Nothing.
I let the last fractured notes of that shapeless abomination of a tune drop like glass splinters from between my fingers. Then I lowered the whistle, shook it twice to clear it of saliva and slid it back into my pocket.
‘So tell me about it,’ Coldwood suggested.
I turned to face him, looked him in the eye. ‘About what, Gary?’ I asked, with brittle politeness.
He nodded in the direction of the car. ‘What happened here.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happened here,’ I admitted bluntly. ‘But I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. Nobody died. And you must have known that when you hauled me out of bed and dragged me halfway across London to watch the sun come up.’
Coldwood did the deadpan again — one of his favourite party tricks. ‘This isn’t about what
‘That’s the human condition,’ I observed. ‘Now what the fuck am I doing here if you don’t have a DOA?’
He came away from the car’s flank, squaring his shoulders. ‘Where were you earlier tonight?’ he asked me, in the guilty-until-proven-dead tone that all cops use when they deliver that line.
‘What?’
‘Where were you earlier tonight?’
Well, the truth wouldn’t serve so a lie would have to do. ‘I was in bed, Gary. I was snogging Morpheus, tongues and tonsils and everything, until you woke me up and brought me here. Why? You got something you want to put me in the frame for?’
‘Was anybody with you, Fix?’
‘A squad of cheerleaders, but I didn’t get any of the names.’ Coldwood waited me out. ‘No. There was nobody with me.’
‘But Pen was in the house?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You two share your usual drink before bedtime?’
‘No.’
‘No? Then when was the last time anyone—?’
‘It was a
‘So when was the last time—?’
‘Jesus! A bit after one o’clock. So if someone sneaked down here to the wilds of Walworth and blew someone else’s brains out through their ear, then yeah, it could have been me. All I’d have had to do is avoid those roadworks around Saint George’s Circus, and I’d have been laughing. Then again, if brains were flying, I think I would have got a hint of them just now. But I didn’t. And you being a homicide detective, Gary, that puzzles me. It puzzles me to Hell and back again. So I repeat: what the fuck?’
It looked as though the preliminary interview was over. Gary’s gaze shot off to stage left again, towards the red car with its entourage of plods. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go take a look. But don’t touch anything. If you do, we’ll both probably end up wishing you hadn’t.’
What I was wishing was that I’d declined Coldwood’s invitation in the first place. But then it hadn’t been phrased in a way that left me the option. I walked over to the car, aware that he was following me at a discreet distance. Basquiat was still throwing her weight all around the uniformed division, but when the cop next to her looked in my direction she followed his gaze and our eyes met.
She gave a gesture to the uniforms that basically meant back off, and they did. As I walked around the side of the car, everyone got out of my way. That gave me a clear view of the amazingly wide bloodstain that had spilled down the embankment from the car’s driver-side door. A sheet of clear plastic had been laid over the stain, its edges neatly anchored with white marker tape and annotated with esoteric symbols. Not magic symbols, I hasten to add: not the lexicon of wards and stay-nots that I know all too well. These were the marks of a different mystery, signalling trajectories, angles, identities, values, place markers for people and objects removed for forensic testing. It wasn’t a world that I was particularly at home with.
Basquiat nodded towards the windscreen, but I was sideways-on to it and whatever revelation awaited me there was still a few seconds away. I slowed and stared in through the side window, amazed at the sheer amount of blood that had splashed all over the upholstery, the dashboard, the steering column. There were even a pair of fluffy dice, gore-covered and dangling like trophies from a bullfight. And if someone had fought a bull inside this cramped little car, then maybe the volume of blood that had been spilled was reasonable after all.
Basquiat and her harem of constables were all staring at me, a certain tense expectation visible in most of the faces. Coldwood was behind me, but something told me that he was watching me too. As nonchalantly as I could, I took the final three steps that brought me to the front of the car.
There’s something about your own name in someone else’s handwriting that gives you an instant blip of recognition, even when you meet it in unusual circumstances. And this certainly counted as unusual in my book. For one thing, it was written backwards, from right to left: but then, that was because it had been written on the inside of the car windscreen, by someone sitting in the driver’s seat. More strikingly, it was written in blood.
F, first of all: a big sprawling capital F whose elongated upright stretched all the way from the top to the bottom of the glass: presumably a sign of how copiously the poor bastard must have been bleeding. A ragged red wedge hid the rest of that first word, apart from the curve of whatever letter came next.
But ‘Castor’, underneath and a little to the right, stood out very legibly indeed, in spite of the problems the writer seemed to have had keeping the crossbar of the ‘t’ and its curving upstroke separate, and in spite of a ragged tail-off on the ‘r’. But then, he was probably running out of writing materials at that point.
‘Jesus!’ I said. Or at least my lips formed the word. I don’t think any actual sound came out. The words ‘
‘Know anyone by that name?’ Coldwood asked, standing at my shoulder.
‘Jesus, Gary!’
‘I know. You probably want to breathe slow and deep. If you pass out on the road it will dent your rep.’
I groped for a mental handle or key: something that would make sense of this obscenity. For a moment there wasn’t one, but then the salient fact smacked me in the face like a slab of raw fish.
‘He’s not dead. He didn’t die.’
‘No. He’s at the Royal, in intensive care. They’re fifty-fifty as to whether he’ll pull through.’
I’m used to death; and I’ve looked at it in the style pioneered by Judy Collins — from both sides — so maybe I get a little free and easy in my attitude. Right then, though, my stomach was pitching in slow, queasy arcs, and I suddenly felt like I was standing a couple of degrees off true vertical.
‘How could he not die?’ I asked, hoping my voice didn’t sound as uneven to the peanut gallery as it did to me.
Coldwood’s tone, by contrast, was blunt and matter-of-fact. ‘He just didn’t lose enough blood, amazingly. He was cut up like you wouldn’t believe. His face. His throat. His upper torso. Defensive wounds on his hands, too, which is probably how he was able to write your name. Someone spent a lot of time on him and tried out a lot of different angles. Mostly pretty shallow cuts, except for one across his shoulder and into his throat. If he dies, that will be the one that killed him. Went right through the brachio-cephalic artery. Hence most of this mess: the brachio is like Old Faithful in pillar-box red.’
Gary likes to flaunt his knowledge of anatomy, picked up when he did his BTEC higher certificate in forensic medicine at Keighley College. At any other time I would have bounced back with some caustic comment about what you can learn working round the back of a Fleet Street pie shop, but right then the wellsprings of my jaunty banter seemed to have dried up. Or maybe congealed.
‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘I mean — who is he?’
‘Local lad. Lived over there, all on his tod.’ Coldwood pointed off to the east, where the horizon was dominated by one of South London’s least-loved landmarks: the Salisbury estate. I’d seen it a couple of times before, so I knew what it was. Another bit of utopian city planning gone tits-up and stinking as soon as the paint dried and the real world set in.
Twelve massive tower blocks were arranged in a three-by-four formation: guardsmen standing to attention in
