Thicker Than Water

‘I said almost all the cases on your printout were incised or puncture wounds,’ she said. ‘But the odd one out is a big one.’ She clearly wanted me to ask, so I obliged - mainly to make up for the earlier off-colour innuendo.

‘Big in what way?’

‘It’s Mark,’ Nurse Ryall said. ‘Mark thingumajig. Mister Seddon’s stepson. You said he fell, didn’t you? From high up. So that’s a crush injury.’

As exit lines go, it wasn’t all that punchy, but it left me staring at the door long after it swung to behind her.

Wounds. Points and edges. And one long, lonely fall to the ground. Or two. There would have been two if I hadn’t stopped Bic from stepping off the ledge the other night.

What the fuck did it all mean? And where did I go to fill in the gaps?

14

The next day dragged on like a wounded snake across a barbed wire entanglement. It still hurt me to breathe, and I still couldn’t walk very far without resting up every few steps to let my lungs reinflate. I could have checked myself out of the hospital, but I was stiff and sore enough to find the prospect daunting, and I wasn’t sure yet where I was going to go. Something was crystallising in my mind, but it was taking its own time coming.

A junior intern changed the dressing on my ribs, giving my fingers a cursory examination along the way. I asked her how soon I could expect to play the tin whistle again: she looked at me like that was meant to be a joke, and then suggested that I take up comb and paper. Later on, a nurse came round to inspect my stitches and declared that they were doing nicely.

‘Then I can expect to leave soon?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, I should think so. We’ll be needing the bed for someone else.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘When the doctor says.’

On and off through the day, I read through Nicky’s downloads and transcripts, looking for insights that didn’t seem to be there. Nurse Ryall’s hunch about the wounds played out strongly across the board. The dense, dry prose was full of people puncturing each other and themselves, carving and slicing and severing human flesh in every way imaginable. And in the middle of all this, one boy jumped off an eighth-storey walkway and kissed the concrete.

Or rather, not in the middle: Mark Seddon’s death predated everything else on Nicky’s list. It was as though he’d opened the door to something that had come spilling out like toxic waste across the entire estate.

Feeling restless, and enervated from doing nothing else but lie or stand or sit up on†"1e the ward, I went for a walk around the rest of the wing. Inspiration didn’t come, and if anything the ghosts with their alarming array of stigmata and their disregard for walls and floors were even more of a distraction than the kid with the headphones. But it felt good, in some obscure way, to be moving - even if I was going round in circles.

In the evening, when I was sitting up in bed again with the notes spread out in front of me, chewing over random horrors until they were bland and flavourless, I had a visit from Detectives Basquiat and Coldwood. Basquiat said she wanted to ask me a few more questions. She was carrying a black leather document wallet which looked disturbingly full of something or other: also a micro-tape recorder which she switched on and put down on my bedside table. Gary seemed to be there purely to act as chaperone, which probably didn’t bode well for me at all.

‘What happened to your face?’ Basquiat demanded, after she’d cued in the tape with date, time, people and place. There was a glint in her eye that was far from solicitous: she was interested because she didn’t believe there was an honest way to come by bumps and bruises on such a heroic scale unless you were in police custody at the time.

‘Cut myself shaving,’ I said.

Gary opened his mouth, probably to tell me to do myself a favour and stop pissing about, but Basquiat signalled for him to let it pass. ‘I’d like to come back to the question of your movements on the night when Kenneth Seddon was attacked,’ she said.

‘What I told you last time still stands,’ I said.

‘Meaning that you were at home with your landlady, enjoying a takeaway curry and a few cans of Special Brew.’ She was only so-so as a poker player: she kept the edge out of her voice and her face as expressionless as the keyboard player in Sparks, but there was a set to her shoulders that betrayed an underlying tension.

‘I don’t drink Special Brew,’ I temporised. ‘It was probably Theakston’s Old Peculier. Or maybe some kind of Belgian blond—’

‘You were at home,’ Basquiat repeated, cutting across me. ‘You didn’t go out the whole night until Detective Sergeant Coldwood came to collect you at four a.m.’

Backed into a corner, I gave a straight answer. Too bad it had to be a straight lie. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To the best of my recollection, I didn’t go out.’

‘Not even to pick up a pack of cigarettes?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Nicotine patches, then.’

‘I don’t smoke because I never got started.’

‘Dry-roasted peanuts. Salt-and-vinegar crisps. A DVD rental.’

‘No, no, and no.’