Thicker Than Water (18 page)

‘We didn’t discuss it with Billy,’ he said. ‘John knew all about it, of course, because they were talking about it up and down the estate, but Billy mostly stays at home and does his own thing, like. He’s got his Playstation and his books. Or he goes off wandering, sometimes, with his mates. There’s half a dozen of them – no harm in any of them, not like the bloody teenagers we’ve got round here.

‘But as Jeanie says, Billy’s not stupid. He knew Mark had gone, and I imagine there was talk at school about what had happened. Must have been, mustn’t there? Anyway, he started brooding about it. Next thing we knew, he’s cutting stuff [ cut h out of the newspapers and taping bits off the TV news. I suppose it hit him hard, this lad living right next door to him and being sort of his friend and everything.’

‘His best friend,’ Jean said softly.

Tom looked at her and shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘There was five years between them.’

‘He gave Billy the poem,’ Jean said, talking to me more than to her husband. ‘That had to have meant something. I told you he had no friends his own age, Mister Castor. I think he thought Billy understood him. I think it must have hit him very hard when Billy stopped talking to him.’

She trailed off into silence.

There was an elephant in the living room with us, and I felt that it was time to try wrangling it a little. ‘When did Billy’s hands start to bleed?’ I asked.

Tom blanched at this blunt wording, but Jean took it squarely on the chin. ‘That was later,’ she said, her voice almost level. ‘The dreams came first.’

‘He dreamed about Mark?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really. At least, he didn’t see Mark in his dreams. He dreamed about a place. It was really dark there – so dark you couldn’t see anything, not even yourself. And he’d stumble around for a while, trying to find a way out. But he never could, so in the end he’d just sit down on the ground and wait.

‘The ground . . .’ She hesitated, as if she really didn’t know how to say this. ‘He said it was warm. Like skin. But not soft like skin: it was all ridged and rough and shiny. He said it was like lava after a volcano. When it’s cooled, he said, you get miles and miles of this stuff like the surface of the moon.’ She smiled faintly. ‘He’d just done volcanoes at school.

‘And then he’d start to hear this voice, in the darkness. And he was sure it was Mark’s voice, even though he said it didn’t sound anything like. But there it was, this voice droning on and on. Not really talking to Billy, so he said. Just talking.’

‘About what?’

She gave me a slightly haunted look. ‘What do you think? About hurting yourself. Cutting yourself open. About the way it feels when you cut into yourself and let the pain out. About how wounds are roses and blood is wine.’

One of those leaden silences fell between us: the kind where everyone is expecting someone else to be the next to speak, and it gets more awkward the longer you leave it.

‘Did the news articles mention that Mark was a self-harmer? ’ I asked.

‘Some of them,’ said Tom. ‘But he could have got most of it from the poem, couldn’t he? It’s all there. We just tried talking him out of it at first, because he’s bright and he’s a good lad, like Jeanie said. We thought it would be a nine days’ wonder, [dayoutlike most things are when you’re that age. We took the tapes and all the bits of paper away and locked them in a cupboard. And we kicked him out when he got back after school to play in the adventure playground or over in the park. We thought he just needed his mind taking off it.’

‘And that,’ said Jean, with heavy finality, ‘was when the bleeding started. Just a drop, at first, but how can you have blood, Mister Castor, if you haven’t cut yourself? And the more we wiped it away, the more it came. We took him in to see the GP, and then a dermatologist, but they don’t have a clue. They were talking about our Billy being a haemophiliac, as though that explains it. But his blood clots normally if you test it, so it isn’t that.’

‘And that bloody priest . . .’ Tom interposed, but then he seemed to think better of that line of discussion and left the words hanging.

‘The priest?’ I echoed. ‘Is that the man you mentioned before? The man in the white raincoat?’ Tom didn’t answer, but the look he threw at Jean was of the he-already-knows variety. ‘Was his name Gwillam?’ I asked.

After a strained pause, Jean nodded. ‘That’s him.’

‘What did he want? Was it something to do with Billy?’

Another look passed between them.

‘It was my fault,’ Tom muttered, ‘for mentioning it to Father Merrick at Bethesda’s. I should have kept my mouth—’

‘I don’t think it’s something I feel comfortable talking about, Mister Castor,’ Jean broke in, her tone as tense and taut as if Gwillam had put an indecent proposal to her. ‘I’m sorry.’

That left me somewhat high and dry. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s not my place to ask. And I’m grateful for what you’ve told me already.’ I stood up. ‘See what the hospital says about Billy,’ I said. ‘Hopefully he’ll just wake up tomorrow not remembering any of this. But I’d get him out of this place, if you’ve got anywhere else to send him. He needs to be in a different atmosphere for a while.’

‘There’s my sister’s,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘In Croydon.’

The thought of sending anyone to Croydon for their health was as surreal as anything else in this conversation. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That sort of thing. Just for a couple of weeks. You’ve got the school holidays coming up. Pack him off out of this.’

But Jean was shaking her head. ‘He stays here,’ she said, ‘with me. Or we all go together. If my boy is going through something bad, then I’m the one who looks after him. Thank you for your time, Mister Castor.’

There was no misinterpreting her tone. The consultation was over.

‘I think it’s this place more than anything else that’s making him sick,’ I said, persisting with my diagnosis in the teeth of her new-found determination. ‘It’s your choice, obviously. And I know it’s complicated. It [mplth always is. But look, if anything should come up that you want to talk to me about . . .’ I gave them my card, with the solemnity of someone who hasn’t been doing that kind of thing for very long. The card is a recent innovation, obtained from a printer who offered to do me a job lot of a hundred for free by way of an introductory offer. If he’d known the size of my client base he would have cut that back to ten.

Jean turned the card in her hand, and Tom looked over her shoulder at it, his expression changing to a slightly pained frown.

‘Spiritual services,’ Jean read aloud. ‘That’s what you get from an exorcist, is it? What does it mean, exactly?’

‘It means a lot of different things,’ I said. ‘I set up wards against the dead, advise people how to make their houses safe, that sort of thing. I persuade ghosts to go away if they’re making a nuisance of themselves, or else I find out what it is they want. I can tell you if someone you haven’t seen for a while is alive or dead, and if they’re dead I can invite them over to talk to you. I do kids’ parties too, sometimes. Don’t ask for references on that, though, because I haven’t had any satisfied customers yet. The number on the back is my landlady’s: if I don’t pick up on the office number, you can leave a message for me there.’

Jean gave the card to Tom to look after, and he slipped it into a back pocket. I stood up, feeling like I’d overstayed my welcome.

‘Thank you, Mister Castor,’ Jean said, giving me a slightly awkward handshake. Tom didn’t put out his hand, and I didn’t feel inclined to offer mine.

‘Seriously,’ I said to Jean. ‘If you need me, call. I’m only an hour away.’

She nodded.

‘He’ll be fine when he wakes up,’ Tom said, with brusque conviction.

But Bic was still sleeping – or unconscious – when I left, and the ambulance still hadn’t arrived.

I noticed as I walked past that Kenny’s door was now closed. That was good, as far as it went, but I wondered who was going around behind me, covering my tracks. I also wondered what business Gwillam could have with the Daniels family – and why it didn’t bear repeating.

I was lost in thought as I walked down the stairs. But as I came level with the third-floor walkway, a movement at the corner of my eye made me turn my head. It had come from outside, from the walkway itself, which meant I was seeing it through the grimed glass of the swing-doors. What had made it noticeable was that there was a light out there – one of the few functioning street lamps – and whoever had moved had momentarily occulted it from my perspective: light-darkness-light, a Morse-code flash.

I stopped and stared. There was a figure standing on the walkway, her back against the street light. Not a bad position to take up if you were watching Weston Block, because to anyone looking back you’d just be a backlit silhouette. But I
knew
the silhouette: I’d seen it only a day before, and the ponyta [andng il was a dead give-away. It was the woman I’d seen with Gwillam.

I took an involuntary step forward. Despite the stern tone I’d taken with Nicky, I was itching to find out what Gwillam was up to down here. Maybe the ponytailed woman would be willing to give me a few hints if I did my Rudy-Basquiat-consulting-detective routine again. You never know until you try.

But as I headed for the doors she saw me too. Her gaze had been fixed on the higher levels of the building: now it flicked down and caught the movement nearer to hand, and she was gone out of the circle of light before I even had the door open.

I went after her at a flat run, along the full length of the walkway and into the gaping doors that led into the next tower block in the daisy chain.

The doors facing me – doors that led out onto another stretch of walkway – were still swinging. I headed in that direction, but something – some mistrustful gene that’s probably a precious part of my Liverpudlian heritage – made me slow and listen for half a second even as I took the bait. It was half a second well invested: the woman’s rapid footsteps were clearly audible from the echoing stairwell off to my right, and from below me. I slewed round and followed, taking each flight of stairs in two giant strides.

I guess Juliet is right about my aversion to planning: this kind of whimsical improvisation has got me into trouble more times than I care to count. But I only wanted to talk to the woman, in a spirit of bluff and intimidation, and maybe get a hint about how the Salisbury fitted into the Anathemata’s world-view. Plus my blood was up now: I was filled with the thrill of the chase.

That was probably why I walked right into what was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. As I rounded the final bend, still a dozen or so steps above ground level, a big hand thrust itself out of the shadows in the dank lobby, grabbed a generous swathe of my lapels and hooked me through the air to slam me hard against the wall.

It was Gwillam’s other friend: the tall, lean man with the planed and spirit-levelled face. He held me pinned against the wall with surprising strength, his hand pressing against my chest so hard that he squeezed the breath out of me like the air out of a bellows, making it impossible for me to inflate my lungs. He looked round inquiringly at the ponytailed woman, who was standing up against the street doors, which she’d pushed half open. She looked breathless and angry.

‘Scrape him off,’ she snapped. ‘Then fold and follow me.’

The flat-faced man brought his face up close to mine, staring at me slightly quizzically with his head tilted first to one side, then to the other. His movements were staccato, punctuated by perfect stillness.

‘Bad boy,’ he said, in a voice that was both deep and hollow, like an oracle speaking from a cave or from the bottom of a well. His tone was detached, though, despite the disapproving words – and his mouth, as I’d noticed the day before when he was talking to Gwillam, moved all of a piece, as though his lower jaw, like a puppet’s, was a piece of wood hinged at the ends.

I locked both of my hands on his one, and tried to lever it away or at least relieve some of the pressure so that I could draw a breath. Nothing doing: this guy wasn’t particularly thickset, but he was terrifyingly strong.

‘You – ’ he said, and he let the word linger while black dots clustered and spread behind my eyes. ‘ – really need to take a rest.’

He pulled me back and slammed me forward again so that I crashed against the wall once, twice, three times. I tried to let my head sag forward, but on the third beat he got the angle just so and the back of my skull smacked off the wall, turning the black dots into impressive techni-colour Catherine wheels.

There was one further impact, but it came from a different angle. I was dimly aware that the big man must have thrown me, or maybe just let me fall. Through the spiked fug of near-unconsciousness, I deduced that I was horizontal and used that as a clue to what it might take to get upright again. But my limbs had forgotten the effortless cooperation they’d developed over thirty-some years: I must have looked like Bambi on ice.

Unfortunately, Flat-face had lingered to make sure I stayed down, and he seemed to take my trying to get up as a deliberate provocation. I saw his foot draw back for a kick, aimed squarely at my head. I raised a feeble, futile arm to fend it off.

‘That’s enough,’ said a voice from over by the street doors. ‘Leave him alone.’

Flat-face lowered his foot and turned. Blinking my eyes semi-clear, I looked off in that direction too. The newcomer stood framed in the doorway, holding the double doors open with fully extended arms, but there was a querulous note in his voice that clashed badly with the dramatic pose. It wasn’t the voice of a man who knows he’s going to be obeyed.

‘Who says it’s enough?’ demanded Flat-face in a dangerous basso rumble.

‘I do, obviously.’ The newcomer took a step towards us. ‘I mean it, Feld. Look at me if you don’t believe me.’

Flat-face stared down at the newcomer. I stared at him too and I probably would have gasped if I’d had any breath left to do it. The big man didn’t gasp: in fact he didn’t respond in any way that I could see. But after a moment or two he flexed his arms and adjusted his cuffs, first left and then right.