Thicker Than Water Page 7

  Gary shook his head once, brusque and emphatic. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to take you in for questioning, Fix, and we’ll need a formal statement. I’m sorry.’ That one hit me before I was ready for it.

  ‘What about the other seventeen Castors?’ I asked, aghast.

  ‘They stopped being relevant when you told us you knew this bloke.’

  ‘So am I being charged?’

  Coldwood opened his mouth, but Basquiat’s snarl cut across whatever he was going to say.

  ‘That would look great in court, wouldn’t it? Invite you down here to read the scene, then arrest you when you get here? No, Castor, you’re just assisting us with our inquiries. Anything else will have to wait until we’ve got the forensics in.’

  She was looking at Gary rather than at me as she said all this, and it was clear that there was an unspoken question between them.

  ‘Under the circumstances, Detective Sergeant Basquiat,’ Coldwood said with clipped formality, ‘I think it advisable that you conduct the interview with Mister Castor. My personal and professional relationship with him probably precludes my being involved in interrogating him or taking a statement from him.’

  There was a momentary silence, then Basquiat nodded, seemingly satisfied.

  ‘But if you’re thinking of having a testicle roast,’ Gary added, ‘then think again.’

  ‘He’s as safe as if he was in God’s pocket,’ Basquiat promised blandly.

  She jerked her head in a way that obviously conveyed a lot of information to her entourage of bluebottles. Two of them fell in on either side of me and led me away.

  4

  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Basquiat played by the rules, mostly. She was just kidding about God’s pocket, but I got to keep my testicles.

  She seemed mostly concerned with getting me on record about my previous relationship with Kenny, and she only cut up rough when I tried to back-pedal from the lurid story I’d sketched out on the overpass. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law in my time and I’m pretty good on the rules of evidence, so I knew that none of what I was saying could be used to establish just cause: but I also knew how bad it would sound in court if the Met ever did decide to charge me, so I was more careful with my phrasing than I’d been during the first rendition - and Basquiat, knowing her job, shone a torch into every area of vagueness and obscurity and tripped me up whenever I contradicted myself.

  There was no malice in it, which made this a distinct improvement on the time when Basquiat had interviewed me with her fists in the course of the Abbie Torrington case. But I was still sweaty, dishevelled and exhausted by the time we were done - and, admiring the detective sergeant’s lean good looks in passing, I was reminded that there are more pleasant ways of getting that way.

  After the interview and the grand, formal taking of the statement they left me to cool for a while in a smaller cell at the end of a long corridor that smelled of piss and stewed cabbage. Someone told me once that the Uxbridge Road cop shop used to be a workhouse back in Victorian times, and I can believe it. There’s a damp, miserable effluvium about the place that you’d need a Jamaican steel band and a flame-thrower to disperse. There are also a fair number of ghosts, and I got to meet three of them: two broadly human in appearance, the third an amorphous nightmare that had forgotten what it was long ago and now only held itself together by some inchoate impulse that kept it moving like a shark around and around the lower storeys of the building.

  I was doing the same thing, only on the inside: prowling my own memories in pointless circles that always seemed to bring me out in more or less the same place.

  Eventually Basquiat came back in and told me I was free to go.

  ‘What swung it?’ I asked her, knowing that she’d mainly been keeping me around while she made her mind up.

  She looked at me hard for a second before answering: I had no right to ask, of course, and if they did end up charging me they wouldn’t want me in a position to second-guess the evidence. On the other hand, there’s never anything to lose by trying.

  ‘The forensics are starting to come through,’ she said grudgingly. ‘They confirm what Coldwood said about the prints. You weren’t one of the people who held that razor. There are also a few . . . anomalies about the wounds themselves. Things we’ll have to look at again.’ Her eyes defocused for a moment, as if she was taking that line of reasoning a little further inside her head. Then she recollected herself and became brisk. ‘So we won’t be charging you just yet, Castor. But you should probably keep yourself available in case we need to talk to you again. Tell us if you’re going anywhere.’

  ‘What about if I go to the Salisbury?’ I asked.

  Her expression soured. ‘I’ve got two gorillas on my team,’ she said. ‘They were transferred out of Lambeth for questionable use of force. If I see you anywhere near my crime scene I’m going to get the pair of them to give you a Swedish massage in the back of a slam van. My sacred, solemn word.’

  ‘I’ve had promises like that before,’ I said, accepting the little bag with my belongings in it. ‘I always end up getting my heart broken.’

  ‘Don’t worry about your heart, worry about your neck,’ Basquiat suggested as she walked out.

  Sometimes it’s best to let events take their course. As Taoists say, the best direction is wu wei - with the course of the water. You abandon the illusions of will and control and drift freely in the currents of life letting chance or fate choose your direction.

  I’m not a Taoist. For the most part, when it comes to the river of life I sink to the bottom and then I start walking. Against the current.

  So now, being a free man again and loosed onto the streets in the dazzling, over-emphatic sunshine, instead of declaring a goof-off day and making a beeline to the nearest pub to meditate on my misspent youth I found my thoughts drifting to the Salisbury - and to that stubborn stain of psychic effluent that I’d seen from afar. Was that what Kenny had been trying to tell me about?

  Could it hurt to take a look?

  The answer was yes, of course. It’s always yes. But I went anyway.

  Back in the nineteenth century, when London was basically a big pile of crap with some buildings floating in it, and when a cholera epidemic was raging through the city like a drunk with a Gatling gun, they had this theory about what they were dying of. Nobody had made the link yet to infected water - not until John Snow came along in the 1850s with his epidemiological version of the New Testament. So the best idea they could come up with in the meantime was the miasma: a vast cloud of bad air, the exhaled breath of a million diseased and dying people, that drifted over London and infected you if you breathed it in.

  That turned out to be bollocks, and Snow saved tens of thousands of lives when he tore the handles off the Soho pumps to prove his point. In the twenty-first century most people laugh at miasmas.

  Not exorcists, though. We know better than anyone that things can gather in the air, unseen, and that you can breathe them in without knowing it. Most places have emotional resonances: random echoes of the emotions felt by the people who live in those places or walk through them. Mostly they stay at a low level because - to use a crude metaphor - the peaks and troughs don’t match up. It’s like ripples in a pond cancelling each other out as their wave fronts intersect. Occasionally, though, if a lot of people are feeling the same thing, then instead of cancelling each other out the emotions reinforce each other, etch themselves deeper and deeper into what we flippantly call reality. When that happens you can get a very strong emotional residue hanging over a particular place and enduring over time. Schools, prisons, death camps, brothels, army barracks, even churches: they have their own psychic flavour, which exorcists pick up on the same wavelength that allows us to see the dead. We’re like dogs in that way, pricking up our ears at a whistle that nobody else can hear.

  The Salisbury Estate had an aura of this kind. I could feel it from a long way away, when I got off the bus at Burgess Park an
d started to walk north towards it. The closest of the towers was a good half a mile off, but already there was a thickening in the air that you could almost taste. The people around me - mothers with pushchairs, mainly, along with the occasional homeless guy and truanting kid, because this was the dead waste and middle of the day - didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. They kept right on walking, didn’t even look over their shoulders at the great grey towers looming behind them. So I knew it was my tuning-fork soul, resonating on a frequency that the rest of the world was deaf to.

  The miasma intensified as I got closer, but although the individual towers of the Salisbury separated themselves out in my field of vision the feeling didn’t attach itself to any one of them.

  The contradiction between those two impressions - the vividness of the sensation and the vagueness of its source - came as something of a surprise. I’ve learned the hard way that the physics of the material world don’t apply to my chosen field all that much: if they did, an enraged geist wouldn’t be able to pick me up and slam me into a wall because his massless form wouldn’t allow him any leverage. And zombies wouldn’t be able to move without a working heart to oxygenate their putrefying tissues.

  But it’s a reliable rule that most hauntings have a fixed physical locus, an anchor point, where something that no longer belongs in this world has somehow got stuck and failed to move on. Finding the anchor is one of the first steps in any exorcism, because it means you can apply your leverage to the point where it’s going to have the biggest impact. It’s like aiming your fire extinguisher at the base of the fire, not at the flames.

  This field of buzzing emotional energy wasn’t playing by the rules. It remained diffuse, impossible to pinpoint: my psychic compass wobbled and spun, looking for a true north that seemed not to be there.

  The emotional weight that the miasma carried became more and more vivid as I approached: intensified, without narrowing down. What I was tasting in the air was a tension, a restless alertness, together with a sort of shift in my vision that made everything I was seeing subtly different - as though I was seeing it through a window that had been misted with somebody else’s breath.

  I walked between the first of the Salisbury’s towers as I came off Freemantle Street, passing a primary school on my left. Kids are like dogs, too, and the two hundred or so toddlers swarming around in the playground seemed unusually subdued and thoughtful. They were playing on the climbing frames and hopscotch grids, but silently and with a disconcerting solemnity.

  I looked up as the shadow of the Salisbury’s eastern-most block fell across me. The towers all had name plaques fixed to their walls at head height, the names barely visible beneath a hundred layers of granulated, half-erased graffiti: this one - the pink tower that stood at one end of the artfully arranged colour field - was Sandford Block, and its companion on my left, a slightly warmer shade of the same basic colour, was Cole. I thought of cattle brands, and of Adam naming the beasts. These hulking monsters wore their names lightly, and didn’t seem to have been tamed or humanised by them to any measurable extent.

  The remaining towers stretched in a colonnade ahead of me, probably about a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Over my head were the first of the walkways, linking the towers within a rigidly geometrical spiderweb. The floor was paved with blocks of faded rose-pink and yellow, between which weeds grew in stubborn profusion: everything else was poured concrete, forty years old now and well into its mid-life crisis. There was a shopping trolley abandoned at the foot of Cole Block, lying on its side like a dead wildebeest. There was also a small cluster of boys in their early teens who were completely ignoring me as they kicked a football against the concrete wall, taking turns to hone their ball control in solo displays that clearly had a competitive edge to them.

  I checked the address that Nicky Heath had given me, scribbled on a torn-out page of Notes for Persons in Police Custody, the Home Office pamphlet they give you these days in place of the old ‘You’ve been nicked, me laddie.’ I’d asked Coldwood for the address first, but he’d warned me off even more emphatically than Basquiat had, pointing out that if I was serious about not wanting to be arrested the best thing I could do was sod off home and stay there.

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing, Gary,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’m also serious about being innocent. I didn’t take a straight razor to Kenny Seddon’s throat. The last time I wanted to do that, I hadn’t even started to shave.’

  Coldwood shook his head. ‘So?’

  ‘So I know Kenny wasn’t writing my name in blood because he wanted to tell you who’d attacked him. You’re still open-minded on that subject, which is more or less where you need to be, but I’m not. It was something else - some other kind of message, and I’ve got to assume it was meant for me. Not “It was Castor what done it” but “Castor, take a look at this.” You understand? I don’t know what it’s about or if it’s really any of my business, but I need to find out before I can let this drop. And since you won’t even tell me where Kenny lives, I don’t trust you to tell me anything else you turn up. No hard feelings.’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything I think you need to know,’ Coldwood promised, and the stolid emphasis told me exactly how carefully he was choosing his words.

  ‘And I’ll do the same for you,’ I assured him, with a straight face. Then I walked on out of the station, found the nearest working phone box - my mobile being down on batteries again because I can never be arsed to recharge it - and called Nicky Heath, my technically dead sometime-informant. He shagged Kenny’s address from the electoral roll in about ten seconds flat.

  ‘New case?’ he asked me after I’d taken the details down.

  ‘Not exactly, Nicky,’ I said. ‘But it’s something I’m looking into. And I’ll probably be coming to you for a bit more than this as soon as I know what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Sure. Tell me about it tonight. You’re coming to the screening, right?’

  I trod water mentally while I tried to work out what he meant. Then I remembered the gold-trimmed card that had dropped onto Pen’s doormat three weeks before - requesting the pleasure of my company at a one-off presentation of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (the original theatrical release, not the director’s cut) at Nicky’s formerly derelict cinema, the Walthamstow Gaumont. Strictly by invitation only, gatecrashers strongly discouraged - and since Nicky had indulged his burgeoning paranoia by turning the Gaumont into a cavernous booby-trapped fortress, that phrase hid a whole world of pain.

  ‘The screening,’ I echoed. ‘Right. I’ll see you there.’

  And if that was what it took, that was what I’d do. But business before some implausible imitation of pleasure.

  Kenny Seddon lived at 137 Weston Block, Nicky had said. I could check each tower in turn, but why not use the natural resources that were already on offer? I wandered over to the small group of boys who were still intent on their kick-about. A few of them turned to watch me as I approached, but the lad who was in possession of the ball carried on side-kicking it up into the air and then bouncing it off his chest in a metronomic rhythm.

  They were younger than I’d thought, most of them probably not yet into their teens. That was welcome, because along with the broad daylight it gave me a certain assurance that they wouldn’t roll me at knifepoint for my mobile phone. They didn’t look threatening, it has to be said, but there was a certain edginess to their expressions. Maybe they were tense for the same reason that the kids in the schoolyard hadn’t seemed to be enjoying their playtime all that much: because on some level they were aware of the psychic miasma and were responding to it. Or maybe they just thought I was the truant officer.

  ‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Which block is Weston?’

  Most of the boys seemed happy to stare me out, but one of them pointed. ‘Fourth along,’ he said, flicking his flax-blond hair out of his eyes with his thumb. He was as skinny as a whippet - a whippet that’s
been on a low-fat diet for a while - and the nervous gesture made me notice that he had a grubby bandage wrapped around his hand. One around each hand, in fact. He was so pale that his skin looked like paper. His orange tee-shirt bore the enigmatic legend URBAN FREESTYLE.

  I nodded, said thanks and turned to leave.

  ‘Eighth floor,’ the boy added, to my departing back.

  I stopped and looked at him again.

  ‘What?’ I inquired.

  The boy hesitated, looking confused and a little hunted. ‘The - place you wanted,’ he said. ‘Number 137. It’s on the eighth floor, right next door to where I . . .’ He trailed off into silence, frowning as he tried to remember what I’d actually said.

  Some of the other lads glared at him. They clearly felt that giving information to casual strangers was a bad idea on general principle. I couldn’t fault their thinking on that one. ‘Your turn, Bic,’ one of them said pointedly. He threw the ball hard at the blond kid, who just got his hands up in time to catch it. The conversation was over, and there was no point in pushing the point. I walked on across the pastel-coloured pavement, heading for the tower that he’d indicated.

  When I looked back, twenty seconds or so later, the boys still hadn’t resumed their game: they were watching me out of sight, except for the blond boy who was staring down at the ball as he rubbed his bandaged hand against its surface. He still looked unhappy about what had just happened. He’d clearly heard the number 137: I just hadn’t said it.

  The miasma stabbed against the inside of my temples, suddenly agonisingly acute, then faded again just as abruptly into the background rasp that it had now become.

  Up close, Weston Block was an impressive if unlovely structure, its coat of duck-egg green doing nothing to bring it into harmony with its surroundings. There was a broad stairwell going up its side, leading to the first of the walkways a few storeys above my head. There were also double doors leading into a foyer with three lifts side by side, marked like the outer walls with many overlays of spray-painted graffiti. As it turned out, none of the lifts worked. There were interior stairs too, but they smelled heavily of mildew cut through with the sharper stink of urine.