Thicker Than Water (14 page)

I reached out and touched the tips of my fingers to his open palm. Silence. Nobody home. I stood as still as I could, eyes tight shut, trying to find Kenny’s frequency through the emotional effluvia pooling all around me – the gone-but-not-erased emotions that had soaked into the hospital’s walls over the course of the last century and a half and now seemed to my strained perceptions to be sweating out of the brickwork.

I was picking up something, but it wasn’t much: a dimly flickering filament of consciousness like a 25-watt light bulb left burning somewhere in the basement rooms of Kenny’s mind – the psychic equivalent of a pulse. But I was getting nothing else: not memory, not emotion, not even the raw light-dark strobe of an untranslatable dream. Kenny wasn’t a good sender, and the conditions were almost as bad as they could be. It seemed I’d spent a lot of effort and ingenuity to no good end.

But then, acting on an impulse I didn’t consciously examine, I slid my hand across Kenny’s palm until the tip of my index finger touched the line of one of his old, half-healed wounds. Instantly, that faint pulse opened up like a hot red flower and I flinched from the shock of the contact, almost pulling my hand away.

What I was feeling was a mixture of contradictory emotions that turned around and through each other without merging, like oil in water. There was pain in there, sharp and real and narrowly focused: but the pain was shot through with a restless hunger that was almost erotic in its intensity, and riding on the hunger there was a sense of urgency, a formless conviction that translated as
NOW
,
NOW
,
NOW
,
LET
IT BE
NOW
.

It took a real effort not to step back, not to break the contact, because the emotions were so alien and so powerful: someone else’s excitement, someone else’s suffering and need flooding my synapses. I felt as though I was collaborating in an assault in which I was simultaneously victim and accomplice.

Images began to surface in the flow of emotion like corpuscles in plasma or felled trees on a rolling river. I saw a small, cramped room barely big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers, the top of the chest piled high with CDs and empty CD cases; the towers and walkways of the Salisbury, by day and then by night; and a hand, probably male, touching the surface of a broken mirror in which a face was reflected in jumbled jigsaw pieces. The face was eerily familiar, but I didn’t have time to reassemble that jigsaw before the ceaseless rush of thought carried it away from me again, brought me instead a razor, a bitter taste, a drumming, repetitive song.

I got the sword

I’m good because

I got the sword

I’m good because

I tried to screen the music out but it had an insane, viral insistence: it overwhelmed and effaced the other sensations one piece at a time until there was nothing else left but the pounding drumbeat.

I opened my eyes and pulled back my hand, stopping the drumbeat dead. My fingertip tingled and throbbed as though I’d touched a hot plate and a blister was starting to form.

‘He’s looking better than he was,’ said a voice from behind me. A woman’s voice: the nurse. A moment later I heard her footsteps coming towards me.

I managed not to turn.

‘Yeah?’ I answered. ‘How do you mean?’

She walked past me, brisk and businesslike, carrying a grey plastic bowl, half full of water, which she set down on the table next to Kenny’s bed. She had a towel and a flannel hung over one arm, and she laid them out too with practised, economical movements. From her pocket she took a bottle of liquid soap. She was a short brunette, broad at shoulder and hip and as formidable as her voice. She was probably about my age, but she wore it better. Most people do.

‘His blood pressure is up a bit,’ she said. ‘Sixty over forty. And his eyes are moving in his sleep – I saw that when I came in before. That’s a very good sign.’

There had to be some reason why she was talking to me like an old friend instead of asking to see my credentials or screaming for the cop on the door, and I’d figure it out sooner or later. For now I was content to gather whatever rosebuds were on offer.

‘What do you make of the wounds?’ I asked.

She straightened and looked round at me, looking a bit bemused. ‘What do
I
make of them?’

I nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘Well, you’re the expert.’

Okay. The penny dropped at that point. She couldn’t think I was a consultant on his rounds, so she must be mistaking me for one of Coldwood’s boys, stopping by to scrape up a bit more forensic evidence. It says a lot for the public perception of the Met that a guy who rolls in out of the night in a long coat with two days’ worth of stubble on his chin is taken to be one of London’s finest rather than a wino looking for a berth.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, straight-faced. ‘I am. But you know how it is with experts:
multum in parvo
.’

The nurse blinked. ‘Multi what?’

‘Means “deep but narrow”, which defines me perfectly. ‘I’m -‘ well I’d better not be Castor this time out, in case that name ended up on a charge sheet some time soon ‘- Basquiat. Rudy Basquiat. Detective Sergeant. Who are you?’

She gave me an old-fashioned look and tapped the badge she wore on her ample chest. She was
Petra Ryall, charge nurse
. Right. I bet when she lowered her head and charged she’d be something to see.

‘Petra,’ I said. ‘What I mean is, I just look at things from one angle. And your angle is going to be different because . . .’

‘Because?’

‘Because I’m a tough, hard-bitten, cynical London cop and you’re an angel of mercy.’

Nurse Ryall grinned at me. ‘You think they’ll give us our own TV series?’ she asked.

‘Bound to.’

‘Well, I only know what I saw when I was putting the dressings on, but I was thinking the angles are all weird. Did you think that?’

‘You first,’ I said, ‘then me. What do you mean by weird?’

She shrugged, looking away into the corner of the room as she consulted her memory. ‘I just mean . . . all over the place,’ she said. ‘Some of them low, some of them high. Left side, right side. Daft, really. They said he was in a car when he was attacked. You wouldn’t think there’d be room in a car for someone to, you know, come at him from all sides like that.’

I nodded encouragement, as though she was echoing my very thoughts. ‘Say he was struggling to get away, though,’ I suggested. ‘Trying to get out of his seat belt, maybe. He’d be squirming around, presenting different parts of his body to the attacker. Maybe it happened like that.

‘Maybe,’ Petra allowed, but she sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know. There was something else, you know? Well, of course you know. If I’m talking rubbish, just tell me.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, some of these cuts were really two cuts. The razor had hit the same place twice. You can tell because there’s different lines – different incisions – that overlap each other. So it’s more like he was being held still and the other bloke was going and going at him. Does that make sense?’

‘Perfect sense,’ I assured her. ‘Evidence, inference, conclusion. You’d make a good detective.’

She seemed to appreciate the compliment. ‘So are they connected?’ she asked, waggling her finger to indicate Kenny and the room’s other occupant.

I was momentarily thrown. ‘Why would you assume that?’ I asked, temporising.

My surprise must have shown on my face. Petra hesitated for a moment, maybe wondering if she’d overstepped the bounds of forensic decorum. ‘Well, because of the address, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Same postcode. And two stabbings coming so close together. Not a razor, I know, but I thought it could still be . . .’

‘No, absolutely,’ I agreed as she faltered into silence. ‘We haven’t discounted that possibility at all. I’m just impressed that you made the connection. Were they really as close together as all that, though?’

She rounded the other bed and consulted the chart.

‘Three days,’ she admitted. ‘I thought it was only two.’

‘And the MO,’ I mused, chancing my arm. ‘Sometimes the differences can tell you a lot.’

Petra looked down at the frail old man lying in troubled slumber between us. ‘Lots of wounds again,’ she said. ‘But lots of little punctures, this time. And all more or less the same depth. Creepy. You’d think someone had tied him up with barbed wire or something. K or th But he was just lying in his bed, wasn’t he? Until that priest found him and brought him in.’

Priest?

‘Father Gwillam,’ I said.

‘Yeah, him.’ She glanced up at me, her face earnest and unhappy. ‘Who’d do a thing like that to a poor old man?’ she demanded. ‘It’s horrible. Sometimes I hate this world.’

I nodded, but my mind was racing and it was all I could do to maintain a suitable poker face. Was it the differences or the similarities that were more important here? Was I looking at variations on a theme or two unconnected acts of random violence? One attack involved stab wounds, the other puncture wounds. And Kenny had been ambushed in his car while this other guy seemed to have been attacked by a burglar. But from what Petra had said, both victims were from the Salisbury estate. And the Salisbury estate was suffering from two parallel infestations: sinister graffiti and the Anathemata.

It was worth taking the temperature one more time, particularly as I didn’t have anything to lose here. Without asking permission I leaned down to examine the sleeping man at closer range. The puncture marks that Petra had mentioned weren’t in evidence, but three small dressings on the man’s face – at forehead, cheek and chin – showed where some of them had been. I touched his cheek gently with the back of my hand, as close to the edge of the bandage as I could.

Nothing. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting – or whether the same kind of searing, vivid newsflash I’d got from Kenny would have been welcome or not. But this man was soundly asleep and his mind and soul were folded in on themselves: there was nothing to be gleaned from them, or at least not by me.

‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Nurse Ryall,’ I said, giving her a nod as I stepped back from the bed. She was watching me with a sort of puzzled patience. ‘You’ve helped me to clarify some thoughts.’

‘Well, you’re welcome,’ she said. ‘Listen, I came in here to give Mister Seddon a bed bath. I’m going to have to put the screens up, and since you’re not a relative . . .’

I raised my hands. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘I’d love to see you in action, but I’ve got places to be and crimes to solve. You know how it is.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘I think so. Down the – what-d’you-call-it – mean streets . . .’

‘A man must walk. Exactly.’

‘You’re dead laid-back for a detective, aren’t you, Sergeant Basquiat?’

‘I used to be on the drug squad,’ I said. ‘The ganja gets to you after a while. Cheers, Petra.’

I left her rolling Kenny carefully onto his side. Sooner her than me.

The cop on the door gave me less than half a glance as I left Kanc

I looked at my watch. Still nowhere near midnight, but by the time I got over to Walworth the witching hour would be over and done with.

Good. I had things to do over there that I didn’t want the daylight to look upon.

The Salisbury at night was if anything even less prepossessing than it was by day. The light of a hunter’s moon bleached the unresisting pastels from the faces of the towers, so that they looked like titanic ribs of bone, and shadows accreted like crusted blood under the walkways.

But the air was alive. While the residents slept, it seemed that the emotional miasma I’d felt on my first visit woke and stirred. It had been an annoying distraction when I’d been here before, setting my teeth on edge until I finally attuned to it and let it fade into the perceptual background. But it was in the foreground now with a vengeance, buzzing in my ears like an angry mosquito.

No, not angry. It wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was something else – but reaching for the word made the feeling disappear, the droning whine shutting down like a mosquito does as soon as you’ve got the rolled-up newspaper at the ready. And it wasn’t really in my head that the mosquitoes were buzzing: it was in my fingers and in the palms of my hands, as if there was something that I had to do that was getting more urgent by the moment.

Yeah, that was it, now that I thought about it. It was the same feeling of urgency and greed that I’d got when I’d touched the old wounds on Kenny’s wrist.

I came in from the north this time, and because I knew my way I walked more quickly. Maybe I could be in and out before this oppressive presence gave me a headache and ruined what was left of my night.

It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning and the place seemed deserted. Most of the lights in the flats were out, too, suggesting that the good people of Walworth had called it a night and turned in early. Maybe they were afraid of werewolves, although in real life it was the dark of the moon that caused most of the problems on that front: that was when the animal flesh fought back hardest against the human spirit that was riding it, resulting in some truly scary amalgamations of man and beast.

I scanned the graffiti wherever the moon shone its torchlight on a wall or pillar. I didn’t see the peculiar symbol again, but the slogan
NOW
IT
BLEEDS
was emblazoned on the wooden slats of the wheelie-bin corral, and underneath it in a different hand – or at least a different colour –
GONNA
GET
HURT
.

I found my way back to Weston Block and up to the eighth floor. It was as silent as the grave – not that that particular simile has a whole lot of meaning these days. I was half-afraid that the external door would be locked after dark. It wasn’t, but it opened with an extended, rust-stopped groan like a homage to a Boris Karloff movie. I opened it just to my own body’s width and Neneslipped inside. Then I wedged it open with an empty Silk Cut packet that was lying on the floor so that we wouldn’t get the same performance again when it slid to.