Thicker Than Water

Other and his friend Nobody. There’s also a straight razor, which all three of them had their mitts on at different times. And none of them is you. There’s no evidence trail, and there are seventeen other Castors in the Greater London phone book, with five more ex-directory. If we arrested you for being the only Castor we know personally, it could look awkward at the committal hearing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.

‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.

Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.

‘Right.’

‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’

I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advh ayed to antage. ‘Sure.’

‘Kenneth Seddon.’

My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.

‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.

‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question."

"‘Yeah,’ I admitted.

‘So you do know him?’

‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’

‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’

Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.

‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said.

3

Kenny Seddon was a name from another life - and the impact of memory, hitting from such an unexpected angle, was as grating and discontinuous as a bad special effect in a cheap old movie. Zoom in tight on my face, ripple dissolve.

I live in London these days, as you probably already noticed: London was where I fetched up when I’d had my fill of moving around, and it suits me pretty well. But I was born in Liverpool and I lived there until I was eighteen, the bulk of my childhood and adolescence falling across that black hole in space and time and good sense known as the 1980s.

So I grew up in a city that was in thrall to two different kinds of decay.

The first kind was historical - dating from World War Two - and it wasn’t anything that specially belonged to Liverpool or to the North-West. After all, the Luftwaffe hadn’t had it in for Scousers any more than they did for anyone else.