Thicker Than Water

9

‘You’ve got a visitor’ were the first words that Pen said when she opened the door to me. Then she noticed Matt, standing in the puddle of moonlight behind me. ‘Oh,’ she appended, without enthusiasm. She walked away, leaving the door open behind her.

We came out of the warm sticky night into the warm sticky hallway, and followed Pen downstairs into her chthonic domain. Tales From Topographic Oceans was playing softly from below us, the occasional crack and hiss making it clear that we were listening to vinyl being played on Pen’s old Dual 2.2 turntable. Gary Coldwood was sitting on the shapeless leather sofa with a glass of brandy in his hand. Edgar and Arthur perched on the sofa’s back on either side of him, clearly acting as chaperones. They needn’t have worried: Gary is in love with his job.

He set the glass down as we came into the room so that he could look more like a copper when he stood up and scowled at me.

‘Two reports came in at Uxbridge Road within ten minutes of each other, Fix,’ he said, as I crossed the room and uncorked the brandy bottle. ‘Both from the Salisbury Estate. A breaking and entering and an affray. Would you know anything about either of those?’

The brandy burned as it trickled down my throat — and since Pen hadn’t seen fit to put out the good stuff I let it trickle fairly liberally. Then I set the bottle down and belched, more for effect than anything. I noticed a smear of blood on the neck of the bottle where my hand had held it: I’d scraped my palms when I went down the second time, and they were raw and stinging. ‘Gary Coldwood,’ I said, hooking a thumb over my shoulder, ‘Matthew Castor. Father Matthew Castor. My big brother. I don’t think you’ve ever met. Gary’s a cop, Matty: you’d better get an alibi ready.’

Gary refused to be deflected, but he looked at Matt with unmistakable interest. ‘Two men fled the scene,’ he pursued grimly. ‘One was described as wearing a long coat of some kind — maybe a mac or a heavy overcoat. So, second time of asking: were you there? If you were, I need to know about it. I may be able to come between you and the shit-storm if I know what it is you’ve done.’

‘I may occasionally enter, but I never break,’ I said, slumping down on the sofa because standing up was feeling like a real effort. ‘And I’ve been with my brother all evening. He’s a man of the cloth, did I say? Sit down, Matt, you’re making the place look untidy. Pen, have you got any antiseptic salve or anything?’

‘I’ve got cider vinegar,’ Pen said, heading for the kitchen. ‘That’ll do just as well.’

‘And make me smell like a bag of chips,’ I said, glumly.

‘Fix–’ Coldwood was glaring down at me.

‘Gary.’ I stared back, deadpan. ‘I’ve been down in that neck of the woods tonight, I won’t deny it. I was there for quite a while, so you’ll find no shortage of people who can give you my description. But you know how peaceable a soul I am. I wouldn’t dream of getting involved in an affray, even if I was invited. I’m just sniffing around, trying to figure out what it was that Kenny was trying to tell me. How’s he doing, by the way? Dead or alive?’

Gary swore, coarsely and caustically. ‘Sniffing around,’ he repeated, with biting emphasis. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You broke into the house of a man you might end up charged with murdering.’

‘I just told you I didn’t, and I’m sticking to that. So Kenny is—?’

‘No change. But the longer he stays in the coma, the less likely he is to recover. Did you at least wear gloves?’

‘For a quiet evening walk with my brother, the priest? Of course not. We’ve had our differences in the past, but it’s never come to blows. And if it ever does, I think it’s likely to be a bare-knuckle fight.’

Gary shook his head in grim wonderment. ‘Are you insane?’ he asked me.

‘Are you?’ I countered equably. ‘Two calls come in from right next door to your crime scene and you come here? Why aren’t you getting a head start on Basquiat the big blonde battering ram, Gary? You’re not letting her steal the case out from under your nose, are you?’

‘I’m fucking homicide, Fix,’ Gary almost yelled. ‘Burglary and random bottlings are as relevant to my working day as minding your own business is to yours. I only came here because I can read the bloody signs by now. I had this vivid sense of you drawing yourself a tall pint of razor blades and getting ready to take the first swig. Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll walk right out of here. Go ahead.’

I considered him in silence. Pen came back into the room carrying a bottle of vinegar and some torn-off lengths of kitchen towel: also a couple more glasses for the booze.

‘Right,’ Coldwood said, tersely. ‘Thought so.’

I wadded up the kitchen towel and applied vinegar to my abraded hands — noticing in the process that the palms were still itching insanely. Edgar and Arthur bated at the intense, pungent smell, but they were usually present when Pen did her witchy conjurations, so they were used to worse. Coldwood, meanwhile, had finally turned to Matt who was still hovering uneasily by the doorway. He gave him a perfunctory handshake.

‘Pleased to meet you, father,’ he said. ‘You’re the oldest, right?’

‘Just Matt,’ said Matt. ‘I’m three years older than Felix, yes.’

‘And where did this evening walk of yours take you, besides the Salisbury Estate?’

Matt thought about this for a long moment. ‘Nowhere else,’ he said at last. ‘I met Felix there. I was already passing — walking — I was in the area. I heard the sound of a fight and intervened.’

‘A fight?’ Coldwood’s expression of exaggerated surprise was straight out of the silent movies. ‘You found Fix involved in a fight? And him so peaceable? No wonder he looks like an elephant wiped its arse with him.’

I dropped the vinegar-soaked kitchen towel onto the table and went for the brandy bottle again, but Pen intercepted me, grabbing hold of my wrists and turning them over so she could view the damage. ‘How do they feel?’ she asked.

‘Painful,’ I said. ‘And mildly pickled.’

‘I’ll make you a sulphur poultice later,’ she promised.

‘Maybe I’ll get lucky and die from gangrene.’

Pretending to be offended, Pen released my wrists and made a gesture that told me I was divorced from her mercy and goodwill. I took the opportunity to pour myself some more liquor. ‘Tell me about the lab data, Gary,’ I said. ‘Have you got any better idea of what happened in that car?’

Coldwood grimaced and didn’t answer. I refreshed his glass and pushed it across the table towards him.

‘Two men,’ I prompted. ‘One of them was Kenny. The other one wasn’t me.’

‘Two men,’ Coldwood agreed, picking up the glass and taking a solid swig. ‘Two men besides Seddon. All three of them touch the razor at different times — lots of different times, shifting their grip. It looks as though the razor was a major fucking talking point.’

‘Do we know whether it belonged to Kenny or one of these other guys?’

He shook his head. ‘No idea. But if it belonged to one of the killers — I mean, the assailants — then he definitely used it mainly for shaving.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that anyone who knew how to handle a malky wouldn’t have made such a frigging dog’s breakfast of it. To look at the wounds, you’d think Seddon had been done over with a potato peeler. And then switched to a tin-opener for the actual kill. Sorry, father.’

Matt did look a little pale and introspective. He’d sat down at last, on the huge wooden chest in the corner, as far removed from these discussions as he could get. He swallowed audibly. I was going to tell him where the bathroom was, forestalling any further degradation of Pen’s already grimy carpet, but Gary was still talking and I didn’t want to interrupt in case it was hard to get him started again. ‘We’ve got some fibres,’ he said, ‘from the other guys’ clothes. No footprints, though. The car was parked on a slope, with the bias towards the driver’s side. Easy enough to bypass the blood if you go in and out by the passenger door. But with the fingerprints and the other bits and pieces, there’s no margin for error.’

‘So we’ll know these guys when we find them,’ I summarised.

‘Which we is this?’ Gary went and leaned against the fireplace as though putting some distance between himself and me. ‘You don’t work for me any more, Fix. Ruth Basquiat doesn’t see you as part of any we. And she’s I/C on the case now, so you’d better not expect any favours.’

‘Basquiat is—?’ I echoed. This wasn’t good news. ‘When did that happen?’

He shrugged. ‘As soon as we hauled you in for questioning. You heard me backing off on that. Basquiat thinks the conflict of interest is deep enough to be fundamental, and she was prepared to bring the DCI in. She’s not seeing you as the chief suspect, but she wants to be free to go wherever this takes her. She told me not to get in her way.’

‘And you took that?’ I was incredulous.

‘Yeah. I did.’ Coldwood’s tone was harsh. ‘Because she’s right. Look at it from her point of view — which the DCI is bound to share if he’s got half a brain. If you are involved somehow, then she knows you’ll try to play me. And if it’s anyone else then the big question at trial will be why we didn’t go after you properly out of the gate. We’ll look about as bent as a nine-bob note, and razor-boy will walk on a technicality. Either way I’m a defence lawyer’s wet dream. So there you go. I’m still dancing but Ruth is leading. And that — before you ask — is the other reason I came here tonight: because I thought you ought to know. The weather’s going to get colder.’

I mulled that unpalatable fact over for a moment or two: brandy didn’t sweeten it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the warning. Listen, Gary, you’re already digging into Kenny’s past, presumably. Any leads there? You know what happened to his wife and kid, right?’

‘Common-law wife,’ Coldwood corrected me. ‘She’s MIA. Walked out on him a year or so back, according to the neighbours. The son belonged to her, not to him, and he’s dead. We’re still getting the details.’

‘Would that include calling up the autopsy report?’ I asked.

Coldwood shrugged and raised his eyes to Heaven.

‘Could I get a copy of that?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Fix!’

‘All right, all right. No harm in asking. What do you make of the other wounds on Kenny’s arms? The older ones?’

‘Botched suicide attempt? Wouldn’t be too surprising, would it? When you think about what he’s been through . . .’

‘I think he might have been self-harming,’ I said.

Coldwood stared at me.

‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.

‘Because I — sorry, because whoever broke into the flat found a hurt-kit in the bedroom. Not the boy’s bedroom. Kenny’s.’

‘We already went over that room.’

I blew out my cheeks. ‘Yeah, but I bet you did it politely. It isn’t a crime scene, and Kenny isn’t a suspect. I almost missed it myself.’

‘You keep defaulting back to that first-person stuff, Fix,’ Gary pointed out testily. ‘Work on it. So are you saying that Seddon—?’

Matt stood up abruptly. ‘I am finding all this talk . . . unnerving,’ he confessed. ‘I think I might leave now. I’m teaching at a seminary in Cheam and I have a very full day tomorrow. If you don’t mind–’

‘I do mind,’ I said firmly. ‘Come on, Matt, we haven’t seen each other in, what, must be a year and a half. And I bet you hear a lot worse in the confessional.’

‘Well, I was leaving anyway,’ Gary said, putting his empty glass down. ‘I’ve got to be on my feet again in four hours. Mind how you go, Fix. And keep your fingers crossed that the floating-pronoun burglar didn’t leave too many prints behind him in Seddon’s gaff. Even my C2s can’t be relied on to miss everything that’s under their noses. I’ll tell them to take another stroll around that bedroom.’

He thanked Pen for the booze and hospitality and let himself out. And then there were three.

‘So how are you doing, Matt?’ Pen asked my brother. ‘I didn’t know you were teaching now.’

‘For six years,’ Matt said, killing that line of conversation stone-dead. Pen was only trying to be nice because the last time Matt had come visiting she’d hit him in the nose with a tea-tray. It hadn’t been in the course of a theological debate, either, although that wouldn’t have been much of a surprise: Pen takes her spirituality pretty seriously.

But I hadn’t insisted on Matty staying behind so that we could discuss the good of his soul. It was something else that was bugging me, and I needed an answer now.

‘We’ll see you in the morning, Pen,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘We’ve got some things we need to go over in private.’

‘Take the bottle,’ Pen suggested. I lifted it, started to say thanks and noticed it was empty. She was just making a point, in her own inimitable way. ‘I’ll get another in the morning,’ I promised.

‘Just pay me some rent,’ she riposted, stroking Arthur the raven’s glossy back.

I led the way up the stairs. Matt lingered by the front door for a moment, as if contemplating making a break for it. ‘I’m serious, Matt,’ I said. ‘We’re having this conversation sooner or later, and I did you the courtesy of not having it in front of a copper. So let’s make it sooner, eh?’

Without protest — in fact, without reacting at all — Matt followed me up to my attic room. That put two clear storeys between us and Pen: enough so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by raised voices or colourful language.

There’s only one chair in the room. I waved Matt to sit down, but he crossed to the window instead and examined the badly repaired plasterwork around the sill. ‘This is where your sex-demon friend jumped through after she almost devoured you,’ he reminisced. It was such a transparent attempt to put me off balance that I felt a sudden wave of affection for him. It took me by surprise, reminding me of brotherly feuds long past, and the kind of dirty pool we always played against each other before he found God and lost the rest of us. Maybe for that reason, I came straight to the point instead of dancing around it looking for an unfair advantage.

‘What were you doing at the Salisbury, Matt?’ I demanded.

He turned to look at me. His blue-grey eyes, otherwise unknown in the Castor family, held my gaze unblinkingly. ‘I was just walking,’ he said, with immaculate calm. But I knew from way back how good he was at the straight-faced kidding.

I nodded. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Hell of a walk, from Cheam, but they’re your shoes. I saw someone else just walking there recently — Gwillam. That shitehawk from the Anathemata Curialis. You remember him?’

‘Of course I remember him,’ Matt said, with guarded emphasis.

‘When from?’

‘I’m sorry, Felix?’

‘When do you remember him from, exactly? When did you last see him, and what’s he got you doing on the Salisbury?’

‘Felix–’

‘Don’t get coy, Matty.’ I pushed the chair around so that it faced him. ‘That was Gwillam’s man you hauled off me right now, and you called him by name. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s a self-righteous lunatic fighting a one-man crusade against the undead. You’re just a priest who can’t say no. Somewhere you were bound to meet.’

Matt still refused to sit. ‘You’re wrong, Felix,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. It’s not a one-man crusade. The Anathemata probably has upwards of a thousand members — a couple of hundred in the UK alone. It’s not an official arm of the Church any more, but it’s still highly respected in many circles. And Thomas Gwillam is a hugely influential voice when it comes to . . .’ he faltered for the first time, but it was a short hesitation and a good recovery ‘. . . the more controversial aspects of the afterlife.’

‘Thomas,’ I mused. ‘Probably named after the popular saint.’

‘Probably.’

‘Whose unique selling point was that he had those doubts, yeah? Amazingly, he wasn’t always a hundred per cent sure he was doing the right thing. I could really get behind a saint like that.’

Matt sighed — a long-drawn-out sound that was more indicative of exhaustion than of resignation. He did look tired, now that I looked at him properly: tired and a bit beaten down, as though something serious and distracting was weighing on him. ‘Aquinas, Felix,’ he said. ‘Saint Thomas Aquinas, not the apostle Thomas. You know this. You went to church too, and to Sunday school. You only pretend to be ignorant.’

‘But we are what we pretend to be, Matty,’ I countered. ‘Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 1, verse 1. So if you pretend to be a carpet-chewing religious bigot, that’s how you end up. What the fuck are you doing mixing with the likes of Gwillam?’

There was a long, strained silence.

‘You take a lot of things for granted,’ Matt said. His voice trembled slightly.

I shrugged. ‘Well, that’s me,’ I said. ‘Always jumping to conclusions. I see the head of a secret Church organisation hanging around on a street corner. Then I see my brother, who’s a priest, hanging around on the same corner less than twelve hours later. And I think to myself, something’s going down. Something’s got the ‘if-it’s-dead-bust-its-head’ brigade well and truly steamed up. And I start wondering what that something might be.’

Matt clenched his fist in a very uncharacteristic gesture, but then only massaged it absently with the other palm. ‘That’s absurd,’ he said. ‘I’m not even a member of the Anathemata.’

I shrugged. ‘If you say so. Lying’s a sin, so I’m sure you’d never do that. But you are from the arse-end of Walton. And you did take your holy orders at Upholland, just a few miles down the road from where we grew up. So if anyone was looking for a priest with a Liverpool 9 background, yours would be the first CV to pop up, wouldn’t it?’

‘Who would look?’ Matt asked, still meeting my gaze and still looking both weary and unmoved. ‘Why would they look?’

‘Because of Kenny Seddon,’ I said, and I saw the name hit home. Matt shook his head wordlessly, but his expression was almost a wince. ‘There’s something really strange going on over at the Salisbury,’ I went on, not giving him a chance to interrupt. ‘Something in the air that’s driving people crazy. I don’t know what it is, even though I’ve felt it. It’s not an emotion I can give a name to. It’s more like an impulse, moving people in different ways. Tonight I saw a kid try to kill himself, and I think it was because he was possessed by this — whatever it is. This spirit. This peripatetic emotion.

‘And two nights ago, Kenny Seddon met a couple of guys a mile down the road for a quiet chat. Relaxed. Informal. Bring your own razor. And whatever it was they talked about, the conversation — as you just heard with no trace of surprise — ended with Kenny carved up like a Christmas turkey. And I mean the way Homer Simpson carves up a Christmas turkey.’

Matt held up a hand as if to correct me on a point of fact. I rode right over him. ‘Now maybe those things aren’t connected, but I’m working on the assumption that they are. Because the last thing Kenny did, as his nifty little urban runabout filled up with his own blood, was to write my name on the windshield. He called in an exorcist, Matty. The only exorcist whose name he knew. Leaving me with a lot to explain to the boys in blue, but making bloody sure I got to hear about what had happened to him. Why do you think that was?’

Matt’s brow constricted into a frown. ‘It wasn’t . . .’ he began, but then he shook his head as if despairing of shifting me from my point of view. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I have no idea at all.’

‘Me neither. But if I’m right — if the Anathemata is sniffing after something at the Salisbury, and if Kenny is a part of that something, then is it too much of a stretch to imagine good Father Thomas Aquinas Gwillam sifting through all the tools in the box until he finds the one Catholic priest who happened to know Kenny when we were all kids? Like I said, he’s got that kind of mindset. So I could see him asking you, Matty. I think that’s well within the bounds of possibility. Don’t you? The only thing left to wonder about is what answer you gave him.’

Instead of answering, Matt made to walk past me, heading for the door. I stepped into his way, forcing him to stop. Although I didn’t touch him, he backed away as if he was rebounding from a physical barrier. There was genuine pain on his face now.

‘Please, Felix,’ he said. ‘You really don’t understand. And I’m–’ He drew a slightly ragged breath. ‘I’m desperately sorry that you got involved in this. It’s unfortunate, and unforeseen. You should walk away, as quickly as you can. It’s not something that needs to concern you. It doesn’t bear on anything that you know about, or need to know about.’

He was grinding his clenched fist into his open palm again.

‘Are your palms itchy?’ I asked. He looked down at his hands as if only just realising they were there. The skin of my own hands felt like it was crawling with bugs, although the sensation seemed to have peaked and was now starting to fade. I’d forgotten it until Matt’s nervous gesture brought it back into mental focus.

‘I’m fine,’ Matt said, with slightly too much emphasis to be convincing.

I hesitated. We really don’t know each other all that well, Matt and me: that lost ground in our childhoods is somehow still there in between us, keeping us at a distance from each other no matter what else happens and what life turns us into. So now, for instance, I didn’t know if he wanted me to push it further or not, or even whether he saw me as a friend or an enemy.

From one point of view, Gwillam and I ought to be natural allies. I used to be an exorcist, at least after a fashion, and that put me on one side of a line that more and more people seemed to be keen to draw: between us and them; between the people who still lived and breathed and the people who’d passed through the veil only to bounce right back again. The Anathemata were on the same side, building bulwarks of faith against the rising tide of the dead.

But I didn’t like that company much. And I didn’t see the dead — or the undead, for that matter — as the enemy.

‘Matty,’ I tried again. ‘Toss me a bone, will you? I’m not walking away from this because I can’t afford to. You heard what Coldwood said: I’m in the frame here, and the woman in charge of the investigation hates my guts. So I really need to know what the hell it was that Kenny was trying to tell me. If I’m wrong — if what’s going on down on that estate has got nothing to do with him and nothing to do with me — then tell me what it’s all about and I’ll leave it at that. Swear to God, I’ll mind my own business. If you don’t trust my honest face, trust me to be a selfish bastard.’

Matt was silent for long enough that I believed he was really giving that proposition some serious thought. But when he spoke it was only to repeat himself.

‘I’m sorry you’ve become involved in this. You need to get out of it again and stay out. Whatever happens — I don’t believe you’ll be incriminated.’

‘I’ve already been incriminated,’ I yelled, grabbing his lapels and giving them an exasperated shake. ‘Haven’t you been listening?’ It was the first time I’d touched him, and he brought up his arms to break the contact, smacking me away forcefully. In Matt that looked like a scary lack of control: he’s so used to turning the other cheek he can do the whole Linda Blair thing and rotate his neck three-sixty. It startled me, and made me take a step back, not sure for a moment if he was going to follow it up and turn this into a real fight.

He didn’t. He just stood there with his hands raised in a guard stance, like an ecclesiastical Bruce Lee. The effect was a little spoiled, though, by how badly he was shaking.

‘You saw what happened tonight,’ he blurted out. ‘And what almost happened. I mean it, Felix. Keep your distance from it. Don’t even ask any more questions. Whatever it looks like — it’s not yours. Not your kind of thing. Nothing — nothing at all to do with you.’

He was having to force the words out by this time. His face was pale and there was an audible catch to his breathing.

‘So you won’t trust me?’ I said, more quietly.

‘Oh, I trust you, Fix,’ Matt said tremulously. ‘I know exactly what I can expect from you. I’ve known ever since the first time I took your confession.’

I didn’t see that one coming, and it silenced me as effectively as a punch in the gut. Before I could answer, Matt pushed violently past me, barging me out of his way, and ran from the room. By the time I got out onto the landing he was onto the second flight of stairs, taking them at a run.

I followed more slowly, not trying to catch him. It seemed like we’d reached a conversational impasse.

The door slammed below me, and as I came down into the hall Pen came up from the Stygian depths and met me at ground level. She looked at the door, then back at me.

‘Well, that was loud,’ she said.

I shook my head, too uneasy about what had just happened to bother to hide it. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I took it as far away from you as I could. I’m sorry you got landed with Coldwood too. Did he ask you about Rafi?’

Pen nodded. ‘I just said what you told me to say. I haven’t visited Rafi in more than a month, and I don’t know where he is.’

‘Good. There’s nothing to prove you had any part in it. He can’t get from me to you.’

She didn’t seem to want to pursue that topic any further. ‘So did you sort it all out with Matt?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t think so. Come on down and talk me through it.’

I normally keep Pen at arm’s length from my professional life, but on the few occasions when we’ve got down to cases, as it were, she’s turned out to have some pretty shrewd insights. I looked at my watch. Too little left of the night now to make an issue of it anyway, and I was at that stage where you’re too close to what you’re looking at to see it at all. Not to mention the fact that Pen had probably weaselled a lot of the story out of Coldwood already. Brandy is a potent lever in her hands, and with the home-team advantage she’s pretty hard to beat.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

Over lethally potent coffee from her stove-top Moka pot, Pen listened to the whole story in inscrutable silence.

‘What did he mean?’ she asked, when I got to the confession part. ‘You don’t go for all that stuff, do you, Fix?’

I gave a scoffing laugh. ‘Too many sins,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine the queue that would build up behind me?’

‘Then why did Matt say that to you?’

I didn’t answer for a moment. The memory came over me so strongly, I felt like I was there again. That last spring before I left home. The party we threw for Matt at the Railway Club on Breeze Lane, the day after his ordination.

Pen waited, knowing me too well to push: and after a while, speaking softly because this too felt like a confession, I told her the story.

The party was Dad’s idea: to celebrate Matt’s achievement and to rub everyone’s nose in the fact that he had a priest for a son. The Castors would be first in the queue for Heaven from now on: we had our very own inside man.

I wasn’t exactly in the party spirit: I prowled around the edges of the good time that was being had, feeling the same old resentments coming to a boil in my mind. Matt had walked out on us back when ‘us’ was still the barely viable huddle of him, me and Dad: now Matt had come back the hero. I didn’t see anything much to celebrate here.

So I swiped a bottle of whisky — a potent liquor I’d only just discovered — and a glass, found a tiny room at the back of the club where they stacked empty beer barrels, and commenced an experiment that Albert Hofmann would have approved of.

Matt appeared in the doorway maybe an hour later. He’d noticed my absence from the party and had come looking for me.

‘You okay, Felix?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine,’ I answered, raising the whisky bottle to support the contention. ‘Doing good here, Matt.’

‘Then do you want to come and join the rest of us? Auntie Lily wants to talk to you about the ghost in her outside loo.’

‘Auntie Lily can whistle for it.’

Matt came forward into the room. He was wearing the scrimshaw cross that Mum had just given him: carved with bas-relief thorns to the point where it looked like a bramble thicket, and with the legend INRI inscribed on a scroll at its centre, it was an object both beautiful and grotesque. He took the whisky bottle from my hand. ‘I think you’ve probably had enough,’ he said gently.

I took it back and poured myself another large one. ‘Probably right there,’ I allowed.

‘Fix–’ Matt hardly ever used my nickname, so this was a sign of some preternatural unbending. ‘I know you could have done with having me around, the past few years. I just — felt that this was something I really needed to do. Something I was meant to do. They say if God wants you to be a priest he speaks inside you so you can’t mistake it. And it was like that, it really was. Like something pulling me, that I couldn’t refuse. But it was terrible having to leave you and Dad. I’m going to try to think of ways to make it up to you.’

‘You are?’ I asked. ‘That’s cool, Matt. You’re a prince.’ He looked pained at the sarcasm, which encouraged me to go on. But I was drunk as a bastard by this time, and it took me a while to think of anything good. I was about to ask him what sort of penance he thought was suitable for sodding off for five years and leaving us all up the Swanee, but the word itself — penance — set off a chain of associations that led to a better idea.

‘Take my confession, Father Castor,’ I said.

Surprise and consternation crossed Matt’s face, but only for a moment. He shook his head. ‘If you’re serious about that, Fix, go to St Mary’s and talk to Father Stone. You don’t want absolution from me. I want it from you, but that’s beside the point.’

‘I am serious,’ I persisted. ‘There’s something that’s weighing on my mind. It’s been troubling me for twelve years, and I can’t share it with anyone. Except you, Matt. Because you’re family and this is family business.’

I held him with my stare, like the Ancient Mariner. He wanted to leave — wanted not to have come in here in the first place — but I had him by the balls, from a clerical-pastoral-tragical-historical point of view. He couldn’t say no in case I meant it: and what with the booze and the baggage, that was a question that I couldn’t have answered myself.

Matt sat down on a barrel.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Do it properly,’ I slurred.

He took the hit with an impatient gesture. ‘Then stick to the script,’ he countered.

I spoke the familiar, disused words with a prickling sense of unreality. ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been eight years and some odd months since my last confession. I have one sin on my conscience.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Just the one, Matt. I don’t want to keep you from your adoring fans.’

He didn’t answer, so I went on.

‘After Katie died . . .’

The words just hung there. Whatever I’d been about to say drained out of my head like oil from a cracked sump. Nothing came to replace them.

‘After Katie died?’ Matt repeated, prompting me. ‘Go on, Felix. What happened after Katie died?’

Why had I started this? What had been the point of the joke? I filled my glass from the whisky bottle, discovering in the process that it was still full from the last time. The pungent liquid ran down my fingers and spattered on the ground.

‘After Katie died . . . ?’

I couldn’t look at him, so I stared at the brimming glass: at the shivers and ripples chasing themselves across the meniscus. ‘I killed her again.’

‘What does that even mean, Felix?’ Matt’s voice was still mild, but I felt the tension underneath the words.

‘Her ghost. Her . . . spirit came back. She came into my room.’

‘You imagined she did. Your grief–’

‘No, Matt. Katie. Katie herself. You know I can see things that you can’t.’

‘I know you’ve convinced yourself that you can.’ The tightness was right there on the surface now. Matt had known about my death-sense ever since we were kids, but we’d never discussed it since he took holy orders. It was the elephant we danced arabesques around every time we talked.

‘And I made her go away by . . . singing,’ I went on. ‘By chanting. I think she just wanted to talk. I think she was scared, and she wanted to be where she belonged, with the family. But I sent her away. And she never came back.’

The silence stretched.

‘Go to her grave,’ Matt suggested at last. ‘Pray for her. Pray that she found her way to Heaven, and pray for her forgiveness.’

I turned the over-full glass in my hands and more whisky oozed over the rim of it to trickle down the sides of the glass like sweat or tears.

‘Do you hear me, Felix?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I hear you.’

He smacked glass and bottle out of my hands. The glass shattered, the bottle didn’t: it just skittered away across the floor, coughing up booze like a docker at chucking-out time.

‘Then say the Act of Contrition,’ he suggested.

I started in. ‘Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet–’ But it had been too long and I didn’t remember the words. Matt recited them for me and I parroted along, finding my feet again at ‘adiuvante gratia tua.’ It was just words, and I didn’t believe there was anybody listening.

But there was, of course. There was Matt.

He put his hand on my shoulder, gripping hard enough to hurt.

‘Your sins are forgiven, you drunken, selfish bastard,’ he said. ‘Go in peace.’

When I looked up, he was gone. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that I didn’t look up until I was sure: until his footsteps had faded into silence. The music and shouting rose to a peak and then fell to a rumble again, announcing the opening and closing of a distant door.

I sat breathing whisky fumes like profane incense, still feeling the weight of his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t feel like I’d been absolved: it was more like I’d had my collar felt by some holy constable of the spirit. I knew two things, and two things only: that Matt’s vocation was real, and that as far as absolution went, a few soggy prayers weren’t going to cut it.

Pen heard me out in silence. When she spoke — pagan gods bless her infallible instincts — it was to change the subject.

‘So this thing that you’re feeling when you’re over there at the Salisbury. Do you think it’s a geist of some kind?’

Pen speaks the argot, and she was using the word in its technical sense. To an exorcist, a geist is a human spirit that takes no visible form but can still have powerful — almost always destructive — effects.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘But I don’t think so. Most geists move things — physical things. They break bottles, throw furniture around, blow candles out, fling people through windows. This is . . . intangible. It’s just a feeling. And it seems to be really pervasive — I mean, it spreads across the whole estate, where a geist would tend to stick to one small locus.’

Pen inhaled the steam from her coffee cup, eyes closed, like Nicky drinking the wine breath. Then she downed it in one swallow. I waited patiently, knowing she was thinking it through.

‘The people on the estate,’ she said, when she finally opened her eyes again. ‘Do they know this thing is there? I mean, obviously it’s changing the way they feel and the way they behave, but are they aware that it’s happening or are they just submerged in it?’

‘The second, I think. I’m aware of it because–’

‘—Because of your built-in radar.’

‘Exactly. But to anyone else I think it would be like a sound that’s been in your ears for so long you can’t hear it any more — you just hear the silence when it stops. It’s subtle. Powerful, but really subtle. To tell you the truth, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a demon mixed up in this somewhere.’

Pen nodded as though she was coming to the same conclusion at the same moment.

‘Then you should talk to an expert,’ she said.