Thicker Than Water

Gary shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you in an awkward situation,’ he said. The echo of my own earlier words was deliberate, and done with ruthless finesse. I acknowledged it with a nod.

‘If you change your mind, I’m still here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how much I can do to help. Depends on what you’ve got to tell me.’ He reached into another pocket, brought out a brown paper bag whose contents had leaked and stained its corners dark red. He set it down on the tray table.

‘Grapes,’ he explained, and left.

Once I was alone, the sense of relief turned out to be short-lived. It drained away, to be replaced by a greater puzzlement and unease than before. If Basquiat had someone else in her gunsights, then her not arresting‹r nliv me made a little more sense. But then why come in and brace me in the first place? And what kind of help was Coldwood offering if I wasn’t even in the frame any more?

Maybe I was unconsciously hiding from the answers - not wanting to go in the only direction that made any sense. In any case, before I could put my thoughts in any kind of marching order, Nurse Ryall came over with the meds trolley. I ordered tramadol with an amphetamine chaser, but the à la carte menu was off.

‘That looked heavy,’ she observed.

By way of answer, I held up my hands for her to inspect. ‘Look, ma. No cuffs.’

‘But that was the police, right? The real police, I mean?’ I nodded ruefully. ‘Not just the real police, but the real Sergeant Basquiat.’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Rudy actually exists?’

‘Yeah. But he’s a Ruth.’

‘You should have introduced us. Listen, I’m on duty in the new wing today. I only came in here to tell you that your man had died. But she told you that already, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah. But thanks, anyway. I appreciate the thought. Did he—?’

‘Say anything before he popped off? Not while I was around, no.’ She stared at me in silence for a moment or two while I tried to digest all this and found parts of it sticking in my throat at odd and uncomfortable angles.

‘How do you feel?’ Nurse Ryall asked.

I looked up, startled.

‘About Kenny being dead? I’d be lying if I said I felt anything at all. It’s been too long. It’s like being told they knocked down a pub you used to drink in a long time ago. Actually that would probably affect me more, because I really like booze, and when you come right down to it Kenny was a bit of a turd.’

‘Then why are you looking so mardy?’

Why indeed? Because he’d died at a sodding awkward time: invited me into his seething nightmare of a life and then pissed off to join the choir invisible, leaving me facing a murder charge and an invisible monster with a sweet tooth for what Petra Ryall so charmingly called incised wounds.

It was a neat trick. Not quite the same kind of bullshit he used to pull on me when we were kids, but definitely not a major change of direction.

‘Because I’m still a suspect,’ I said, abridging the more complicated truth. Coldwood had told me that I wasn’t, but that was less comforting than I would have expected. Even if they did get the guy with the straight-edged razor and his mate with the blunt knife bang to rights, Basquiat’s investigations were still likely to nail me to the board for the crime I really had committed that night - taking Rafi ‹ - untDitko out of the Stanger care home with forged papers. And then there was the demon at the Salisbury, which I was reasonably sure I’d met the night before, up on Kenny’s ward. Something had to be done about that. In a way, it wasn’t my problem: but I thought about Mark Blainey’s bare room and about Bic’s attempt to re-enact his death, and I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this.

Something hit the sheets next to me with a soft thump. I stared at it for a few moments before realising what it was. It was the plastic canula from a surgical drip, still slightly stained with the rusty brown of blood. I looked from it to Nurse Ryall, who shrugged almost apologetically.

‘Just a thought,’ she said. ‘When you told me how you people work, you said you could use personal effects to raise a ghost. Maybe you could have another go at Mister Seddon. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but by dying he’s put himself right in your comfort zone, hasn’t he?’

Kenny. The man, not the demon. It might work, at that. I nodded slowly, giving Nurse Ryall a look of frank appreciation that she took without a flinch or a blush. ‘I like the way your mind works,’ I said.

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she assured me, deadpan. ‘By the way, you asked me to check the admissions records. We’ve had dozens from the Salisbury over the last year and a bit. Two a week, sometimes. Over the past couple of months, more than that, even. And they’ve almost all been incisions and puncture wounds.’