Thicker Than Water

5

Harrison Ford went first, sidling out onto the landing from the barely opened door of his apartment and checking out the lie of the land before he allowed Sean Young to join him. Her immaculate hair and high-gloss lips suggested the unearthly perfection of CGI, but in 1982 that wasn’t even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye. She just happened to be perfect.

‘You’re talking through your arse,’ Nicky informed me curtly, wrenching my attention away from the on-screen action. He flicked a couple of switches on the projector, unnecessarily, just to remind me who was in charge. ‘There’s no way Deckard is a replicant.’

Suppressing a shiver that was purely physiological — the projection booth was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator — I tapped the glass that separated us from the auditorium below. ‘Just keep watching,’ I instructed Nicky.

On the screen, Ford looked down. The heel of Sean Young’s shoe had kicked against some small object on the floor, making it move and catch the light. He bent down and picked it up, but the focus stayed on his face for a moment or two before pulling to the thing in his hand: a tiny unicorn made out of the silvered paper and card from a cigarette packet.

After the briefest of pauses, Ford nodded — one of the most eloquent and compelling gestures in the whole of cinema, in my lowbrow opinion. He followed Young into the elevator, the door sliding closed behind him with a terminal, echoing THOOM.

I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.

‘It just means the other detective — Eddie Olmos — has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’

‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air — Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works — and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.’

‘Yeah, well, Rutger Hauer says you’re full of shit,’ Nicky pointed out, fitting the lid onto the can and carefully detaching it from the projector’s housing.

‘Fine actor — not the sharpest tool in the box,’ I summarised.

‘It’s left ambiguous.’

‘In this version it’s left ambiguous. In the director’s cut, the sequence where Deckard dreams about the unicorn nails it down tight.’

Nicky put the film canister into the steel cabinet at one end of the projection booth, closed the doors and double-locked them with painstaking care. ‘I prefer Deckard to be human,’ he said, tugging on the handles to make sure the doors were secure. There was a slight tension, both in his voice and in the set of his shoulders.

I let it go at that point. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing, because Nicky used to be human once too. That was before he had a heart attack in his late thirties and joined the ranks of the existentially challenged. Some people come back in the spirit — as ghosts — and have an uneventful afterlife hanging around the places they remember from back when they had a pulse. Others take the low road, invading and possessing and reshaping animal flesh (the default option, if only because animal spirits are weak enough not to make a fight of it most of the time) into something broadly resembling the body they used to have. That’s how werewolves are made, although the term most often used these days is the polite, non-judgemental loup-garou.

Nicky is a stubborn bastard, in death as he was in life. He took the third option, generally considered to combine the drawbacks of the other two — the isolation of the ghost and the flesh-management problems of the werewolf. He came back in the body, as a zombie.

For most people it’s a short-term option: bodies rot, and once they pass a certain point all the will-power in the world won’t make them move any more. Nicky was holding that crisis at bay with an idiosyncratic mixture of home embalming, faith healing and careful refrigeration. And to be honest he looks pretty good for a dead guy: the artificial tan he buys in by the bucketload disguises the waxy sheen of his pickled flesh, and his Mediterranean good looks still make women take a second look unless they’re close enough to catch that subtle whiff of formaldehyde. And he’s a zombie of substance these days, with an impressive property portfolio including the disused cinema where he lives, so who the hell am I to knock it? He’s ahead of the game, even if he’s playing posthumously.

‘So you bumped into this guy Gwillam,’ Nicky said, changing the subject as he pocketed the keys to the film cupboard. ‘The papal-backed motherfucker who tried to kill you over that Abbie Torrington business.’

‘Gwillam doesn’t have the blessing of the pope,’ I corrected him. ‘In fact his order — the Anathemata — were excommunicated by Benedict XVI in a job lot as soon as he sobered up from his launch party. They do their own thing now, and the Church tries to pretend they don’t exist.’

It was a half-truth, but it would do for now. The last time I’d met Gwillam, he’d hinted strongly that the excommunication was just a way of letting the Anathemata off the leash. They were kind of like the provisional wing of the Catholic Church now: a guerrilla army of religious fanatics with a scarily open-ended brief: save humankind from the dead and the undead, in God’s holy name. In the case of Abbie Torrington, that had included compounding the murder of a little girl by the extinguishing of her soul. Gwillam hadn’t been happy when — with Juliet’s help — I had managed to piss on that particular picnic.

Nicky didn’t seem happy either. ‘Don’t bury me alive in the fucking details, Castor,’ he said, making for the door. ‘It’s the same guy, right? The one who thinks people like me are the intro to Armageddon? Sees himself as God’s soldier in some fucking big holy war?’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘That’s him.’ I didn’t bother to point out that I’m the one who’s normally inclined to skip the details in favour of a simple-minded soundbite. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I leave the obsessive, anally retentive stuff to Nicky, because that’s where he really shines.

‘Great,’ Nicky grunted. ‘So you just say that straight out and then we know where we stand. You want me to turn over some stones? Find out what those foam-flecked holy rollers are doing down in Walworth?’

He was holding the door open for me. I took the hint and stepped out onto the landing. Nicky came out after me, locking the door behind him and setting the alarms and deadfalls. I waited until he was finished because it’s a task that takes all of his attention.

‘No,’ I said, when he looked up at me again. ‘That’s not what I want.’

He tried to hide his disappointment, but fine muscle control is an early casualty for a zombie and his poker face needed work. ‘How come?’ he demanded.

‘Because he plays dirty and he’s got men with guns,’ I said. ‘Also, men with teeth and claws and way too much body hair. He uses loup-garous, Nicky. Werewolves who’ve been given cast-iron absolution in advance for anything they do when they’re under the influence. Can you believe that? He’s passing round get-out-of-Hell-free cards. And he’s already got a grudge against me because I worked that switch on him with Abbie Torrington’s locket. The last thing I need to be doing is giving him more reasons to want me six feet under.’ Nicky opened his mouth to lodge an objection, but I kept on going. ‘Anyway, I don’t think Gwillam’s got anything to do with this. Kenny was attacked last night. I only got there as quickly as I did because I was helping the police with their inquiries. Whatever brought Gwillam sniffing around, I’m betting it’s something else.’

‘Or maybe the Anathemata set up the whole thing,’ Nicky suggested, ‘and Gwillam wrote your name on the car windscreen to frame you.’

‘I don’t think he’s that subtle,’ I said. ‘He’s more of an “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out” kind of guy. Assuming he wanted me out of the picture, he’d just snap his fingers and I’d be landfill somewhere. Then he’d go square himself with the Almighty by means of a few Hail Marys and a nice stiff flogging, and it would all be good.’ Nicky was still looking at me expectantly. I shook my head. ‘Makes no difference,’ I said, as he opened his mouth to speak. ‘Believe me, Nicky, you don’t want to tangle with these boys. Or rather, I can see that you do, maybe because you’re thinking Gwillam will be a big, fascinating nut to crack. But he’ll see you and raise you, and you’re the one that’s going to end up looking like Humpty Dumpty.’

I was talking to myself as much as to Nicky, because the truth was that I really did want to know what the Anathemata were doing so close to my home turf. I just didn’t think I was in a good position to find out. I was still exposed on the Rafi front, and now I was a possible suspect in an attempted murder. If ever there was a time to keep my head way down below the parapet, this was it.

We headed down the stairs towards the main auditorium.

‘Humpty Dumpty was an egg,’ Nicky remarked.

‘Sorry?’

‘He wasn’t a nut, he was an egg. You mixed your metaphors.’

‘Point stands.’

‘Then what do you want from me, Castor?’

‘Mainly I just want you to run some searches on Kenny Seddon,’ I said. ‘How long he’s been at the Salisbury. Where he was before that. Anything he’s done that’s left a footprint, and any recent events on the estate that he might have been mixed up in.’

‘What kind of events?’

I thought about Jean Daniels and her litany of hints and euphemisms: something had happened, but I wasn’t even close to being able to define what kind of something it had been. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Anything at all. Cast your net as wide as you can.’

‘You could do that at your fucking local library,’ Nicky said acerbically. ‘You getting lazy, Castor?’

‘Well, there is one more thing.’

‘Go on.’

I took a sheet of paper from my pocket and showed it to him. On it I’d sketched the ellipsoid shape with the radiating lines — the one I’d seen twice during my brief visit to Kenny’s flat. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’

‘Looks like a schoolkid’s drawing of a vagina,’ Nicky commented. ‘Last time I saw one of those, I still had a functional heart. And a functional penis. You need the first to get the second, you see, because erectile tissue–’

‘What about these lines coming out in all directions?’ I asked, forestalling the biology lesson.

‘Evidently it’s a bright, shiny vagina.’

‘It was drawn on a wall at the Salisbury. The words “Now it bleeds” were written in spray paint right next to it.’

Nicky shrugged. ‘The vagina hypothesis still looks robust,’ he said. ‘Why do you care, anyway? Is this anything to do with Kenny Seddon?’

‘It might be,’ I said non-committally. ‘It just struck me as odd, that’s all, so I thought I’d Rorschach you with it and see what it reminded you of. Now I wish I hadn’t. There’s a weird, poisoned atmosphere around the place, that’s all. And maybe that’s why Gwillam is there, now that I come to think of it. If he thought there was demonic activity in the area, he’d have his shock troops armed and ready.’

‘But you said you were avoiding Gwillam.’

‘I’m avoiding a head-on confrontation with him, yeah. But I’m still interested in anything that’s going down at the Salisbury that’s even slightly out of the ordinary. That’s why I’m asking you. Your antenna is pretty sensitive when it comes to stuff like this.’

He acknowledged the compliment with a nod. By this time we were right in front of the doors to the auditorium. Nicky threw them open, brought up the main lights by tripping a big steel switch on the wall, and walked in with me following along behind him.

The rest of the audience stood up, turning to face us. There was only one of her, but this was Juliet so one was more than enough. She smiled at us smoulderingly, her black-on-black eyes swallowing the light.

‘What did you think of the movie?’ Nicky asked.

Juliet thought about this for a moment. ‘I enjoyed the deaths,’ she said, like someone looking around your living room for something to compliment you on and finally settling on the curtains because all of the furniture is eye-wateringly bad.

‘You enjoyed the deaths,’ Nicky repeated, his tone pained and indignant. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? It’s a story. It’s a fucking–’ His hands fluttered ineffectually for a moment as he struggled with some way of defining narrative that he hadn’t already used. ‘Ah, forget it.’

‘A story about something that hasn’t yet happened, and isn’t likely to happen,’ Juliet agreed. ‘I understand what it is. I just don’t really see what it’s for.’

‘It’s for pleasure,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t understand pleasure, Juliet. I won’t believe you.’

‘But you know the things I take pleasure in,’ she countered, calmly exact. ‘Blood. Sex. Blood and sex together. Simple and primal things. Things that never lose their freshness and savour.’

I tried to shut down a whole slew of mental images that were filling my mind in proliferating excess like pop-ups on an Internet browser. ‘I’ve seen you watching the telly with Susan,’ I pointed out. ‘You seemed happy enough then.’

‘Did you notice whether or not my eyes were in focus?’

‘Pearls before swine,’ Nicky muttered, crossing to the trestle table he’d set out earlier. ‘Okay, the inaugural screening is over. The Nicky Heath Gaumont is open for business, and God bless all who sail in her. Which will just be me, except when I see fit to invite you plebeian scum-bags. That’s it for the speeches, so let’s get to the alcohol.’

On the table was a bottle of 1982 Chateau Pichon-Lalande Pauillac, which Nicky had opened and decanted earlier. He poured three glasses, held out one in each hand for me and Juliet to take. Then he raised the third glass himself, put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. That’s how Nicky takes his booze these days: he drinks the wine-breath, like ghosts are supposed to do, because he lacks the digestive enzymes to deal with the stuff if he actually drinks it. The sound he makes when he breathes is harsh and dry and pained, because inflating your lungs is something else that doesn’t come naturally to a corpse.

Juliet finished her glass in a single swig and licked her lips. There’s something subversive about the way she does that: it makes you think of huge jungle cats tonguing gobbets of bloody tissue from between their teeth after a kill. Nicky looked away — not out of fear or distaste but because the bottle had cost him three hundred quid and he knew that she hadn’t really tasted it going down. Juliet is only an epicure when it comes to flesh: anything else she sees as window dressing.

‘So you did it,’ I observed, clinking glasses with him. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’ He took another snort of the Pauillac’s heady bouquet. ‘I thought I might go for a double bill next time.’

‘Yeah? What movies?’

‘Night of the Hunter and They Saved Hitler’s Brain.’

I blinked. ‘I don’t see the connection, Nicky.’

‘Stanley Cortez cinematography. The Salisbury is a fucking dump, Castor.’

The change of topic threw me for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It’s high up on my list of places not to go. But it was meant to be a model community, right? The estate of the future.’

Nicky nodded. ‘That was the hype,’ he said. ‘They got Derek Winch in to consult, back when everyone still thought he was God. Some other guy built it, though — don’t remember the name, but you can see the thinking. Get Winch’s name on the project, then ship someone else in to do it for half the money in a quarter of the time. They were gonna have shops, restaurants, cinemas up there, fuck knows what. The idea was that you never had to touch the ground if you didn’t want to — you could live your whole life up in the towers. Use the walkways like streets, come and go as you pleased, be one step closer to Heaven. Which, coincidentally, was the slogan they used when they opened it up for applications.’

‘Heaven,’ Juliet echoed, pouring herself another brimming glass. Her tone was heavy with sarcasm.

Nicky watched her tilt and swallow, with a slightly tragic face.

‘But it all came apart,’ I prompted him.

He nodded. ‘Before they’d even finished building it. The usual bullshit. They went in without enough money, cut corners, raced deadlines to save political face. But some people will tell you the design was screwed to start with.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked him, listening with half an ear because I was still thinking about the teardrop graffiti with its corona of radiating lines. Actually I was thinking about that and Gwillam, and I was almost making a connection, but chasing it just made it flicker and fizzle out before I could grab hold of it.

‘The walkways were the main problem,’ said Nicky. ‘Having streets eighty feet off the ground seemed like a fantastic idea when they started out. Pure sci-fi. They were talking about a city in the air — linked estates from Peckham to Elephant and Castle. Leave your worries on the ground, take to the skies and live clean.

‘Only it turned out that you left a lot of other stuff on the ground, too. Like law and order. The Salisbury was a vertical maze — and it was impossible to police the place because muggers, pushers and gang-bangers could be somewhere else before the cops ever got within spitting distance. The walkways turned into thieves’ rookeries. And then people started dumping their shit out on them rather than carting it down to the ground floor. And then the damp set in because the concrete was made out of spit and bumfluff. Closer to Heaven, maybe, but you bring the weather with you.’

I took a fastidious sip of the wine: Juliet was emptying the rest of the bottle into her glass, so I figured I’d better make it last. ‘That’s more or less what I heard,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Blair do a photo op there back in ’97, just after he got in?’

‘Shit, yeah. That’s where he did his “forgotten people” speech.’

‘And then—?’

Nicky sneered nastily. ‘He forgot them.’

I decided I’d talked shop for long enough. We were here to celebrate, and we weren’t making much of a fist of it. I toasted the echoing vault around us and the newly painted screen at the far end of it. ‘To the Walthamstow Gaumont,’ I said. ‘Like its owner — come back from the dead with grace and style.’

Juliet drained her glass and crushed it in her hand, letting the fragments spill out between her fingers and squeezing out a few drops of blood to follow them.

‘Ye’air gva aku norim, hesh te va’azor,’ she said.

Nicky gave her a pained stare. ‘Which is . . . ?’

‘The closest thing I know to a blessing.’

‘Well, thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘And now I’ve got succubus blood on my carpet. Is it — like — acid or something?’

‘It’s like blood,’ said Juliet. And then to me, ‘Would you like a lift?’

‘Where are you going?’ I asked her.

‘Home. To Susan. Our working hours haven’t overlapped for the last three days. I’m starting to forget what she tastes like.’

‘Then it’s thanks but no thanks,’ I said, resisting the urge to ask for further details that I probably didn’t need to know. ‘I’m going back into town.’

‘To this council estate?’

I shook my head. ‘To Whitechapel. The Royal London.’

‘The hospital? Why?’

‘That’s where they took Kenny Seddon.’

‘Your enemy?’

I laughed at that. ‘Not my enemy, Jules. Not exactly. Nor my friend, ever, that I knew of.’

‘You said you fought over a woman–’

‘A girl.’

‘—Who you both lusted after. Didn’t that make you enemies?’

‘I never lusted after Anita Yeats.’

Juliet looked me in the eyes for a long moment. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did. At some point.’

There’s no point arguing with Juliet about something like that. ‘Well, I never did anything about it,’ I amended.

‘Leaving that aside,’ Nicky interjected, ‘isn’t this same shitbird Seddon in a coma or something?’

‘Yeah. He is.’

‘So, what — you want to leave some fucking flowers?’

‘No. I just thought it wouldn’t do any harm to take a look at him — and if I get the chance, maybe try a laying-on of hands. You know I can sometimes do the psychic wiretap thing.’

Juliet shook her head. ‘This is how you approach all your cases, Castor. You wander around the edges of them until things happen to you. That’s not a plan — it’s the absence of a plan.’

‘What would you suggest?’

‘In this instance, I’d go and find Gwillam and threaten to sink my teeth into his throat if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.’

‘But I don’t think he knows what I want to know,’ I pointed out.

‘Then you’d have the pleasure of ripping his throat out. And incidentally — notwithstanding my earlier point about not asking me for any favours — if your path and his do cross again, I want to be there. He bound me the last time we met: bound me and humiliated me. It would be pleasant to balance the books.’

Job satisfaction. It’s a very important part of what we do.

‘So that would count as a small favour from me to you,’ I mused.

‘Hypothetically, I suppose. It hasn’t happened yet.’

‘But in the futures market it’s solid gold. Can I borrow on it?’

Juliet chastised me with narrowed eyes, but she didn’t say no.

‘I’d be really grateful for a second opinion,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was that I was sensing down there on the Salisbury, it wasn’t your bog-standard haunting.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it didn’t feel right. It’s too big, and it doesn’t have a proper focus. It’s like someone tore a whole bunch of ghosts into confetti and sprinkled them over the entire estate.’ I threw out my hands in an inadequate gesture, fingers spread. ‘The feeling is everywhere, Juliet. I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

‘Couldn’t it just be a lot of different ghosts? You said yourself this place is a slum. And it’s old enough now for a lot of people to have died there.’

Reflexively, I touched my left hand to my chest — to where my tin whistle nestled close to my heart. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t be that. I’d hear it differently. You know how my thing works. To me, a bunch of ghosts in the same space would be kind of like half a dozen bands jamming in the same room. This was just one impression. One thing, but spread out over a wide area. It’s like — you know how they say ants and bees don’t have individual minds? That they’re part of a hive mind, a collective self?’

‘Go on.’

‘That’s all. It was all around me, and it was all the same thing. Big. Broken up. Not localised. Equally strong over the whole area of the estate, which is like a quarter of a mile from end to end. Did you ever come across anything like that?’

Juliet considered this, furrows of concentration appearing on her brow. While she thought, I put some time into just admiring her face: it never felt like time wasted.

‘Possibly,’ she said at last. ‘But not for a long time.’

‘Will you go take a look?’

She didn’t answer for a moment. She was looking at me as if she was trying to read something in my face. Or maybe she was just exasperated by my inadequate verbal photofit.

‘If I’m passing,’ she allowed, ‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Thanks, Juliet.’

‘If I’m passing, Castor. You wait patiently and you don’t hassle me. I’ll call you as and when.’

‘Thanks,’ I said again.

That would have to do, for now. I thanked her for the advice about jugulars and hit the road.