Thicker Than Water

‘I’m celibate,’ I said shortly. ‘Only the pure in heart can seek the Holy Grail.’

Walking past Kenny’s door, which was now nailed shut and sporting police-incident tape, made my skin tingle as though I was showering in battery acid. I was nearly certain it wasn’t psychosomatic, although by now I had a vivid enough sense of the horrors that must have been enacted behind that door that I didn’t have to go reaching for supernatural explanations. Did the wound demon have a physical locus after all? Would an exorcism undertaken in Mark Blainey’s bedroom have a better chance of succeeding?

Another missed opportunity, I was willing to bet; like Bic.

Jean Daniels answered to my knock, looking like a woman who was self-medicating in order to perform open-heart surgery on her own ventricles, and had been called away in the middle of the procedure. She stared at me with hollow eyes, seeming to take several seconds to register who I was.

‘Mister Castor,’ she mumbled. ‘You’re back. I called you a few times, and left messages, but you didn’t . . .’

‘I haven’t been home, Jean,’ I said, ‘so I wouldn’t have got them. I’m really sorry. Can we come in?’

She nodded brusquely, stepping aside to let me in: then she realised I wasn’t alone.

‘This is—’ I said, pointing towards the cat’s-cradle woman. ‘Well, actually, who the hell are you?’

‘Trudie Pax,’ she said, holding out her hand to Jean.

Jean took a step back, as though Trudie’s hand was contaminated in some way. ‘We’ve already told Father Gwillam that we’ve got nothing more to say to him,’ she said coldly.

‘And we’ve accepted that,’ Trudie said sweetly. ‘In any case, Mrs Daniels, we don’t believe any more that your son has been touched by God. The way things have gone over the past few days has proved us wrong. But Castor has thought of something that might improve William’s condition, and we’re here to help in any way we can.

Tom had come from somewhere to stand behind his wife, so he was hearing this too. He looked almost as wrecked as Jean, and pugnacious with it, but Jean had locked onto the salient point in Trudie’s little recitation. Her face as she looked at me lit up with something like hope.

‘You can help him?’ she said.

‘Let me look at him,’ I said, by way of a non-answer.