Thicker Than Water

Thicker Than Water

MIKE CAREY

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

extras

about the author

interview

Teaser chapter

By Mike Carey

The Devil You Know

Vicious Circle

Dead Men’s Boots

Thick

Thicker Than Water

MIKE CAREY

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2009

Copyright © 2008 by Mike Carey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of the publisher,

nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed

on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters and events in this publication, other than

those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1160 2

This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

Hachette Digital

And imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my brother, Dave, who went back to Liverpool with me so I could check my memories against what’s left of the reality. It was a strange time, and it would have been a lot harder without him. Thanks also to A, who wrote the original on which Mark’s poem is based, and taught me what little I know about how it feels to be in that place.

To Barbara and Eric, with love

1

This is kind of how it would have looked, if you were watching from the outside - and this is how the papers reported it when they finally got hold of the story.

Ten minutes shy of midnight on 3 July, a van pulled off Coppetts Road into the front drive of the Charles Stanger Care Facility in Muswell Hill, North London. It was just a plain white Bedford van, unmarked and with very high sides, but it parked right in front of the doors in the bay marked AMBULANCES ONLY.

One woman and two men got out of the van - the woman in an immaf t„culate black two-piece, the men in pale blue medical scrubs. The woman was wearing large, severe spectacles which gave her a stern schoolteacherly appearance - although she was unsettlingly beautiful, too, and she carried herself in a way that made the sternness seem to be an ironic - almost a provocative - pose. She checked her reflection in the nearside mirror, tilting her head to the left and then to the right while staring at herself critically out of the corners of her eyes.

‘You look lovely,’ said one of the two men.

The woman shot him a look and he threw up his hands in ironic apology. I was only saying.

The night was almost oppressively warm, and very quiet. The Stanger itself, normally the source of many unsettling sounds at night - screams, sobs, curses, prophetic rants - was unusually still. There were crickets, though, despite the paltriness of the Stanger’s grass verges, which seemed too meagre to support an ecosystem. But this was London, after all: maybe the crickets had to commute like everyone else.

The three went in through the swing doors, the woman leading the way.

The nurse on duty at the reception desk had seen them pull up and now watched them enter. She had to buzz them in through a second set of doors that had been installed very recently to enhance the Stanger’s security. She did so without waiting for them to announce themselves, because she was expecting them: strictly speaking, that was a breach of security right there.

She noticed that the two men didn’t look entirely convincing as hospital orderlies. One was a slender Asian man with a certain resemblance to Bruce Lee and an air that you could - if you wanted to be polite - call piratical. The other wore his scrubs as though they were pyjamas that he’d been sleeping in for three nights, and had a sardonic self-assured cast to his features that she instinctively mistrusted. His mid-brown hair was unkempt and his mouth subtly asymmetrical, hanging down slightly more on one side than on the other so that when his features were at rest they seemed to wear either a wry smile or a leer.