’
‘Then what do you want from me, Castor?’
‘Mainly I just want you to run some searches on Kenny Seddon,’ I said. ‘How long he’s been at the Salisbury. Where he was before that. Anything he’s done that’s left a footprint, and any recent events on the estate that he might have been mixed up in.’
‘What kind of events?’
I thought about Jean Daniels and her litany of hints and euphemisms: something had happened, but I wasn’t even close to being able to define what kind of something it had been. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘You could do that at your fucking local library,’ Nicky said acerbically. ‘You getting lazy, Castor?’
‘Well, there is one more thing.’
‘Go on.’
I took a sheet of paper from my pocket and showed it to him. Cwed> < On it I’d sketched the ellipsoid shape with the radiating lines - the one I’d seen twice during my brief visit to Kenny’s flat. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’
‘Looks like a schoolkid’s drawing of a vagina,’ Nicky commented. ‘Last time I saw one of those, I still had a functional heart. And a functional penis. You need the first to get the second, you see, because erectile tissue—’
‘W
‘Evidently it’s a bright, shiny vagina.’
‘It was drawn on a wall at the Salisbury. The words “Now it bleeds” were written in spray paint right next to it.’
Nicky shrugged. ‘The vagina hypothesis still looks robust,’ he said. ‘Why do you care, anyway? Is this anything to do with Kenny Seddon?’
‘It might be,’ I said non-committally. ‘It just struck me as odd, that’s all, so I thought I’
"‘But you said you were avoiding Gwillam.’
‘I’m avoiding a head-on confrontation with him, yeah. But I’m still interested in anything that’s going down at the
He acknowledged the compliment with a nod. By this time we were right in front of the doors to the auditorium.