London Falling (24 page)

‘You’re saying it’s not always about something that’s died and stays on here afterwards,’ said Costain.

‘But sometimes it is,’ said Quill, ‘like with Harry’s dad, or the kid that bloke at the football match was carrying.’

There was silence as they considered that.

‘That old fellow at the bus stop saw it,’ said Costain.

‘Yeah, he did,’ Sefton found himself pointing at Costain as if he’d got an answer right in a quiz game, and realized how patronizing that looked and lowered his hand.
‘But only for a second . . . and that’s another thing. I don’t think this is about who’s got the Sight and who hasn’t. I think it’s a . . . spectrum of who can
see what, when and where. That place, for some reason, is where it’s easier for people without the Sight to see the thing. And then it vanished for us too. But maybe we could follow it and
see it elsewhere. Or maybe we could see it all the time if we used some of those hand gestures.’

Ross managed one of her awkward smiles. ‘You’ve got something going here,’ she acknowledged. ‘Go on, establish the narrative.’

Sefton shared that look with her, feeling relieved.

He took them to Charterhouse Square near the Barbican and, as the rain battered down on them, they bent down to hear more clearly the agonized, continual screaming under the
carefully mown grass. Quill got quickly to his feet and walked away a few paces. ‘A plague pit,’ explained Sefton. ‘Some of them are meant to have been buried alive.’

‘Ghosts again,’ said Costain.

‘Yeah, sort of. It’s meant to be the ones who
were
still alive doing the screaming.’

Quill sighed. ‘Fuck me. I wish there was some point at which this team of ours could decide to go off duty, ’cos I need a pint.’

Sefton nodded obligingly. ‘We can do that, too, and continue the demonstration.’

They ended up drinking at a pub called the Sutton Arms. And Sefton felt an awkwardness as they had a pint without having officially come off duty. But Quill was right. With
just the four of them in the only unit pursuing this, they could never really go off duty, so they had to cut themselves some slack. There still hadn’t been further word from the database
searches. He asked the pub regulars what their ghost ‘Charley’ was like, and then led the other three as they looked around the place, finally finding a shimmering man with a ruddy face
sitting on his own in a corner, staring wide-eyed at every woman. He looked part funny and part scary, in a ratio which changed, Sefton thought, almost every second.

‘Definitely scary,’ said Ross when he asked her. And, in that same moment, Sefton watched as the man’s leer became less a thing of seaside postcards and more like something
you’d imagine on the face of a rapist. ‘I wouldn’t mind interviewing him, mind. What could one of those things tell us, if they’ve been hanging round for
centuries?’

‘Harry’s dad wasn’t much use.’

‘That might not always be the case, though. Maybe I should work out a questionnaire.’

They sipped a careful two pints each. Quill hesitated a moment when Sefton said they’d get a better look now it was dark. But finally he followed them. Sefton took them
to the Charterhouse itself, off the square of the same name.

‘I looked up some of the most historical places,’ he explained, ‘by which I mean places where terrible shit happened. Places that are meant to have ghosts. This was originally
a priory, like a monastery, and it’s been used for all sorts of stuff since.’ They entered the complex of cobblestone courtyards and old buildings, with signs pointing to restaurants
and toilets, and still a few hardy tourists. Immediately Sefton pointed out the wraithlike figure of a monk drifting through the grounds. They watched for a minute as it repeated the same pattern
of movements. Quite a few tourists seemed to look round as it passed them, but none of them stopped and stared. Conditions, whatever they were, obviously weren’t right for them to see it
entirely.

‘Now that,’ said Costain, ‘is a ghost.’

Sefton consulted the website map, and walked them over to a specific stairwell inside the main building. He leaped back as a man dressed like something out of Shakespeare walked out of it, with
his head tucked underneath one arm.

‘Even better,’ said Ross.

‘That,’ Sefton said, ‘is Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk.’

‘And he is—?’

‘Some dead posh bloke. I could read you his Wiki.’

‘What he is now is a well proper ghost,’ said Costain. He sounded to be putting some hope in the simplicity of the statement. Sefton looked to the others. They didn’t look
quite so burdened. He hadn’t yet got to the point of this exercise but, along the way, the familiar nature of some of these ‘hauntings’ seemed to be doing the team good. That was
kind of awkward, given what he’d particularly wanted to tell them. Even Quill was now looking more engaged.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘maybe there are categories we could sort this stuff into . . .’

‘Ghosts, witches, objects, like the ships . . .’ suggested Ross.

Sefton hesitated. Right now he didn’t want to tell them that he thought it was more complicated than that. But he had to reach the end of his demonstration. ‘Let’s get to the
final stop on my list,’ he said.

It was getting close to 7 p.m. by the time Sefton led them into Berkeley Square. The pavements were still busy with office workers going off to the pub, tourists heading
between sandwich bars and coffee shops. The little park in the middle had a few remaining parents with pushchairs and owners of small dogs, or the homeless combing the bins that by now were full of
the remains of the day.

‘Number 50, Berkeley Square,’ said Sefton, as they arrived at the address. The ground floor contained the shopfront of Clanfields, a dealer in rare books, with a window that looked
warm and inviting and modern. They all looked up together. The upper floor radiated darkness. ‘According to all the books, this is the most haunted building in London.’

Costain watched Quill summon the manager of the shop and, albeit with a bit of initial weariness, manage to summon up his usual rough-diamond character to talk to her. He
looked relieved to be throwing his weight around again. Costain knew how that went, but these days he wondered if merely pretending to be someone other than the cringing savage that was surely
inside everyone was bad in itself, yet another contribution to whatever complex of burdens was taking him to Hell. Everything for him was now about that. Everything had to be.

The manager had been about to close up for the evening, and was understandably concerned at having a detective inspector on the premises. ‘It’s the sort of thing I hope we can do
without a warrant,’ explained Quill. ‘Nobody in your firm is under suspicion of anything. But, unfortunately, I can’t tell you much beyond that.’

He asked her if they’d heard anything strange from the upstairs floor, and it was immediately obvious he’d touched a nerve.

‘You’re interested in . . . all that?’

Costain felt stupidly offended by her tone. The weight he felt on his shoulders, that they all did – to these ordinary people it was merely ‘all that’. But he recognized the
direction his thoughts were going, and made himself stop thinking badly of her. Every thought, every moment . . . how much would it take to scrub him clean? Or would he one day be able to put a
bullet through the head of that smiling man and get out of jail free? Or was that a bad thought, too?

‘Purely professionally, ma’am.’

She made a sour face. ‘Every few days, someone comes in asking about it. We’re a bit fed up with it, to be honest, and none of us believes in it. Except, you know, whenever we hear a
bang or a crash from the stockroom or the office, we say “That’s just the ghosts.”’

She led them up a narrow unpainted flight of stairs, a sudden contrast to the shop below. It got quickly colder as they climbed, and Costain found himself thinking of the warm comfort of that
pub. He put that unworthy idea out of his head, too. Every thought, every moment . . . But it was going to take more than that, wasn’t it? Some holy ceremony, some great deed of repentance
– or just making right everything he’d done. But how could he do that, when so much of it was lost in the past, beyond altering? He wasn’t used to shit like this slopping around
inside his head. He hoped that it wasn’t showing on his face. That was the last bit of front he had left.

They came out onto a landing with bare boards, an open door that showed a tiny office beyond, two closed doors leading to the stockrooms further back. ‘This is where it’s all
supposed to happen,’ she said. Even with all of them up here beside her, she looked eager to retreat. Their vague interest was making her believe far more than she normally liked.

‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Costain, carefully doing another good deed.

They waited until she’d gone back downstairs, then they took a quick look round the small office, waiting for Sefton to give them some cue about what to expect, but he
remained silent, as if he was waiting to play a gag on them. There was a faint sense of unworldliness about this place, and Costain wouldn’t have wanted to work up here alone. Especially with
the desk facing the grubby window and your back to the door. But there was a confidence about the team now, and Costain had to admit this had been a good idea of Sefton’s, whatever his
eventual plan was. They’d become a little more familiar with the enemy, and all they were going to find here was another floating spectre, or probably a whole bunch of them. But that would be
okay, for it looked like ‘ghosts’ were the shallow end, and a long way from Losley.

Sefton headed over to the door into the stockroom. He gently opened it, then looked inside. ‘I think it’s worse in here,’ he called back. Costain went in along with the
others.

They were standing in what had once been a bedroom: plaster curlicues in the corners of the ceiling; an elegant bare window, now dingy, and dark outside. Bare boards. Another door led to what
might still be a bathroom. This room was full of boxes, carefully stacked piles of them arranged in rows, with delivery forms in cellophane attached. There was a tall glass-fronted bookcase that
contained what must be duplicate stock or books too precious to be displayed downstairs. Also there was a side table on which sat still more books, paperwork lying beside them, a Stanley knife
having just hacked open a new delivery.

‘All dark and brooding on the outside,’ said Quill, ‘but nothing evident in here.’

‘Just the potential for something,’ said Sefton. ‘That makes sense, too. The building itself has a reputation, so from outside it’s kind of a “ghost”
too.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Ross.

They all turned to look, and Costain was the first to realize what the woman was seeing. The room had got significantly darker, but without the lights dimming. It was as if the darkness had
moved in from every corner. He felt his pulse increase, his breathing grow faster.
Bit of a white-knuckle ride coming up, then. Okay.
It was as if he’d stepped into an open doorway
with light behind him, and was, for some reason, pausing there. He wanted to run.
I will not run.
He controlled himself. His fear suddenly seemed as artificial as this darkness was. It
wasn’t coming from inside . . .
Oh fuck.

He could feel it. Something enormous was approaching from all directions at once. Its shadow had fallen across the house. The Sight seemed to be turning a dial in his head, up and up and up.
‘This is not the shallow end,’ he said. ‘This isn’t like what we saw before. This is bigger than Losley, than anything else we’ve yet seen . . .’
Bigger than
what that smiling bastard lets us see of him. Or maybe this is him!

‘No,’ said Sefton. ‘Wait a sec. This isn’t what it looks like.’

Costain looked to Quill, who nodded back at him, visibly sweating. So now Costain had his orders: now he had to stay if he was going to keep on being the good little boy. The four of them, as
one, took a step closer to each other.

‘An experiment,’ said Sefton. ‘This might make it a bit easier.’ He went over to the table, grabbed a marker pen, and on the polished floorboards drew a wobbly circle
surrounding the others. Then he stepped back inside it.

‘What’s that about?’ said Quill.

‘In what I’ve read online, any sort of circle is protection.’

‘Oh,’ said Costain. ‘Great.’

‘I think . . . you might have to be prepared to believe in it.’

‘Now you tell us.’

There was a sudden noise from around their feet. They all looked down. The ink circle was sparking and hissing. And now Costain became aware that it was significantly lighter inside it. They
shuffled closer together. ‘Now I believe in it,’ he said.

‘As long as it isn’t broken,’ said Sefton.

The darkness became solid around them. It became a warm, close thing, like being pressed up against some enormous animal. Costain slowly lost the ability to see anything elsewhere in the room.
He had to look at the others to check he hadn’t gone blind. Normal evening was contained only in this circle. A smell wafted through the air. He’d smelt it before, he realized, and now
he really started to feel afraid. He looked over to where the door to the stairs should be. All he would have to do now was run six paces—

He stopped himself.
No!

The smell was the same one he had smelt during those moments of horror and falling in Losley’s attic. It was like the most terrible nostalgia, something that connected your brain to
somewhere outside time; as if something inside you knew an awful truth that your memory didn’t. It was that place you sometimes went in dreams, when you then awoke thankful to be back in . .
. he now hesitated to think of it as the real world. Because, somewhere inside him, he was desperately hoping there was a real world elsewhere that he might one day get back to. ‘So,’
he said to Sefton, ‘you knew that ghosts were real . . . and you led us to the “most haunted building in London”. What’s up with that?’

‘I didn’t . . . I don’t think it’s—!’ What Costain most of all didn’t like was that Sefton seemed completely wrong-footed by this experience now.
Whatever he’d expected to happen, this was obviously a long way from it.