Thicker Than Water

I take each case on its own merits these days, as you’ve maybe seen. If a ghost is genuinely dangerous, I’ll bind it or even banish it and pocket the cheque. For demons, excluding personal friends and acquaintances, my standards are even lower. But - call it a weakness, or an eccentricity - I like to know both who and what I’m dealing with these days before I get out the bell, book and candle. I don’t empty the whole clip into every room as I kick the door down: that’s for amateurs and idiots.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, by way of abridging all this angst and introspection into soluble form. ‘I need to find out more about what this thing is - and how it’s tied up with Kenny.’

Petra seemed to find this answer unsatisfactory. ‘Through the boy,’ she said, bluntly. ‘Mark. If that’s what they’re both saying in their sleep—’

‘If,’ I repeated, cutting across her. ‘And even granting that that’s true, we still don’t know why, or how. Mark is dead. Did someone raise the demon to get vengeance for him? Is it looking for Mark’s spirit for some reason? Did Mark himself bring it to the Salisbury - whether he meant to or not - by something he did? There are just too many ways it could all fit together, and if I go in without knowing the answers, I’m probably going to last as long as a marshmallow in a microwave.’

Petra stared at me.

‘You’re afraid of this thing,’ she said. It wasn’t a taunt - just an observation.

‘Oh yeah.’

She looked at the two fitfully sleeping men, then back at me. ‘But you’re - awake. Healthy. It can’t hurt you, can it?’

‘When I fell over just now, it was about a heartbeat away from doing something to me that the English language doesn’t even have a verb for.’

Nurse Ryall nodded uncertainly, visibly rearranging the furniture in her conceptual space. ‘Okay. So what should we do?’"

"I noted the ‘we’, and I was impressed. Scared as she was, she wasn’t just writing this off as somebody else’s problem. ‘Right now,’ I said, ‘we should get out of here. There’s nothing more I can do until I get some of my facts straight.’

We left the same way we came in,ƒwayme under the bored eyes of the duty cop who didn’t even ask us what the music was all about. Maybe he thought a late-night serenade was something that NICE had approved for general therapeutic use.

Back on my own ward, I stowed my paletot thoughtfully while Nurse Ryall picked up Nicky’s printouts and flicked through them with unashamed curiosity.

‘Are these the facts you were talking about?’ she asked.

‘Some of them,’ I allowed. ‘The rest I’m going to have to pick up on the ground.’

I thought she’d just make a desultory pass through the frankly soul-deadening bulk of Nicky’s transcripts and then put them down again. But half an hour later she was still reading, while the kid with the headphones communed with his inner ears and the fat man woke, looked around in surprise and suspicion, dozed off again. I let her read, covertly admiring the furrow of her brow, her lower lip unselfconsciously thrust out in deep concentration. I like intelligent women. It’s a pity they’re mostly too smart to get involved with me.

After a while she looked up at me, turning the sheaf of documents so that the top sheet faced me.

‘Incised wounds,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is that what this is about? Incised wounds?’

I was momentarily at a loss. ‘There are a lot of woundings in there, Nurse Ryall,’ I acknowledged. ‘But as you can see, there’s no pattern. We’ve got every weapon under the sun, including some that came as news to me, and every variation on murder, suicide, self-harm and lethal ambush. It’s hard to think of a kind of wound that isn’t in there.’

She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded at last.

‘I thought I was.’

‘Then you really needed to ask an expert.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The ones that aren’t in there? Blunt-instrument trauma. Crush and impact trauma. Abraded wounds. Gunshot wounds. Not to mention, if you widen the field a bit, burns, fractures, dislocations, concussions and sprains, strangulation, suffocation—’

I held up my hands, partly in surrender and partly to rein her in a little. ‘Okay, fine. What does that leave?’

‘I told you,’ Nurse Ryall said, with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘Incised and puncture wounds - and you’ve got one of each of them up in that ward. Almost all these cases fall into one of those two basic types: the damage was done either with a point or with an edge - or sometimes both. Stabbing and hacking, basically. Hurting people with things that are sharp.’

‘You must be a lot of fun at playtime,’ I said sardonically. It was either that or break into full applause, and I didn’t want her to get too cocky at this early stage in our relatioƒ inat nship.

‘Nursing diploma - BSc equivalent.