Thicker Than Water Read online

  Later for that. Business is business.

  The Liver Building is the iconic face of Liverpool: pure white stone, golden at sunset like an emperor’s palace floating on the muddy Mersey, and guarded by those two mythical cormorants with their well-chronicled fondness for honest men and virtuous women. The Cunard is the big ugly bread box right alongside: as squat as a stool and as elegant as the stump of a limb. I worked there myself in the summer before I went off to college, as an office assistant for the Regis Shipping and Forwarding Company. I’d almost died, but that was mainly the systemic shock of having to get up at half past six in the morning and put in a full day’s work. I was pretty sure that my destiny lay elsewhere: God couldn’t be that cruel.

  That was eighteen years ago, but the place hasn’t changed much. The war memorial with its winged Victory is still standing in the forecourt. The foyer is as imposing and unwelcoming as ever, with its massive Doric columns designed to put generations of junior clerks firmly in their place. And the elevators still play Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances with enough crackle and hiss to drown out the music, which makes you wonder if in some secret chamber in the heart of the building they’ve got an endless supply of identical pre-Dolby eight-track tapes that Mr Cunard boosted from some fire sale in a spirit of waste not, want not.

  A single phone call to Nicky from the Orrell Park had established the fact that Steven Seddon, MSSP, worked as a law clerk for Sedgewick & Stacey, a firm of solicitors specialising in contract law, with three partners on permanent retainer to half a dozen Liverpool-based shipping lines. ‘Clean, as far as that goes,’ Nicky had said. ‘No obvious bad smells, anyway. Seddon. Any relation to the late Kenneth Seddon?’

  ‘Brother,’ I confirmed.

  ‘He’s been there three years and a month. Should have been promoted last year when he got his paralegal diploma, but he squeaked in with the lowest pass grade you can get. It was a skin-of-the-teeth kind of thing, and they decided to bump him a year.’

  ‘You got all that from their website, Nicky?’

  ‘Nope. I’m in their personnel files. It’s all up on the office intranet. Restricted log-in, but what’s a password between friends? I’m currently one of the senior partners, a Mister John Loose. As in “fast and . . .” Oh, and by the way, guess which demon-haunted estate in South London made the news last night?’

  I felt a prickling on my scalp and the back of my neck. ‘What happened?’ I demanded.

  ‘There was a fight. Couple of gangs met up by prior arrangement and had a bit of an altercation. Nobody dead, but lots of blood spilled. Cops came in to break it up, and here’s the bizarre part. The good citizens sided with the gang-bangers. Cops were pelted with all kinds of shit from up on the walkways. Bricks. Bottles. A widescreen TV. It got kind of intense. And while I’m watching this on the nine o’clock news, what do I see but the other bastard walking right past the camera.’

  ‘What other bastard?’

  ‘Good old Tom Gwillam. The Pope’s plausibly deniable leg-breaker.’

  ‘So he’s still there,’ I mused. ‘Well, he can’t have too many illusions about what’s happening now. And maybe he can do some good.’

  ‘What, with the power of prayer?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Actually, Gwillam was an exorcist, and a pretty damn powerful one. He got the drop on Juliet once, which was more than I’d ever managed. ‘Thanks, Nicky. I owe you, man.’

  ‘Oh, indubitably.’

  So here I now was, sitting in Sedgewick & Stacey’s reception area, which was about the size of Lime Street station but had considerably more potted palms, waiting for Steve to put in an appearance. He seemed to be in no hurry at all to do that, but I was prepared to be patient. That was my main bargaining chip. I was comfortably dressed in my jeans and greatcoat, and I had a good greasy breakfast under my belt, so I just sat reading the magazines while other clients came and went, and while the receptionist, shooting the occasional frosty glare in my direction, called Steve on the intercom at ten-minute intervals - which I timed by the clock above her desk.

  Steve broke before I did, which is where my money would have been if I’d been making book on this. He came out of the inner office after barely an hour, looking harassed and hunted. I knew him at once, even though his complexion had cleared and he didn’t have the words LOVE and HATE written on his knuckles in red biro, as he had when I’d seen him last. He’d grown up without filling out, so he was basically just an attenuated version of his childhood self with a line of bum-fluff on his upper lip. He was wearing a suit, and it looked like a pretty good one except that it was brown. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a brown suit, but I was nearly certain that Norman Wisdom had been wearing it.

  Steve nodded a begrudging acknowledgement to the receptionist to show that he was taking care of this, then crossed to me as I folded my magazine and stood up.

  ‘Hey, Steve,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ he growled back at me, if you can growl while you’re keeping your voice half a hair above a whisper. He gave me a look of the up-and-then-back-down-again variety, his lip curling. ‘Christ, it really is you, isn’t it? Felix bloody Castor! Well, take the bloody hint, okay? I don’t want to talk to you, and you shouldn’t want to talk to me. You’re probably prejudicing that fucker’s case just being here.’

  ‘Fucker?’ I queried.

  ‘Don’t play thick. Your frigging loser of a brother.’

  ‘Wow,’ I reflected. ‘Free legal advice! Do the partners know you give it out for nothing, Stevie? Or are you planning to hit me with a bill on my way out?’

  ‘I’ll hit you with the toe of my frigging boot,’ Steve hissed, with another panicky glance towards the receptionist, who was still watching us with undisguised interest. ‘Piss off, Castor. I mean it. Do you want me to tell the prosecutors you came here to offer me a bribe?’

  ‘I don’t want you to do anything that would niggle at your conscience, Steve,’ I said. ‘Children and lawyers should get a completely free ride, in my opinion. Karmically, I mean. But then you’re not actually a lawyer yet, are you? You’re still slogging your way up the ziggurat, and it’s got slippery sides. All the more so when you barely scrape a pass in your tests and your kid brother is up Beddie Road doing time for drugs. So I’m hoping we can have a civilised conversation here and not make a scene. Because a scene would be ugly and demeaning and it might mean you miss out on your promotion for the second year running. In fact,’ I added, poking him lightly in the stomach, ‘if we make it just ugly and demeaning enough, you could be out of a job altogether. What do you think?’

  Steve stared at me, nonplussed. ‘Fuck you,’ he said at last, shaking his head in wonder at my impudence.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I agreed. ‘But quietly and discreetly, yeah? So as not to wake the neighbours. Sit down and let’s talk. Or I will, I promise you, blot your copybook here beyond any chance of unblotting.’

  Steve laughed indignantly. ‘I’ll just have you thrown out.’

  ‘Then I’ll go out screaming that you raped my teenaged sister after I refused to sell you any more drugs.’ I shot him an affable smile. ‘Sit down,’ I said again. ‘Last time of asking.’

  A heroic psychomachia played itself out in his face. To my chagrin, it looked as though he’d decided on the ‘publish and be damned’ option, but the receptionist, who had left her desk and crossed the room to join us, intervened at the tipping point by pure chance.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mister Seddon?’ she asked, with heavy emphasis.

  ‘It’s fine, Karen,’ Steve said, instinctively shrinking back from the edge of the abyss. ‘I might have double-booked an appointment time, but I’m sorting it out. Thanks.’

  He stared at her, a stiff smile on his face, until she retreated again, with a begrudging nod. She knew something wasn’t kosher, but she couldn’t push it any further in the face of Steve’s stonewalling. And Steve, as soon as she was out of earshot again, gave up the unequal struggle. He
sat down opposite me, giving me a venomous look.

  ‘How long ago did you talk to Kenny?’ I asked him, feeling in no mood for small talk.

  ‘You mean before your brother killed him?’ Steve shot back, his voice sinking to the lower limit of audibility.

  ‘I just mean how long ago, Steve. Give me straight answers and you’ll get me out of your life a lot faster.’

  ‘Months ago. A year, almost. We don’t talk.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Why do you think?’ Steve’s tone was sharp.

  ‘Because you’re trying to become a lawyer, and everyone else in your family is a petty crook with a rap sheet as long as a nun’s nightie?’

  ‘There you go.’

  ‘But you knew who Kenny was shacking up with, right? Up until a couple of years back? The big love of his life, until she left him for a builder’s merchant with a moped?’

  ‘Anita Yeats.’ Steve spat out the name as though it was something poisonous that he’d almost swallowed.

  ‘Exactly. How did that happen, Steve? How did the star-crossed lovers meet up again so far from home?’

  ‘How the fuck should I know, Castor? And why the fuck should I care? Kenny always had a thing about her. I wouldn’t have put it past him to go looking for her. Or pay someone else to. He couldn’t be made to see sense on that subject. Anita Yeats was a frigging bike, and he talked about her like she was the Blessed Virgin.’

  ‘Couldn’t be made to see sense?’ I echoed. ‘Did you try? Was that something you talked about a lot?’

  Steve rolled his eyes, shrugged in exasperation. ‘We didn’t talk about anything a lot!’ he said. ‘He was two hundred miles away, Castor, and we didn’t have a blind bastard thing in common to start with. If we talked once a year, it was all we did.’

  ‘But you had strong opinions about Anita, obviously,’ I observed. ‘You didn’t think your brother should be taking up with her.’

  Steve shook his head. ‘Not just Kenny,’ he said. ‘Anyone. Fucking psycho-bitch from Hell! You know what she did to him with that bit of steel. And anyway she wasn’t worth picking up off the street. She was a scissor-reflex slut, like all the women in her family. Getting herself knocked up before she was twenty, then carting the kid around with her from pillar to post while she was looking for another shag!’

  Steve’s face twisted with distaste. I raised my voice as I answered, loud enough for the earwigging receptionist to hear me very clearly from across the room. ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Steve. Sexual morality’s a funny thing, when you think about it. One man’s meat, kind of thing.’

  Steve cringed, hunching his shoulders. ‘Keep your frigging voice down,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Then keep it respectful,’ I counter-suggested, ‘In case you’ve forgotten, the psycho-bitch from Hell episode was when Anita saved my life from your much more scarily psycho brother. So remove the beam from your own eye first, eh, Steve?’ Another thought struck me, so I pushed on, dropping my voice again. The receptionist wasn’t even trying to pretend not to eavesdrop now, so I threw her a friendly wave over Steve’s head. He started and turned, the hunted expression coming back onto his face. ‘Who was Blainey?’ I asked. ‘The guy she named her kid after, I mean. Did you ever meet him?’

  Steve opened his mouth to speak, and judging from his expression it was going to be another mouthful of bile. But our eyes met and he hesitated, then changed gear. ‘I saw him a couple of times,’ he said. ‘He was . . . nobody. Really, nobody. A gobshite from Childwall Valley who was stupid enough to let her bring another man’s kid into his house.’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Then why do you remember him after sixteen years?’

  Steve was silent for a moment. In case he was trying to come up with a lie, I pressed him again. ‘Why do you remember him?’

  Steve exhaled: a world-weary sigh of resignation.

  ‘Kenny sent me and Ronnie over there to have a look at him,’ he said.

  ‘What? Why did he do that?’

  ‘I have no fucking idea. Because he never saw sense where Anita was concerned.’

  I turned this fact over in my mind. ‘Just to look, or—’

  ‘No. We warned him off. Told him that if he didn’t drop Anita, someone with a flick knife and no sense of humour was going to drop him.’

  ‘And did that work?’

  ‘Yeah. She was on her travels again in short order. We did it a couple of times after that, too. In the end she packed her bags and fucked off south. Which was always what she was going to do, but you couldn’t tell Kenny that. He thought that if he terrorised enough of her boyfriends, in the end she’d come running back to him because he’d be the only viable option. Dozy fuck.’

  Steve looked away towards the windows, where the Mersey flowed by in its sluggish brown majesty. ‘Well, it took him sixteen years,’ he said bleakly. ‘But he got there in the end, didn’t he? Got the both of them. Anita and her fucked-up kid, too. Fantastic, eh? A real Hollywood happy ending. Except that Anita still couldn’t stand him, really. And her brat thought cutting pieces out of himself was the best game in the fucking world.’

  ‘Pot, meet kettle,’ I said.

  Steve stared at me, half mystified and half annoyed. ‘What?’

  ‘Kenny was a self-harmer, too.’

  The annoyance won out. ‘No, he bloody wasn’t. Kenny cut lots of people in his time, but he never cut himself.’

  ‘I saw his body, Steve,’ I pointed out.

  ‘So what?’ Steve demanded, unimpressed. ‘I’m telling you, Kenny never cut himself. It used to drive him apeshit when the kid did it. He gave him a proper fucking hiding whenever he caught him at it. The last thing he’d do was . . . you’re full of shit, Castor!’

  His indignation at this slur on Kenny’s memory was overriding even his sense of self-preservation. The receptionist was now talking on the phone to someone, casting urgent glances in our direction. I could see that this conversation was going to have to be curtailed.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. If Kenny found Mark so creepy, why did he let him stay on after Anita bailed?’

  ‘No idea,’ Steve said. ‘But I can tell you it wasn’t for love. What he had going with Anita was fucked up seven ways from Sunday, and we’ve all suffered for it. But the kid he just despised.’

  That blew one theory that had been growing slowly at the back of my mind: that Mark had been Kenny’s kid, belatedly acknowledged. It would have made sense in that case for Anita to have come back to Kenny, even if she’d taken her time doing it. But it seemed like that kite wouldn’t fly.

  I was about to ask Steve to explain the little crack about suffering, but at that moment two building security guards in ever-serviceable black uniforms lumbered into view behind him, separating to approach me from opposite directions. It seemed like I’d worn out my welcome.

  I stood, raising my hands in a shrug of acquiescence. Far be it from me to make any trouble. ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure, Steve,’ I said. ‘Using the word in the sense of “worth the bus fare into town”. Good luck with the law.’

  ‘You can drop dead. You and your bastard brother,’ Steve riposted. The word ‘brother’ almost stuck in his throat, it came out with such a freight of bristling hatred.

  ‘I’ll tell him you said hi,’ I promised.

  The men in black saw me to the door, but with no laying-on of hands, and I walked out into bright sunshine. But after their ninety-three million mile sprint, the dazzling rays faltered in the final straight and didn’t seem to reach me. I was like some guy in a bloody Leonard Cohen song.

  My mobile buzzed as I walked down towards the Pier Head. I took it out and put it to my ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Castor.’ The voice was instantly recognisable: Dick-Breath sounded like his balls still hadn’t dropped.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s me. Hello, Richie. Thanks for getting in to
uch.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Keighley said you wanted to talk. I want that, too.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Do you know where my mum is living now? It’s just on the—’

  ‘I can’t come to Walton,’ Richie said, categorically.

  ‘Why’s that, then, Richie?’

  ‘I just can’t. I’ll tell you when I see you. But choose somewhere off the street, Castor. Somewhere where nobody will see us. And it needs to be out in the open.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked again.

  ‘So I can see you coming,’ Richie said.

  18

  The Linacre Lane cemetery in Bootle was looking a lot less overgrown and graffitied than when I’d seen it last. There were fewer used condoms on the ground, too, so someone was clearly making a real effort; but I wasn’t here to admire the view.

  The 61 bus put me off within sight of the gates, but I walked on by and did a circuit of the place first - both to see if I’d been followed and to think about what I’d already picked up while I’d been here.

  Not the jackpot, obviously - that I could only get from Anita herself - but a few little nuggets of possibility. Kenny’s obsession with Anita meant that the two of them playing house together two hundred miles from home was a smaller camel to swallow: particularly since Kenny had done his level best to drive Anita away from the ’Pool in the first place. Mind you, I reflected, there wouldn’t have been a lot keeping her here: as a single mum in Walton with no man in tow, she would have taken a lot of cheap shots, a lot of innuendo and collateral contempt from the matriarchs of my mum’s generation. There would have been no shortage of places where she’d have set tongues wagging and heads shaking: and, little by little, that kind of shit wears you down.

  And then there was Steve’s obvious hatred of Matt. It had shown in his face, both times he’d been mentioned. Steve disliked me cordially, that was obvious, and I didn’t blame him; but there was some additional weight of animus when he talked or thought about Matt: something that gave his aggression a whole lot more forward momentum. Maybe his mother had been frightened by a rabid priest while he was still in the womb: they say that leaves an impression.