Thicker Than Water (5 page)

‘Jesus!’ I said. Or at least my lips formed the word. I don’t think any actual sound came out. The words ‘
Use a pen, Sideshow Bob
‘ flitted incongruously through my brain.

‘Know anyone by that name?’ Coldwood asked, standing at my shoulder.

‘Jesus, Gary!’

‘I know. You probably want to breathe slow and deep. If you pass out on the road it will dent your rep.’

I groped for a mental handle or key: something that would make sense of this obscenity. For a moment there wasn’t one, but then the salient fact smacked me in the face like a slab of raw fish.

‘He’s not dead. He didn’t die.’

‘No. He’s at the Royal, in intensive care. They’re fifty-fifty as to whether he’ll pull through.’

I’m used to death; and I’ve looked at it in the style pioneered by Judy Collins – from both sides – so maybe I get a little free and easy in my attitude. Right then, though, my stomach was pitching in slow, queasy arcs, and I suddenly felt like I was standing a couple of degrees off true vertical.

‘How could he not die?’ I asked, hoping my voice didn’t sound as uneven to the peanut gallery as it did to me.

Coldwood’s tone, by contrast, was blunt and matter-of-fact. ‘He just didn’t lose enough blood, amazingly. He was cut up like you wouldn’t believe. His face. His throat. His upper torso. Defensive woundkeyfensives on his hands, too, which is probably how he was able to write your name. Someone spent a lot of time on him and tried out a lot of different angles. Mostly pretty shallow cuts, except for one across his shoulder and into his throat. If he dies, that will be the one that killed him. Went right through the brachio-cephalic artery. Hence most of this mess: the brachio is like Old Faithful in pillar-box red.’

Gary likes to flaunt his knowledge of anatomy, picked up when he did his
BTEC
higher certificate in forensic medicine at Keighley College. At any other time I would have bounced back with some caustic comment about what you can learn working round the back of a Fleet Street pie shop, but right then the wellsprings of my jaunty banter seemed to have dried up. Or maybe congealed.

‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘I mean – who is he?’

‘Local lad. Lived over there, all on his tod.’ Coldwood pointed off to the east, where the horizon was dominated by one of South London’s least-loved landmarks: the Salisbury estate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, so I knew what it was. Another bit of utopian city planning gone tits-up and stinking as soon as the paint dried and the real world set in.

Twelve massive tower blocks were arranged in a three-by-four formation: guardsmen standing to attention in some apocalyptic parade. They were about twenty storeys high, and the first thing you noticed when you looked at them was that each of the four rows of three had been painted in a different colour, shifting – as your gaze panned right – across the spectrum from pastel pink, through buttercup yellow and duck-egg green, to moody indigo. The second thing you noticed was the walkways that connected the towers at irregular intervals above the ground, welding them into one entity: the uber-estate.

I don’t hold much with premonitions. Mostly our unconscious minds just tell us what we already know, lending a supernatural confirmation to a preformed prejudice. But as I looked across the rooftops towards the Salisbury I felt that twinge of presentiment brush my mind again like a wind-borne cobweb. So what I’d felt earlier hadn’t come from the car: it had come from the distant vista behind it. There seemed to be a smudge of black like a thumbprint in the air, blurring my view of the Salisbury. It wasn’t smoke, because in modern, post-industrial London there’s nothing around to do the smoking: it was a psychic effluent, hanging there untouched by wind, immune to rain. It was the stain of a great sin, or a great unhappiness: or more likely, I thought, pulling my gaze away from the tombstone towers, it was the collective residue of a lot of smaller discontents and domestic tragedies, trickling together and then left to curdle.

‘I don’t know anybody there,’ I said. A stupid thing to say, really: it was just an instinctive reaction to want to distance myself from what I was feeling – from what was coming in on Radio Death.

‘You sound pretty damn sure,’ said Basquiat, looming behind Coldwood’s shoulder very promptly on her cue, as though she’d been waiting in earshot but out of my line of sight this whole time.

‘I mean,’ I amended, taking my eyes off the distant vista with an effort, ‘none of my friends live around here. I’m not aware of knowing anybody on the Salisbury estate. It’s somethto . It’s ing I would have remembered.’

‘Why’s that?’ Basquiat asked, politely but with an edge.

‘Because I’ve heard of the place. It would have stuck in my mind. Especially if I’d just popped over to stab one of the residents to death in his car before I’d even had breakfast.’

‘But you stuck in
his
mind, obviously.’

‘Yeah.’ My eyes flicked back to ‘F Castor’ written arse-first in black-edged red. ‘Obviously.’

‘So tell me about your movements last night,’ Basquiat suggested. A uniformed cop at her elbow flicked open a ring-bound notebook and held a biro at the ready. Basquiat’s beautifully proportioned unadorned face stared at me expectantly.

‘I already told Coldwood,’ I pointed out.

‘Right. And now you’re telling me.’

Better to draw the line now and find out where I stood.

‘If I’m under arrest,’ I said, ‘then Grandma Castor would turn in her grave if I said anything without benefit of legal counsel.’

‘You’re not under arrest,’ Coldwood said. He was still looking at the skyline, keeping his back turned to his colleague as though it hurt even to look at her. At the Uxbridge Road cop shop their feud was getting to be the stuff of legend. ‘Ask me why.’

‘Coldwood—’ Basquiat said warningly.

‘Why am I not under arrest, Detective Sergeant Coldwood?’

‘Because there are three sets of prints in that car – the victim’s, and two sets belonging to Mister A.N. Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

‘Right.’

‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advh ayed to antage. ‘Sure.’

‘Kenneth Seddon.’

My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘So you do know him?’

‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’

‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’

Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.

‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said. ‘But he messed it up.’

Kenny Seddon was a name from another life – and the impact of memory, hitting from such an unexpected angle, was as grating and discontinuous as a bad special effect in a cheap old movie. Zoom in tight on my face, ripple dissolve.

I live in London these days, as you probably already noticed: London was where I fetched up when I’d had my fill of moving around, and it suits me pretty well. But I was born in Liverpool and I lived there until I was eighteen, the bulk of my childhood and adolescence falling across that black hole in space and time and good sense known as the 1980s.

So I grew up in a city that was in thrall to two different kinds of decay.

The first kind was historical – dating from World War Two – and it wasn’t anything that specially belonged to Liverpool or to the North-West. After all, the Luftwaffe hadn’t had it in for Scousers any more than they did for anyone else. It was just that most of the rest of the country seemed to have had the money to repair some of the damage: through some mysterious combination of municipal incompetence and cheeky mop-top corruption, Liverpool never did.

By the punk era the war had been over for more than three decades, but about half the streets I knew had gaps in the rows of terraced houses where bombs had hit – and the substrate in these random spaces, underneath the burgeoning weeds and sparse earth, was shattered brick and slate. We had a word for those places: we called them
débris
, pronounced ‘deb-ree’. We swam in ponds on the Walton Triangle that were not ponds at all but bomb craters, and on one memorable occasion when I was seven the whole of Breeze Hill was cordoned off for the best part of a day because an anomalous object had been found that some council functionary thought was an unexploded bomb. It turned out to be a hot-water tank of an esoteric design, but you really never knew.

The other kind of decay was different, because it moved and grew and shifted its outlines. It was a disease that we were all sick with, and didn’t even know we were – the slow, inexorable decline of Liverpool’s fortunes as a port and an industrial megapolis, which closed factories and shipyards, threw families out onto the street or more usually caused them to disappear without explanation, and turned my father’s life, like the lives of most of the men he knew, into a complicated game of abstract strategy where the goal was to find some place where they were prepared to pay you a day’s wage for a day’s work before some other bastard found it first and shut you out.

As kids, we experienced both of these things – the war damage and the economic meltdown – as almost unmixed blessings. Bomb-sites and boarded-up factories were our adventure playgrounds: spaces that the adult world had abandoned in its wake and took no further interest in, so that we were free to annex and colonise. The battlefield where I clashed with Kenny Seddon was a case in point – and so were the weapons that we chose for our duel to the death. But the reason why we became such bitter enemies was different. That came from me; from a third kind of decay that was mine and mine alone.

From as far back as I could remember, I lived in a city that was inhabited by the dead as well as the living. These communities existed side by side, and at first it was hard for me to tell them apart. Okay, some people could walk through walls and some couldn’t, but there are lots of things that work like that when you’re a kid: aspects of experience that you don’t understand and mostly can’t ask the adults around you to explain.

And there again, some people could move, the same way I could move, while some were inexplicably chained to one place. And some people grew older while some never changed at all: but the ones who stayed put and didn’t change were often terrifyingly marked by violence or disease, to the point where it was hard to look at them. Strange. Very strange.

Gradually I followed these clues to a great and unsuspected truth: that the word
dead
, spoken in whispers around us children and dripping with finality, didn’t denote an ending at all but a transition. What happened when you died was that you slipped away from the people you’d known and entered this other state: this state where you could look but not touch and where your appearance froze in the aspect of death as though you were a moving but unchanging photograph of what you’d been before.

I realised, too, that this was something most other people didn’t know, couldn’t see. In my snot-nosed innocence, I tried to fill in the dots for them, but that turned out to be harder than it looked. A lot of harsh language and a few smacks to the head taught me that nobody wants the mysteries of the universe explained to them by a kid with a tidemark on his neck and scabs on his knees.

Nobody ever did come up with a word that defined us for what we were – the sensitives, the dark-adapted eyes, the ones with the built-in death-sense. Later, by virtue of what we did, we were called exorcists: but back then that game hadn’t got started yet, and nobody could see it coming. As for the other stuff – the zombies, the were-kin, the demons – that was more than twenty years away. We were a bunch of John the Baptists who’d turned up to the party before the balloons and streamers had

So if we were smart we learned not to talk about it. It was a strategy that saved you a world of pain in the short run.

Kind of a shame, then, that I let my guard down and said what I said to Kenny Seddon – the last person in the world who was going to take it lying down.

Kenny was one of those scary psychopaths you just have to work around when you’re a kid. His mum died when he was eight – of what my mum and dad, when they talked about it at all, called ‘the big C’ – and the rest of his growing-up followed a template of his own making. His dad worked at the Metal Box, then at Dunlop, then at Mother’s Pride, racing ahead of the bowwave of industrial collapse and chasing the work wherever it could be found. He turned his three sons over to his elderly mother to look after when he was away, but she was too old and they were too wayward, so they did their own thing and she lied to cover their tracks.

Kenny was the toughest of a tough brood – only two years older than me if we’re talking strict chronology, but he was the kind of kid who seems to go straight from infancy to adolescence, becoming big and muscular and intractable and getting into the kind of fights that leave blood on the pavement while his peers were still making the difficult transition to lace-up shoes.

He was a bully’s bully, ruthless and arbitrary to a fault, and he brought fear and pain into my life on a number of occasions. In the urban wastelands that we swept through like a swarm of grubby locusts, he was a moving hazard that none of us ever figured out how to negotiate. Once he decided he was going to write his name on all the younger kids in the street – a literal sign of his authority over us. His rough-hewn scrawl on my upper arm turned into an archipelago of bruises that lasted a good few days after the ink had faded.