Thicker Than Water

2

The sound of hammering dragged me up from uneasy dreams. Then the dreams and the noise got muddily entwined, so that for a few confused seconds I was knocking nails into a cross where one of the Bee Gees — Robin, I think — was hanging in place of Christ. I tried to apologise, but he was laying down the lead vocal riff from ‘Staying Alive’ and with the headphones on I don’t think he even heard me.

Then I was awake, and I realised that the noise hadn’t stopped. I got myself upright and threw the covers back, my head throbbing as though my brain had been set to ‘vibrate’ and was taking a lot of incoming calls all at the same time. Why was that?

Oh yeah. Because last night we’d been down in Peckham at the Ice-Maker’s, for the third time this week, and when we got back Pen had been too wired to sleep. So we’d talked until the early hours, about old times and counter-factual worlds, until the alcohol drowned the adrenalin and we finally staggered off to our beds.

Half a bottle of Courvoisier XO on an empty stomach, and less than two hours’ sleep: the perfect way to start the day, if you want it to feel as long as two days and be filled end-to-end with pain.

I don’t have a dressing gown, but I am the proud owner of a Russian army greatcoat — the latest in a long lineage — so I made that do instead. The bare boards of the stairs were cool under my feet as I trudged down from my attic roost, feeling like something simultaneously thin and fragile and flammable. What time was it, anyway? It had to be well past four o’clock; but, since the half-moon of grubby glass over the door was pitch black, it was still before dawn. Either that or I’d been woken up in the middle of a total eclipse. Someone was going to pay for this, if only in the coinage of over-the-top invective.

Pen came out of her bedroom just as I got to the first-floor landing. She was wearing a black silk kimono with a motif of cranes and floating islands. The raven on her shoulder looked like someone’s sardonic comment on the twee chinoiserie, but it still set off her long red hair to good effect: no pallid bust of Pallas ever made as good a perch as incendiary Pen.

She looked spooked, though, and I knew why it was that she hadn’t just rolled over in bed and ignored the door knocker’s peremptory summons. ‘Fix, don’t answer it!’ she said, her voice hoarse from sleep. ‘It’s got to be the police. They’ve found out!’

I put my hands on her shoulders to stiffen her moral fibre — not usually necessary with Pen, but these were special circumstances. ‘You didn’t do anything illegal,’ I reminded her. ‘I did, but they probably won’t be able to pin it on me — and you’re clean even if they do. Anyway, it’s been two weeks now. If they’d had anything on us, they would have dragged us in for questioning ages ago. So whoever it is that’s down there waking up the neighbours, it’s not about Rafi. Why don’t you go back to bed and let me deal with it?’ I made my tone as emollient as I could: I’d only become Pen’s lodger again a couple of months before, and I was anxious not to spoil the warm afterglow of our reconciliation.

‘Bugger that,’ Pen snapped back. She was deeply rattled, but it wasn’t in her nature to back away from a fight — or even to arrive late for one.

So we went down the stairs in convoy, Pen leading the way. Edgar the raven screeched and baited in protest at the jostling, raising a breeze that would have been pleasant if it hadn’t smelled of raw meat.

Pen spoke a couple of words to the door, under her breath, rapid-fire, and then drew back the bolts. Most people make do with woodbine sprigs and factory-stamped magic circles to keep them safe at night, but Pen is a priestess in a pagan religion that she probably made up herself, so she handles her own security.

Because she was still in front of me, blocking my view, and because the night outside was as black as a bailiff’s soul, I saw Pen’s reaction before I saw the man standing in the porch. She started and took a half-step back, then got herself under control again with an effort I could see even from behind.

‘Sorry, Pen,’ said a voice I knew very well indeed. ‘I need to talk to Fix.’

Pen stepped aside with enormous reluctance, each movement seeming like an effort, and Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood walked in out of the night. I muttered a coarse oath, and Coldwood shrugged laconically in reply.

‘Get it out of your system now,’ he suggested. ‘You’ve got a long ride ahead of you.’

Pen looked from me to him and back again. Then she looked across at a horrendous vase — some kind of Mingdynasty cuspidor — that she kept on the newel post at the foot of the stairs. There was a terrible strain on her face, and I could see exactly what she was thinking. I shook my head emphatically.

Coldwood conveniently assumed that I was reacting to his words. ‘No arguments,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’ll explain as we go, but this is time-sensitive. And it’s not business as usual, Fix. Far fucking from it.’

‘So I’m back on the books,’ I summarised, for Pen’s benefit more than for his or mine. ‘You want me to read a crime scene for you?’

Coldwood nodded slowly, but he seemed to think the nod needed to be qualified. ‘Something like that,’ he allowed. Behind him, Pen sagged with relief as her nervous system stood down abruptly from Defcon One.

‘I’ll leave you two to it then,’ she said cravenly, and she had it away on her heels. Edgar took flight at the last moment, dipping at a steep angle through the narrowing gap as Pen kicked the kitchen door closed behind her. He soared across to the shelf over the street door, where he stared down at us with beady-eyed fascination. It’s hard not to see him and his brother Arthur as Pen’s Hugin and Munin — spies in bird form sent abroad to gather intelligence in situations where she can’t eavesdrop herself.

‘Did I walk in on something?’ Coldwood asked. ‘Not that I give a monkey’s, you understand. But your mate Rafi checked out of his digs a fortnight back, didn’t he? So if you’re knocking off his lady love behind his back, you’ll probably wake up some day soon wearing your entrails as a bow tie.’

I gave Gary a look that might have dropped him where he stood if my hangover headache hadn’t taken the edge off it.

‘Leave it,’ I suggested.

‘Only too happy to.’ He looked at his watch, rubbing the ugly scar on his right cheek absent-mindedly. ‘Half past four,’ he mused. ‘Going to take us the best part of an hour, even at this time of night. Get some clothes on, Fix — and bring your paraphernalia.’

I could see in his face that there was no room for argument.

‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see. Don’t worry, I’ll get you back in time for breakfast.’

Edgar gave a derisive caw. I knew what he meant: I’d heard that one before too.

Coldwood was right about it being a long drive, because we ended up south of the river, crossing foul old Father Thames at Lambeth just as the sun came up. The sky was clear apart from a few wisps of cirrus dead-centred in the windscreen of Coldwood’s unmarked Primera: it was going to be another scorcher. I looked between the maculate white chimneys of Battersea power station for a flying pig, but there wasn’t anything moving up there. We were on our own as we tacked south by east through the rat runs of Southwark.

‘How much further?’ I asked Coldwood, since he didn’t seem to want to tell me what it was I was going to be looking at. He didn’t answer: just looked at his watch again and made a vague calming gesture, like a stern dad to a child whining ‘Are we there yet?’ He seemed to have forgotten his earlier promise to brief me in the car.

‘Tell them we’re coming,’ he instructed his stolid, hatchet-faced driver. The driver nodded and muttered into a walkie-talkie. ‘Got the sarge and the . . .’ He hesitated and flicked a glance over his shoulder at me. ‘Exorcist,’ I filled in helpfully, but he decided to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘We’re on our way to the scene now.’

‘Don’t let the C2s in until we’re finished,’ Coldwood called out to him, and the driver relayed the instruction to whoever he was talking to. ‘C2s’ was an idiosyncratic abbreviation for celebrity chefs: it was what Coldwood and his Serious Crimes Unit muckers called their valued colleagues in the forensics division.

We drove through Newington as it was waking up: shopkeepers taking their armour plating down to greet the new day, or tipping buckets of foaming bleach on the dog turds in front of their doors; a sluggish street-cleaning van nosing its way along the gutters like a pig looking for truffles.

‘You didn’t seem surprised to hear that Rafi Ditko had gone walkies,’ Gary commented, looking back at me from the car’s front passenger seat. His face was so devoid of emotion that a passing artist might have mistaken it for a blank canvas. ‘We were only officially notified about it yesterday.’

‘Well, I keep my ear to the ground,’ I responded in kind.

‘Good way to get your face trodden on.’

‘If you catch me at it, feel free to cast the first boot.’

Gary frowned. He hates being smart-mouthed in front of his chattels and gofers, and this probably rankled all the more because he was doing me a favour: letting me know, in his own winsome way, that Rafi’s disappearance from the secure care facility where he’d lived — if you wanted to call it that — for the past three years had now become a police matter. It wasn’t good news, but it was coming sooner or later so there was no point in crying about it. We’d see what we’d see.

Perhaps by way of clawing back some of the points he’d just lost, Gary switched to another topic. ‘So who is it that’s watching you?’ he asked.

I blinked, false-footed. ‘Who’s what?’ Now this was news to me, and I couldn’t quite get my guard up in time to hide it. ‘Two-man tag team,’ Gary said. ‘One on the corner, one in a car a bit further down the street. Discreet operation, but they must have a budget.’

‘Probably the rent man,’ I said sourly. Jenna-Jane bloody Mulbridge, much more likely. Maybe this was why she’d kept Rafi out of the news: so I’d relax, get sloppy and lead her straight to him. But obviously it hadn’t worked yet, or they wouldn’t still be there. And now — well, forewarned was forearmed.

Just south of Elephant and Castle we turned off the main drag onto a service road that took a slack-bellied run-up around the back of the station car park before screwing up its courage and leaping over Kennington Lane in the form of a concrete flyover. All the other traffic on the road was pulling to the left or right in two confused, jostling streams before they got onto this overpass, because directly ahead of us three more police cars had been parked so that they blocked the whole carriageway: or at least the whole carriageway apart from a single narrow gap guarded by a hard-faced WPC. Seeing us coming straight towards her she raised her hand to wave us away, but then she recognised either Coldwood or the driver and stood aside to let us through.

The road beyond had the unsettling emptiness of a school playground during the summer holidays. By this time on a weekday morning it ought to have been heaving; but there were only four vehicles that I could see, and none of them were moving. Two of them were Astras in police livery, with uniformed cops standing in inert clusters around them. A blonde woman in a black Dryzabone was talking to one of the clusters, pointing off towards the distant skyline: two boys in blue went forth to do her bidding. I thought I recognised that tall slim figure and hard handsome face, but there was no point in jumping off that bridge until I came to it.

The third vehicle was an ambulance, standing with its back doors wide open and its hoist platform down, and the last was a sprightly pillar-box red Ford Ka parked on a precariously angled concrete apron too narrow to be called a hard shoulder. Something about the sight of it gave me a sudden qualm of unease. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, whether or not that response was coming from the part of my perceptual equipment I call my death-sense. I couldn’t see anything dead in the vicinity — or, for that matter, anything in that badly defined and mystifying state we choose to call undead — but then we were still a hundred yards or so away. When we got closer, maybe I’d find out what it was that had set me off.

But we didn’t get closer: Coldwood tapped the driver’s shoulder and we slowed to a halt at the side of the road, up against a buckled steel crash barrier that seemed to have done its job on more than one occasion.

Coldwood got out, a little awkwardly because his legs hadn’t been set particularly well after being broken the year before — at certain angles they moved in a robotic, discontinuous way. I followed him because this was clearly the end of the ride. Walking around the back of the car to join him, I glanced idly over the edge of the parapet. We were high enough up that we were looking down on the mottled apron of a rooftop car park. The asphalt was bare apart from a phalanx of wheelie bins in one corner, behind which a black jacket lay like a dead bird: part of the inexplicable roadkill of the inner city.

Coldwood leaned against the flank of the car, hands in pockets, like Patience on a monument but with a more pugnacious facial expression. ‘So what’s the score?’ I asked him when it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak first.

‘You tell me, Fix,’ he suggested.

I waited for the other shoe to drop. For the most part I ply my trade wherever there’s a profit to be made, and the Metropolitan Police’s homicide division has been a lucrative source of income for me on more than one occasion. At one time, in fact, the Met had been my main client, and I’d started to take it for granted. But then, like an old married couple, we’d parted company at last because of irreconcilable differences, mostly arising out of me being arrested for murder. It had been a while since Coldwood had put any work my way, and a longer while since I’d asked him for any favours. So there was something else going on here, and I was damned if I was going to commit myself to anything, even an opinion, before I knew what it was.

But Coldwood seemed equally coy, and the staring match couldn’t go on for ever. I shrugged and reached inside my greatcoat. There’s a pocket there that I sewed in myself — deep but narrow, just the right size to hold a tin whistle with an inch of clearance at the top so that it’s easy to hook it out in a hurry. The whistle in question is a Clarke Sweetone in the key of D. I’ve tried other brands and other keys, but only in the way that a compass needle tries to pull away from north. It never sticks.

Whistle in hand, I headed over towards the parked Ka. From behind me, Coldwood said, ‘Fix.’

I turned and looked back at him. He hadn’t moved. ‘Yeah?’ I demanded.

‘Do it from here.’

I measured the distance to the car. ‘I can’t see anything from here,’ I pointed out.

Coldwood held my gaze. ‘How do you know until you try?’

There was a time when bullshit like that would have made me dig my heels in, when I would have turned around and walked away rather than play a command performance with a blindfold on. But at this particular time there was something like an unsettled debt between me and Coldwood, dating from an occasion — quite recently — when I’d almost got him killed: that one incident explained both the limp and the scar. And right about then, when I was more or less evenly balanced between giving him a tune and telling him exactly where and how deeply to shove it, the blonde woman came striding up to us, walking right past me without a glance to address herself to Coldwood.

‘This isn’t right,’ she said without preamble. Her expression was grim and tight.

Coldwood nodded. It wasn’t a nod of agreement: he was just acknowledging an argument he’d clearly already heard. ‘You’re down on record, Ruth,’ he said, ‘so you can stop banging the drum any time you get sick of the sound. But you don’t have any seniority on me here and this is the way we’re doing it.’

The blonde woman turned now and favoured me with a cold, clinical stare. She was beautiful — really beautiful — but in a hard and austere way that told you more clearly than words how little she cared about what you thought of her. She wore her hair short, and her blue eyes stared out at you pale and unframed, without the benefit of mascara. She favoured greys and blacks, with occasional concessions to blue. Maybe she thought warm colours would be provocative. Tonight she was at the darker end of her spectrum, and her subtle curves were reined in to leave as straight-edged an outline as possible.

‘Hey, Basquiat,’ I said to her.

‘It’s not even fair to him,’ she said, which threw me for a moment until I realised that she was still carrying on her conversation with Coldwood as though I hadn’t spoken — and that the ‘him’ in question was me. ‘Or are you finessing the case before it even gets started by making sure it gets thrown out of–’

Coldwood cut in before she could finish.

‘I just want Castor to read the scene,’ he said. ‘I’ve used him before, and I’ll probably use him again. It’s custom and practice, and there’s nothing for anyone to hang an objection on. And you’ll notice that we’re standing way over here, not inside your perimeter. Not even close to it. You can even stick around and chaperone me, if you’re worried.’

Basquiat turned her gaze back to Coldwood, her eyes narrowing.

‘And that will help a lot,’ she said, ‘given that you came down from Turnpike Lane together.’

‘With a driver,’ Gary pointed out, looking away towards the rising sun. ‘You’re welcome to ask him what was said, on or off the record.’

‘Oh, please.’ Basquiat’s tone was blistering. ‘Any man on your squad will swear that black is pink-and-fucking-ochre-plaid if you tell him to. I want him when you’ve finished with him.’ Those were her last words on the subject, apparently, and she was already walking away as she said them. I gathered that ‘him’ was back to being me.

Barely acknowledging the interruption, Coldwood looked across at me and gave a horizontal wave, inviting me to get started. This time I accepted the invitation, because it was pretty damn obvious that I wasn’t going to find out what this was all about until I did. Not business as usual, Gary had said. Yeah, that was for damn sure — although anything that had him and Basquiat at each other’s throats was bound to have a familiar ring to it.

I put the whistle to my lips, looking towards the parked car because that was where Basquiat and the uniformed cops were and it was obviously the epicentre for whatever had happened here.

I started to play. Not an exorcism, because those take time to plan and prepare: this was more like an echo-sounding, sending my attention out along the filaments of the music to see what I could see.

This is what I do for a living, and if I say so myself I do it pretty damn well. If you’re an exorcist, you’re born with the knack: the extra chunk of sensory equipment that lets you see what can’t be seen and touch what can’t be touched. But each of us finds a unique and personal way to tap that common barrel. One might scrawl symbols in a magic circle; another might chant words in dead languages, or light candles, or deal hands of cards or any of a thousand other quaint, banal, potent rituals. I play music, and the music becomes an extension of my mind, plugging me in like the jacks of an old-fashioned telephone switchboard to the world of the dead — which, things being how they are, is usually buzzing.

It was a knack I’d discovered more or less by accident. I’d always been able to see the dead, but I never knew I could bind them until my sister Katie was run down by a truck a couple of weeks after my sixth birthday. It was in trying to dissuade Katie from coming into my bedroom at night with her blood-caked face and talking to me in the dark that I performed my first — entirely accidental — exorcism. I did it by chanting rude playground songs at her until she shut up and went away. Sounds. Patterned sounds, expressing in pitch and rhythm something that I couldn’t define or perceive in any other way.

Later I discovered that music worked even better.

Later still I picked up a tin whistle, and it shaped itself to my hand as though it belonged there. Christian Barnard must have felt like that when he picked up his first scalpel. Or Osama Bin Laden when he flicked off the safety catch of his first AK-47.

This particular tune didn’t have much in the way of either form or progression. It just ambled backwards and forwards through the same sequence of chords, all in the lower half of the whistle’s register and sounding somewhat sullen and melancholy. But as the notes skirled around me the world darkened: or rather, my perceptions shifted a little along the spectrum that has life and death as its two poles.

I was expecting to see the road get more crowded at this point. If anyone had died in the little red car, or under its wheels, then they ought to have come sharply into focus now. In fact, I ought to have been seeing them already, because the newly dead stand out like halogen bulbs in my eyes most of the time. But my death-sense isn’t infallible. The whistle is.

This time, though, and apart from the added depths and subtracted highlights, the scene before me didn’t seem to have changed at all. Okay, there was a smudged-out but broadly humanoid figure standing in the air a little way out from the edge of the flyover: a suicide, maybe, or someone who’d walked the parapet on a drunken bet and then fallen off. But the elisions and imperfections in that shape — the fact that I couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been a man or a woman, or how old it had been when it shed its flesh and blood and bone and sinew to stand naked in the world — showed that it hadn’t arrived there in the recent past. It had died years if not decades ago and that was probably why I hadn’t seen it at first. Over time, ghosts fade like the colours on a cheap tee-shirt. And that ghost was the only one that was haunting this section of the overpass.

Turning my attention back to the parked car, I shifted my fingers on the stops of the whistle and slowly ascended the scale. Like most tin whistles, my Sweetone only has an effective range of about two octaves: but if you’re not too worried about the sensibilities of the people around you, you can make brief forays outside that range by half-holing and by varying how hard you blow. I took it as far as I could, an unmelodic shriek creeping in on the highest notes as I pressed down with all eight fingers and pursed my lips more tightly.

Nothing.

I let the last fractured notes of that shapeless abomination of a tune drop like glass splinters from between my fingers. Then I lowered the whistle, shook it twice to clear it of saliva and slid it back into my pocket.

‘So tell me about it,’ Coldwood suggested.

I turned to face him, looked him in the eye. ‘About what, Gary?’ I asked, with brittle politeness.

He nodded in the direction of the car. ‘What happened here.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened here,’ I admitted bluntly. ‘But I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. Nobody died. And you must have known that when you hauled me out of bed and dragged me halfway across London to watch the sun come up.’

Coldwood did the deadpan again — one of his favourite party tricks. ‘This isn’t about what I know, Fix,’ he told me. ‘It’s about what you know. And it’s probably a good idea if you keep your temper. Because sometimes when you lose it you say things you don’t mean.’

‘That’s the human condition,’ I observed. ‘Now what the fuck am I doing here if you don’t have a DOA?’

He came away from the car’s flank, squaring his shoulders. ‘Where were you earlier tonight?’ he asked me, in the guilty-until-proven-dead tone that all cops use when they deliver that line.

‘What?’

‘Where were you earlier tonight?’

Well, the truth wouldn’t serve so a lie would have to do. ‘I was in bed, Gary. I was snogging Morpheus, tongues and tonsils and everything, until you woke me up and brought me here. Why? You got something you want to put me in the frame for?’

‘Was anybody with you, Fix?’

‘A squad of cheerleaders, but I didn’t get any of the names.’ Coldwood waited me out. ‘No. There was nobody with me.’

‘But Pen was in the house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You two share your usual drink before bedtime?’

‘No.’

‘No? Then when was the last time anyone—?’

‘It was a lot of drinks. Different kinds, but variations on a theme of thundering oblivion.’

‘So when was the last time—?’

‘Jesus! A bit after one o’clock. So if someone sneaked down here to the wilds of Walworth and blew someone else’s brains out through their ear, then yeah, it could have been me. All I’d have had to do is avoid those roadworks around Saint George’s Circus, and I’d have been laughing. Then again, if brains were flying, I think I would have got a hint of them just now. But I didn’t. And you being a homicide detective, Gary, that puzzles me. It puzzles me to Hell and back again. So I repeat: what the fuck?’

It looked as though the preliminary interview was over. Gary’s gaze shot off to stage left again, towards the red car with its entourage of plods. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go take a look. But don’t touch anything. If you do, we’ll both probably end up wishing you hadn’t.’

What I was wishing was that I’d declined Coldwood’s invitation in the first place. But then it hadn’t been phrased in a way that left me the option. I walked over to the car, aware that he was following me at a discreet distance. Basquiat was still throwing her weight all around the uniformed division, but when the cop next to her looked in my direction she followed his gaze and our eyes met.

She gave a gesture to the uniforms that basically meant back off, and they did. As I walked around the side of the car, everyone got out of my way. That gave me a clear view of the amazingly wide bloodstain that had spilled down the embankment from the car’s driver-side door. A sheet of clear plastic had been laid over the stain, its edges neatly anchored with white marker tape and annotated with esoteric symbols. Not magic symbols, I hasten to add: not the lexicon of wards and stay-nots that I know all too well. These were the marks of a different mystery, signalling trajectories, angles, identities, values, place markers for people and objects removed for forensic testing. It wasn’t a world that I was particularly at home with.

Basquiat nodded towards the windscreen, but I was sideways-on to it and whatever revelation awaited me there was still a few seconds away. I slowed and stared in through the side window, amazed at the sheer amount of blood that had splashed all over the upholstery, the dashboard, the steering column. There were even a pair of fluffy dice, gore-covered and dangling like trophies from a bullfight. And if someone had fought a bull inside this cramped little car, then maybe the volume of blood that had been spilled was reasonable after all.

Basquiat and her harem of constables were all staring at me, a certain tense expectation visible in most of the faces. Coldwood was behind me, but something told me that he was watching me too. As nonchalantly as I could, I took the final three steps that brought me to the front of the car.

There’s something about your own name in someone else’s handwriting that gives you an instant blip of recognition, even when you meet it in unusual circumstances. And this certainly counted as unusual in my book. For one thing, it was written backwards, from right to left: but then, that was because it had been written on the inside of the car windscreen, by someone sitting in the driver’s seat. More strikingly, it was written in blood.

F, first of all: a big sprawling capital F whose elongated upright stretched all the way from the top to the bottom of the glass: presumably a sign of how copiously the poor bastard must have been bleeding. A ragged red wedge hid the rest of that first word, apart from the curve of whatever letter came next.

But ‘Castor’, underneath and a little to the right, stood out very legibly indeed, in spite of the problems the writer seemed to have had keeping the crossbar of the ‘t’ and its curving upstroke separate, and in spite of a ragged tail-off on the ‘r’. But then, he was probably running out of writing materials at that point.

‘Jesus!’ I said. Or at least my lips formed the word. I don’t think any actual sound came out. The words ‘Use a pen, Sideshow Bob’ flitted incongruously through my brain.

‘Know anyone by that name?’ Coldwood asked, standing at my shoulder.

‘Jesus, Gary!’

‘I know. You probably want to breathe slow and deep. If you pass out on the road it will dent your rep.’

I groped for a mental handle or key: something that would make sense of this obscenity. For a moment there wasn’t one, but then the salient fact smacked me in the face like a slab of raw fish.

‘He’s not dead. He didn’t die.’

‘No. He’s at the Royal, in intensive care. They’re fifty-fifty as to whether he’ll pull through.’

I’m used to death; and I’ve looked at it in the style pioneered by Judy Collins — from both sides — so maybe I get a little free and easy in my attitude. Right then, though, my stomach was pitching in slow, queasy arcs, and I suddenly felt like I was standing a couple of degrees off true vertical.

‘How could he not die?’ I asked, hoping my voice didn’t sound as uneven to the peanut gallery as it did to me.

Coldwood’s tone, by contrast, was blunt and matter-of-fact. ‘He just didn’t lose enough blood, amazingly. He was cut up like you wouldn’t believe. His face. His throat. His upper torso. Defensive wounds on his hands, too, which is probably how he was able to write your name. Someone spent a lot of time on him and tried out a lot of different angles. Mostly pretty shallow cuts, except for one across his shoulder and into his throat. If he dies, that will be the one that killed him. Went right through the brachio-cephalic artery. Hence most of this mess: the brachio is like Old Faithful in pillar-box red.’

Gary likes to flaunt his knowledge of anatomy, picked up when he did his BTEC higher certificate in forensic medicine at Keighley College. At any other time I would have bounced back with some caustic comment about what you can learn working round the back of a Fleet Street pie shop, but right then the wellsprings of my jaunty banter seemed to have dried up. Or maybe congealed.

‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘I mean — who is he?’

‘Local lad. Lived over there, all on his tod.’ Coldwood pointed off to the east, where the horizon was dominated by one of South London’s least-loved landmarks: the Salisbury estate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, so I knew what it was. Another bit of utopian city planning gone tits-up and stinking as soon as the paint dried and the real world set in.

Twelve massive tower blocks were arranged in a three-by-four formation: guardsmen standing to attention in some apocalyptic parade. They were about twenty storeys high, and the first thing you noticed when you looked at them was that each of the four rows of three had been painted in a different colour, shifting — as your gaze panned right — across the spectrum from pastel pink, through buttercup yellow and duck-egg green, to moody indigo. The second thing you noticed was the walkways that connected the towers at irregular intervals above the ground, welding them into one entity: the uber-estate.

I don’t hold much with premonitions. Mostly our unconscious minds just tell us what we already know, lending a supernatural confirmation to a preformed prejudice. But as I looked across the rooftops towards the Salisbury I felt that twinge of presentiment brush my mind again like a wind-borne cobweb. So what I’d felt earlier hadn’t come from the car: it had come from the distant vista behind it. There seemed to be a smudge of black like a thumbprint in the air, blurring my view of the Salisbury. It wasn’t smoke, because in modern, post-industrial London there’s nothing around to do the smoking: it was a psychic effluent, hanging there untouched by wind, immune to rain. It was the stain of a great sin, or a great unhappiness: or more likely, I thought, pulling my gaze away from the tombstone towers, it was the collective residue of a lot of smaller discontents and domestic tragedies, trickling together and then left to curdle.

‘I don’t know anybody there,’ I said. A stupid thing to say, really: it was just an instinctive reaction to want to distance myself from what I was feeling — from what was coming in on Radio Death.

‘You sound pretty damn sure,’ said Basquiat, looming behind Coldwood’s shoulder very promptly on her cue, as though she’d been waiting in earshot but out of my line of sight this whole time.

‘I mean,’ I amended, taking my eyes off the distant vista with an effort, ‘none of my friends live around here. I’m not aware of knowing anybody on the Salisbury estate. It’s something I would have remembered.’

‘Why’s that?’ Basquiat asked, politely but with an edge.

‘Because I’ve heard of the place. It would have stuck in my mind. Especially if I’d just popped over to stab one of the residents to death in his car before I’d even had breakfast.’

‘But you stuck in his mind, obviously.’

‘Yeah.’ My eyes flicked back to ‘F Castor’ written arse-first in black-edged red. ‘Obviously.’

‘So tell me about your movements last night,’ Basquiat suggested. A uniformed cop at her elbow flicked open a ring-bound notebook and held a biro at the ready. Basquiat’s beautifully proportioned unadorned face stared at me expectantly.

‘I already told Coldwood,’ I pointed out.

‘Right. And now you’re telling me.’

Better to draw the line now and find out where I stood.

‘If I’m under arrest,’ I said, ‘then Grandma Castor would turn in her grave if I said anything without benefit of legal counsel.’

‘You’re not under arrest,’ Coldwood said. He was still looking at the skyline, keeping his back turned to his colleague as though it hurt even to look at her. At the Uxbridge Road cop shop their feud was getting to be the stuff of legend. ‘Ask me why.’

‘Coldwood–’ Basquiat said warningly.

‘Why am I not under arrest, Detective Sergeant Coldwood?’

‘Because there are three sets of prints in that car — the victim’s, and two sets belonging to Mister A.N. Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

‘Right.’

‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advantage. ‘Sure.’

‘Kenneth Seddon.’

My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘So you do know him?’

‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’

‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’

Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.

‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said. ‘But he messed it up.’