‘He’s looking better than he was,’ said a voice from behind me. A woman’s voice: the nurse. A moment later I heard her footsteps coming towards me.
I managed not to turn.
‘Yeah?’ I answered. ‘How do you mean?’
She walked past me, brisk and businesslike, carrying a grey plastic bowl, half full of water, which she set down on the table next to Kenny’s bed. She had a towel and a flannel hung over one arm, and she laid them out too with practised, economical movements. From her pocket she took a bottle of liquid soap. She was a short brunette, broad at shoulder and hip and as formidable as her voice. She was probably about my age, but she wore it better. Most people do.
‘His blood pressure is up a bit,’ she said. ‘Sixty over forty. And his eyes are moving in his sleep — I saw that when I came in before. That’s a very good sign.’
There had to be some reason why she was talking to me like an old friend instead of asking to see my credentials or screaming for the cop on the door, and I’d figure it out sooner or later. For now I was content to gather whatever rosebuds were on offer.
‘What do you make of the wounds?’ I asked.
She straightened and looked round at me, looking a bit bemused. ‘What do
I nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘Well, you’re the expert.’
Okay. The penny dropped at that point. She couldn’t think I was a consultant on his rounds, so she must be mistaking me for one of Coldwood’s boys, stopping by to scrape up a bit more forensic evidence. It says a lot for the public perception of the Met that a guy who rolls in out of the night in a long coat with two days’ worth of stubble on his chin is taken to be one of London’s finest rather than a wino looking for a berth.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, straight-faced. ‘I am. But you know how it is with experts:
The nurse blinked. ‘Multi what?’
‘Means “deep but narrow”, which defines me perfectly. ‘I’m –’ well I’d better not be Castor this time out, in case that name ended up on a charge sheet some time soon ‘Basquiat. Rudy Basquiat. Detective Sergeant. Who are you?’
She gave me an old-fashioned look and tapped the badge she wore on her ample chest. She was
‘Petra,’ I said. ‘What I mean is, I just look at things from one angle. And your angle is going to be different because . . .’
‘Because?’
‘Because I’m a tough, hard-bitten, cynical London cop and you’re an angel of mercy.’
Nurse Ryall grinned at me. ‘You think they’ll give us our own TV series?’ she asked.
‘Bound to.’
‘Well, I only know what I saw when I was putting the dressings on, but I was thinking the angles are all weird. Did you think that?’
‘You first,’ I said, ‘then me. What do you mean by weird?’
She shrugged, looking away into the corner of the room as she consulted her memory. ‘I just mean . . . all over the place,’ she said. ‘Some of them low, some of them high. Left side, right side. Daft, really. They said he was in a car when he was attacked. You wouldn’t think there’d be room in a car for someone to, you know, come at him from all sides like that.’
I nodded encouragement, as though she was echoing my very thoughts. ‘Say he was struggling to get away, though,’ I suggested. ‘Trying to get out of his seat belt, maybe. He’d be squirming around, presenting different parts of his body to the attacker. Maybe it happened like that.
‘Maybe,’ Petra allowed, but she sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know. There was something else, you know? Well, of course you know. If I’m talking rubbish, just tell me.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Well, some of these cuts were really two cuts. The razor had hit the same place twice. You can tell because there’s different lines — different incisions — that overlap each other. So it’s more like he was being held still and the other bloke was going and going at him. Does that make sense?’
‘Perfect sense,’ I assured her. ‘Evidence, inference, conclusion. You’d make a good detective.’
She seemed to appreciate the compliment. ‘So are they connected?’ she asked, waggling her finger to indicate Kenny and the room’s other occupant.
I was momentarily thrown. ‘Why would you assume that?’ I asked, temporising.
My surprise must have shown on my face. Petra hesitated for a moment, maybe wondering if she’d overstepped the bounds of forensic decorum. ‘Well, because of the address, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Same postcode. And two stabbings coming so close together. Not a razor, I know, but I thought it could still be . . .’
‘No, absolutely,’ I agreed as she faltered into silence. ‘We haven’t discounted that possibility at all. I’m just impressed that you made the connection. Were they really as close together as all that, though?’
She rounded the other bed and consulted the chart.
‘Three days,’ she admitted. ‘I thought it was only two.’
‘And the MO,’ I mused, chancing my arm. ‘Sometimes the differences can tell you a lot.’
Petra looked down at the frail old man lying in troubled slumber between us. ‘Lots of wounds again,’ she said. ‘But lots of little punctures, this time. And all more or less the same depth. Creepy. You’d think someone had tied him up with barbed wire or something. But he was just lying in his bed, wasn’t he? Until that priest found him and brought him in.’
Priest?
‘Father Gwillam,’ I said.
‘Yeah, him.’ She glanced up at me, her face earnest and unhappy. ‘Who’d do a thing like that to a poor old man?’ she demanded. ‘It’s horrible. Sometimes I hate this world.’
I nodded, but my mind was racing and it was all I could do to maintain a suitable poker face. Was it the differences or the similarities that were more important here? Was I looking at variations on a theme or two unconnected acts of random violence? One attack involved stab wounds, the other puncture wounds. And Kenny had been ambushed in his car while this other guy seemed to have been attacked by a burglar. But from what Petra had said, both victims were from the Salisbury estate. And the Salisbury estate was suffering from two parallel infestations: sinister graffiti and the Anathemata.
It was worth taking the temperature one more time, particularly as I didn’t have anything to lose here. Without asking permission I leaned down to examine the sleeping man at closer range. The puncture marks that Petra had mentioned weren’t in evidence, but three small dressings on the man’s face — at forehead, cheek and chin — showed where some of them had been. I touched his cheek gently with the back of my hand, as close to the edge of the bandage as I could.
Nothing. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting — or whether the same kind of searing, vivid newsflash I’d got from Kenny would have been welcome or not. But this man was soundly asleep and his mind and soul were folded in on themselves: there was nothing to be gleaned from them, or at least not by me.
‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Nurse Ryall,’ I said, giving her a nod as I stepped back from the bed. She was watching me with a sort of puzzled patience. ‘You’ve helped me to clarify some thoughts.’
‘Well, you’re welcome,’ she said. ‘Listen, I came in here to give Mister Seddon a bed bath. I’m going to have to put the screens up, and since you’re not a relative . . .’
I raised my hands. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘I’d love to see you in action, but I’ve got places to be and crimes to solve. You know how it is.’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘I think so. Down the — what-d’you-call-it — mean streets . . .’
‘A man must walk. Exactly.’
‘You’re dead laid-back for a detective, aren’t you, Sergeant Basquiat?’
‘I used to be on the drug squad,’ I said. ‘The ganja gets to you after a while. Cheers, Petra.’
I left her rolling Kenny carefully onto his side. Sooner her than me.
