Thicker Than Water Page 4

  ‘So tell me about it,’ Coldwood suggested.

  I turned to face him, looked him in the eye. ‘About what, Gary?’ I asked, with brittle politeness.

  He nodded in the direction of the car. ‘What happened here.’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened here,’ I admitted bluntly. ‘But I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. Nobody died. And you must have known that when you hauled me out of bed and dragged me halfway across London to watch the sun come up.’

  Coldwood did the deadpan again - one of his favourite party tricks. ‘This isn’t about what I know, Fix,’ he told me. ‘It’s about what you know. And it’s probably a good idea if you keep your temper. Because sometimes when you lose it you say things you don’t mean.’

  ‘That’s the human condition,’ I observed. ‘Now what the fuck am I doing here if you don’t have a DOA?’

  He came away from the car’s flank, squaring his shoulders. ‘Where were you earlier tonight?’ he asked me, in the guilty-until-proven-dead tone that all cops use when they deliver that line.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where were you earlier tonight?’

  Well, the truth wouldn’t serve so a lie would have to do. ‘I was in bed, Gary. I was snogging Morpheus, tongues and tonsils and everything, until you woke me up and brought me here. Why? You got something you want to put me in the frame for?’

  ‘Was anybody with you, Fix?’

  ‘A squad of cheerleaders, but I didn’t get any of the names.’ Coldwood waited me out. ‘No. There was nobody with me.’

  ‘But Pen was in the house?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You two share your usual drink before bedtime?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Then when was the last time anyone—?’

  ‘It was a lot of drinks. Different kinds, but variations on a theme of thundering oblivion.’

  ‘So when was the last time—?’

  ‘Jesus! A bit after one o’clock. So if someone sneaked down here to the wilds of Walworth and blew someone else’s brains out through their ear, then yeah, it could have been me. All I’d have had to do is avoid those roadworks around Saint George’s Circus, and I’d have been laughing. Then again, if brains were flying, I think I would have got a hint of them just now. But I didn’t. And you being a homicide detective, Gary, that puzzles me. It puzzles me to Hell and back again. So I repeat: what the fuck?’

  It looked as though the preliminary interview was over. Gary’s gaze shot off to stage left again, towards the red car with its entourage of plods. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go take a look. But don’t touch anything. If you do, we’ll both probably end up wishing you hadn’t.’

  What I was wishing was that I’d declined Coldwood’s invitation in the first place. But then it hadn’t been phrased in a way that left me the option. I walked over to the car, aware that he was following me at a discreet distance. Basquiat was still throwing her weight all around the uniformed division, but when the cop next to her looked in my direction she followed his gaze and our eyes met.

  She gave a gesture to the uniforms that basically meant back off, and they did. As I walked around the side of the car, everyone got out of my way. That gave me a clear view of the amazingly wide bloodstain that had spilled down the embankment from the car’s driver-side door. A sheet of clear plastic had been laid over the stain, its edges neatly anchored with white marker tape and annotated with esoteric symbols. Not magic symbols, I hasten to add: not the lexicon of wards and stay-nots that I know all too well. These were the marks of a different mystery, signalling trajectories, angles, identities, values, place markers for people and objects removed for forensic testing. It wasn’t a world that I was particularly at home with.

  Basquiat nodded towards the windscreen, but I was sideways-on to it and whatever revelation awaited me there was still a few seconds away. I slowed and stared in through the side window, amazed at the sheer amount of blood that had splashed all over the upholstery, the dashboard, the steering column. There were even a pair of fluffy dice, gore-covered and dangling like trophies from a bullfight. And if someone had fought a bull inside this cramped little car, then maybe the volume of blood that had been spilled was reasonable after all.

  Basquiat and her harem of constables were all staring at me, a certain tense expectation visible in most of the faces. Coldwood was behind me, but something told me that he was watching me too. As nonchalantly as I could, I took the final three steps that brought me to the front of the car.

  There’s something about your own name in someone else’s handwriting that gives you an instant blip of recognition, even when you meet it in unusual circumstances. And this certainly counted as unusual in my book. For one thing, it was written backwards, from right to left: but then, that was because it had been written on the inside of the car windscreen, by someone sitting in the driver’s seat. More strikingly, it was written in blood.

  F, first of all: a big sprawling capital F whose elongated upright stretched all the way from the top to the bottom of the glass: presumably a sign of how copiously the poor bastard must have been bleeding. A ragged red wedge hid the rest of that first word, apart from the curve of whatever letter came next.

  But ‘Castor’, underneath and a little to the right, stood out very legibly indeed, in spite of the problems the writer seemed to have had keeping the crossbar of the ‘t’ and its curving upstroke separate, and in spite of a ragged tail-off on the ‘r’. But then, he was probably running out of writing materials at that point.

  ‘Jesus!’ I said. Or at least my lips formed the word. I don’t think any actual sound came out. The words ‘Use a pen, Sideshow Bob’ flitted incongruously through my brain.

  ‘Know anyone by that name?’ Coldwood asked, standing at my shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, Gary!’

  ‘I know. You probably want to breathe slow and deep. If you pass out on the road it will dent your rep.’

  I groped for a mental handle or key: something that would make sense of this obscenity. For a moment there wasn’t one, but then the salient fact smacked me in the face like a slab of raw fish.

  ‘He’s not dead. He didn’t die.’

  ‘No. He’s at the Royal, in intensive care. They’re fifty-fifty as to whether he’ll pull through.’

  I’m used to death; and I’ve looked at it in the style pioneered by Judy Collins - from both sides - so maybe I get a little free and easy in my attitude. Right then, though, my stomach was pitching in slow, queasy arcs, and I suddenly felt like I was standing a couple of degrees off true vertical.

  ‘How could he not die?’ I asked, hoping my voice didn’t sound as uneven to the peanut gallery as it did to me.

  Coldwood’s tone, by contrast, was blunt and matter-of-fact. ‘He just didn’t lose enough blood, amazingly. He was cut up like you wouldn’t believe. His face. His throat. His upper torso. Defensive wounds on his hands, too, which is probably how he was able to write your name. Someone spent a lot of time on him and tried out a lot of different angles. Mostly pretty shallow cuts, except for one across his shoulder and into his throat. If he dies, that will be the one that killed him. Went right through the brachio-cephalic artery. Hence most of this mess: the brachio is like Old Faithful in pillar-box red.’

  Gary likes to flaunt his knowledge of anatomy, picked up when he did his BTEC higher certificate in forensic medicine at Keighley College. At any other time I would have bounced back with some caustic comment about what you can learn working round the back of a Fleet Street pie shop, but right then the wellsprings of my jaunty banter seemed to have dried up. Or maybe congealed.

  ‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘I mean - who is he?’

  ‘Local lad. Lived over there, all on his tod.’ Coldwood pointed off to the east, where the horizon was dominated by one of South London’s least-loved landmarks: the Salisbury estate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, so I knew what it was. Another bit of utopian city planning gone tits-up and stinking as soon a
s the paint dried and the real world set in.

  Twelve massive tower blocks were arranged in a three-by-four formation: guardsmen standing to attention in some apocalyptic parade. They were about twenty storeys high, and the first thing you noticed when you looked at them was that each of the four rows of three had been painted in a different colour, shifting - as your gaze panned right - across the spectrum from pastel pink, through buttercup yellow and duck-egg green, to moody indigo. The second thing you noticed was the walkways that connected the towers at irregular intervals above the ground, welding them into one entity: the uber-estate.

  I don’t hold much with premonitions. Mostly our unconscious minds just tell us what we already know, lending a supernatural confirmation to a preformed prejudice. But as I looked across the rooftops towards the Salisbury I felt that twinge of presentiment brush my mind again like a wind-borne cobweb. So what I’d felt earlier hadn’t come from the car: it had come from the distant vista behind it. There seemed to be a smudge of black like a thumbprint in the air, blurring my view of the Salisbury. It wasn’t smoke, because in modern, post-industrial London there’s nothing around to do the smoking: it was a psychic effluent, hanging there untouched by wind, immune to rain. It was the stain of a great sin, or a great unhappiness: or more likely, I thought, pulling my gaze away from the tombstone towers, it was the collective residue of a lot of smaller discontents and domestic tragedies, trickling together and then left to curdle.

  ‘I don’t know anybody there,’ I said. A stupid thing to say, really: it was just an instinctive reaction to want to distance myself from what I was feeling - from what was coming in on Radio Death.

  ‘You sound pretty damn sure,’ said Basquiat, looming behind Coldwood’s shoulder very promptly on her cue, as though she’d been waiting in earshot but out of my line of sight this whole time.

  ‘I mean,’ I amended, taking my eyes off the distant vista with an effort, ‘none of my friends live around here. I’m not aware of knowing anybody on the Salisbury estate. It’s something I would have remembered.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Basquiat asked, politely but with an edge.

  ‘Because I’ve heard of the place. It would have stuck in my mind. Especially if I’d just popped over to stab one of the residents to death in his car before I’d even had breakfast.’

  ‘But you stuck in his mind, obviously.’

  ‘Yeah.’ My eyes flicked back to ‘F Castor’ written arse-first in black-edged red. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So tell me about your movements last night,’ Basquiat suggested. A uniformed cop at her elbow flicked open a ring-bound notebook and held a biro at the ready. Basquiat’s beautifully proportioned unadorned face stared at me expectantly.

  ‘I already told Coldwood,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Right. And now you’re telling me.’

  Better to draw the line now and find out where I stood.

  ‘If I’m under arrest,’ I said, ‘then Grandma Castor would turn in her grave if I said anything without benefit of legal counsel.’

  ‘You’re not under arrest,’ Coldwood said. He was still looking at the skyline, keeping his back turned to his colleague as though it hurt even to look at her. At the Uxbridge Road cop shop their feud was getting to be the stuff of legend. ‘Ask me why.’

  ‘Coldwood—’ Basquiat said warningly.

  ‘Why am I not under arrest, Detective Sergeant Coldwood?’

  ‘Because there are three sets of prints in that car - the victim’s, and two sets belonging to Mister A.N. Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

  Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

  I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advantage. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Kenneth Seddon.’

  My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

  ‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

  ‘So you do know him?’

  ‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’

  ‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’

  Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.

  ‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said. ‘But he messed it up.’

  3

  Kenny Seddon was a name from another life - and the impact of memory, hitting from such an unexpected angle, was as grating and discontinuous as a bad special effect in a cheap old movie. Zoom in tight on my face, ripple dissolve.

  I live in London these days, as you probably already noticed: London was where I fetched up when I’d had my fill of moving around, and it suits me pretty well. But I was born in Liverpool and I lived there until I was eighteen, the bulk of my childhood and adolescence falling across that black hole in space and time and good sense known as the 1980s.

  So I grew up in a city that was in thrall to two different kinds of decay.

  The first kind was historical - dating from World War Two - and it wasn’t anything that specially belonged to Liverpool or to the North-West. After all, the Luftwaffe hadn’t had it in for Scousers any more than they did for anyone else. It was just that most of the rest of the country seemed to have had the money to repair some of the damage: through some mysterious combination of municipal incompetence and cheeky mop-top corruption, Liverpool never did.

  By the punk era the war had been over for more than three decades, but about half the streets I knew had gaps in the rows of terraced houses where bombs had hit - and the substrate in these random spaces, underneath the burgeoning weeds and sparse earth, was shattered brick and slate. We had a word for those places: we called them débris, pronounced ‘deb-ree’. We swam in ponds on the Walton Triangle that were not ponds at all but bomb craters, and on one memorable occasion when I was seven the whole of Breeze Hill was cordoned off for the best part of a day because an anomalous object had been found that some council functionary thought was an unexploded bomb. It turned out to be a hot-water tank of an esoteric design, but you really never knew.

  The other kind of decay was different, because it moved and grew and shifted its outlines. It was a disease that we were all sick with, and didn’t even know we were - the slow, inexorable decline of Liverpool’s fortunes as a port and an industrial megapolis, which closed factories and shipyards, threw families out onto the street or more usually caused them to disappear without explanation, and turned my father’s life, like the lives of most of the men he knew, into a complicated game of abstract strategy where the goal was to find some place where they were prepared to pay you a day’s wage for a day’s work before some other bastard found it first and shut you out.

  As kids, we experienced both of these things - the war damage and the economic meltdown - as almost unmixed blessings. Bomb-sites and boarded-up factories were our adventure playgrounds: spaces that the adult world had abandoned in its wake and took no further interest in, so that we were free to annex and colonise. The battlefield where I clashed with Kenny Seddon was a case in point - and so were the weapons that we chose for our duel to the deat
h. But the reason why we became such bitter enemies was different. That came from me; from a third kind of decay that was mine and mine alone.

  From as far back as I could remember, I lived in a city that was inhabited by the dead as well as the living. These communities existed side by side, and at first it was hard for me to tell them apart. Okay, some people could walk through walls and some couldn’t, but there are lots of things that work like that when you’re a kid: aspects of experience that you don’t understand and mostly can’t ask the adults around you to explain.

  And there again, some people could move, the same way I could move, while some were inexplicably chained to one place. And some people grew older while some never changed at all: but the ones who stayed put and didn’t change were often terrifyingly marked by violence or disease, to the point where it was hard to look at them. Strange. Very strange.

  Gradually I followed these clues to a great and unsuspected truth: that the word dead, spoken in whispers around us children and dripping with finality, didn’t denote an ending at all but a transition. What happened when you died was that you slipped away from the people you’d known and entered this other state: this state where you could look but not touch and where your appearance froze in the aspect of death as though you were a moving but unchanging photograph of what you’d been before.

  I realised, too, that this was something most other people didn’t know, couldn’t see. In my snot-nosed innocence, I tried to fill in the dots for them, but that turned out to be harder than it looked. A lot of harsh language and a few smacks to the head taught me that nobody wants the mysteries of the universe explained to them by a kid with a tidemark on his neck and scabs on his knees.

  Nobody ever did come up with a word that defined us for what we were - the sensitives, the dark-adapted eyes, the ones with the built-in death-sense. Later, by virtue of what we did, we were called exorcists: but back then that game hadn’t got started yet, and nobody could see it coming. As for the other stuff - the zombies, the were-kin, the demons - that was more than twenty years away. We were a bunch of John the Baptists who’d turned up to the party before the balloons and streamers had even been set out.