Thicker Than Water

‘Father Gwillam changed his mind,’ she said, simply, stopping three steps below me. I noticed, impressed, that she wasn’t out of breath after her sprint up the stairs. A childhood infatuation with Ellen Ripley stirred in the depths of my hindbrain and reminded me of the space where once it had sat enthroned in my libido.

‘About what?’ I asked.

‘About the boy. He said if you let one of us come with you, to make sure nothing goes wrong, you can do it.’

‘I already told you—’ I began. But she lifted a school-marmish finger to shut me up.

‘Double blind. Whoever goes with you doesn’t get to know the address, and you do whatever you need to do to make sure they don’t get a clear look at the route.’ She looked at me expectantly. ‘We’re meeting you halfway, Castor. It’s up to you to figure it out now. One of us has to come, but it can be on your terms. Okay?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, but it was only for form’s sake. I wasn’t going to get a better offer, and we didn’t have any other choices left. Rather than let her see how emphatically and irrevocably up a³rre fogainst the wall I felt, I turned and started walking again.

She fell in behind me, keeping a respectful three paces’ distance until we got to the eighth floor.

‘I don’t need an escort,’ I said over my shoulder.

‘No? Still get it for free, do you?’"

"It wasn’t the kind of comeback I expected from a woman who was big in the Church - even if we were talking about the Church’s black-ops division. Then again, Sue Book had been a verger when I’d first met her and now she was in a more than civil partnership with a demon. You never can tell with these mission dolls.

‘I’m celibate,’ I said shortly. ‘Only the pure in heart can seek the Holy Grail.’

Walking past Kenny’s door, which was now nailed shut and sporting police-incident tape, made my skin tingle as though I was showering in battery acid. I was nearly certain it wasn’t psychosomatic, although by now I had a vivid enough sense of the horrors that must have been enacted behind that door that I didn’t have to go reaching for supernatural explanations. Did the wound demon have a physical locus after all? Would an exorcism undertaken in Mark Blainey’s bedroom have a better chance of succeeding?

Another missed opportunity, I was willing to bet; like Bic. Although with Bic we still had one final chance to make good. If ‘good’ was the right word.

Jean Daniels answered to my knock, looking like a woman who was self-medicating in order to perform open-heart surgery on her own ventricles, and had been called away in the middle of the procedure. She stared at me with hollow eyes, seeming to take several seconds to register who I was.

‘Mister Castor,’ she mumbled. ‘You’re back. I called you a few times, and left messages, but you didn’t . . .’

‘I haven’t been home, Jean,’ I said, ‘so I wouldn’t have got them. I’m really sorry. Can we come in?’

She nodded brusquely, stepping aside to let me in: then she realised I wasn’t alone.

‘This is—’ I said, pointing towards the cat’s-cradle woman. ‘Well, actually, who the hell are you?’

‘Trudie Pax,’ she said, holding out her hand to Jean. ‘I’m with Father Gwillam.’

Jean took a step back, as though Trudie’s hand was contaminated in some way. ‘We’ve already told Father Gwillam that we’ve got nothing more to say to him,’ she said coldly.

‘And we’ve accepted that,’ Trudie said sweetly. ‘In any case, Mrs Daniels, we don’t believe any more that your son has been touched by God. The way things have gone over the past few days has proved us wrong. But Castor has thought of something that might improve William’s condition, and we’re here to help in any way we can.’

Tom had come from somewhere to stand behind his wife, so he was hearing this too. He looked almost as wrecked as Jean, and pugnacious with it, but Jean had locked onto the salient point in Trudie’s little recitation. Her face as she looked at me lit up with something like hope.

‘You can help him?’ she said.

‘Let me look at him,’ I said, by way of a non-answer.

Jean led us through, not to the living room where I’d been before but to a bedroom that led off the hall to the left. Walking through the doorway gave me a premonitory shudder, but it was because of the room itself: because the floor plan was the same as that of Kenny’s flat, and Bic’s room occupied the identical space in the layout to Mark’s.

Lost boys, sharing the same existential billet. But Bic, at least, was loved and looked for: and he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world the way that Mark had done. Not if there was anything I could do to stop it.

He was lying on his bed, on top of the covers, in the Spiderman PJs again.