He’d been handsome once: big-eyed, long-haired, slender in face and build. In a zombie it was pathetic and obscurely indecent. You wanted to look away. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you, and used to have to beat the girls off with a shitty stick.
I waited for a moment, because he seemed to be about to speak. When he didn’t, I decided to break the ice myself.
‘Anything I can do for you?’ I asked.
The guy grimaced and shook his head. ‘You look like someone I used to know,’ he said, his voice a bone-dry murmur. What was that accent? If he’d spoken again I might have placed it. But he didn’t. He turned away again and went on down the stairs.
Happy to disappoint you, I thought. But brief as it was, the encounter had an oddity about it that skewed my mood. The guy had seemed not just surprised to see me but unnerved. In fact he looked a little bit like the man in the story who flees to Samara to avoid Death, only to find he’s kept the appointment after all. Maybe Death and I have a family resemblance that nobody’s ever pointed out to me.
Well, it would have to keep. He was already out of sight, and in this maze I’d be lucky to find him again if I started after him. Anyway, I was here to check out the lie of the land, not to chase herrings of whatever colour.
The next walkway was on the eighth floor: exactly where Bic had said I should go. I stepped back into Weston Block through a swing door that didn’t swing any more on account of a broken mounting. A short corridor stretched ahead of me, with two doors on either side and one more straight ahead. The first door on my left was 137.
So Bic’s directions were right on the money. Interesting. I’d had my pocket picked before, but not my mind. Or had the news of Kenny’s near-death experience already filtered through to the Salisbury, making the kid guess that this was my destination? Occam’s razor said yes, but when you make a living out of dealing with the yobs and malcontents of the invisible kingdom you tend to keep an open mind on a whole lot of things.
The door to 137 was identical to all the others in sight — a single piece of wood, painted more or less the same shade of green as the tower’s exterior, with the number of the flat blazoned on an oval ceramic plate that was screwed onto the door at chest height, and only a Yale lock to keep the world out. I could have cracked the lock inside of a minute if I’d brought the right tools, and at some stage I might end up doing exactly that: but not in broad daylight, and not without my lockpicks. This was more in the nature of preliminary reconnaissance: you can get into a lot of trouble if you waltz at dead of night into a place you’ve never even seen for a spot of breaking and entering.
The walls inside the block were mostly free of daubed exhortations and expletives, but I noticed that something had been scrawled in black marker next to Kenny’s door, a foot or so off the ground. I bent down to examine it, moved mostly by idle curiosity. There were no words here: only an image as simple as a cave drawing. It showed a teardrop shape with straight lines radiating outwards from it in a ragged starburst.
‘He’s not in,’ said a voice from behind me.
I straightened and turned around. A woman was staring at me from the doorway at the end of the hall, which had opened without me hearing it. She was tall and red-haired, the red serving to set off the general lack of vivid colours anywhere else about her person. Her eyes were grey, her skin pale and freckled like the house-sparrow egg Matt had shown me once during his brief and uncharacteristically cruel foray into bird’s-nesting. She wore what you might call earth colours, although the earth in question would be the margins of a desert: sand and dry topsoil blowing away in a tropical wind that never quit. She could only have been about forty, but she looked older. You immediately identified her as someone who’d had a crummy life and bent under it to keep from breaking.
She was looking at me with something like suspicion. Either for purposes of self-defence or because I’d caught her in the middle of making lunch, she held a long kitchen knife in one frail-looking hand. The smell of frying that wafted out into the hall from behind her seemed to confirm the second hypothesis.
‘I’m sorry?’ I asked, smiling a slightly imbecilic, wrath-deflecting smile. Not that this lady had any particular wrath to give.
‘Mister Seddon. He’s not in. He hasn’t been in all day.’ The woman’s voice was very low, dipping lower still at the end of every phrase as though whenever she opened her mouth she was sticking her head up over a parapet and then reflexively ducking again in case she got shot at.
I tried to look surprised and disappointed as I ambled across the hallway towards her. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Miss–’
‘Mrs.’
‘Mrs . . . ?’
‘Daniels.’ She looked back over her shoulder with a distracted air, then back at me. ‘I can’t really talk right now,’ she said, and then, as if the lapse of manners had to be balanced or atoned for in some way, she added ‘Jean. Jean Daniels.’
‘Of course. Mrs Daniels. Kenny said for me to call today.’ That sentence hung in the air for an over-long moment, while I assembled some other lies to go along with it. ‘For the books.’
The red haired woman frowned. ‘The books?’ she repeated.
I nodded gravely. ‘I’m collecting for the rummage sale,’ I said. ‘At Saint Gary-le-Pauvre. The priest’s a friend of mine, and I like to help out.’
‘Oh.’ The frown didn’t disappear, despite this morally unimpeachable cover story. If anything it deepened. ‘Well, I know Mister Seddon’s not in because my Thomas had to take his post from the postman this morning and we’ve knocked six or seven times to give it to him. You’ll have to come back another time.’
I didn’t take the hint: this was a recon mission, after all, and that included making contact with the local citizenry. ‘Kenny’s a fine man,’ I said, throwing out a random hook. ‘But we’ve not seen each other in a while. I hope he’s well. I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself. I’m Felix Castor.’
I held out my hand, but Jean Daniels didn’t seem keen to reciprocate.
‘So you’re from the church?’ she demanded again. Her tone was solemn and slow: the tone of someone working through a complex syllogism.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you said “the priest”, so — a Catholic church?’
‘Well . . .’ Too late to temporise. ‘Not un-Catholic,’ I admitted lamely. ‘Definitely on the Catholic side of the equation.’
‘But Mister Seddon is Protestant, isn’t he? Bitter orange, was the way he put it. I remember it particularly because it was one of the first things he ever said to me.’
Bitter orange. It was a resonant phrase for anyone born and bred in the briar patch of Liverpool 9. Mrs D was right, too: I remembered now that Kenny’s dad and all his uncles had been in the Lodge, marching in bright orange sashes and Moss Bros suits along County Road on the Glorious Twelfth.
Fortunately, Mrs Daniels seemed more apologetic than indignant to have caught me out in a flat lie. Or at any rate, she went on talking to cover the social embarrassment. ‘The very next day after he moved in, when I met him for the first time by the lift, Mister Seddon asked me what denomination we were. And when I said we weren’t anything very much he wasn’t happy at all. He said we must have been brought up something, in a Christian country. So I told him my parents were Catholic, my Tom’s were High Church Anglican, and he never had another word to say to us.’ She shook her head in solemn wonder. ‘It’s a shame the uses some people put the Lord to — making hate where there should be love, and turning a good message into a bad one.’