Thicker Than Water

’ Her eyes defocused for a moment, as if she was taking that line of reasoning a little further inside her head. Then she recollected herself and became brisk. ‘So we won’t be charging you just yet, Castor. But you should probably keep yourself available in case we need to talk to you again. Tell us if you’re going anywhere.’

‘What about if I go to the Salisbury?’ I asked.

Her expression soured. ‘I’ve got two gorillas on my team,’ she said. ‘They were transferred out of Lambeth for questionable use of force.

If I see you anywhere near my crime scene I’m going to get the pair of them to give you a Swedish massage in the back of a slam van. My sacred, solemn word.’

‘I’ve had promises like that before,’ I said, accepting the little bag with my belongings in it. ‘I always end up getting my heart broken.’

‘Don’t worry about your heart, worry about your neck,’ Basquiat suggested as she walked out.

Sometimes it’s best to let events take their course. As Taoists say, the best direction is wu wei - with the course of the water.

You abandon the illusions of will and control and drift freely in the currents of life letting chance or fate choose your direction.

I’m not a Taoist. For the most part, when it comes to the river of life lieiver ofI sink to the bottom and then I start walking. Against the current.

So now, being a free man again and loosed onto the streets in the dazzling, over-emphatic sunshine, instead of declaring a goof-off day and making a beeline to the nearest pub to meditate on my misspent youth I found my thoughts drifting to the Salisbury - and to that stubborn stain of psychic effluent that I’d seen from afar.

Was that what Kenny had been trying to tell me about?

Could it hurt to take a look?

The answer was yes, of course. It’s always yes. But I went anyway.

Back in the nineteenth century, when London was basically a big pile of crap with some buildings floating in it, and when a cholera epidemic was raging through the city like a drunk with a Gatling gun, they had this theory about what they were dying of.

Nobody had made the link yet to infected water - not until John Snow came along in the 1850s with his epidemiological version of the New Testament. So the best idea they could come up with in the meantime was the miasma: a vast cloud of bad air, the exhaled breath of a million diseased and dying people, that drifted over London and infected you if you breathed it in.