London Falling (26 page)

The others started to sit up, to look at him and each other. They were shaken to the core. Costain had his hands covering his face. Footsteps approached.
Footsteps on the stairs.
But no,
no . . . not now.

The startled manager was peering at them. Slowly they got to their feet. Quill just nodded to her, no funny line appearing on his lips. Sefton just about managed to get himself down the stairs.
The others stumbled down around him.

Costain found he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. He reached out to Ross for support, and appreciated that strong shoulder. He felt as if he was going to burst
into tears or else throw up. Doing either would feel like death. He had seen it again. It had nearly had him again.

They went back to the pub. Costain put his hands on his pint but didn’t trust himself to lift it. He didn’t feel able to look at Sefton, even though the man had saved him. That was
wrong. He looked at the other two, who were shaking as much as he was. ‘Headless fucking ghosts. As if!’ he said. ‘We had no idea. We’re not even rookies. We’re just .
. . kids!’

‘We . . . we learned something.’ That was Sefton, looking angry and defensive. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; it’s what people believe,
and—’

‘Shut the fuck up.’ And then the crushing limitations descended again. ‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘It’s okay—’ Quill began.

‘It’s
not
okay! We’re playing . . . cops and robbers because it
comforts
us. That’s all there is to it!’

Ross took Costain’s hands in hers. ‘What did we all see?’ she said. ‘I saw . . . my dad, over and over.’

‘I saw a lot . . . of fuckwittery concerning myself,’ said Quill, ‘about which I feel like suing someone. Pity, then, that it was all true.’

‘Complicated.’ Sefton shook his head. ‘I need to think about it.’

Ross looked back to Costain. ‘So what about you?’

He didn’t want to answer, but . . . this was still going to come out. It was beyond his control, and he hated that too. ‘I saw it again . . . what I saw in Losley’s attic. The
place I’m . . . I’m going to.’

‘Hell,’ suggested Sefton, sounding like he wanted to say it out loud, but also sounding like he didn’t bloody believe it.

‘Back in the attic, you lot were being
sent
there, so maybe it appeared differently for you. I was just . . . getting there early, so I saw all the details. And I saw them again
just now.’

‘No,’ said Quill, ‘we don’t do theology—’

‘Jimmy, we have to,’ said Ross.

‘That smiling bastard was there, too. And down there he felt like . . . like one of those gang enforcers who have done the really bad shit, the ones where you can see it in their faces
that they can’t surprise themselves with how far they’d go, because there
is
no limit to . . .’ He had to stop. He was shaking so hard, it took him a moment to continue.
‘The sort that put blowtorches to informers’ feet. Every UC . . . we
think
about those guys, about ending up in the hands of one of them.’

‘Yeah,’ whispered Sefton.

‘He’s the biggest version going of one of those terrifying sods. He knew all about me, so I had no secrets I could give up to spare myself anything. He’s waiting for me when I
die. I know he is, it’s just obvious. Does nobody get that?’

Sefton again nodded, grudgingly. ‘Yeah.’

‘And with him . . . there was this informer. Sammy Cliff, his name was.’ They were silent now, listening carefully. ‘He kept pretending he didn’t want my money. This is
years before Goodfellow. He kept saying he was “on the side of the police”; that’s the catchphrase we joked about with him. Fucking little bike boy, user, dirty fucking hair,
burns . . . that smell on his skin.’ He saw from their faces that they’d all known similar. ‘He kept saying how he was nothing, a pile of shit on the pavement; that’s what
he once told me he was. When it became clear we weren’t going to get his boss, best we could do for him was not nick him. And it was bloody obvious to the gang, by the end, who the informer
was. They can’t run anywhere, not kids like that. Their idea of running is going to a different mattress. He ended up with one of
those
blokes. They burned his feet off, worked upwards
from there. They made a party of it, there were cans and condoms all over the warehouse. We heard all the details. So there he was, Sammy Cliff, waiting for me. He didn’t even look pleased.
All he was there for was to wait his chance to see what had been done to him also being done to me. Forever.’

‘So,’ said Sefton, oh so gently, as if he was talking to a lunatic, ‘you think that now you have to be good.’

‘It’s my only chance, yeah? And it’s so bloody hard to think of every single thing, all the time—’

Sefton was shaking his head. ‘Can I say something?’

‘More of your theories,’ said Costain, ‘’cos
that
worked so well! Sorry!’

‘There’s no God, so there’s no Heaven—’

‘How do you
know
?’

‘—and this “Hell” might well be like that, might well have the ghost or the memory or whatever these things are of this informer of yours in it, but it is just the place
where the big boss of whatever we’ve found—’

‘How do you
know
?!’

‘If you’d listen! I’ve found out—’

And suddenly Costain was up out of his seat, and had thrown himself at him.

Ross leaped up just as Quill did. She managed to grab Sefton so that a punch that would have taken Costain’s head off went wide. They hauled the pair apart. They fell on the floor as one
mass.

Bar staff were running over, shouting. Among all the confusion, as they were being hauled to their feet, Quill’s phone beeped. As he stumbled out onto the street, looking angry as he did
so, as he made himself do it – he looked at the screen. ‘The DNA database results are in,’ he said, his voice incredulous. ‘They found nothing.’

‘A vicar, a rabbi and an imam walk into a Portakabin,’ said Quill. He was looking up at just that. Sefton and Costain looked over in surprise too.

Ross raised her head from her endless scrolling through computerized bills records from various London boroughs. They’d all got back to that, letting their eyes cover page after page to
see if they noticed one of Losley’s edits in the records of a borough where she wasn’t known to have lived. The same effect, frustratingly, didn’t hold for the DNA records. There
were no matches with the DNA from any of the child skeletons, or from the skull on the newel post, in the files for any still-open cases. That is to say, none of these victims was listed as a
missing child. Having heard that staggering verdict, they’d expected the files to have been edited, and had got copies sent over, but they showed no sign of tampering. It wasn’t that
Losley had altered the records of who these children were; it was that the world seemed to have forgotten them. There came with the results a great mass of descriptions, details of hair colour and
teeth and ethnic origin (increasingly diverse as the strata approached modern times) and how, on several occasions, there seemed to be groups of three siblings taken together. The West Ham away
game against Liverpool had finished in a nil– nil draw. The next home game would be on Wednesday. Costain and Sefton were doing their best to avoid each other, and Sefton hadn’t raised
the matter of looking into the background materials again, though Ross saw him poring through pages on the internet.

Quill had been in conference with Lofthouse a great deal, trying to find some resource or clue in the evidence coming out of any of the searched houses, Toshack’s included, but so far
there had been nothing. They had so many alerts for missing children in place it wasn’t true, and also a public that was keen to cooperate to the point of being terrorized. Consequently,
playgrounds were empty and school runs were packed. The unit had asked to be sent reports of Losley, and now had way too many of them to sort through, from places as far afield as Inverness and
Guernsey. An elderly woman in Aldershot had even been forced to leave her house after persistent attacks on her by youths identifying her as Losley. Ross had decided on some filters for sorting
these reports, notably instantly chucking away all those from outside London. Still, working through them was another thing each of them could be doing when whatever else they did was proving
fruitless and they felt they had to be doing something.

And behind it all was the spectre of that smiling man, Losley’s lord – the shape in the dark whose existence, every now and then, suggested to Ross, on the edge of sleep, that all
they were doing was futile.

The Ops Board had only a couple of new things added to it: an explanation of ‘remembered’ by Sefton, and the phone number from which the darkness had texted them. It comprised a
string of numbers which appeared in no searches, and which Quill had scribbled at the bottom left of the board. Ross had pinned up a sheet to cover the board a few minutes ago, and it was a bad
sign that her workmates hadn’t mentioned that.

‘Detective Inspector Quill,’ she said now, ‘these are my guests.’

Yesterday morning she’d realized what might bring together Costain’s needs and Sefton’s needs, and had arranged it without bothering to ask the increasingly distant Quill if it
was a good idea. She got to her feet. ‘This is the Met chaplain, the Reverend Toby Franklin,’ who looked as if he’d come straight from being kicked around on the rugger pitch,
‘Rabbi Peter Shulman,’ who looked as if he’d walked into the wrong room, ‘and Dr Firdos Irfan, who’s an imam,’ and who also looked to be regretting this already.
‘These last two gentlemen work in the prison service in London.’

‘What’s this about?’ said Sefton, standing up. Costain was looking kind of thankful and awkward at the same time. He’d clearly got it straight away.

Quill eyed her questioningly, then nodded. ‘Let’s call it showing initiative.’

‘I was expecting to meet someone with a spiritual crisis . . .’ began Franklin.

‘You might well call it that,’ said Quill. ‘A dirty great spiritual crisis. Tea, Reverend?’

The three clerics started to look concerned as they realized that this was about an operation. Sefton kept his distance as he watched Costain fussing over them. He felt almost
betrayed, though Ross kept looking at him encouragingly. It seemed that his colleagues hadn’t heard a word he’d said. If these three men had any power, then the churches and mosques and
synagogues of London would be aglow with it. This counted as a wholesale adoption of what the other two probably saw as Costain’s agenda, and if this had been a regular squad . . . well, he
supposed he could have complained to somebody. Not that he ever would have.

Sefton had spent every waking moment since the bookshop incident researching the world in which they now found themselves. He’d come up with a lot of theories, only he was sure now that
this lot wouldn’t want to hear them. Not after he’d led the group into danger. Not after they’d pulled him off Costain – who’d come at him, not the other bloody way
round, but who’d nearly got what was coming to him. Only, because of the situation they were in, there couldn’t be any talk of disciplinary action. It was as if they were all waiting,
instead, for some regular police-work-shaped clue to come along, rather than bothering to deal with his stuff. When he’d spoken to Ross about this stuff being for the lost and downtrodden . .
. well, maybe he’d got it more right than he’d imagined. For he was the specialist here, slight as his expertise was. These three priests simply didn’t know what the world
they’d found themselves in was like. Getting them in here was like getting a bloody psychic into a normal investigation. He pushed the anger down inside, folded his arms across his chest.

‘Reverend—’ Quill began, turning to Franklin.

‘Or Toby,’ said the priest.

‘Yeah . . . Reverend, Rabbi, Imam, we brought you here to ask you . . .’ He looked to Ross.

‘For points four or seven on the Objectives list,’ she said, nodding to the concealed Ops Board, ‘I think we could do with some holy water.’

The clerics stared at her.

‘No,’ said Ross, ‘seriously.’

‘What do you want that for?’ asked Shulman.

‘That would be an operational matter,’ said Quill.

‘Okay . . .’ said Franklin, ‘what exactly do you
mean
by—?’

Sefton couldn’t take it any longer. If they were going to do this, they were going to do it. If he’d known this was what Ross had been after, he’d have been able to provide her
with all the details. And, as long as this was all there was going to be to it, he had to admit she had a point. He located on his phone the website he’d bookmarked. “Holy water,”
he read out. “A sacramental, as used in baptism, having been blessed by a priest.” We’d need at least several large bottles of it.’ He looked challengingly at Ross.
‘For testing.’

‘Or,’ said Ross, ‘you could just . . .
do
the water supply of this building, so we can get it out of the tap when required.’ She looked hopefully between them.

The clerics stared at each other. They then stood up. ‘All right,’ said Irfan, ‘I’ve had it. Your analyst got us to come all the way over here because it sounded
urgent—’

‘No,’ Quill said, ‘listen, this isn’t a joke—’

‘You know,’ said Franklin, ‘even a couple of years ago, nobody would have dared to do this. Now I get kids knocking on my door, I get prank phone calls—’

‘You think we’re
making this up
?’ snarled Costain.

The clerics fell still.

Sefton watched the three men of faith doing what they did. He saw their body-language skills, their active listening, their voices pulling more and more explanation out of the
others, to the point where he had to speak up and remind them of what couldn’t be said. They were preying on the group’s tiredness, on the stress, seeing their job as merely
ameliorating that. They were also obviously aware that this was the team dealing with ‘the witch of West Ham’, and were excited and alarmed by what their being here meant. Whereas in
fact they were here, to give Ross some credit, to demonstrate whether what they represented meant
anything
in this new world the team had found. Proof of meaninglessness would help Costain
with his issues.