Thicker Than Water

The third vehicle was an ambulance, standing with its back doors wide open and its hoist platform down, and the last was a sprightly pillar-box red Ford Ka parked on a precariously angled concrete apron too narrow to be called a hard shoulder. Something about the sight of it gave me a sudden qualm of unease. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, whether or not that response was coming from the part of my perceptual equipment I call my death-sense. I couldn’t see anything dead in the vicinity - or, for that matter, anything in that badly defined and mystifying state we choose to call undead - but then we were still a hundred yards or so away. When we got closer, maybe I’d find out what it was that had set me off.

But we didn’t get closer: Coldwood tapped the driver’s shoulder and we slowed to a halt at the side of the road, up against a buckled steel crash barrier that seemed to have done its job on more than one occasion.

Coldwood got out, a little awkwardly because his legs hadn’t been set particularly well after being broken the year before - at certain angles they moved in a robotic, discontinuous way. I followed him because this was clearly the end of the ride. Walking around the back of the car to join him, I glanced idly over the edge of the parapet. We were high enough up that we were looking down on the mottled apron of a rooftop car park. The asphalt was bare apart from a phalanx of wheelie bins in one corner, behind which a black jacket lay like a dead bird: part of the inexplicable roadkill of the inner city.

Coldwood leaned against the flank of the car, hands in pockets, like Patience on a monument but with a more pugnacious facial expression. ‘So what’s the score?’ I asked him when it was clear that he wasn’t going to speak first.

‘You tell me, Fix,’ he suggested.

I waited for the other shoe to drop. For the most part I ply my trade wherever there’s a profit to be made, and the Metropolitan Police’s homicide division has been a lucrative source of income for me on more than one occasion. At one time, in fact, the Met had been my main client, and I’d started to take it for granted. But then, like an old married couple, we’d parted company at last because of irreconcilable differences, mostly arising out of me being arrested for murder. It had been a while since Coldwood had put any work my way, and a longer while since I’d asked him for any favours. So there was something else going on here, and I was damned if I was going to commit myself to anything, even an opinion, before I knew what it was.

But Coldwood seemed equally coy, and the staring match couldn’t go on for ever. I shrugged and reached inside my greatcoat. There’s a pocket there that I sewed in myself - deep but narrow, just the right size to hold a tin whistle with an inch of clearance at the top so that it’s easy to hook it out in a hurry. The whistle in question is a Clarke Sweetone in the key of D. I’ve tried other brands and other keys, but only in the way that a compass needle tries to pull away from north. It never sticks.

Whistle in hand, I headed over towards the parked Ka. From behind me, Coldwood said, ‘Fix.’

I turned and looked back at him. He hadn’t moved. ‘Yeah?’ I demanded.

‘Do it from here.’

I measured the distance to the car. ‘I can’t see anything from here,’ I pointed out.

Coldwood held my gaze. ‘How do you know until you try?’

There was a time when bullshit like that would have made me dig my heels in, when I would have turned around and walked away rather than play a command performance with a blindfold on. But at this particular time there was something like an unsettled debt between me and Coldwood, dating from an occasion - quite recently - when I’d almost got himf Dlmost g killed: that one incident explained both the limp and the scar. And right about then, when I was more or less evenly balanced between giving him a tune and telling him exactly where and how deeply to shove it, the blonde woman came striding up to us, walking right past me without a glance to address herself to Coldwood.

‘This isn’t right,’ she said without preamble. Her expression was grim and tight.

Coldwood nodded. It wasn’t a nod of agreement: he was just acknowledging an argument he’d clearly already heard. ‘You’re down on record, Ruth,’ he said, ‘so you can stop banging the drum any time you get sick of the sound. But you don’t have any seniority on me here and this is the way we’re doing it.’