‘You tell me, Fix,’ he suggested.
I waited for the other shoe to drop. For the most part I ply my trade wherever there’s a profit to be made, and the Metropolitan Police’s homicide division has been a lucrative source of income for me on more than one occasion. At one time, in fact, the Met had been my main client, and I’d started to take it for granted. But then, like an old married couple, we’d parted company at last because of irreconcilable differences, mostly arising out of me being arrested for murder. It had been a while since Coldwood had put any work my way, and a longer while since I’d asked him for any favours. So there was something else going on here, and I was damned if I was going to commit myself to anything, even an opinion, before I knew what it was.
But Coldwood seemed equally coy, and the staring match couldn’t go on for ever. I shrugged and reached inside my greatcoat. There’s a pocket there that I sewed in myself — deep but narrow, just the right size to hold a tin whistle with an inch of clearance at the top so that it’s easy to hook it out in a hurry. The whistle in question is a Clarke Sweetone in the key of D. I’ve tried other brands and other keys, but only in the way that a compass needle tries to pull away from north. It never sticks.
Whistle in hand, I headed over towards the parked Ka. From behind me, Coldwood said, ‘Fix.’
I turned and looked back at him. He hadn’t moved. ‘Yeah?’ I demanded.
‘Do it from here.’
I measured the distance to the car. ‘I can’t see anything from here,’ I pointed out.
Coldwood held my gaze. ‘How do you know until you try?’
There was a time when bullshit like that would have made me dig my heels in, when I would have turned around and walked away rather than play a command performance with a blindfold on. But at this particular time there was something like an unsettled debt between me and Coldwood, dating from an occasion — quite recently — when I’d almost got him killed: that one incident explained both the limp and the scar. And right about then, when I was more or less evenly balanced between giving him a tune and telling him exactly where and how deeply to shove it, the blonde woman came striding up to us, walking right past me without a glance to address herself to Coldwood.
‘This isn’t right,’ she said without preamble. Her expression was grim and tight.
Coldwood nodded. It wasn’t a nod of agreement: he was just acknowledging an argument he’d clearly already heard. ‘You’re down on record, Ruth,’ he said, ‘so you can stop banging the drum any time you get sick of the sound. But you don’t have any seniority on me here and this is the way we’re doing it.’
The blonde woman turned now and favoured me with a cold, clinical stare. She was beautiful — really beautiful — but in a hard and austere way that told you more clearly than words how little she cared about what you thought of her. She wore her hair short, and her blue eyes stared out at you pale and unframed, without the benefit of mascara. She favoured greys and blacks, with occasional concessions to blue. Maybe she thought warm colours would be provocative. Tonight she was at the darker end of her spectrum, and her subtle curves were reined in to leave as straight-edged an outline as possible.
‘Hey, Basquiat,’ I said to her.
‘It’s not even fair to
Coldwood cut in before she could finish.
‘I just want Castor to read the scene,’ he said. ‘I’ve used him before, and I’ll probably use him again. It’s custom and practice, and there’s nothing for anyone to hang an objection on. And you’ll notice that we’re standing way over here, not inside your perimeter. Not even close to it. You can even stick around and chaperone me, if you’re worried.’
Basquiat turned her gaze back to Coldwood, her eyes narrowing.
‘And that will help a lot,’ she said, ‘given that you came down from Turnpike Lane together.’
‘With a driver,’ Gary pointed out, looking away towards the rising sun. ‘You’re welcome to ask him what was said, on or off the record.’
‘Oh, please.’ Basquiat’s tone was blistering. ‘Any man on your squad will swear that black is pink-and- fucking-ochre-plaid if you tell him to. I want him when you’ve finished with him.’ Those were her last words on the subject, apparently, and she was already walking away as she said them. I gathered that ‘him’ was back to being me.
Barely acknowledging the interruption, Coldwood looked across at me and gave a horizontal wave, inviting me to get started. This time I accepted the invitation, because it was pretty damn obvious that I wasn’t going to find out what this was all about until I did. Not business as usual, Gary had said. Yeah, that was for damn sure — although anything that had him and Basquiat at each other’s throats was bound to have a familiar ring to it.
I put the whistle to my lips, looking towards the parked car because that was where Basquiat and the uniformed cops were and it was obviously the epicentre for whatever had happened here.
I started to play. Not an exorcism, because those take time to plan and prepare: this was more like an echo- sounding, sending my attention out along the filaments of the music to see what I could see.
This is what I do for a living, and if I say so myself I do it pretty damn well. If you’re an exorcist, you’re born with the knack: the extra chunk of sensory equipment that lets you see what can’t be seen and touch what can’t be touched. But each of us finds a unique and personal way to tap that common barrel. One might scrawl symbols in a magic circle; another might chant words in dead languages, or light candles, or deal hands of cards or any of a thousand other quaint, banal, potent rituals. I play music, and the music becomes an extension of my mind, plugging me in like the jacks of an old-fashioned telephone switchboard to the world of the dead — which, things being how they are, is usually buzzing.
It was a knack I’d discovered more or less by accident. I’d always been able to see the dead, but I never knew I could bind them until my sister Katie was run down by a truck a couple of weeks after my sixth birthday. It was in trying to dissuade Katie from coming into my bedroom at night with her blood-caked face and talking to me in the dark that I performed my first — entirely accidental — exorcism. I did it by chanting rude playground songs at her until she shut up and went away. Sounds. Patterned sounds, expressing in pitch and rhythm something that I couldn’t define or perceive in any other way.
Later I discovered that music worked even better.
Later still I picked up a tin whistle, and it shaped itself to my hand as though it belonged there. Christian Barnard must have felt like that when he picked up his first scalpel. Or Osama Bin Laden when he flicked off the safety catch of his first AK-47.
This particular tune didn’t have much in the way of either form or progression. It just ambled backwards and forwards through the same sequence of chords, all in the lower half of the whistle’s register and sounding somewhat sullen and melancholy. But as the notes skirled around me the world darkened: or rather, my perceptions shifted a little along the spectrum that has life and death as its two poles.
I was expecting to see the road get more crowded at this point. If anyone had died in the little red car, or under its wheels, then they ought to have come sharply into focus now. In fact, I ought to have been seeing them already, because the newly dead stand out like halogen bulbs in my eyes most of the time. But my death-sense isn’t infallible. The whistle is.
This time, though, and apart from the added depths and subtracted highlights, the scene before me didn’t seem to have changed at all. Okay, there was a smudged-out but broadly humanoid figure standing in the air a little way out from the edge of the flyover: a suicide, maybe, or someone who’d walked the parapet on a drunken bet and then fallen off. But the elisions and imperfections in that shape — the fact that I couldn’t even tell for sure whether it had been a man or a woman, or how old it had been when it shed its flesh and blood and bone and sinew to stand naked in the world — showed that it hadn’t arrived there in the recent past. It had died years if not decades ago and that was probably why I hadn’t seen it at first. Over time, ghosts fade like the colours on a cheap tee-shirt. And that ghost was the only one that was haunting this section of the overpass.
Turning my attention back to the parked car, I shifted my fingers on the stops of the whistle and slowly ascended the scale. Like most tin whistles, my Sweetone only has an effective range of about two octaves: but if you’re not too worried about the sensibilities of the people around you, you can make brief forays outside that range by half-holing and by varying how hard you blow. I took it as far as I could, an unmelodic shriek creeping in on the highest notes as I pressed down with all eight fingers and pursed my lips more tightly.
