Thicker Than Water

Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.

How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?

My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.

I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.

After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.

‘Hello?’

‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.

‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’

There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’

Another silence.

‘This is my statutory phone call, Fix,’ Matt said at last, his voice unnaturally calm. ‘I’m at Cromwell Road police station. I’m under arrest for murder.’

15

The interview suite at Cromwell Road reminded me of the classrooms at tŽv>

So I suppose it was just the institutional thing: not quite ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, but the feeling that you’re handing over some portion of your life into someone else’s hands, to be tagged and bagged and given back to you later, maybe, if they can find it again and if it’s still identifiable as yours. Fatalism descends on you like a stifling woolly blanket as the door closes behind you.

Gary Coldwood was sitting in a tubular steel chair with a red plastic seat - some kind of Platonic archetype of cheap, nasty, totally disposable furniture. But he stood up as I came into the room.

The surroundings were sparse. Just a table and two chairs, a green plastic wastebasket and, for some reason that escaped me, a poster on the far wall advertising all the many benefits of using a condom. When having sex, I assumed, rather than, say, for piping crème de chantilly or impromptu party decorations.

‘Go and get Matthew Castor from the remand cells,’ Gary said to the cop with the keys. ‘Sign him in here for thirty minutes on my bounce code. Seven-thirteen.’

The uniform hesitated. ‘Can’t use these rooms for visits, sarge,’ he said, in a timid tone that sounded like it didn’t know what it was doing in his square-jawed, bushy-bearded mouth.

‘It’s not a visit,’ Gary said. ‘It’s an interview.’

The uniform still didn’t seem entirely happy. He shot a look at me that spoke twenty-seven volumes plus an appendix. ‘But, you know, for an interview,’ he said. ‘If there’s a civilian observer, you’ve got to fill in a—’

‘What civilian do you mean?’ Gary asked mildly.

The constable thought this through, and eventually got there. ‘Right you are, sarge,’ he said, in a nudge-nudge-wink-wink kind of voice, and he went on his way.

‘Thanks,’ I said to Coldwood.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘And thanks for the heads-up, too, you duplicitous bastard.’

Coldwood nodded. ‘Which is why we’re in here,’ he said, ‘and all on our lonesomes. Get it out of your system, Fix.’

‘You fucking knew she was going “ shoutafter Matt.’ I thrust a finger at his face. ‘You knew it, and you didn’t tell me.’

Gary nodded. ‘Right. I knew it. Did you?’

‘No!’ I exploded. ‘If I’d had the slightest fucking inkling, I’d have warned him. And I’d have kept my mouth shut in front of you and your better half, you back-stabbing little pig-farmer.’

‘I’m going to have to smack you,’ Gary admonished me.

‘On an interview?’

‘You had the marks when you came in. You’ve seen how reliable a witness PC Dennison is.’

‘Gary, why the fuck didn’t you at least give me a—’

‘Because it’s an open and shut case,’ Gary said. ‘And your best bet, if you really had nothing to do with it, was to stay well clear. Whereas if I’d told you we were about to arrest your brother, you’d have gone barging in like a fuckwit, probably got yourself seen tampering with the evidence and ended up on a bloody conspiracy charge. Because what you’re short on, Fix - what you do not have even a bastard trace of - is peripheral vision. You only see what you’re going for, and you walk right into every bleeding thing else.’