Thicker Than Water

8

As though a voice had yelled ‘Cut!’ from the darkness beyond the street light, everyone instantly lost volition and direction. The hands holding me fell away. Johnno blinked three times, each slower than the last, as he stared down at his brother’s sprawled body. His bloodthirsty cohorts looked at a loss, almost embarrassed, unable even to hold each other’s gaze. I knew how they felt: some tremor had passed over and through us, and this was the pained lull between the quake and the aftershock.

I knelt down and lifted Bic up, gently, in my arms.

‘Open the door,’ I said to the nearest bravo, hooking my head to point. He moved to obey, and as I stepped forward the ranks of Johnno’s gang parted. One burly acned teen put his knife-hand behind his back with incongruous shyness, as though he’d been caught flicking ink pellets at school.

I walked into Weston Block, past Kenny’s door — it was still standing open, as I feared — and on to the door at the end where Jean Daniels and her family lived. I didn’t look behind me, but I knew I had an entourage. I decided not to chance my luck with another direct order, though. The spell could break at any moment. Or had it already broken? Was it the earlier drug-hazed bloodlust that was the enchantment? In any event, I kicked the door three times with my foot.

After a few moments there was the sound of someone fumbling with lock. The gang scattered like cockroaches when you turn the light on, so when the door opened I was alone.

A stocky middle-aged man with an inelegant comb-over stared out at me, backlit by the hall light so that I couldn’t see his face.

‘What the fucking hell do you call this?’ he asked, sounding despite the words more mystified than heated. Then his gaze fell to what I carried. ‘Oh God! Oh bloody hell!’

He scooped Bic out of my arms and turned on his heel, stumble-running back into the flat. ‘Jeanie!’ he bellowed as he went, heedless of the late hour and the neighbours’ slumbers. ‘Jean!’

I followed more slowly, into an infinitesimal hallway the exact same size and shape as Kenny’s, — it smelled faintly of fried fish — and through into a living room that was completely dark apart from the light spilling in from the hall. The man — Tom Daniels, I had to assume — laid his son down very carefully on the sofa of a three-piece suite that was too big for the room. Then the light clicked on behind us and we both turned to look at Mrs Daniels, who ignored us completely as she saw Bic laid out on the sofa.

In that first moment, maybe inevitably, the worst possible conclusion was the one that jumped out and ambushed her. She gave a wail like the first note of an ambulance siren, when it’s still climbing towards its ear-hurting peak, and I stepped aside hastily as she strode past us to the sofa. She went down on her knees and put her hands to Bic’s face, huge sobs shaking her thin frame the way a hurricane shakes scaffolding.

‘Billy–’ she moaned. ‘Oh my baby!’

Tom Daniels turned to me, his eyes wide with surmise and his fists clenched.

I stood my ground. My blood was still up from the fight outside and I had to struggle against an urge to raise my own fists in response. What was it with this place? ‘He’s not dead,’ I said, from between gritted teeth. But Jean had discovered this for herself by this time.

‘He’s all right,’ she wailed, still on the same painful, rising note: her relief sounded very much like her grief. ‘Oh thank God, he’s all right.’

Speaking personally, I wouldn’t have gone that far. Bic had just tried to throw himself off the walkway in what seemed to be a full-blown trance state. He was back in that state now, with the possibility of a concussion to add spice to the mix.

‘Mrs Daniels,’ I said, still watching her husband for sudden moves. ‘Jean. I don’t think he’s all right at all. I think he’s very, very unwell. Even in danger.’

She raised her head to look at me, her face tear-stained and hectic. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘Tom, ask him what he means.’

‘Answer her,’ Tom Daniels ordered me belligerently. ‘What happened to our Billy? Where did you find him?’

I followed my instincts and went for the truth again. Lies hadn’t worked all that well on Jean the first time I’d met her. ‘Right outside,’ I said, nodding towards the window. ‘On the walkway. I’m thinking he must have walked in his sleep. At any rate, he was up on the parapet and about to jump off. I got to him just in time.’

I was expecting another wail from Jean, but instead she gave a strangled sob and buried her face in Bic’s narrow chest, where there was scarcely room for it. Tom Daniels swore and shook his head, but then came back onto the attack.

‘Did anyone see all this?’ he demanded, glaring at me again.

‘Your other son and his friends came along right afterwards, ’ I said. ‘They didn’t exactly see it, but Bic told John–’

I stopped because John himself had come into the room — or at least, into the doorway. He stood there uncertainly, like a vampire who hasn’t been invited in yet and so can’t cross the threshold. I stared at him, slightly baffled. He was the same kid I’d met outside on the walkway, very obviously, but he was also different in some not-so-subtle ways. Calmer, for one thing, and with less of an edge to him: less of a narcotic turbo-tilt to the movements of his eyes.

‘Stevie Rawlings saw,’ he mumbled. ‘He was over by Sandford, on three, and he said . . . what this bloke said. Bic climbed up on the ledge, and he just stood there. Stevie shouted to him, but Bic didn’t answer or anything. Then he leaned forward, like he was gonna jump off, and this bloke caught him in the air, kind of thing. Pulled him back, before he could go over. That’s what Bic said, too, before he fainted.’

The mood in the room changed, as I went from potential enemy to something less easily definable.

‘I’m calling 999,’ Tom Daniels muttered, crossing to the phone.

Jean stroked her son’s cheek again, and then stood up on legs that seemed understandably shaken. She wiped her bleary eyes with the heel of her hand.

‘You were here before,’ she said, giving me a wary, searching look. ‘Yesterday.’

‘To see Kenny Seddon,’ I confirmed.

‘He’s in the hospital. He was mugged.’

I let that word slide, although it seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the frenzied industry of Kenny’s attacker; the threshing of his flesh with a straight razor until the floor of his car filled up like a well with his blood. ‘I know,’ I admitted.

‘And you’re . . . nothing to do with the church, are you?’

‘No. I’m an exorcist.’

She nodded as though that answer confirmed something she’d already guessed. She started to say something, but that was when her husband got through to the emergency services, and his clipped answers to the standard questions cut her off short. ‘This place is sick,’ was all she said, and then she returned her attention to her unconscious son.

There wasn’t much she could do for him, but such as it was, she did it. She got John to go and get a cold flannel to drape over Bic’s forehead, although the heat of the day had faded by this time and the room actually felt a little chilly. Hedging her bets, she brought a blanket in from one of the bedrooms and covered him with it. She fetched some pillows, too, but then seemed to have second thoughts about whether or not his head should be raised, so she made John take them back again and bring a glass of water so she could wet Bic’s lips.

By this time Tom Daniels was finished on the phone. ‘They said there’ll be an ambulance along inside of half an hour,’ he said to his wife.

‘He could be bloody well dead by then,’ she said bitterly. ‘God forbid.’

‘He’s breathing steadily,’ I pointed out. ‘And you can see his eyes moving under the lids. I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.’

Jean picked up on the apparent contradiction, staring up at me hard from where she knelt at Bic’s head.

‘Then what did you mean before?’ she said. ‘When you said he was.’

I hesitated. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry these people and add to the problems they already had on their plate — particularly given how little I really knew about what was going on here. On the other, I didn’t want to fob them off with some bullshit when their kid was lying comatose on the sofa — and had been an inch away from killing himself a moment before for reasons that seemed more geographical than psychological.

‘You said this place is sick,’ I said. ‘I think I know what you mean. And I think that Bic — Billy — has caught the same sickness. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was in a trance state of some kind.’ I looked from her to Tom, and then to the older boy, John, who was back loitering in the doorway again. I could have added that John had seemed pretty out of it too, in a different but equally scary way, but I suspected that it would derail the discussion into a pointless argument. I appealed to him as a witness instead. ‘Bic told us that, didn’t he? That he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, or how he got there.’

John nodded but didn’t speak.

‘Well, we’ll take care of it now,’ Tom said, turning his gaze from his older son to me and keeping it there until he was sure I’d got the message. I nodded, accepting the brush-off without argument. He was right. I had no business being here.

But as I headed for the door, Jean spoke a single word. ‘No.’

I stopped and turned. Jean released her hold on her son and stood again. Husband and wife exchanged an asymmetrical stare: surprised and affronted on his side, cold and calm on hers.

‘You heard him,’ Jean said. ‘He’s an exorcist.’

Tom huffed out breath in an exasperated grunt. ‘Oh not that bloody rubbish again! Didn’t we have enough of this with that frigging nutcase in the white coat?’ I pricked my ears up at that. Gwillam? Gwillam had been here? Why? But Tom Daniels was still talking and there was no opening to slip the question into. ‘It’s just his mind, woman. It’s bloody sick ideas he’s got in his head from the other little psycho, isn’t it? Poems and bloody pornography! I’ve sat by and watched and I’ve said nothing, but enough is enough. That filth poisoned his mind, and any other man would have smacked it out of him long before now. He doesn’t need an exorcist, he needs to — he needs a—!’

Words failing him, Tom brandished his clenched fist to illustrate what Bic needed. Jean stared at it as if it was a slug she’d found in a lettuce. After a moment he lowered it again, some of his belligerence fading as he realised how little impression it had made.

‘The day you touch him,’ Jean said, her quiet voice sounding very distinct after Tom’s little tirade, ‘will be the last day on this earth that you have a family. I’ll go out that door and they’ll go with me.’

Tom blinked. I saw a guy once get hit in the eye with a piece of a car tyre, when the tyre exploded after he overfilled it. That was how Tom Daniels looked, more or less: as though some mechanism whose workings he was sure he knew had just blown up in his face and left him bloody.

‘John,’ Jean Daniels said after a strained pause. ‘Go and wait on the street for that ambulance. Tell them where to come. They could waste ten minutes traipsing around this place.’

John protested half-heartedly, but gave it up on the second repetition and did as he was told. Jean crossed the room to close the door behind him. Tom stared at her with troubled eyes, clearly aware that there’d just been a coup d’état and — it seemed to me — not wanting to put a foot wrong before he’d had the new constitution explained to him.

‘There’s things that have been going on,’ Jean told me, with a catch in her voice.

‘You never saw very much of her,’ Mrs Daniels said. ‘Mrs Seddon. Did you, Tom?’

We were talking in the kitchen so as not to disturb Bic — or perhaps because we were talking about things that Jean didn’t want her son to hear. It was a cramped, functional little galley: there was room for the three of us in there, but not a lot left over. The kitchen knife that Jean had been wielding when I first saw her lay in the sink, protruding from a plastic bowl full of unwashed dishes. My eyes kept straying to it as I listened.

‘Hardly ever saw her at all,’ Tom agreed. ‘Only she did the shopping, some days. You’d see her coming up the stairs with her bags. Never had a word to say to anyone.’ He was pathetically eager to please: a willing collaborator with the new regime of Jean the First.

‘And once . . .’ his wife prompted.

‘Once she had a black eye, and a sort of a cut on her lip. It looked like someone had given her a bit of a hiding. If it had been anyone else, I’d have asked them if they were all right, but I didn’t feel like I could. Not to someone I’d never even spoken to. It would have felt like nosing.’

I thought of Jean’s monologue at the door the other day. Nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. ‘Did you tell anyone else?’ I asked. ‘The police?’

Tom rolled his eyes and Jean scowled bleakly. ‘I called them a few times,’ she said, with a contemptuous emphasis on the pronoun. ‘Not just then, but later on when they had the fights. Smashing things and screaming at each other at two in the morning. I knew he was hitting her. I didn’t need to see it. I could hear it.’

‘Hear what, Jean?’ I asked, wanting to be sure I was getting the right end of the stick.

‘Hear him hitting, and her — making the noises you make when you’re hit.’

‘Crying out?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Not exactly. Grunting. Gasping. She didn’t ever scream or cry: she was as tough as nails, that one. I don’t think she wanted to give him the satisfaction.’

‘You’re talking about her in the past tense,’ I said. ‘Did something happen to her?’

‘She left him,’ Tom Daniels said, with flat and absolute conviction. ‘For a younger bloke. A real flash Harry, he was. Used to work for some builder’s merchant’s down Blue Anchor Lane, but he looked like an Italian waiter with his long black hair and his motorbike. And he had this palaver all over his face.’ He gestured vaguely towards his own forehead. ‘Earrings on his eyes, sort of thing. I don’t know why anyone would do that to themselves, and on a man . . .’ He tutted, leaving the obvious verdict unspoken. ‘He used to come and see her on a Saturday afternoon when Seddon was on his allotment down Surrey Square. Ten in the morning till one in the afternoon, every Saturday. As long as the weather held, he never missed it. And from what I heard, neither did she.’

Jean winced at this crude single entendre, but she confirmed Tom’s version of events with a curt nod, only qualifying it with a ‘Well, there’s always talk.’ As a defence of Mrs Seddon’s virtue, it was less than spirited. ‘He went mental when he found out she’d gone,’ she went on. ‘Seddon did, I mean. Running up and down the stairways shouting after her, asking everyone if they’d seen her. He had the police in and everything, only they said it was a missing-persons and they don’t investigate a missing-persons unless there’s . . . you know. Unless they think there was funny business.’

‘How long ago was this?’ I asked. ‘That she left Kenny, I mean?’

‘Nineteen months, now,’ said Tom promptly. ‘Just before Christmas, it was. Has to have been, because he pulled down all their decorations after she went. I reckon Christmas was like bloody Lent for that poor lad that year.’

‘For her son?’ I clarified, and Jean nodded.

‘That was what I was coming to, really,’ she said. ‘The young lad. Mark. After she left, he used to hang around here like a lost soul. He’d left school by then, but he was too young to be on supplementary, so he didn’t have any money to spend. He didn’t run with any of the gangs.’

‘Didn’t seem to have any mates at all, to be honest,’ Tom chipped in.

‘He just sat, out there on the walkway, the livelong day. Bouncing a ball off a wall, or reading a comic sometimes. And sometimes some of the younger kids would sit with him, on a weekend or after school, because he had the comics — the American ones, you know, with Spiderman and whatnot — and he’d let the little ones take them away when he’d finished reading them.’

‘So that was how Billy got to know him.’ Jean’s tone became more sombre and her eyes defocused. This part she was remembering more vividly. ‘He’d sit with Mark for an hour or more, just talking about superheroes and superpowers. And he’d come in with an armload of Superman and Spiderman and X-Man and Daredevil-Man, and sit on that sofa –’ she nodded towards the living room, one skin of brickwork away on the other side of the wall that faced her ‘for hours. In his own little world.

‘Then I found the poem.’

Tom’s face darkened at the word. ‘Show him,’ he suggested. ‘Show it to him.’

‘I don’t know if I kept it,’ Jean said. And then, abandoning the subterfuge immediately, ‘All right.’

She got up and turned her chair round. Using it as an ad hoc stepladder, she climbed up onto the seat and reached into the space on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. A moment later she got down again and handed me a sheet of paper: lined, folded into four, ragged along the left-hand edge where it had been torn from a pad or an exercise book.

I opened it up and read in silence. Twelve lines in small, neat handwriting with only one crossing-out.

If I could talk, I’d talk. It’s the easy choice.

But I can’t, so my knife has to be my voice.

I sing. Do you hear me sing? But what you don’t know

Is what that sounds like inside me, in the depths below.

I’m full of pain. Like a bottle full of coke.

I take the blade and it just needs one stroke.

It comes out, but it changes as it flows.

Water becomes wine. My wound becomes a rose.

The pressure is balanced, outside and in.

The torment is over, the future can begin.

In that moment I know where I belong.

So you see why I need the blade to make my song.

The crossing out was in the fifth line. I’m full of pain had originally been I’m full of darkness.

‘Mark wrote this?’ I asked.

Jean nodded. ‘Or copied it from somewhere. And he gave it to Billy as a present. Because he thought Billy would get what he was going on about, Billy being such a bright little lad. So after that–’

‘I put my foot down,’ Tom said. ‘I told him to have nothing to do with Mark. Not even to talk to him. I said if he did, I’d stop his pocket money and pull him out of the school football team.’

Jean took the sheet of paper out of my hands and folded it up again, as though its dangerous doggerel had to be silenced. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she assured me. ‘So that was that, we thought. And then in the summer — I suppose that would be a year ago, wouldn’t it, so you’re right, Tom, it must be longer since she went — in the summer Mark jumped off the walkway out there and killed himself. And it came out at the inquest that he’d been cutting himself. For years. Which was what he was telling us, if we’d only cared enough to listen.’ She waved the sheet of paper like a tiny white flag of surrender. ‘What can you say, Mister Castor?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘What kind of love did he get at home, if his mother ups and leaves him for a brickie with a fancy hairdo, and his father is an animal who just hits out all the time at everyone around him? It was for me to say something, and I only thought about Billy. About my own.’

She relapsed into dismal silence. Tom seemed thrown by the sudden detour into moral philosophy, but he struggled on manfully.

‘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 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, like 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 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 ponytail 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.

‘I’ll take advice,’ he said in the same deep voice.

‘You do that,’ the other man agreed.

I watched Flat-face groggily from my floor-level ringside seat as he stepped carefully around the newcomer, staring at him the while as if to show that his readiness for mayhem hadn’t abated by a single degree. Then he walked out into the night, opening the doors by the novel expedient of slamming his head into them so hard that they flew back to their full extent. They hit the wall on either side like a pistol shot in badly synched stereo.

My rescuer helped me to my feet, which took a couple of attempts because I was embarrassingly weak and groggy after my recent anoxic experiences.

‘Out for a late-night walk?’ I asked sardonically.

He shrugged. ‘Just be thankful I was here. You make friends everywhere you go, don’t you, Felix? You really should think twice before coming into a place like this at night.’

There were lights going on up above us now, and faces peering over the banisters on the upper levels. Only a natural impulse towards self-preservation had prevented anyone from coming down and seeing what all the noise was about, but it could only be a matter of moments. Better to have this conversation somewhere else, far from the madding crowd: especially considering how spectacularly madding they could get around here. We left Weston Block, our shoes crunching on broken glass.

‘Well, it’s good of you to take an interest,’ I said as I led the way between the towers, heading north across the estate. ‘But any place that’s good enough for you and your friend Gwillam is good enough for me.’ Considering he’d probably just saved my life, the satisfaction I took in his startled expression was a little ungenerous. But I was starting to see a pattern, and it was one I liked even less than red and green Paisley.

There was one final broad flight of steps that led down from the concrete plain towards the New Kent Road. I took it, limping slightly, and my rescuer followed me.

‘I thought you gave up the pastoral stuff,’ I muttered over my shoulder.

‘Where you’re concerned, Felix?’ Matt answered with a sorrowful inflection. ‘I think I’ll always be my brother’s keeper.’