London Falling (41 page)

‘Nah, come on. Is this just you doing the right thing again?’

‘Well, yeah. But—’

‘But we don’t ever know why anyone does what they do, do we? You might have stayed even if you hadn’t felt forced into it. You came back that first time, didn’t
you?’

‘And now I need you to trust me.’

‘I’m watching you heading for the door with something that’s halfway between evidence and a witness, so I think I’m there. Is that it, or are we going in for any more of
the touchy-feelies?’

Costain nodded to him.

Quill nodded back.

Costain headed out to his car, taking the cat with him.

Ross stood in front of what had once been her family home, on that corner of a tree-lined street in Bermondsey. It was raining again on this Sunday afternoon. Only a couple of
details of the house had altered: whoever owned it now had changed the garden, and put up different curtains. There was, thank God, nothing that looked special to the Sight.

The door was opened by a middle-aged Asian woman, who eyed her suspiciously. Ross presented her documents, and told the woman she could call the station if she wanted to confirm her identity.
The woman kept the door on the chain while she did so, but finally let her in. Ross knew she must look suspicious, her professional politeness hardly concealing the personal urgency of what she was
doing here. ‘It’s a routine inquiry, ma’am, to do with an ongoing investigation. Nobody here is in any trouble.’

‘I should hope not!’

Ross didn’t react to that. ‘I’d like a look around upstairs, please. Alone.’

The smell was so nearly the same. New people, new fragrances, same polish. She stepped onto the landing and walked straight past the door leading to what had been her bedroom.
She moved on, instead to where Dad’s office had been.

The door was, once again, open just a bit. She resisted the awful urge to first peer through the gap, and instead just pushed the door open and went in.

What Quill had said about where he’d see the ghost of his daughter – that had been the first seed of it for her. She recognized that in retrospect. He’d been right: like with
the ships and the bus, this was about places too. People didn’t always carry their ghosts around with them. In her case, she’d suddenly realized, she had very much associated her father
with this room. She knew he was now in Hell. She knew that more definitely than any other fact in her head, but without having a solid sense of what that meant, even considering her own experience.
But Harry’s dad hadn’t been just a bundle of Harry’s own insecurities. According to Quill, he’d acted with his own volition, right at the end. She hoped that hadn’t
all been down to Losley. Ross didn’t know how it worked, so this was going to be an experiment. A terrible experiment. But she owed it to Quill to find the courage to do this.

She stepped into the room, closed the door behind her, looked around at the unfamiliar furniture of a spare bedroom. She looked up and saw that the ceiling rose was still there. No huge reaction
to seeing the ceiling. It was just plaster. She made herself remember again, and now she could see it clearly again: that moment that was stamped into her, that had made her. She focused on every
detail of what, if she could see a ghost specific to her, she might expect to see here.

‘Dad?’ she said.

No answer. But she suddenly noticed something: she could smell something new. Him, his aftershave, the smell of his jacket, the cigars and beer. And something under that, which spoke of vastness
and closeness, of Halloween, of things let in on special nights. ‘Dad, if you can hear me, I need to see you. It’s . . . it’s not just for me. It’s something important. I
know you’d always try to look after me . . . no matter where you are. It doesn’t matter what you look like now, or what’s going on, you can . . . come back. It’s
okay.’

She waited, feeling afraid and vulnerable but waiting. She smelled it before she saw or heard anything, and then a rose of thorns burst from the ceiling above her. And that distant smell burst
in along with it. And the room was full of uneasy light. She staggered back but she stayed on her feet, looking up, looking and looking . . . A feeling of potential harm had flooded in all around
her. Something formed out of those shapes above.

And there – there he was again. Hanging there, making choking noises, the noose once again around his neck. It was as if the memory she’d fixated on for all these
years had been preserved here. There was his wonderful face, alive again, an expression living on it again. She stared and stared as the blood hammered through her body and head. It was him. It was
him! He spun and rocked in the awful light, looking at her desperately, one hand outstretched. She could see clearly the signs on his body of what the woman with the Tarot cards had called the
threefold death.

But this time she had a knife. She grabbed it from her pocket, dragged the stool from the dressing table across the room and leaped up onto it. She started to saw at the rope. But the rope was
like diamond. This was a new nightmare. Her fingers kept slipping off it. The blade kept flying away from it.

‘No!’ he said. His voice! He could say things! ‘Lisa, no! Don’t touch it! You can’t cut it, girl. You can’t undo it. Don’t you get too close.’

She stopped, helpless, staring at his face, loving him. And he looked back at her, and it was the best thing. It was the best thing. But she was still helpless.

He looked quickly upwards, over his shoulder. His voice was a gasp, limited by the rope, but not as limited as it should have been, and that was terrible, that implication that this was usual
for him now. ‘I can’t stay long or they’ll notice.’

‘You don’t deserve to be in there!’ She hadn’t wanted this to be about her and him, but she couldn’t control a single thing she might do or say now.

‘I had a bad life, love. We kept it from you.’

She wanted to ask him – ridiculously – she realized, if what she was doing now was okay. Or if she had betrayed him as well as the family. But there was no time for that. ‘Dad,
I’ve been given . . . they call it the Sight?’

He made a strangled cry, took another moment to breathe. ‘No, not my girl. That means you can see all the things I have to look at every day. This is another punishment they’re
doing
to me!’ It was terrible to hear him so fearful. A dad shouldn’t be afraid.

‘This is about . . . There’s kids, Dad, okay? She kills
kids
. She worked for Rob. Do you know of a Mora Losley?’

He made the sound again. ‘Mora Losley? Bloody Rob! Bloody Rob! He took everything! Took you! He’s up
here
now!’ Alf was suddenly gleeful, swinging back and forth, though
the effort made his voice crack up. ‘In his own Hell!’

‘Dad, how can we . . . get her?’ She’d nearly said ‘nick’, but that would have sounded wrong.

He seemed to gaze up into something that Ross couldn’t see. As if he was looking over things, and into things, reading distant signs. ‘What haven’t you seen? What haven’t
you seen? Oh, you’ve done stuff. You’ve done such a lot.’ She tried not to feel pride at hearing that. ‘But . . . Oh, there. The empty boxes.’

‘What, from his office?’

‘Yeah. I was shown him from up here, when he was alive and I wasn’t. They showed me what he was up to, as he took over my old life. I don’t know how much it’ll help, but
it’s something. Sometimes he
drove
out to his lock-up—’

‘His lock-up?! We haven’t found that. Where—?’

‘And sometimes, when he could get away with it, he . . .’ He looked quickly around, as if something was approaching. ‘Can’t stay,’ he said. And he turned, looking
scared like a child, and twisted out of the way before something could see him. And the ceiling vomited shut, and he was gone.

Ross’ legs collapsed under her. She fell to the floor and stayed where she lay, looking up. She could see his face still against the white. She felt the horror of it washing over her. She
started to sob. She felt she should remain here, that she should always be here to talk to him, to offer him some tiny comfort.

Her Tarot card reading had turned out to be true. She had found an ongoing hope through someone who had been a sacrifice. She had found something that could help. And she had found something for
all seasons that she could return to. That she
would
return to. She could tell him about her revenge and that would make it better for him. And his being here was horrifying, but it would
also make her life better. They still had each other. Slightly. Horrifyingly.

She stood up, and she left the room, and she walked faster and faster down the stairs of her childhood, with her phone already in her hand, making the call to Quill, and she got all the way to
her car and drove off without once looking back.

It was early morning when Kevin Sefton parked in a space which only someone with a permit was entitled to occupy, put his job logbook in the car window, to keep the traffic
wardens at bay, and stepped out into the tidy streets where he had grown up. An old lady walking her dog looked him up and down, noting the way he was dressed, then his face. She’d soon be on
the phone to the Neighbourhood Watch, he thought.

He walked along the wide pavements, down the tree-lined avenues leading to the main road. He saw school kids walking past, and he stopped himself thinking about his own childhood. He was either
about to escape who he was or about to fall victim to it. Dwelling on it wouldn’t help either way.

He went to the deserted bus stop, and looked straight down the road. He tried to focus every aspect of the Sight into the distance, where the low sun glinted off pools of water in the potholes.
He could hear it now: the distant sound of an engine that was different to those of the cars and lorries passing by. It slowly came into view, for just him. The number 7 to Russell Square, running
on its Sunday timetable, with those silhouettes inside it, the darkness pulsing from within it.

He suddenly had doubts. Was he now committing suicide? He steeled himself, having never deliberately walked into anything worse than this. But he knew he could do it. The kids who’d spat
at him, at a place just like this, would never have imagined that. They didn’t understand what they were creating when they made him.

This was his sacrifice.

He stuck out his hand. The bus slowed and came to a stop right in front of him. It waited, its engine idling. It was full of darkness. He knew, absolutely, in that instant, what waited inside
for him. But, in a moment it would move off again if he didn’t act now.

He made himself put one foot in front of the other. He stepped onto the platform at the rear. He couldn’t see inside, and it was cold in there. Of course it was. He was about to enter a
ghost. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the darkness.

It was like being squeezed into something awful inside his own head. It reminded him, for a moment, of the horror they’d all been suspended over in the attic. And then he
was through that, and into—

It rushed at him. Oh God, oh God, he’d stepped straight into Hell! He’d deliberately stepped into Hell! Because he hadn’t believed in it! Every inch of the bus was full of
them, and it was more of a bus than any real bus could be; it was his school bus and every other sort of bus that had ever transported things that fought. They were on him, a mass of children,
bigger than him, and yet he was still an adult. They put their fingers into his eyes and mouth, and down his trousers and up his arse, and they told him all that was wrong with him, pushed it into
him like shoving wads of wet paper into his ears and brain until he knew it. They made him eat the whole bus, pushing it down into his throat until his body bulged and his muscles locked and
cramped around it, until he curled himself up round it. And all the while the laughter directed at him was like white noise, them above him and pissing down on him like continual British rain.

This was going to go on, he realized, forever. And he’d deliberately sought it out! He put his hands up to shield his head, and then they started on his hands instead. Tiny nails
scrabbling into every pore. Was he only trying to punish himself?

No, absolutely not. I’m not doing this to myself. You’re doing this to me.

He felt a slight give in the pressure around him. He conjured up another thought of what he could compare this to: the act of being born. The ultimate violence. The ultimate passage from comfort
to horror. It hadn’t been the pain that he’d needed to go through; he had to face the fear. Understanding that now made him realize he could hear a real engine noise under the horror
that was controlling his body. If he fought his way backwards, and he could, then he could reach the rear platform, and let go of the rail and just escape. The choice was clear.

But no.
No
. He’d come here for a reason. He’d come here because this bus went somewhere beyond anything he knew, and because getting on it would be a sacrifice that was just a
tiny way towards what Losley had suffered. He pushed forward instead of back. He’d made use of this knowledge before, hadn’t he? He remembered the bookshop. This wasn’t just his
school bus, this was an old London bus too. What did London buses have that his school bus hadn’t?

He kept his eyes open even as things spiked into the corners of them . . . made himself see past the pain that left pools of blood in them . . . made out a figure amid the purple blotches.
There, among the hazy shapes of seats ahead, was the shape of a ticket inspector. Sefton brought him closer, closer again, trying to ignore all the pain. And closer still, until the figure turned
and saw him, and paid attention.

A cold shadow fell across the bundle of struggling flesh that was now more clearly defined, but yet somehow all himself. Sefton was a shape made up of fighting children that were pricking and
consuming him. Sefton realized that he couldn’t look up at that figure. He could just see what might be a hand thrust demandingly close to his face. He’d been caught out. He was on this
bus under an arrogant assumption. Even if he could make it the right sort of bus, he still didn’t have a ticket. He didn’t deserve to be here. He had to be his UC self now, quickly and,
bluff his way through—