Thicker Than Water (4 page)

But Coldwood seemed equally coy, and the staring match couldn’t go on for ever. I shrugged and reached inside my greatcoat. There’s a pocket there that I sewed in myself – deep but narrow, just the right size to hold a tin whistle with an inch of clearance at the top so that it’s easy to hook it out in a hurry. The whistle in question is a Clarke Sweetone in the key of D. I’ve tried other brands and other keys, but only in the way that a compass needle tries to pull away from north. It never sticks.

Whistle in hand, I headed over towards the parked Ka. From behind me, Coldwood said, ‘Fix.’

I turned and looked back at him. He hadn’t moved. ‘Yeah?’ I demanded.

‘Do it from here.’

I measured the distance to the car. ‘I can’t see anything from here,’ I pointed out.

Coldwood held my gaze. ‘How do you know until you try?’

There was a time when bullshit like that would have made me dig my heels in, when I would have turned around and walked away rather than play a command performance with a blindfold on. But at this particular time there was something like an unsettled debt between me and Coldwood, dating from an occasion – quite recently – when I’d almost got himf Dlmost g killed: that one incident explained both the limp and the scar. And right about then, when I was more or less evenly balanced between giving him a tune and telling him exactly where and how deeply to shove it, the blonde woman came striding up to us, walking right past me without a glance to address herself to Coldwood.

‘This isn’t right,’ she said without preamble. Her expression was grim and tight.

Coldwood nodded. It wasn’t a nod of agreement: he was just acknowledging an argument he’d clearly already heard. ‘You’re down on record, Ruth,’ he said, ‘so you can stop banging the drum any time you get sick of the sound. But you don’t have any seniority on me here and this is the way we’re doing it.’

The blonde woman turned now and favoured me with a cold, clinical stare. She was beautiful – really beautiful – but in a hard and austere way that told you more clearly than words how little she cared about what you thought of her. She wore her hair short, and her blue eyes stared out at you pale and unframed, without the benefit of mascara. She favoured greys and blacks, with occasional concessions to blue. Maybe she thought warm colours would be provocative. Tonight she was at the darker end of her spectrum, and her subtle curves were reined in to leave as straight-edged an outline as possible.

‘Hey, Basquiat,’ I said to her.

‘It’s not even fair to
him
,’ she said, which threw me for a moment until I realised that she was still carrying on her conversation with Coldwood as though I hadn’t spoken – and that the ‘him’ in question was me. ‘Or are you finessing the case before it even gets started by making sure it gets thrown out of—’

Coldwood cut in before she could finish.

‘I just want Castor to read the scene,’ he said. ‘I’ve used him before, and I’ll probably use him again. It’s custom and practice, and there’s nothing for anyone to hang an objection on. And you’ll notice that we’re standing way over here, not inside your perimeter. Not even close to it. You can even stick around and chaperone me, if you’re worried.’

Basquiat turned her gaze back to Coldwood, her eyes narrowing.

‘And that will help a lot,’ she said, ‘given that you came down from Turnpike Lane together.’

‘With a driver,’ Gary pointed out, looking away towards the rising sun. ‘You’re welcome to ask him what was said, on or off the record.’

‘Oh, please.’ Basquiat’s tone was blistering. ‘Any man on your squad will swear that black is pink-and-fucking-ochre-plaid if you tell him to. I want him when you’ve finished with him.’ Those were her last words on the subject, apparently, and she was already walking away as she said them. I gathered that ‘him’ was back to being me.

Barely acknowledging the interruption, Coldwood looked across at me and gave a horizontal wave, inviting me to get started. This time I accepted the invitation, because it was pretty damn obvious that I wasn’t going to find out what t annd out his was all about until I did. Not business as usual, Gary had said. Yeah, that was for damn sure – although anything that had him and Basquiat at each other’s throats was bound to have a familiar ring to it.

I put the whistle to my lips, looking towards the parked car because that was where Basquiat and the uniformed cops were and it was obviously the epicentre for whatever had happened here.

I started to play. Not an exorcism, because those take time to plan and prepare: this was more like an echo-sounding, sending my attention out along the filaments of the music to see what I could see.

This is what I do for a living, and if I say so myself I do it pretty damn well. If you’re an exorcist, you’re born with the knack: the extra chunk of sensory equipment that lets you see what can’t be seen and touch what can’t be touched. But each of us finds a unique and personal way to tap that common barrel. One might scrawl symbols in a magic circle; another might chant words in dead languages, or light candles, or deal hands of cards or any of a thousand other quaint, banal, potent rituals. I play music, and the music becomes an extension of my mind, plugging me in like the jacks of an old-fashioned telephone switchboard to the world of the dead – which, things being how they are, is usually buzzing.

It was a knack I’d discovered more or less by accident. I’d always been able to see the dead, but I never knew I could bind them until my sister Katie was run down by a truck a couple of weeks after my sixth birthday. It was in trying to dissuade Katie from coming into my bedroom at night with her blood-caked face and talking to me in the dark that I performed my first – entirely accidental – exorcism. I did it by chanting rude playground songs at her until she shut up and went away. Sounds. Patterned sounds, expressing in pitch and rhythm something that I couldn’t define or perceive in any other way.

Later I discovered that music worked even better.

Later still I picked up a tin whistle, and it shaped itself to my hand as though it belonged there. Christian Barnard must have felt like that when he picked up his first scalpel. Or Osama Bin Laden when he flicked off the safety catch of his first AK-47.

This particular tune didn’t have much in the way of either form or progression. It just ambled backwards and forwards through the same sequence of chords, all in the lower half of the whistle’s register and sounding somewhat sullen and melancholy. But as the notes skirled around me the world darkened: or rather, my perceptions shifted a little along the spectrum that has life and death as its two poles.

I was expecting to see the road get more crowded at this point. If anyone had died in the little red car, or under its wheels, then they ought to have come sharply into focus now. In fact, I ought to have been seeing them already, because the newly dead stand out like halogen bulbs in my eyes most of the time. But my death-sense isn’t infallible. The whistle is.

This time, though, and apart from the added depths and subtracted highlights, the scene before me didn’t seem to have changed at all. Okay, there was a smudged-out but broadly humanoid figure standing in the air a henin the little way out from the edge of the flyover: a suicide, maybe, or someone who’d walked the parapet on a drunken bet and then fallen off. But the elisions and imperfections in that shape – the fact that I couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been a man or a woman, or how old it had been when it shed its flesh and blood and bone and sinew to stand naked in the world – showed that it hadn’t arrived there in the recent past. It had died years if not decades ago and that was probably why I hadn’t seen it at first. Over time, ghosts fade like the colours on a cheap tee-shirt. And that ghost was the only one that was haunting this section of the overpass.

Turning my attention back to the parked car, I shifted my fingers on the stops of the whistle and slowly ascended the scale. Like most tin whistles, my Sweetone only has an effective range of about two octaves: but if you’re not too worried about the sensibilities of the people around you, you can make brief forays outside that range by half-holing and by varying how hard you blow. I took it as far as I could, an unmelodic shriek creeping in on the highest notes as I pressed down with all eight fingers and pursed my lips more tightly.

Nothing.

I let the last fractured notes of that shapeless abomination of a tune drop like glass splinters from between my fingers. Then I lowered the whistle, shook it twice to clear it of saliva and slid it back into my pocket.

‘So tell me about it,’ Coldwood suggested.

I turned to face him, looked him in the eye. ‘About what, Gary?’ I asked, with brittle politeness.

He nodded in the direction of the car. ‘What happened here.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened here,’ I admitted bluntly. ‘But I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. Nobody died. And you must have known that when you hauled me out of bed and dragged me halfway across London to watch the sun come up.’

Coldwood did the deadpan again – one of his favourite party tricks. ‘This isn’t about what
I
know, Fix,’ he told me. ‘It’s about what
you
know. And it’s probably a good idea if you keep your temper. Because sometimes when you lose it you say things you don’t mean.’

‘That’s the human condition,’ I observed. ‘Now what the fuck am I doing here if you don’t have a DOA?’

He came away from the car’s flank, squaring his shoulders. ‘Where were you earlier tonight?’ he asked me, in the guilty-until-proven-dead tone that all cops use when they deliver that line.

‘What?’

‘Where were you earlier tonight?’

Well, the truth wouldn’t serve so a lie would have to do. ‘I was in bed, Gary. I was snogging Morpheus, tongues and tonsils and everything, until you woke me up and brought me here. Why? You got something you want to put me in the frame for?’

‘Was anybody with you, Fix?’

‘A squad of cheerleaders, but I didn’t get any of the names.’ Coldwood waited me out. ‘No. There was nobody with me.’

‘But Pen was in the house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You two share your usual drink before bedtime?’

‘No.’

‘No? Then when was the last time anyone—?’

‘It was a
lot
of drinks. Different kinds, but variations on a theme of thundering oblivion.’

‘So when was the last time—?’

‘Jesus! A bit after one o’clock. So if someone sneaked down here to the wilds of Walworth and blew someone else’s brains out through their ear, then yeah, it could have been me. All I’d have had to do is avoid those roadworks around Saint George’s Circus, and I’d have been laughing. Then again, if brains were flying, I think I would have got a hint of them just now. But I didn’t. And you being a homicide detective, Gary, that puzzles me. It puzzles me to Hell and back again. So I repeat: what the fuck?’

It looked as though the preliminary interview was over. Gary’s gaze shot off to stage left again, towards the red car with its entourage of plods. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go take a look. But don’t touch anything. If you do, we’ll both probably end up wishing you hadn’t.’

What I was wishing was that I’d declined Coldwood’s invitation in the first place. But then it hadn’t been phrased in a way that left me the option. I walked over to the car, aware that he was following me at a discreet distance. Basquiat was still throwing her weight all around the uniformed division, but when the cop next to her looked in my direction she followed his gaze and our eyes met.

She gave a gesture to the uniforms that basically meant back off, and they did. As I walked around the side of the car, everyone got out of my way. That gave me a clear view of the amazingly wide bloodstain that had spilled down the embankment from the car’s driver-side door. A sheet of clear plastic had been laid over the stain, its edges neatly anchored with white marker tape and annotated with esoteric symbols. Not magic symbols, I hasten to add: not the lexicon of wards and stay-nots that I know all too well. These were the marks of a different mystery, signalling trajectories, angles, identities, values, place markers for people and objects removed for forensic testing. It wasn’t a world that I was particularly at home with.

Basquiat nodded towards the windscreen, but I was sideways-on to it and whatever revelation awaited me there was still a few seconds away. I slowed and stared in through the side window, amazed at the sheer amount of blood that had splashed all over the upholstery, the dashboard, the steering column. There were even a pair of fluffy dice, gore-covered and dangling like trophies from a bullfight. And if someone had fought a bull inside this cramped little car, then maybe the volume ofdivthe vol blood that had been spilled was reasonable after all.

Basquiat and her harem of constables were all staring at me, a certain tense expectation visible in most of the faces. Coldwood was behind me, but something told me that he was watching me too. As nonchalantly as I could, I took the final three steps that brought me to the front of the car.

There’s something about your own name in someone else’s handwriting that gives you an instant blip of recognition, even when you meet it in unusual circumstances. And this certainly counted as unusual in my book. For one thing, it was written backwards, from right to left: but then, that was because it had been written on the inside of the car windscreen, by someone sitting in the driver’s seat. More strikingly, it was written in blood.

F, first of all: a big sprawling capital F whose elongated upright stretched all the way from the top to the bottom of the glass: presumably a sign of how copiously the poor bastard must have been bleeding. A ragged red wedge hid the rest of that first word, apart from the curve of whatever letter came next.

But ‘Castor’, underneath and a little to the right, stood out very legibly indeed, in spite of the problems the writer seemed to have had keeping the crossbar of the ‘t’ and its curving upstroke separate, and in spite of a ragged tail-off on the ‘r’. But then, he was probably running out of writing materials at that point.