Thicker Than Water

Inspiration didn’t come, and if anything the ghosts with their alarming array of stigmata and their disregard for walls and floors were even more of a distraction than the kid with the headphones. But it felt good, in some obscure way, to be moving - even if I was going round in circles.

In the evening, when I was sitting up in bed again with the notes spread out in front of me, chewing over random horrors until they were bland and flavourless, I had a visit from Detectives Basquiat and Coldwood. Basquiat said she wanted to ask me a few more questions. She was carrying a black leather document wallet which looked disturbingly full of something or other: also a micro-tape recorder which she switched on and put down on my bedside table. Gary seemed to be there purely to act as chaperone, which probably didn’t bode well for me at all.

‘What happened to your face?’ Basquiat demanded, after she’d cued in the tape with date, time, people and place. There was a glint in her eye that was far from solicitous: she was interested because she didn’t believe there was an honest way to come by bumps and bruises on such a heroic scale unless you were in police custody at the time.

‘Cut myself shaving,’ I said.

Gary opened his mouth, probably to tell me to do myself a favour and stop pissing about, but Basquiat signalled for him to let it pass. ‘I’d like to come back to the question of your movements on the night when Kenneth Seddon was attacked,’ she said.

‘What I told you last time still stands,’ I said.

‘Meaning that you were at home with your landlady, enjoying a takeaway curry and a few cans of Special Brew.’ She was only so-so as a poker player: she kept the edge out of her voice and her face as expressionless as the keyboard player in Sparks, but there was a set to her shoulders that betrayed an underlying tension.

‘I don’t drink Special Brew,’ I temporised. ‘It was probably Theakston’s Old Peculier. Or maybe some kind of Belgian blond—’

‘You were at home,’ Basquiat repeated, cutting across me. ‘You didn’t go out the whole night until Detective Sergeant Coldwood came to collect you at four a.m.’

Backed into a corner, I gave a straight answer. Too bad it had to be a straight lie. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To the best of my recollection, I didn’t go out.’

‘Not even to pick up a pack of cigarettes?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Nicotine patches, then.’

‘I don’t smoke because I never got started.’

‘Dry-roasted peanuts. Salt-and-vinegar crisps. A DVD rental.’

‘No, no, and no.’"

"She nodded, satisfied. ‘And your landlady will corroborate this?’

I looked over Basquiat’s head at Coldwood, who was studying Van Gogh’s ever-cheerful sunflowers and didn’t meet my eye.

‘Ask her yourself,’ I suggested.

‘In good time. I’m just asking you if you’re happy with your alibi, from a structural point of view. Is it fit for purpose, Castor? Will it take the strain?’

I looked her in the eye. ‘Alibi?’ I repeated, as if it was a word I’d never heard before.

‘If you were down in South London that night, you might not want to tell us about it.’

‘I can’t even remember the last time I was south of the river,’ I said. ‘Well, I mean before this thing broke.’

‘Days? Weeks? Months?’

‘Months. Must have been.’

‘How many months?’

‘At least six.’

Basquiat didn’t answer, but she did finally unzip the document wallet. On top of the papers inside was a small stack of A4-sized photographs, one of which she held up for me to see. It was a grainy enlargement from a badly framed original, taken at night without a flash but with some kind of light-enhancement technique that made everything into an over-contrasted soot-and-chalk cartoon. It showed a white Bedford van, stationary at a traffic light. Someone had drawn a ring around the registration plate in thick black marker.

Basquiat flicked that photo down onto my bedsheets like a blackjack dealer, revealing the second one behind it. This was a zoom in from the previous image, focusing on the driver. He was hunched over the wheel, squinting sideways at the red light that had stopped him in his tracks as though he could make it turn green just by facing it down. The resolution was surprisingly good: it was me at the wheel, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt. Basquiat dealt me that one too and showed me the third: a close-up on my face, the image looking a little washed out and raggedy-edged this time. So did I, for that matter. My mother would have said ‘Poor Felix!’ by automatic reflex.

‘Speed camera?’ I asked, conversationally.

‘Do you see any motion blur? Bus-lane camera, Castor. St George’s Road, Elephant and Castle. You tried to overtake a truck in the left-hand lane and got caught by the red at just the wrong moment. This was three weeks ago. The night of the third. ‘

I handed her the first two photos back.