Thicker Than Water

Nicky dropped his voice for this last part, because the guy with the greasy hair had turned to look in our direction a moment ago, when Nicky’s tone became more animated. I nodded. I’d made the same connection myself.

‘I tried to get Juliet on the case, too,’ I murmured. ‘She went down there to take a look at it for me. But she’s being real cagey about what she found.’

‘Cagey?’

‘She won’t discuss it at all. She more or less said she knows what it is but she’s out of it. On the sidelines.’

Nicky thought this through, obviously fascinated. ‘Did she seem scared?’ he asked. ‘Was it, like, this is too big for her? She doesn’t want to get in deeper than she can deal with?’

I shook my head. ‘No, not that. Or at least, it didn’t feel like that. I just don’t know, Nicky. She’s never bailed on me before. Well,’ I amended, ‘for a while on the Myriam Kale case, when she was seeing it as a sisterhood thing, but even there she came around. I don’t get this at all, but I’ve seen Juliet face off against everything from were-kin to God Almighty. I don’t think there’s anything out there that she’s afraid of.’

Nicky acknowledged the point with a nod. ‘Well, anything else she tells you, I want to know about it,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He looked at me as if that was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. ‘Because knowing things is my shtick,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

‘Okay, Nicky.’ I made my tone emollient because I was too tired and sore right then to want an argument. ‘What about Kenny Seddon? You turn anything up there?’

He shrugged with his eyebrows.

‘A little. I mean, I got what was there to be got, but there wasn’t much. And none of it is what you’d call illuminating.’

‘Go on.’

He pointed at the thick stack of pages. ‘It’s in your reading material,’ he said.

‘Give me the highlights.’

‘What highlights? He’s born, he lives, he maybe dies. Bit of a cliffhanger ending there, but that’s as good as it gets.’

I held his gaze, and after a few moments he took an in-breath so he could sigh theatrically. ‘Okay, whatever. Full name, Kenneth Christopher Seddon. Born, Walton, Liverpool, late 1960s. The exact date is in there somewhere. He gets to age fourteen without incident, then has his first run-in with the police - possession of stolen goods. Court appearance, rap on the knuckles, off he goes. That’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship - he turns up on the magistrates’ court dockets six more times before he hits eighteen. Couple of affrays, couple of B-and-Es, drunk driving, and one moderately juicy wounding with intent.

‘Then he cleans up his act. Puts away childish things and doesn’t put a foot wrong for about five years or so. Or so we assume. Certainly doesn’t leave any footprint on the world. I’ve got a few possible pings on the name from Glasgow and Oldham - credit checks of one sort or another, mostly - so maybe he was on his travels.’

‘Maybe,’ I allowed. I’d already left Liverpool myself by that time, and truth to tell I hadn’t gone back much since. I’d n {h s>‘Mever seen Kenny on any of my brief trips home, but then, I hadn’t been looking for him. I had no idea whether he’d stuck around. A lot of my generation were shaken loose when the slums around the hospital were knocked down and new estates were built there. A lot more had already gone, deserting the sinking ship that Liverpool had looked like back in the Thatcher/Hatton era.

‘But then we get a solid sighting in January 2001,’ Nicky went on. ‘In the exuberant spirit of the new millennium, your man Kenny head-butted a cop after being pulled over on the M25, which places him in London and tells us something about the deficiencies in his survival instincts.’

He made a gesture towards the sheaf of paper. ‘I decided to narrow the search then, and hit a rich seam. There’s a K. Seddon working casual shifts at a haulage firm in Newport Pagnell in August 2001. He doesn’t stick around long, but then he pops up again at a Lada garage in Welham Green, where he works for a year on and off. Pays his taxes, keeps his nose clean.

‘He’s down on the council register in Brent in 2002, on the waiting list but not yet in residence. He gets sick of that, presumably, and heads south. Bribes, blags or begs his way onto the list in Southwark and in due course gets his offer. Not the Salisbury, at first. Somewhere a bit classier than that. He lands in a two-bedroom conversion in Curtin’s Grove - the only council estate in South London where most of your neighbours live in fucking Grade Two listed buildings. And two bedrooms makes you think, doesn’t it? There’s no mention of dependants on the application form, but obviously there had to be some. Presumably it came up at the screening interview, and the records were filed with the housing department’s formal assessment. Which was erased, as per the stipulations of the Data Protection Act, when he left that address.’