Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

Somewhere in my overstretched cerebellum, the other shoe dropped.

‘You grassed Ronnie up?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Richie nodded emphatically. ‘Just had to get the timing right. He always did the Red Pepper on a Friday night, so I placed a call to the Greater Merseyside drug squad and told them exactly where and when to flash the bacon.’ He smiled even wider: he was evidently enjoying the memory. ‘And I’m going to get Steve, too,’ he said in a more meditative tone. ‘I’ve been following him for months and I finally struck gold. The stupid bastard is seeing prozzies down the Dock Road and I’m getting pictures of him doing it. When I’ve got a nice thick photo album’s worth, I’m going to send it in to his boss. Should fuck him over nicely, don’t you think?’

I nodded, because there was no way of disagreeing. ‘You blame them all, then?’ I said. ‘For — whatever happened to Anita?’

‘They hounded her from pillar to post,’ he said, grinding out the discarded dog-end with his heel as though it were a Seddon he’d inadvertently missed. ‘They wouldn’t let her rest. And then when they’d hounded her all the way back to that bastard down in Walworth, they walked away and let him kill her. Yes, Castor. I blame them all. I blame a lot of people. Don’t get me started.’

I was prepared to take that advice, but there was one more thing I needed to know. Well, two things, now that I thought about it.

‘Richie,’ I said. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but . . . it wasn’t you, was it? With the razor? You didn’t go down to the Smoke on a day return and — you know — do a bit more pruning?’

Richie gave a sardonic snort. ‘I wish,’ he said. ‘But I already told you, I’m no good at that stuff. I must be a throwback or something, mustn’t I? A Walton kid with no taste for aggro.’

He sounded like he meant it; and the accusation hadn’t got the smallest response beyond that weary, self-hating derision. ‘Okay,’ I said, feeling obscurely relieved. ‘Then answer me this and I’m out of your hair. Can you think of any reason why Kenny would have had a grudge against Matt? A big enough grudge that he’d frame him for murder? Because that was the last thing he did, as he was drowning in his own blood. And it seems like a strange . . .’

I tailed off into silence, because Richie was looking at me with enormous, astonished eyes.

‘Why Kenny would hate your brother?’ he echoed.

‘Yeah.’

‘Castor, who do you think you’re talking to? And what fucking tree did you just fall out of?’ Richie’s tone was pained and angry.

‘Okay,’ I said, cautiously. ‘I’m assuming those were rhetorical questions. You think there’s something obvious I’m missing, then? Something you know, and you think I should know, too?’

He stood up. ‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me in that car. I already told you that. But if it had been, and if I was someone else instead of me — a macho psycho killer kind of someone, in the real Walton style — then I wouldn’t have stopped at Kenny.’

He brushed the grass off his jacket, wincing as the movement chafed his blistered finger.

‘I’d have killed your brother, too,’ he said.

Then he seemed to recollect where he was; or perhaps he read the expression on my face. Either way, his gaze fell from my face to the name on the headstone we’d been leaning against, and he had the decency to look abashed.

‘Okay,’ he muttered. ‘Shitty thing to say. I’m sorry. It’s just — fucking priests, you know? Is there one of them out there who can—? Never mind. Forget it. There are degrees, aren’t there? Maybe he said a few Hail Marys and squared himself with God. But he’ll never square himself with me.’

He walked away before I could ask him what he meant by that. I was left staring at the gravestone, still feeling the ghost-echo of it against my back. Feeling as though her name had been burned on my skin, through the cool stone and through the fabric of my coat.

CATHERINE PAULINE CASTOR

BELOVED DAUGHTER AND SISTER

Just those words, and the two dates: the two dates so very close together.

My phone, which I’d set to vibrate, squirmed like a rat in my pocket, startling me out of a grim reverie. I put it to my ear.

‘Hello?’

‘Castor.’ I couldn’t place the voice at first, but the slight muffling effect caused by a fat lip gave me the clue I needed.

‘Gwillam. How’s life?’

He didn’t bother to answer. ‘You were right,’ was all he said. ‘Get back here as soon as you can, because we need to talk.’

The mix of old tragedies and current irritations made me curt. ‘Do we? About what?’

‘About the Salisbury. Come and save these people, Castor, because they’re in Hell. And I’m not strong enough to get them out.’

The towers were silent, and most of the lights were out. Here and there a single window blazed yellow-white, the random elevations and distances making the Salisbury seem like a constellation that nobody had got around to naming yet. I watched some of those windows for a fair old while, but nothing moved behind them.

Nothing was moving where I was, either. I’d taken a taxi from Kings Cross, but told the driver to stop on the overpass where Kenny had been attacked, now open to traffic again but not so busy at this time of night that we’d be in anyone’s way. I’d thought about calling in on Matt on the way, but I didn’t know how to frame the question I wanted to ask him. If I was wrong, it was the sort of thing that could wreck a sturdier relationship than ours.

So here I was: the Lone Ranger riding to the rescue with no six-guns. All I had was another piece of the puzzle, and the sour knowledge growing inside me that the price for anything better was going to be higher than the one that Faust paid.

With the taxi driver’s suspicious gaze on me every step of the way, I got out of the cab and walked over to the edge of the parapet, staring out towards the Salisbury. I didn’t bother with the whistle because I really didn’t need it: I just focused my concentration on my death-sense, closing down my eyes and ears the better to see and hear what was in front of me.

It was seething. The miasma hadn’t widened, but it had deepened: it was an indelible skein of screaming wrongness impaled and spread out across that sector of the skyline. It hung in front of me like mouldering curtains, so vividly present that I felt I could reach out and touch it: part the veil and look into some other place entirely.

A penny for the peep-show.

‘Are we going anywhere, mate?’ the cabbie asked from behind me. Even on the meter, he clearly didn’t like his time being wasted. Which was a pity, because I would have been happy to draw this out a lot longer.

But there was nothing else I could do from a mile away, and it was more than time that was being wasted. I got back into the cab.

‘New Kent Road,’ I said. ‘The Salisbury Estate.’

We pulled back into the traffic, and I thought about what I had to do. Promises to break. Innocent people to lie to. Stupid, blind risks to take while I pretended that I knew what I was doing. Just another day at the office, really. Maybe I should have worked harder at giving the children’s-party entertaining a fair trial.

It took five or six minutes to get to the Salisbury, the air seeming to thicken and congeal around me with every yard we travelled. I paid off the cabbie and walked up the steps to the concrete apron, where I saw with little surprise a small posse of Gwillam’s merry men and un-men waiting to meet me. The flat-faced man — Feld — was there, but I didn’t know the others. There was a short swag-bellied man in a shabby suit who looked like he might be someone’s fat, jolly uncle, although the Father Christmas effect was slightly spoiled by a horrendous scar that ran diagonally down his face in a bend sinister of rucked and hardened flesh, and a hard case who was dressed entirely in black: ready for night ops, and maybe trying just a bit too hard. He had impressive muscles, though: but then, being around born-again Gwillam’s menagerie would obviously leave an ordinary baseline human feeling like he had something to live up to. Poor sod was probably at the gym all the hours God sent.