Authors: Paul Cornell
‘Fuck,’ said Ross, ‘that’s why Toshack didn’t send her after me. I was up north.’ She added a note to that effect to the board, under Losley’s name.
They mulled that over for a few moments.
‘I’ll see if she’s caught on camera anywhere else inside the nick,’ said Quill. ‘Though I don’t know if we’ll learn anything more from it. Meanwhile . .
.’ he turned to the others and realized that, with two UCs and an analyst, he had no sensible way of picking who should do the legwork. ‘Toss a coin for who calls up West Ham again. See
if they have a list of people who they sold their soil to. Then tell them to stop.’
They actually did the coin toss, and it turned out to be Costain whose job it was to cajole and intimidate the West Ham hierarchy. Quill listened to him doing it, impressed but
also a bit freaked out. There was something in the man’s voice that sounded as if it was his first day on the job now, too eager to impress. He felt that Losley had already taken a piece out
of one of his team by making Costain behave like that. The football club turned out only to have a mailing list of people who’d bought soil over the internet. Getting that sent over was no
problem, and indeed it arrived by immediate email. But they were selling a lot of soil right now, because they were in the process of moving to their new home, and every fan wanted a piece of the
old Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, and those in charge couldn’t see any reason why the police would want them to cease trading. All Costain could say was, ‘it’s an operational
matter.’
When Quill waved to him to give the phone over to him and have a superior officer yell at them, Costain held up a hand and went into overdrive. ‘You know what you get when you Google
“West Ham” now? Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer . . . oh, look, there’s also some news about your FA Cup run, there on the third page. Only saving grace is,
you’re helping to catch this killer by cooperating so fully. Yeah, I will speak to your chairman, that’d be nice.’ When he eventually put down the phone, job done, Quill slapped
him on the back.
Costain nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
That afternoon, Quill led his small team into Gipsy Hill, causing a raised eyebrow from the station reception officer on shift when she saw Costain and Sefton. Everyone would
now be gossiping, Quill knew, about the huge pay-off from what had originally looked like a weird and intimidating spin-off. And everyone would be wondering why they themselves hadn’t been
considered good enough or straight enough to go after the real juice behind the Toshack organization. Seeing the four of them march in right now, including the UCs, half of the operational team
would assume they were here to nick someone, and the other half that just showing them those two UCs was some sort of demonstration of trust.
Plus, of course, Quill’s lot hadn’t slept and they all looked like tramps.
Nods and smiles of appreciation greeted Quill when he entered the Ops Room, but he could feel the dutiful nature of it, the fear and irony at the edge of it. Goodfellow was busy to overflowing
with paperwork and personnel, but it was all post-raid stuff eclipsed now by his serial killer. Quill felt glad to be back in his real world. Except here came Harry, with his dad beside him. Quill
looked over his shoulder and saw the other three checking out this new vision. Well, at least nobody else in the nick seemed to be carting dead relatives around with them.
Harry held out his wrists. ‘It’s a fair cop, Jimmy.’
‘Don’t kow-tow to him,’ said his dad. ‘You little shit, you’re worth ten of him.’
Quill wished desperately that he could talk to Harry alone. That they could go for a pint again, be proper mates again. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘come on now—’
‘What,’ said Harry, suddenly serious, ‘you’re not
really
here for me, are you?’
‘Don’t be fucking scared of him! What sort of a friend is he, to lord it over you?! He’s just a pretend copper, an actor playing a part!’
Quill clapped his hands together to get the room’s attention. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you lot, listen. I came over from my Siberian exile to say that Operation Toto has
found conclusive proof of what I always suspected: there isn’t and never has been a security leak in Operation Goodfellow. More than that I can’t tell you, only that . . . I never
bloody believed it, okay? I never sat there looking down at you lot, thinking any single one of you, Harry here included, were anything but the best bloody coppers in the world, all right? And to
be put at this distance from you like that . . .’ He found he had a catch in his throat, and let it stop him. To his amazement, Harry came over and put a hand on his shoulder, which made his
dad scowl. And the applause slowly started up again from the whole room. Only this time it was genuine.
Quill raised a hand in acknowledgement, then clapped an arm around Harry’s shoulder, and hauled him away from his dad. ‘And, erm, also we popped over ’cos we’re after the
keys to the evidence room. And any chance of a cup of sugar?’ Behind him, he saw Sefton putting his hand right through Harry’s dad, and getting a glare in return.
‘Jimmy, mate,’ said Harry, ‘I’ll open it up for you myself.’ Quill followed him through the door, looking over his shoulder to where the other three were all
backing out of the room quickly, embarrassed by and not used to dealing with the appreciation of their comrades. He was glad they’d got to see that, though.
Ross had hoped that the door of the evidence room would be heaved open to reveal a glittering mass of objects: like the contents of that locked study in the Toshack house that
she’d had such expectations of, but that had contained no juice at all when the UCs had searched it. She’d hoped that this look back into Goodfellow would be more fruitful than
Quill’s examination of the operation’s files. But at first glance that was not to be. The shelves contained rows of tagged evidence, and a pile of Toshack’s favourite cardboard
boxes at the back, but nothing at all leaped out. Their Sight counted for nothing here. She’d delivered some brave words about Losley, but it was now slowly sinking in that her revenge was
still going to count for nothing. More than that, something worse had taken Toshack’s place, and she hadn’t prepared herself for it, hadn’t focused herself in the right way. The
death of her father was now sidelined. It felt horribly selfish to make the pursuit of Losley all about her own teenage injuries. But what else could give her the stimulus she needed to get through
this?
‘So we look through it all again,’ announced Quill. ‘We untag, process, seal and record.’
‘I’ll give you a hand if you like,’ said Harry. ‘Be good for me to catch up.’
So they worked their way through all the stuff.
‘Why,’ said Sefton, ‘did this bloke keep eighty-three stationery boxes with nothing in them?’ He glanced over to where Harry was busy opening boxes, Quill being forced to
look over his shoulder continually, because Harry wouldn’t be able to see what they were looking for. Harry’s dad kept berating him, both of them getting increasingly worked up.
‘There was nothing like this when my dad was in charge of the gang,’ remarked Ross. She was starting to feel the effects of fatigue, seeing things out of the corner of her eye which
scared her awake again, but which weren’t real, just memories, the symptoms of sleep trying to force its way into her.
‘He kept his local branch of Staples busy,’ said Sefton. ‘That’d be good for his epitaph.’
‘Though it does fail,’ observed Ross, ‘to tell the whole story.’
‘Listen to you, with the copper jokes.’
‘Why is he looking over your shoulder?’ Harry’s father prodded. ‘Look at him, he’d much rather have just his new friends here. He doesn’t
trust you. You’re not quite the thing, are you? Not any more.’
‘You may have wondered why I’m looking over your shoulder,’ said Quill to Harry. ‘It’s ’cos I’m looking for a particular piece of evidence, and you
wouldn’t recognize what you were looking at.’
‘What is it, exactly?’
‘Can’t tell you. Due to the usual operational bollocks. But – tell you what – you find
anything
unusual,’ he looked meaningfully towards Harry’s dad,
‘and it’ll be pay dirt. Then I’ll use it to try and get you recruited for Toto. And how often do you get to use that sentence?’
Harry nodded appreciatively, and took another box down from the shelf.
Quill waited for a moment to see if Harry’s dad was going to react to anything, then, when he didn’t, wandered over to the others, glancing back to see the ghost looking at him
angrily. ‘He’s a bit one-note,’ he remarked quietly. ‘I was hoping, ’cos he was his dad, he’d want to help Harry a bit and so he’d whizz about like a genie
and find what we’re looking for. But he’s all about delivering the abuse.’ He sighed. ‘I can be a bit of a bastard, you may have noticed.’
Quill felt the energy draining from his team as it became clear they weren’t going to find anything new. He said a fond goodbye to Harry, glowered at his dad, and forced
on himself another burst of enthusiasm. He drove them out to the Toshack house, so they could keep talking in the car, and, apart from a couple of near misses, found that nothing of the Sight
jumped out to stop him from driving safely. Maybe, he said, the wonders were still concealed in the place itself. But the house, emptied for purposes of evidence, was completely normal. Even that
regularly locked office the UCs had had such high hopes of turned out to be utterly mundane. As night came on, they returned to the Hill and the Portakabin, and managed, slumped together, to watch
CCTV footage from the nick that merely showed Losley, as expected, impossibly approaching and walking through the wall of the interview room. All that they’d recently added to the board was a
list of notes in the Concepts section, beneath a new heading about ‘Soil’.
‘I think we’ve worked off a bit of that original shock,’ said Quill, ‘so you’ll be ready for what comes next.’ They all looked up at him at once, those
defeated faces again expectant. ‘We know where she’s going to be. She might have only one bolt-hole left to run to. And we know she’s got a limited fuel supply. She’s a big
monster, but so’s the Met. Normal police methods have got us a long way, so let’s use them to see how much of her is merely front. Go home and get some kip, because tomorrow we’re
going to nick her.’
‘You look terrible,’ said Lofthouse. ‘Will a drop of gin help with that?’
Quill waved that suggestion aside, settling heavily into the comfort of the chair facing her desk. ‘It’s only ten o’clock at night, so a bit early for me.’ He noticed
that she wasn’t wearing her charm bracelet, and then felt a little uncomfortable about noticing it.
‘Bit of a blip in the media coverage last night. They went away again through lack of fresh material, thank God. What’s this about a broken window and a hoo-hah at the crime
scene?’
Quill didn’t want to lie to her. ‘Just . . . one of those things,’ he replied.
‘Have you got everything you need for tomorrow?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Ta for getting that sorted so fast.’
‘A lot of it involved persuading Brian Finch, the Stoke City chairman, that his players might have anything to fear from a mad old woman – even one who poisons people.’
Quill suddenly thought of something. Did the bemusement they’d all felt at the super putting this incredibly weird team together mean she knew something extra about this situation
he’d found himself in? ‘Does . . . the word “protocol” mean anything to you, ma’am?’
‘Are you saying that operational protocol is getting in the way of—?’
Quill shook his head, dismissing it. ‘Thanks for all you’ve done, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it pays off tomorrow.’
Quill drove himself home to his semi in Enfield. A journey which seemed to take a day. He had to keep the radio turned way up to keep himself awake. Every now and then, outside
the car, some weird sight shouted into his eyeballs. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he responded.
The lounge floor was covered in bizarre novelties. The kitchen floor was messy and the house smelt of . . . must be some problem with the plumbing. But the Sight told him
nothing disturbing about any of the rooms he looked in, thank God. Outside, his street had looked normal too. He heard music from upstairs, so Sarah was home.
He looked round the door of her office, trying to project sobriety before he remembered that he was actually sober. She didn’t look up from her computer, therefore he knew she was angry
with him. He watched the back of her head, the defensive hunch of her shoulders. He’d been thinking about this all the way home. He wanted to tell her everything, but she just wouldn’t
believe him. They weren’t . . . close enough, he felt, for him to tell her something impossible and for her just to accept it. Maybe they had been close enough once. The more he’d
thought about it, the more he’d found there was now this . . . hole in the middle of their relationship. It was as if it had taken him witnessing the impossible to make him realize that. But
he had no idea what the vacuum between them was, or how to start fixing it. Sorting stuff like that out was something he wasn’t naturally equipped for. He and Sarah had always just got on
with it, and neither of them liked the deep and meaningful. Which was awkward now that life had got deep and meaningful.
‘Love,’ he began, ‘listen, I’ve been thinking about us moving out of the city, Reading or somewhere, me commuting in—’
‘Have you?’ She was thinking that his suggestion was way beside the point.
‘Yeah, look, I’ve been trying to call you. That was me in the middle of the night—’
She looked round at him. ‘Yeah, I guessed that because it was your number on the phone. Me being a brilliant detective.’
‘You’ve seen the case we’re working, how big it is—’
‘And it’s just you, is it? There aren’t other shifts who could take over from you?’ She had worked up to full-on anger now. And she was so beautiful. And he wanted to
cry. They’d always fought a lot. And, until very recently, he’d thought that was good somehow. Again, he didn’t know why that had changed, and it felt like the reason had fallen
down the hole.