Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

That suited me fine. I was looking at this brief stay in the way that old lags look on short stretches of imprisonment: you do your time, interacting with your environment as little as you can, and then you walk. I’ve already told you why I hate hospitals: the teeming multitudes of ghosts are as distracting as mosquitoes, as spirit-sapping as a constant hangover. That aside, though, this was a new-ish ward with reasonable decor. Reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Picasso’s Man With the Blue Guitar and one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans looked down on us from the walls, and the fluorescent strips were the kind that are meant to simulate outdoor light. Despite my bitching, it could have been a lot worse.

‘Okay, you’re kind of spoiled for choice,’ Nicky said, dropping a thick wodge of computer printouts on the table in front of me. Actually, ‘thick’ doesn’t cover it: it looked like a Central London phone book. Propped up in bed in tee-shirt and pyjama trousers with every muscle in my body aching, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry, I could only stare.

‘This is—?’

Nicky gave the massive accumulation of data an affectionate pat. ‘Incidents on the Salisbury estate involving a police report or a newsfeed write-up. I went back two years — and I widened the net to include an area of a few blocks on all sides of the Salisbury itself. I didn’t know how tight your brief was.’

‘So tight I’m having trouble breathing,’ I said, fingering the bandage across my chest. ‘Jesus, Nicky, how many incidents are we talking about?’

‘I didn’t tally up. And bear in mind, there’s a lot of redundancy in there — some things popped up in a lot of different places, and I didn’t bother to filter out because, hey, you don’t pay me enough for the deluxe service. Also, I set the bar real low. If someone’s bike got stolen, it’s in there. Or say little Timmy went missing for an hour or two and turned out to be round at his gran’s . . . So long as someone called the cops and the call was logged, I threw it all in the pot. I didn’t discriminate.’

He paused. I could tell it was a pause rather than a dead halt because there was something in his voice — the eagerness to spill that Nicky feels when he’s unearthed something good.

‘But?’ I prompted.

‘But there’s a lot of good stuff, too. I mean, if you were looking for evidence that the Salisbury is a snake-pit, then you’ve got it. Standouts from this year included a guy cutting up his teenaged daughter with a carving knife because she stayed out too late, and a bunch of kids who caught a cat, dismembered it and posted the pieces through all the letter boxes in Boateng Block. Last year someone celebrated Christmas by hanging a tramp with a noose of barbed wire in the doorway of an empty flat where he was squatting. A while before that, a kid took a swan-dive off the eighth-floor walkway head first onto the concrete.’

I pondered this. ‘Is all of this inside the bell-shaped curve, or out of it?’ I asked him.

Nicky’s face lit up as he answered, with the fervour of the data-rat. He’s never happier than when he’s slinging some choice statistics.

‘How many people live in that towering shithole, would you say? With full occupancy, I’d say it would be pushing three thousand. But some flats are in between tenants and some have been certified unfit for human habitation. Call it two thousand, for the sake of argument.

‘Average percentage for public-disorder offences involving violence is 2.2 per thousand head of population. That’s across the whole of the UK mainland. For London it’s 2.9, and on the worst sink estates you can expect to be up past five. The magic number for the Salisbury holds steady at six all the way from 2000 up until late last year. Then it jumps to more than three times that. Okay, across small populations you can expect crazy year-on-year variations, but I’d say this is something special — especially given how wild and wacky some of these incidents are. It reminds me of that time last year, you know? When your friend Asmodeus got loose inside a church and made the whole congregation turn rabid.’

Nicky dropped his voice for this last part, because the guy with the greasy hair had turned to look in our direction a moment ago, when Nicky’s tone became more animated. I nodded. I’d made the same connection myself.

‘I tried to get Juliet on the case, too,’ I murmured. ‘She went down there to take a look at it for me. But she’s being real cagey about what she found.’

‘Cagey?’

‘She won’t discuss it at all. She more or less said she knows what it is but she’s out of it. On the sidelines.’

Nicky thought this through, obviously fascinated. ‘Did she seem scared?’ he asked. ‘Was it, like, this is too big for her? She doesn’t want to get in deeper than she can deal with?’

I shook my head. ‘No, not that. Or at least, it didn’t feel like that. I just don’t know, Nicky. She’s never bailed on me before. Well,’ I amended, ‘for a while on the Myriam Kale case, when she was seeing it as a sisterhood thing, but even there she came around. I don’t get this at all, but I’ve seen Juliet face off against everything from were-kin to God Almighty. I don’t think there’s anything out there that she’s afraid of.’

Nicky acknowledged the point with a nod. ‘Well, anything else she tells you, I want to know about it,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He looked at me as if that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. ‘Because knowing things is my shtick,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

‘Okay, Nicky.’ I made my tone emollient because I was too tired and sore right then to want an argument. ‘What about Kenny Seddon? You turn anything up there?’

He shrugged with his eyebrows.

‘A little. I mean, I got what was there to be got, but there wasn’t much. And none of it is what you’d call illuminating.’

‘Go on.’

He pointed at the thick stack of pages. ‘It’s in your reading material,’ he said.

‘Give me the highlights.’

‘What highlights? He’s born, he lives, he maybe dies. Bit of a cliffhanger ending there, but that’s as good as it gets.’

I held his gaze, and after a few moments he took an in-breath so he could sigh theatrically. ‘Okay, whatever. Full name, Kenneth Christopher Seddon. Born, Walton, Liverpool, late 1960s. The exact date is in there somewhere. He gets to age fourteen without incident, then has his first run-in with the police — possession of stolen goods. Court appearance, rap on the knuckles, off he goes. That’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship — he turns up on the magistrates’ court dockets six more times before he hits eighteen. Couple of affrays, couple of B-and-Es, drunk driving, and one moderately juicy wounding with intent.

‘Then he cleans up his act. Puts away childish things and doesn’t put a foot wrong for about five years or so. Or so we assume. Certainly doesn’t leave any footprint on the world. I’ve got a few possible pings on the name from Glasgow and Oldham — credit checks of one sort or another, mostly — so maybe he was on his travels.’

‘Maybe,’ I allowed. I’d already left Liverpool myself by that time, and truth to tell I hadn’t gone back much since. I’d never seen Kenny on any of my brief trips home, but then, I hadn’t been looking for him. I had no idea whether he’d stuck around. A lot of my generation were shaken loose when the slums around the hospital were knocked down and new estates were built there. A lot more had already gone, deserting the sinking ship that Liverpool had looked like back in the Thatcher/Hatton era.

‘But then we get a solid sighting in January 2001,’ Nicky went on. ‘In the exuberant spirit of the new millennium, your man Kenny head-butted a cop after being pulled over on the M25, which places him in London and tells us something about the deficiencies in his survival instincts.’