Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘To see Kenny Seddon,’ I confirmed.

‘He’s in the hospital. He was mugged.’

I let that word slide, although it seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the frenzied industry of Kenny’s attacker; the threshing of his flesh with a straight razor until the floor of his car filled up like a well with his blood. ‘I know,’ I admitted.

‘And you’re . . . nothing to do with the church, are you?’

‘No. I’m an exorcist.’

She nodded as though that answer confirmed something she’d already guessed. She started to say something, but that was when her husband got through to the emergency services, and his clipped answers to the standard questions cut her off short. ‘This place is sick,’ was all she said, and then she returned her attention to her unconscious son.

There wasn’t much she could do for him, but such as it was, she did it. She got John to go and get a cold flannel to drape over Bic’s forehead, although the heat of the day had faded by this time and the room actually felt a little chilly. Hedging her bets, she brought a blanket in from one of the bedrooms and covered him with it. She fetched some pillows, too, but then seemed to have second thoughts about whether or not his head should be raised, so she made John take them back again and bring a glass of water so she could wet Bic’s lips.

By this time Tom Daniels was finished on the phone. ‘They said there’ll be an ambulance along inside of half an hour,’ he said to his wife.

‘He could be bloody well dead by then,’ she said bitterly. ‘God forbid.’

‘He’s breathing steadily,’ I pointed out. ‘And you can see his eyes moving under the lids. I don’t think he’s in any immediate danger.’

Jean picked up on the apparent contradiction, staring up at me hard from where she knelt at Bic’s head.

‘Then what did you mean before?’ she said. ‘When you said he was.’

I hesitated. On the one hand, I didn’t want to worry these people and add to the problems they already had on their plate — particularly given how little I really knew about what was going on here. On the other, I didn’t want to fob them off with some bullshit when their kid was lying comatose on the sofa — and had been an inch away from killing himself a moment before for reasons that seemed more geographical than psychological.

‘You said this place is sick,’ I said. ‘I think I know what you mean. And I think that Bic — Billy — has caught the same sickness. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He was in a trance state of some kind.’ I looked from her to Tom, and then to the older boy, John, who was back loitering in the doorway again. I could have added that John had seemed pretty out of it too, in a different but equally scary way, but I suspected that it would derail the discussion into a pointless argument. I appealed to him as a witness instead. ‘Bic told us that, didn’t he? That he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, or how he got there.’

John nodded but didn’t speak.

‘Well, we’ll take care of it now,’ Tom said, turning his gaze from his older son to me and keeping it there until he was sure I’d got the message. I nodded, accepting the brush-off without argument. He was right. I had no business being here.

But as I headed for the door, Jean spoke a single word. ‘No.’

I stopped and turned. Jean released her hold on her son and stood again. Husband and wife exchanged an asymmetrical stare: surprised and affronted on his side, cold and calm on hers.

‘You heard him,’ Jean said. ‘He’s an exorcist.’

Tom huffed out breath in an exasperated grunt. ‘Oh not that bloody rubbish again! Didn’t we have enough of this with that frigging nutcase in the white coat?’ I pricked my ears up at that. Gwillam? Gwillam had been here? Why? But Tom Daniels was still talking and there was no opening to slip the question into. ‘It’s just his mind, woman. It’s bloody sick ideas he’s got in his head from the other little psycho, isn’t it? Poems and bloody pornography! I’ve sat by and watched and I’ve said nothing, but enough is enough. That filth poisoned his mind, and any other man would have smacked it out of him long before now. He doesn’t need an exorcist, he needs to — he needs a—!’

Words failing him, Tom brandished his clenched fist to illustrate what Bic needed. Jean stared at it as if it was a slug she’d found in a lettuce. After a moment he lowered it again, some of his belligerence fading as he realised how little impression it had made.

‘The day you touch him,’ Jean said, her quiet voice sounding very distinct after Tom’s little tirade, ‘will be the last day on this earth that you have a family. I’ll go out that door and they’ll go with me.’

Tom blinked. I saw a guy once get hit in the eye with a piece of a car tyre, when the tyre exploded after he overfilled it. That was how Tom Daniels looked, more or less: as though some mechanism whose workings he was sure he knew had just blown up in his face and left him bloody.

‘John,’ Jean Daniels said after a strained pause. ‘Go and wait on the street for that ambulance. Tell them where to come. They could waste ten minutes traipsing around this place.’

John protested half-heartedly, but gave it up on the second repetition and did as he was told. Jean crossed the room to close the door behind him. Tom stared at her with troubled eyes, clearly aware that there’d just been a coup d’état and — it seemed to me — not wanting to put a foot wrong before he’d had the new constitution explained to him.

‘There’s things that have been going on,’ Jean told me, with a catch in her voice.

‘You never saw very much of her,’ Mrs Daniels said. ‘Mrs Seddon. Did you, Tom?’

We were talking in the kitchen so as not to disturb Bic — or perhaps because we were talking about things that Jean didn’t want her son to hear. It was a cramped, functional little galley: there was room for the three of us in there, but not a lot left over. The kitchen knife that Jean had been wielding when I first saw her lay in the sink, protruding from a plastic bowl full of unwashed dishes. My eyes kept straying to it as I listened.

‘Hardly ever saw her at all,’ Tom agreed. ‘Only she did the shopping, some days. You’d see her coming up the stairs with her bags. Never had a word to say to anyone.’ He was pathetically eager to please: a willing collaborator with the new regime of Jean the First.

‘And once . . .’ his wife prompted.

‘Once she had a black eye, and a sort of a cut on her lip. It looked like someone had given her a bit of a hiding. If it had been anyone else, I’d have asked them if they were all right, but I didn’t feel like I could. Not to someone I’d never even spoken to. It would have felt like nosing.’

I thought of Jean’s monologue at the door the other day. Nobody said a thing, did they? Nobody ever does. ‘Did you tell anyone else?’ I asked. ‘The police?’

Tom rolled his eyes and Jean scowled bleakly. ‘I called them a few times,’ she said, with a contemptuous emphasis on the pronoun. ‘Not just then, but later on when they had the fights. Smashing things and screaming at each other at two in the morning. I knew he was hitting her. I didn’t need to see it. I could hear it.’

‘Hear what, Jean?’ I asked, wanting to be sure I was getting the right end of the stick.

‘Hear him hitting, and her — making the noises you make when you’re hit.’

‘Crying out?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Not exactly. Grunting. Gasping. She didn’t ever scream or cry: she was as tough as nails, that one. I don’t think she wanted to give him the satisfaction.’

‘You’re talking about her in the past tense,’ I said. ‘Did something happen to her?’