Thicker Than Water

they’re both saying in their sleep–’

‘If,’ I repeated, cutting across her. ‘And even granting that that’s true, we still don’t know why, or how. Mark is dead. Did someone raise the demon to get vengeance for him? Is it looking for Mark’s spirit for some reason? Did Mark himself bring it to the Salisbury — whether he meant to or not — by something he did? There are just too many ways it could all fit together, and if I go in without knowing the answers, I’m probably going to last as long as a marshmallow in a microwave.’

Petra stared at me.

‘You’re afraid of this thing,’ she said. It wasn’t a taunt — just an observation.

‘Oh yeah.’

She looked at the two fitfully sleeping men, then back at me. ‘But you’re — awake. Healthy. It can’t hurt you, can it?’

‘When I fell over just now, it was about a heartbeat away from doing something to me that the English language doesn’t even have a verb for.’

Nurse Ryall nodded uncertainly, visibly rearranging the furniture in her conceptual space. ‘Okay. So what should we do?’

I noted the ‘we’, and I was impressed. Scared as she was, she wasn’t just writing this off as somebody else’s problem. ‘Right now,’ I said, ‘we should get out of here. There’s nothing more I can do until I get some of my facts straight.’

We left the same way we came in, under the bored eyes of the duty cop who didn’t even ask us what the music was all about. Maybe he thought a late-night serenade was something that NICE had approved for general therapeutic use.

Back on my own ward, I stowed my paletot thoughtfully while Nurse Ryall picked up Nicky’s printouts and flicked through them with unashamed curiosity.

‘Are these the facts you were talking about?’ she asked.

‘Some of them,’ I allowed. ‘The rest I’m going to have to pick up on the ground.’

I thought she’d just make a desultory pass through the frankly soul-deadening bulk of Nicky’s transcripts and then put them down again. But half an hour later she was still reading, while the kid with the headphones communed with his inner ears and the fat man woke, looked around in surprise and suspicion, dozed off again. I let her read, covertly admiring the furrow of her brow, her lower lip unselfconsciously thrust out in deep concentration. I like intelligent women. It’s a pity they’re mostly too smart to get involved with me.

After a while she looked up at me, turning the sheaf of documents so that the top sheet faced me.

‘Incised wounds,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Is that what this is about? Incised wounds?’

I was momentarily at a loss. ‘There are a lot of woundings in there, Nurse Ryall,’ I acknowledged. ‘But as you can see, there’s no pattern. We’ve got every weapon under the sun, including some that came as news to me, and every variation on murder, suicide, self-harm and lethal ambush. It’s hard to think of a kind of wound that isn’t in there.’

She stared at me wide-eyed. ‘Are you serious?’ she demanded at last.

‘I thought I was.’

‘Then you really needed to ask an expert.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘The ones that aren’t in there? Blunt-instrument trauma. Crush and impact trauma. Abraded wounds. Gunshot wounds. Not to mention, if you widen the field a bit, burns, fractures, dislocations, concussions and sprains, strangulation, suffocation–’

I held up my hands, partly in surrender and partly to rein her in a little. ‘Okay, fine. What does that leave?’

‘I told you,’ Nurse Ryall said, with slightly exaggerated patience. ‘Incised and puncture wounds — and you’ve got one of each of them up in that ward. Almost all these cases fall into one of those two basic types: the damage was done either with a point or with an edge — or sometimes both. Stabbing and hacking, basically. Hurting people with things that are sharp.’

‘You must be a lot of fun at playtime,’ I said sardonically. It was either that or break into full applause, and I didn’t want her to get too cocky at this early stage in our relationship.

‘Nursing diploma — BSc equivalent. I’m studying four nights a week.’ She said, stiffly on her dignity. ‘So I don’t get much playtime, Felix Castor. But I do get to know everything there is to know about wounds. Or did you think that was just prurient curiosity?’

‘Fix,’ I said.

She bridled. ‘What is?’

‘My name. It’s Fix. Short for Felix.’

‘Oh.’ She looked only slightly mollified. She stood up, briskly, as if she was suddenly conscious of other things she ought to be doing. Her break must have ended long ago. ‘Well, you can carry on calling me Nurse Ryall. It shows respect.’

‘Good enough,’ I agreed. ‘And since you’re the expert, can you do me one other favour?’

‘Possibly.’ Her tone was cold. The playtime remark had gone badly awry. ‘Depends what it is.’

I gave Nurse Ryall another one of my rare and precious business cards, having palmed one from the pocket of the paletot earlier. ‘Keep an eye on Kenny for me,’ I said. ‘And an ear. If he says anything else that you can make out, or if anything else happens that strikes you as weird, or even if he just gets better or worse, will you keep me clued in?’

She took the card, but she looked disapproving. ‘Why?’ she demanded.

‘Because it’ll be another fact,’ I said. ‘And I’m collecting them.’

‘Wide range of wounds,’ she scoffed. I took that as a positive sign: she wasn’t saying no.

‘So sue me,’ I said, with a comic shrug. ‘I bet you don’t know anything about medieval grimoires.’

‘I can see what’s in front of my face, though.’

Her breasts were on a level with my eyes. ‘Me too,’ I said.

‘Don’t push it, Castor.’ She dropped Nicky’s printouts onto my tray table with an audible thud. The top sheets sloughed off in a loose concertina.

‘Thanks,’ I said, sincerely.

‘You’re welcome. And thank you too, I suppose. At least now I know that I’m not going mad. You should get some sleep.’

‘Yes, nurse.’

‘And I should get over to casualty, or I’m going to be on report.’ She started to walk away, got halfway to the door and then turned back.

‘You didn’t pick me up on the almost,’ she said.

‘Almost what?’ I asked.

‘I said almost all the cases on your printout were incised or puncture wounds,’ she said. ‘But the odd one out is a big one.’ She clearly wanted me to ask, so I obliged — mainly to make up for the earlier off-colour innuendo.

‘Big in what way?’

‘It’s Mark,’ Nurse Ryall said. ‘Mark thingumajig. Mister Seddon’s stepson. You said he fell, didn’t you? From high up. So that’s a crush injury.’

As exit lines go, it wasn’t all that punchy, but it left me staring at the door long after it swung to behind her.

Wounds. Points and edges. And one long, lonely fall to the ground. Or two. There would have been two if I hadn’t stopped Bic from stepping off the ledge the other night.

What the fuck did it all mean? And where did I go to fill in the gaps?

14

The next day dragged on like a wounded snake across a barbed wire entanglement. It still hurt me to