Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

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.