‘Help’s on the way,’ I said.
Abbie nodded. ‘I don’t want him to die,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want anything to hurt him.’
All I could do was nod in my turn.
Peace stirred, woke from his shallow sleep, and looked up at me in momentary dislocation. Almost he reached for his gun: then he seemed to remember who I was and what was going on. ‘There’s coffee,’ he muttered thickly, pointing to a small stash of packets and jars up against the wall near the gas burner. ‘And bottled water.’
I made coffee, just for something to do. While the water came slowly to the boil, I went and retrieved my coat from the floor. It wasn’t a cold night, but I always prefer to have my whistle where I can get to it in a hurry. Absentmindedly, I checked the contents of the pockets, finding everything where it should have been – and one anomalous item, which I didn’t recognise until I pulled it out into the light: the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll, slightly chipped but miraculously still in one piece. I slid it back into the pocket hastily: I didn’t know what memories it might provoke for her, and I didn’t want to find out right then.
The coffee was instant, of course, but I poured a slug from my hip flask into each of the mugs to sweeten the pill. I brought one over to Peace and put it down on the floor next to him. He nodded a thank-you.
‘So what’s the story?’ I said, sitting down on the suitcase which was the closest thing to a chair I could see.
Peace sighed and shook his head. ‘No story. Stories make some kind of fucking sense. My life is just . . . things. Things happening. I never knew where I was going.’ He looked tired and old, although I guessed he only had a couple of years on me.
‘I meant about Abbie,’ I said, bluntly. ‘She calls you Dad. Is that just a figure of speech, or did you really have a part to play in making her?’
He gave me a bleak stare. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, at last.
‘I think there’s a birth certificate on file in Burkina Faso that shows you fathered a child there. But the record shows that the girl who died last Saturday night in Hendon was the daughter of a man named Stephen Torrington.’
‘Yeah? Well, you should go ask Stephen Torrington about that. You’ll need your whistle, though: he’s likely to want a little coaxing before he talks.’
‘And her mother was a woman named Melanie – but after that it’s pick-a-card-any-card, because she seems to change her surname the way other people change their underwear.’
‘When I met her it was Melanie Jeffers.’
I was going to let the subject drop, but I reckoned that it might do Peace good to talk: and it would certainly do me good to listen. ‘Peace,’ I said gently, ‘I’ve just spent three days living in a Whitehall farce where every cupboard had a cop, a Catholic or a lunatic cultist inside it. I could get ten years just for knowing Abbie was dead when the police still thought she was alive. So could you find it in your heart to be a little less terse?’
‘It’s my life, Castor.’
‘Mine too.’
We stared at each other again: this time he broke first.
‘Yeah,’ he muttered. ‘Why not? Give me another shot of that brandy first. I hate going back over this shit. I hate the fucker I was when I did this shit.’
Peace seemed to have lost his reservations about swearing in front of Abbie – and, anyway, she seemed not to have noticed, so maybe it wasn’t the first time. I handed him the flask, thinking he was going to top up his coffee. Instead he upended it and drank it dry, then handed it back to me with an appreciative grimace.
‘That was rough,’ he said.
‘Didn’t seem to slow you down much.’
‘Rough is what I need right now. Abbie?’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘This is your story too, and you’ve got a right to hear it. But not all of it. There’s a bit in the middle that I’m going to send you to sleep for, because – because it’s not the sort of thing a girl your age should be exposed to. Okay?’
The ghost nodded silently. Send her to sleep? I was going to watch that one with keen interest: if Peace could whistle ghosts down as well as up, and do it without risk of exorcising them altogether, he had more control of the fine-tuning than I’d ever had. I remembered the psychic smackdown he’d given me the second time I tried to get a fix on Abbie. I might learn something here – assuming he lived long enough to teach me.
‘You’ve probably heard a lot about me by now,’ Peace said, ‘and you can take it for granted that most of it’s true. There’s worse, too: things that never made it into the legend because I was careful who I talked to. I’m not going into detail, but you know the sort of thing I mean: I was big for my age – bigger at fifteen than most grown men – so I came to a lot of things early and learned a lot of bad habits.
‘I’m not making any excuses for myself. I did bad things because I was stupid and immature and I didn’t care all that much. Saying I was too young to know any better doesn’t make a gram of difference in my book and I don’t see why it should in yours.’
Peace hesitated, as if he was poised at the brink of a revelation he wasn’t quite ready for yet. ‘I’m not a saint,’ I told him, by way of speeding things along. ‘And I’m not your confessor, either.’
He nodded, but the silence stretched a little further before he spoke again. ‘It was like – I went into everything just wanting to know what I could get out of it. Screwed people over in all kinds of ways and never thought about it, because people who can’t look out for themselves deserve to get taken. That’s just the way the world works.
‘I must have been about twelve when I found out I had the gift. For exorcism, I mean. I’d always gambled: horses, dogs, slot machines – but my favourite game was poker and no one could beat me at it. I’d be sitting at a table with four or five other blokes, and I could look at each one of them in turn, and think – yeah, that’s what you’ve got. You’re sitting on a pair of eights, aren’t you, betting on another one in the flop. He’s got a king high, he’s got jacks over threes, and Mister Cool over there has got sod all so I can win this.
‘But after a while I found out I could do a lot more than that. Instead of just guessing the cards that people were holding, I started to see people themselves as cards – as hands of cards. Live or dead, didn’t matter, there was a particular hand of cards that stood for that person in my mind. That’s how I bind ghosts – I deal out the right hand of cards, and then I shuffle it back into the deck. Bang. They’re gone.
‘Like I said, with me everything was a means to an end. I burned ghosts for money, sure – just like I gambled for money. And sometimes if I found a ghost that was still fresh and more or less together, I’d sweat it for what it had left behind when it died that might still be around for me to pick up. Like, what were the numbers on your bank accounts, and is there a little stash of money at home that you salted away against a rainy day and that your missus doesn’t know about?’
Peace looked at me hard, which was probably how I was looking at him. ‘There wasn’t anyone I’d have spared in those days,’ he said. ‘Man, woman or child, I didn’t give a fuck. I did it for the cash, because I went through a lot of cash, and I did it for the hell of it. Because I could.’
He seemed to expect an answer – maybe outrage or accusation – but after going over this ground with Nicky there wasn’t much he could say that would have surprised me. I shrugged. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you were a bad man. Maybe the worst. Let’s take that as read.’
Peace gave a bitter laugh and shook his head. ‘Give me a break, Castor. I wasn’t the worst, not by a million sodding miles. Maybe I kidded myself that I was, but I was a fucking babe in arms compared with some of the people I met.
‘Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the 45 medium regiment, first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army – not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while: mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.