Vicious Circle

hear a dry whisper, like wind through grass.

?Poor?poor??

Self-pity is something you often get from the dead, and it?s not like you can really blame them for it. It doesn?t look like any of the options are all that attractive; even heaven, if you take the majority view, is a state of oneness with God and perpetual praise of his goodness, which must wear pretty thin after the first few hours, let alone the rest of eternity. On the other hand, this guy was a pusher and a porn merchant and fuck alone knew what else: I wasn?t wasting any sympathy, because you never know when you?re going to run out.

?Yeah,? I said. ?It?s very much a crock of shit. Some bastard really stiffed you, Sheehan. It?s almost worth believing in hell so you can have the comfort of imagining him roasting in it.?

?Poor?poor?poor??

?You said that. I agreed.?

?Pauley!? The name was barely audible, but I?ve got good ears and I was listening on all frequencies.

?Pauley.? I turned my back on him: best to distract him as little as possible now, because his attention deficit was probably only going to get worse. ?Pauley topped you, did he? Well that?s friends for you. Did it hurt, or was it all over too quick for you to notice??

A long silence; then a hoarse, almost voiceless whisper. ?H-h-hurt. Hurt me.?

?Was this over at your place, then?? I asked, my tone so relentlessly neutral I must have sounded bored to death with the whole subject. ?Knock on the door, bang, you?re dead, kind of thing? Or were you out on the town??

There was a very long silence. I let it stretch. It sounded like the kind of silence that might have a payoff at the end of it. ?Bronze,? Sheehan whispered. ?Bronze.? He made a sound like a moan stretched thin and hung up to cure?a moan with no bass to it, because the dead tend to have trouble hitting the low notes. ?Buried.?

The silence after that final exhalation was different. When I turned around, I knew what I?d see: Sheehan was gone. Exhausted by the effort of speech, his physical manifestation had faded into random motes in the air: not matter, nor energy, nor anything that anyone had managed to trap or measure. He?d be back, given that he had nowhere else to go, but it wouldn?t be soon.

I went to the door and stepped outside onto the narrow ribbon of asphalt that separated the warehouse from the street. The only cars parked there were Coldwood?s tax-deductible Primera and three regular black-and- whites. Coldwood was off to one side by himself, talking on his cellphone. The plods and the backroom boys were in two separate cliques, responding atavistically to each other?s pheromones. There was a brisk wind coming down from the north, but at least it wasn?t raining anymore. The sun was setting behind the brutalist high-rises of Colindeep Lane, and a huge mass of gun-gray cloud was pouring across the sky behind it like water down a drain.

Coldwood finished his conversation, put his phone away, and came over to me. ?Anything?? he asked, in a tone that expected so little it couldn?t possibly be disappointed.

?He fingered Pauley,? I said. Coldwood?s eyebrows shot up his forehead. ?At least, I think he did. And when I asked him where he died he said ?bronze.? Then ?buried.? ?

?Brondesbury,? Coldwood translated. ?Brondesbury Auto Parts. Christ, that?d be a bloody kiss on the cheek from God. If the body?s still there?? He was already heading for his car at a fast stroll, dialing as he went. The uniformed coppers turned to follow him with their eyes, awaiting orders with a sort of stolid urgency unique to the boys in blue, but Coldwood was talking on the phone again. ?The bodywork place,? he was snapping. ?The one in Brondesbury Park. Get over there now. Yeah. Yes, get a warrant. But don?t wait. Get the place surrounded and don?t let any bugger in or out!?

?I take it this is good news,? I said to Coldwood?s back as he hauled the car door open. Sliding into the driver?s seat he spared me a micro-second glance. ?That shop is in Pauley?s name,? he said, with a nasty smile. ?We?ve already got probable cause. If we can get a search warrant, and if the body?s still there, we can raid all of his other gaffs and really get some action going.? His gaze snapped from me to a uniformed constable who?d just stepped up behind me?the one who?d had to run outside to be sick. ?MacKay, take Castor?s statement and fax it on to DC Tennant at Luke Street.? The car window was already sliding closed as he said it, making any reply redundant. Then Coldwood was out onto the road and gone, trailing a whiff of tortured rubber.

Having my statement taken was very much adding insult to injury, but it was an invitation of the kind that?s hard to refuse. I went over the events of the evening while Constable MacKay wrote them down in laborious longhand, culminating in what Sheehan?s ghost had said to me when I interrogated him in my official capacity as ghostbuster general. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sangfroid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckoned he had the right stuff to be an officer.

Nothing wrong with his observational skills, though: After a while, he noticed that I was getting fidgety, and that there was an edge creeping into my tone when I was repeating myself for the third or fourth time on some minor detail like where I?d been standing when I said X or Y.

?Got somewhere else you need to be?? he asked aggressively.

?Yeah,? I agreed. ?That?s it exactly.?

?Oh, right. Hot, is she?? He favored me with the kind of pruriently suggestive leer that cops and squaddies get issued on day one along with their boots.

I really wasn?t in the mood. ?It?s a he,? I said. ?He?s a demonically possessed psychopath, and he tends to run a core temperature about eight degrees higher than the bog standard ninety-eight point four. So yeah, I think you could safely say he?s hot.?

MacKay put his notebook away, giving me a stare of truculent suspicion: he?d felt the breeze of something going over his head, and he didn?t like it. ?Well I don?t think we need anything else from you right now,? he said sternly. ?The sergeant will probably be in touch again later on, though, so you keep yourself available, yeah??

?It?s all right,? I said. ?I?ll contact him on the astral plane.?

?Eh?? The suspicion had turned to frank alarm.

?Skip it,? I muttered over my shoulder as I walked away. It wasn?t MacKay?s fault that my Saturday night was up the Swannee. That was down to nobody but me, which is never as much consolation as it ought to be.

The weekend is meant to be a time when you unwind from the stresses of the week that?s gone and recharge your batteries for the shit-storm to come. But not for me, not tonight. The place I was going on to now made this God-spurned dump look positively cozy.

Two

ICAN DRIVE, WHEN I HAVE TO, BUT I DON?T OWN A CAR. IN London, owning a car doesn?t seem to help all that much, unless you want somewhere to sit and soak up the sun while you?re lazing on the M25. So it was going to take a long haul on the underground to get me to where I was going?into town on one branch of the Northern Line, back out again on the other one.

It was the twilight zone between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night: the football crowds had already faded away like fairy gold, and it was too early yet for the clubbers and the theatergoers. I was able to sit for most of the way, even if the carriage did have a fugitive whiff of stale fat from someone?s illicitly consumed Big Mac.

The guy next to me was reading The Guardian, so I read it, too, in staccato glimpses over his shoulder as he turned the pages. The Tories were about to slice and dice their latest leader, which has always been my favorite blood sport; the home secretary was denying some spectacular abuse of office while refusing to relax an injunction that would have allowed the news media to describe exactly what it was; and the Post Mortem Rights Bill was about to come back to the Commons for what was expected to be an eventful third reading.

That wasn?t what they were calling it, of course. I think the actual title of the proposed act of parliament was the Redefinition of Legal Status Extraordinary Powers Act?but the tabloids had resorted to various forms of shorthand, and Post Mortem Rights was the one that had stuck. Personally, I tended to think of it as the Alive Until Proven Dead Act.

Basically the government was trying to pull the law up by its own bootstraps so that it could slip a fairly fundamental postscript into every major statute that had ever been written. It wasn?t a case of how the law worked, exactly: it was more a case of who it applied to. The aim was to give some measure of legal protection to the dead?and that?s where it got to be good clean fun of the kind that could keep a million lawyers happily engaged from now until Doomsday. Because there were more different kinds of dead and undead entity around these days than there were fish in the sea, or reality TV shows on channel 4. Where did you draw the line? Exactly how much of a physical manifestation did you need to count as a productive citizen?

There?d been some spirited batting around of all these issues in the Commons and in the Lords, and the pundits were saying the bill might hit the rocks if it came to a free vote. But even if it did, it seemed like it was only a matter of time: sooner or later we had to grudgingly accept that our old