Thicker Than Water

4

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Basquiat played by the rules, mostly. She was just kidding about God’s pocket, but I got to keep my testicles.

She seemed mostly concerned with getting me on record about my previous relationship with Kenny, and she only cut up rough when I tried to back-pedal from the lurid story I’d sketched out on the overpass. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law in my time and I’m pretty good on the rules of evidence, so I knew that none of what I was saying could be used to establish just cause: but I also knew how bad it would sound in court if the Met ever did decide to charge me, so I was more careful with my phrasing than I’d been during the first rendition — and Basquiat, knowing her job, shone a torch into every area of vagueness and obscurity and tripped me up whenever I contradicted myself.

There was no malice in it, which made this a distinct improvement on the time when Basquiat had interviewed me with her fists in the course of the Abbie Torrington case. But I was still sweaty, dishevelled and exhausted by the time we were done — and, admiring the detective sergeant’s lean good looks in passing, I was reminded that there are more pleasant ways of getting that way.

After the interview and the grand, formal taking of the statement they left me to cool for a while in a smaller cell at the end of a long corridor that smelled of piss and stewed cabbage. Someone told me once that the Uxbridge Road cop shop used to be a workhouse back in Victorian times, and I can believe it. There’s a damp, miserable effluvium about the place that you’d need a Jamaican steel band and a flame-thrower to disperse. There are also a fair number of ghosts, and I got to meet three of them: two broadly human in appearance, the third an amorphous nightmare that had forgotten what it was long ago and now only held itself together by some inchoate impulse that kept it moving like a shark around and around the lower storeys of the building.

I was doing the same thing, only on the inside: prowling my own memories in pointless circles that always seemed to bring me out in more or less the same place.

Eventually Basquiat came back in and told me I was free to go.

‘What swung it?’ I asked her, knowing that she’d mainly been keeping me around while she made her mind up.

She looked at me hard for a second before answering: I had no right to ask, of course, and if they did end up charging me they wouldn’t want me in a position to second-guess the evidence. On the other hand, there’s never anything to lose by trying.

‘The forensics are starting to come through,’ she said grudgingly. ‘They confirm what Coldwood said about the prints. You weren’t one of the people who held that razor. There are also a few . . . anomalies about the wounds themselves. Things we’ll have to look at again.’ Her eyes defocused for a moment, as if she was taking that line of reasoning a little further inside her head. Then she recollected herself and became brisk. ‘So we won’t be charging you just yet, Castor. But you should probably keep yourself available in case we need to talk to you again. Tell us if you’re going anywhere.’

‘What about if I go to the Salisbury?’ I asked.

Her expression soured. ‘I’ve got two gorillas on my team,’ she said. ‘They were transferred out of Lambeth for questionable use of force. If I see you anywhere near my crime scene I’m going to get the pair of them to give you a Swedish massage in the back of a slam van. My sacred, solemn word.’

‘I’ve had promises like that before,’ I said, accepting the little bag with my belongings in it. ‘I always end up getting my heart broken.’

‘Don’t worry about your heart, worry about your neck,’ Basquiat suggested as she walked out.

Sometimes it’s best to let events take their course. As Taoists say, the best direction is wu wei — with the course of the water. You abandon the illusions of will and control and drift freely in the currents of life letting chance or fate choose your direction.

I’m not a Taoist. For the most part, when it comes to the river of life I sink to the bottom and then I start walking. Against the current.

So now, being a free man again and loosed onto the streets in the dazzling, over-emphatic sunshine, instead of declaring a goof-off day and making a beeline to the nearest pub to meditate on my misspent youth I found my thoughts drifting to the Salisbury — and to that stubborn stain of psychic effluent that I’d seen from afar. Was that what Kenny had been trying to tell me about?

Could it hurt to take a look?

The answer was yes, of course. It’s always yes. But I went anyway.

Back in the nineteenth century, when London was basically a big pile of crap with some buildings floating in it, and when a cholera epidemic was raging through the city like a drunk with a Gatling gun, they had this theory about what they were dying of. Nobody had made the link yet to infected water — not until John Snow came along in the 1850s with his epidemiological version of the New Testament. So the best idea they could come up with in the meantime was the miasma: a vast cloud of bad air, the exhaled breath of a million diseased and dying people, that drifted over London and infected you if you breathed it in.

That turned out to be bollocks, and Snow saved tens of thousands of lives when he tore the handles off the Soho pumps to prove his point. In the twenty-first century most people laugh at miasmas.

Not exorcists, though. We know better than anyone that things can gather in the air, unseen, and that you can breathe them in without knowing it. Most places have emotional resonances: random echoes of the emotions felt by the people who live in those places or walk through them. Mostly they stay at a low level because — to use a crude metaphor — the peaks and troughs don’t match up. It’s like ripples in a pond cancelling each other out as their wave fronts intersect. Occasionally, though, if a lot of people are feeling the same thing, then instead of cancelling each other out the emotions reinforce each other, etch themselves deeper and deeper into what we flippantly call reality. When that happens you can get a very strong emotional residue hanging over a particular place and enduring over time. Schools, prisons, death camps, brothels, army barracks, even churches: they have their own psychic flavour, which exorcists pick up on the same wavelength that allows us to see the dead. We’re like dogs in that way, pricking up our ears at a whistle that nobody else can hear.

The Salisbury Estate had an aura of this kind. I could feel it from a long way away, when I got off the bus at Burgess Park and started to walk north towards it. The closest of the towers was a good half a mile off, but already there was a thickening in the air that you could almost taste. The people around me — mothers with pushchairs, mainly, along with the occasional homeless guy and truanting kid, because this was the dead waste and middle of the day — didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. They kept right on walking, didn’t even look over their shoulders at the great grey towers looming behind them. So I knew it was my tuning-fork soul, resonating on a frequency that the rest of the world was deaf to.

The miasma intensified as I got closer, but although the individual towers of the Salisbury separated themselves out in my field of vision the feeling didn’t attach itself to any one of them.

The contradiction between those two impressions — the vividness of the sensation and the vagueness of its source — came as something of a surprise. I’ve learned the hard way that the physics of the material world don’t apply to my chosen field all that much: if they did, an enraged geist wouldn’t be able to pick me up and slam me into a wall because his massless form wouldn’t allow him any leverage. And zombies wouldn’t be able to move without a working heart to oxygenate their putrefying tissues.

But it’s a reliable rule that most hauntings have a fixed physical locus, an anchor point, where something that no longer belongs in this world has somehow got stuck and failed to move on. Finding the anchor is one of the first steps in any exorcism, because it means you can apply your leverage to the point where it’s going to have the biggest impact. It’s like aiming your fire extinguisher at the base of the fire, not at the flames.

This field of buzzing emotional energy wasn’t playing by the rules. It remained diffuse, impossible to pinpoint: my psychic compass wobbled and spun, looking for a true north that seemed not to be there.

The emotional weight that the miasma carried became more and more vivid as I approached: intensified, without narrowing down. What I was tasting in the air was a tension, a restless alertness, together with a sort of shift in my vision that made everything I was seeing subtly different — as though I was seeing it through a window that had been misted with somebody else’s breath.

I walked between the first of the Salisbury’s towers as I came off Freemantle Street, passing a primary school on my left. Kids are like dogs, too, and the two hundred or so toddlers swarming around in the playground seemed unusually subdued and thoughtful. They were playing on the climbing frames and hopscotch grids, but silently and with a disconcerting solemnity.

I looked up as the shadow of the Salisbury’s eastern-most block fell across me. The towers all had name plaques fixed to their walls at head height, the names barely visible beneath a hundred layers of granulated, half-erased graffiti: this one — the pink tower that stood at one end of the artfully arranged colour field — was Sandford Block, and its companion on my left, a slightly warmer shade of the same basic colour, was Cole. I thought of cattle brands, and of Adam naming the beasts. These hulking monsters wore their names lightly, and didn’t seem to have been tamed or humanised by them to any measurable extent.

The remaining towers stretched in a colonnade ahead of me, probably about a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Over my head were the first of the walkways, linking the towers within a rigidly geometrical spiderweb. The floor was paved with blocks of faded rose-pink and yellow, between which weeds grew in stubborn profusion: everything else was poured concrete, forty years old now and well into its mid-life crisis. There was a shopping trolley abandoned at the foot of Cole Block, lying on its side like a dead wildebeest. There was also a small cluster of boys in their early teens who were completely ignoring me as they kicked a football against the concrete wall, taking turns to hone their ball control in solo displays that clearly had a competitive edge to them.

I checked the address that Nicky Heath had given me, scribbled on a torn-out page of Notes for Persons in Police Custody, the Home Office pamphlet they give you these days in place of the old ‘You’ve been nicked, me laddie.’ I’d asked Coldwood for the address first, but he’d warned me off even more emphatically than Basquiat had, pointing out that if I was serious about not wanting to be arrested the best thing I could do was sod off home and stay there.

‘You’re forgetting one thing, Gary,’ I pointed out.

‘Which is?’

‘I’m also serious about being innocent. I didn’t take a straight razor to Kenny Seddon’s throat. The last time I wanted to do that, I hadn’t even started to shave.’

Coldwood shook his head. ‘So?’

‘So I know Kenny wasn’t writing my name in blood because he wanted to tell you who’d attacked him. You’re still open-minded on that subject, which is more or less where you need to be, but I’m not. It was something else — some other kind of message, and I’ve got to assume it was meant for me. Not “It was Castor what done it” but “Castor, take a look at this.” You understand? I don’t know what it’s about or if it’s really any of my business, but I need to find out before I can let this drop. And since you won’t even tell me where Kenny lives, I don’t trust you to tell me anything else you turn up. No hard feelings.’

‘I’ll tell you everything I think you need to know,’ Coldwood promised, and the stolid emphasis told me exactly how carefully he was choosing his words.

‘And I’ll do the same for you,’ I assured him, with a straight face. Then I walked on out of the station, found the nearest working phone box — my mobile being down on batteries again because I can never be arsed to recharge it — and called Nicky Heath, my technically dead sometime-informant. He shagged Kenny’s address from the electoral roll in about ten seconds flat.

‘New case?’ he asked me after I’d taken the details down.

‘Not exactly, Nicky,’ I said. ‘But it’s something I’m looking into. And I’ll probably be coming to you for a bit more than this as soon as I know what I’m looking for.’

‘Sure. Tell me about it tonight. You’re coming to the screening, right?’

I trod water mentally while I tried to work out what he meant. Then I remembered the gold-trimmed card that had dropped onto Pen’s doormat three weeks before — requesting the pleasure of my company at a one-off presentation of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (the original theatrical release, not the director’s cut) at Nicky’s formerly derelict cinema, the Walthamstow Gaumont. Strictly by invitation only, gatecrashers strongly discouraged — and since Nicky had indulged his burgeoning paranoia by turning the Gaumont into a cavernous booby-trapped fortress, that phrase hid a whole world of pain.

‘The screening,’ I echoed. ‘Right. I’ll see you there.’

And if that was what it took, that was what I’d do. But business before some implausible imitation of pleasure.

Kenny Seddon lived at 137 Weston Block, Nicky had said. I could check each tower in turn, but why not use the natural resources that were already on offer? I wandered over to the small group of boys who were still intent on their kick-about. A few of them turned to watch me as I approached, but the lad who was in possession of the ball carried on side-kicking it up into the air and then bouncing it off his chest in a metronomic rhythm.

They were younger than I’d thought, most of them probably not yet into their teens. That was welcome, because along with the broad daylight it gave me a certain assurance that they wouldn’t roll me at knifepoint for my mobile phone. They didn’t look threatening, it has to be said, but there was a certain edginess to their expressions. Maybe they were tense for the same reason that the kids in the schoolyard hadn’t seemed to be enjoying their playtime all that much: because on some level they were aware of the psychic miasma and were responding to it. Or maybe they just thought I was the truant officer.

‘Hey, guys,’ I said. ‘Which block is Weston?’

Most of the boys seemed happy to stare me out, but one of them pointed. ‘Fourth along,’ he said, flicking his flax-blond hair out of his eyes with his thumb. He was as skinny as a whippet — a whippet that’s been on a low-fat diet for a while — and the nervous gesture made me notice that he had a grubby bandage wrapped around his hand. One around each hand, in fact. He was so pale that his skin looked like paper. His orange tee-shirt bore the enigmatic legend URBAN FREESTYLE.

I nodded, said thanks and turned to leave.

‘Eighth floor,’ the boy added, to my departing back.

I stopped and looked at him again.

‘What?’ I inquired.

The boy hesitated, looking confused and a little hunted. ‘The — place you wanted,’ he said. ‘Number 137. It’s on the eighth floor, right next door to where I . . .’ He trailed off into silence, frowning as he tried to remember what I’d actually said.

Some of the other lads glared at him. They clearly felt that giving information to casual strangers was a bad idea on general principle. I couldn’t fault their thinking on that one. ‘Your turn, Bic,’ one of them said pointedly. He threw the ball hard at the blond kid, who just got his hands up in time to catch it. The conversation was over, and there was no point in pushing the point. I walked on across the pastel-coloured pavement, heading for the tower that he’d indicated.

When I looked back, twenty seconds or so later, the boys still hadn’t resumed their game: they were watching me out of sight, except for the blond boy who was staring down at the ball as he rubbed his bandaged hand against its surface. He still looked unhappy about what had just happened. He’d clearly heard the number 137: I just hadn’t said it.

The miasma stabbed against the inside of my temples, suddenly agonisingly acute, then faded again just as abruptly into the background rasp that it had now become.

Up close, Weston Block was an impressive if unlovely structure, its coat of duck-egg green doing nothing to bring it into harmony with its surroundings. There was a broad stairwell going up its side, leading to the first of the walkways a few storeys above my head. There were also double doors leading into a foyer with three lifts side by side, marked like the outer walls with many overlays of spray-painted graffiti. As it turned out, none of the lifts worked. There were interior stairs too, but they smelled heavily of mildew cut through with the sharper stink of urine.

So I went back outside and ascended into the sky on Shanks’s pony.

The first walkway was three floors up. It was wider than it looked from the ground — almost as wide as a street. And like a street it had its own lighting: octagonal grey lamp-posts supported art-deco globes that didn’t sort well with anything else I could see. There was a chest-high stone parapet on either side of the walkway to stop people tumbling down onto the pavement below, and a trellised arch at the end furthest from me that looked as though it had been put there for the benefit of climbing plants. But nothing decorated the walkway except for some broken glass tastefully strewn around and a few overfilled black plastic bin bags spilling out their freight of tea leaves and tin cans into my path. The parapet was cracked at a couple of points, as though the walkway had suffered a little from subsidence and never been repaired.

This seemed to be where the older kids hung out — school apparently not being an option that anyone around here took very seriously. A group of them were sitting on the parapet, smoking. One of them looked at me with unfriendly interest as I hove into view, then looked away and spat casually over the edge of the walkway.

I slogged on up the stairs. A lean guy in his thirties, with slicked black hair, a piercing above his right eye and an acrid stench of body odour fighting an olfactory ground war with some cheap cologne, jostled my shoulder as he passed me going down. Then suddenly he stopped, giving me a harder look. He was as pale as the kid, Bic: in fact, his pallor had gone beyond whiteness into the yellow sallows of nearly exposed bone, so he wasn’t equipped to blanch. But his expression was one of stunned surprise, and my death-sense prickled as he stared at me. Not what he seemed, then: a zombie, most likely, but with enough animation in his face and movements to be of fairly recent vintage.

He’d been handsome once: big-eyed, long-haired, slender in face and build. In a zombie it was pathetic and obscurely indecent. You wanted to look away. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you, and used to have to beat the girls off with a shitty stick.

I waited for a moment, because he seemed to be about to speak. When he didn’t, I decided to break the ice myself.

‘Anything I can do for you?’ I asked.

The guy grimaced and shook his head. ‘You look like someone I used to know,’ he said, his voice a bone-dry murmur. What was that accent? If he’d spoken again I might have placed it. But he didn’t. He turned away again and went on down the stairs.

Happy to disappoint you, I thought. But brief as it was, the encounter had an oddity about it that skewed my mood. The guy had seemed not just surprised to see me but unnerved. In fact he looked a little bit like the man in the story who flees to Samara to avoid Death, only to find he’s kept the appointment after all. Maybe Death and I have a family resemblance that nobody’s ever pointed out to me.

Well, it would have to keep. He was already out of sight, and in this maze I’d be lucky to find him again if I started after him. Anyway, I was here to check out the lie of the land, not to chase herrings of whatever colour.

The next walkway was on the eighth floor: exactly where Bic had said I should go. I stepped back into Weston Block through a swing door that didn’t swing any more on account of a broken mounting. A short corridor stretched ahead of me, with two doors on either side and one more straight ahead. The first door on my left was 137.

So Bic’s directions were right on the money. Interesting. I’d had my pocket picked before, but not my mind. Or had the news of Kenny’s near-death experience already filtered through to the Salisbury, making the kid guess that this was my destination? Occam’s razor said yes, but when you make a living out of dealing with the yobs and malcontents of the invisible kingdom you tend to keep an open mind on a whole lot of things.

The door to 137 was identical to all the others in sight — a single piece of wood, painted more or less the same shade of green as the tower’s exterior, with the number of the flat blazoned on an oval ceramic plate that was screwed onto the door at chest height, and only a Yale lock to keep the world out. I could have cracked the lock inside of a minute if I’d brought the right tools, and at some stage I might end up doing exactly that: but not in broad daylight, and not without my lockpicks. This was more in the nature of preliminary reconnaissance: you can get into a lot of trouble if you waltz at dead of night into a place you’ve never even seen for a spot of breaking and entering.

The walls inside the block were mostly free of daubed exhortations and expletives, but I noticed that something had been scrawled in black marker next to Kenny’s door, a foot or so off the ground. I bent down to examine it, moved mostly by idle curiosity. There were no words here: only an image as simple as a cave drawing. It showed a teardrop shape with straight lines radiating outwards from it in a ragged starburst.

‘He’s not in,’ said a voice from behind me.

I straightened and turned around. A woman was staring at me from the doorway at the end of the hall, which had opened without me hearing it. She was tall and red-haired, the red serving to set off the general lack of vivid colours anywhere else about her person. Her eyes were grey, her skin pale and freckled like the house-sparrow egg Matt had shown me once during his brief and uncharacteristically cruel foray into bird’s-nesting. She wore what you might call earth colours, although the earth in question would be the margins of a desert: sand and dry topsoil blowing away in a tropical wind that never quit. She could only have been about forty, but she looked older. You immediately identified her as someone who’d had a crummy life and bent under it to keep from breaking.

She was looking at me with something like suspicion. Either for purposes of self-defence or because I’d caught her in the middle of making lunch, she held a long kitchen knife in one frail-looking hand. The smell of frying that wafted out into the hall from behind her seemed to confirm the second hypothesis.

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, smiling a slightly imbecilic, wrath-deflecting smile. Not that this lady had any particular wrath to give.

‘Mister Seddon. He’s not in. He hasn’t been in all day.’ The woman’s voice was very low, dipping lower still at the end of every phrase as though whenever she opened her mouth she was sticking her head up over a parapet and then reflexively ducking again in case she got shot at.

I tried to look surprised and disappointed as I ambled across the hallway towards her. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Miss–’

‘Mrs.’

‘Mrs . . . ?’

‘Daniels.’ She looked back over her shoulder with a distracted air, then back at me. ‘I can’t really talk right now,’ she said, and then, as if the lapse of manners had to be balanced or atoned for in some way, she added ‘Jean. Jean Daniels.’

‘Of course. Mrs Daniels. Kenny said for me to call today.’ That sentence hung in the air for an over-long moment, while I assembled some other lies to go along with it. ‘For the books.’

The red haired woman frowned. ‘The books?’ she repeated.

I nodded gravely. ‘I’m collecting for the rummage sale,’ I said. ‘At Saint Gary-le-Pauvre. The priest’s a friend of mine, and I like to help out.’

‘Oh.’ The frown didn’t disappear, despite this morally unimpeachable cover story. If anything it deepened. ‘Well, I know Mister Seddon’s not in because my Thomas had to take his post from the postman this morning and we’ve knocked six or seven times to give it to him. You’ll have to come back another time.’

I didn’t take the hint: this was a recon mission, after all, and that included making contact with the local citizenry. ‘Kenny’s a fine man,’ I said, throwing out a random hook. ‘But we’ve not seen each other in a while. I hope he’s well. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Felix Castor.’

I held out my hand, but Jean Daniels didn’t seem keen to reciprocate.

‘So you’re from the church?’ she demanded again. Her tone was solemn and slow: the tone of someone working through a complex syllogism.

‘That’s right.’

‘And you said “the priest”, so — a Catholic church?’

‘Well . . .’ Too late to temporise. ‘Not un-Catholic,’ I admitted lamely. ‘Definitely on the Catholic side of the equation.’

‘But Mister Seddon is Protestant, isn’t he? Bitter orange, was the way he put it. I remember it particularly because it was one of the first things he ever said to me.’

Bitter orange. It was a resonant phrase for anyone born and bred in the briar patch of Liverpool 9. Mrs D was right, too: I remembered now that Kenny’s dad and all his uncles had been in the Lodge, marching in bright orange sashes and Moss Bros suits along County Road on the Glorious Twelfth.

Fortunately, Mrs Daniels seemed more apologetic than indignant to have caught me out in a flat lie. Or at any rate, she went on talking to cover the social embarrassment. ‘The very next day after he moved in, when I met him for the first time by the lift, Mister Seddon asked me what denomination we were. And when I said we weren’t anything very much he wasn’t happy at all. He said we must have been brought up something, in a Christian country. So I told him my parents were Catholic, my Tom’s were High Church Anglican, and he never had another word to say to us.’ She shook her head in solemn wonder. ‘It’s a shame the uses some people put the Lord to — making hate where there should be love, and turning a good message into a bad one.’

‘Well, Saint Gary’s is an ecumenical mission,’ I assured her, wishing I’d thought up a better cover story: she was sharper than she looked. ‘But it’s never been about the religion for me. I just like to do good for goodness’ sake.’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘Not in the slightest. My brother’s a priest,’ I offered, as though that helped to establish my own credentials. ‘Like I said, I really just wanted to check in on Kenny and find out if things were going okay for him these days. We go back a long way. In case I didn’t mention it before, I’m Felix. Felix Castor.’ (I knew I was repeating myself but I reckoned it was time to be persistent.)

I stuck my hand out again. It would have been rude to ignore it twice, and Mrs Daniels seemed deathly afraid of giving offence. She put her own hand in mine, a little limply, and allowed it to be shaken.

Which meant that I finally got to read her. This kind of random trawling is an automatic thing with me: the same morbid sensitivity that lets me see ghosts even where others can’t sometimes allows me to pick up surface thoughts and emotions from people’s minds when I touch them. So I do it even in situations like this one where there probably isn’t much to be gained.

What I got from Mrs Daniels was powerful, narrowly specific, and no use to me at all. She had a shallow cut on her forearm and she couldn’t think how she’d done it. It was making her itch like mad but she didn’t want to scratch in front of a stranger. That was also why she hadn’t wanted to shake my hand, because she’d left the cut uncovered to make it scab faster and she was embarrassed to have it be seen. She was worried about someone — no names, no image, just a conceptual knot that was full of warmth and uncritical love — and worried in a different way about the time she was wasting as she stood here talking to me. She was also embarrassed about the kitchen knife, and she glanced down at it now as she disengaged her hand from my grip.

‘Cooking his lunch,’ she said by way of explanation as she held up the knife for my inspection. ‘I should get back, really. I can’t turn the ring down all the way and the fat might catch. Things aren’t.’

I thought I might have misheard those last two words, because they didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of the sentence in any meaningful way. But Mrs Daniels saw my puzzled blink and went on with barely a break.

‘Well, you asked me if things were going well for him — for Mister Seddon. They’re not. He’s going from bad to worse, really. I don’t think he’s ever got over it. He puts a brave face on, because you’ve got to, but it’s not something that ever goes away, is it? You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done.’

I was lost in this welter of restricted code. I tilted my head in polite inquiry. ‘Anything you could have done to . . . ?’

‘Well, to stop it,’ Mrs Daniels said, looking at me with eyes that carried a full share of the world’s hurt. ‘I mean, you’d be thinking that if you’d seen the signs early enough you could have said something. Got some help. I know they say you can’t, but I think it depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it?’

It seemed safest to agree. ‘What were the circumstances?’ I asked earnestly. ‘I’ve never felt able to ask.’

Mrs D shook her head bleakly. ‘I could tell you some tales,’ she said, with a lack of enthusiasm that belied the words. ‘But I won’t. Not now. The time to have said something was before, when it might have done some good. I blame myself. We all should blame ourselves. He deserved better. Whatever was going on at home . . .’ She paused, then went on quickly, nervously, as if she’d just stepped across an unacknowledged abyss and didn’t want to look down. ‘He still deserved better. We’ve all got a responsibility, I think, don’t you? To say what can’t be said? A boy that age has got his whole life ahead of him. I used to see him with the girls, and there were two or three who wouldn’t have said no if he’d asked. But he was lost. He never looked like he was in the same world as everyone else. And then you start to hear the stories, from the other boys. My John’s the same age, but it was my Billy, my youngest, funnily enough, who knew him better than anyone. And he’s said things that pulled me up short, more than once. It was there. He wasn’t hiding it. A hundred people saw it, and twice as many as that knew all about it. But nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. That’s what I meant when I said we were all to blame.’

She’d talked herself into a state of mild distress, her voice becoming more animated as she wrestled with her own undefined sin. Now she looked at me expectantly, but I had no idea what it was she was expecting. Commiseration? Absolution? A smack on the wrist? I struggled to find a loose thread in her tone poem that I could seize and pull at to see if it unravelled. Kenny Seddon was a bit long in the tooth to be called a boy, so presumably this ‘he’ was someone else. A son? Did Kenny have a family? I was nearly certain that Gary had said he lived alone. I opened my mouth to frame a question that wouldn’t give away my ignorance.

A bellow with a lot of bass in it sounded from the open door at Mrs Daniels’s back, drowning out whatever I was going to say. ‘Jean! Jeanie! Is there a shirt in here that’s been ironed?’

Mrs Daniels folded in on herself in some subtle, mostly non-physical way. ‘That’s my Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She stepped back over the threshold, starting to close the door. Then she stopped abruptly, her face splitting open in a radiant smile that took me completely by surprise. It wasn’t for me, though: she was looking past me along the hallway, and whatever it was she was seeing made that infolding reverse itself; made her open up again, like a flower at the end of a long, dark night.

‘It never fails,’ she said, her voice suddenly alive with droll over-emphasis. ‘Put some chips in a pan, and here he comes.’

I turned to see the blond boy, Bic, walking towards me. He gave me a puzzled glance, nodded vaguely, and then submitted to his mother’s exuberant embrace. When she’d squashed him a little out of shape, she held him at arm’s length for inspection. ‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘You can wash before you eat, you little urchin.’ She took the sting out of the words by tousling his hair with the same vigour that she’d applied to the hug.

‘Get off, Mum!’ Bic protested, deciding that enough was enough. He ducked under her arm and past her into the flat, but only because she didn’t contest it.

‘Children are the treasure house of the world,’ Mrs Daniels declared, favouring me with a self-conscious but sincere smile. The fact that I’d seen her in her parental role seemed to have broken the ice between us in some decisive way.

I nodded, returning the smile. ‘Shouldn’t he be in school?’ I asked, mainly for the sake of prolonging the moment of trust and intimacy.

‘Baker day,’ Mrs Daniels said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘In-service training. All the secondary schools are closed today. It’s lucky I’m on a late shift, isn’t it? God knows how other mothers cope. I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to go now. Nice to meet you, Mister . . .’

For a moment I considered giving her a false name, since my real one clearly hadn’t stuck either time. There might possibly be some point in lying, if Basquiat came gunning for me in earnest and wanted to establish an evidence trail. But I gave the detective credit where it was due: she wouldn’t stay in the dark for long if she seriously wanted to check up on me.

‘Castor,’ I said, making the hat trick. ‘Felix Castor.’

‘Good day to you, Mister Castor. I’ll tell Mister Seddon you were looking for him.’

The door closed in my face — all the way, this time. Tom’s needs had to be met, and clearly Mrs Daniels had no more time for small talk. I stood in the corridor for a few moments longer, trying to make sense of what she’d said. Clearly something had happened to Kenny recently. Something bad, that had left a permanent shadow — or had seemed to. Something he could perhaps have prevented, because there were signs in advance that other people had been able to see.

It was probably unrelated to the attack on him, of course — and the odds were overwhelming that it had no bearing at all on why he’d written my name in his own blood as he sank into unconsciousness and possibly into death. But I had to start somewhere, and if I couldn’t cajole the truth out of the neighbours I knew someone I could buy it from at the market price.

I went back into the daylight at last, and it was welcome. There was something oppressive about the interior of the tower that made me grateful to see the sun again, even if it was beating down like a hammer on an anvil. A wounded-ox lowing of distant traffic met my ears, audible again because I’d been out of it for ten minutes. The miasma was becoming harder to sense for the opposite reason — because it was holding steady now, and my senses were starting to tune it out.

I might as well carry on north, I thought — maybe pick up the Tube at Elephant and Castle. I headed on along the walkway, past more bin bags and a bike that had been chained to a lamp post with a D-lock and then deprived of its wheels to deter theft. Unless the wheels had been stolen to deter cycling.

I saw the same sigil again — the teardrop with its corona of radiating lines, this time executed in red paint — on the parapet wall. Next to it, spray-painted on the grey cement of the walkway itself, were the words NOW IT BLEEDS. The words were also done in red, and they looked fresh and new in this faded place. I crossed to look at them, then squatted down and touched the curve of the final S. Very fresh: the paint was still wet.

From this vantage point, I noticed for the first time that the concrete slabs of the parapet wall had been set with narrow gaps in them every few feet. The gaps afforded a view of the lower walkway beneath me and then the ground, where Bic’s friends — or maybe a different group of boys entirely — came briefly into view on their way to somewhere that probably wasn’t any better than here.

Someone on the lower walkway was watching them, or at least looking out in that direction. He was standing right up against the parapet, his back to me. He wore a raincoat of pure unblemished white that recalled Alec Guinness as Sidney Stratton, the Man in the Ice Cream Suit, and his sleek, possibly brilliantined black hair stood out all the more starkly against it. There was something indefinably familiar about that black-white contrast, and about the man’s ramrod bearing; his refusal to lean against the parapet even though it was right there, at the perfect leaning distance and height. I had a presentiment that was nothing to do with my death-sense.

Another man walked into my severely restricted field of vision and joined him. This guy was big and rangy and looked subtly out of proportion: but then I was seeing him from an odd angle. His face was almost completely flat, as though he’d made humorous Tom-and-Jerry-style contact with a frying pan. When he spoke, his mouth opened across its full width in a way that looked strained and awkward, the lips not moving at all. It was like a ventriloquist’s doll talking, the lower jaw bobbing straight up and down to convey by clumsy shorthand the full range of human articulation. His complexion was appalling, the skin piebald with blotches and roughly pitted.

The man on the lower walkway turned to face the newcomer as he approached, and a jolt of surprise went through me when I saw his face, even though I’d subliminally made the connection already. It was Father Gwillam, of the Anathemata Curialis.

Gwillam pointed up towards one of the higher walkways diagonally across from us. Flat-face spoke again, and Gwillam sketched something with his fingertip in the air in front of his face. It looked like brackets.

Flat-face left, at a fast trot. At the other end of the walkway he was joined by a woman — tall, somewhat heavy-set, with long dark hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed to have bandages tied around her hands, like the ones that the boy Bic had had. They headed off together towards the south end of the estate.

Time for me to book, too. I knew enough about the good father to make that particular encounter a must to avoid. But I wasn’t quite quick enough. He turned and looked up, directly towards me, as though he’d known that I was there all along.

The sun was hanging over my shoulder, directly in his face. From that distance and at that angle I’d probably just be a silhouette.

Probably.

I didn’t stay to find out.