Thicker Than Water

some apocalyptic parade. They were about twenty storeys high, and the first thing you noticed when you looked at them was that each of the four rows of three had been painted in a different colour, shifting — as your gaze panned right — across the spectrum from pastel pink, through buttercup yellow and duck-egg green, to moody indigo. The second thing you noticed was the walkways that connected the towers at irregular intervals above the ground, welding them into one entity: the uber-estate.

I don’t hold much with premonitions. Mostly our unconscious minds just tell us what we already know, lending a supernatural confirmation to a preformed prejudice. But as I looked across the rooftops towards the Salisbury I felt that twinge of presentiment brush my mind again like a wind-borne cobweb. So what I’d felt earlier hadn’t come from the car: it had come from the distant vista behind it. There seemed to be a smudge of black like a thumbprint in the air, blurring my view of the Salisbury. It wasn’t smoke, because in modern, post-industrial London there’s nothing around to do the smoking: it was a psychic effluent, hanging there untouched by wind, immune to rain. It was the stain of a great sin, or a great unhappiness: or more likely, I thought, pulling my gaze away from the tombstone towers, it was the collective residue of a lot of smaller discontents and domestic tragedies, trickling together and then left to curdle.

‘I don’t know anybody there,’ I said. A stupid thing to say, really: it was just an instinctive reaction to want to distance myself from what I was feeling — from what was coming in on Radio Death.

‘You sound pretty damn sure,’ said Basquiat, looming behind Coldwood’s shoulder very promptly on her cue, as though she’d been waiting in earshot but out of my line of sight this whole time.

‘I mean,’ I amended, taking my eyes off the distant vista with an effort, ‘none of my friends live around here. I’m not aware of knowing anybody on the Salisbury estate. It’s something I would have remembered.’

‘Why’s that?’ Basquiat asked, politely but with an edge.

‘Because I’ve heard of the place. It would have stuck in my mind. Especially if I’d just popped over to stab one of the residents to death in his car before I’d even had breakfast.’

‘But you stuck in his mind, obviously.’

‘Yeah.’ My eyes flicked back to ‘F Castor’ written arse-first in black-edged red. ‘Obviously.’

‘So tell me about your movements last night,’ Basquiat suggested. A uniformed cop at her elbow flicked open a ring-bound notebook and held a biro at the ready. Basquiat’s beautifully proportioned unadorned face stared at me expectantly.

‘I already told Coldwood,’ I pointed out.

‘Right. And now you’re telling me.’

Better to draw the line now and find out where I stood.

‘If I’m under arrest,’ I said, ‘then Grandma Castor would turn in her grave if I said anything without benefit of legal counsel.’

‘You’re not under arrest,’ Coldwood said. He was still looking at the skyline, keeping his back turned to his colleague as though it hurt even to look at her. At the Uxbridge Road cop shop their feud was getting to be the stuff of legend. ‘Ask me why.’

‘Coldwood–’ Basquiat said warningly.

‘Why am I not under arrest, Detective Sergeant Coldwood?’

‘Because there are three sets of prints in that car — the victim’s, and two sets belonging to Mister A.N. Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

‘Right.’

‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advantage. ‘Sure.’

‘Kenneth Seddon.’

My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘So you do know him?’

‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’

‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’

Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.

‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said. ‘But he messed it up.’

3

Kenny Seddon was a name from another life — and the impact of memory, hitting from such an unexpected angle, was as grating and discontinuous as a bad special effect in a cheap old movie. Zoom in tight on my face, ripple dissolve.

I live in London these days, as you probably already noticed: London was where I fetched up when I’d had my fill of moving around, and it suits me pretty well. But I was born in Liverpool and I lived there until I was eighteen, the bulk of my childhood and adolescence falling across that black hole in space and time and good sense known as the 1980s.

So I grew up in a city that was in thrall to two different kinds of decay.

The first kind was historical — dating from World War Two — and it wasn’t anything that specially belonged to Liverpool or to the North-West. After all, the Luftwaffe hadn’t had it in for Scousers any more than they did for anyone else. It was just that most of the rest of the country seemed to have had the money to repair some of the damage: through some mysterious combination of municipal incompetence and cheeky mop-top corruption, Liverpool never did.

By the punk era the war had been over for more than three decades, but about half the streets I knew had gaps in the rows of terraced houses where bombs had hit — and the substrate in these random spaces, underneath the burgeoning weeds and sparse earth, was shattered brick and slate. We had a word for those places: we called them débris, pronounced ‘deb-ree’. We swam in ponds on the Walton Triangle that were not ponds at all but bomb craters, and on one memorable occasion when I was seven the whole of Breeze Hill was cordoned off for the best part of a day because an anomalous object had been found that some council functionary thought was an unexploded bomb. It turned out to be a hot-water tank of an esoteric design, but you really never knew.

The other kind of decay was different, because it moved and grew and shifted its outlines. It was a disease that we were all sick with, and didn’t even know we were — the slow, inexorable decline of Liverpool’s fortunes as a port and an industrial megapolis, which closed factories and shipyards, threw families out onto the street or more usually caused them to disappear without explanation, and turned my father’s life, like the lives of most of the men he knew, into a complicated game of abstract strategy where the goal was to find some place where they were prepared to pay you a day’s wage for a day’s work before some other bastard found it first and shut you out.

As kids, we experienced both of these things — the war damage and the economic meltdown — as almost unmixed blessings. Bomb-sites and boarded-up factories were our adventure playgrounds: spaces that the adult world had abandoned in its wake and took no further interest in, so that we were free to annex and colonise. The battlefield where I clashed with Kenny Seddon was a case in point — and so were the weapons that we chose for our duel to the death. But the reason why we became such bitter enemies was different. That came from me; from