at me. ‘No doctors,’ he said vehemently, trying to sit up and not quite managing it. ‘You don’t know who you’re up against. Any 999 call gets logged – any call to a GP surgery likewise. Even if you could get someone to come out here and ask no questions, he’d still get to know about it and he’d be down on me before you could fill the fucking prescription.’ There was a brief pause, and then he added as he let his head sink back down heavily onto the rolled-up jacket, ‘Pardon my French, Abbie.’
He pulled the blanket back up to cover the horrific landscape of his wounds. ‘You can turn round again now, sweetheart,’ he muttered, but Abbie seemed not to have heard. Her insubstantial figure, barely etched on the darkness, remained staring away from us into the corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. I didn’t want to speculate about what she was seeing there.
I thought about my own infection. That had come from a single cut, and it had laid me out like ten quids’ worth of loose change in a sock. It was a miracle that Peace was still conscious at all. It also occurred to me to wonder how it was that the loup-garous hadn’t been able to follow his scent the way they’d followed mine. Maybe the faint smell of incense had something to do with that, but I was willing to bet that Peace had ways of blindsiding them just as he’d done to me. He was a foxy bastard, no doubt about it: but now he had his leg in the trap and his options were running out.
‘Peace,’ I said, ‘you’re right about the call-logging, but take it from me that this is going to get worse, not better. I think you’ll most likely die if you won’t let anyone treat you.’
He absorbed that in silence, thinking it through.
‘Carla,’ he muttered at last. ‘Go and see Carla. Get me some more speed. I’ll ride the bastard out.’ He closed his eyes, and for a moment it looked as though he was sinking into a doze, but then he bared his teeth in a grimace, letting out a long, ragged breath. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t, will I?’ His eyes snapped open again and fixed me with a fierce glare. ‘I can’t die, Castor. I can’t. If I die, then they’ll . . .’ He hesitated, his gaze flicking to Abbie and then back to me. ‘I can’t leave her alone.’
I nodded. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I might be able to get you what you need without going through a hospital or a practice. Can I use my mobile?’
‘To call who?’ I saw his fists clench: even without the gun, and even in the ravaged state he was in now, he was still a force to be reckoned with. I didn’t want to have to argue with him.
‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A very old friend. My landlady, in fact. Who by a very happy coincidence is currently doing the nasty with a doctor. She’s also got healing hands on her own account. Holistic medicine, kind of thing. So this is a two-for-one deal.’ That phrase made me think of Susan Book – she’d said something similar about Juliet and me – and for a moment I felt a premonitory qualm.
Peace, on the other hand, relaxed slightly as he saw a way of squaring the circle.
‘And she can be trusted?’
‘Absolutely. She’s not even capable of telling a lie. It’s against her religion.’
‘God-botherer?’ Peace’s lip curled back in distaste, and he waved a hand over his midriff to indicate what the blanket now hid. ‘Those fucking Catholics did this to me.’
‘No, Pen’s sort of a religion of one these days,’ I said. ‘Believe me, she’s not going to shop you to the Anathemata.’
Peace gave a very faint nod, surrendering the point as though he was too weak to hammer it out any more. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Call her. But tell her to make sure nobody follows her. If she’s that close to you, they could be watching her too.’
I called Pen at home. The phone rang six times, and then the answering machine kicked in. ‘Hi, this is Pamela Bruckner. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .’ Pen picked up as the message was still playing, to my great relief. ‘Hello?’ she said, her voice sounding fuzzy with sleep.
‘Pen, it’s me. Sorry to wake you, but this is a bit of an emergency.’
‘Fix? Where are you? It’s—’
‘Two in the morning. I know, I know. Listen, you remember the state I was in when you found me on the doorstep? Well, I’m with someone else who’s had a bigger dose of the same thing, and he’s in a really bad way. Did that little Scottish guy leave any of those antibiotics lying around?’
‘I don’t think so. But I can call Dylan. Where are you?’
‘Way out west. Call him now and then call me back, okay?’
‘Okay.’
She hung up. Pen gets the point quickly, bless her, and she doesn’t waste words. I turned back to Peace. ‘Do you want me to meet her somewhere else?’ I asked. ‘She can pass the drugs on to me without finding out where you and Abbie are.’
‘You said she might be able to do some good herself,’ he reminded me.
‘Yeah, I did say that.’
‘Then let her come.’
Peace closed his eyes again, his breath coming quick and shallow now. He’d been holding on by pure willpower, and it was starting to falter now that he’d put himself in my hands. Not good: not good at all.
I felt a sensation like the epidermal prickling you get with pins and needles, and glanced up to find Abbie’s wraith-like form hovering beside me.
‘Will my dad be okay?’ she asked, her voice touching my ear without stirring the still air.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘He’s in a bad way. It’s not so much the wounds, it’s the infection.’
‘Make him better,’ Abbie whispered, sounding younger than her fourteen years. She’d never be older now.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, my own voice barely louder than hers.
The phone rang, smacking me out of unpleasant thoughts. It was Pen. I turned away from Abbie and Peace to take the call.
‘Dylan said he’d come himself,’ she told me. ‘He’s at home. He says he’s got some vancomycin there, but he’s not giving it away without seeing the patient. So if you tell me where you are, I can tell him and he can come and meet you.’
Chinese Whispers is a lousy game at the best of times. Peace had said it was okay to tell Pen: he hadn’t given me permission to bring in any third parties.
I glanced around and saw that Peace still had his eyes closed.
‘Peace,’ I called. He didn’t respond. I called again, but he seemed to be sleeping. At any rate, his eyes were still closed.
I thought it through, and decided that I didn’t have a choice. Without antibiotics, he wasn’t going to see the night out. I put the phone back to my ear.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do you know Castlebar Hill?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe Dylan does.’
‘If not, he can look it up on a map. Where are you on Castlebar Hill?’
‘There’s a roundabout. I’m there.’
‘On the roundabout?’
‘Yeah. It’s a big one. You have to park up on one of the side streets and walk in. There’s a building – the remains of a building. It burned down a few years back.’
‘And that’s where you are? At two in the morning?’
‘Don’t start.’
‘Okay. I’ve told him it’s an emergency. He’ll get there as quick as he can.’
‘We’re not going anywhere. Thanks, Pen.’
‘You can pay me back by telling me the whole story.’
‘If I survive it, I will.’
She hung up again and I pocketed the phone. I sat down on the floor beside Peace, with nothing to do now but wait. The dead girl walked across to stand over me, her feet not quite touching the ground. For ghosts, most things come down to memory and routine. They behave as though they still have flesh but all they’ve really got are habits. She stared down at her father, himself more dead than alive, and the expression on her face was hard to bear.