Thicker Than Water

14

The next day dragged on like a wounded snake across a barbed wire entanglement. It still hurt me to breathe, and I still couldn’t walk very far without resting up every few steps to let my lungs reinflate. I could have checked myself out of the hospital, but I was stiff and sore enough to find the prospect daunting, and I wasn’t sure yet where I was going to go. Something was crystallising in my mind, but it was taking its own time coming.

A junior intern changed the dressing on my ribs, giving my fingers a cursory examination along the way. I asked her how soon I could expect to play the tin whistle again: she looked at me like that was meant to be a joke, and then suggested that I take up comb and paper. Later on, a nurse came round to inspect my stitches and declared that they were doing nicely.

‘Then I can expect to leave soon?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, I should think so. We’ll be needing the bed for someone else.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘When the doctor says.’

On and off through the day, I read through Nicky’s downloads and transcripts, looking for insights that didn’t seem to be there. Nurse Ryall’s hunch about the wounds played out strongly across the board. The dense, dry prose was full of people puncturing each other and themselves, carving and slicing and severing human flesh in every way imaginable. And in the middle of all this, one boy jumped off an eighth-storey walkway and kissed the concrete.

Or rather, not in the middle: Mark Seddon’s death predated everything else on Nicky’s list. It was as though he’d opened the door to something that had come spilling out like toxic waste across the entire estate.

Feeling restless, and enervated from doing nothing else but lie or stand or sit up on the ward, I went for a walk around the rest of the wing. Inspiration didn’t come, and if anything the ghosts with their alarming array of stigmata and their disregard for walls and floors were even more of a distraction than the kid with the headphones. But it felt good, in some obscure way, to be moving — even if I was going round in circles.

In the evening, when I was sitting up in bed again with the notes spread out in front of me, chewing over random horrors until they were bland and flavourless, I had a visit from Detectives Basquiat and Coldwood. Basquiat said she wanted to ask me a few more questions. She was carrying a black leather document wallet which looked disturbingly full of something or other: also a micro-tape recorder which she switched on and put down on my bedside table. Gary seemed to be there purely to act as chaperone, which probably didn’t bode well for me at all.

‘What happened to your face?’ Basquiat demanded, after she’d cued in the tape with date, time, people and place. There was a glint in her eye that was far from solicitous: she was interested because she didn’t believe there was an honest way to come by bumps and bruises on such a heroic scale unless you were in police custody at the time.

‘Cut myself shaving,’ I said.

Gary opened his mouth, probably to tell me to do myself a favour and stop pissing about, but Basquiat signalled for him to let it pass. ‘I’d like to come back to the question of your movements on the night when Kenneth Seddon was attacked,’ she said.

‘What I told you last time still stands,’ I said.

‘Meaning that you were at home with your landlady, enjoying a takeaway curry and a few cans of Special Brew.’ She was only so-so as a poker player: she kept the edge out of her voice and her face as expressionless as the keyboard player in Sparks, but there was a set to her shoulders that betrayed an underlying tension.

‘I don’t drink Special Brew,’ I temporised. ‘It was probably Theakston’s Old Peculier. Or maybe some kind of Belgian blond–’

‘You were at home,’ Basquiat repeated, cutting across me. ‘You didn’t go out the whole night until Detective Sergeant Coldwood came to collect you at four a.m.’

Backed into a corner, I gave a straight answer. Too bad it had to be a straight lie. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To the best of my recollection, I didn’t go out.’

‘Not even to pick up a pack of cigarettes?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Nicotine patches, then.’

‘I don’t smoke because I never got started.’

‘Dry-roasted peanuts. Salt-and-vinegar crisps. A DVD rental.’

‘No, no, and no.’

She nodded, satisfied. ‘And your landlady will corroborate this?’

I looked over Basquiat’s head at Coldwood, who was studying Van Gogh’s ever-cheerful sunflowers and didn’t meet my eye.

‘Ask her yourself,’ I suggested.

‘In good time. I’m just asking you if you’re happy with your alibi, from a structural point of view. Is it fit for purpose, Castor? Will it take the strain?’

I looked her in the eye. ‘Alibi?’ I repeated, as if it was a word I’d never heard before.

‘If you were down in South London that night, you might not want to tell us about it.’

‘I can’t even remember the last time I was south of the river,’ I said. ‘Well, I mean before this thing broke.’

‘Days? Weeks? Months?’

‘Months. Must have been.’

‘How many months?’

‘At least six.’

Basquiat didn’t answer, but she did finally unzip the document wallet. On top of the papers inside was a small stack of A4-sized photographs, one of which she held up for me to see. It was a grainy enlargement from a badly framed original, taken at night without a flash but with some kind of light-enhancement technique that made everything into an over-contrasted soot-and-chalk cartoon. It showed a white Bedford van, stationary at a traffic light. Someone had drawn a ring around the registration plate in thick black marker.

Basquiat flicked that photo down onto my bedsheets like a blackjack dealer, revealing the second one behind it. This was a zoom in from the previous image, focusing on the driver. He was hunched over the wheel, squinting sideways at the red light that had stopped him in his tracks as though he could make it turn green just by facing it down. The resolution was surprisingly good: it was me at the wheel, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt. Basquiat dealt me that one too and showed me the third: a close-up on my face, the image looking a little washed out and raggedy-edged this time. So did I, for that matter. My mother would have said ‘Poor Felix!’ by automatic reflex.

‘Speed camera?’ I asked, conversationally.

‘Do you see any motion blur? Bus-lane camera, Castor. St George’s Road, Elephant and Castle. You tried to overtake a truck in the left-hand lane and got caught by the red at just the wrong moment. This was three weeks ago. The night of the third. ‘

I handed her the first two photos back. Might as well keep the whole set together.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me. Being vague on dates isn’t evidence of murder, though.’

‘No, just of having something you needed to lie about. We traced the reg back to a dodgy little runt in Cheshunt. Name of Packer. The worst kind of dodgy little runt, in a lot of ways — the kind that’s on parole, and caves in at the first whiff of a search warrant. He was telling us first of all that he’d hired the van out to a Greek gentleman named Economides. But I reminded him that every time a lag on probation actively colludes in a criminal enterprise, a fairy dies. After that he was only too happy to put your name in the frame.’

Thanks, Packer, I thought sourly. I owe you one, mate. But hard on the heels of that thought came the twin realisations that he didn’t have any choice and it didn’t make any difference. Once they had the van they had as much supporting evidence as they liked. My fingerprints would be all over it in any case. Basquiat had found a smoking pistol — but it was the wrong pistol, and the wrong crime. Looking for evidence that I’d tried to murder Kenny, she’d found the trail that linked me to Rafi’s escape.

I waited for her to tell me I had the right to remain silent, but she didn’t seem in any hurry to wrap this up.

‘So what were you doing in Elephant and Castle at half past midnight?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Getting into line early for the tropical house? Or crossing over into South London by a route that wasn’t the shortest line between your gaff and Seddon’s?’

This was bad. Worse than bad, probably. At the Stanger we’d been careful not to park anywhere within range of the one visible security camera, but the nurse on reception had seen the van and presumably the description was right there in the police report. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. The only way I could get myself off the hook for attempted murder was to put myself on a different hook labelled grand theft Ditko. Either that or pray that Kenny would come out of his coma and agree to be a character witness. Under the circumstances, dumb insolence was the closest thing to a strategy I could scrape up.

Basquiat didn’t mind. She was keeping her end of the conversation up very well without me.

‘So we’ve got you in the vicinity of the Salisbury Estate,’ she summarised. ‘Admittedly, some weeks before the attack on Kenny Seddon, but — to make things more interesting — in a van you took the trouble to hire under an assumed name. And we’ve got you lying about it in evidence freely given to an investigating officer — both now and when I asked you the first time down at the Cromwell Road nick. Are we having fun yet, Castor? Because it gets better.’

I looked at Coldwood again. This time he met my gaze. He touched his lips, which were closed, presumably to indicate that I had nothing to gain by running my mouth off here. It was a fair point, but not one that I needed coaching in.

‘You were seen on the Salisbury Estate,’ Basquiat went on. ‘Two nights ago. Barely twenty-four hours after you were released from police custody. I’ve got positive ID from two separate sources. I ought to be embarrassed about how easy you’re making this, but hell, these days it takes a lot to make me blush. Now tell me what you were up to, and maybe when you come out on the far side of this you won’t be quite old enough to claim your pension.’

Her tone had become even colder and more clipped in the course of this speech, and she was leaning forward, her face just a little too close to mine. Two separate sources? I thought irrelevantly. Was one of them Catholic? Was the other Gary? Where did the Pope shit these days, anyway?

‘I was looking into the attack on Kenny myself,’ I began, ‘because it seemed pretty likely that I was going to end up in the frame for it–’

‘You built the bloody frame,’ Coldwood growled — his first contribution to the proceedings. I knew what he meant. I couldn’t have put myself in a shittier position if I’d been trying. But hope springs eternal, especially when you’ve got nothing else to fall back on.

‘Kenny was sending me a message,’ I said. ‘The words on the car windscreen were like — the last throw of the dice. He wanted me to look at what was happening down on the Salisbury, so he did the only thing he could think to do as he was bleeding out.’

‘And you felt like you had to honour his last request?’ Gary concluded. Basquiat clenched her fists and swung round to give him a look, but she was too late to stop him from spoiling her game plan. I took the sucker punch to the chest, not to the chin.

‘Kenny’s dead,’ I said, feeling a momentary sense of vertigo.

‘About three hours ago,’ Basquiat confirmed. ‘So it’s not wounding with intent any more, Castor. It’s murder. And this is your last chance to level with me about your part in it.’

‘My part?’ I couldn’t make my brain work, and I couldn’t figure out what her game was — the way she was playing this. But my hopes of Kenny coming round and explaining how all this was just some amusing mistake had just gone up the Swanee. ‘Basquiat, for the love of Christ!’ I said, almost pleading because I really felt like I needed not to be arrested right now. ‘I didn’t kill Kenny. You know I didn’t. You’ve got two other men’s prints on the fucking razor.’

‘But the razor wasn’t the murder weapon,’ she reminded me grimly, her face still almost shoved into mine. ‘The last blow — the one that counted — was struck with a short knife, none too sharp, that we haven’t been able to retrieve yet. What’s the fascination with the Salisbury Estate, Castor? Why do you keep going back there, if it’s not to get paid or cover your tracks or coach someone down there through their story?’

‘I was checking the place out,’ I persisted doggedly, ‘because Kenny’s message–’

‘And you called in some back-up of your own, didn’t you? I almost forgot that part. But you were smart there, at least. Kept it in the family.’

‘In the family?’ I echoed, missing her point for a moment. Then I realised what she was talking about and felt sour anger flare in my stomach like a progress report from a perforated ulcer. ‘Yeah, right. Of course. I teamed up with my brother, who’s a fucking priest, and we carved Kenny up because he stole our football back when I was ten. Basquiat, Matt wasn’t even with me when I went to the Salisbury. He was there by himself, under orders from another priest named Thomas Gwillam. If you want to know more, look him up in the Yellow Pages under rabid religious conspiracies.’

‘The two of you were seen at the Salisbury together.’

‘Because we were both there for the same reason, I suppose. I mean, because of what happened to Kenny. But we didn’t arrive together and we didn’t . . .’ I faltered for a second, lost my thread, because I was listening to my own words and I could see, very abruptly, how little sense they made. Everything was tied together. It had to be. But maybe I was wrong in putting Kenny at the centre of it. When I first saw Gwillam on the walkway at the Salisbury, it was before any word of Kenny’s death could possibly have got out to him. And the first thing he’d done, as far as I could make out, was to knock on the Danielses’ door.

Incised wounds. Puncture wounds. Bic didn’t have either kind. And I suddenly realised that that might be the point.

Basquiat was still looking at me expectantly. ‘Didn’t what?’ she prompted.

‘Didn’t anything,’ I muttered. ‘We ran into each other, we talked, and then we went our separate ways.’

‘You ran into each other.’ Basquiat didn’t even need to inject any sarcasm this time: the words just hung there, limp and ailing in the unsympathetic air.

‘I didn’t call Matt to the Salisbury,’ I said.

‘So he was there for reasons of his own.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Before Kenny Seddon was attacked, or after?’

‘Like I said, ask Gwillam. There’s a church-based group called the Anathemata Curialis–’

At this point the main door of the ward swung open and Charge Nurse Petra Ryall walked in, wheeling the meds trolley. She immediately looked across at the little group by my bed, and her gaze lingered. Basquiat’s power dressing is multifunctional, but you couldn’t mistake Gary for anything but a cop.

‘Find Gwillam,’ I suggested again. ‘Ask him about all this. Matt is part of whatever he’s doing. You ought to be able to get chapter and verse on that from your two fucking sources–’

Basquiat stood up, so abruptly that I was taken by surprise and stopped in mid-curse. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘And in the meantime, I suggest you don’t leave town. Can you promise me that, Castor? Because if I have to come chasing after you, when I find you I’ll nail your balls to the table to make sure you stay where you’re put.’

I stared at her, mystified. The absence of handcuffs, verbal cautions and statutory phone calls caught me so far off balance that all I could think of to say was ‘What?’

‘Stay at your regular address,’ Coldwood interpreted. ‘Or check with us before you go anywhere. We’ll be in touch again soon.’

‘Ending interview at ten-sixteen a.m.,’ Basquiat said. She picked up the tape recorder, turned it off, and slipped it back into her pocket. ‘Very soon,’ she confirmed, and stalked away without even blowing me a kiss. She stopped and looked back, though, when she realised that Gary wasn’t following her. He was still loitering by the sunflowers.

‘I need a minute,’ he said.

‘Off the record?’ Basquiat’s tone was dangerous.

‘Off the record.’

‘No.’

‘How exactly are you going to stop me, Ruth?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘By telling you no,’ she said. ‘I’m senior officer on the case and I conduct the interviews.’

‘This isn’t an interview.’

‘Then send him a bloody postcard.’

Gary waited her out. In the end she made a gesture of disgust and walked on through the door, pushing the meds trolley out of her way. Petra Ryall muttered something that could have been either an apology or an imprecation, but Basquiat wasn’t listening in any case.

I looked up at Gary, and he looked down at me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few folded sheets of paper, which he handed to me wordlessly. I looked a question at him.

‘Mark Seddon’s autopsy report,’ he said. ‘Only he’s down as Mark Blainey. They went by the birth certificate.’

‘Bloody hell.’ I picked up the sheets and stared at them with a certain wonder. ‘Thanks, Gary. I wasn’t expecting this.’

He didn’t answer, but it was clear from his face that there was something else on his mind, so I waited for him to spit it out. ‘Fix, I took a hard fall for you last year when you had me looking into that crematorium thing. And you never really told me what it was all about.’ It wasn’t an accusation. His expression was sombrely reflective.

‘A lot of people ended up dead,’ I reminded him. ‘I didn’t want to put you in an awkward situation.’

‘You never apologised to me for getting my legs broken, either.’

‘I said sorry in my own way, Gary.’

‘By never referring to it again and dodging the subject whenever I brought it up.’

‘Exactly.’

He shook his head. ‘You can be a right bastard when you want to, Fix,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘I’m a bastard. It’s a gift. But I failed the police entrance exam so I never turned it into a career.’

Gary didn’t seem to be listening, so my attempt to drag the conversation back onto the well-worn tracks of our usual repartee fell flat.

‘But bastard or not,’ he said, ‘you usually look as though you know what you’re up to. As though you’ve got some kind of a game plan. This time — it’s like you’re flailing around waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Or waiting for Ruth to put the collar on you.’

It was close enough to the truth to sting a little, but I shrugged it off because I got the distinct impression that Gary was trying to tell me something.

‘It’s more complicated than it looks,’ was all I said.

‘Oh, I’m sure.’ Gary nodded sourly. ‘And if I came out and asked you, as a friend, if you knew who’d killed Kenny Seddon, what would you say?’

‘I’d say, Gary — as a professional exorcist and former police informer — that I don’t have a fucking clue.’

He searched my face. ‘Honestly?’

I nodded. ‘Honestly. Why, you think Basquiat’s right? You think I’m in some kind of conspiracy?’

‘If she thought you were in a conspiracy,’ he pointed out dourly, ‘you’d be nicked already and sitting in a remand cell in Jackson Road.’

‘In hospital pyjamas.’

‘Until they could fit you for prison ones. She didn’t arrest you because she’s got a warrant out on someone else. We matched one of those sets of fingerprints.’

Relief left me momentarily speechless, the conclusions I’d been building to falling down like a card house inside my head. ‘Who?’ I demanded, after a long pause for thought.

Gary shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward situation,’ he said. The echo of my own earlier words was deliberate, and done with ruthless finesse. I acknowledged it with a nod.

‘If you change your mind, I’m still here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much I can do to help. Depends on what you’ve got to tell me.’ He reached into another pocket, brought out a brown paper bag whose contents had leaked and stained its corners dark red. He set it down on the tray table.

‘Grapes,’ he explained, and left.

Once I was alone, the sense of relief turned out to be short-lived. It drained away, to be replaced by a greater puzzlement and unease than before. If Basquiat had someone else in her gunsights, then her not arresting me made a little more sense. But then why come in and brace me in the first place? And what kind of help was Coldwood offering if I wasn’t even in the frame any more?

Maybe I was unconsciously hiding from the answers — not wanting to go in the only direction that made any sense. In any case, before I could put my thoughts in any kind of marching order, Nurse Ryall came over with the meds trolley. I ordered tramadol with an amphetamine chaser, but the à la carte menu was off.

‘That looked heavy,’ she observed.

By way of answer, I held up my hands for her to inspect. ‘Look, ma. No cuffs.’

‘But that was the police, right? The real police, I mean?’ I nodded ruefully. ‘Not just the real police, but the real Sergeant Basquiat.’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Rudy actually exists?’

‘Yeah. But he’s a Ruth.’

‘You should have introduced us. Listen, I’m on duty in the new wing today. I only came in here to tell you that your man had died. But she told you that already, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah. But thanks, anyway. I appreciate the thought. Did he—?’

‘Say anything before he popped off? Not while I was around, no.’ She stared at me in silence for a moment or two while I tried to digest all this and found parts of it sticking in my throat at odd and uncomfortable angles.

‘How do you feel?’ Nurse Ryall asked.

I looked up, startled.

‘About Kenny being dead? I’d be lying if I said I felt anything at all. It’s been too long. It’s like being told they knocked down a pub you used to drink in a long time ago. Actually that would probably affect me more, because I really like booze, and when you come right down to it Kenny was a bit of a turd.’

‘Then why are you looking so mardy?’

Why indeed? Because he’d died at a sodding awkward time: invited me into his seething nightmare of a life and then pissed off to join the choir invisible, leaving me facing a murder charge and an invisible monster with a sweet tooth for what Petra Ryall so charmingly called incised wounds.

It was a neat trick. Not quite the same kind of bullshit he used to pull on me when we were kids, but definitely not a major change of direction.

‘Because I’m still a suspect,’ I said, abridging the more complicated truth. Coldwood had told me that I wasn’t, but that was less comforting than I would have expected. Even if they did get the guy with the straight-edged razor and his mate with the blunt knife bang to rights, Basquiat’s investigations were still likely to nail me to the board for the crime I really had committed that night — taking Rafi Ditko out of the Stanger care home with forged papers. And then there was the demon at the Salisbury, which I was reasonably sure I’d met the night before, up on Kenny’s ward. Something had to be done about that. In a way, it wasn’t my problem: but I thought about Mark Blainey’s bare room and about Bic’s attempt to re-enact his death, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this.

Something hit the sheets next to me with a soft thump. I stared at it for a few moments before realising what it was. It was the plastic canula from a surgical drip, still slightly stained with the rusty brown of blood. I looked from it to Nurse Ryall, who shrugged almost apologetically.

‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘When you told me how you people work, you said you could use personal effects to raise a ghost. Maybe you could have another go at Mister Seddon. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but by dying he’s put himself right in your comfort zone, hasn’t he?’

Kenny. The man, not the demon. It might work, at that. I nodded slowly, giving Nurse Ryall a look of frank appreciation that she took without a flinch or a blush. ‘I like the way your mind works,’ I said.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she assured me, deadpan. ‘By the way, you asked me to check the admissions records. We’ve had dozens from the Salisbury over the last year and a bit. Two a week, sometimes. Over the past couple of months, more than that, even. And they’ve almost all been incisions and puncture wounds.’

By this time I would have been surprised to hear anything else. But those figures confirmed the sense that I’d been getting from Nicky’s printouts: the sense of a slow-building epidemic, cresting like a wave; of the Salisbury as a raft of lost souls in the path of some sundering flood that was going to get much, much worse before it got better. Assuming it ever did.

Once again, Bic’s was the face that came into my mind: the tiny human figure by which you measure the scale of something enormous.

‘What does it mean.’ I asked Petra, ‘when you put your head in the lion’s mouth and it doesn’t bite down?’

She shoved her lower lip out while she thought. ‘Is this a metaphor?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. For the lion, imagine that scary blonde who was in here just now. The one with the badge.’

‘Oh. Got you. You mean–’

‘She hates my guts, and she could have arrested me for — I don’t know. Something. Conspiracy, at least. Wasting police time. Consorting with known felons. Something would have stuck, and she knew it. So I’m wondering why she didn’t at least make the effort. It’s enough to make a man feel unloved.’

‘I’m sure you’ve got used to that by this stage in your life,’ said Nurse Ryall sweetly. And she was gone before I could think of a comeback.

The open ward didn’t seem like the right place to summon Kenny’s ghost, and the middle of the afternoon didn’t seem like the right time. But it would be a long time before the sun went down, and contrary to what you may have heard, ghosts aren’t any more active by night than they are by day: they’re just easier to see.

In the end I locked myself into the disabled toilet on the corridor outside the ward, put the canula down on the floor in front of me and played while sitting on the toilet. I took it slowly, because the pain from the previous night’s musical exertions was still very fresh and very vivid.

It felt strange in a way, summoning a spirit that was already so familiar to me. Okay, it had been a long time since Kenny and I had met — at least, with both of us actually conscious — but most of the ghosts I raise are strangers and even after seventeen years Kenny was a long way from being that. Also, most ghosts don’t scare me: Kenny had been a monster to me back when I still believed in monsters, and locking myself in with his spirit was something that I did with a slight prickling of unease, even though I hated myself for that atavistic weakness.

The tune was slow in coming, and it was only partly because of my aching chest and shortness of breath. I had to overcome a powerful reluctance to open myself up to the music — to start the process that would bring Kenny’s wandering essence into focus in this place, at this time. It was as though a part of me was trying to back away and another part was holding me in place by the scruff of the neck. And the part that wanted to retreat was about twelve years old, which paradoxically gave it an edge against the adult, rational Castor that wanted to play the summoning: on the lost highways of the id, reason is a bike with no wheels.

But it happened in any case, the tune pulling me onwards in spite of myself: a fractally branching tail winding out through the disinfectant-soured air and wagging me like a dog. I closed my eyes, tried to keep my embouchure reasonably tight and let it happen.

Consequently I felt Kenny before I saw him. That’s how it works for me most of the time, of course: the death-sense drives the music and the music turns into a negative image, a sound-painting that describes the thing it wants and brings it by describing it.

He was close. Of course he was close: he’d died in this very building only a few hours before. The sense of him went from tenuous to vivid to claustrophobic within the space of maybe a dozen heartbeats.

I opened my eyes again. The air darkened in front of me and he began to appear, in separate splotches of deepening tone that spread and merged like blood from a shaving cut soaking through tissue paper. As soon as I thought that, I tried to banish the image from my mind, but that was what Kenny was like: a wound in the air that my skirling music had incised.

Some ghosts don’t know where or even who they are: they get lost in a memory or an emotion, replay a past moment like a ragged piece of vinyl being ceaselessly sampled by a demonic DJ. Kenny stared at me in silence, and I saw the recognition in his eyes. Unlike the living Kenny, he wore no bandages, which meant that his body was criss-crossed with wounds so dense and interconnected in places that they looked like words in some hieroglyphic script.

I lowered the whistle to my lap, and he didn’t fade.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You called me. What did you want?’

The ghost looked down, turned its hands over to examine its ravaged wrists. Its lips moved, and although I didn’t hear the word it spoke I could read the shape of it.

‘Mark,’ I agreed. ‘What about him, Kenny? Is that what you wanted to tell me about? How he died? What’s been happening since?’

The ghost shook its head slowly from side to side, but I wasn’t sure whether it was in disagreement or just in bewilderment. This time when he spoke I heard the word as a tinny, baseless whisper in the air: the hum of a breathless mosquito.

‘Mark . . .’

‘Did he bring it? The thing that’s living in the Salisbury now, and making people cut themselves? Did he summon it, in some way? With his hurt-kit instead of a magic circle? Is that what happened?’

Kenny blinked, but he had no tear ducts now to wash the surface of those fleshless eyes. A grimace spread across his face in slow motion.

‘Angry,’ he whispered. ‘Because . . . an . . . an . . . an . . . an . . .’

After each repetition of that syllable, the pauses lengthened. Whatever he was trying to say, it was a gradient which his cooling consciousness refused to climb.

‘Who was angry?’ I asked. ‘Mark? Mark was angry?’

The ghost whimpered, bringing its hands up to chest height with the fingers curled like hooks. It looked as though it wanted to rend its own breast, but of course that wasn’t an option.

‘Cut,’ it said, very distinctly. ‘Again. And again. An . . . an . . . an . . .’

A ripple passed through it, so that for a moment it looked like a piece of washing hung out on a line. I was reminded, grotesquely, of how kids pretend to be ghosts by draping sheets over themselves.

‘Who killed you?’ I demanded, cutting to the chase. ‘Who was with you in the car?’

The ghost’s desolate gaze travelled along the length of its right arm, starting at the wrist and finishing at the shoulder; then on down its hacked and sliced torso.

‘Oh,’ it murmured brokenly. ‘I didn’t — I couldn’t — He’s too big now and he made me–’

‘Kenny–’ I said, but its head snapped up suddenly to fix me with a pleading, agonised stare.

‘Castorrrrrrrrr!’ it shrilled.

‘Shrilled’ is the wrong word: there was nothing behind that voice to push it up the register either in pitch or in volume. It was a broken fingernail making a forlorn pilgrimage across a blackboard without end.

Kenny broke into pieces, shattered by the note of his own grief and pain. Abruptly I was alone again, apart from the hideous echoes of that sound, clawing their blind, blunted way around my brain.

I lurched to my feet, groped for the bolt on the door and found it, stumbled out into the corridor as though I was a ghost myself, breaking free from my own tomb. My heart was hammering arrhythmically and my body was drenched in sweat. I leaned against the wall as the sweat cooled and the hammering slowed.

I went back to the ward, my feet shaky enough to require two further stops. Once there, I fell with relief back into my own bed.

Death had brought no relief to Kenny, that was clear. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much at all. And for all I’d learned from raising him, I might as well have stayed in bed and messed around with a ouija board.

The dark mood engendered by the summoning refused to lift from my mind. Giving in to it, I picked up Nicky’s sheaf of notes again and made to pick up where I’d left off the night before. I wasn’t expecting the endless catalogue of perforated bodies to yield anything new in the way of insight, but I knew with a gloomy certainty that my mind wouldn’t settle to anything else.

Then I belatedly remembered Gary Coldwood’s little gift. Mark Seddon’s autopsy report. It was still lying where I’d left it on the bedside cabinet. I picked it up and unfolded it.

I scanned the name and address details with a cursory eye and went straight to the physical indexes. They were as grimly, relentlessly thorough as you’d expect, compiling to a full but oppressively abstract description of the kind of damage cold poured concrete will do to a body that hits it at a velocity of forty-some metres per second. There were even photographs, but fortunately they were so dark and lacking in contrast that you couldn’t really see what they were of. Except for one of them, and I stared at that one with slowing gathering shock and unease.

A terse note underneath the photo identified it as a tattoo on Mark Seddon’s left shoulder. It was a stylised teardrop shape surrounded by radiating lines.

I sat propped up on my pillows staring at that inscrutable, unrevealing image for the best part of a minute. Then, since I couldn’t look away from it, I tried to hide it by putting the cover sheet back over it. Doing that gave my system its last and maybe biggest shock of the evening: or maybe the nasty stutter of my pulse was an after-effect of the summoning, with its combination of physical and psychological exertion.

The cover sheet was where all the name and address details were set down. Mark Seddon, place of residence 137 Weston Block, Salisbury Estate, Walworth. Father’s name left blank. Mother’s name given in full. Not a Tina, or a Tania.

Anita.

Married name, Anita Mary Corkendale.

Birth name, Anita Mary Yeats.

My stomach did something complicated and self-destructive, and suddenly I was fighting to keep my hospital dinner — which was already inclined to defy gravity — down in the hold.

Anita.

That downtrodden chattel, who went from Brent to Walworth as part of the property and appurtenances of a boyfriend who beat her up every night as regularly as another guy might put the cat out.

Anita.

Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.

How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?

My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.

I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.

After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.

‘Hello?’

‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.

‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’

There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’

Another silence.

‘This is my statutory phone call, Fix,’ Matt said at last, his voice unnaturally calm. ‘I’m at Cromwell Road police station. I’m under arrest for murder.’