Thicker Than Water Page 25

  ‘Exactly.’

  He shook his head. ‘You can be a right bastard when you want to, Fix,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘I’m a bastard. It’s a gift. But I failed the police entrance exam so I never turned it into a career.’

  Gary didn’t seem to be listening, so my attempt to drag the conversation back onto the well-worn tracks of our usual repartee fell flat.

  ‘But bastard or not,’ he said, ‘you usually look as though you know what you’re up to. As though you’ve got some kind of a game plan. This time - it’s like you’re flailing around waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Or waiting for Ruth to put the collar on you.’

  It was close enough to the truth to sting a little, but I shrugged it off because I got the distinct impression that Gary was trying to tell me something.

  ‘It’s more complicated than it looks,’ was all I said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure.’ Gary nodded sourly. ‘And if I came out and asked you, as a friend, if you knew who’d killed Kenny Seddon, what would you say?’

  ‘I’d say, Gary - as a professional exorcist and former police informer - that I don’t have a fucking clue.’

  He searched my face. ‘Honestly?’

  I nodded. ‘Honestly. Why, you think Basquiat’s right? You think I’m in some kind of conspiracy?’

  ‘If she thought you were in a conspiracy,’ he pointed out dourly, ‘you’d be nicked already and sitting in a remand cell in Jackson Road.’

  ‘In hospital pyjamas.’

  ‘Until they could fit you for prison ones. She didn’t arrest you because she’s got a warrant out on someone else. We matched one of those sets of fingerprints.’

  Relief left me momentarily speechless, the conclusions I’d been building to falling down like a card house inside my head. ‘Who?’ I demanded, after a long pause for thought.

  Gary shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward situation,’ he said. The echo of my own earlier words was deliberate, and done with ruthless finesse. I acknowledged it with a nod.

  ‘If you change your mind, I’m still here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much I can do to help. Depends on what you’ve got to tell me.’ He reached into another pocket, brought out a brown paper bag whose contents had leaked and stained its corners dark red. He set it down on the tray table.

  ‘Grapes,’ he explained, and left.

  Once I was alone, the sense of relief turned out to be short-lived. It drained away, to be replaced by a greater puzzlement and unease than before. If Basquiat had someone else in her gunsights, then her not arresting me made a little more sense. But then why come in and brace me in the first place? And what kind of help was Coldwood offering if I wasn’t even in the frame any more?

  Maybe I was unconsciously hiding from the answers - not wanting to go in the only direction that made any sense. In any case, before I could put my thoughts in any kind of marching order, Nurse Ryall came over with the meds trolley. I ordered tramadol with an amphetamine chaser, but the à la carte menu was off.

  ‘That looked heavy,’ she observed.

  By way of answer, I held up my hands for her to inspect. ‘Look, ma. No cuffs.’

  ‘But that was the police, right? The real police, I mean?’ I nodded ruefully. ‘Not just the real police, but the real Sergeant Basquiat.’

  Her eyebrows went up. ‘Rudy actually exists?’

  ‘Yeah. But he’s a Ruth.’

  ‘You should have introduced us. Listen, I’m on duty in the new wing today. I only came in here to tell you that your man had died. But she told you that already, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah. But thanks, anyway. I appreciate the thought. Did he—?’

  ‘Say anything before he popped off? Not while I was around, no.’ She stared at me in silence for a moment or two while I tried to digest all this and found parts of it sticking in my throat at odd and uncomfortable angles.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Nurse Ryall asked.

  I looked up, startled.

  ‘About Kenny being dead? I’d be lying if I said I felt anything at all. It’s been too long. It’s like being told they knocked down a pub you used to drink in a long time ago. Actually that would probably affect me more, because I really like booze, and when you come right down to it Kenny was a bit of a turd.’

  ‘Then why are you looking so mardy?’

  Why indeed? Because he’d died at a sodding awkward time: invited me into his seething nightmare of a life and then pissed off to join the choir invisible, leaving me facing a murder charge and an invisible monster with a sweet tooth for what Petra Ryall so charmingly called incised wounds.

  It was a neat trick. Not quite the same kind of bullshit he used to pull on me when we were kids, but definitely not a major change of direction.

  ‘Because I’m still a suspect,’ I said, abridging the more complicated truth. Coldwood had told me that I wasn’t, but that was less comforting than I would have expected. Even if they did get the guy with the straight-edged razor and his mate with the blunt knife bang to rights, Basquiat’s investigations were still likely to nail me to the board for the crime I really had committed that night - taking Rafi Ditko out of the Stanger care home with forged papers. And then there was the demon at the Salisbury, which I was reasonably sure I’d met the night before, up on Kenny’s ward. Something had to be done about that. In a way, it wasn’t my problem: but I thought about Mark Blainey’s bare room and about Bic’s attempt to re-enact his death, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this.

  Something hit the sheets next to me with a soft thump. I stared at it for a few moments before realising what it was. It was the plastic canula from a surgical drip, still slightly stained with the rusty brown of blood. I looked from it to Nurse Ryall, who shrugged almost apologetically.

  ‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘When you told me how you people work, you said you could use personal effects to raise a ghost. Maybe you could have another go at Mister Seddon. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but by dying he’s put himself right in your comfort zone, hasn’t he?’

  Kenny. The man, not the demon. It might work, at that. I nodded slowly, giving Nurse Ryall a look of frank appreciation that she took without a flinch or a blush. ‘I like the way your mind works,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she assured me, deadpan. ‘By the way, you asked me to check the admissions records. We’ve had dozens from the Salisbury over the last year and a bit. Two a week, sometimes. Over the past couple of months, more than that, even. And they’ve almost all been incisions and puncture wounds.’

  By this time I would have been surprised to hear anything else. But those figures confirmed the sense that I’d been getting from Nicky’s printouts: the sense of a slow-building epidemic, cresting like a wave; of the Salisbury as a raft of lost souls in the path of some sundering flood that was going to get much, much worse before it got better. Assuming it ever did.

  Once again, Bic’s was the face that came into my mind: the tiny human figure by which you measure the scale of something enormous.

  ‘What does it mean.’ I asked Petra, ‘when you put your head in the lion’s mouth and it doesn’t bite down?’

  She shoved her lower lip out while she thought. ‘Is this a metaphor?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. For the lion, imagine that scary blonde who was in here just now. The one with the badge.’

  ‘Oh. Got you. You mean—’

  ‘She hates my guts, and she could have arrested me for - I don’t know. Something. Conspiracy, at least. Wasting police time. Consorting with known felons. Something would have stuck, and she knew it. So I’m wondering why she didn’t at least make the effort. It’s enough to make a man feel unloved.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got used to that by this stage in your life,’ said Nurse Ryall sweetly. And she was gone before I could think of a comeback.

  The open ward didn’t seem like the right place to summon Kenny’s ghost, and the middl
e of the afternoon didn’t seem like the right time. But it would be a long time before the sun went down, and contrary to what you may have heard, ghosts aren’t any more active by night than they are by day: they’re just easier to see.

  In the end I locked myself into the disabled toilet on the corridor outside the ward, put the canula down on the floor in front of me and played while sitting on the toilet. I took it slowly, because the pain from the previous night’s musical exertions was still very fresh and very vivid.

  It felt strange in a way, summoning a spirit that was already so familiar to me. Okay, it had been a long time since Kenny and I had met - at least, with both of us actually conscious - but most of the ghosts I raise are strangers and even after seventeen years Kenny was a long way from being that. Also, most ghosts don’t scare me: Kenny had been a monster to me back when I still believed in monsters, and locking myself in with his spirit was something that I did with a slight prickling of unease, even though I hated myself for that atavistic weakness.

  The tune was slow in coming, and it was only partly because of my aching chest and shortness of breath. I had to overcome a powerful reluctance to open myself up to the music - to start the process that would bring Kenny’s wandering essence into focus in this place, at this time. It was as though a part of me was trying to back away and another part was holding me in place by the scruff of the neck. And the part that wanted to retreat was about twelve years old, which paradoxically gave it an edge against the adult, rational Castor that wanted to play the summoning: on the lost highways of the id, reason is a bike with no wheels.

  But it happened in any case, the tune pulling me onwards in spite of myself: a fractally branching tail winding out through the disinfectant-soured air and wagging me like a dog. I closed my eyes, tried to keep my embouchure reasonably tight and let it happen.

  Consequently I felt Kenny before I saw him. That’s how it works for me most of the time, of course: the death-sense drives the music and the music turns into a negative image, a sound-painting that describes the thing it wants and brings it by describing it.

  He was close. Of course he was close: he’d died in this very building only a few hours before. The sense of him went from tenuous to vivid to claustrophobic within the space of maybe a dozen heartbeats.

  I opened my eyes again. The air darkened in front of me and he began to appear, in separate splotches of deepening tone that spread and merged like blood from a shaving cut soaking through tissue paper. As soon as I thought that, I tried to banish the image from my mind, but that was what Kenny was like: a wound in the air that my skirling music had incised.

  Some ghosts don’t know where or even who they are: they get lost in a memory or an emotion, replay a past moment like a ragged piece of vinyl being ceaselessly sampled by a demonic DJ. Kenny stared at me in silence, and I saw the recognition in his eyes. Unlike the living Kenny, he wore no bandages, which meant that his body was criss-crossed with wounds so dense and interconnected in places that they looked like words in some hieroglyphic script.

  I lowered the whistle to my lap, and he didn’t fade.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You called me. What did you want?’

  The ghost looked down, turned its hands over to examine its ravaged wrists. Its lips moved, and although I didn’t hear the word it spoke I could read the shape of it.

  ‘Mark,’ I agreed. ‘What about him, Kenny? Is that what you wanted to tell me about? How he died? What’s been happening since?’

  The ghost shook its head slowly from side to side, but I wasn’t sure whether it was in disagreement or just in bewilderment. This time when he spoke I heard the word as a tinny, baseless whisper in the air: the hum of a breathless mosquito.

  ‘Mark . . .’

  ‘Did he bring it? The thing that’s living in the Salisbury now, and making people cut themselves? Did he summon it, in some way? With his hurt-kit instead of a magic circle? Is that what happened?’

  Kenny blinked, but he had no tear ducts now to wash the surface of those fleshless eyes. A grimace spread across his face in slow motion.

  ‘Angry,’ he whispered. ‘Because . . . an . . . an . . . an . . . an . . .’

  After each repetition of that syllable, the pauses lengthened. Whatever he was trying to say, it was a gradient which his cooling consciousness refused to climb.

  ‘Who was angry?’ I asked. ‘Mark? Mark was angry?’

  The ghost whimpered, bringing its hands up to chest height with the fingers curled like hooks. It looked as though it wanted to rend its own breast, but of course that wasn’t an option.

  ‘Cut,’ it said, very distinctly. ‘Again. And again. An . . . an . . . an . . .’

  A ripple passed through it, so that for a moment it looked like a piece of washing hung out on a line. I was reminded, grotesquely, of how kids pretend to be ghosts by draping sheets over themselves.

  ‘Who killed you?’ I demanded, cutting to the chase. ‘Who was with you in the car?’

  The ghost’s desolate gaze travelled along the length of its right arm, starting at the wrist and finishing at the shoulder; then on down its hacked and sliced torso.

  ‘Oh,’ it murmured brokenly. ‘I didn’t - I couldn’t - He’s too big now and he made me—’

  ‘Kenny—’ I said, but its head snapped up suddenly to fix me with a pleading, agonised stare.

  ‘Castorrrrrrrrr!’ it shrilled.

  ‘Shrilled’ is the wrong word: there was nothing behind that voice to push it up the register either in pitch or in volume. It was a broken fingernail making a forlorn pilgrimage across a blackboard without end.

  Kenny broke into pieces, shattered by the note of his own grief and pain. Abruptly I was alone again, apart from the hideous echoes of that sound, clawing their blind, blunted way around my brain.

  I lurched to my feet, groped for the bolt on the door and found it, stumbled out into the corridor as though I was a ghost myself, breaking free from my own tomb. My heart was hammering arrhythmically and my body was drenched in sweat. I leaned against the wall as the sweat cooled and the hammering slowed.

  I went back to the ward, my feet shaky enough to require two further stops. Once there, I fell with relief back into my own bed.

  Death had brought no relief to Kenny, that was clear. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much at all. And for all I’d learned from raising him, I might as well have stayed in bed and messed around with a ouija board.

  The dark mood engendered by the summoning refused to lift from my mind. Giving in to it, I picked up Nicky’s sheaf of notes again and made to pick up where I’d left off the night before. I wasn’t expecting the endless catalogue of perforated bodies to yield anything new in the way of insight, but I knew with a gloomy certainty that my mind wouldn’t settle to anything else.

  Then I belatedly remembered Gary Coldwood’s little gift. Mark Seddon’s autopsy report. It was still lying where I’d left it on the bedside cabinet. I picked it up and unfolded it.

  I scanned the name and address details with a cursory eye and went straight to the physical indexes. They were as grimly, relentlessly thorough as you’d expect, compiling to a full but oppressively abstract description of the kind of damage cold poured concrete will do to a body that hits it at a velocity of forty-some metres per second. There were even photographs, but fortunately they were so dark and lacking in contrast that you couldn’t really see what they were of. Except for one of them, and I stared at that one with slowing gathering shock and unease.

  A terse note underneath the photo identified it as a tattoo on Mark Seddon’s left shoulder. It was a stylised teardrop shape surrounded by radiating lines.

  I sat propped up on my pillows staring at that inscrutable, unrevealing image for the best part of a minute. Then, since I couldn’t look away from it, I tried to hide it by putting the cover sheet back over it. Doing that gave my system its last and maybe biggest shock of the evening: or maybe the nasty stutter of my pulse was an after-effect
of the summoning, with its combination of physical and psychological exertion.

  The cover sheet was where all the name and address details were set down. Mark Seddon, place of residence 137 Weston Block, Salisbury Estate, Walworth. Father’s name left blank. Mother’s name given in full. Not a Tina, or a Tania.

  Anita.

  Married name, Anita Mary Corkendale.

  Birth name, Anita Mary Yeats.

  My stomach did something complicated and self-destructive, and suddenly I was fighting to keep my hospital dinner - which was already inclined to defy gravity - down in the hold.

  Anita.

  That downtrodden chattel, who went from Brent to Walworth as part of the property and appurtenances of a boyfriend who beat her up every night as regularly as another guy might put the cat out.

  Anita.

  Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.

  How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?

  My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.

  I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.

  After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.

  ‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’

  There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’