home-made shurikens and caltrops, piano wire and cheese graters . . . Okay, we were talking about a span of well over a year, but were the residents of the Salisbury so much in love with blood that they spent their time devising new implements for tapping it? The sheer invention on display was disturbing in itself, although it paled next to the terse, unreflective case histories. This wasn’t right. Nothing here was right.
A clitter-clatter of heels jolted me out of my reverie, and I looked up to see Petra Ryall approaching, grim- faced. She looked around, her expression defensive and resentful, but the consultant and his teenage sidekicks had moved on to pastures new, the fat man and the twitching guy were asleep and the kid was lost in his own world of high-fidelity audio input. She pulled up the chair, sat down, glanced at her watch once to note the start time.
‘Ten minutes,’ she reminded me.
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Well, for starters, I’m not a detective. I’m an exorcist.’
That got a sceptical eyebrow-flash, but no other response. Nurse Ryall stared at me, waiting for more.
‘I bind and banish the dead,’ I translated.
‘How?’
‘With a tin whistle.’ I spoke over her next question, because I’ve had this conversation a lot of times with a lot of people. ‘No two exorcists do it the same way. It’s music for me. For someone else it could be pentagrams or incantations or automatic writing or interpretative dance. It doesn’t matter. You make patterns, and things happen.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I can make a ghost come to me by calling it. Sometimes I’ll use an object — some personal effect or keepsake — as a focus; other times I just get the sense of the ghost by being close to it, and I can play the tune that makes it come. Then if I want to I can bind it and send it away.’
‘With music?’
‘Exactly. And I can do that with other things, too. Not just ghosts but . . .’ I hesitated. It was a big enough morsel to swallow already, without going into the full catalogue. ‘Let me tell you about Kenny,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe that’s the best way of explaining this.’
I started with the story of how me and Kenny had fought our one-sided duel on the roof of the tinworks, jumped forward to Kenny bleeding out in a car with my name on the windscreen, then went back and filled in as many of the gaps as Nicky’s brief orientation lecture and my own ferreting around the Salisbury would allow. I played down the demon-weavings, played up the wanting to find out what it was that Kenny had to tell me that was worth wasting a pint of his own blood to do it. From about two minutes in, I could tell from her expression that Nurse Ryall wasn’t buying it. Her frankly lovely face looked like a hod full of hard-core. And as soon as I’d finished, she shook her head.
‘If what you’re telling me is true,’ she said, ‘then why were you interested in the other man on the ward, too? The one with the puncture wounds.’
She had me there. By putting the emphasis so much on me and Kenny, I’d left out too much of the bigger picture — which maybe she needed to make sense of the other stuff.
I tried again, this time telling her about some of the stuff that was happening at the Salisbury — the epidemic of violence, the weird graffiti, the tranced kid trying to jump off the walkway. But it made things worse, not better. There wasn’t any thread of logic connecting these things, and that became more and more obvious the more I talked about it. I was just whistling in the dark, trying to make a whole out of a bunch of parts that I didn’t even understand separately. I decided to finish what I’d started, but more from mule-headedness than from any feeling that it would do any good. By the time I got to Nicky’s stats, I could hear the hollow echo of my own words in the silent ward, and when I finally wound down Nurse Ryall didn’t make any answer at all.
But her expression was unhappy, and it was noticeable that she wasn’t telling me that I was a rabid dog who ought to be put down for the good of humanity. I waited her out, and at last she spoke.
‘Can you walk?’ she asked, very quietly.
‘Normally, I’m proficient,’ I said. ‘Tonight, I don’t know, but I’m prepared to give it a shot. What do you fancy? A movie? A Brick Lane curry?’
She didn’t seem to hear the lame joke. ‘Get your dressing gown on, then,’ she instructed me. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed. Taking my weight on my hands, I touched down on the frigid tiles like Neil Armstrong making his one small step. But then Neil Armstrong was certified drug-free by NASA, and he was only contending with low gravity, whereas gravity seemed to be pulling me in a whole lot of random directions.
‘We haven’t got all night,’ Nurse Ryall said testily.
I stood up with barely a stagger, which I thought deserved at least a short round of applause. My paletot was in the bedside locker. I shrugged it on, to Nurse Ryall’s pained surprise.
‘You’re wearing that?’
‘It’s in right now,’ I muttered, concentrating on my vertical hold. ‘Rat-shit brown is the new black.’
She shook her head in disapproval, turned and strode off without a word towards the door. I followed her, assuming that she was leading the way rather than just giving up on me.
We went along a short corridor lit by fluorescent tubes that seemed agonisingly bright after the subdued lighting in the ward. There were backless benches along one wall where patients sat in some forlorn limbo, either waiting to be seen or just taking a breather somewhere on their personal roads to Calvary. Some of them looked hopefully at Nurse Ryall, as though they thought she might be their guide for the next stage of that journey: but not tonight.
We went out into the open air, across a courtyard where a few vans and a single ambulance were parked, and then back into a different part of the main building. It was darker and older here, and I started to recognise this or that turn in the corridor, this or that loitering spirit. We came to the main staircase: Nurse Ryall looked back once to see if I was following her, then went up. We were going to Kenny’s ward.
The cop on the landing — fortunately not the one I’d met two days ago — gave us a questioning glance as we approached the forbidden door. Nurse Ryall nodded to him, showed her ID and said nothing about me. She entered the code and pulled, but the door stuck for a moment as the lock’s old and cranky wards failed to pull back all the way. The cop took the edge of the jamb and added his own heft to hers: she thanked him politely.
I knew where we were going, but I didn’t know why, so I let Nurse Ryall keep the lead as we crossed the narrow space to the door of Kenny’s ward. There were still just the two beds occupied, Kenny and his roomie both asleep and breathing heavily. Nurse Ryall turned to me with an expectant look on her face.
I hesitated for a moment, glancing around the room. She said she’d show me something, but there was nothing to be seen.
‘What?’ I said.
She made an impatient gesture. ‘Listen.’
I did. Nothing but the rough-edged breathing of the two men that would have been snores if there’d been more strength in their chests to push them out. I was about to say ‘What?’ again, for lack of any better ideas, but then the two men stirred in their sleep and spoke.
It was just the usual half-formed mumble of a dreamer almost but not quite breaching the surface of consciousness. The kind of sound in which you can perceive the melted outlines of words without being able to separate them out or decode them. They ended in a subdued, lip-smacking swallow, a slightly tremulous sigh.
Both men. Together. The same sounds, in perfect synchrony.
13
I swore, very softly, and Nurse Ryall nodded.
But she’d asked me to listen before the men spoke, and now I realised why. I could see it as well as hear it: Kenny’s chest and the other man’s rising and falling in unison, their in-breaths and out-breaths coming at exactly the same time.
With a slight sense of unreality, I looked at the nurse and she looked back at me. There was a strained inquiry in her expression:
