Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Bound to.’

‘Well, I only know what I saw when I was putting the dressings on, but I was thinking the angles are all weird. Did you think that?’

‘You first,’ I said, ‘then me. What do you mean by weird?’

She shrugged, looking away into the corner of the room as she consulted her memory. ‘I just mean . . . all over the place,’ she said. ‘Some of them low, some of them high. Left side, right side. Daft, really. They said he was in a car when he was attacked. You wouldn’t think there’d be room in a car for someone to, you know, come at him from all sides like that.’

I nodded encouragement, as though she was echoing my very thoughts. ‘Say he was struggling to get away, though,’ I suggested. ‘Trying to get out of his seat belt, maybe. He’d be squirming around, presenting different parts of his body to the attacker. Maybe it happened like that.

‘Maybe,’ Petra allowed, but she sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know. There was something else, you know? Well, of course you know. If I’m talking rubbish, just tell me.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, some of these cuts were really two cuts. The razor had hit the same place twice. You can tell because there’s different lines — different incisions — that overlap each other. So it’s more like he was being held still and the other bloke was going and going at him. Does that make sense?’

‘Perfect sense,’ I assured her. ‘Evidence, inference, conclusion. You’d make a good detective.’

She seemed to appreciate the compliment. ‘So are they connected?’ she asked, waggling her finger to indicate Kenny and the room’s other occupant.

I was momentarily thrown. ‘Why would you assume that?’ I asked, temporising.

My surprise must have shown on my face. Petra hesitated for a moment, maybe wondering if she’d overstepped the bounds of forensic decorum. ‘Well, because of the address, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Same postcode. And two stabbings coming so close together. Not a razor, I know, but I thought it could still be . . .’

‘No, absolutely,’ I agreed as she faltered into silence. ‘We haven’t discounted that possibility at all. I’m just impressed that you made the connection. Were they really as close together as all that, though?’

She rounded the other bed and consulted the chart.

‘Three days,’ she admitted. ‘I thought it was only two.’

‘And the MO,’ I mused, chancing my arm. ‘Sometimes the differences can tell you a lot.’

Petra looked down at the frail old man lying in troubled slumber between us. ‘Lots of wounds again,’ she said. ‘But lots of little punctures, this time. And all more or less the same depth. Creepy. You’d think someone had tied him up with barbed wire or something. But he was just lying in his bed, wasn’t he? Until that priest found him and brought him in.’

Priest?

‘Father Gwillam,’ I said.

‘Yeah, him.’ She glanced up at me, her face earnest and unhappy. ‘Who’d do a thing like that to a poor old man?’ she demanded. ‘It’s horrible. Sometimes I hate this world.’

I nodded, but my mind was racing and it was all I could do to maintain a suitable poker face. Was it the differences or the similarities that were more important here? Was I looking at variations on a theme or two unconnected acts of random violence? One attack involved stab wounds, the other puncture wounds. And Kenny had been ambushed in his car while this other guy seemed to have been attacked by a burglar. But from what Petra had said, both victims were from the Salisbury estate. And the Salisbury estate was suffering from two parallel infestations: sinister graffiti and the Anathemata.

It was worth taking the temperature one more time, particularly as I didn’t have anything to lose here. Without asking permission I leaned down to examine the sleeping man at closer range. The puncture marks that Petra had mentioned weren’t in evidence, but three small dressings on the man’s face — at forehead, cheek and chin — showed where some of them had been. I touched his cheek gently with the back of my hand, as close to the edge of the bandage as I could.

Nothing. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting — or whether the same kind of searing, vivid newsflash I’d got from Kenny would have been welcome or not. But this man was soundly asleep and his mind and soul were folded in on themselves: there was nothing to be gleaned from them, or at least not by me.

‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Nurse Ryall,’ I said, giving her a nod as I stepped back from the bed. She was watching me with a sort of puzzled patience. ‘You’ve helped me to clarify some thoughts.’

‘Well, you’re welcome,’ she said. ‘Listen, I came in here to give Mister Seddon a bed bath. I’m going to have to put the screens up, and since you’re not a relative . . .’

I raised my hands. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘I’d love to see you in action, but I’ve got places to be and crimes to solve. You know how it is.’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘I think so. Down the — what-d’you-call-it — mean streets . . .’

‘A man must walk. Exactly.’

‘You’re dead laid-back for a detective, aren’t you, Sergeant Basquiat?’

‘I used to be on the drug squad,’ I said. ‘The ganja gets to you after a while. Cheers, Petra.’

I left her rolling Kenny carefully onto his side. Sooner her than me.

The cop on the door gave me less than half a glance as I left. People walking out were even less in his remit than people letting themselves in with the right security code.

I looked at my watch. Still nowhere near midnight, but by the time I got over to Walworth the witching hour would be over and done with.

Good. I had things to do over there that I didn’t want the daylight to look upon.

The Salisbury at night was if anything even less prepossessing than it was by day. The light of a hunter’s moon bleached the unresisting pastels from the faces of the towers, so that they looked like titanic ribs of bone, and shadows accreted like crusted blood under the walkways.

But the air was alive. While the residents slept, it seemed that the emotional miasma I’d felt on my first visit woke and stirred. It had been an annoying distraction when I’d been here before, setting my teeth on edge until I finally attuned to it and let it fade into the perceptual background. But it was in the foreground now with a vengeance, buzzing in my ears like an angry mosquito.

No, not angry. It wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was something else — but reaching for the word made the feeling disappear, the droning whine shutting down like a mosquito does as soon as you’ve got the rolled-up newspaper at the ready. And it wasn’t really in my head that the mosquitoes were buzzing: it was in my fingers and in the palms of my hands, as if there was something that I had to do that was getting more urgent by the moment.

Yeah, that was it, now that I thought about it. It was the same feeling of urgency and greed that I’d got when I’d touched the old wounds on Kenny’s wrist.

I came in from the north this time, and because I knew my way I walked more quickly. Maybe I could be in and out before this oppressive presence gave me a headache and ruined what was left of my night.

It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning and the place seemed deserted. Most of the lights in the flats were out, too, suggesting that the good people of Walworth had called it a night and turned in early. Maybe they were afraid of werewolves, although in real life it was the dark of the moon that caused most of the problems on that front: that was when the animal flesh fought back hardest against the human spirit that was riding it, resulting in some truly scary amalgamations of man and beast.