Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

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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. Working backwards from Mark’s age, it must have been when you came back from the seminary. Before you went to your first ministry. Is that right?’

Matt was still staring at me, unable to look away, unable to speak.

‘Is that right?’ I repeated. The details were going to matter. I couldn’t let him off the hook, even though I could see how much this was hurting him. I had to hurt him a lot more yet.

‘That was - the last time,’ Matt said. ‘We’d already—I loved her, Felix. I almost gave up the Church for her. As it was, I just gave up my conscience. Did what any cowardly philanderer does - taking the easy solace and postponing the hard decision. But I swear to you, Felix, I never knew she’d had a child. My child. If I’d known that, I would have gone to her. I would have been with her, whatever it took.’

‘And you never saw her again?’

He shook his head, tears now chasing each other down his cheeks. ‘I - I only - only heard—’ He fell silent for a while, folding in on his pain. Juliet looked at me inquiringly: she was probably wondering whether there was any point to this beyond pure sadism. Coldwood was watching me too, wary and truculent. He’d been dragged into this against his will and now he knew it bore on his murder case as well as on the current mayhem. He wasn’t happy, but he was letting me play my hand.

A hand in which razor blades counted as aces.

‘Kenny didn’t get in touch with me until after Anita disappeared,’ Matt said, his voice barely audible because he was speaking into his own chest, his upper body bowed now almost to the floor. ‘He said - he said she’d had my child, a long time before. He said he knew all the details. Names. Addresses. If I met him - on the Borough Road overpass - he’d tell me. He’d tell me everythinÓll d, g.’"

"‘And did he?’ Gary chipped in.

Matt looked up, startled. He seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t alone.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘He just - he said he’d lied to me. There wasn’t a child. Then he said there was, but he was already dead. He’d killed himself with a - a straight razor.’

‘And he showed you the razor,’ I said. ‘He made you touch it.’

Matt nodded.

‘None of this will ever stand up in court,’ Coldwood said distantly, as though to himself. ‘Okay, I buy Kenny hating his kid’s real father: feeling like he had something to prove, maybe. But tenderising yourself with a straight razor and making it look like it was the other bloke? It’s a plan with a fair few holes in it, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a plan that might seem irresistible,’ Juliet said, ‘if a wound-demon was whispering in your ear. Blood and pain must have started to feel like desirable things in themselves. Kenny Seddon just tried to harness them to a different end.’

‘But it doesn’t work,’ Gary pointed out bluntly. ‘There’s still the angle of the wounds. Some of them were self-inflicted, but some of them couldn’t have been. A fit-up doesn’t explain the facts.’

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’ Gary’s tone was savagely sardonic. ‘I thought it did. Your fucking brother is facing a murder charge, you self-satisfied tosspot!’

‘My fucking brother,’ I snarled back at him, my temper fraying right through, ‘thinks his biggest sin was a fucking bunk-up with Anita Yeats eighteen fucking years ago. When in point of fucking fact, it’s this.’ I threw out my arms, indicating with a sweeping gesture not just the room, the flat, the tower, but the whole of the Salisbury Estate in all its singed, shattered, punctured, incised and blood-smeared horror.

‘This is your biggest sin, Matty. How long has it been since your last confession?’

In spring we used to walk to the Seven Sisters - the bomb craters on the Walton Triangle that had turned into lakes - and go fishing for frogspawn.