Thicker Than Water

I led the way into Kenny’s flat and down to his gutted living room.

‘That was bloody blue murder,’ Gary complained. I ignored him and looked at Matt. He’d sustained a certain amount of damage in getting to this point - a bruised cheek, and a jagged cut on the back of one hand - but clearly he hadn’t been seriously wounded.

Yet.

‘Why am I here?’ he asked me, looking around in something like terror. ‘Why have you brought me here, Felix? Is this where—?’

‘This is where he lived,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sit down, Matt.

Pull up a broken-off bit of furniture and park your arse on it, because you’re not getting out of here until you’ve heard the truth.’

Juliet entered the room, rubbing her hands together.

‘It’s worse than I would have expected,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Well, you’d know,’ I said.

‘Get to the point,’ Coldwood suggested. He was leaning against the wall just next to the door, arms folded. His lip was thickened and his voice was slightly slurred, but he too seemed to have got away lightly.

Juliet’s flawless white skin, by contrast, was criss-crossed with new wounds, none of which would last: she healed fast, and she would have deliberately put herself between the others and the worst of the violence.

‘The point,’ I said. ‘Right. Matt, you didn’t sit down yet.’

‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Matt said. ‘Not in this place.’ He lookÓplaiv>ed around him with a mixture of fear and hatred.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then stand. Okay, we’ll start with the obvious. You have a son.

Or at least you did have one. He’s dead now. And there - right there - is our fucking problem.’

Matt made a strangled noise and staggered backwards, one step and then a second. Slowly he sank down onto his knees. Probably it sounds as though I was being unnecessarily brutal: but there was so much worse to come, there seemed no point in beating about the bush with the relatively straightforward stuff.

‘Oh God!’ Matt whimpered. ‘Oh God!’

‘But you knew that,’ I said. ‘You had to know that.

I mean, Anita didn’t want to be too obvious, but she named him after the next evangelist along. And how else could Kenny have got you to come out here and meet him, Matt?’

‘He said - but I wasn’t—’ Matt looked up at me with horrified, pleading eyes. ‘I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t - I didn’t want it to be true. If it was true, then—’

‘Then you left your kid to be brought up by a psychopathic bully,’ I finished. ‘I did wonder about that one.