Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Basquiat is—?’ I echoed. This wasn’t good news. ‘When did that happen?’

He shrugged. ‘As soon as we hauled you in for questioning. You heard me backing off on that. Basquiat thinks the conflict of interest is deep enough to be fundamental, and she was prepared to bring the DCI in. She’s not seeing you as the chief suspect, but she wants to be free to go wherever this takes her. She told me not to get in her way.’

‘And you took that?’ I was incredulous.

‘Yeah. I did.’ Coldwood’s tone was harsh. ‘Because she’s right. Look at it from her point of view — which the DCI is bound to share if he’s got half a brain. If you are involved somehow, then she knows you’ll try to play me. And if it’s anyone else then the big question at trial will be why we didn’t go after you properly out of the gate. We’ll look about as bent as a nine-bob note, and razor-boy will walk on a technicality. Either way I’m a defence lawyer’s wet dream. So there you go. I’m still dancing but Ruth is leading. And that — before you ask — is the other reason I came here tonight: because I thought you ought to know. The weather’s going to get colder.’

I mulled that unpalatable fact over for a moment or two: brandy didn’t sweeten it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the warning. Listen, Gary, you’re already digging into Kenny’s past, presumably. Any leads there? You know what happened to his wife and kid, right?’

‘Common-law wife,’ Coldwood corrected me. ‘She’s MIA. Walked out on him a year or so back, according to the neighbours. The son belonged to her, not to him, and he’s dead. We’re still getting the details.’

‘Would that include calling up the autopsy report?’ I asked.

Coldwood shrugged and raised his eyes to Heaven.

‘Could I get a copy of that?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Fix!’

‘All right, all right. No harm in asking. What do you make of the other wounds on Kenny’s arms? The older ones?’

‘Botched suicide attempt? Wouldn’t be too surprising, would it? When you think about what he’s been through . . .’

‘I think he might have been self-harming,’ I said.

Coldwood stared at me.

‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.

‘Because I — sorry, because whoever broke into the flat found a hurt-kit in the bedroom. Not the boy’s bedroom. Kenny’s.’

‘We already went over that room.’

I blew out my cheeks. ‘Yeah, but I bet you did it politely. It isn’t a crime scene, and Kenny isn’t a suspect. I almost missed it myself.’

‘You keep defaulting back to that first-person stuff, Fix,’ Gary pointed out testily. ‘Work on it. So are you saying that Seddon—?’

Matt stood up abruptly. ‘I am finding all this talk . . . unnerving,’ he confessed. ‘I think I might leave now. I’m teaching at a seminary in Cheam and I have a very full day tomorrow. If you don’t mind–’

‘I do mind,’ I said firmly. ‘Come on, Matt, we haven’t seen each other in, what, must be a year and a half. And I bet you hear a lot worse in the confessional.’

‘Well, I was leaving anyway,’ Gary said, putting his empty glass down. ‘I’ve got to be on my feet again in four hours. Mind how you go, Fix. And keep your fingers crossed that the floating-pronoun burglar didn’t leave too many prints behind him in Seddon’s gaff. Even my C2s can’t be relied on to miss everything that’s under their noses. I’ll tell them to take another stroll around that bedroom.’

He thanked Pen for the booze and hospitality and let himself out. And then there were three.

‘So how are you doing, Matt?’ Pen asked my brother. ‘I didn’t know you were teaching now.’

‘For six years,’ Matt said, killing that line of conversation stone-dead. Pen was only trying to be nice because the last time Matt had come visiting she’d hit him in the nose with a tea-tray. It hadn’t been in the course of a theological debate, either, although that wouldn’t have been much of a surprise: Pen takes her spirituality pretty seriously.

But I hadn’t insisted on Matty staying behind so that we could discuss the good of his soul. It was something else that was bugging me, and I needed an answer now.

‘We’ll see you in the morning, Pen,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘We’ve got some things we need to go over in private.’

‘Take the bottle,’ Pen suggested. I lifted it, started to say thanks and noticed it was empty. She was just making a point, in her own inimitable way. ‘I’ll get another in the morning,’ I promised.

‘Just pay me some rent,’ she riposted, stroking Arthur the raven’s glossy back.

I led the way up the stairs. Matt lingered by the front door for a moment, as if contemplating making a break for it. ‘I’m serious, Matt,’ I said. ‘We’re having this conversation sooner or later, and I did you the courtesy of not having it in front of a copper. So let’s make it sooner, eh?’

Without protest — in fact, without reacting at all — Matt followed me up to my attic room. That put two clear storeys between us and Pen: enough so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by raised voices or colourful language.

There’s only one chair in the room. I waved Matt to sit down, but he crossed to the window instead and examined the badly repaired plasterwork around the sill. ‘This is where your sex-demon friend jumped through after she almost devoured you,’ he reminisced. It was such a transparent attempt to put me off balance that I felt a sudden wave of affection for him. It took me by surprise, reminding me of brotherly feuds long past, and the kind of dirty pool we always played against each other before he found God and lost the rest of us. Maybe for that reason, I came straight to the point instead of dancing around it looking for an unfair advantage.

‘What were you doing at the Salisbury, Matt?’ I demanded.

He turned to look at me. His blue-grey eyes, otherwise unknown in the Castor family, held my gaze unblinkingly. ‘I was just walking,’ he said, with immaculate calm. But I knew from way back how good he was at the straight-faced kidding.

I nodded. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Hell of a walk, from Cheam, but they’re your shoes. I saw someone else just walking there recently — Gwillam. That shitehawk from the Anathemata Curialis. You remember him?’

‘Of course I remember him,’ Matt said, with guarded emphasis.

‘When from?’

‘I’m sorry, Felix?’

‘When do you remember him from, exactly? When did you last see him, and what’s he got you doing on the Salisbury?’

‘Felix–’

‘Don’t get coy, Matty.’ I pushed the chair around so that it faced him. ‘That was Gwillam’s man you hauled off me right now, and you called him by name. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s a self-righteous lunatic fighting a one-man crusade against the undead. You’re just a priest who can’t say no. Somewhere you were bound to meet.’

Matt still refused to sit. ‘You’re wrong, Felix,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. It’s not a one-man crusade. The Anathemata probably has upwards of a thousand members — a couple of hundred in the UK alone. It’s not an official arm of the Church any more, but it’s still highly respected in many circles. And Thomas Gwillam is a hugely influential voice when it comes to . . .’ he faltered for the first time, but it was a short hesitation and a good recovery ‘. . . the more controversial aspects of the afterlife.’

‘Thomas,’ I mused. ‘Probably named after the popular saint.’

‘Probably.’

‘Whose unique selling point was that he had those doubts, yeah? Amazingly, he wasn’t always a hundred per cent sure he was doing the right thing. I could really get behind a saint like that.’