breathe, and I still couldn’t walk very far without resting up every few steps to let my lungs reinflate. I could have checked myself out of the hospital, but I was stiff and sore enough to find the prospect daunting, and I wasn’t sure yet where I was going to go. Something was crystallising in my mind, but it was taking its own time coming.
A junior intern changed the dressing on my ribs, giving my fingers a cursory examination along the way. I asked her how soon I could expect to play the tin whistle again: she looked at me like that was meant to be a joke, and then suggested that I take up comb and paper. Later on, a nurse came round to inspect my stitches and declared that they were doing nicely.
‘Then I can expect to leave soon?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, I should think so. We’ll be needing the bed for someone else.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘When the doctor says.’
On and off through the day, I read through Nicky’s downloads and transcripts, looking for insights that didn’t seem to be there. Nurse Ryall’s hunch about the wounds played out strongly across the board. The dense, dry prose was full of people puncturing each other and themselves, carving and slicing and severing human flesh in every way imaginable. And in the middle of all this, one boy jumped off an eighth-storey walkway and kissed the concrete.
Or rather, not in the middle: Mark Seddon’s death predated everything else on Nicky’s list. It was as though he’d opened the door to something that had come spilling out like toxic waste across the entire estate.
Feeling restless, and enervated from doing nothing else but lie or stand or sit up on the ward, I went for a walk around the rest of the wing. Inspiration didn’t come, and if anything the ghosts with their alarming array of stigmata and their disregard for walls and floors were even more of a distraction than the kid with the headphones. But it felt good, in some obscure way, to be moving — even if I was going round in circles.
In the evening, when I was sitting up in bed again with the notes spread out in front of me, chewing over random horrors until they were bland and flavourless, I had a visit from Detectives Basquiat and Coldwood. Basquiat said she wanted to ask me a few more questions. She was carrying a black leather document wallet which looked disturbingly full of something or other: also a micro-tape recorder which she switched on and put down on my bedside table. Gary seemed to be there purely to act as chaperone, which probably didn’t bode well for me at all.
‘What happened to your face?’ Basquiat demanded, after she’d cued in the tape with date, time, people and place. There was a glint in her eye that was far from solicitous: she was interested because she didn’t believe there was an honest way to come by bumps and bruises on such a heroic scale unless you were in police custody at the time.
‘Cut myself shaving,’ I said.
Gary opened his mouth, probably to tell me to do myself a favour and stop pissing about, but Basquiat signalled for him to let it pass. ‘I’d like to come back to the question of your movements on the night when Kenneth Seddon was attacked,’ she said.
‘What I told you last time still stands,’ I said.
‘Meaning that you were at home with your landlady, enjoying a takeaway curry and a few cans of Special Brew.’ She was only so-so as a poker player: she kept the edge out of her voice and her face as expressionless as the keyboard player in Sparks, but there was a set to her shoulders that betrayed an underlying tension.
‘I don’t drink Special Brew,’ I temporised. ‘It was probably Theakston’s Old Peculier. Or maybe some kind of Belgian blond–’
‘You were at home,’ Basquiat repeated, cutting across me. ‘You didn’t go out the whole night until Detective Sergeant Coldwood came to collect you at four a.m.’
Backed into a corner, I gave a straight answer. Too bad it had to be a straight lie. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘To the best of my recollection, I didn’t go out.’
‘Not even to pick up a pack of cigarettes?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Nicotine patches, then.’
‘I don’t smoke because I never got started.’
‘Dry-roasted peanuts. Salt-and-vinegar crisps. A DVD rental.’
‘No, no, and no.’
She nodded, satisfied. ‘And your landlady will corroborate this?’
I looked over Basquiat’s head at Coldwood, who was studying Van Gogh’s ever-cheerful sunflowers and didn’t meet my eye.
‘Ask her yourself,’ I suggested.
‘In good time. I’m just asking you if you’re happy with your alibi, from a structural point of view. Is it fit for purpose, Castor? Will it take the strain?’
I looked her in the eye. ‘Alibi?’ I repeated, as if it was a word I’d never heard before.
‘If you were down in South London that night, you might not want to tell us about it.’
‘I can’t even remember the last time I was south of the river,’ I said. ‘Well, I mean before this thing broke.’
‘Days? Weeks? Months?’
‘Months. Must have been.’
‘How many months?’
‘At least six.’
Basquiat didn’t answer, but she did finally unzip the document wallet. On top of the papers inside was a small stack of A4-sized photographs, one of which she held up for me to see. It was a grainy enlargement from a badly framed original, taken at night without a flash but with some kind of light-enhancement technique that made everything into an over-contrasted soot-and-chalk cartoon. It showed a white Bedford van, stationary at a traffic light. Someone had drawn a ring around the registration plate in thick black marker.
Basquiat flicked that photo down onto my bedsheets like a blackjack dealer, revealing the second one behind it. This was a zoom in from the previous image, focusing on the driver. He was hunched over the wheel, squinting sideways at the red light that had stopped him in his tracks as though he could make it turn green just by facing it down. The resolution was surprisingly good: it was me at the wheel, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt. Basquiat dealt me that one too and showed me the third: a close-up on my face, the image looking a little washed out and raggedy-edged this time. So did I, for that matter. My mother would have said ‘Poor Felix!’ by automatic reflex.
‘Speed camera?’ I asked, conversationally.
‘Do you see any motion blur? Bus-lane camera, Castor. St George’s Road, Elephant and Castle. You tried to overtake a truck in the left-hand lane and got caught by the red at just the wrong moment. This was three weeks ago. The night of the third. ‘
I handed her the first two photos back. Might as well keep the whole set together.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me. Being vague on dates isn’t evidence of murder, though.’
‘No, just of having something you needed to lie about. We traced the reg back to a dodgy little runt in Cheshunt. Name of Packer. The worst kind of dodgy little runt, in a lot of ways — the kind that’s on parole, and caves in at the first whiff of a search warrant. He was telling us first of all that he’d hired the van out to a Greek gentleman named Economides. But I reminded him that every time a lag on probation actively colludes in a criminal enterprise, a fairy dies. After that he was only too happy to put your name in the frame.’
Thanks, Packer, I thought sourly. I owe you one, mate. But hard on the heels of that thought came the twin realisations that he didn’t have any choice and it didn’t make any difference. Once they had the van they had as much supporting evidence as they liked. My fingerprints would be all over it in any case. Basquiat had found a smoking pistol — but it was the wrong pistol, and the wrong crime. Looking for evidence that I’d tried to murder Kenny, she’d found the trail that linked me to Rafi’s escape.
I waited for her to tell me I had the right to remain silent, but she didn’t seem in any hurry to wrap this up.
‘So what were you doing in Elephant and Castle at half past midnight?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Getting into line early for the tropical house? Or crossing over into South London by a route that wasn’t the shortest line between your gaff and Seddon’s?’
