‘Yeah,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘I think so. Down the — what-d’you-call-it — mean streets . . .’
‘A man must walk. Exactly.’
‘You’re dead laid-back for a detective, aren’t you, Sergeant Basquiat?’
‘I used to be on the drug squad,’ I said. ‘The ganja gets to you after a while. Cheers, Petra.’
I left her rolling Kenny carefully onto his side. Sooner her than me.
The cop on the door gave me less than half a glance as I left. People walking out were even less in his remit than people letting themselves in with the right security code.
I looked at my watch. Still nowhere near midnight, but by the time I got over to Walworth the witching hour would be over and done with.
Good. I had things to do over there that I didn’t want the daylight to look upon.
7
The Salisbury at night was if anything even less prepossessing than it was by day. The light of a hunter’s moon bleached the unresisting pastels from the faces of the towers, so that they looked like titanic ribs of bone, and shadows accreted like crusted blood under the walkways.
But the air was alive. While the residents slept, it seemed that the emotional miasma I’d felt on my first visit woke and stirred. It had been an annoying distraction when I’d been here before, setting my teeth on edge until I finally attuned to it and let it fade into the perceptual background. But it was in the foreground now with a vengeance, buzzing in my ears like an angry mosquito.
No, not angry. It wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was something else — but reaching for the word made the feeling disappear, the droning whine shutting down like a mosquito does as soon as you’ve got the rolled-up newspaper at the ready. And it wasn’t really in my head that the mosquitoes were buzzing: it was in my fingers and in the palms of my hands, as if there was something that I had to do that was getting more urgent by the moment.
Yeah, that was it, now that I thought about it. It was the same feeling of urgency and greed that I’d got when I’d touched the old wounds on Kenny’s wrist.
I came in from the north this time, and because I knew my way I walked more quickly. Maybe I could be in and out before this oppressive presence gave me a headache and ruined what was left of my night.
It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning and the place seemed deserted. Most of the lights in the flats were out, too, suggesting that the good people of Walworth had called it a night and turned in early. Maybe they were afraid of werewolves, although in real life it was the dark of the moon that caused most of the problems on that front: that was when the animal flesh fought back hardest against the human spirit that was riding it, resulting in some truly scary amalgamations of man and beast.
I scanned the graffiti wherever the moon shone its torchlight on a wall or pillar. I didn’t see the peculiar symbol again, but the slogan NOW IT BLEEDS was emblazoned on the wooden slats of the wheelie-bin corral, and underneath it in a different hand — or at least a different colour — GONNA GET HURT.
I found my way back to Weston Block and up to the eighth floor. It was as silent as the grave — not that that particular simile has a whole lot of meaning these days. I was half-afraid that the external door would be locked after dark. It wasn’t, but it opened with an extended, rust-stopped groan like a homage to a Boris Karloff movie. I opened it just to my own body’s width and slipped inside. Then I wedged it open with an empty Silk Cut packet that was lying on the floor so that we wouldn’t get the same performance again when it slid to.
Kenny’s door held out against my lockpicks for about a minute and a half: it would have been less than that if I’d been able to turn on the landing light, but it seemed a better idea not to. As soon as the cylinder click-clacked its laconic surrender I slipped inside and closed the door silently behind me. I could relax now. So long as I didn’t make any loud noises, I was unlikely to be disturbed.
I took the penlight I’d brought out of my pocket and flicked it on. Its strong but narrow beam showed me a dismal hallway, cluttered up with boxes and discarded shoes. Three hooks on the right-hand wall bore about sixty-three coats. The carpet, which looked to be of 1970s vintage, had a mandala pattern in a lot of vivid colours, none of which did anything for any of the others. There was the faint, sad smell of an unlived-in space ruminating on old meals, stale cigarette smoke and rising damp.
I searched the coat pockets. Since I had no idea what I was looking for, one place was as good as another. There were betting stubs in one, keys in another. The rest came up blank apart from fluff and orphaned matchsticks.
The hallway was only three strides long. At the other end of it, instead of doors leading to a living room or bedroom, there were stairs going down. I’d come across this sort of design before, when I’d lived in a council block off the Barking Relief Road: in the building trade it’s called vertical herringbone. Instead of having all the rooms for each flat laid out on a given floor of the building, you tessellate them in three dimensions: so you can have your door on the eighth floor, like Kenny, and the rest of your flat on the seventh — or if you’re unlucky, the seventh and eighth and ninth, depending on how awkward the space is and how ingenious the builders have been in not wasting any. Most people I know who’ve experienced it hate it because it means that your bedroom can be right up against someone else’s den — their TV blaring away on the other side of a thin sheet of plasterboard while you’re counting sheep with less and less conviction.
I went down the stairs, which led directly into Kenny’s living room. I was seeing it in the light from a lamp on the walkway immediately outside the window, because the curtains were half-open. I crossed over and closed them before turning on the light.
Nothing much here, either: an ageing three-piece, an aquarium in which a rainbow fish and a few neon tetras circled, a bookcase that held only a dozen or so books, a magazine rack stuffed to bursting with old copies of TV Quick, and a huge widescreen TV. I searched perfunctorily, then more thoroughly, looking under cushions and down the backs of chairs. Nothing of a remotely personal nature surfaced, and a fortiori nothing that gave me the slightest idea of what Kenny had been trying to tell me: assuming — and I was feeling less certain of this now than I was when I’d walked out of the Uxbridge Road lock-up — that he’d been trying to tell me anything at all.
Only one other door out of the room, and it led to a second hall from which all the other rooms opened off. The first one I opened was a bathroom, decorated in light and dark blue with a striking missing-tile motif. The second was a bedroom: large double bed, unmade; wardrobe and vanity table, the latter suspiciously bare; a cross hanging on the wall over the bed, which made me think — involuntarily and with a grimace — of my mum and dad’s room back in Walton, where the crucified Christ stared down on all their goings and comings. More than enough to give you functional impotence, in my opinion. Like the living room, the bedroom had a window that looked out directly onto the walkway linking Weston to the block next door.
If the flat held any clues as to what Kenny had tried to tell me, this was where I was going to find them: but something made me check the last door, too. It was another bedroom, and I stared in from the doorway with a cold prickle of recognition. It was a room I felt I knew, even though I’d only ever seen it once: and the once, needless to say, had been when I’d pressed my fingertips to Kenny’s wound back at the Royal.
It had all the hallmarks of a teenaged boy’s room. In addition to the hi-fi tower and profusion of CDs (mostly death metal and heavy rock) there were posters of Vin Diesel and Abi Titmuss on the wall — mercifully not together — and a lamp on the bedside table bearing the Manchester United logo. There were differences, though, between this room and the one I’d glimpsed in Kenny’s memories: the CDs were neatly stacked now: the general leavening of socks and boxer shorts that had graced every horizontal surface in the remembered room were gone, the bed was stripped, and the hi-fi had a thick, unblemished patina of dust on top of it. Nobody had lived here for a long while.