Thicker Than Water (27 page)

I felt a twinge of formless regret, thinking of that bare bedroom like an inadequate mausoleum: a memorial to a life, but from which all the visible signs of that life had been scrupulously erased. Didn’t grieving parents keep their kids’ rooms the way they were when the kids died? Wasn’t that how it was meant to work?

In my mind’s eye I’d given this lost boy the face of Bic, the prescient kid with the bandaged hands. And I suddenly realised that the hands were the link I’d unconsciously followed. Bic’s hands were wrapped up in grubby dressings: Kenny’s were criss-crossed with the scars of old wounds. Even the ponytailed woman who was hanging out with Gwillam had her hands wrapped up. And my hands, when I’d visited the Salisbury for the second time, had itched so badly that I’d wanted to tear the skin off them.

You need hands to hold a little baby
, Max Bygraves crooned lugubriously in some imperfectly locked room in my memory. When I was about eight, there was a certain level of drunkenness that would cause my mum to break out her LPs late at night and play them loud enough so that the sound came up through the floorboards to the bedroom I shared with Matt.
SingalongaMax
was one that we came to dread.

‘Tell me about that,’ I said. ‘I mean, how he died.’

‘He was the jumper. I told you there was a jumper, right? Maybe eighteen months ago. Jumped off the walkway between Weston and Beckett Block. Lot of alcohol in the blood, and a lot of speed, too, which is never a good combination. Couple of people saw him climb up on the concrete parapet, yell something and then jump. Verdict was accidental death, mainly because of the bloodwork. He probably wasn’t sober enough to make up his mind to kill himself and then stick to it.’

‘How old?’ I asked. Jean Daniels had already told me, but there’s never any harm in checking against the records.

‘Eighteen. Just.’

Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me. This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the double bed he now slept in alone, and carving out his indignation on his wrists and forearms . . . that was no stretch at all. But Kenny mourning a dead child? That wasn’t such an easy fit. And the bare room belied it, too, unless he cleared out all the kid’s stuff because it aroused memories that were too painful to bear.

I suddenly saw another anomaly, though, and the vivid picture faded.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘If Kenny’s girlfriend had left, why was the son still living with him? Didn’t he move on with the mother every other time she switched boyfriends?’

Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That seems to have been the pattern. But not this time. This time she hit the road and he hit the concrete. Everyone leaves the nest sooner or later.’

I found I wasn’t in the mood, somehow, for Nicky’s flippant little homilies, but as I opened my mouth to launch a put-down a nurse stuck her head in through the door and called out ‘Five minutes!’ in a ringing tone to the room at large.

‘Man, you should ask for a cavity search,’ Nicky scoffed. ‘That’s all you’re missing for the full institutional experience.’

‘That and some decent food,’ I reminded him. ‘Nicky, did you get anywhere with that drawing? The teardrop thing?’

‘The shiny vagina? Not so far,’ Nicky confessed grudgingly. ‘Still working on it.’

‘Okay. I want you to do me another favour.’

‘Well, Jesus, what a surprise.’

‘Gwillam. Find out where he lives.’

Nicky’s eyes lit up, but he couldn’t resist the cheap shot when it was sitting there right in front of him. ‘I thought that was Humpty-Dumpty territory,’ he reminded me.

‘It is. But hey, they cracked me once and I didn’t break. Not all the way. So now it’s my turn.’

‘Then I’ve got some good news for you.’ Nicky reached inside his pocket, fished out a folded sheet of paper and waved it in front of my face before dropping it onto the sheets. ‘I took the {s. poc liberty. He hides himself pretty fucking well, and it took a while. But it was a labour of love.’

I unfolded the sheet. It was an address in St Albans: The Rosewell Ecumenical Trust, Church Street.

‘That one you get for free, by the way,’ Nicky added.

‘Truly, this is the ending of days.’

‘Get well. And get bent.’

He walked away with a laconic wave, and I immediately turned my attention to the papers he’d left me. Not Gwillam’s address – that would keep – but the incident reports and statistics.

They would have made dry and difficult reading even if I’d been in better shape than I was. Nicky’s hacks get him into all kinds of interesting places, but he usually loses a certain amount of formatting along the way, so I was facing vast blocks of prose with pretty much no punctuation apart from line breaks.

And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tide. People hurt and killed each other, or themselves: broke against pavements, were impaled on railings, swallowed razor blades, carved gnomic messages on their own flesh or the flesh of their loved ones. There was blood, and there was pain. It drew me in, until I couldn’t see the land any more.

Was self-harm just another current within that sea, or was it something else? Mark, the dead boy, had cut himself and written poems about it: the wounds were clearly part of his inner life; the most intense and precious part. And Kenny had got the habit, too: as though it was something you could catch. As though . . .

‘Felix Castor!’

The voice was acerbic, angry, the emphasis very pronounced. I came out of my grim reverie and found myself looking up at the nurse, who was standing at the foot of my bed with my chart in her hand. And I understood her tone immediately, because she already knew me. But not by that name.

‘Nurse Ryall,’ I said, weakly. ‘Petra.’

The redhead quirked her head and flashed her eyes meaningfully. ‘Detective . . . Basketcase, was it?’

‘Basquiat,’ I said. ‘Would you believe I’m here undercover?’

She thrust the chart back into its holder with more vigour than was necessary. ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ she said. ‘That bloke upstairs was under police guard because someone had tried to murder him. I don’t know how you got in there, but I’m going to report it to the shift registrar and let her decide what to do with you.’

I tried to jump up out of the bed to head her off, but the pain relief I’d been given was working too well for that. I slumped back down onto the banked pillows and she turned on her heel.

‘They’ll want to know why you didn’t ask to see any ID,’ I called hastily.

Nurse Ryall hesitated, and then turned back to me with a flush of anger on her face.

‘You told me—’ she began.

‘No, you just made an assumption,’ I countered. ‘And I played up to it. Look, give me a minute to explain. I can’t stop you from reporting me, but if you do we’re both going to be in the shit for nothing.’

She stared at me wordlessly for a long time. I held on for the answer, keeping my stare locked with hers.

‘Go on,’ she said at last, her tone verging on grim.

I pointed to the chair that Nicky had left vacant. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Because you said you’d only need a minute.’

‘That was poetic licence. I’ll need ten.’

She consulted the watch she wore pinned to her chest. ‘I don’t have ten minutes,’ she said. ‘I’m on ward rounds.’

‘Then come back later. Seriously, there’s an innocent explanation for all this.’ If you stretch the word ‘innocent’ out to its functional limits, I thought to myself, and then knot it into a balloon sculpture. Nurse Ryall looked unconvinced, but after another painfully overextended pause she finally nodded.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘In two hours, when I’m on my break. But it had better be good.’

‘I’ll see you then,’ I confirmed, feeling weak with relief. Well, feeling weak generally, if the truth be known, but relief was in the mix.

Nurse Ryall stalked away, accompanied by the concatenation of her heels like the hoofbeats of apocalyptic horsemen.

I tried to wade into the haunted depths of Nicky’s paper trail again, but my attention was shot to hell. Giving up, I thought about the few things I thought I knew and the many, many more about which I was totally in the dark.

Something – quite possibly something demonic – was haunting the Salisbury estate. And the ripples seemed to be spreading in the form of an increase in violent acts of every kind. Even in that cautious formulation, I was naggingly aware that there was something I was missing. But my mind was too distracted by drugs and discomfort to pin it down.

Kenny, who had a ringside seat from the eighth floor of Weston Block, and whose own stepson was one of the victims, had tried to warn me about something. Or at least, while dying in his car of an overdose of slash wounds he had written my name on his windscreen in his own generously flowing blood. He’d got my attention, at somewhere considerably over the market price.

And the Anathemata Curialis, an ultramontane Catholic sect dedicated to the overthrow of the risen dead and undead, was now doorstepping the flats on the Salisbury – raising subjects that Jean Daniels hadn’t wanted to discuss with me. I’d tried to step in on that dance and had got myself well and truly bounced by the big man, Feld. Clearly this gig was invitation only – and the invitation seemed to have extended to my brother Matt, even if it hadn’t quite reached all the way to me.

A consultant on his late-evening sweep was working his way down the ward, looking at charts without enthusiasm and making a few observations now and again to his retinue of admiring interns. The procession stopped at my bed briefly, but seeing that I presented nothing more interesting than a punctured pleura and a few bumps and bruises, there was nothing to keep them.

Bored and restless, I tried again to make sense of the paperwork. It wasn’t just the unappetising format that was making it hard for me, it was the content, too. It was like looking through a tiny, smeary window into one of the circles of Hell. A drunken fight where one of the combatants had pulled a can opener instead of a knife, and had put it to a use not too far removed from the one it was designed for; a late-night duel with sharpened pool cues; home-made shurikens and caltrops, piano wire and cheese graters . . . Okay, we were talking about a span of well over a year, but were the residents of the Salisbury so much in love with blood that they spent their time devising new implements for tapping it? The sheer invention on display was disturbing in itself, although it paled next to the terse, unreflective case histories. This wasn’t right. Nothing here was right.

A clitter-clatter of heels jolted me out of my reverie, and I looked up to see Petra Ryall approaching, grim-faced. She looked around, her expression defensive and resentful, but the consultant and his teenage sidekicks had moved on to pastures new, the fat man and the twitching guy were asleep and the kid was lost in his own world of high-fidelity audio input. She pulled up the chair, sat down, glanced at her watch once to note the start time.

‘Ten minutes,’ she reminded me.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Well, for starters, I’m not a detective. I’m an exorcist.’

That got a sceptical eyebrow-flash, but no other response. Nurse Ryall stared at me, waiting for more.

‘I bind and banish the dead,’ I translated.

‘How?’

‘With a tin whistle.’ I spoke over her next question, because I’ve had this conversation a lot of times with a lot of people. ‘No two exorcists do it the same way. It’s music for me. For someone else it could be pentagrams or incantations or automatic writing or interpretative dance. It doesn’t matter. You make patterns, and things happen.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I can make a ghost come to me by calling it. Sometimes I’ll use an object – some personal effect or keepsake – as a focus; other times I just get the sense of the ghost by b {theimeeing close to it, and I can play the tune that makes it come. Then if I want to I can bind it and send it away.’

‘With music?’

‘Exactly. And I can do that with other things, too. Not just ghosts but . . .’ I hesitated. It was a big enough morsel to swallow already, without going into the full catalogue. ‘Let me tell you about Kenny,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe that’s the best way of explaining this.’

I started with the story of how me and Kenny had fought our one-sided duel on the roof of the tinworks, jumped forward to Kenny bleeding out in a car with my name on the windscreen, then went back and filled in as many of the gaps as Nicky’s brief orientation lecture and my own ferreting around the Salisbury would allow. I played down the demon-weavings, played up the wanting to find out what it was that Kenny had to tell me that was worth wasting a pint of his own blood to do it. From about two minutes in, I could tell from her expression that Nurse Ryall wasn’t buying it. Her frankly lovely face looked like a hod full of hard-core. And as soon as I’d finished, she shook her head.

‘If what you’re telling me is true,’ she said, ‘then why were you interested in the other man on the ward, too? The one with the puncture wounds.’

She had me there. By putting the emphasis so much on me and Kenny, I’d left out too much of the bigger picture – which maybe she needed to make sense of the other stuff.

I tried again, this time telling her about some of the stuff that was happening at the Salisbury – the epidemic of violence, the weird graffiti, the tranced kid trying to jump off the walkway. But it made things worse, not better. There wasn’t any thread of logic connecting these things, and that became more and more obvious the more I talked about it. I was just whistling in the dark, trying to make a whole out of a bunch of parts that I didn’t even understand separately. I decided to finish what I’d started, but more from mule-headedness than from any feeling that it would do any good. By the time I got to Nicky’s stats, I could hear the hollow echo of my own words in the silent ward, and when I finally wound down Nurse Ryall didn’t make any answer at all.