Thicker Than Water

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.

You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done, Mrs Daniels had said. About what? Where was the kid who’d slept in this bed? What was it that Kenny had never got over?

I was aware that anything I touched in here was going to leave marks in the dust.

Not fingerprints, because I was wearing gloves, but even so it seemed like a bad idea to advertise my visit too blatantly. I retreated with a slight feeling of unease, and went back into the main bedroom: Kenny’s room and, judging from the double bed, his wife’s room too. But she clearly wasn’t around, and nobody had mentioned her. In fact, Coldwood had already told me that Kenny lived alone.

I started with the chest of drawers.

It contained mostly socks and underwear and tee-shirts, and they were all in the left-hand drawers: the drawers on the right of the cabinet were empty. Evidence was mounting up: Kenny had had a family, and he didn’t have one any more.

He didn’t have any photos of them either, annoyingly: the bedroom and the living room were as void of personal memorabilia as a hotel room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Gideon Bible in one of the drawers.