Thicker Than Water

‘I didn’t - I couldn’t - He’s too big now and he made me—’

‘Kenny—’ I said, but its head snapped up suddenly to fix me with a pleading, agonised stare.

‘Castorrrrrrrrr!’ it shrilled.

‘Shrilled’ is the wrong word: there was nothing behind that voice to push it up the register either in pitch or in volume. It was a broken fingernail making a forlorn pilgrimage across a blackboard without end.

Kenny broke into pieces, shattered by the note of his own grief and pain. Abruptly I was alone again, apart from the hideous echoes of that sound, clawing their blind, blunted way around my brain.

I lurched to my feet, groped for the bolt on the door and found it, stumbled out into the corridor as though I was a ghost myself, breaking free from my own tomb. My heart was hammering arrhythmically and my body was drenched in sweat. I leaned against the wall as the sweat cooled and the hammering slowed.

I went back to the ward, my feet shaky enough to require two further stops. Once there, I fell with relief back into my own bed.

Death had brought no relief to Kenny, that was clear. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much at all. And for all I’d learned from raising him, I might as well have stayed in bed and messed around with a ouija board.

The dark mood engendered by the summoning refused to lift from my mind. Giving in to it, I picked up Nicky’s sheaf of notes again and made to pick up where I’d left off the night before. I wasn’t expecting the endless catalogue of perforated bodies to yield anything new in the way of insight, but I knew with a gloomy certainty that my mind wouldn’t settle to anything else.

Then I belatedly remembered Gary Coldwood’s little gift. Mark Seddon’s autopsy report. It was still lying where I’d left it on the bedside cabinet. I picked it up and unfolded it.

I scanned the name and address details with a cursory eye and went straight to the physical indexes. They were as grimly, relentlessly thorough as you’d expect, compiling to a full but oppressively abstract description of the kind of damage cold poured concrete will do to a body that hits it at a velocity of forty-some metres per second. There were even photographs, but fortunately they were so dark and lacking in contrast that you couldn’t really see what they were of. Except for one of them, and I stared at that one with slowing gathering shock and unease.

A terse note underneath the photo identified it as a tattoo on Mark Seddon’s left shoulder. It was a stylised teardrop shape surrounded by radiating lines.

I sat propped up on my pillows staring at that inscrutable, unrevealing image for the best part of a minute. Then, since I couldn’t look away from it, I tried to hide it by putting the cover sheet back over it. Doing that gave my system its last and maybe biggest shock of the evening: or maybe the nasty stutter of my pulse was an after-effect of the summoning, with its combination of physical and psychological exertion.

The cover sheet was where all the name and address details were set down. Mark Seddon, place of residence 137 Weston Block, Salisbury Estate, Walworth. Father’s name left blank. Mother’s name given in full. Not a Tina, or a Tania.

Anita.

Married name, Anita Mary Corkendale.

Birth name, Anita Mary Yeats.

My stomach did something complicated and self-destructive, and suddenly I was fighting to keep my hospital dinner - which was already inclined to defy gravity - down in the hold.

Anita.

That downtrodden chattel, who went from Brent to Walworth as part of the property and appurtenances of a boyfriend who beat her up every night as regularly as another guy might put the cat out.

Anita."

"Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.

How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?

My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.

I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.

After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.

‘Hello?’

‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.

‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’

There was a long silence.