Thicker Than Water (32 page)

‘Angry,’ he whispered. ‘Because . . . an . . . an . . . an . . . an . . .’

After each repetition of that syllable, the pauses lengthened. Whatever he was trying to say, it was a gradient which his cooling consciousness refused to climb.

‘Who was angry?’ I asked. ‘Mark? Mark was angry?’

The ghost whimpered, bringing its hands up to chest height with the fingers curled like hooks. It looked as though it wanted to rend its own breast, but of course that wasn’t an option.

‘Cut,’ it said, very distinctly. ‘Again. And again. An . . . an . . . an . . .’

A ripple passed through it, so that for a moment it looked like a piece of washing hung out on a line. I was reminded, grotesquely, of how kids pretend to be ghosts by draping sheets over themselves.

‘Who killed you?’ I demanded, cutting to the chase. ‘Who was with you in the car?’

The ghost’s desolate gaze travelled along the length of its right arm, starting at the wrist and finishing at the shoulder; then on down its hacked and sliced torso.

‘Oh,’ it murmured brokenly. ‘I didn’t – I couldn’t – He’s too big now and he made me—’

‘Kenny—’ I said, but its head snapped up suddenly to fix me with a pleading, agonised stare.

‘Castorrrrrrrrr!’ it shrilled.

‘Shrilled’ is the wrong word: there was nothing behind that voice to push it up the register either in pitch or in volume. It was a broken fingernail making a forlorn pilgrimage across a blackboard without end.

Kenny broke into pieces, shattered by the note of his own grief and pain. Abruptly I was alone again, apart from the hideous echoes of that sound, clawing their blind, blunted way around my brain.

I lurched to my feet, groped for the bolt on the door and found it, stumbled out into the corridor as though I was a ghost myself, breaking free from my own tomb. My heart was hammering arrhythmically and my body was drenched in sweat. I leaned against the wall as the sweat cooled and the hammering slowed.

I went back to the ward, my feet shaky enough to require two further stops. Once there, I fell with relief back into my own bed.

Death had brought no relief to Kenny, that was clear. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much at all. And for all I’d learned from raising him, I might as well have stayed in bed and messed around with a ouija board.

The dark mood engendered by the summoning refused to lift from my mind. Giving in to it, I picked up Nicky’s sheaf of notes again and made to pick up where I’d left off the night before. I wasn’t expecting the endless catalogue of perforated bodies to yield anything new in the way of insight, but I knew with a gloomy certainty that my mind wouldn’t settle to anything else.

Then I belatedly remembered Gary Coldwood’s little gift. Mark Seddon’s autopsy report. It was still lying where I’d left it on the bedside cabinet. I picked it up and unfolded it.

I scanned the name and address details with a cursory eye and went straight to the physical indexes. They were as grimly, relentlessly thorough as you’d expect, compiling to a full but oppressively abstract description of the kind of damage cold poured concrete will do to a body that hits it at a velocity of forty-some metres per second. There were even photographs, but fortunately they were so dark and lacking in contrast that you couldn’t really see what they were of. Except for one of them, and I stared at that one with slowing gathering shock and unease.

A terse note underneath the photo identified it as a tattoo on Mark Seddon’s left shoulder. It was a stylised teardrop shape surrounded by radiating lines.

I sat propped up on my pillows staring at that inscrutable, unrevealing image for the best part of a minute. Then, since I couldn’t look away from it, I tried to hide it by putting the cover sheet back over it. Doing that gave my system its last and maybe biggest shock of the evening: or maybe the nasty stutter of my pulse was an after-effect of the summoning, with its combination of physical and psychological exertion.

The cover sheet was where all the name and address details were set down. Mark Seddon, place of residence 137 Weston Block, Salisbury Estate, Walworth. Father’s name left blank. Mother’s name given in full. Not a Tina, or a Tania.

Anita.

Married name, Anita Mary Corkendale.

Birth name, Anita Mary Yeats.

My stomach did something complicated and self-destructive, and suddenly I was fighting to keep my hospital dinner – which was already inclined to defy gravity – down in the hold.

Anita.

That downtrodden chattel, who went from Brent to Walworth as part of the property and appurtenances of a boyfriend who beat her up every night as regularly as another guy might put the cat out.

Anita.

Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.

How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?

My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.

I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.

After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.

‘Hello?’

‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.

‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’

There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’

Another silence.

‘This is my statutory phone call, Fix,’ Matt said at last, his voice unnaturally calm. ‘I’m at Cromwell Road police station. I’m under arrest for murder.’

The interview suite at Cromwell Road reminded me of the classrooms at tŽv>

So I suppose it was just the institutional thing: not quite ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, but the feeling that you’re handing over some portion of your life into someone else’s hands, to be tagged and bagged and given back to you later, maybe, if they can find it again and if it’s still identifiable as yours. Fatalism descends on you like a stifling woolly blanket as the door closes behind you.

Gary Coldwood was sitting in a tubular steel chair with a red plastic seat – some kind of Platonic archetype of cheap, nasty, totally disposable furniture. But he stood up as I came into the room.

The surroundings were sparse. Just a table and two chairs, a green plastic wastebasket and, for some reason that escaped me, a poster on the far wall advertising all the many benefits of using a condom. When having sex, I assumed, rather than, say, for piping crème de chantilly or impromptu party decorations.

‘Go and get Matthew Castor from the remand cells,’ Gary said to the cop with the keys. ‘Sign him in here for thirty minutes on my bounce code. Seven-thirteen.’

The uniform hesitated. ‘Can’t use these rooms for visits, sarge,’ he said, in a timid tone that sounded like it didn’t know what it was doing in his square-jawed, bushy-bearded mouth.

‘It’s not a visit,’ Gary said. ‘It’s an interview.’

The uniform still didn’t seem entirely happy. He shot a look at me that spoke twenty-seven volumes plus an appendix. ‘But, you know, for an interview,’ he said. ‘If there’s a civilian observer, you’ve got to fill in a—’

‘What civilian do you mean?’ Gary asked mildly.

The constable thought this through, and eventually got there. ‘Right you are, sarge,’ he said, in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink kind of voice, and he went on his way.

‘Thanks,’ I said to Coldwood.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘And thanks for the heads-up, too, you duplicitous bastard.’

Coldwood nodded. ‘Which is why we’re in here,’ he said, ‘and all on our lonesomes. Get it out of your system, Fix.’

‘You fucking knew she was going ” shoutafter Matt.’ I thrust a finger at his face. ‘You knew it, and you didn’t tell me.’

Gary nodded. ‘Right. I knew it. Did you?’

‘No!’ I exploded. ‘If I’d had the slightest fucking inkling, I’d have warned him. And I’d have kept my mouth shut in front of you and your better half, you back-stabbing little pig-farmer.’

‘I’m going to have to smack you,’ Gary admonished me.

‘On an interview?’

‘You had the marks when you came in. You’ve seen how reliable a witness PC Dennison is.’

‘Gary, why the fuck didn’t you at least give me a—’

‘Because it’s an open and shut case,’ Gary said. ‘And your best bet, if you really had nothing to do with it, was to stay well clear. Whereas if I’d told you we were about to arrest your brother, you’d have gone barging in like a fuckwit, probably got yourself seen tampering with the evidence and ended up on a bloody conspiracy charge. Because what you’re short on, Fix – what you do not have even a bastard trace of – is peripheral vision. You only see what you’re going for, and you walk right into every bleeding thing else.’

Gary had been talking in his usual voice when he started that little speech, but he was shouting when he got to the end of it. I opened my mouth to shout back, and – to my complete and absolute amazement – he was as good as his word. He clocked me a solid one on the mouth.

It wasn’t hard enough to knock me down, but it made me stagger. I blinked twice and shook my head. Licking my lips, I tasted blood. ‘Son of a bitch,’ I growled, and I started forward with my fists up. But Gary just stood there, staring me down, and after a moment I let my hands fall again.

‘Are you ready to listen to reason now?’ he asked.

I spat on the floor – a thick red gobbet – then met his gaze. ‘Have you got any?’

Gary breathed out heavily. ‘What I’ve got, Fix, is evidence. Which I’m about to share with you out of the goodness of my heart – unless you piss me off so much that I sign off early and forget you’re stuck in here until the morning. If you’re interested, sit down and shut up. Otherwise, say something really clever and sarcastic and I’ll be happy to leave you to it.’

After a moment’s painfully weighted silence, I sat down in the other chair, giving him a shrug and a wave.

‘The writing on the windscreen,’ Gary said.

‘Points to me,’ I observed.

‘No. It doesn’t.’

‘What, you know another F. Castor, Gary?’

‘We put the lab boys on it, Fix. The letters had been washed or smeared away, but the oil traces from Seddon’s fingertip were still there on the glass. He didn’t write “Felix Castor”. He wrote “
Father
Castor”.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words fled away into my hind-brain and my mouth just hung open, waiting for them to come back.

‘So then we looked at your brother’s movements,’ Gary said. ‘He was seen leaving that Saint Bon Appetit place around midnight, although he’d previously told a colleague that he was turning in for the night. We’ve got his car on
CCTV
twice, once in Streatham and once at Herne Hill. And – get this, Fix – the priest in the room next to his is woken up at four the next morning by the sound of someone crying. Loud, uncontrollable sobbing, in his own words, coming from Matthew’s room. And he’s prepared to go on record that it was Father Castor he was hearing.’

I found a word floating somewhere in the void that seemed as though it might be relevant and serviceable. ‘Circumstantial,’ I said. ‘It’s all circumstantial.’

‘Maybe it is,’ Gary allowed. ‘But it was enough to get us a warrant. And the Basilisk was careful to shake you first, before she went in, just in case the forensics didn’t play. She got your statement, which placed Matthew Castor at the Salisbury both before and after the fact.’

I shook my head in protest. ‘Not before. I couldn’t eyewitness him before. I just said he was with Gwillam, and Gwillam—’

‘None of it matters, Fix.’ Gary cut across me impatiently. ‘Because the forensics did play out. Matthew’s fingerprints and boot print match, a hundred per cent. And this just in – we shagged the phone records for the place where Matthew teaches. Him and Seddon were gabbing away every day for a week before the killing. They met up in that car, and your brother brought a straight razor with him. He brought an accomplice, too, and we’re still working on that. But we’ve got him, Fix. If he’s innocent, then this is a fit-up so immaculate that only God could have pulled it off.’

And that was out of the question, of course, because God loves Matt. He loves all His little children, of course, but Matt is actually on His team. I just sat there, not saying a word, and Gary sat there watching me, until PC Dennison swiped the door lock again and then leaned inside to hold the door open for Matt.

Matt was a mess: unshaven, red-eyed, his hair up in a tousled Stan Laurel peak. They’d left him his own clothes but had taken his shoelaces and his belt. Being put on suicide watch must be particularly hard for a practising Catholic.

‘Felix,’ he mumbled. ‘Thank you. Thank you for coming. I’m – it’s all been a little crazy, since—’

He faltered into silence, blinking fast as he stared at me with pleading, bewildered eyes. I got up and crossed the room to him. Neither of us was ever very big on physical shows of affection – something we got from Dad – and Matt would have cringed if I’d tried to hug him, but I put my hands on his shoulders and squeezed: a clumsy, truncated gesture of solidarity that he didn’t” th Ma even seem to notice.

‘It’s okay, Matt,’ I said, going against both the evidence and common sense. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

Coldwood made for the door. ‘Knock on the glass when you’re done,’ he said, brusquely. PC Dennison was still holding the door open: Gary swept through and he let it fall to again with the decisive clunk of a solid mortice lock that I could probably have identified just from the sound if my mind hadn’t been otherwise occupied.