Thicker Than Water

Working backwards from Mark’s age, it must have been when you came back from the seminary. Before you went to your first ministry. Is that right?’

Matt was still staring at me, unable to look away, unable to speak.

‘Is that right?’ I repeated. The details were going to matter. I couldn’t let him off the hook, even though I could see how much this was hurting him. I had to hurt him a lot more yet.

‘That was - the last time,’ Matt said. ‘We’d already—I loved her, Felix. I almost gave up the Church for her.

As it was, I just gave up my conscience. Did what any cowardly philanderer does - taking the easy solace and postponing the hard decision. But I swear to you, Felix, I never knew she’d had a child. My child. If I’d known that, I would have gone to her. I would have been with her, whatever it took.’

‘And you never saw her again?’

He shook his head, tears now chasing each other down his cheeks. ‘I - I only - only heard—’ He fell silent for a while, folding in on his pain.

Juliet looked at me inquiringly: she was probably wondering whether there was any point to this beyond pure sadism. Coldwood was watching me too, wary and truculent. He’d been dragged into this against his will and now he knew it bore on his murder case as well as on the current mayhem. He wasn’t happy, but he was letting me play my hand.

A hand in which razor blades counted as aces.

‘Kenny didn’t get in touch with me until after Anita disappeared,’ Matt said, his voice barely audible because he was speaking into his own chest, his upper body bowed now almost to the floor.

‘He said - he said she’d had my child, a long time before. He said he knew all the details. Names. Addresses. If I met him - on the Borough Road overpass - he’d tell me. He’d tell me everythinÓll d, g.’"

"‘And did he?’ Gary chipped in.

Matt looked up, startled. He seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t alone.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just - he said he’d lied to me. There wasn’t a child. Then he said there was, but he was already dead. He’d killed himself with a - a straight razor.’

‘And he showed you the razor,’ I said. ‘He made you touch it.’

Matt nodded.

‘None of this will ever stand up in court,’ Coldwood said distantly, as though to himself. ‘Okay, I buy Kenny hating his kid’s real father: feeling like he had something to prove, maybe.