Thicker Than Water

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?’"

"‘With a tin whistle.’ I spoke over her next question, because I’ve had this conversation a lot of times with a lot of people. ‘No two exorcists do it the same way. It’s music for me. For someone else it could be pentagrams or incantations or automatic writing or interpretative dance. It doesn’t matter. You make patterns, and things happen.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I can make a ghost come to me by calling it.

Sometimes I’ll use an object - some personal effect or keepsake - as a focus; other times I just get the sense of the ghost by b {theimeeing close to it, and I can play the tune that makes it come. Then if I want to I can bind it and send it away.’

‘With music?’

‘Exactly. And I can do that with other things, too. Not just ghosts but . . .’ I hesitated. It was a big enough morsel to swallow already, without going into the full catalogue.