Thicker Than Water

Just south of Elephant and Castle we turned off the main drag onto a service road that took a slack-bellied run-up around the back of the station car park before screwing up its courage and leaping over Kennington Lane in the form of a concrete flyover. All the other traffic on the road was pulling to the left or right in two confused, jostling streams before they got onto this overpass, because directly ahead of us three more police cars had been parked so that they blocked the whole carriageway: or at least the whole carriageway apart from a single narrow gap guarded by a hard-faced WPC.

Seeing us coming straight towards her she raised her hand to wave us away, but then she recognised either Coldwood or the driver and stood aside to let us through.

The road beyond had the unsettling emptiness of a school playground during the summer holidays. By this time on a weekday morning it ought to have been heaving; but there were only four vehicles that I could see, and none of them were moving.

Two of them were Astras in police livery, with uniformed cops standing in inert clusters around them. A blonde woman in a black Dryzabone was talking to one of the clusters, pointing off towards the distant skyline: two boys in blue went forth to do her bidding. I thought I recognised that tall slim figure and hard handsome face, but there was no point in jumping off that bridge until I came to it."

"The third vehicle was an ambulance, standing with its back doors wide open and its hoist platform down, and the last was a sprightly pillar-box red Ford Ka parked on a precariously angled concrete apron too narrow to be called a hard shoulder.

Something about the sight of it gave me a sudden qualm of unease. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, whether or not that response was coming from the part of my perceptual equipment I call my death-sense. I couldn’t see anything dead in the vicinity - or, for that matter, anything in that badly defined and mystifying state we choose to call undead - but then we were still a hundred yards or so away. When we got closer, maybe I’d find out what it was that had set me off.

But we didn’t get closer: Coldwood tapped the driver’s shoulder and we slowed to a halt at the side of the road, up against a buckled steel crash barrier that seemed to have done its job on more than one occasion.