Thicker Than Water Page 18

  But I’ve started a ball collection too, and the aforementioned magistrate is part of it. I got my own court order, immaculately forged, and went in first. Webb and J-J woke up the next morning to a fait accompli. Rafi was gone, having traded the dubious hospitality of the Stanger for the ministering hands of my good friend Imelda Probert - known to most of London’s dead and undead as the Ice-Maker.

  It was a spoiler run, and it was desperate improvisation. At the Stanger, Rafi was penned in a silver cell and Webb and his team had a dozen or more ways, ranging from subtle to brutal, of keeping Asmodeus in check when he rose into the ascendant. Now all we had was my whistle, and Imelda - who had never thought that this was a good idea in the first place.

  As I trudged back to the Tube, I imagined the ructions I was going to have with her, and the sheer gruelling agony of whistling the hell-spawn up and then back down again in a single session. It was going to be bad. Bad for me, anyway: Pen would see it differently, because she’d be able to visit with Rafi while I - assuming things went to plan - consulted his bad-ass alter ego.

  But when I went back to Pen’s to give her the equivocal tidings, she was waiting with the phone receiver still in her hand and some news of her own to pass on.

  ‘Someone called Daniels,’ she told me. ‘They said it was about Billy. Billy’s awake.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said, but Pen was looking solemn and troubled.

  ‘Apparently not,’ she said.

  It was practically on our way: a crow flying across London from Turnpike Lane to Peckham and sticking to the rules would pass within a spitball’s distance of the New Kent Road. Pen wasn’t eager to break the journey, but I had two trump cards. One was that Tom and Jean Daniels were potential clients: Pen likes me to earn money, because I owe her a vast amount of the stuff and every little helps.

  The other was what Coldwood had said about someone watching Pen’s house. I’d had my radar out since then, looking for tails, but there hadn’t really been anything at stake until now. If it was Jenna-Jane, hoping I’d lead her to Rafi, then the more twists and turns we added to our itinerary tonight, the better. We had to be damn sure that when we got to the Ice-Maker’s we’d be alone.

  So we went to the Salisbury, and as we passed into the shadow of the first two concrete monoliths Pen gave an involuntary shudder.

  I stared at her curiously. ‘You feel it?’ I demanded.

  ‘I’m just cold,’ Pen muttered.

  ‘Billy’s awake,’ Jean Daniels said, almost before we’d got inside the door, ‘but he’s not himself, Mister Castor. He’s wandering in his mind. Tom was sitting with him up until an hour ago, but he had to go and sign on down at the job centre.’

  She pointed me through to the living room. Bic still lay on the sofa where I’d deposited him the night before, but in his pyjamas now rather than his street clothes, and with an old overcoat, by way of a blanket, covering him up to the waist. The pyjamas were red and blue: Spiderman fought Doctor Octopus across the front of them.

  Bic’s eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see me. He was restless, his fingers moving with small fluttering motions as though he was a guitarist trying to remember a chord sequence with no instrument ready to hand. His lips were moving too, although no sound was coming out.

  ‘What did they say at the hospital?’ I asked.

  Jean flicked a doubtful glance at Pen, seeming reluctant to drag out family business under the eyes of a stranger.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘This is Pen Bruckner. She’s my landlady. She’s also sort of a shareholder in the business, on account of I owe her more than I’m worth.’

  Jean accepted the explanation with a hapless shrug: needs must when the devil drives, she seemed to say. ‘They told me he might have a concussion. Then he woke up and they said he didn’t. Then he started to talk all funny, and he didn’t seem to know who I was, so they decided they weren’t sure. They gave him some tests but they wouldn’t tell us what any of the results were. It was obvious they didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him. We were there for five hours, waiting on some consultant or other, and when he came he only said again that it wasn’t a concussion and Billy would probably be all right inside of a few hours.’

  She rubbed furiously at her eye, more as though she wanted to force a tear back inside than to wipe it away. ‘They were going to keep him in,’ she said, her mouth setting tight at the memory, ‘but when I asked them what they were going to do they couldn’t give me a straight answer. Keep him under observation, they said. As if that’s going to make him better all by itself. So we brought him home. But he’s getting worse, Mister Castor. It’s like he’s got a fever, only he isn’t hot. So I told Tom we should call you, and we had a big row about it and he said I could only do it when he wasn’t in the house because he doesn’t believe in any of the things you were talking about. I suppose I didn’t either, until all this happened. But there’s no point sticking your head in the sand. This isn’t a medical thing, is it? It’s not a medical thing at all. Not with the bleeding and the dreams and all that. It’s . . .’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Well, I think it has to be something more in your line, doesn’t it?’

  I nodded, but for a moment I didn’t speak. The miasma - the migraine buzz in the air, the prickling sense at the back of my skull - confused my death-senses to the point where they were almost useless. I honestly couldn’t tell right then if Bic was one of the loci it was coming from or not. On the other hand, I’d seen him the night before about to sleepwalk off the edge of a balcony sixty feet above the ground. And I’d seen his hands running with blood despite the absence of a wound. If it wasn’t possession, then what was it?

  ‘Yeah,’ I said at last. ‘In my line, certainly. But I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what it was, Jean.’

  ‘I don’t need to know,’ Jean said, her voice thickening. ‘Just bring him back. That’s all I want. If you can do that, I’ll pay you anything you want.’

  It was an empty boast. How much could she afford, if Tom was on job-seeker’s allowance? Even a tenner would probably stretch the budget. But why had I come here if it wasn’t to do the job? And how could I smack this woman in the face with charity after everything else she’d been hit with? It was a knotty problem whichever way you looked at it.

  And then there was the matter of my own professional competence, which I reckoned we’d better get sorted right now before we went any further.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do it or not,’ I told her. ‘Because like I said, I don’t know what I’m dealing with. If I do bring him back, it’s not likely to be on the first pass. It could take a few days, and a few visits, with nothing promised at the end of it. I’m prepared to try. That’s the best I can offer.

  ‘As far as money goes - I’m sort of already working this case for another client,’ I said, shading the truth without blushing. ‘So I can offer you a discount. In fact, under these circumstances I’ll work COD. I won’t charge you anything up front, but I’ll send in a bill if Billy gets better and doesn’t get sick again.’

  ‘A bill for how much?’ Jean persisted, no doubt being far too used to the foibles of debt collectors and money-lenders to fall for vague expressions of goodwill.

  ‘A hundred,’ I said, plucking a figure out of the air. ‘A hundred quid.’

  Jean did some quick mental arithmetic, her eyes moving from side to side as she shunted invisible beads on an invisible abacus.

  ‘All right, Mister Castor,’ she said at last. ‘A hundred it is.’

  I took out my whistle. Jean stared at it a little blankly. ‘I’m on my way to another appointment,’ I said, which was also true. ‘But I’m going to do a preliminary examination now and see what I can find out. Then I’ll come back later - or more likely tomorrow - and spend some more time with him.’

  Jean looked at me forlornly. ‘Tomorrow?’ she repeated.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m dealing with,’ I reminded her. ‘So it’s the best
I can do. If it’s a ghost, or -’ I skirted around the word demon ‘- something like a ghost, then I need to get a fix on it. Kind of a psychic mugshot. I can’t do anything else until I’ve got that. I still think getting Billy out of here would be the best medicine for him, but if he has to stay on the estate then I’m going to have to do what I always do, which is to work the thing out in stages. Or you can tell me to bugger off, if you want. But either way, I don’t want to give you any false hopes.’

  Jean looked at the whistle again, and shook her head. She wasn’t turning down the offer: I think she was just struck with wonder at how slim a reed she was clinging to.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘No false hopes.’ She tried to laugh, but it just loosed the tears at last and she broke down in front of us, which was what she’d been struggling so hard not to do all this time.

  Pen scooped her into an embrace, saying the usual consoling nothings. We exchanged a glance over Jean’s bowed head, and I pointed towards the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s get ourselves a cup of tea,’ Pen suggested, taking Jean in hand and steering her in that direction with the magic of artificial good cheer. ‘I can talk you through what Castor does while he’s doing it, and then we won’t be getting in his way.’

  They went through into the hall and I pushed the door to. Pen hadn’t needed to ask why I wanted to be alone for this. She knows from past experience that when I’m putting a tune together for the first time - using the music as sonar to zero in on a dead or undead presence that I haven’t got a proper fix on yet - the two things that are most likely to screw me up are strong emotions and external sounds.

  I turned to look at Bic. He had carried on twitching and muttering all through our conversation, his eyes wide and unseeing. Lost in his own little world, Jean had said, describing what her son was like when he was reading superhero comics. Well, he was now, that was for damned sure. And wherever that world was, it was a long way from South London.

  Sitting on the arm of the sofa, I closed my eyes and fitted the whistle to my lips. I blew a few exploratory notes, drawing them out long and slow, not even trying to fit them together into a phrase. They faded from the air but remained in my mind and on my inner ear: something to build on. The next notes had a suggestion of melody to them, although it was a melody that kept changing its mind, rising and then falling, approaching a resolution and then shying away from it, breaking into discord and then finding the key again when you thought it was out of reach. Gently and painstakingly, I assembled braided ropes of sound and sent them out into the room. And as they grew in complexity, my sense of the room itself faded. I drifted in an undefined un-place, drawn along in the wake of my expelled breath like a sailboat making its own headwind.

  Two presences hung off to the right of me, one small and bright, the other huge and sprawling and dark: the boy’s soul and its passenger. But bright and dark were metaphors in this case, because I wasn’t seeing them with my eyes: it was more like how a bat sees a moth, through the shapes made by the distorted echoes of its own shrill cries.

  I tried to stifle the surge of triumph that I’d found the thing so soon, because finding it wasn’t the same as driving it out. But it seemed like a good omen, all the same, and I couldn’t resist the urge to push it a little further. I played an atonal sequence that approximated to a stay-not: a crude command to the dark thing to piss off out of here before things got rough. The notes rolled straight forward from my mind like the bow wave of my will and consciousness. They touched the edges of the dark thing.

  It backed away from me, in some direction that wasn’t up or down or left or right or anything else I could find a name for. It receded or shrank, and I pressed it hard with more and louder trills and elisions, the tune becoming a hurried, spiky thing with no grace to it but lots of momentum.

  Bourbon Bill Bryant, the former ghostbreaker who used to run the Oriflamme, the exorcists’ pub on Castlebar Hill, told me once that one of the biggest mistakes you can make in our profession is to go hunting bear with a pea-shooter. Pretty self-evident, you’d think: but that was the trap I’d fallen into. I was chasing this thing just because it was running away, forgetting that until I had a clear enough mental impression of it to feed into the music I was not only wielding a pea-shooter - I hadn’t even brought along any peas.

  Suddenly, the darkness was no longer receding. It was standing still, and I was rushing towards it. It seemed to grow, not continuously but in a series of flickering freeze-frames, becoming denser and deeper and bigger by the moment. I was sailing into a storm, and there was nothing ahead but blackness.

  I modulated the tune, letting it dip almost into silence, letting the wind drop. But the darkness was moving toward me now of its own volition, and it was so huge that I had no sense any more of where it began and ended. It was the world around me. It was the hungry void in which I floated, and although it already filled the sky it was still getting closer.

  When it was right on top of me, my skin prickling with the ghost-sense of imminent contact, I forced myself to open my eyes. It felt like I was hefting two bowling balls, one on each eyelid. My sight was swimming, both eyes watering and stinging as though I’d jammed slivers of raw onion into my tear ducts. There was a ringing in my ears. But I was back in the real world, so abruptly that it felt like that moment just before sleep when you jolt back into wakefulness with a feeling like you’ve fallen out of thin air onto the bed.

  Bic wasn’t moving any more. He was preternaturally still. Very distinctly, he said, ‘I got the sword.’

  ‘What sword is that, Bic?’ I asked, my voice scraping against the sides of my dry throat.

  ‘Wilkinson’s. Wilkinson’s Sword.’

  ‘Just those three words?’ Pen demanded.

  ‘Yeah. Just those three words.’

  ‘But what did he mean?’

  I shook my head, walking faster so that she had to trot a little to keep up. We could have grabbed a cab down to Peckham, but I was restless and walking felt like a good way to burn it off. A little unfair to Pen, though, whose legs, although in perfect proportion to the rest of her, are a good bit shorter than mine.

  ‘You don’t know either?’ Pen asked.

  ‘I know what the words mean,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just not sure who was saying them.’

  ‘Fix, am I going to have to drag this out of you one syllable at a time? Either tell me or—’

  ‘Wilkinson’s Sword,’ I said, ‘is a well-known and popular brand of razor blade, second only to Gillette in UK market share.’

  Pen digested this in silence for a moment or two. ‘The boy who died,’ she mused.

  ‘Mark. He was a self-harmer. So is Kenny.’

  ‘The bully who beat you up when you were a kid? Are you sure?’

  ‘Reasonably sure, yeah. He’s kept his dead kid’s hurt-kit and there’s so much scar tissue on his wrists he’d have a hard time putting his hands in his pockets.’

  ‘Is there a connection?’

  I shrugged irritably. Having to tell Jean Daniels that I’d blown the gig had left me in a sour mood. I’d promised to come back and try again, but for the time being all I’d managed to do was calm Bic down a little and leave him in a light, seemingly normal sleep. It was some considerable way short of a command performance. Whatever this thing was, it had stopped me cold. But then again, I’d gone in half-cocked, so I had nobody but myself to blame.

  Which was about as much of a consolation as it ever is.

  We were on the outskirts of Peckham by this time, and Pen’s excitement was becoming a palpable thing. Short legs and all, she was outstripping me now: but then, I was only going to have a chat with a demon - a process that always carries the risk of agonising death - while she was going to meet her lover. On balance, her jubilant horniness took some of the edge off my unease.

  And there’s a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean
plastic. If you set your back against the kitsch-Bauhaus folly that is Peckham library and walk half a mile south towards the common, you’ll eventually find yourself walking through streets that the property developers haven’t found their way to yet: streets where endless curved terraces of turn-of-the-century three-storey town houses, like the tiers of some city-sized amphitheatre, have been left to fall in on themselves at their leisure. There’s a hectic tubercular beauty to them.

  The two of us threaded this maze, thinking our own separate thoughts. I knew what Pen’s were, more or less, because her walk was halfway to being a run by this time, and her hands kept clenching and unclenching from sheer nervous energy. Mine were focused on the question of whether we were being followed. By this time I was almost a hundred per cent certain that the answer was no: not because I hadn’t seen anyone - that didn’t mean a thing - but because I’d added enough loops and squiggles as we went from Pen’s place to the Salisbury to force any tail either to drop us or to show himself. I was satisfied that we were safe, but I remained in paranoid mode because it has its uses.

  Imelda Probert’s place stands on a cul-de-sac that reminds you of the literal meaning of that term - the arse end of a bag. There was precious little beauty to be found here: just the ugly functionality of boarded-up windows, basement-level front lightwells turned into skips and shipwrecked cars lying dormant under birdshit-spattered tarpaulins.

  We ignored the front door, which had been screwed immovably into its frame in aeons past, and went in via the side alley. That meant braving the yard, where weeds grew to the height of men and every clump of grass hid a broken bottle. Pen led the way with reckless speed: I followed more cautiously, knowing from previous visits how treacherous this terrain could be.

  We walked up the stairs in the sullen twilight of a forty-watt bulb. On the second floor Pen’s eyes strayed to a door that was scrawled over and over with makeshift wards and sigils and had been closed with a heavy padlock. She slowed for a moment. This was the lodestone that had been drawing her, and it was hard for her to walk on past it. But she knew there was no way into that room except with me and Imelda to act as Virgils to her Dante.