Thicker Than Water (38 page)

Call me a sentimentalist, but I’ve always felt a sort of kinship with that bird. It belongs to no genus, but everyone confidently declares it to be a stork, a pelican, or whatever else they need it to be to fit the ž kitheory in hand. Whereas actually it’s a sleight of hand, a brazen forgery passed off on man and nature. As a symbol for my home town, it’s not bad: everybody thinks they know what Scousers are like, but the closer you look at us, the less neatly the individual details seem to add up.

Inside, the Breeze continued to give that same impression of inelegant confinement. The main room is long and narrow, with the bar running the whole length of it: there’s just enough room between the bar and the wall for one row of people standing up and one row sitting down. When my parents were regulars here, social propriety dictated that the standing drinkers were men: tonight there was a fair mix, but I noticed that there was a heavy age bias, with most of the faces – both at the bar and along the wall – belonging to my mum and dad’s generation. The Breeze clearly wasn’t managing to sell itself as a happening place for the younger social drinker: no widescreen TV, no games machines, no jukebox even. There was a one-armed bandit sitting in an unfrequented corner, which probably made less income in a month than the bar staff earned from tips, but that was the only concession to the modern era.

I didn’t recognise more than half a dozen people, and none of them seemed to recognise me. Life is the best disguise of all, and I’d been through a lot of it since the last time I’d bought a round in this place.

But Harold Keighley hadn’t changed a bit. Standing dead centre at the bar, he was pulling a pint of Stingo from a chipped black hand pump with a golden liver bird perched on its apex, expertly tipping the glass to a shallower angle as it filled so that the head would be an even half-inch or so. He’d always been a big man – Hungry Harold, Harold the Barrel – and now he’d filled out to even more heroic proportions: his size, and his fearsome flatulence, were legendary, as was his refusal to treat drinking yourself into oblivion as anything other than a strict business proposition. His face, which I couldn’t remember in any other condition than flushed hectic red, was heavy-jowled and pugnacious, topped with a full head of hair the colour of the snow you’re not supposed to eat. Mind you, it would probably have been pure white if Harold hadn’t been a forty-a-day man: even now, in defiance of the recent ban, he had a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth – inspiring other, similar beacon fires around the room.

He finished pulling the pint, set it down, took the money, gave change. I waited patiently while he dealt with two other customers who were at the bar before me. A younger guy with a nose-stud who was also serving asked me if he could get me anything, but I sent him on his way with a curt shake of the head. Harold had seen me by this time and I waited patiently while he worked his way around to me.

‘Matty Castor,’ he said, wagging his pudgy finger at me. ‘I thought you were a priest now.’

‘He is,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m not. I’m the other one. Felix.’

‘The little bugger who used to steal the beer mats.’

‘The same. I’m done with them now if you want them back.’

He pursed his lips as though he was actually considering the offer, then made an obscene gesture. ‘What can I get you?’£can”1e he asked.

‘Pint of Guinness,’ I said, not being a big fan of Tetley beers. While he poured it I took another look around the room. Still just that thin leavening of people I vaguely knew, none of them likely to lead me onwards in the direction I needed to go in, even if they decided to talk to me.

So I went for the big man instead.

‘Richie Yeats still drink in here, Harold?’ I asked.

The Guinness was on an electric pump, so Harold didn’t need to give it much attention as it sluggishly climbed the glass. He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Well, now,’ he said, with a humourless smile. ‘If I had a fiver for every time I got that question . . .’

‘Yeah?’ I was interested. ‘Who else is looking for him, then?’

‘Who isn’t, these days?’ Harold countered. ‘That’ll be two sixty.’

‘And whatever you’re having.’

‘I’m having rectal surgery. Stick it in the lifeboat.’

He took my money and gave me my change: true to his word, he’d just taken the cost of my pint, refusing the offered drink. Since I mentioned Richie, the temperature had cooled. I fed my change into the
RNLI
money box, a coin at a time. Harold waited, staring me out.

‘What about Anita?’ I asked, changing tack. ‘Ever see her around?’

To my surprise, Harold’s dour face suddenly cracked open in an involuntary smile that had real warmth in it. ‘Not in too many years,’ he said. ‘Light of my life, she was. Even as a kid. She should have gone on the telly or something. A girl like that, her face is her fortune, innit? Her fortune or her falling down, as our Nan used to say.’

That reflection seemed to sour his mood again. He shook his head, his lower lip jutting out like a shelf weighed down with all the world’s woes. Down at the other end of the bar some other guy’s hand was waving with an empty glass in it. Harold noticed it and turned, starting to head in that direction: I put my own hand out to detain him.

‘Could I leave a message for Richie?’ I asked.

He stared at me hard, frowning so that his eyes almost disappeared as the topography of his corpulent face shifted seismically. ‘Could you what?’ he echoed.

‘I just want to talk to him,’ I said. ‘About Anita. She’s missing and I’m trying to find her. He knows we used to be friends. If he wants to meet up he can leave a message here. Or he can just call me.’ I fished a pen out of some recess of my greatcoat and wrote my mobile number on a beer mat, then held it up for Harold to take. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded brusquely at the counter top, indicating that I should put the beer mat back where I’d found it.

‘If I see him,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell him. If I remember. I’m not saying I’ll remember.’

‘Thanks.’ Harold walked away and I drank the Guinness, which in Liverpool is almost as good as it is in Dublin. Then for the hell of it I went over and fed a few coins into the one-armed bandit. There’s something about watching your hard-earned cash disappear very quickly into a machine’s impassive maw that encourages philosophical detachment. It’s a very pure transaction: almost spiritual. All you’re buying is a few seconds’ worth of flashing lights, and a near-subliminal flicker of hope.

The towel was up by the time I’d finished that pint, and true to form the doors at either end of the bar were standing open. It doesn’t have quite the same impact in summer, but I was done anyway. I left the pub, walked down to Rice Lane and caught yet another cab: this time out to Aintree, where there was a small B&B I remembered. It was called the Orrell Park. It took in a lot of travelling sales reps, and consequently stayed open all hours. They had a room for me at a knock-down price, and it was – just about – worth every penny. It even had a kettle and some sachets of Douwe Egbert’s, so I made myself a treacly black coffee and ate a complementary pack of digestive biscuits: not much by way of supper, but I’d make it up with an artery-hardening English breakfast in the morning.

In the meantime I lay on the bed with my shoes off and worked out a plan of campaign for the next day. There were a few other people I could shake down for a possible sighting of Anita or Richie, but they could wait until the afternoon. My morning was going to be devoted to Steven Seddon.

I wondered about Harold Keighley’s sudden changes of mood. He definitely hadn’t been happy to hear Richie’s name, or else to hear that I was looking for him; and he’d said in so many words that I wasn’t the only one. Maybe Dick-Breath had landed himself in some kind of trouble and was lying low for reasons of his own, using the Breeze as a
poste restante
. But in any case he was only relevant to me as a possible bridge to Anita, and if Harold was right and she hadn’t been seen around in a long while, then I was probably just chasing my own tail to start with.

How in the name of all that’s fucked up and untenable had she ended up with Kenny? What tortuous byways of destiny and dumb lucklessness had led her to live with a guy she already knew was a coward, a bully and an emotionally unavailable gobshite?

Nicky had filled in some of the gaps, of course, but it hurt a little to think about that: about the long succession of other men she’d lived with, only to move on once the magic wore off or the hard-core abuse set in. Why had she made so little of her life? Become a casual adjunct to a bunch of losers, one of whom had even given her a kid without that making the slightest difference to his level of commitment? She’d seemed like the best of us, in a lot of ways. The most alive, anyway.

But where was she now?

And assuming I even found her, could she give me any clue as to why Kenny hated Matt enough to put him in the frame for murder?

I fell asleep still chewing on these unpalatable little nuggets, £itt/diand as a result I slept very shallowly, coming awake from disconnected dreams and then dozing off again in a cycle that made me feel more tired when I woke the next morning than I had been when I went to bed.

But as sometimes happens when you’ve been through a night like that, your mind like a computer that’s hung in the act of shutting down, you wake up with fragments of the recent past stuck in the forefront of your consciousness. For me, the fragments included Matt’s first sermon at Our Lady of Zion. The text was from Numbers 23: ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his.’ A pretty downbeat choice for your first Mass at your first ministry, I thought at the time. But I never asked him why, and I realised now what a shitty thing it was I’d done to him. Yeah, I came along to wave the flag and mark the occasion. But Matty was hurting: he’d told me so as clearly as he knew how. And I’d walked away without saying a word.

Later for that. Business is business.

The Liver Building is the iconic face of Liverpool: pure white stone, golden at sunset like an emperor’s palace floating on the muddy Mersey, and guarded by those two mythical cormorants with their well-chronicled fondness for honest men and virtuous women. The Cunard is the big ugly bread box right alongside: as squat as a stool and as elegant as the stump of a limb. I worked there myself in the summer before I went off to college, as an office assistant for the Regis Shipping and Forwarding Company. I’d almost died, but that was mainly the systemic shock of having to get up at half past six in the morning and put in a full day’s work. I was pretty sure that my destiny lay elsewhere: God couldn’t be that cruel.

That was eighteen years ago, but the place hasn’t changed much. The war memorial with its winged Victory is still standing in the forecourt. The foyer is as imposing and unwelcoming as ever, with its massive Doric columns designed to put generations of junior clerks firmly in their place. And the elevators still play Dvorak’s
Slavonic Dances
with enough crackle and hiss to drown out the music, which makes you wonder if in some secret chamber in the heart of the building they’ve got an endless supply of identical pre-Dolby eight-track tapes that Mr Cunard boosted from some fire sale in a spirit of waste not, want not.

A single phone call to Nicky from the Orrell Park had established the fact that Steven Seddon,
MSSP
, worked as a law clerk for Sedgewick & Stacey, a firm of solicitors specialising in contract law, with three partners on permanent retainer to half a dozen Liverpool-based shipping lines. ‘Clean, as far as that goes,’ Nicky had said. ‘No obvious bad smells, anyway. Seddon. Any relation to the late Kenneth Seddon?’

‘Brother,’ I confirmed.

‘He’s been there three years and a month. Should have been promoted last year when he got his paralegal diploma, but he squeaked in with the lowest pass grade you can get. It was a skin-of-the-teeth kind of thing, and they decided to bump him a year.’

‘You got all that from their website, Nicky?’

‘Nope. I’m in their personnel files. It’s all up on the office intranet. Restricted log-in, but what’s a password between £sswm” friends? I’m currently one of the senior partners, a Mister John Loose. As in “fast and . . .” Oh, and by the way, guess which demon-haunted estate in South London made the news last night?’

I felt a prickling on my scalp and the back of my neck. ‘What happened?’ I demanded.

‘There was a fight. Couple of gangs met up by prior arrangement and had a bit of an altercation. Nobody dead, but lots of blood spilled. Cops came in to break it up, and here’s the bizarre part. The good citizens sided with the gang-bangers. Cops were pelted with all kinds of shit from up on the walkways. Bricks. Bottles. A widescreen TV. It got kind of intense. And while I’m watching this on the nine o’clock news, what do I see but the other bastard walking right past the camera.’

‘What other bastard?’

‘Good old Tom Gwillam. The Pope’s plausibly deniable leg-breaker.’

‘So he’s still there,’ I mused. ‘Well, he can’t have too many illusions about what’s happening now. And maybe he can do some good.’

‘What, with the power of prayer?’

‘Something like that.’ Actually, Gwillam was an exorcist, and a pretty damn powerful one. He got the drop on Juliet once, which was more than I’d ever managed. ‘Thanks, Nicky. I owe you, man.’

‘Oh, indubitably.’

So here I now was, sitting in Sedgewick & Stacey’s reception area, which was about the size of Lime Street station but had considerably more potted palms, waiting for Steve to put in an appearance. He seemed to be in no hurry at all to do that, but I was prepared to be patient. That was my main bargaining chip. I was comfortably dressed in my jeans and greatcoat, and I had a good greasy breakfast under my belt, so I just sat reading the magazines while other clients came and went, and while the receptionist, shooting the occasional frosty glare in my direction, called Steve on the intercom at ten-minute intervals – which I timed by the clock above her desk.

Steve broke before I did, which is where my money would have been if I’d been making book on this. He came out of the inner office after barely an hour, looking harassed and hunted. I knew him at once, even though his complexion had cleared and he didn’t have the words
LOVE
and
HATE
written on his knuckles in red biro, as he had when I’d seen him last. He’d grown up without filling out, so he was basically just an attenuated version of his childhood self with a line of bum-fluff on his upper lip. He was wearing a suit, and it looked like a pretty good one except that it was brown. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a brown suit, but I was nearly certain that Norman Wisdom had been wearing it.