He was away from the street for a long time — first of all in intensive care, then on a normal ward, and finally with an aunt way out in Kirkby where his dad sent him to recuperate. All of this was relayed to us by Ronnie and Steven, who without their big brother to make up the trinity were now humble rank-and-filers in the gang. Davey Barlow, the Igor to Kenny’s Frankenstein, faded out around then too, so we experienced something of a renaissance. I remember the rest of that summer as a good time, marred only by the fact that Anita also abandoned the gang after that day, and by occasional letters from Matt that made me resent his absence all the more.
When Kenny did come back, he came back as someone else. His sixteenth birthday had taken place while he was still away from the street, but it was obvious when we saw him walking up Breeze Lane eight months later that he was carrying an unaccustomed weight on his shoulders. He had a job now, at Plunkett’s garage, and a girlfriend out in Kirkby who he visited every Saturday night. He had a context that kept me safe in perpetuity from his vicious streak, like a Walton get-out-of-jail-free card. Grown men didn’t hit kids, unless the kids were their own.
So these were the events that passed in review before my eyes after Basquiat spoke the fateful name. They didn’t come in exactly that order, as a clean and coherent sequence: they were mixed in with a lot of other things. For me, thinking about Liverpool was always like trying to take one tissue out of one of those little hotel-room boxes where the bloody things are interleaved and as thin and fragile as the Turin Shroud: one tug and you take the whole box.
So I also remembered my mum coming home to Liverpool three years later to face my dad down and move in with her former fancy man, Big Terry Lackland. I remembered Matt’s finishing his holy orders and becoming Father Matthew Castor, on a spring day in torrential rain, wearing a rough-hewn but beautiful scrimshaw crucifix that Mum had bought from the pawnshop as his ordination present. I remembered — with confused emotions — my own escape, when I aced my A levels against everyone’s expectations including mine and pissed off to Oxford without a backward glance: the best way to leave, in my experience, if you can make it stick.
And as the cascade reached its inevitable conclusion, I remembered the one Castor who wasn’t around to see all this stuff happen. The one whose death taught me what I was and launched me on my path, bringing me by insensible degrees to this moment and this place.
I remembered Katie.
And the rest was silence, until Gary Coldwood broke it with a blunt question, pulling me by the heels back into the present day.
‘So you and Mister Seddon weren’t on the best of terms?’ he demanded.
I shrugged, as casually as I could manage. ‘It’s not a Batman and Joker thing, Gary,’ I said. ‘It was a hell of a long time ago, and I haven’t seen him since. Haven’t even thought about him.’
‘It’s probably fair to say that he’s thought about you,’ Basquiat pointed out, her tone hard. ‘He painted your name in his blood.’
I shrugged again. ‘Maybe he was starting to write his will,’ I suggested. Well, what the fuck? My conscience was clean, at least as far as attempted murders were concerned. Whatever this looked like, I knew what it wasn’t: it wasn’t The Tell-Tale Heart.
‘You still want to leave this hanging?’ Basquiat asked Coldwood.
Gary shook his head once, brusque and emphatic. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to take you in for questioning, Fix, and we’ll need a formal statement. I’m sorry.’ That one hit me before I was ready for it.
‘What about the other seventeen Castors?’ I asked, aghast.
‘They stopped being relevant when you told us you knew this bloke.’
‘So am I being charged?’
Coldwood opened his mouth, but Basquiat’s snarl cut across whatever he was going to say.
‘That would look great in court, wouldn’t it? Invite you down here to read the scene, then arrest you when you get here? No, Castor, you’re just assisting us with our inquiries. Anything else will have to wait until we’ve got the forensics in.’
She was looking at Gary rather than at me as she said all this, and it was clear that there was an unspoken question between them.
‘Under the circumstances, Detective Sergeant Basquiat,’ Coldwood said with clipped formality, ‘I think it advisable that you conduct the interview with Mister Castor. My personal and professional relationship with him probably precludes my being involved in interrogating him or taking a statement from him.’
There was a momentary silence, then Basquiat nodded, seemingly satisfied.
‘But if you’re thinking of having a testicle roast,’ Gary added, ‘then think again.’
‘He’s as safe as if he was in God’s pocket,’ Basquiat promised blandly.
She jerked her head in a way that obviously conveyed a lot of information to her entourage of bluebottles. Two of them fell in on either side of me and led me away.
4
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Basquiat played by the rules, mostly. She was just kidding about God’s pocket, but I got to keep my testicles.
She seemed mostly concerned with getting me on record about my previous relationship with Kenny, and she only cut up rough when I tried to back-pedal from the lurid story I’d sketched out on the overpass. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law in my time and I’m pretty good on the rules of evidence, so I knew that none of what I was saying could be used to establish just cause: but I also knew how bad it would sound in court if the Met ever did decide to charge me, so I was more careful with my phrasing than I’d been during the first rendition — and Basquiat, knowing her job, shone a torch into every area of vagueness and obscurity and tripped me up whenever I contradicted myself.
There was no malice in it, which made this a distinct improvement on the time when Basquiat had interviewed me with her fists in the course of the Abbie Torrington case. But I was still sweaty, dishevelled and exhausted by the time we were done — and, admiring the detective sergeant’s lean good looks in passing, I was reminded that there are more pleasant ways of getting that way.
After the interview and the grand, formal taking of the statement they left me to cool for a while in a smaller cell at the end of a long corridor that smelled of piss and stewed cabbage. Someone told me once that the Uxbridge Road cop shop used to be a workhouse back in Victorian times, and I can believe it. There’s a damp, miserable effluvium about the place that you’d need a Jamaican steel band and a flame-thrower to disperse. There are also a fair number of ghosts, and I got to meet three of them: two broadly human in appearance, the third an amorphous nightmare that had forgotten what it was long ago and now only held itself together by some inchoate impulse that kept it moving like a shark around and around the lower storeys of the building.
I was doing the same thing, only on the inside: prowling my own memories in pointless circles that always seemed to bring me out in more or less the same place.
Eventually Basquiat came back in and told me I was free to go.
‘What swung it?’ I asked her, knowing that she’d mainly been keeping me around while she made her mind up.
She looked at me hard for a second before answering: I had no right to ask, of course, and if they did end up charging me they wouldn’t want me in a position to second-guess the evidence. On the other hand, there’s never anything to lose by trying.
‘The forensics are starting to come through,’ she said grudgingly. ‘They confirm what Coldwood said about the prints. You weren’t one of the people who held that razor. There are also a few . . . anomalies about the wounds themselves. Things we’ll have to look at again.’ 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.’