Thicker Than Water Read online

  Pen stepped aside with enormous reluctance, each movement seeming like an effort, and Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood walked in out of the night. I muttered a coarse oath, and Coldwood shrugged laconically in reply.

  ‘Get it out of your system now,’ he suggested. ‘You’ve got a long ride ahead of you.’

  Pen looked from me to him and back again. Then she looked across at a horrendous vase - some kind of Mingdynasty cuspidor - that she kept on the newel post at the foot of the stairs. There was a terrible strain on her face, and I could see exactly what she was thinking. I shook my head emphatically.

  Coldwood conveniently assumed that I was reacting to his words. ‘No arguments,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ll explain as we go, but this is time-sensitive. And it’s not business as usual, Fix. Far fucking from it.’

  ‘So I’m back on the books,’ I summarised, for Pen’s benefit more than for his or mine. ‘You want me to read a crime scene for you?’

  Coldwood nodded slowly, but he seemed to think the nod needed to be qualified. ‘Something like that,’ he allowed. Behind him, Pen sagged with relief as her nervous system stood down abruptly from Defcon One.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to it then,’ she said cravenly, and she had it away on her heels. Edgar took flight at the last moment, dipping at a steep angle through the narrowing gap as Pen kicked the kitchen door closed behind her. He soared across to the shelf over the street door, where he stared down at us with beady-eyed fascination. It’s hard not to see him and his brother Arthur as Pen’s Hugin and Munin - spies in bird form sent abroad to gather intelligence in situations where she can’t eavesdrop herself.

  ‘Did I walk in on something?’ Coldwood asked. ‘Not that I give a monkey’s, you understand. But your mate Rafi checked out of his digs a fortnight back, didn’t he? So if you’re knocking off his lady love behind his back, you’ll probably wake up some day soon wearing your entrails as a bow tie.’

  I gave Gary a look that might have dropped him where he stood if my hangover headache hadn’t taken the edge off it.

  ‘Leave it,’ I suggested.

  ‘Only too happy to.’ He looked at his watch, rubbing the ugly scar on his right cheek absent-mindedly. ‘Half past four,’ he mused. ‘Going to take us the best part of an hour, even at this time of night. Get some clothes on, Fix - and bring your paraphernalia.’

  I could see in his face that there was no room for argument.

  ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see. Don’t worry, I’ll get you back in time for breakfast.’

  Edgar gave a derisive caw. I knew what he meant: I’d heard that one before too.

  Coldwood was right about it being a long drive, because we ended up south of the river, crossing foul old Father Thames at Lambeth just as the sun came up. The sky was clear apart from a few wisps of cirrus dead-centred in the windscreen of Coldwood’s unmarked Primera: it was going to be another scorcher. I looked between the maculate white chimneys of Battersea power station for a flying pig, but there wasn’t anything moving up there. We were on our own as we tacked south by east through the rat runs of Southwark.

  ‘How much further?’ I asked Coldwood, since he didn’t seem to want to tell me what it was I was going to be looking at. He didn’t answer: just looked at his watch again and made a vague calming gesture, like a stern dad to a child whining ‘Are we there yet?’ He seemed to have forgotten his earlier promise to brief me in the car.

  ‘Tell them we’re coming,’ he instructed his stolid, hatchet-faced driver. The driver nodded and muttered into a walkie-talkie. ‘Got the sarge and the . . .’ He hesitated and flicked a glance over his shoulder at me. ‘Exorcist,’ I filled in helpfully, but he decided to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘We’re on our way to the scene now.’

  ‘Don’t let the C2s in until we’re finished,’ Coldwood called out to him, and the driver relayed the instruction to whoever he was talking to. ‘C2s’ was an idiosyncratic abbreviation for celebrity chefs: it was what Coldwood and his Serious Crimes Unit muckers called their valued colleagues in the forensics division.

  We drove through Newington as it was waking up: shopkeepers taking their armour plating down to greet the new day, or tipping buckets of foaming bleach on the dog turds in front of their doors; a sluggish street-cleaning van nosing its way along the gutters like a pig looking for truffles.

  ‘You didn’t seem surprised to hear that Rafi Ditko had gone walkies,’ Gary commented, looking back at me from the car’s front passenger seat. His face was so devoid of emotion that a passing artist might have mistaken it for a blank canvas. ‘We were only officially notified about it yesterday.’

  ‘Well, I keep my ear to the ground,’ I responded in kind.

  ‘Good way to get your face trodden on.’

  ‘If you catch me at it, feel free to cast the first boot.’

  Gary frowned. He hates being smart-mouthed in front of his chattels and gofers, and this probably rankled all the more because he was doing me a favour: letting me know, in his own winsome way, that Rafi’s disappearance from the secure care facility where he’d lived - if you wanted to call it that - for the past three years had now become a police matter. It wasn’t good news, but it was coming sooner or later so there was no point in crying about it. We’d see what we’d see.

  Perhaps by way of clawing back some of the points he’d just lost, Gary switched to another topic. ‘So who is it that’s watching you?’ he asked.

  I blinked, false-footed. ‘Who’s what?’ Now this was news to me, and I couldn’t quite get my guard up in time to hide it. ‘Two-man tag team,’ Gary said. ‘One on the corner, one in a car a bit further down the street. Discreet operation, but they must have a budget.’

  ‘Probably the rent man,’ I said sourly. Jenna-Jane bloody Mulbridge, much more likely. Maybe this was why she’d kept Rafi out of the news: so I’d relax, get sloppy and lead her straight to him. But obviously it hadn’t worked yet, or they wouldn’t still be there. And now - well, forewarned was forearmed.

  Just south of Elephant and Castle we turned off the main drag onto a service road that took a slack-bellied run-up around the back of the station car park before screwing up its courage and leaping over Kennington Lane in the form of a concrete flyover. All the other traffic on the road was pulling to the left or right in two confused, jostling streams before they got onto this overpass, because directly ahead of us three more police cars had been parked so that they blocked the whole carriageway: or at least the whole carriageway apart from a single narrow gap guarded by a hard-faced WPC. Seeing us coming straight towards her she raised her hand to wave us away, but then she recognised either Coldwood or the driver and stood aside to let us through.

  The road beyond had the unsettling emptiness of a school playground during the summer holidays. By this time on a weekday morning it ought to have been heaving; but there were only four vehicles that I could see, and none of them were moving. Two of them were Astras in police livery, with uniformed cops standing in inert clusters around them. A blonde woman in a black Dryzabone was talking to one of the clusters, pointing off towards the distant skyline: two boys in blue went forth to do her bidding. I thought I recognised that tall slim figure and hard handsome face, but there was no point in jumping off that bridge until I came to it.

  The third vehicle was an ambulance, standing with its back doors wide open and its hoist platform down, and the last was a sprightly pillar-box red Ford Ka parked on a precariously angled concrete apron too narrow to be called a hard shoulder. Something about the sight of it gave me a sudden qualm of unease. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, whether or not that response was coming from the part of my perceptual equipment I call my death-sense. I couldn’t see anything dead in the vicinity - or, for that matter, anything in that badly defined and mystifying state we choose to call undead - but then we were still a hundred yards or so away. When we got closer, maybe I’d find out what it was that had set me off.

 
But we didn’t get closer: Coldwood tapped the driver’s shoulder and we slowed to a halt at the side of the road, up against a buckled steel crash barrier that seemed to have done its job on more than one occasion.

  Coldwood got out, a little awkwardly because his legs hadn’t been set particularly well after being broken the year before - at certain angles they moved in a robotic, discontinuous way. I followed him because this was clearly the end of the ride. Walking around the back of the car to join him, I glanced idly over the edge of the parapet. We were high enough up that we were looking down on the mottled apron of a rooftop car park. The asphalt was bare apart from a phalanx of wheelie bins in one corner, behind which a black jacket lay like a dead bird: part of the inexplicable roadkill of the inner city.

  Coldwood leaned against the flank of the car, hands in pockets, like Patience on a monument but with a more pugnacious facial expression. ‘So what’s the score?’ I asked him when it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak first.

  ‘You tell me, Fix,’ he suggested.

  I waited for the other shoe to drop. For the most part I ply my trade wherever there’s a profit to be made, and the Metropolitan Police’s homicide division has been a lucrative source of income for me on more than one occasion. At one time, in fact, the Met had been my main client, and I’d started to take it for granted. But then, like an old married couple, we’d parted company at last because of irreconcilable differences, mostly arising out of me being arrested for murder. It had been a while since Coldwood had put any work my way, and a longer while since I’d asked him for any favours. So there was something else going on here, and I was damned if I was going to commit myself to anything, even an opinion, before I knew what it was.

  But Coldwood seemed equally coy, and the staring match couldn’t go on for ever. I shrugged and reached inside my greatcoat. There’s a pocket there that I sewed in myself - deep but narrow, just the right size to hold a tin whistle with an inch of clearance at the top so that it’s easy to hook it out in a hurry. The whistle in question is a Clarke Sweetone in the key of D. I’ve tried other brands and other keys, but only in the way that a compass needle tries to pull away from north. It never sticks.

  Whistle in hand, I headed over towards the parked Ka. From behind me, Coldwood said, ‘Fix.’

  I turned and looked back at him. He hadn’t moved. ‘Yeah?’ I demanded.

  ‘Do it from here.’

  I measured the distance to the car. ‘I can’t see anything from here,’ I pointed out.

  Coldwood held my gaze. ‘How do you know until you try?’

  There was a time when bullshit like that would have made me dig my heels in, when I would have turned around and walked away rather than play a command performance with a blindfold on. But at this particular time there was something like an unsettled debt between me and Coldwood, dating from an occasion - quite recently - when I’d almost got him killed: that one incident explained both the limp and the scar. And right about then, when I was more or less evenly balanced between giving him a tune and telling him exactly where and how deeply to shove it, the blonde woman came striding up to us, walking right past me without a glance to address herself to Coldwood.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ she said without preamble. Her expression was grim and tight.

  Coldwood nodded. It wasn’t a nod of agreement: he was just acknowledging an argument he’d clearly already heard. ‘You’re down on record, Ruth,’ he said, ‘so you can stop banging the drum any time you get sick of the sound. But you don’t have any seniority on me here and this is the way we’re doing it.’

  The blonde woman turned now and favoured me with a cold, clinical stare. She was beautiful - really beautiful - but in a hard and austere way that told you more clearly than words how little she cared about what you thought of her. She wore her hair short, and her blue eyes stared out at you pale and unframed, without the benefit of mascara. She favoured greys and blacks, with occasional concessions to blue. Maybe she thought warm colours would be provocative. Tonight she was at the darker end of her spectrum, and her subtle curves were reined in to leave as straight-edged an outline as possible.

  ‘Hey, Basquiat,’ I said to her.

  ‘It’s not even fair to him,’ she said, which threw me for a moment until I realised that she was still carrying on her conversation with Coldwood as though I hadn’t spoken - and that the ‘him’ in question was me. ‘Or are you finessing the case before it even gets started by making sure it gets thrown out of—’

  Coldwood cut in before she could finish.

  ‘I just want Castor to read the scene,’ he said. ‘I’ve used him before, and I’ll probably use him again. It’s custom and practice, and there’s nothing for anyone to hang an objection on. And you’ll notice that we’re standing way over here, not inside your perimeter. Not even close to it. You can even stick around and chaperone me, if you’re worried.’

  Basquiat turned her gaze back to Coldwood, her eyes narrowing.

  ‘And that will help a lot,’ she said, ‘given that you came down from Turnpike Lane together.’

  ‘With a driver,’ Gary pointed out, looking away towards the rising sun. ‘You’re welcome to ask him what was said, on or off the record.’

  ‘Oh, please.’ Basquiat’s tone was blistering. ‘Any man on your squad will swear that black is pink-and-fucking-ochre-plaid if you tell him to. I want him when you’ve finished with him.’ Those were her last words on the subject, apparently, and she was already walking away as she said them. I gathered that ‘him’ was back to being me.

  Barely acknowledging the interruption, Coldwood looked across at me and gave a horizontal wave, inviting me to get started. This time I accepted the invitation, because it was pretty damn obvious that I wasn’t going to find out what this was all about until I did. Not business as usual, Gary had said. Yeah, that was for damn sure - although anything that had him and Basquiat at each other’s throats was bound to have a familiar ring to it.

  I put the whistle to my lips, looking towards the parked car because that was where Basquiat and the uniformed cops were and it was obviously the epicentre for whatever had happened here.

  I started to play. Not an exorcism, because those take time to plan and prepare: this was more like an echo-sounding, sending my attention out along the filaments of the music to see what I could see.

  This is what I do for a living, and if I say so myself I do it pretty damn well. If you’re an exorcist, you’re born with the knack: the extra chunk of sensory equipment that lets you see what can’t be seen and touch what can’t be touched. But each of us finds a unique and personal way to tap that common barrel. One might scrawl symbols in a magic circle; another might chant words in dead languages, or light candles, or deal hands of cards or any of a thousand other quaint, banal, potent rituals. I play music, and the music becomes an extension of my mind, plugging me in like the jacks of an old-fashioned telephone switchboard to the world of the dead - which, things being how they are, is usually buzzing.

  It was a knack I’d discovered more or less by accident. I’d always been able to see the dead, but I never knew I could bind them until my sister Katie was run down by a truck a couple of weeks after my sixth birthday. It was in trying to dissuade Katie from coming into my bedroom at night with her blood-caked face and talking to me in the dark that I performed my first - entirely accidental - exorcism. I did it by chanting rude playground songs at her until she shut up and went away. Sounds. Patterned sounds, expressing in pitch and rhythm something that I couldn’t define or perceive in any other way.

  Later I discovered that music worked even better.

  Later still I picked up a tin whistle, and it shaped itself to my hand as though it belonged there. Christian Barnard must have felt like that when he picked up his first scalpel. Or Osama Bin Laden when he flicked off the safety catch of his first AK-47.

  This particular tune didn’t have much in the way of either form or progression. It just ambled back
wards and forwards through the same sequence of chords, all in the lower half of the whistle’s register and sounding somewhat sullen and melancholy. But as the notes skirled around me the world darkened: or rather, my perceptions shifted a little along the spectrum that has life and death as its two poles.

  I was expecting to see the road get more crowded at this point. If anyone had died in the little red car, or under its wheels, then they ought to have come sharply into focus now. In fact, I ought to have been seeing them already, because the newly dead stand out like halogen bulbs in my eyes most of the time. But my death-sense isn’t infallible. The whistle is.

  This time, though, and apart from the added depths and subtracted highlights, the scene before me didn’t seem to have changed at all. Okay, there was a smudged-out but broadly humanoid figure standing in the air a little way out from the edge of the flyover: a suicide, maybe, or someone who’d walked the parapet on a drunken bet and then fallen off. But the elisions and imperfections in that shape - the fact that I couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been a man or a woman, or how old it had been when it shed its flesh and blood and bone and sinew to stand naked in the world - showed that it hadn’t arrived there in the recent past. It had died years if not decades ago and that was probably why I hadn’t seen it at first. Over time, ghosts fade like the colours on a cheap tee-shirt. And that ghost was the only one that was haunting this section of the overpass.

  Turning my attention back to the parked car, I shifted my fingers on the stops of the whistle and slowly ascended the scale. Like most tin whistles, my Sweetone only has an effective range of about two octaves: but if you’re not too worried about the sensibilities of the people around you, you can make brief forays outside that range by half-holing and by varying how hard you blow. I took it as far as I could, an unmelodic shriek creeping in on the highest notes as I pressed down with all eight fingers and pursed my lips more tightly.

  Nothing.

  I let the last fractured notes of that shapeless abomination of a tune drop like glass splinters from between my fingers. Then I lowered the whistle, shook it twice to clear it of saliva and slid it back into my pocket.