Thicker Than Water

Basquiat and her harem of constables were all staring at me, a certain tense expectation visible in most of the faces. Coldwood was behind me, but something told me that he was watching me too. As nonchalantly as I could, I took the final three steps that brought me to the front of the car.

There’s something about your own name in someone else’s handwriting that gives you an instant blip of recognition, even when you meet it in unusual circumstances. And this certainly counted as unusual in my book. For one thing, it was written backwards, from right to left: but then, that was because it had been written on the inside of the car windscreen, by someone sitting in the driver’s seat.

F, first of all: a big sprawling capital F whose elongated upright stretched all the way from the top to the bottom of the glass: presumably a sign of how copiously the poor bastard must have been bleeding. A ragged red wedge hid the rest of that first word, apart from the curve of whatever letter came next.

But ‘Castor’, underneath and a little to the right, stood out very legibly indeed, in spite of the problems the writer seemed to have had keeping the crossbar of the ‘t’ and its curving upstroke separate, and in spite of a ragged tail-off on the ‘r’. But then, he was probably running out of writing materials at that point.

‘Jesus!’ I said. Or at least my lips formed the word. I don’t think any actual sound came out. The words ‘Use a pen, Sideshow Bob’ flitted incongruously through my brain.

‘Know anyone by that name?’ Coldwood asked, standing at my shoulder.

‘Jesus, Gary!’

‘I know. You probably want to breathe slow and deep. If you pass out on the road it will dent your rep.’

I groped for a mental handle or key: something that would make sense of this obscenity. For a moment there wasn’t one, but then the salient fact smacked me in the face like a slab of raw fish.

‘He’s not dead. He didn’t die.’

‘No. He’s at the Royal, in intensive care.

I’m used to death; and I’ve looked at it in the style pioneered by Judy Collins - from both sides - so maybe I get a little free and easy in my attitude. Right then, though, my stomach was pitching in slow, queasy arcs, and I suddenly felt like I was standing a couple of degrees off true vertical.

‘How could he not die?’ I asked, hoping my voice didn’t sound as uneven to the peanut gallery as it did to me.