Thicker Than Water

Okay. So here it all was in black and white, just as Jean had laid it out for me. This was the tragedy that she didn’t think Kenny had ever got over: a tragedy maybe slightly qualified by the fact that this wasn’t his own flesh and blood. But that wasn’t the main issue here, was it? That wasn’t what was niggling me. It was just that I found it hard to imagine Kenny Seddon loving anyone. Beating up his girlfriend in a drunken rage, that I could see: and then turning his hatred on his own body when he ran out of other targets. Kenny sitting in his bedroom, on the double bed he now slept in alone, and carving out his indignation on his wrists and forearms . . . that was no stretch at all. But Kenny mourning a dead child? That wasn’t such an easy fit. And the bare room belied it, too, unless he cleared out all the kid’s stuff because it aroused memories that were too painful to bear.

I suddenly saw another anomaly, though, and the vivid picture faded.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘If Kenny’s girlfriend had left, why was the son still living with him? Didn’t he move on with the mother every other time she switched boyfriends?’

Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That seems to have been the pattern. But not this time. This time she hit the road and he hit the concrete. Everyone leaves the nest sooner or later.’

I found I wasn’t in the mood, somehow, for Nicky’s flippant little homilies, but as I opened my mouth to launch a put-down a nurse stuck her head in through the door and called out ‘Five minutes!’ in a ringing tone to the room at large.

‘Man, you should ask for a cavity search,’ Nicky scoffed. ‘That’s all you’re missing for the full institutional experience.’

‘That and some decent food,’ I reminded him. ‘Nicky, did you get anywhere with that drawing? The teardrop thing?’

‘The shiny vagina? Not so far,’ Nicky confessed grudgingly. ‘Still working on it.’

‘Okay. I want you to do me another favour.’

‘Well, Jesus, what a surprise.’

‘Gwillam. Find out where he lives.’

Nicky’s eyes lit up, but he couldn’t resist the cheap shot when it was sitting there right in front of him. ‘I thought that was Humpty-Dumpty territory,’ he reminded me.

‘It is. But hey, they cracked me once and I didn’t break. Not all the way. So now it’s my turn.’

‘Then I’ve got some good news for you.’ Nicky reached inside his pocket, fished out a folded sheet of paper and waved it in front of my face before dropping it onto the sheets. ‘I took the {s. poc liberty. He hides himself pretty fucking well, and it took a while. But it was a labour of love.’

I unfolded the sheet. It was an address in St Albans: The Rosewell Ecumenical Trust, Church Street.

‘That one you get for free, by the way,’ Nicky added.

‘Truly, this is the ending of days.’

‘Get well. And get bent.’

He walked away with a laconic wave, and I immediately turned my attention to the papers he’d left me. Not Gwillam’s address - that would keep - but the incident reports and statistics.

They would have made dry and difficult reading even if I’d been in better shape than I was. Nicky’s hacks get him into all kinds of interesting places, but he usually loses a certain amount of formatting along the way, so I was facing vast blocks of prose with pretty much no punctuation apart from line breaks.

And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tide. People hurt and killed each other, or themselves: broke against pavements, were impaled on railings, swallowed razor blades, carved gnomic messages on their own flesh or the flesh of their loved ones. There was blood, and there was pain. It drew me in, until I couldn’t see the land any more.

Was self-harm just another current within that sea, or was it something else? Mark, the dead boy, had cut himself and written poems about it: the wounds were clearly part of his inner life; the most intense and precious part. And Kenny had got the habit, too: as though it was something you could catch. As though . . .

‘Felix Castor!’

The voice was acerbic, angry, the emphasis very pronounced. I came out of my grim reverie and found myself looking up at the nurse, who was standing at the foot of my bed with my chart in her hand. And I understood her tone immediately, because she already knew me. But not by that name.

‘Nurse Ryall,’ I said, weakly. ‘Petra.’

The redhead quirked her head and flashed her eyes meaningfully. ‘Detective . . . Basketcase, was it?’

‘Basquiat,’ I said. ‘Would you believe I’m here undercover?’

She thrust the chart back into its holder with more vigour than was necessary. ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ she said. ‘That bloke upstairs was under police guard because someone had tried to murder him. I don’t know how you got in there, but I’m going to report it to the shift registrar and let her decide what to do with you.’

I tried to jump up out of the bed to head her off, but the pain relief I’d been given was working too well for that. I slumped back down onto the banked pillows and she turned on her heel.