Thicker Than Water

24

Anita started to deteriorate almost as soon as Mark’s spirit left us.

I’d seen this before. It wasn’t physical decay: it was a more subtle and inexorable surrender, a failure of the motive force, the driving will-power that allows something as tenuous and fragile as a ghost to bludgeon something as solid as a body into submission. Her farewell to her son and her reconciliation with Matt had shifted some crucial point of balance within her, and her hold over her borrowed flesh was faltering moment by moment. She was slowing to a final halt.

We sat with her amidst the rubble of the walkway, keeping her company while she died for the second time. She told us about the first time: about how Kenny had found her and Roman in flagrante, in the climactic phase of a hastily snatched knee-trembler in the flat’s poky kitchen.

She’d been doing the ironing before the sex got under way, and it was the iron that Kenny used to kill her. She was still turning, trying to disengage herself from Roman’s embrace when it hit her, and that was the last she knew. But Kenny carried on hitting her for a long time after she was dead. She knew that because . . . well, because she’d seen the results. Later.

She woke in the ground: a burning splinter of consciousness filled with fear and urgency, not knowing why it had no eyes to see with and no hands to claw its way free from the undefined place where it was caught.

She did the zombie thing, but the zombie thing didn’t work. Her own body was mostly pulp, bones broken in so many places her insides were like the kids’ game of PickUp Sticks.

But Roman’s body was right next to her, and Roman had been killed with a single stab wound to the neck. She didn’t know why Kenny had dropped the iron and used a knife: maybe it was a kitchen knife that Roman had picked up to defend himself and Kenny had turned against him. It didn’t matter, anyway. Roman’s spirit had gone on to its eternal reward, and his flesh was lying there with a TO LET, UNFURNISHED sign figuratively pinned to his chest.

Anita moved in, and sat up. Kenny had buried them in his allotment, and he hadn’t troubled to bury them deep because he was the only one who ever went there. She carefully replaced the soil so there was no sign of what had happened, and went off to settle accounts with her bastard husband.

But she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about it. She didn’t feel she could go to the police because she had no way of proving who she was. She didn’t even know whether the born-again could give evidence in court, or whether she’d be allowed to walk free again once she’d brought herself to the authorities’ notice. Was taking Roman’s body actually a crime? Would she be dispossessed and kicked out into nothingness? She couldn’t let that happen.

And she’d spent longer underground than she thought she had: almost a full year, in fact, which was why there was no change in the weather to warn her. When she got back to the Salisbury, it was to find Mark already dead. The shock and pain of it almost made her release her hold on life right then and there, but she held on by main force, determined to stay in the world long enough to see that Kenny got his come-uppance.

So while Kenny stalked Matt, she stalked Kenny. And when Kenny finally baited his sick, over-elaborate little trap, she was watching from a little way off. She saw Matt keep the rendezvous. She saw him walk away. She saw Kenny cut his own arms, his own face, squeezing out enough blood so that he could write Matt’s name on his windshield. He was crazed, she said, revelling in it. There was no doubt at all that the wound-demon was inside him by this time, influencing his thoughts and actions. It wasn’t responsible for Kenny’s hatred of Matt: that had always been there, for as long as he’d known that Matt was Mark’s father. But it was certainly the demon that made Kenny’s revenge take the shape it did.

Anita watched the parked car for more than an hour. When she was certain that Kenny had passed out from blood loss, she moved in and finished the job with Roman’s Swiss army penknife. It had just come to her, as she stared down at him, that she was never going to have a better chance: that her zombie body was too slow and uncoordinated for her to fight him when he was awake and alert. The temptation had grown in her, and suddenly she’d had the knife in her hand and she was working it backwards and forwards in Kenny’s neck. The wound-demon again, maybe, although God knows she had reason enough on her own account to want Kenny dead. ‘Cutting that bastard’s throat was the best thing I ever did,’ she said, through lips that were now a cyanotic blue. ‘I just wish — I’d done it back when we were all — kids. I wish–’

She shook her head, unable to put the waste and the wistfulness into words.

‘The penknife,’ Coldwood said, ever the consummate cop. ‘The one you used to finish Seddon off. Is there any chance you–’

‘It was in my jacket,’ Anita said. ‘The pocket of my jacket. And the jacket was covered in blood. I couldn’t bear the feel of it on my skin. I took it off and I — I threw it away. I don’t know where.’

‘I do,’ I said to Coldwood. ‘There’s a car park underneath that underpass. I looked over the edge when you first called me to the crime scene, and I saw a jacket there behind some wheelie bins. You probably can’t see it at all from the ground, so it may still be there.’

Coldwood went away to make another phone call, and Anita lapsed into silence. Then another thought occurred to her, and she cast her gaze around until she saw me.

‘Fix,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I knew — I knew by then what Mark had turned into, and I thought you’d come to send him away. I was so scared, when I first saw you — I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t — myself.’ Her eyes rolled weakly as she saw the ironic sense of the words.

‘Nobody on the Salisbury was, by that time,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s okay, Anita. In a bizarre way you actually helped me. It was while I was in hospital that I saw Mark for the first time, and started fitting the pieces together.’

‘Nita,’ Matt said, his voice cracking, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. If you’d told me — if I’d known that you were pregnant–’

Anita stared at him, perplexed. ‘I knew you would have come,’ she murmured. ‘But — I didn’t want to make you come, Matty. Not like that. What would it have meant — if you married me because I blackmailed you? And if you gave up — everything else you wanted — to be with me? You would have — hated me.’

He shook his head in denial or protest, sobbing aloud now. Anita put a hand up to touch his face.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. You ought to bless me. Now that you’ve heard my confession.’

Matt didn’t bless her. I think I understood why he couldn’t do that, even though he knew the words would have comforted her. To say a blessing would have been to turn back into a priest: it was too big a jump from where he was, and in a direction that he simply couldn’t take right then.

He kissed her instead. The lips were rotting, because this was a body two years dead, and they weren’t even hers in the first place. But then, this was a kiss that had been pending for a lot longer than two years: it probably didn’t matter as much as you’d think.

Tired of waiting for me to get the hint on my own, Juliet grabbed my lapels and hauled me away, off the walkway into the ruins of Weston Block. It’s coming to something when I have to take lessons in tact from a pit-spawned monster.

Although, it suddenly struck me, that was a phrase that needed to be scanned.

‘Juliet,’ I said tentatively.

‘Yes, Castor?’

I picked my words carefully. ‘I’ve always had — some fixed ideas about Hell. They seemed to make sense, in terms of the available evidence. It’s kind of a point on a moral compass. It’s where bad people go when they die, and the demons that live there have to be bad too, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.’

Juliet stared at me, deadpan. ‘Yes. So?’

‘So — how much of that is bullshit?’

There was a silence during which we could hear Coldwood on the floor below us chewing out one of his subordinates. ‘Well, whichever corner is closest to the bloody underpass. Are you seeing wheelie bins? Well, right fucking there, then. Look behind them. I don’t care how much fucking mess there is–’

‘How many demons, Castor,’ Juliet asked me, in a tone of long-suffering patience, ‘have been summoned by how many necromancers and mages and scholars and hobbyists and enthusiastic imbeciles? Down the centuries, from the Middle Ages when the first grimoires were written, to the present day when the grimoires are almost irrelevant because you can raise a hell-hound with an incautious word? How many, would you say?’

I shrugged impatiently. ‘I don’t know. Hundreds? Thousands?’

‘Or tens of thousands. And not one of them has ever discussed these matters with the ones who summoned them.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Trust me,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s the truth. Not one of them. I told you a long time ago that there were certain things I wasn’t prepared to discuss with you. I told you this was one of them. It still is.’

‘What, because you’re afraid?’ I demanded, still hurting too much to be circumspect. ‘Because you think I’ll use the information against you in some way?’

‘Not you, perhaps. And not against me. But someone, sometime. Against my kind.’

‘Juliet, you’re working as a fucking exorcist. You’re already a class traitor, so what’s to be coy about?’

She took a sudden step towards me, and the look on her face was so dark that I raised my fists, as if I had a hope in Hell against her if she wanted to take me out. But all she did was grasp my chin in her hand and hold my face in place as she brought her own up close. Mostly that only happens when I’m asleep and dreaming.

‘Do you see a difference between the public execution of a criminal and an act of genocide?’ she asked me, speaking very softly but very distinctly.

‘I’m fort of oppoved to bofe,’ I mumbled, unable to part my jaws.

‘Whereas I’m perfectly happy with the first, but by and large prefer not to abet the second.’ She let go of me, but she was still standing close enough that her achingly beautiful scent filled the air between us. ‘Understand me, Castor. It occurred to me not to allow you — any of you — to walk away with what you’ve learned today. A few more deaths in the course of the riot wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows or merited any special investigation. But I’ve gone native. I know that. I can’t help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy.

‘So you get to live. And you also get — at no additional cost — these three pieces of advice. Don’t push this topic any further. Don’t ask questions that you may not want to know the answers to. And don’t assume for a moment that if you make me choose between you and my entire race, I’ll choose you.’

I was about to answer her, but I wasn’t able to because she pressed her lips to mine and kissed me, deeply and passionately.

This was our third kiss, and it was different from the other two. The first, way back when Gabriel McClennan had first summoned Juliet, had been part of a concerted attempt to devour my flesh and spirit in accordance with her brief: it had been an attack, which I’d only survived through dumb luck and fortuitous rescue. The second had lent me enough of her strength to survive the hardest and most gruelling exorcism of my entire life: it was a gift, and I’d never stopped being grateful for it.

This one was a warning. It was meant to remind me of her power, and of how little effort it would take her to destroy me.

When Juliet finally removed her lips from mine I sagged backwards and almost fell. But she kept me upright with one strong arm around my waist.

‘I’d prefer,’ she said, ‘not to have to choose.’

She propped me up against the wall, not without care, and walked away.

Eventually I pulled myself together and became aware of the outside world again. Matt was still kneeling beside Anita on the walkway outside. I couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was still moving and speaking, whether her spirit was still present, but either way I suspected that he wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Coldwood was still talking on the phone on the landing below, directing his lackeys to take whatever they’d found down to the forensic lab on Lambeth Road and then stay with it until the results came through.

I stumbled across to the lift and pressed the call button. It came at once and didn’t smell of piss, as befits an age of miracle and wonder. It made a scary grinding noise as it descended, though, and the floor shuddered and bucked under my feet as if some corner of the cage was scraping against the wall of the shaft. I was profoundly relieved when I got to the ground floor and the doors, after a few premonitory clicks and ratcheting sounds, slid open.

Outside on the concrete apron, paramedics were tacking between the other towers and the fleet of waiting ambulances, carrying bodies on stretchers: all alive, thank God, but then again they’d have left the dead where they were as a substantially lower priority. The police and fire crews were moving too, clearing barricades and locking off stairwells while they conducted shouted conversations on walkie-talkies.

I walked through the melee, unnoticed, and descended the steps to the New Kent Road. More ambulances here, and more cops. Also, away behind the barriers, the media crews and the disaster tourists.

I almost walked past Trudie Pax without seeing her. She was sitting at the edge of the kerb, her shoulders slumped, staring at the ground.

‘Long night,’ I said. ‘How’s Bic?’

She started at the sound of my voice, looked up at me as though for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.

‘Castor–’ She scrambled to her feet with a kind of urgency, but then didn’t seem to know what to do when she’d got there. Her hands moved without purpose, and I suddenly realised that she’d been crying.

‘What?’ I asked. A horrible portent crashed into me from nowhere: like a contact on my death-sense, but with no ghost present. ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen to the kid?’

Trudie shook her head, but I read something else in her face: something like guilt, or maybe shame. I took a hold on her shoulders without even knowing I was doing it.

‘Where is he?’ I demanded. ‘Where did you take him?’

Her gaze flicked left. I turned my head to see a light green tent where two or three nurses fussed around a huge water-heater while half a dozen others distributed the resultant hot horse-piss among the shell-shocked survivors: a comfort station.

‘He’s . . . in there,’ she said.

And he was. I caught a sudden glimpse of him, still in his pyjamas, sitting next to his father while his mother knelt in front of him and wiped at his grimy face with a damp J-cloth, showing the same merciless assiduity that all mothers show when they decide that you need a public face-washing. And Bic was fighting back the way all kids do, by squirming and shifting around to make the task as hard as possible.

‘He’s fine,’ Trudie blurted. And he was. It was plain to see.

‘Then is there something else on your mind?’ I began. ‘Because you don’t look–’

The penny started to drop as I was speaking, because my gaze had lingered on Bic and I finally saw what was staring me in the face. They were the wrong pyjamas: plain blue flannel rather than rampant superheroes. In a war zone? Someone had stopped to change him out of his old gear in the middle of all this? And not into outdoor clothes, but into another set of PJs?

‘I didn’t know,’ Trudie was saying, her voice high and strained. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

I stared at her in sudden, near-incontinent horror. ‘While — while Cheadle was making you change–’

‘Father Gwillam had Sallis plant a GPS pip on the boy. He didn’t tell me, Castor. When I said that you should trust me, I meant it. I never lied to you. I’ve told them I won’t stay in the order–’

I was already running. I had to get out past the police roadblocks and out onto a road where there was some traffic running. The Walworth Road: there ought to be some cabs there. But the crowds of onlookers seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, and short of bludgeoning them to the ground there was no way to get through them at anything faster than an arthritic shuffle.

Coldwood. I turned and headed back towards the steps, caught sight of him almost immediately coming down them. I headed towards him, but someone grabbed hold of my arm. Trudie again, her face red with crying.

‘Let me come with you. Let me help.’

‘When I need your help,’ I snarled, ‘I’ll swallow a razor blade. It’s quicker.’ I pulled free with a savage wrench and yelled at Gary just as he was getting into the back of a big black cop-mobile. He saw me coming and stopped.

‘I need to get to Peckham,’ I panted.

‘Try walking for once,’ he told me coolly. ‘I’m about to get your brother off a murder charge, and then I’m back here all day dealing with the fallout from this shit-fest.’

‘Gary, I’m serious. I need to get to Peckham fucking now. It won’t wait.’

He gave me a quizzical look and opened his mouth to argue the toss some more. With an agonised bellow of frustration, I grabbed his lapels and yelled into his face. ‘Asmodeus! Fucking Asmodeus! You remember St Michael’s church, in Acton? Abbie Torrington? The body bags at the Whiteleaf shopping mall?’

‘Get in,’ Gary said. And to the driver, ‘Take him where he tells you. I’ll scrape up an ARU and follow you.’

Amazingly, Trudie Pax was still with me. She got into the other side of the car at the same time as I got in myself. Kicking her out again would have scratched an itch, but it would have wasted ten or twenty seconds — longer if she’d fought — and I could always do it once the car was moving.

I told the driver Imelda Probert’s address and waited in an agony of impatience as he threaded his way slowly and carefully through the interlaced armies of firefighters and nurses. Once we were clear, though, he put the siren on and hit the reheat, slamming us back into the leather upholstery.

Trudie was talking to me, but the words washed over me like whale-song. I was trying to decide which of the many appalling outcomes from this I was most afraid of.

And which I was actually hoping for.