Thicker Than Water (10 page)

The walls inside the block were mostly free of daubed exhortations and expletives, but I noticed that something had been scrawled in black marker next to Kenny’s door, a foot or so off the ground. I bent down to examine it, moved mostly by idle curiosity. There were no words here: only an image as simple as a cave drawing. It showed a teardrop shape with straight lines radiating outwards from it in a ragged starburst.

‘He’s not in,’ said a voice from behind me.

I straightened and turned around. A woman was staring at me from the doorway at the end of the hall, which had opened without me hearing it. She was tall and red-haired, the red serving to set off the general lack of vivid colours anywhere else about her person. Her eyes were grey, her skin pale and freckled like the house-sparrow egg Matt had shown me once during his brief and uncharacteristically cruel foray into bird’s-nesting. She wore what you might call earth colours, although the earth in question would be the margins of a desert: sand and dry topsoil blowof topsoiing away in a tropical wind that never quit. She could only have been about forty, but she looked older. You immediately identified her as someone who’d had a crummy life and bent under it to keep from breaking.

She was looking at me with something like suspicion. Either for purposes of self-defence or because I’d caught her in the middle of making lunch, she held a long kitchen knife in one frail-looking hand. The smell of frying that wafted out into the hall from behind her seemed to confirm the second hypothesis.

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, smiling a slightly imbecilic, wrath-deflecting smile. Not that this lady had any particular wrath to give.

‘Mister Seddon. He’s not in. He hasn’t been in all day.’ The woman’s voice was very low, dipping lower still at the end of every phrase as though whenever she opened her mouth she was sticking her head up over a parapet and then reflexively ducking again in case she got shot at.

I tried to look surprised and disappointed as I ambled across the hallway towards her. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Miss—’

‘Mrs.’

‘Mrs . . . ?’

‘Daniels.’ She looked back over her shoulder with a distracted air, then back at me. ‘I can’t really talk right now,’ she said, and then, as if the lapse of manners had to be balanced or atoned for in some way, she added ‘Jean. Jean Daniels.’

‘Of course. Mrs Daniels. Kenny said for me to call today.’ That sentence hung in the air for an over-long moment, while I assembled some other lies to go along with it. ‘For the books.’

The red haired woman frowned. ‘The books?’ she repeated.

I nodded gravely. ‘I’m collecting for the rummage sale,’ I said. ‘At Saint Gary-le-Pauvre. The priest’s a friend of mine, and I like to help out.’

‘Oh.’ The frown didn’t disappear, despite this morally unimpeachable cover story. If anything it deepened. ‘Well, I know Mister Seddon’s not in because my Thomas had to take his post from the postman this morning and we’ve knocked six or seven times to give it to him. You’ll have to come back another time.’

I didn’t take the hint: this was a recon mission, after all, and that included making contact with the local citizenry. ‘Kenny’s a fine man,’ I said, throwing out a random hook. ‘But we’ve not seen each other in a while. I hope he’s well. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Felix Castor.’

I held out my hand, but Jean Daniels didn’t seem keen to reciprocate.

‘So you’re from the church?’ she demanded again. Her tone was solemn and slow: the tone of someone working through a complex syllogism.

‘That’s right.’

‘And you said “the priest”, so – a
Catholic
church?’

‘Well . . .’ Too late to temporise. ‘Not un-Catholic,’ I admitted lamely. ‘Definitely on the Catholic side of the equation.’

‘But Mister Seddon is Protestant, isn’t he? Bitter orange, was the way he put it. I remember it particularly because it was one of the first things he ever said to me.’

Bitter orange. It was a resonant phrase for anyone born and bred in the briar patch of Liverpool 9. Mrs D was right, too: I remembered now that Kenny’s dad and all his uncles had been in the Lodge, marching in bright orange sashes and Moss Bros suits along County Road on the Glorious Twelfth.

Fortunately, Mrs Daniels seemed more apologetic than indignant to have caught me out in a flat lie. Or at any rate, she went on talking to cover the social embarrassment. ‘The very next day after he moved in, when I met him for the first time by the lift, Mister Seddon asked me what denomination we were. And when I said we weren’t anything very much he wasn’t happy at all. He said we must have been brought up something, in a Christian country. So I told him my parents were Catholic, my Tom’s were High Church Anglican, and he never had another word to say to us.’ She shook her head in solemn wonder. ‘It’s a shame the uses some people put the Lord to – making hate where there should be love, and turning a good message into a bad one.’

‘Well, Saint Gary’s is an ecumenical mission,’ I assured her, wishing I’d thought up a better cover story: she was sharper than she looked. ‘But it’s never been about the religion for me. I just like to do good for goodness’ sake.’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘Not in the slightest. My
brother
‘s a priest,’ I offered, as though that helped to establish my own credentials. ‘Like I said, I really just wanted to check in on Kenny and find out if things were going okay for him these days. We go back a long way. In case I didn’t mention it before, I’m Felix. Felix Castor.’ (I knew I was repeating myself but I reckoned it was time to be persistent.)

I stuck my hand out again. It would have been rude to ignore it twice, and Mrs Daniels seemed deathly afraid of giving offence. She put her own hand in mine, a little limply, and allowed it to be shaken.

Which meant that I finally got to read her. This kind of random trawling is an automatic thing with me: the same morbid sensitivity that lets me see ghosts even where others can’t sometimes allows me to pick up surface thoughts and emotions from people’s minds when I touch them. So I do it even in situations like this one where there probably isn’t much to be gained.

What I got from Mrs Daniels was powerful, narrowly specific, and no use to me at all. She had a shallow cut on her forearm and she couldn’t think how she’d done it. It was making her itch like mad but she didn’t want to scratch in front of a stranger. That was also why she hadn’t wanted to shake my hand, because she’d left the cut uncovered to make it scab faster and she was embarrassed to have it be seen. She was worried about someone – no names, no image, just a conceptual knot thatignual kno was full of warmth and uncritical love – and worried in a different way about the time she was wasting as she stood here talking to me. She was also embarrassed about the kitchen knife, and she glanced down at it now as she disengaged her hand from my grip.

‘Cooking his lunch,’ she said by way of explanation as she held up the knife for my inspection. ‘I should get back, really. I can’t turn the ring down all the way and the fat might catch. Things aren’t.’

I thought I might have misheard those last two words, because they didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of the sentence in any meaningful way. But Mrs Daniels saw my puzzled blink and went on with barely a break.

‘Well, you asked me if things were going well for him – for Mister Seddon. They’re not. He’s going from bad to worse, really. I don’t think he’s ever got over it. He puts a brave face on, because you’ve got to, but it’s not something that ever goes away, is it? You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done.’

I was lost in this welter of restricted code. I tilted my head in polite inquiry. ‘Anything you could have done to . . . ?’

‘Well, to stop it,’ Mrs Daniels said, looking at me with eyes that carried a full share of the world’s hurt. ‘I mean, you’d be thinking that if you’d seen the signs early enough you could have said something. Got some help. I know they say you can’t, but I think it depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?’

It seemed safest to agree. ‘What
were
the circumstances?’ I asked earnestly. ‘I’ve never felt able to ask.’

Mrs D shook her head bleakly. ‘I could tell you some tales,’ she said, with a lack of enthusiasm that belied the words. ‘But I won’t. Not now. The time to have said something was before, when it might have done some good. I blame myself. We all should blame ourselves. He deserved better. Whatever was going on at home . . .’ She paused, then went on quickly, nervously, as if she’d just stepped across an unacknowledged abyss and didn’t want to look down. ‘He still deserved better. We’ve all got a responsibility, I think, don’t you? To say what can’t be said? A boy that age has got his whole life ahead of him. I used to see him with the girls, and there were two or three who wouldn’t have said no if he’d asked. But he was lost. He never looked like he was in the same world as everyone else. And then you start to hear the stories, from the other boys. My John’s the same age, but it was my Billy, my youngest, funnily enough, who knew him better than anyone. And he’s said things that pulled me up short, more than once. It was there. He wasn’t hiding it. A hundred people saw it, and twice as many as that knew all about it. But nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. That’s what I meant when I said we were all to blame.’

She’d talked herself into a state of mild distress, her voice becoming more animated as she wrestled with her own undefined sin. Now she looked at me expectantly, but I had no idea what it was she was expecting. Commiseration? Absolution? A smack on the wrist? I struggled to find a loose thread in her tone poem that I could seize and pull at to see if it unravelled. Kenny Seddon was a bit long in the tooth to be called a boy, so presumably this ‘he’ was someone else. A son? Did Kenny have a family? I was nearly cm” was neertain that Gary had said he lived alone. I opened my mouth to frame a question that wouldn’t give away my ignorance.

A bellow with a lot of bass in it sounded from the open door at Mrs Daniels’s back, drowning out whatever I was going to say. ‘Jean! Jeanie! Is there a shirt in here that’s been ironed?’

Mrs Daniels folded in on herself in some subtle, mostly non-physical way. ‘That’s my Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She stepped back over the threshold, starting to close the door. Then she stopped abruptly, her face splitting open in a radiant smile that took me completely by surprise. It wasn’t for me, though: she was looking past me along the hallway, and whatever it was she was seeing made that infolding reverse itself; made her open up again, like a flower at the end of a long, dark night.

‘It never fails,’ she said, her voice suddenly alive with droll over-emphasis. ‘Put some chips in a pan, and here he comes.’

I turned to see the blond boy, Bic, walking towards me. He gave me a puzzled glance, nodded vaguely, and then submitted to his mother’s exuberant embrace. When she’d squashed him a little out of shape, she held him at arm’s length for inspection. ‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘You can wash before you eat, you little urchin.’ She took the sting out of the words by tousling his hair with the same vigour that she’d applied to the hug.

‘Get off, Mum!’ Bic protested, deciding that enough was enough. He ducked under her arm and past her into the flat, but only because she didn’t contest it.

‘Children are the treasure house of the world,’ Mrs Daniels declared, favouring me with a self-conscious but sincere smile. The fact that I’d seen her in her parental role seemed to have broken the ice between us in some decisive way.

I nodded, returning the smile. ‘Shouldn’t he be in school?’ I asked, mainly for the sake of prolonging the moment of trust and intimacy.

‘Baker day,’ Mrs Daniels said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘In-service training. All the secondary schools are closed today. It’s lucky I’m on a late shift, isn’t it? God knows how other mothers cope. I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go now. Nice to meet you, Mister . . .’

For a moment I considered giving her a false name, since my real one clearly hadn’t stuck either time. There might possibly be some point in lying, if Basquiat came gunning for me in earnest and wanted to establish an evidence trail. But I gave the detective credit where it was due: she wouldn’t stay in the dark for long if she seriously wanted to check up on me.

‘Castor,’ I said, making the hat trick. ‘Felix Castor.’

‘Good day to you, Mister Castor. I’ll tell Mister Seddon you were looking for him.’

The door closed in my face – all the way, this time. Tom’s needs had to be met, and clearly Mrs Daniels had no more time for small talk. I stood in the corridor for a few moments longer, trying to make sense of what she’d said. Clearly something ha wi somethd happened to Kenny recently. Something bad, that had left a permanent shadow – or had seemed to. Something he could perhaps have prevented, because there were signs in advance that other people had been able to see.

It was probably unrelated to the attack on him, of course – and the odds were overwhelming that it had no bearing at all on why he’d written my name in his own blood as he sank into unconsciousness and possibly into death. But I had to start somewhere, and if I couldn’t cajole the truth out of the neighbours I knew someone I could buy it from at the market price.

I went back into the daylight at last, and it was welcome. There was something oppressive about the interior of the tower that made me grateful to see the sun again, even if it was beating down like a hammer on an anvil. A wounded-ox lowing of distant traffic met my ears, audible again because I’d been out of it for ten minutes. The miasma was becoming harder to sense for the opposite reason – because it was holding steady now, and my senses were starting to tune it out.

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.