Thicker Than Water

The hallway was only three strides long. At the other end of it, instead of doors leading to a living room or bedroom, there were stairs going down. I’d come across this sort of design before, when I’d lived in a council block off the Barking Relief Road: in the building trade it’s called vertical herringbone. Instead of having all the rooms for each flat laid out on a given floor of the building, you tessellate them in three dimensions: so you can have your door on the eighth floor, like Kenny, and the rest of your flat on the seventh - or if you’re unlucky, the seventh and eighth and ninth, depending on how awkward the space is and how ingenious the builders have been in not wasting any. Most people I know who’ve experienced it hate it because it means that your bedroom can be right up against someone else’s den - their TV blaring away on the other side of a thin sheet of plasterboard while you’re counting sheep with less and less conviction.

I went down the stairs, which led directly into Kenny’s living room. I was seeing it in the light from a lamp on the walkway immediately outside the window, because the curtains were half-open. I crossed over and closed them before turning on the light.

Nothing much here, either: an ageing three-piece, an aquarium in which a rainbow fish and a few neon tetras circled, a bookcase that held only a dozen or so books, a magazine rack stuffed to bursting with old copies of TV Quick, and a huge widescreen TV. I searched perfunctorily, then more thoroughly, looking under cushions and down the backs of chairs. Nothing of a remotely personal nature surfaced, and a fortiori nothing that gave me the slightest idea of what Kenny had been trying to tell me: assuming - and I was feeling less certain of this now than I was when I’d walked out of the Uxbridge Road lock-up - that he’d been trying to tell me anything at all.

Only one other door out of the room, and it led to a second hall from which all the other rooms opened off. The first one I opened was a bathroom, decorated in light and dark blue with a striking missing-tile motif. The second wa S Th. Ts a bedroom: large double bed, unmade; wardrobe and vanity table, the latter suspiciously bare; a cross hanging on the wall over the bed, which made me think - involuntarily and with a grimace - of my mum and dad’s room back in Walton, where the crucified Christ stared down on all their goings and comings. More than enough to give you functional impotence, in my opinion. Like the living room, the bedroom had a window that looked out directly onto the walkway linking Weston to the block next door.

If the flat held any clues as to what Kenny had tried to tell me, this was where I was going to find them: but something made me check the last door, too. It was another bedroom, and I stared in from the doorway with a cold prickle of recognition. It was a room I felt I knew, even though I’d only ever seen it once: and the once, needless to say, had been when I’d pressed my fingertips to Kenny’s wound back at the Royal.

It had all the hallmarks of a teenaged boy’s room. In addition to the hi-fi tower and profusion of CDs (mostly death metal and heavy rock) there were posters of Vin Diesel and Abi Titmuss on the wall - mercifully not together - and a lamp on the bedside table bearing the Manchester United logo. There were differences, though, between this room and the one I’d glimpsed in Kenny’s memories: the CDs were neatly stacked now: the general leavening of socks and boxer shorts that had graced every horizontal surface in the remembered room were gone, the bed was stripped, and the hi-fi had a thick, unblemished patina of dust on top of it. Nobody had lived here for a long while.

You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done, Mrs Daniels had said. About what? Where was the kid who’d slept in this bed? What was it that Kenny had never got over?

I was aware that anything I touched in here was going to leave marks in the dust. Not fingerprints, because I was wearing gloves, but even so it seemed like a bad idea to advertise my visit too blatantly. I retreated with a slight feeling of unease, and went back into the main bedroom: Kenny’s room and, judging from the double bed, his wife’s room too. But she clearly wasn’t around, and nobody had mentioned her. In fact, Coldwood had already told me that Kenny lived alone.

I started with the chest of drawers. It contained mostly socks and underwear and tee-shirts, and they were all in the left-hand drawers: the drawers on the right of the cabinet were empty. Evidence was mounting up: Kenny had had a family, and he didn’t have one any more.

He didn’t have any photos of them either, annoyingly: the bedroom and the living room were as void of personal memorabilia as a hotel room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Gideon Bible in one of the drawers.