Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘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.’