Thicker Than Water

‘Local lad. Lived over there, all on his tod.’ Coldwood pointed off to the east, where the horizon was dominated by one of South London’s least-loved landmarks: the Salisbury estate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, so I knew what it was. Another bit of utopian city planning gone tits-up and stinking as soon as the paint dried and the real world set in.

Twelve massive tower blocks were arranged in a three-by-four formation: guardsmen standing to attention in some apocalyptic parade. They were about twenty storeys high, and the first thing you noticed when you looked at them was that each of the four rows of three had been painted in a different colour, shifting - as your gaze panned right - across the spectrum from pastel pink, through buttercup yellow and duck-egg green, to moody indigo. The second thing you noticed was the walkways that connected the towers at irregular intervals above the ground, welding them into one entity: the uber-estate.

I don’t hold much with premonitions. Mostly our unconscious minds just tell us what we already know, lending a supernatural confirmation to a preformed prejudice. But as I looked across the rooftops towards the Salisbury I felt that twinge of presentiment brush my mind again like a wind-borne cobweb. So what I’d felt earlier hadn’t come from the car: it had come from the distant vista behind it. There seemed to be a smudge of black like a thumbprint in the air, blurring my view of the Salisbury. It wasn’t smoke, because in modern, post-industrial London there’s nothing around to do the smoking: it was a psychic effluent, hanging there untouched by wind, immune to rain. It was the stain of a great sin, or a great unhappiness: or more likely, I thought, pulling my gaze away from the tombstone towers, it was the collective residue of a lot of smaller discontents and domestic tragedies, trickling together and then left to curdle.

‘I don’t know anybody there,’ I said. A stupid thing to say, really: it was just an instinctive reaction to want to distance myself from what I was feeling - from what was coming in on Radio Death.

‘You sound pretty damn sure,’ said Basquiat, looming behind Coldwood’s shoulder very promptly on her cue, as though she’d been waiting in earshot but out of my line of sight this whole time.

‘I mean,’ I amended, taking my eyes off the distant vista with an effort, ‘none of my friends live around here. I’m not aware of knowing anybody on the Salisbury estate. It’s somethto . It’s ing I would have remembered.’

‘Why’s that?’ Basquiat asked, politely but with an edge.

‘Because I’ve heard of the place. It would have stuck in my mind. Especially if I’d just popped over to stab one of the residents to death in his car before I’d even had breakfast.’

‘But you stuck in his mind, obviously.’

‘Yeah.’ My eyes flicked back to ‘F Castor’ written arse-first in black-edged red. ‘Obviously.’

‘So tell me about your movements last night,’ Basquiat suggested. A uniformed cop at her elbow flicked open a ring-bound notebook and held a biro at the ready. Basquiat’s beautifully proportioned unadorned face stared at me expectantly.

‘I already told Coldwood,’ I pointed out.

‘Right. And now you’re telling me.’

Better to draw the line now and find out where I stood.

‘If I’m under arrest,’ I said, ‘then Grandma Castor would turn in her grave if I said anything without benefit of legal counsel.’

‘You’re not under arrest,’ Coldwood said. He was still looking at the skyline, keeping his back turned to his colleague as though it hurt even to look at her. At the Uxbridge Road cop shop their feud was getting to be the stuff of legend. ‘Ask me why.’

‘Coldwood—’ Basquiat said warningly.

‘Why am I not under arrest, Detective Sergeant Coldwood?’

‘Because there are three sets of prints in that car - the victim’s, and two sets belonging to Mister A.N. Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

‘Right.’

‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advh ayed to antage. ‘Sure.’

‘Kenneth Seddon.’

My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.