Thicker Than Water

I just like to do good for goodness’ sake.’

‘You’re not a priest?’

‘Not in the slightest. My brother’s a priest,’ I offered, as though that helped to establish my own credentials. ‘Like I said, I really just wanted to check in on Kenny and find out if things were going okay for him these days. We go back a long way. In case I didn’t mention it before, I’m Felix. Felix Castor.’ (I knew I was repeating myself but I reckoned it was time to be persistent.)

I stuck my hand out again. It would have been rude to ignore it twice, and Mrs Daniels seemed deathly afraid of giving offence.

Which meant that I finally got to read her. This kind of random trawling is an automatic thing with me: the same morbid sensitivity that lets me see ghosts even where others can’t sometimes allows me to pick up surface thoughts and emotions from people’s minds when I touch them. So I do it even in situations like this one where there probably isn’t much to be gained.

What I got from Mrs Daniels was powerful, narrowly specific, and no use to me at all. She had a shallow cut on her forearm and she couldn’t think how she’d done it. It was making her itch like mad but she didn’t want to scratch in front of a stranger. That was also why she hadn’t wanted to shake my hand, because she’d left the cut uncovered to make it scab faster and she was embarrassed to have it be seen. She was worried about someone - no names, no image, just a conceptual knot thatignual kno was full of warmth and uncritical love - and worried in a different way about the time she was wasting as she stood here talking to me.

‘Cooking his lunch,’ she said by way of explanation as she held up the knife for my inspection. ‘I should get back, really. I can’t turn the ring down all the way and the fat might catch.

I thought I might have misheard those last two words, because they didn’t seem to be attached to the rest of the sentence in any meaningful way. But Mrs Daniels saw my puzzled blink and went on with barely a break.

‘Well, you asked me if things were going well for him - for Mister Seddon. They’re not. He’s going from bad to worse, really. I don’t think he’s ever got over it.