‘Go on.’
‘At my office, in Craven Park Road – next to that kebab house I told you about. There’s a black plastic bag, full of toys and clothes. They all—’
‘We already checked your office,’ Basquiat interrupted, waving me silent. ‘The door had been smashed in, and you’d been turned over pretty thoroughly. There was nothing there.’
Damn. I groped around for inspiration. ‘My coat,’ I said. ‘There was a doll’s head in the pocket—’ Basquiat was shaking her head. It looked as though Fanke had outthought me all along the line.
Or maybe not. I remembered the golden chain wrapped around Peace’s wrist. Wrapped tightly, and clenched firmly in that meaty fist. Clenched tightly because it had already broken when Peace tore it from around the dead girl’s neck at the meeting house.
‘When your men turned over the Oriflamme,’ I said, ‘did they find any links from a gold chain?’
Basquiat’s eyes narrowed very slightly. She shook her head.
‘Check again. They’d have to be small enough to miss. And maybe they could have fallen into a crack in the floor, or got into the seams of Peace’s clothes. That chain was hers. Abbie’s. She wore it every day of her life. And it was broken, so it could have shed a link or two during the fight . . .’
The detective sergeant stood up briskly, crossed to the door and hammered on it. ‘I’m not saying I believe you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘I am saying I’ll check it.’
‘Fast,’ I told her. ‘Do it fast. I know Abbie already counts as dead in your book. But what Fanke has in mind for her is worse.’
‘I said I’ll check it.’
The door opened and she stepped through without a word.
‘Get me my phone call!’ I shouted after her. ‘Basquiat, get me my fucking phone call!’
The door slammed shut.
But this time she’d listened – and relented. Barely ten minutes later the door opened again, and an orderly in a white coat wheeled in a payphone on a trolley. He walked right out again, and the cop who’d opened the door looked at me expectantly.
‘I don’t have any money,’ I reminded him.
He looked truculent. ‘Nothing in the rules says I’ve got to sub you, you cheeky fucker,’ he grunted.
‘Detective Sergeant Basquiat will pay you back,’ I assured him. ‘And contrariwise, she’ll probably twist your bollocks off if her collar goes tits-up because you didn’t give me my statutory rights.’
The cop dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of silver, which he flung down on the floor. ‘There you go,’ he sneered, and stalked out. The key turned in the lock.
There was a Yellow Pages on a wire shelf underneath the trolley. I looked under ‘Roman Catholic church’, found nothing, but under ‘Religious Organisations’ there were a number of places that looked vaguely promising. I eventually settled on a seminary in Vauxhall. I dialled the number, and a man’s voice said, ‘Father Braithewaite’ in slightly plummy tones.
‘Good evening, father,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you can help me. I need a number for a biblical research organisation which I believe is located in Woolwich. Does that ring any bells with you?’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Father Braithewaite immediately. ‘The Douglas Ignatieff Trust. I should be able to obtain their number – I’ve several publications of theirs on my shelves. Just a moment.’
There was a clunk as the phone was put down, followed by a variety of other bangs, rustles and scrapes which seemed to go on for a hell of a long time. Finally, just as I was about to hang up and try somewhere else, the priest came back on the line.
‘Here it is,’ he said, and recited a number to me. Since I didn’t have any way to write it down, I asked him to repeat it and committed it to memory.
Thanking Father Braithewaite for his help, I hung up and dialled the new number. It was the right place, but all I got was a recorded voice and an invitation to leave a message on the answerphone.
Well, in for a penny. ‘This is Castor,’ I said, ‘and my message is for Father Gwillam of the Anathemata Curialis. Ask him to call me on this number. As quick as he can, because the clock’s ticking. If he’s still looking for Dennis Peace, you can tell him that the trail’s gone dead. Literally. The only way he’s going to get to Abbie Torrington now is through me.’
I hung up and settled down to sweat out the wait, hoping that they wouldn’t come and take the phone away from me before I got my answer. Also, that this wasn’t one of those cleverly doctored payphones that block incoming calls.
It wasn’t. The phone rang after about fifteen minutes and I scooped it up on the first bounce. If the cops outside the door heard the sound, they didn’t respond to it.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Mister Castor?’
I remembered the dry voice. I’d forgotten the inhuman, puritanical calm.
‘Yeah.’
‘Gwillam here. What can I do for you?’
I told him, and he laughed without any trace of humour. It was like hearing a corpse laugh.
‘And is there anything else you’d like?’ he asked, the irony in the words not making it through to the remorselessly level voice. ‘Any dead relatives of yours we can intercede for? Or we could stop along the way and pick you up some pizza . . .’
‘We’ll talk terms later, Gwillam,’ I told him, in no mood for light banter. ‘For now, just you go ahead and let the dogs out.’
I hung up, hard enough to split the plastic of the receiver.
19
I’m not good at waiting. I never have been. I’ve met people who can switch into Zen mode when there’s nothing going on and just mentally hibernate until the toast pops up. I tend to be punching the walls after a while – or, in the absence of walls, other people.
Basquiat had left me my watch, which was either a rare sign of humanity or the most insidious and refined torture. I looked at it often enough over the next few hours to wear a hole in the glass.
The day dragged on, like a glacier fingernailing its way down a mountain. I couldn’t settle to the car reviews again, so I found myself leaning on the windowsill looking out across Highgate Hill, where the sun, shot down in terrible slo-mo, made the sky over Marx’s tomb flare a deep enough red to have satisfied even him.
Maybe that red sky was an omen of some kind – happy shepherds notwithstanding. Just before the sun touched the horizon there was a sound like the clapping of God’s hands, followed by an endlessly prolonged windchime scream of breaking glass.
The fire alarms went off all over the building, including one just outside my door which drowned out any sounds from further away. I felt the vibrations of running footsteps, though; then immediately afterwards there were shouts in the corridor outside. I heard some kind of bellowed challenge or warning, cut short as something hit the door with enough force to pop the top hinge.
The door leaned inwards an inch or so, and then a second impact made it topple forward into the room, crashing down a few inches from my startled face. One of the uniformed constables came down with it, obviously unconscious even though his glazed eyes were still half open. Even though it was the one who’d tossed his small change onto the floor so that I’d had to grovel for it, I still felt a twinge of compassion for him. But it passed.
The werewolves, Zucker and Po, stepped over the body. Zucker was in human form – or what passed for human form with him. Po was a monstrous tower of flesh, the remains of a torn shirt still clinging to his barrel-like torso in strips here and there. An unfeasible array of yellow-white fangs bristled in his face, drawing my gaze so completely that the other features became a sliding blur as he lumbered past me to check that the unfortunate cop wasn’t likely to get up again soon.
Zucker flashed me a scary smile.
‘We were in the neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘Thought we’d drop in.’
‘And me without a cake,’ I mourned.
‘We don’t eat cake. You got anything you need to pick up on the way?’