Thicker Than Water

I’ve already told you why I hate hospitals: the teeming multitudes of ghosts are as distracting as mosquitoes, as spirit-sapping as a constant hangover. That aside, though, this was a new-ish ward with reasonable decor. Reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Picasso’s Man With the Blue Guitar and one of Andy Warhol’s soup cans looked down on us from the walls, and the fluorescent strips were the kind that are meant to simulate outdoor light. Despite my bitching, it could have been a lot worse.

‘Okay, you’re kind of spoiled for choice,’ Nicky said, dropping a thick wodge of computer printouts on the table in front of me.

Actually, ‘thick’ doesn’t cover it: it looked like a Central London phone book. Propped up in bed in tee-shirt and pyjama trousers with every muscle in my body aching, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry, I could only stare.

‘This is—?’

Nicky gave the massive accumulation of data an affectionate pat. ‘Incidents on the Salisbury estate involving a police report or a newsfeed write-up.

I went back two years - and I widened the net to include an area of a few blocks on all sides of the Salisbury itself. I didn’t know how tight your brief was.’

‘So tight I’m having trouble breathing,’ I said, fingering the bandage across my chest. ‘Jesus, Nicky, how many incidents are we talking ab { wevinout?’

‘I didn’t tally up. And bear in mind, there’s a lot of redundancy in there - some things popped up in a lot of different places, and I didn’t bother to filter out because, hey, you don’t pay me enough for the deluxe service.

Also, I set the bar real low. If someone’s bike got stolen, it’s in there. Or say little Timmy went missing for an hour or two and turned out to be round at his gran’s . . . So long as someone called the cops and the call was logged, I threw it all in the pot. I didn’t discriminate.’

He paused. I could tell it was a pause rather than a dead halt because there was something in his voice - the eagerness to spill that Nicky feels when he’s unearthed something good.

‘But?’ I prompted.

‘But there’s a lot of good stuff, too. I mean, if you were looking for evidence that the Salisbury is a snake-pit, then you’ve got it. Standouts from this year included a guy cutting up his teenaged daughter with a carving knife because she stayed out too late, and a bunch of kids who caught a cat, dismembered it and posted the pieces through all the letter boxes in Boateng Block.