Thicker Than Water

But those figures confirmed the sense that I’d been getting from Nicky’s printouts: the sense of a slow-building epidemic, cresting like a wave; of the Salisbury as a raft of lost souls in the path of some sundering flood that was going to get much, much worse before it got better. Assuming it ever did.

Once again, Bic’s was the face that came into my mind: the tiny human figure by which you measure the scale of something enormous.

‘What does it mean.’ I asked Petra, ‘when you put your head in the lion’s mouth and it doesn’t bite down?’

She shoved her lower lip out while she thought.

‘Yeah. For the lion, imagine that scary blonde who was in here just now. The one with the badge.’

‘Oh. Got you. You mean—’

‘She hates my guts, and she could have arrested me for - I don’t know. Something. Conspiracy, at least. Wasting police time. Consorting with known felons. Something would have stuck, and she knew it. So I’m wondering why she didn’t at least make the effort.

‘I’m sure you’ve got used to that by this stage in your life,’ said Nurse Ryall sweetly. And she was gone before I could think of a comeback.

The open ward didn’t seem like the right place to summon Kenny’s ghost, and ‹y’s>

In the end I locked myself into the disabled toilet on the corridor outside the ward, put the canula down on the floor in front of me and played while sitting on the toilet. I took it slowly, because the pain from the previous night’s musical exertions was still very fresh and very vivid.

It felt strange in a way, summoning a spirit that was already so familiar to me. Okay, it had been a long time since Kenny and I had met - at least, with both of us actually conscious - but most of the ghosts I raise are strangers and even after seventeen years Kenny was a long way from being that. Also, most ghosts don’t scare me: Kenny had been a monster to me back when I still believed in monsters, and locking myself in with his spirit was something that I did with a slight prickling of unease, even though I hated myself for that atavistic weakness.

The tune was slow in coming, and it was only partly because of my aching chest and shortness of breath. I had to overcome a powerful reluctance to open myself up to the music - to start the process that would bring Kenny’s wandering essence into focus in this place, at this time.