Thicker Than Water Page 9

  I might as well carry on north, I thought - maybe pick up the Tube at Elephant and Castle. I headed on along the walkway, past more bin bags and a bike that had been chained to a lamp post with a D-lock and then deprived of its wheels to deter theft. Unless the wheels had been stolen to deter cycling.

  I saw the same sigil again - the teardrop with its corona of radiating lines, this time executed in red paint - on the parapet wall. Next to it, spray-painted on the grey cement of the walkway itself, were the words NOW IT BLEEDS. The words were also done in red, and they looked fresh and new in this faded place. I crossed to look at them, then squatted down and touched the curve of the final S. Very fresh: the paint was still wet.

  From this vantage point, I noticed for the first time that the concrete slabs of the parapet wall had been set with narrow gaps in them every few feet. The gaps afforded a view of the lower walkway beneath me and then the ground, where Bic’s friends - or maybe a different group of boys entirely - came briefly into view on their way to somewhere that probably wasn’t any better than here.

  Someone on the lower walkway was watching them, or at least looking out in that direction. He was standing right up against the parapet, his back to me. He wore a raincoat of pure unblemished white that recalled Alec Guinness as Sidney Stratton, the Man in the Ice Cream Suit, and his sleek, possibly brilliantined black hair stood out all the more starkly against it. There was something indefinably familiar about that black-white contrast, and about the man’s ramrod bearing; his refusal to lean against the parapet even though it was right there, at the perfect leaning distance and height. I had a presentiment that was nothing to do with my death-sense.

  Another man walked into my severely restricted field of vision and joined him. This guy was big and rangy and looked subtly out of proportion: but then I was seeing him from an odd angle. His face was almost completely flat, as though he’d made humorous Tom-and-Jerry-style contact with a frying pan. When he spoke, his mouth opened across its full width in a way that looked strained and awkward, the lips not moving at all. It was like a ventriloquist’s doll talking, the lower jaw bobbing straight up and down to convey by clumsy shorthand the full range of human articulation. His complexion was appalling, the skin piebald with blotches and roughly pitted.

  The man on the lower walkway turned to face the newcomer as he approached, and a jolt of surprise went through me when I saw his face, even though I’d subliminally made the connection already. It was Father Gwillam, of the Anathemata Curialis.

  Gwillam pointed up towards one of the higher walkways diagonally across from us. Flat-face spoke again, and Gwillam sketched something with his fingertip in the air in front of his face. It looked like brackets.

  Flat-face left, at a fast trot. At the other end of the walkway he was joined by a woman - tall, somewhat heavy-set, with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed to have bandages tied around her hands, like the ones that the boy Bic had had. They headed off together towards the south end of the estate.

  Time for me to book, too. I knew enough about the good father to make that particular encounter a must to avoid. But I wasn’t quite quick enough. He turned and looked up, directly towards me, as though he’d known that I was there all along.

  The sun was hanging over my shoulder, directly in his face. From that distance and at that angle I’d probably just be a silhouette.

  Probably.

  I didn’t stay to find out.

  5

  Harrison Ford went first, sidling out onto the landing from the barely opened door of his apartment and checking out the lie of the land before he allowed Sean Young to join him. Her immaculate hair and high-gloss lips suggested the unearthly perfection of CGI, but in 1982 that wasn’t even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye. She just happened to be perfect.

  ‘You’re talking through your arse,’ Nicky informed me curtly, wrenching my attention away from the on-screen action. He flicked a couple of switches on the projector, unnecessarily, just to remind me who was in charge. ‘There’s no way Deckard is a replicant.’

  Suppressing a shiver that was purely physiological - the projection booth was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator - I tapped the glass that separated us from the auditorium below. ‘Just keep watching,’ I instructed Nicky.

  On the screen, Ford looked down. The heel of Sean Young’s shoe had kicked against some small object on the floor, making it move and catch the light. He bent down and picked it up, but the focus stayed on his face for a moment or two before pulling to the thing in his hand: a tiny unicorn made out of the silvered paper and card from a cigarette packet.

  After the briefest of pauses, Ford nodded - one of the most eloquent and compelling gestures in the whole of cinema, in my lowbrow opinion. He followed Young into the elevator, the door sliding closed behind him with a terminal, echoing THOOM.

  I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.

  ‘It just means the other detective - Eddie Olmos - has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’

  ‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air - Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works - and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.’

  ‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.

  ‘Fine actor - not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.

  ‘It’s left ambiguous.’

  ‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’

  Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care. ‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.

  I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit - as ghosts - and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse. Others take the low road, invading and possessing and reshaping animal flesh (the default option, if only because animal spirits are weak enough not to make a fight of it most of the time) into something broadly resembling the body they used to have. That’s how werewolves are made, although the term most often used these days is the polite, non-judgemental loup-garou.

  Nicky is a stubborn bastard, in death as he was in life. He took the third option, generally considered to combine the drawbacks of the other two - the isolation of the ghost and the flesh-management problems of the werewolf. He came back in the body, as a zombie.

  For most people it’s a short-term option: bodies rot, and once they pass a certain point all the will-power in the world won’t make them move any more. Nicky was holding that crisis at bay with an idiosyncratic mixture of home embalming, faith healing and careful refrigeration. And to be honest he looks pretty good for a dead guy: the artificial tan he buys in by the bucketload disguises the waxy sheen of his pickled flesh, and his Mediterranean good looks still make women take a second look unless they’re close enough to catch that subtle whiff of formaldehyde. And he’s a zombie of substance these days, with an impressive property portfolio including the disused cinema where he lives, so who the hell am I to knock it? He’s ahead of the game, even if he’s playing posthumou
sly.

  ‘So you bumped into this guy Gwillam,’ Nicky said, changing the subject as he pocketed the keys to the film cupboard. ‘The papal-backed motherfucker who tried to kill you over that Abbie Torrington business.’

  ‘Gwillam doesn’t have the blessing of the pope,’ I corrected him. ‘In fact his order - the Anathemata - were excommunicated by Benedict XVI in a job lot as soon as he sobered up from his launch party. They do their own thing now, and the Church tries to pretend they don’t exist.’

  It was a half-truth, but it would do for now. The last time I’d met Gwillam, he’d hinted strongly that the excommunication was just a way of letting the Anathemata off the leash. They were kind of like the provisional wing of the Catholic Church now: a guerrilla army of religious fanatics with a scarily open-ended brief: save humankind from the dead and the undead, in God’s holy name. In the case of Abbie Torrington, that had included compounding the murder of a little girl by the extinguishing of her soul. Gwillam hadn’t been happy when - with Juliet’s help - I had managed to piss on that particular picnic.

  Nicky didn’t seem happy either. ‘Don’t bury me alive in the fucking details, Castor,’ he said, making for the door. ‘It’s the same guy, right? The one who thinks people like me are the intro to Armageddon? Sees himself as God’s soldier in some fucking big holy war?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘That’s him.’ I didn’t bother to point out that I’m the one who’s normally inclined to skip the details in favour of a simple-minded soundbite. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I leave the obsessive, anally retentive stuff to Nicky, because that’s where he really shines.

  ‘Great,’ Nicky grunted. ‘So you just say that straight out and then we know where we stand. You want me to turn over some stones? Find out what those foam-flecked holy rollers are doing down in Walworth?’

  He was holding the door open for me. I took the hint and stepped out onto the landing. Nicky came out after me, locking the door behind him and setting the alarms and deadfalls. I waited until he was finished because it’s a task that takes all of his attention.

  ‘No,’ I said, when he looked up at me again. ‘That’s not what I want.’

  He tried to hide his disappointment, but fine muscle control is an early casualty for a zombie and his poker face needed work. ‘How come?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because he plays dirty and he’s got men with guns,’ I said. ‘Also, men with teeth and claws and way too much body hair. He uses loup-garous, Nicky. Werewolves who’ve been given cast-iron absolution in advance for anything they do when they’re under the influence. Can you believe that? He’s passing round get-out-of-Hell-free cards. And he’s already got a grudge against me because I worked that switch on him with Abbie Torrington’s locket. The last thing I need to be doing is giving him more reasons to want me six feet under.’ Nicky opened his mouth to lodge an objection, but I kept on going. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Gwillam’s got anything to do with this. Kenny was attacked last night. I only got there as quickly as I did because I was helping the police with their inquiries. Whatever brought Gwillam sniffing around, I’m betting it’s something else.’

  ‘Or maybe the Anathemata set up the whole thing,’ Nicky suggested, ‘and Gwillam wrote your name on the car windscreen to frame you.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s that subtle,’ I said. ‘He’s more of an “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out” kind of guy. Assuming he wanted me out of the picture, he’d just snap his fingers and I’d be landfill somewhere. Then he’d go square himself with the Almighty by means of a few Hail Marys and a nice stiff flogging, and it would all be good.’ Nicky was still looking at me expectantly. I shook my head. ‘Makes no difference,’ I said, as he opened his mouth to speak. ‘Believe me, Nicky, you don’t want to tangle with these boys. Or rather, I can see that you do, maybe because you’re thinking Gwillam will be a big, fascinating nut to crack. But he’ll see you and raise you, and you’re the one that’s going to end up looking like Humpty Dumpty.’

  I was talking to myself as much as to Nicky, because the truth was that I really did want to know what the Anathemata were doing so close to my home turf. I just didn’t think I was in a good position to find out. I was still exposed on the Rafi front, and now I was a possible suspect in an attempted murder. If ever there was a time to keep my head way down below the parapet, this was it.

  We headed down the stairs towards the main auditorium.

  ‘Humpty Dumpty was an egg,’ Nicky remarked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He wasn’t a nut, he was an egg. You mixed your metaphors.’

  ‘Point stands.’

  ‘Then what do you want from me, Castor?’

  ‘Mainly I just want you to run some searches on Kenny Seddon,’ I said. ‘How long he’s been at the Salisbury. Where he was before that. Anything he’s done that’s left a footprint, and any recent events on the estate that he might have been mixed up in.’

  ‘What kind of events?’

  I thought about Jean Daniels and her litany of hints and euphemisms: something had happened, but I wasn’t even close to being able to define what kind of something it had been. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Anything at all. Cast your net as wide as you can.’

  ‘You could do that at your fucking local library,’ Nicky said acerbically. ‘You getting lazy, Castor?’

  ‘Well, there is one more thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  I took a sheet of paper from my pocket and showed it to him. On it I’d sketched the ellipsoid shape with the radiating lines - the one I’d seen twice during my brief visit to Kenny’s flat. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

  ‘Looks like a schoolkid’s drawing of a vagina,’ Nicky commented. ‘Last time I saw one of those, I still had a functional heart. And a functional penis. You need the first to get the second, you see, because erectile tissue—’

  ‘What about these lines coming out in all directions?’ I asked, forestalling the biology lesson.

  ‘Evidently it’s a bright, shiny vagina.’

  ‘It was drawn on a wall at the Salisbury. The words “Now it bleeds” were written in spray paint right next to it.’

  Nicky shrugged. ‘The vagina hypothesis still looks robust,’ he said. ‘Why do you care, anyway? Is this anything to do with Kenny Seddon?’

  ‘It might be,’ I said non-committally. ‘It just struck me as odd, that’s all, so I thought I’d Rorschach you with it and see what it reminded you of. Now I wish I hadn’t. There’s a weird, poisoned atmosphere around the place, that’s all. And maybe that’s why Gwillam is there, now that I come to think of it. If he thought there was demonic activity in the area, he’d have his shock troops armed and ready.’

  ‘But you said you were avoiding Gwillam.’

  ‘I’m avoiding a head-on confrontation with him, yeah. But I’m still interested in anything that’s going down at the Salisbury that’s even slightly out of the ordinary. That’s why I’m asking you. Your antenna is pretty sensitive when it comes to stuff like this.’

  He acknowledged the compliment with a nod. By this time we were right in front of the doors to the auditorium. Nicky threw them open, brought up the main lights by tripping a big steel switch on the wall, and walked in with me following along behind him.

  The rest of the audience stood up, turning to face us. There was only one of her, but this was Juliet so one was more than enough. She smiled at us smoulderingly, her black-on-black eyes swallowing the light.

  ‘What did you think of the movie?’ Nicky asked.

  Juliet thought about this for a moment. ‘I enjoyed the deaths,’ she said, like someone looking around your living room for something to compliment you on and finally settling on the curtains because all of the furniture is eye-wateringly bad.

  ‘You enjoyed the deaths,’ Nicky repeated, his tone pained and indignant. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? It’s a story. It’s a fucking—’ His hands fluttered ineffectually for a moment as he struggled wi
th some way of defining narrative that he hadn’t already used. ‘Ah, forget it.’

  ‘A story about something that hasn’t yet happened, and isn’t likely to happen,’ Juliet agreed. ‘I understand what it is. I just don’t really see what it’s for.’

  ‘It’s for pleasure,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t understand pleasure, Juliet. I won’t believe you.’

  ‘But you know the things I take pleasure in,’ she countered, calmly exact. ‘Blood. Sex. Blood and sex together. Simple and primal things. Things that never lose their freshness and savour.’

  I tried to shut down a whole slew of mental images that were filling my mind in proliferating excess like pop-ups on an Internet browser. ‘I’ve seen you watching the telly with Susan,’ I pointed out. ‘You seemed happy enough then.’

  ‘Did you notice whether or not my eyes were in focus?’

  ‘Pearls before swine,’ Nicky muttered, crossing to the trestle table he’d set out earlier. ‘Okay, the inaugural screening is over. The Nicky Heath Gaumont is open for business, and God bless all who sail in her. Which will just be me, except when I see fit to invite you plebeian scum-bags. That’s it for the speeches, so let’s get to the alcohol.’

  On the table was a bottle of 1982 Chateau Pichon-Lalande Pauillac, which Nicky had opened and decanted earlier. He poured three glasses, held out one in each hand for me and Juliet to take. Then he raised the third glass himself, put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. That’s how Nicky takes his booze these days: he drinks the wine-breath, like ghosts are supposed to do, because he lacks the digestive enzymes to deal with the stuff if he actually drinks it. The sound he makes when he breathes is harsh and dry and pained, because inflating your lungs is something else that doesn’t come naturally to a corpse.