Thicker Than Water

It’s too big, and it doesn’t have a proper focus. It’s like someone tore a whole bunch of ghosts into confetti and sprinkled them over the entire estate.’ I threw out my hands in an inadequate gesture, fingers spread. ‘The feeling is everywhere, Juliet. I’ve never come across anything quite like it.’

‘Couldn’t it just be a lot of different ghosts? You said yourself this place is a slum. And it’s old enough now for a lot of people to have died there.’

Reflexively, I touched my left hand to my chest - to where my tin whistle nestled close to my heart.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It couldn’t be that. I’d hear it differently. You know how my thing works. To me, a bunch of ghosts in the same space would be kind of like half a dozen bands jamming in the same room. This was just one impression. One thing, but spread out over a wide area. It’s like - you know how they say ants and bees don’t have individual minds? That they’re part of a hive mind, a collective self?’

‘Go on.’

‘That’s all. It was all around me, and it was all the same thing.

Big. Broken up. Not localised. Equally strong over the whole area of the estate, which is like a quarter of a mile from end to end. Did you ever come across anything like that?’

Juliet considered this, furrows of concentration appearing on her brow. While she thought, I put some time into just admiring her face: it never felt like time wasted.

‘Possibly,’ she said at last. ‘But not for a long time.’

‘Will you go take a look?’

She didn’t answer for a moment.

She was looking at me as if she was trying to read something in my face. Or maybe she was just exasperated by my inadequate verbal photofit.

‘If I’m passing,’ she allowed, ‘I’ll take a look.’

‘Thanks, Juliet.’

‘If I’m passing, Castor. You wait patiently and you don’t hassle me. I’ll call you as and when.’

‘Thanks,’ I said again.

That would have to do, for now. I thanked her for the advice about jugulars and hit the road.

6

I hadn’t thought about Anita in years, and now suddenly I couldn’t get her out of my head.

Every time my mind went into idle, as it did while I was Tube-hopping south and west across London, old memories of her kept popping up out of nowhere - no doubt shaken and stirred from the cerebral substrate by the pants-wetting trauma of seeing my name written in Kenny Seddon’s blood.

Had I fancied her? Jesus, who was I trying to kid? Of course I had. More than once, in fact.