Back in the nineteenth century, when London was basically a big pile of crap with some buildings floating in it, and when a cholera epidemic was raging through the city like a drunk with a Gatling gun, they had this theory about what they were dying of. Nobody had made the link yet to infected water — not until John Snow came along in the 1850s with his epidemiological version of the New Testament. So the best idea they could come up with in the meantime was the miasma: a vast cloud of bad air, the exhaled breath of a million diseased and dying people, that drifted over London and infected you if you breathed it in.
That turned out to be bollocks, and Snow saved tens of thousands of lives when he tore the handles off the Soho pumps to prove his point. In the twenty-first century most people laugh at miasmas.
Not exorcists, though. We know better than anyone that things can gather in the air, unseen, and that you can breathe them in without knowing it. Most places have emotional resonances: random echoes of the emotions felt by the people who live in those places or walk through them. Mostly they stay at a low level because — to use a crude metaphor — the peaks and troughs don’t match up. It’s like ripples in a pond cancelling each other out as their wave fronts intersect. Occasionally, though, if a lot of people are feeling the same thing, then instead of cancelling each other out the emotions reinforce each other, etch themselves deeper and deeper into what we flippantly call reality. When that happens you can get a very strong emotional residue hanging over a particular place and enduring over time. Schools, prisons, death camps, brothels, army barracks, even churches: they have their own psychic flavour, which exorcists pick up on the same wavelength that allows us to see the dead. We’re like dogs in that way, pricking up our ears at a whistle that nobody else can hear.
The Salisbury Estate had an aura of this kind. I could feel it from a long way away, when I got off the bus at Burgess Park and started to walk north towards it. The closest of the towers was a good half a mile off, but already there was a thickening in the air that you could almost taste. The people around me — mothers with pushchairs, mainly, along with the occasional homeless guy and truanting kid, because this was the dead waste and middle of the day — didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. They kept right on walking, didn’t even look over their shoulders at the great grey towers looming behind them. So I knew it was my tuning-fork soul, resonating on a frequency that the rest of the world was deaf to.
The miasma intensified as I got closer, but although the individual towers of the Salisbury separated themselves out in my field of vision the feeling didn’t attach itself to any one of them.
The contradiction between those two impressions — the vividness of the sensation and the vagueness of its source — came as something of a surprise. I’ve learned the hard way that the physics of the material world don’t apply to my chosen field all that much: if they did, an enraged geist wouldn’t be able to pick me up and slam me into a wall because his massless form wouldn’t allow him any leverage. And zombies wouldn’t be able to move without a working heart to oxygenate their putrefying tissues.
But it’s a reliable rule that most hauntings have a fixed physical locus, an anchor point, where something that no longer belongs in this world has somehow got stuck and failed to move on. Finding the anchor is one of the first steps in any exorcism, because it means you can apply your leverage to the point where it’s going to have the biggest impact. It’s like aiming your fire extinguisher at the base of the fire, not at the flames.
This field of buzzing emotional energy wasn’t playing by the rules. It remained diffuse, impossible to pinpoint: my psychic compass wobbled and spun, looking for a true north that seemed not to be there.
The emotional weight that the miasma carried became more and more vivid as I approached: intensified, without narrowing down. What I was tasting in the air was a tension, a restless alertness, together with a sort of shift in my vision that made everything I was seeing subtly different — as though I was seeing it through a window that had been misted with somebody else’s breath.
I walked between the first of the Salisbury’s towers as I came off Freemantle Street, passing a primary school on my left. Kids are like dogs, too, and the two hundred or so toddlers swarming around in the playground seemed unusually subdued and thoughtful. They were playing on the climbing frames and hopscotch grids, but silently and with a disconcerting solemnity.
I looked up as the shadow of the Salisbury’s eastern-most block fell across me. The towers all had name plaques fixed to their walls at head height, the names barely visible beneath a hundred layers of granulated, half- erased graffiti: this one — the pink tower that stood at one end of the artfully arranged colour field — was Sandford Block, and its companion on my left, a slightly warmer shade of the same basic colour, was Cole. I thought of cattle brands, and of Adam naming the beasts. These hulking monsters wore their names lightly, and didn’t seem to have been tamed or humanised by them to any measurable extent.
The remaining towers stretched in a colonnade ahead of me, probably about a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide. Over my head were the first of the walkways, linking the towers within a rigidly geometrical spiderweb. The floor was paved with blocks of faded rose-pink and yellow, between which weeds grew in stubborn profusion: everything else was poured concrete, forty years old now and well into its mid-life crisis. There was a shopping trolley abandoned at the foot of Cole Block, lying on its side like a dead wildebeest. There was also a small cluster of boys in their early teens who were completely ignoring me as they kicked a football against the concrete wall, taking turns to hone their ball control in solo displays that clearly had a competitive edge to them.
I checked the address that Nicky Heath had given me, scribbled on a torn-out page of
‘You’re forgetting one thing, Gary,’ I pointed out.
‘Which is?’
‘I’m also serious about being innocent. I didn’t take a straight razor to Kenny Seddon’s throat. The last time I wanted to do that, I hadn’t even started to shave.’
Coldwood shook his head. ‘So?’
‘So I know Kenny wasn’t writing my name in blood because he wanted to tell you who’d attacked him. You’re still open-minded on that subject, which is more or less where you need to be, but I’m not. It was something else — some other kind of message, and I’ve got to assume it was meant for me. Not “It was Castor what done it” but “Castor, take a look at this.” You understand? I don’t know what it’s about or if it’s really any of my business, but I need to find out before I can let this drop. And since you won’t even tell me where Kenny lives, I don’t trust you to tell me anything else you turn up. No hard feelings.’
‘I’ll tell you everything I think you need to know,’ Coldwood promised, and the stolid emphasis told me exactly how carefully he was choosing his words.
‘And I’ll do the same for you,’ I assured him, with a straight face. Then I walked on out of the station, found the nearest working phone box — my mobile being down on batteries again because I can never be arsed to recharge it — and called Nicky Heath, my technically dead sometime-informant. He shagged Kenny’s address from the electoral roll in about ten seconds flat.
‘New case?’ he asked me after I’d taken the details down.
‘Not exactly, Nicky,’ I said. ‘But it’s something I’m looking into. And I’ll probably be coming to you for a bit more than this as soon as I know what I’m looking for.’
‘Sure. Tell me about it tonight. You’re coming to the screening, right?’
I trod water mentally while I tried to work out what he meant. Then I remembered the gold-trimmed card that had dropped onto Pen’s doormat three weeks before — requesting the pleasure of my company at a one-off presentation of Ridley Scott’s
‘The screening,’ I echoed. ‘Right. I’ll see you there.’
And if that was what it took, that was what I’d do. But business before some implausible imitation of pleasure.
Kenny Seddon lived at 137 Weston Block, Nicky had said. I could check each tower in turn, but why not use the natural resources that were already on offer? I wandered over to the small group of boys who were still intent on their kick-about. A few of them turned to watch me as I approached, but the lad who was in possession of the ball carried on side-kicking it up into the air and then bouncing it off his chest in a metronomic rhythm.
They were younger than I’d thought, most of them probably not yet into their teens. That was welcome,
