Thicker Than Water Page 2

  A large delegation emerged from the three vehicles, assembling itself behind an imposing grey-haired woman in her early fifties, dressed in a three-quarter-length dark blue coat in an antiquated and somehow faintly reassuring style. Her face bore an expression of calm and benevolence, which contrasted with the hatchet-faced mien of the big black-suited men who flanked her.

  The nurse buzzed them in, but she was puzzled. The Rafael Ditko transfer was the only note on the duty sheet for the night, and this didn’t look like a casual drop-in. In fact, it looked like a formal visit from a head of state.

  ‘Jenna-Jane Mulbridge,’ said the grey-haired woman, with a smile, presenting the nurse with a set of documents that was the exact duplicate of the ones she’d just filed. ‘From the MOU at Queen Mary’s. We’re here to collect one of your patients for formal transfer. I think you were notified.’

  The nurse boggled at them, her mouth opening and closing. She looked down at the paperwork, which seemed to be all present and correct. She looked up at the woman in the long coat, whose amiable, expectant smile was starting to turn down at the edges.

  She paged the duty manager, who did not emerge from the bathroom.

  ‘Well, this is going to sound funny . . .’ she said, in a quavering voice.

  A long way west and a little way south, the white van pulled off the North Circular Road onto the weed-choked forecourt of a closed and derelict petrol station. Reggie Tang killed the engine and turned to look at me - quite an impressive feat, since it meant looking past Juliet. Reggie is gay, of course, but that’s no defence against Juliet. Short of having your genitals surgically removed and locked away in a blind trust, there is no defence against Juliet.

  ‘This is where I bail,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going across the river at Kew,’ I pointed out. ‘Then I’ll come back around. I can take you a lot closer to home.’

  Reggie gave a sour smile. ‘Thanks, Castor,’ he said. ‘But I think I’ll walk. If you get pulled over, I’d just as soon be somewhere else. You promised me a ton, right? I’d hate to think you were as big a prick-tease as your girlfriend.’

  Juliet gave Reggie a thoughtful stare, then turned and looked inquiringly at me. ‘Prick-tease?’

  ‘Macho shithead obloquy,’ I parsed. ‘Means a girl who promises but doesn’t deliver.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’ Juliet turned to look at Reggie again. ‘But I do deliver,’ she assured him, deadpan. Reggie blanched, which on his dark-hued face made a striking effect. Juliet held his gaze and licked her lips, slowly. To forestall pants-wetting and hysterics, I took out the small sheaf of tenners that was Reggie’s pay-off, slapped him lightly in the face with it to break the spell, and shoved it into his hand.

  ‘Off you go, son,’ I said. ‘And don’t spend it all in the same shop. Remember, if the Met come rolling by, you were sat at home tonight with your dick in your hand. Or maybe Greg’s dick, I’m not fussed.’

  Juliet looked away, letting him off the hook. There hadn’t been any real malice in the show of strength - except that even a faint whiff of misogyny pushes a lot of her buttons - and I know for a fact that she’s on the wagon these days as far as devouring men’s souls is concerned. Still, she can get inside your head and vandalise the furniture with frightening ease. And Reggie had been a real help tonight, even though he really didn’t owe me any favours, so I’d have hated to see him leave with bits of his psyche hanging loose.

  He muttered some kind of goodnight and scrambled out of the van. I took it out of neutral and started to turn the wheel, but Juliet put a restraining hand on my arm.

  ‘I’m getting out here too, Castor,’ she said.

  ‘Seriously?’ I was surprised. ‘I can drop you off right outside your door.’

  She smiled - or at any rate showed her teeth. ‘And then the thing in the back would know where I live.’

  ‘The thing in the back,’ I said, a little grimly, ‘is my best friend.’

  Juliet shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Not any more. There’s a little of Rafael Ditko left, still, but mostly he’s Asmodeus now. There’s a kind of progressive deterioration that comes from being possessed by a demon - a deterioration of the human host, I mean. And because I know what Asmodeus is, and how he takes his pleasure, I’d prefer to keep him as far away from my private life as I can.’

  I thought about that in silence for a moment. ‘And yet you agreed to help me tonight,’ I pointed out cautiously.

  ‘Yes.’ Juliet’s tone was thoughtful. ‘It’s something I’ve been discussing with Susan. The idea that you can experience pleasure in helping someone else even when there’s no direct advantage to be gained from doing it.’

  ‘Altruism,’ I hazarded.

  ‘Yes, exactly. Altruism. I decided to be altruistic tonight, to see how it felt.’

  Susan is Juliet’s lover and more recently her civil partner - a union that’s already done a lot for Juliet in terms of taking some of the rough edges off her and making her less likely to rip people’s heads off in the course of casual interactions. But it’s a steep learning curve, in some respects. Steep, and bumpy, and filled with sudden, unexpected potholes.

  The reason why it’s all those things is because Juliet is a succubus, which is to say a demon whose specific modality is sex. She feeds by arousing men’s desires and then consuming them, body and soul - the guy’s lust functioning in some indefinable way as a necessary ingredient in the feast. I mean, maybe she could still bring herself to devour a man who was thinking about his tax returns, but it would be like eating plain boiled rice or pasta without sauce.

  To describe Juliet’s physical attributes is just a waste of words. She’s tall and slender with narrow hips but full breasts. She has the pale skin, the dark eyes and hair and yada yada that I mentioned earlier on. But these things are accidents: she could be any colour, any size, any shape. The point is that Juliet does something to your brain. It’s a combination of her scent - which is fox-rank on the first breath, ineffable perfume on the second - and her hypnotic gaze. Two seconds after you look at her you can’t remember the face of any other woman you ever met, and you don’t want to. She rewires your perceptions, painlessly, effortlessly: she becomes your Eve, your Helen, your long-lost and looked-for harbour.

  Which until recently was an exquisite adaptation to a predatory lifestyle - as brutally functional as a tiger’s claws or a shark’s teeth. Now, as I think I already said, she’s taken the pledge and wouldn’t rend and eat you if you asked her to. It would just get her in trouble with her missus.

  ‘Well, how was it for you?’ I asked, clearing my throat which felt a little dry. ‘The altruism, I mean?’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Juliet. ‘And not unpleasant. But I think a little of it may go a long way, Castor.’

  ‘Meaning . . . ?’

  ‘Meaning I’ve got a full caseload, and if you need any more favours in the days or weeks to come don’t hesitate to ask someone else. And conversely, if I should need a second gun on anything I attempt I expect you to drop your own affairs and be available to me at any moment of the day or night.’

  ‘Nothing would make me happier,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Day or night.’

  Juliet studied my face for smutty double meanings, but all the meanings were right there on the surface. If she asked, I was there. She knew that. Unfortunately, it was true of most of the people she met so it didn’t mean all that much.

  ‘When Professor Mulbridge finds out that you stole her prize specimen from under her nose,’ she observed, ‘it will make her very angry. She’ll want to get back at you. She’ll think of ways to do it that you won’t see coming.’

  I acknowledged this with a vague shrug. ‘She’s been angry at me ever since I turned down her job offer,’ I said. ‘Let her come. I’ll be ready for her.’

  Juliet looked as though she was reserving her own opinions on that one, but she let the point go. ‘Bind Asmodeus well,’ she said, getting out of the van. ‘If he gets loose - r
eally loose, with no anchor in your friend’s flesh to hold him back - you can’t imagine the harm he could do.’

  But on that point she was wrong. My imagination is just fine, and I know what will happen if Rafi’s passenger ever finds a way to step off the bus.

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, with no hint of sarcasm in her face or voice. ‘I know you take no unnecessary risks, Castor. Not by your own definition.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Shall I tell you now how flawed your definitions are?’

  ‘Give Sue a kiss from me,’ I said. ‘Platonic. On the cheek. Nothing threatening.’

  ‘She has my kisses.’

  ‘Then I guess she’s doing okay.’

  Juliet smiled with real and sudden warmth. ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed. With a final wave she stalked off into the darkness, and was gone more suddenly than the darkness itself could fully explain.

  There was a Judas window in the back of the cab that let me look into the rear of the van. I slid it open and peeped through, although there was really nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either: the silence was absolute.

  ‘You okay, Rafi?’ I ventured, after a few moments.

  No answer. Well, better nobody home than Asmodeus taking Rafi’s calls. And better that he sleep all the way to where we were going, because it would make unloading him at the other end a lot less complicated.

  I wound up the window and drove away. I still had to get to Lambeth and back tonight, and I wasn’t looking forward to the drive. Or to what was waiting at the other end of it.

  But I did what I had to do, which - when it comes right down to it - is the epitaph to most of my days. I handed off to Imelda’s people down in Elephant and Castle. There were two of them: handsome black men of few words who were ten years my junior and could have folded me backwards until I broke if the notion had come into their heads. I gave the van’s keys to the taller of the two, who wore a beanie and bands in rasta colours and had a braided beard that impugned the manhood of any man he met. He waved the keys at me like a schoolteacher waving a pointer.

  ‘Imelda wanted me to say this to you,’ he rumbled. ‘And she wanted me to say it slow, one word at a time.’ He tapped the keys against my chest five times, once for each word. ‘Don’t - make - me - regret - this.’

  Being on his turf and his time, I took the insult with as much good grace as I could muster. ‘You ever get any snarl-ups south of the river?’ I asked.

  He gave me a suspicious scowl. ‘What?’

  ‘The beads,’ I clarified, pointing to his beard. ‘Do they get in the way when you muff-dive?’

  His eyes widened and his mouth set in a tight line. ‘Man, you’re asking for some real—’

  I nodded, making the wrap-it-up gesture used by studio floor managers. ‘Tell Imelda I’m grateful,’ I said. ‘And tell her I’ll sort this out soon. She’s got my word on that.’

  South Circular. Kew Bridge. North Circular. In Pen’s car now, which at least didn’t handle like a barge, but I was at the end of my rope, physically. Tiredness kills. Ask anyone. The only thing that kept me awake was surfing the news channels to find out if I was a wanted man.

  Pen was waiting in the kitchen with all the lights on. She wanted a debriefing, which was extensive and occasionally hysterical, shading eventually into alcoholic.

  When I rolled into bed at last, drunk with fatigue and spent adrenalin and a great deal of actual alcohol, I fell into sleep like a man stepping off the edge of a cliff. On the way down, I thought with a slightly numbed wonder about all the shit that was going to hit all the many and various fans when the morning came.

  And decided to sleep until noon.

  But we got through the next day without the sky falling, and then the day after that. There was nothing about Rafi in the papers or on the TV news: there weren’t even any good rumours flying on the conspiracy websites, and nobody came to the door to ask me where I’d been on the night of the third. Gradually, Pen and I relaxed from our bunker mentality.

  I called Imelda, who said that she’d got Rafi settled in pretty well at her place. ‘Rafi?’ I echoed, just to be sure. ‘Not Asmodeus?’

  ‘Rafael Ditko,’ Imelda confirmed. ‘In his own right mind and native disposition.’

  ‘You’re a wonder, Imelda.’

  ‘Yes, I am. That doesn’t mean I’m any happier about this, incidentally.’

  ‘I know. This wipes out any debts between us.’

  An edge came into her voice. ‘No, Castor, it doesn’t. It leaves the balance on my side. And when I call in that favour, you will damn well know about it.’

  ‘Okay.’ I was prepared to bend over backwards a long way to placate the Ice-Maker: not many people could have done what she’d done, and I’m not counting myself in that number.

  A couple of weeks passed. Pen went down to Peckham every two or three days to visit Rafi, and every visit after the first was what you might call a conjugal one. Without going into indelicate detail, the visits required Imelda and me to pull out all the stops to make sure that Rafi’s infernal other half didn’t surface and try to make it into a threesome. That didn’t bear thinking about.

  In fact, there were a lot of aspects of the situation that didn’t bear thinking about, as Imelda was only too happy to remind me. But you can get used to anything, over time. There’s no atrocity so atrocious that it can’t become a routine.

  We felt like we were on top of things. We’d plucked Rafi from the jaws of Jenna-Jane: we’d given him some kind of a doll’s-house miniature version of a life. We were shit-hot, all things considered: so good, so sharp, so fly that we knew, even while we were congratulating ourselves, that we couldn’t afford to lower our guard by a fraction of an inch. We were good with that. We were holding the door to Hell fast shut, our shoulders braced and our muscles locked.

  But how much use is that when the roof falls in?

  2

  The sound of hammering dragged me up from uneasy dreams. Then the dreams and the noise got muddily entwined, so that for a few confused seconds I was knocking nails into a cross where one of the Bee Gees - Robin, I think - was hanging in place of Christ. I tried to apologise, but he was laying down the lead vocal riff from ‘Staying Alive’ and with the headphones on I don’t think he even heard me.

  Then I was awake, and I realised that the noise hadn’t stopped. I got myself upright and threw the covers back, my head throbbing as though my brain had been set to ‘vibrate’ and was taking a lot of incoming calls all at the same time. Why was that?

  Oh yeah. Because last night we’d been down in Peckham at the Ice-Maker’s, for the third time this week, and when we got back Pen had been too wired to sleep. So we’d talked until the early hours, about old times and counter-factual worlds, until the alcohol drowned the adrenalin and we finally staggered off to our beds.

  Half a bottle of Courvoisier XO on an empty stomach, and less than two hours’ sleep: the perfect way to start the day, if you want it to feel as long as two days and be filled end-to-end with pain.

  I don’t have a dressing gown, but I am the proud owner of a Russian army greatcoat - the latest in a long lineage - so I made that do instead. The bare boards of the stairs were cool under my feet as I trudged down from my attic roost, feeling like something simultaneously thin and fragile and flammable. What time was it, anyway? It had to be well past four o’clock; but, since the half-moon of grubby glass over the door was pitch black, it was still before dawn. Either that or I’d been woken up in the middle of a total eclipse. Someone was going to pay for this, if only in the coinage of over-the-top invective.

  Pen came out of her bedroom just as I got to the first-floor landing. She was wearing a black silk kimono with a motif of cranes and floating islands. The raven on her shoulder looked like someone’s sardonic comment on the twee chinoiserie, but it still set off her long red hair to good effect: no pallid bust of Pallas ever made as good a perch as incendiary Pen.

/>   She looked spooked, though, and I knew why it was that she hadn’t just rolled over in bed and ignored the door knocker’s peremptory summons. ‘Fix, don’t answer it!’ she said, her voice hoarse from sleep. ‘It’s got to be the police. They’ve found out!’

  I put my hands on her shoulders to stiffen her moral fibre - not usually necessary with Pen, but these were special circumstances. ‘You didn’t do anything illegal,’ I reminded her. ‘I did, but they probably won’t be able to pin it on me - and you’re clean even if they do. Anyway, it’s been two weeks now. If they’d had anything on us, they would have dragged us in for questioning ages ago. So whoever it is that’s down there waking up the neighbours, it’s not about Rafi. Why don’t you go back to bed and let me deal with it?’ I made my tone as emollient as I could: I’d only become Pen’s lodger again a couple of months before, and I was anxious not to spoil the warm afterglow of our reconciliation.

  ‘Bugger that,’ Pen snapped back. She was deeply rattled, but it wasn’t in her nature to back away from a fight - or even to arrive late for one.

  So we went down the stairs in convoy, Pen leading the way. Edgar the raven screeched and baited in protest at the jostling, raising a breeze that would have been pleasant if it hadn’t smelled of raw meat.

  Pen spoke a couple of words to the door, under her breath, rapid-fire, and then drew back the bolts. Most people make do with woodbine sprigs and factory-stamped magic circles to keep them safe at night, but Pen is a priestess in a pagan religion that she probably made up herself, so she handles her own security.

  Because she was still in front of me, blocking my view, and because the night outside was as black as a bailiff’s soul, I saw Pen’s reaction before I saw the man standing in the porch. She started and took a half-step back, then got herself under control again with an effort I could see even from behind.

  ‘Sorry, Pen,’ said a voice I knew very well indeed. ‘I need to talk to Fix.’