I sat propped up on my pillows staring at that inscrutable, unrevealing image for the best part of a minute. Then, since I couldn’t look away from it, I tried to hide it by putting the cover sheet back over it. Doing that gave my system its last and maybe biggest shock of the evening: or maybe the nasty stutter of my pulse was an after- effect of the summoning, with its combination of physical and psychological exertion.
The cover sheet was where all the name and address details were set down. Mark Seddon, place of residence 137 Weston Block, Salisbury Estate, Walworth. Father’s name left blank. Mother’s name given in full. Not a Tina, or a Tania.
Anita.
Married name, Anita Mary Corkendale.
Birth name, Anita Mary Yeats.
My stomach did something complicated and self-destructive, and suddenly I was fighting to keep my hospital dinner — which was already inclined to defy gravity — down in the hold.
Anita.
That downtrodden chattel, who went from Brent to Walworth as part of the property and appurtenances of a boyfriend who beat her up every night as regularly as another guy might put the cat out.
Anita.
Why? What fucking sense did that make? She’d seen through Kenny when we were kids. She’d cut a slice out of him to save me, but then did a quick-fade before my balls dropped and I could ask her out on a date.
How could she end up with Kenny, even briefly? How could she give his name to her kid?
My phone rang, making me start so violently that my chest muscles spasmed and my fists clenched from the sudden pain as my damaged lung reported in still not fit for duty.
I hauled the greatcoat off the back of the chair and rifled the pockets with trembling hands. They didn’t seem to be in the right places, and the phone had stopped ringing by the time I found it. I checked last-number redial, but the number wasn’t one I recognised and it refused to take a call. So I waited.
After maybe a minute it rang again. I flicked it open.
‘Hello?’
‘Felix.’ It was Matt’s voice, and hearing it I remembered how our last meeting had ended: probably that was why his tone sounded so guarded. But maybe he’d had second thoughts about letting me in on what he and his dubious friends were up to at the Salisbury.
‘Hi, Matt,’ I said. ‘How’s your soul?’
There was a long silence. Maybe it wasn’t the most tactful way of starting the conversation, but then I was feeling too bruised and battered to be interested in my brother’s tender feelings. ‘Something you want to share?’ I prompted him. ‘Or are you calling me out of the blue because you decided that “brother’s keeper” line was too cheap a shot to let stand?’
Another silence.
‘This is my statutory phone call, Fix,’ Matt said at last, his voice unnaturally calm. ‘I’m at Cromwell Road police station. I’m under arrest for murder.’
15
The interview suite at Cromwell Road reminded me of the classrooms at the Alsop Comprehensive School for Boys, where I spent the years between changing up from short trousers and leaving home. The resemblance wasn’t immediately obvious, because the classrooms at Alsop mostly had windows whereas the Cromwell Road interview rooms are below ground and therefore don’t. And you never had to be swiped in through the doors at Alsop by a burly constable wearing a hundredweight of ironmongery at his belt. Moreover, the teachers at Alsop were for the most part saintly men and women who got little reward for plucking the flowers of higher learning and strewing them at our ungrateful feet: you’d be hard put to it to find a saint in a London cop shop, unless he’d just been done for resisting arrest.
So I suppose it was just the institutional thing: not quite ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, but the feeling that you’re handing over some portion of your life into someone else’s hands, to be tagged and bagged and given back to you later, maybe, if they can find it again and if it’s still identifiable as yours. Fatalism descends on you like a stifling woolly blanket as the door closes behind you.
Gary Coldwood was sitting in a tubular steel chair with a red plastic seat — some kind of Platonic archetype of cheap, nasty, totally disposable furniture. But he stood up as I came into the room.
The surroundings were sparse. Just a table and two chairs, a green plastic wastebasket and, for some reason that escaped me, a poster on the far wall advertising all the many benefits of using a condom. When having sex, I assumed, rather than, say, for piping crème de chantilly or impromptu party decorations.
‘Go and get Matthew Castor from the remand cells,’ Gary said to the cop with the keys. ‘Sign him in here for thirty minutes on my bounce code. Seven-thirteen.’
The uniform hesitated. ‘Can’t use these rooms for visits, sarge,’ he said, in a timid tone that sounded like it didn’t know what it was doing in his square-jawed, bushy-bearded mouth.
‘It’s not a visit,’ Gary said. ‘It’s an interview.’
The uniform still didn’t seem entirely happy. He shot a look at me that spoke twenty-seven volumes plus an appendix. ‘But, you know, for an interview,’ he said. ‘If there’s a civilian observer, you’ve got to fill in a–’
‘What civilian do you mean?’ Gary asked mildly.
The constable thought this through, and eventually got there. ‘Right you are, sarge,’ he said, in a nudge- nudge-wink-wink kind of voice, and he went on his way.
‘Thanks,’ I said to Coldwood.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘And thanks for the heads-up, too, you duplicitous bastard.’
Coldwood nodded. ‘Which is why we’re in here,’ he said, ‘and all on our lonesomes. Get it out of your system, Fix.’
‘You fucking knew she was going after Matt.’ I thrust a finger at his face. ‘You knew it, and you didn’t tell me.’
Gary nodded. ‘Right. I knew it. Did you?’
‘No!’ I exploded. ‘If I’d had the slightest fucking inkling, I’d have warned him. And I’d have kept my mouth shut in front of you and your better half, you back-stabbing little pig-farmer.’
‘I’m going to have to smack you,’ Gary admonished me.
‘On an interview?’
‘You had the marks when you came in. You’ve seen how reliable a witness PC Dennison is.’
‘Gary, why the fuck didn’t you at least give me a–’
‘Because it’s an open and shut case,’ Gary said. ‘And your best bet, if you really had nothing to do with it, was to stay well clear. Whereas if I’d told you we were about to arrest your brother, you’d have gone barging in like a fuckwit, probably got yourself seen tampering with the evidence and ended up on a bloody conspiracy charge. Because what you’re short on, Fix — what you do not have even a bastard trace of — is peripheral vision. You only see what you’re going for, and you walk right into every bleeding thing else.’
Gary had been talking in his usual voice when he started that little speech, but he was shouting when he got to the end of it. I opened my mouth to shout back, and — to my complete and absolute amazement — he was as good as his word. He clocked me a solid one on the mouth.
It wasn’t hard enough to knock me down, but it made me stagger. I blinked twice and shook my head. Licking my lips, I tasted blood. ‘Son of a bitch,’ I growled, and I started forward with my fists up. But Gary just stood there, staring me down, and after a moment I let my hands fall again.
‘Are you ready to listen to reason now?’ he asked.
I spat on the floor — a thick red gobbet — then met his gaze. ‘Have you got any?’
Gary breathed out heavily. ‘What I’ve got, Fix, is evidence. Which I’m about to share with you out of the goodness of my heart — unless you piss me off so much that I sign off early and forget you’re stuck in here until the morning. If you’re interested, sit down and shut up. Otherwise, say something really clever and sarcastic and I’ll be
