Thicker Than Water

‘They’ll want to know why you didn’t ask to see any ID,’ I called hastily.

Nurse Ryall hesitated, and then turned back to me with a flush of anger on her face.

‘You told me—’ she began.

‘No, you just made an assumption,’ I countered. ‘And I played up to it. Look, give me a minute to explain. I can’t stop you from reporting me, but if you do we’re both going to be in the shit for nothing.’

She stared at me wordlessly for a long time. I held on for the answer, keeping my stare locked with hers.

‘Go on,’ she said at last, her tone verging on grim.

I pointed to the chair that Nicky had left vacant. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Because you said you’d only need a minute.’

‘That was poetic licence. I’ll need ten.’

She consulted the watch she wore pinned to her chest. ‘I don’t have ten minutes,’ she said. ‘I’m on ward rounds.’

‘Then come back later. Seriously, there’s an innocent explanation for all this.’ If you stretch the word ‘innocent’ out to its functional limits, I thought to myself, and then knot it into a balloon sculpture. Nurse Ryall looked unconvinced, but after another painfully overextended pause she finally nodded.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘In two hours, when I’m on my break. But it had better be good.’

‘I’ll see you then,’ I confirmed, feeling weak with relief. Well, feeling weak generally, if the truth be known, but relief was in the mix.

Nurse Ryall stalked away, accompanied by the concatenation of her heels like the hoofbeats of apocalyptic horsemen.

I tried to wade into the haunted depths of Nicky’s paper trail again, but my attention was shot to hell. Giving up, I thought about the few things I thought I knew and the many, many more about which I was totally in the dark.

Something - quite possibly something demonic - was haunting the Salisbury estate. And the ripples seemed to be spreading in the form of an increase in violent acts of every kind. Even in that cautious formulation, I was naggingly aware that there was something I was missing. But my mind was too distracted by drugs and discomfort to pin it down.

Kenny, who had a ringside seat from the eighth floor of Weston Block, and whose own stepson was one of the victims, had tried to warn me about something. Or at least, while dying in his car of an overdose of slash wounds he had written my name on his windscreen in his own generously flowing blood. He’d got my attention, at somewhere considerably over the market price.

And the Anathemata Curialis, an ultramontane Catholic sect dedicated to the overthrow of the risen dead and undead, was now doorstepping the flats on the Salisbury - raising subjects that Jean Daniels hadn’t wanted to discuss with me. I’d tried to step in on that dance and had got myself well and truly bounced by the big man, Feld. Clearly this gig was invitation only - and the invitation seemed to have extended to my brother Matt, even if it hadn’t quite reached all the way to me.

A consultant on his late-evening sweep was working his way down the ward, looking at charts without enthusiasm and making a few observations now and again to his retinue of admiring interns. The procession stopped at my bed briefly, but seeing that I presented nothing more interesting than a punctured pleura and a few bumps and bruises, there was nothing to keep them.

Bored and restless, I tried again to make sense of the paperwork. It wasn’t just the unappetising format that was making it hard for me, it was the content, too. It was like looking through a tiny, smeary window into one of the circles of Hell. A drunken fight where one of the combatants had pulled a can opener instead of a knife, and had put it to a use not too far removed from the one it was designed for; a late-night duel with sharpened pool cues; home-made shurikens and caltrops, piano wire and cheese graters . . . Okay, we were talking about a span of well over a year, but were the residents of the Salisbury so much in love with blood that they spent their time devising new implements for tapping it? The sheer invention on display was disturbing in itself, although it paled next to the terse, unreflective case histories. This wasn’t right. Nothing here was right.

A clitter-clatter of heels jolted me out of my reverie, and I looked up to see Petra Ryall approaching, grim-faced. She looked around, her expression defensive and resentful, but the consultant and his teenage sidekicks had moved on to pastures new, the fat man and the twitching guy were asleep and the kid was lost in his own world of high-fidelity audio input. She pulled up the chair, sat down, glanced at her watch once to note the start time.

‘Ten minutes,’ she reminded me.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Well, for starters, I’m not a detective. I’m an exorcist.’

That got a sceptical eyebrow-flash, but no other response. Nurse Ryall stared at me, waiting for more.

‘I bind and banish the dead,’ I translated.

‘How?’