Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘I need a minute,’ he said.

‘Off the record?’ Basquiat’s tone was dangerous.

‘Off the record.’

‘No.’

‘How exactly are you going to stop me, Ruth?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘By telling you no,’ she said. ‘I’m senior officer on the case and I conduct the interviews.’

‘This isn’t an interview.’

‘Then send him a bloody postcard.’

Gary waited her out. In the end she made a gesture of disgust and walked on through the door, pushing the meds trolley out of her way. Petra Ryall muttered something that could have been either an apology or an imprecation, but Basquiat wasn’t listening in any case.

I looked up at Gary, and he looked down at me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few folded sheets of paper, which he handed to me wordlessly. I looked a question at him.

‘Mark Seddon’s autopsy report,’ he said. ‘Only he’s down as Mark Blainey. They went by the birth certificate.’

‘Bloody hell.’ I picked up the sheets and stared at them with a certain wonder. ‘Thanks, Gary. I wasn’t expecting this.’

He didn’t answer, but it was clear from his face that there was something else on his mind, so I waited for him to spit it out. ‘Fix, I took a hard fall for you last year when you had me looking into that crematorium thing. And you never really told me what it was all about.’ It wasn’t an accusation. His expression was sombrely reflective.

‘A lot of people ended up dead,’ I reminded him. ‘I didn’t want to put you in an awkward situation.’

‘You never apologised to me for getting my legs broken, either.’

‘I said sorry in my own way, Gary.’

‘By never referring to it again and dodging the subject whenever I brought it up.’

‘Exactly.’

He shook his head. ‘You can be a right bastard when you want to, Fix,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘I’m a bastard. It’s a gift. But I failed the police entrance exam so I never turned it into a career.’

Gary didn’t seem to be listening, so my attempt to drag the conversation back onto the well-worn tracks of our usual repartee fell flat.

‘But bastard or not,’ he said, ‘you usually look as though you know what you’re up to. As though you’ve got some kind of a game plan. This time — it’s like you’re flailing around waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Or waiting for Ruth to put the collar on you.’

It was close enough to the truth to sting a little, but I shrugged it off because I got the distinct impression that Gary was trying to tell me something.

‘It’s more complicated than it looks,’ was all I said.

‘Oh, I’m sure.’ Gary nodded sourly. ‘And if I came out and asked you, as a friend, if you knew who’d killed Kenny Seddon, what would you say?’

‘I’d say, Gary — as a professional exorcist and former police informer — that I don’t have a fucking clue.’

He searched my face. ‘Honestly?’

I nodded. ‘Honestly. Why, you think Basquiat’s right? You think I’m in some kind of conspiracy?’

‘If she thought you were in a conspiracy,’ he pointed out dourly, ‘you’d be nicked already and sitting in a remand cell in Jackson Road.’

‘In hospital pyjamas.’

‘Until they could fit you for prison ones. She didn’t arrest you because she’s got a warrant out on someone else. We matched one of those sets of fingerprints.’

Relief left me momentarily speechless, the conclusions I’d been building to falling down like a card house inside my head. ‘Who?’ I demanded, after a long pause for thought.

Gary shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward situation,’ he said. The echo of my own earlier words was deliberate, and done with ruthless finesse. I acknowledged it with a nod.

‘If you change your mind, I’m still here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much I can do to help. Depends on what you’ve got to tell me.’ He reached into another pocket, brought out a brown paper bag whose contents had leaked and stained its corners dark red. He set it down on the tray table.

‘Grapes,’ he explained, and left.

Once I was alone, the sense of relief turned out to be short-lived. It drained away, to be replaced by a greater puzzlement and unease than before. If Basquiat had someone else in her gunsights, then her not arresting me made a little more sense. But then why come in and brace me in the first place? And what kind of help was Coldwood offering if I wasn’t even in the frame any more?

Maybe I was unconsciously hiding from the answers — not wanting to go in the only direction that made any sense. In any case, before I could put my thoughts in any kind of marching order, Nurse Ryall came over with the meds trolley. I ordered tramadol with an amphetamine chaser, but the à la carte menu was off.

‘That looked heavy,’ she observed.

By way of answer, I held up my hands for her to inspect. ‘Look, ma. No cuffs.’

‘But that was the police, right? The real police, I mean?’ I nodded ruefully. ‘Not just the real police, but the real Sergeant Basquiat.’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Rudy actually exists?’

‘Yeah. But he’s a Ruth.’

‘You should have introduced us. Listen, I’m on duty in the new wing today. I only came in here to tell you that your man had died. But she told you that already, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah. But thanks, anyway. I appreciate the thought. Did he—?’

‘Say anything before he popped off? Not while I was around, no.’ She stared at me in silence for a moment or two while I tried to digest all this and found parts of it sticking in my throat at odd and uncomfortable angles.

‘How do you feel?’ Nurse Ryall asked.

I looked up, startled.

‘About Kenny being dead? I’d be lying if I said I felt anything at all. It’s been too long. It’s like being told they knocked down a pub you used to drink in a long time ago. Actually that would probably affect me more, because I really like booze, and when you come right down to it Kenny was a bit of a turd.’

‘Then why are you looking so mardy?’

Why indeed? Because he’d died at a sodding awkward time: invited me into his seething nightmare of a life and then pissed off to join the choir invisible, leaving me facing a murder charge and an invisible monster with a sweet tooth for what Petra Ryall so charmingly called incised wounds.

It was a neat trick. Not quite the same kind of bullshit he used to pull on me when we were kids, but definitely not a major change of direction.

‘Because I’m still a suspect,’ I said, abridging the more complicated truth. Coldwood had told me that I wasn’t, but that was less comforting than I would have expected. Even if they did get the guy with the straight-edged razor and his mate with the blunt knife bang to rights, Basquiat’s investigations were still likely to nail me to the board for the crime I really had committed that night — taking Rafi Ditko out of the Stanger care home with forged papers. And then there was the demon at the Salisbury, which I was reasonably sure I’d met the night before, up on Kenny’s ward. Something had to be done about that. In a way, it wasn’t my problem: but I thought about Mark Blainey’s bare room and about Bic’s attempt to re-enact his death, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this.

Something hit the sheets next to me with a soft thump. I stared at it for a few moments before realising what it was. It was the plastic canula from a surgical drip, still slightly stained with the rusty brown of blood. I looked from it to Nurse Ryall, who shrugged almost apologetically.

‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘When you told me how you people work, you said you could use personal effects to raise a ghost. Maybe you could have another go at Mister Seddon. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but by dying he’s put himself right in your comfort zone, hasn’t he?’