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'How sick is your husband? He looks as if he's wasting away'

'He's not sick,' she said. 'He just won't eat any food with colour in it.'

'I'm sorry?'

'No food with colour,' she repeated impatiently. 'Just grits and vanilla ice cream and cauliflower. Things like that. I want you to go now'

'Just one thing more,' he said. 'Who is Flood?'

Chapter Five

Seeing Flood Plain

The Doctor went by the police station early, hoping to catch Rust before his day started, and found him at his desk with a pile of papers and a takeaway cup of coffee from Cafe Du Monde. The detective eyed him warily. 'Another body?'

'Do you know of a man named Vernon Flood?'

'Hell, yes. He's got a sheet long enough to wrap half a dozen birthday presents in. Minor assaults and burglaries mostly. How'd you hear about him?'

The Doctor gave him an edited account of the party.'Apparently he wants to

"get into" magic. They ran him off at Death's Door and he began to hang around

Chic's.'

"That so?' Rust looked thoughtful. 'I always suspected old Vern might have done some low-end work for that cemetery-art ring, but we couldn't prove anything.'

'You know him, then?'

Rust grinned. 'We're close as kissing cousins.' He got up. 'In fact, I've neglected him so long he's probably pining away. Let's go pay him a call.'

'Are you sure you want a civilian along?'

'Oh, yeah.' Rust shrugged into his jacket. 'If he has any weird stuff at his place you can fill me in on it.'

They drove south in Rust's old police department Taurus, out of the city on Highway 90, then down secondary roads into a low country of swamp and cypress. Rust turned down a dirt road and they bumped along under an overhang of oak and bitternut. On either side, spiky cypress outgrowths stuck up from the water like deformed joints.

'This is very beautiful,' said the Doctor.

"This is bayou country. Mostly it's Cajuns live here. Flood's no Cajun, though.'

'How do you know?'

Rust shrugged. 'He just isn't. Name's wrong for one thing. It's not French.'

'I thought the people with French ancestry were called Creoles.'

'It's complicated.' Rust swerved to avoid a large, brilliantly patterned snake that wove rapidly away into the underbrush. 'But you can't really understand New Orleans without understanding the different bloodlines.

The French Catholic aristocrats who settled the city were Creoles. So were the folks descended from their slaves, the so-called free people of colour.

They had certain rights in Louisiana in the eighteenth century, before the Louisiana Purchase. Some of them got rich and owned slaves themselves.'

The Doctor looked at him in surprise. Rust nodded.

'Then, after the Purchase in 1803, the Americans came in, lots of what we'd call rednecks today. Likely Flood's descended from one of them, if he's even from around here. And the richer Americans brought their slaves, West Africans, who were culturally a world away from the black Creoles whose ancestors had been slaves in the West Indies generations back. But all blacks were niggers to the Americans.' He used the repellent word with disgust. 'Louisiana had these real precise definitions about race. If someone was even one-thirty-second black, he was considered legally a Negro, and the laws kept Negroes in their place.'

'What happened to the wealthy free people of colour?'

'Oh, mostly they died out.' Rust smiled grimly. 'Gone with the wind. There's still a few around. The mayor's from an old black Creole family.'

'And the Cajuns?'

'The Cajuns are another story altogether. They're descended from French protestants who fled persecution to Canada and then down here, and mostly they weren't planters but working people, fishers and woodsmen, who didn't own slaves. "Cajun" is a corruption of "Acadian". I told you it was complicated.'

With a shudder, the car bounced out of the trees and landed in a rubbish-strewn yard. A couple of old cars rusted companionably