Thicker Than Water

I walked into Weston Block, past Kenny’s door - it was still standing open, as I feared - and on to the door at the end where Jean Daniels and her family lived. I didn’t look behind me, but I knew I had an entourage. I decided not to chance my luck with another direct order, though. The spell could break at any moment. Or had it already broken? Was it the earlier drug-hazed bloodlust that was the enchantment? In any event, I kicked the door three times with my foot.

After a few moments there was the sound of someone fumbling with lock. The gang scattered like cockroaches when you turn the light on, so when the door opened I was alone.

A stocky middle-aged man with an inelegant comb-over stared out at me, backlit by the hall light so that I couldn’t see his face.

‘What the fucking hell do you call this?’ he asked, sounding despite the words more mystified than heated. Then his gaze fell to what I carried. ‘Oh God! Oh bloody hell!’

He scooped Bic out of my arms and turned on his heel, stumble-running back into the flat. ‘Jeanie!’ he bellowed as he went, heedless of the late hour and the neighbours’ slumbers. ‘Jean!’

I followed more slowly, into an infinitesimal hallway the exact same size and shape as Kenny’s, - it smelled faintly of fried fish - and through into a living room that was completely dark apart from the light spilling in from the hall. The man - Tom Daniels, I had to assume - laid his son down very carefully on the sofa of a three-piece suite that was too big for the room. Then the light clicked on behind us and we both turned to look at Mrs Daniels, who ignored us completely as she saw Bic laid out on the sofa.

In that first moment, maybe inevitably, the worst possible conclusion was the one that jumped out and ambushed her. She gave a wail like the first note of an ambulance siren, when it’s still climbing towards its ear-hurting peak, and I stepped aside hastily as she strode past us to the sofa. She went down on her knees and put her hands to Bic’s face, huge sobs shaking her thin frame the way a hurricane shakes scaffolding.

‘Billy—’ she moaned. ‘Oh my baby!’

Tom Daniels turned to me, his eyes wide with surmise and his fists clenched.

I stood my ground. My blood was still up from the fight outside and I had to struggle against an urge to raise my own fists in response. What was it with this place? ‘He’s not dead,’ I said, from between gritted teeth. But Jean had discovered this for herself by this time.

‘He’s all right,’ she wailed, still on the same painful, rising note: her relief sounded very much like her grief. ‘Oh thank God, he’s all right.’

Speaking personally, I wouldn’t have gone that far. Bic had just tried to throw himself off the walkway in what seemed to be a full-blown trance state. He was back in that state now, with the possibility of a concussion to add spice to the mix.

‘Mrs Daniels,’ I said, still watching her husband for sudden moves. ‘Jean. I don’t think he’s all right at all. I think he’s very, very unwell. Even in danger.’

She raised her head to look at me, her face tear-stained and hectic. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘Tom, ask him what he means.’

‘Answer her,’ Tom Daniels ordered me belligerently. ‘What happened to our Billy? Where did you find him?’

I followed my instincts and went for the truth again. Lies hadn’t worked all that well on Jean the first time I’d met her. ‘Right outside,’ I said, nodding towards the window. ‘On the walkway. I’m thinking he must have walked in his sleep. At any rate, he was up on the parapet and about to jump off. I got to him just in time.’

I was expecting another wail from Jean, but instead she gave a strangled sob and buried her face in Bic’s narrow chest, where there was scarcely room for it. Tom Daniels swore and shook his head, but then came back onto the attack.

‘Did anyone see all this?’ he demanded, glaring at me again.

‘Your other son and his friends came along right afterwards, ’ I said. ‘They didn’t exactly see it, but Bic told John—’

I stopped because John himself had come into the room - or at least, into the doorway. He stood there uncertainly, like a vampire who hasn’t been invited in yet and so can’t cross the threshold. I stared at him, slightly baffled. He was the same kid I’d met outside on the walkway, very obviously, but he was also different in some not-so-subtle ways. Calmer, for one thing, and with less of an edge to him: less of a narcotic turbo-tilt to the movements of his eyes.

‘Stevie Rawlings saw,’ he mumbled. ‘He was over by Sandford, on three, and he said . . . what this bloke said. Bic climbed up on the ledge, and he just stood there. Stevie shouted to him, but Bic didn’t answer or anything. Then he leaned forward, like he was gonna jump off, and this bloke caught him in the air, kind of thing. Pulled him back, before he could go over. That’s what Bic said, too, before he fainted.’

The mood in the room changed, as I went from potential enemy to something less easily definable.