Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You had to know that. I mean, Anita didn’t want to be too obvious, but she named him after the next evangelist along. And how else could Kenny have got you to come out here and meet him, Matt?’

‘He said — but I wasn’t–’ Matt looked up at me with horrified, pleading eyes. ‘I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t — I didn’t want it to be true. If it was true, then–’

‘Then you left your kid to be brought up by a psychopathic bully,’ I finished. ‘I did wonder about that one. Working backwards from Mark’s age, it must have been when you came back from the seminary. Before you went to your first ministry. Is that right?’

Matt was still staring at me, unable to look away, unable to speak.

‘Is that right?’ I repeated. The details were going to matter. I couldn’t let him off the hook, even though I could see how much this was hurting him. I had to hurt him a lot more yet.

‘That was — the last time,’ Matt said. ‘We’d already—I loved her, Felix. I almost gave up the Church for her. As it was, I just gave up my conscience. Did what any cowardly philanderer does — taking the easy solace and postponing the hard decision. But I swear to you, Felix, I never knew she’d had a child. My child. If I’d known that, I would have gone to her. I would have been with her, whatever it took.’

‘And you never saw her again?’

He shook his head, tears now chasing each other down his cheeks. ‘I — I only — only heard–’ He fell silent for a while, folding in on his pain. Juliet looked at me inquiringly: she was probably wondering whether there was any point to this beyond pure sadism. Coldwood was watching me too, wary and truculent. He’d been dragged into this against his will and now he knew it bore on his murder case as well as on the current mayhem. He wasn’t happy, but he was letting me play my hand.

A hand in which razor blades counted as aces.

‘Kenny didn’t get in touch with me until after Anita disappeared,’ Matt said, his voice barely audible because he was speaking into his own chest, his upper body bowed now almost to the floor. ‘He said — he said she’d had my child, a long time before. He said he knew all the details. Names. Addresses. If I met him — on the Borough Road overpass — he’d tell me. He’d tell me everything.’

‘And did he?’ Gary chipped in.

Matt looked up, startled. He seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t alone.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just — he said he’d lied to me. There wasn’t a child. Then he said there was, but he was already dead. He’d killed himself with a — a straight razor.’

‘And he showed you the razor,’ I said. ‘He made you touch it.’

Matt nodded.

‘None of this will ever stand up in court,’ Coldwood said distantly, as though to himself. ‘Okay, I buy Kenny hating his kid’s real father: feeling like he had something to prove, maybe. But tenderising yourself with a straight razor and making it look like it was the other bloke? It’s a plan with a fair few holes in it, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a plan that might seem irresistible,’ Juliet said, ‘if a wound-demon was whispering in your ear. Blood and pain must have started to feel like desirable things in themselves. Kenny Seddon just tried to harness them to a different end.’

‘But it doesn’t work,’ Gary pointed out bluntly. ‘There’s still the angle of the wounds. Some of them were self-inflicted, but some of them couldn’t have been. A fit-up doesn’t explain the facts.’

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’ Gary’s tone was savagely sardonic. ‘I thought it did. Your fucking brother is facing a murder charge, you self-satisfied tosspot!’

‘My fucking brother,’ I snarled back at him, my temper fraying right through, ‘thinks his biggest sin was a fucking bunk-up with Anita Yeats eighteen fucking years ago. When in point of fucking fact, it’s this .’ I threw out my arms, indicating with a sweeping gesture not just the room, the flat, the tower, but the whole of the Salisbury Estate in all its singed, shattered, punctured, incised and blood-smeared horror.

‘This is your biggest sin, Matty. How long has it been since your last confession?’

In spring we used to walk to the Seven Sisters — the bomb craters on the Walton Triangle that had turned into lakes — and go fishing for frogspawn. You’d bring it home in a jam jar, transfer it to a plastic bowl or bucket, stick it in a secluded part of the garden shed or, if you had a death wish or an indulgent mum, your bedroom, and wait for the little black dots at the heart of the translucent jelly to turn into tadpoles. Then the tadpoles would grow legs and turn over the space of weeks into microminiaturised frogs. It was enthralling in a way that cut right across more macho pursuits. You could watch it for hours and feel like you were plugged into some kind of primal magic.

I was thinking about that now as I looked from Juliet to Matt and then back again.

‘Do you want to tell him?’ I asked her. ‘Or is this one down to me?’

Juliet arched an eyebrow. ‘This is your decision, Castor,’ she said. ‘What you’re about to say can’t make anyone who hears it any happier. If I’ve kept the secret this long, it’s not because I’m afraid of what you’ll do with the knowledge. It’s because it can’t do you — any of you — one iota of good.’

‘Mark was into self-harm,’ I told my brother, who was coming out of his foetal crouch and staring at me with aggressive unease. ‘He cut himself for pleasure. Mostly with razor blades, occasionally with other sharp objects that he picked up here and there and saved for the purpose.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Felix?’ Matt demanded.

‘Because you need to know. He saw the whole process as kind of erotic somehow. I’ve read some of his poetry, and that was pretty much all it was about. How beautiful wounds are: how they’re like flowers and fertile river valleys and mouths that speak in a language more eloquent than words. He never said they were like vaginas but it was sort of implied.

‘It was his upbringing, Matt. Kenny was a sadistic bastard — you knew that — and Anita had convinced herself that she was a worthless speck of dirt who deserved no better than the abuse she got. The only thing in all of this fucking mess that I don’t understand is how the strongest, most capable, most alive girl we ever knew turned into this . . . this doormat , but she did. Maybe because the one man she really loved got her up the stick and then walked away whistling “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”. Or maybe it was something else. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

‘But however it played, Mark had this thing in his life that was halfway between a hobby and a love affair. Blades. Wounds. Blood. And then he died. And his soul stayed here like so many souls do — stuck in the mire, too wrapped up in all the unfinished business to let go. I’ve never thought about it before, but there should be more young ghosts than there are old ones. Dead at seventeen? How could you go gentle into that last sod-off? How could you think it was your time?’

Matt uttered an unlovely sound, compounded of grief and pain and protest. He didn’t want to hear any more. But I had to tell him. I had to make him understand what was coming next.

‘I thought he summoned the demon by accident, Matt. I was certain that was how it must have happened. Like, his obsession opened a door wide enough for a creature that loved and lived in wounds to enter by. Like he made a trail it could follow. Like his soul had a scent.

‘But I was kidding myself. First of all because the truth was too insane to be believed, and then because it was too hard. It hurt too much. Juliet refusing to tell me what was going on over here rang alarm bells, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I met Bic — the kid next door. The closest thing Mark had to a friend, and the first soul the demon chose to anchor itself in. For months that was all it did. It lodged there, in that one small soul, until it was strong enough to try its luck elsewhere. Why him? No scars on him anywhere, so he’s never cut himself. And the demon didn’t cut him either. It cut everyone else, or made them cut themselves, but with Bic it was really gentle. It had to have the blood: couldn’t do without that. But it made Bic bleed without breaking his skin.’