Thicker Than Water (9 page)

The miasma intensified as I got closer, but although the individual towers of the Salisbury separated themselves out in my fie byout in ld of vision the feeling didn’t attach itself to any one of them.

The contradiction between those two impressions – the vividness of the sensation and the vagueness of its source – came as something of a surprise. I’ve learned the hard way that the physics of the material world don’t apply to my chosen field all that much: if they did, an enraged geist wouldn’t be able to pick me up and slam me into a wall because his massless form wouldn’t allow him any leverage. And zombies wouldn’t be able to move without a working heart to oxygenate their putrefying tissues.

But it’s a reliable rule that most hauntings have a fixed physical locus, an anchor point, where something that no longer belongs in this world has somehow got stuck and failed to move on. Finding the anchor is one of the first steps in any exorcism, because it means you can apply your leverage to the point where it’s going to have the biggest impact. It’s like aiming your fire extinguisher at the base of the fire, not at the flames.

This field of buzzing emotional energy wasn’t playing by the rules. It remained diffuse, impossible to pinpoint: my psychic compass wobbled and spun, looking for a true north that seemed not to be there.

The emotional weight that the miasma carried became more and more vivid as I approached: intensified, without narrowing down. What I was tasting in the air was a tension, a restless alertness, together with a sort of shift in my vision that made everything I was seeing subtly different – as though I was seeing it through a window that had been misted with somebody else’s breath.

I walked between the first of the Salisbury’s towers as I came off Freemantle Street, passing a primary school on my left. Kids are like dogs, too, and the two hundred or so toddlers swarming around in the playground seemed unusually subdued and thoughtful. They were playing on the climbing frames and hopscotch grids, but silently and with a disconcerting solemnity.

I looked up as the shadow of the Salisbury’s eastern-most block fell across me. The towers all had name plaques fixed to their walls at head height, the names barely visible beneath a hundred layers of granulated, half-erased graffiti: this one – the pink tower that stood at one end of the artfully arranged colour field – was Sandford Block, and its companion on my left, a slightly warmer shade of the same basic colour, was Cole. I thought of cattle brands, and of Adam naming the beasts. These hulking monsters wore their names lightly, and didn’t seem to have been tamed or humanised by them to any measurable extent.

The remaining towers stretched in a colonnade ahead of me, probably about a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Over my head were the first of the walkways, linking the towers within a rigidly geometrical spiderweb. The floor was paved with blocks of faded rose-pink and yellow, between which weeds grew in stubborn profusion: everything else was poured concrete, forty years old now and well into its mid-life crisis. There was a shopping trolley abandoned at the foot of Cole Block, lying on its side like a dead wildebeest. There was also a small cluster of boys in their early teens who were completely ignoring me as they kicked a football against the concrete wall, taking turns to hone their ball control in solo displays that clearly had a competitive edge to them.

I checked the address that Nicky Heath had given me, scribbled on a torn-out page of
Notes for Persons in Police Custody
, the Home Office pamphlet they give you these days in place of the old ‘You’ve been nicked, me laddie.’ I’d asked Coldwood for the address first, but he’d warned me off even more emphatically than Basquiat had, pointing out that if I was serious about not wanting to be arrested the best thing I could do was sod off home and stay there.

‘You’re forgetting one thing, Gary,’ I pointed out.

‘Which is?’

‘I’m also serious about being innocent. I didn’t take a straight razor to Kenny Seddon’s throat. The last time I wanted to do that, I hadn’t even started to shave.’

Coldwood shook his head. ‘So?’

‘So I know Kenny wasn’t writing my name in blood because he wanted to tell you who’d attacked him. You’re still open-minded on that subject, which is more or less where you need to be, but I’m not. It was something else – some other kind of message, and I’ve got to assume it was meant for me. Not “It was Castor what done it” but “Castor, take a look at this.” You understand? I don’t know what it’s about or if it’s really any of my business, but I need to find out before I can let this drop. And since you won’t even tell me where Kenny lives, I don’t trust you to tell me anything else you turn up. No hard feelings.’

‘I’ll tell you everything I think you need to know,’ Coldwood promised, and the stolid emphasis told me exactly how carefully he was choosing his words.

‘And I’ll do the same for you,’ I assured him, with a straight face. Then I walked on out of the station, found the nearest working phone box – my mobile being down on batteries again because I can never be arsed to recharge it – and called Nicky Heath, my technically dead sometime-informant. He shagged Kenny’s address from the electoral roll in about ten seconds flat.

‘New case?’ he asked me after I’d taken the details down.

‘Not exactly, Nicky,’ I said. ‘But it’s something I’m looking into. And I’ll probably be coming to you for a bit more than this as soon as I know what I’m looking for.’

‘Sure. Tell me about it tonight. You’re coming to the screening, right?’

I trod water mentally while I tried to work out what he meant. Then I remembered the gold-trimmed card that had dropped onto Pen’s doormat three weeks before – requesting the pleasure of my company at a one-off presentation of Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner
(the original theatrical release, not the director’s cut) at Nicky’s formerly derelict cinema, the Walthamstow Gaumont. Strictly by invitation only, gatecrashers strongly discouraged – and since Nicky had indulged his burgeoning paranoia by turning the Gaumont into a cavernous booby-trapped fortress, that phrase hid a whole world of pain.

‘The screening,’ I echoed. ‘Right. I’ll see you there.’

And if that was what it took, that was what I’d do. But business before some implausible imitation of pleasure.

Kenny Seddon lived at 137 Weston Block, Nicky had said. I could check each tower in turn, but why not use the natural resources that were already on offer? I wandered over to the small group of boys who were still intent on their kick-about. A few of them turned to watch me as I approached, but the lad who was in possession of the ball carried on side-kicking it up into the air and then bouncing it off his chest in a metronomic rhythm.

They were younger than I’d thought, most of them probably not yet into their teens. That was welcome, because along with the broad daylight it gave me a certain assurance that they wouldn’t roll me at knifepoint for my mobile phone. They didn’t look threatening, it has to be said, but there was a certain edginess to their expressions. Maybe they were tense for the same reason that the kids in the schoolyard hadn’t seemed to be enjoying their playtime all that much: because on some level they were aware of the psychic miasma and were responding to it. Or maybe they just thought I was the truant officer.

‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Which block is Weston?’

Most of the boys seemed happy to stare me out, but one of them pointed. ‘Fourth along,’ he said, flicking his flax-blond hair out of his eyes with his thumb. He was as skinny as a whippet – a whippet that’s been on a low-fat diet for a while – and the nervous gesture made me notice that he had a grubby bandage wrapped around his hand. One around each hand, in fact. He was so pale that his skin looked like paper. His orange tee-shirt bore the enigmatic legend
URBAN
FREESTYLE
.

I nodded, said thanks and turned to leave.

‘Eighth floor,’ the boy added, to my departing back.

I stopped and looked at him again.

‘What?’ I inquired.

The boy hesitated, looking confused and a little hunted. ‘The – place you wanted,’ he said. ‘Number 137. It’s on the eighth floor, right next door to where I . . .’ He trailed off into silence, frowning as he tried to remember what I’d actually said.

Some of the other lads glared at him. They clearly felt that giving information to casual strangers was a bad idea on general principle. I couldn’t fault their thinking on that one. ‘Your turn, Bic,’ one of them said pointedly. He threw the ball hard at the blond kid, who just got his hands up in time to catch it. The conversation was over, and there was no point in pushing the point. I walked on across the pastel-coloured pavement, heading for the tower that he’d indicated.

When I looked back, twenty seconds or so later, the boys still hadn’t resumed their game: they were watching me out of sight, except for the blond boy who was staring down at the ball as he rubbed his bandaged hand against its surface. He still looked unhappy about what had just happened. He’d clearly heard the number 137: I just hadn’t said it.

The miasma stabbed against the inside of my temples, suddenly agonisingly acute, then faded again just as abruptly into the background rasp that it had now become.

Up close, Weston Block was an impressive if unlovely structure, its coat of duck-egg green doing nothing to bring it into harmony with its surroundings. There was a broad stairwell going up its side, leading to the first of the walkways a few storeys above my head. There were also double doors leading into a foyer with three lifts side by side, marked like the outer walls with many overlays of spray-painted graffiti. As it turned out, none of the lifts worked. There were interior stairs too, but they smelled heavily of mildew cut through with the sharper stink of urine.

So I went back outside and ascended into the sky on Shanks’s pony.

The first walkway was three floors up. It was wider than it looked from the ground – almost as wide as a street. And like a street it had its own lighting: octagonal grey lamp-posts supported art-deco globes that didn’t sort well with anything else I could see. There was a chest-high stone parapet on either side of the walkway to stop people tumbling down onto the pavement below, and a trellised arch at the end furthest from me that looked as though it had been put there for the benefit of climbing plants. But nothing decorated the walkway except for some broken glass tastefully strewn around and a few overfilled black plastic bin bags spilling out their freight of tea leaves and tin cans into my path. The parapet was cracked at a couple of points, as though the walkway had suffered a little from subsidence and never been repaired.

This seemed to be where the older kids hung out – school apparently not being an option that anyone around here took very seriously. A group of them were sitting on the parapet, smoking. One of them looked at me with unfriendly interest as I hove into view, then looked away and spat casually over the edge of the walkway.

I slogged on up the stairs. A lean guy in his thirties, with slicked black hair, a piercing above his right eye and an acrid stench of body odour fighting an olfactory ground war with some cheap cologne, jostled my shoulder as he passed me going down. Then suddenly he stopped, giving me a harder look. He was as pale as the kid, Bic: in fact, his pallor had gone beyond whiteness into the yellow sallows of nearly exposed bone, so he wasn’t equipped to blanch. But his expression was one of stunned surprise, and my death-sense prickled as he stared at me. Not what he seemed, then: a zombie, most likely, but with enough animation in his face and movements to be of fairly recent vintage.

He’d been handsome once: big-eyed, long-haired, slender in face and build. In a zombie it was pathetic and obscurely indecent. You wanted to look away.
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you
, and used to have to beat the girls off with a shitty stick.

I waited for a moment, because he seemed to be about to speak. When he didn’t, I decided to break the ice myself.

‘Anything I can do for you?’ I asked.

The guy grimaced and shook his head. ‘You look li an ‘You lke someone I used to know,’ he said, his voice a bone-dry murmur. What was that accent? If he’d spoken again I might have placed it. But he didn’t. He turned away again and went on down the stairs.

Happy to disappoint you, I thought. But brief as it was, the encounter had an oddity about it that skewed my mood. The guy had seemed not just surprised to see me but unnerved. In fact he looked a little bit like the man in the story who flees to Samara to avoid Death, only to find he’s kept the appointment after all. Maybe Death and I have a family resemblance that nobody’s ever pointed out to me.

Well, it would have to keep. He was already out of sight, and in this maze I’d be lucky to find him again if I started after him. Anyway, I was here to check out the lie of the land, not to chase herrings of whatever colour.

The next walkway was on the eighth floor: exactly where Bic had said I should go. I stepped back into Weston Block through a swing door that didn’t swing any more on account of a broken mounting. A short corridor stretched ahead of me, with two doors on either side and one more straight ahead. The first door on my left was 137.

So Bic’s directions were right on the money. Interesting. I’d had my pocket picked before, but not my mind. Or had the news of Kenny’s near-death experience already filtered through to the Salisbury, making the kid guess that this was my destination? Occam’s razor said yes, but when you make a living out of dealing with the yobs and malcontents of the invisible kingdom you tend to keep an open mind on a whole lot of things.

The door to 137 was identical to all the others in sight – a single piece of wood, painted more or less the same shade of green as the tower’s exterior, with the number of the flat blazoned on an oval ceramic plate that was screwed onto the door at chest height, and only a Yale lock to keep the world out. I could have cracked the lock inside of a minute if I’d brought the right tools, and at some stage I might end up doing exactly that: but not in broad daylight, and not without my lockpicks. This was more in the nature of preliminary reconnaissance: you can get into a lot of trouble if you waltz at dead of night into a place you’ve never even seen for a spot of breaking and entering.