Thicker Than Water

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.