London Falling (47 page)

But in that second just before he reached her—

Her hand slashed across. The room was suddenly falling sideways. Quill tried to throw himself across the gap, but now he didn’t know which way he was falling. ‘She’s trying to
leg it again!’ he shouted. ‘Stop her!’

But the room was folding up again, angling towards that red door, which had again become the plughole at the bottom of the world.

‘Stand like coppers!’ yelled Sefton. ‘Compose yourselves!’

The room folded around them, missed them, became an arrow darting for the door, with the streak of what had been the mounted head outside bursting in at the last moment, and then—

They were standing there in the tattered shell of a squat. Losley had gone. And she’d taken Jessica with her.

‘No!’ bellowed Quill. ‘No, no, no!’

Costain heard the noise, under whatever Quill was shouting. He looked over to the inner door, and then he ran towards it.

The cat was lodged in the gap. The force of the inner door had bent it almost in two. Blood was pouring from its mouth. Costain grabbed the door and pulled. The cat fell, breathing heavily.
‘I . . . tried to follow her. I was too slow. And then something went from its eyes, and it lay there empty. Costain found the blood pounding in his head. He squatted down and put his hand on
the cat’s body. It was utterly cold, immediately. He couldn’t feel for it. He couldn’t find anything in himself to do that. After all, it was just a cat.

He made himself stand up. He grabbed the door again and swung it wide open. The force that had tried to close it had cut off once the cat got in the way. Some sort of inbuilt safety mechanism.
He made himself step through first . . . into complete darkness beyond.

The others followed, Sefton using a wooden stake as a wedge to hold the door open. Quill got his torch out of his pocket and switched it on. They were at a T-junction in a corridor made of . . .
Costain couldn’t work out what it was made of. It was like rock, but utterly smooth, as if it had been made of something artificial. The surface showed no natural blemish or roughness. The
corridor smelt of old houses.

‘Which way did she go?’

They tried left, then right, and found themselves with further options branching off from both directions. If they were now in a tunnel between Losley’s houses, it was between many of
them, presumably all of them. Of Losley herself there was no sign. They made themselves be silent, and listened. There was no sound in the distance.

Sefton looked down. ‘Soil,’ he said, squatting to touch a thread of it that ran down the centre of the corridor, looking strange on the material. ‘Which, of course, means West
Ham soil. Which means she needs to take power from it for some reason. So this line would form a sort of . . . power cable. Connecting all her houses. What goes between those houses? Her home, the
furniture, all that stuff. So these lines must provide energy for . . . for moving all that.’

‘Didn’t help her much in Brockley,’ said Quill, ‘when she could only appear down in the street.’

‘Because you put that rubber wedge in the door then,’ said Sefton. ‘She must have sort of shorted out this system, by pushing against it. She had got all her stuff away, but
not herself.’

Quill looked at his watch. ‘The match restarts in five minutes.’

Sefton reached into his holdall and produced the vanes. ‘These work with stuff that’s right in front of you,’ he said. ‘Like this soil is right now. If there’s
power flowing through it . . .’ He held the vanes as he had before. Everyone fell silent. The rods moved, just a touch, towards the left.

Sefton set off in that direction at a jog, and they all followed.

It was, thought Ross, as if they were running inside London itself. Not like in the underground, but inside something fundamental. She could imagine these routes connecting
houses like spokes of a wheel, an alternative tube map where the distances were even less related to real geography. She wished her dad had got to see some of this, had got to try the amazing
things Toshack had discovered, instead of being used as . . . fuel for them. If that had happened, would she herself have become part of the crime family? Had her desire for revenge just made her
choose another gang? She pushed that fragile thinking down inside her. She would do this anyway.
This
would complete her life. Fuck everything else. Fuck everything afterwards.

Quill ran, following Sefton, aware of time running out, aware of that possibility that he could one day love his child or, being more honest with himself, of that other
possibility of terrible emotional harm being done to his wife.

He had still said it, though: ‘You’re nicked,’ had still been that bloke, and maybe he’d never change.

He heard a sound from ahead. The radio! They all broke into a sprint together. Quill followed Sefton, his heart pounding, left– right–left down choices of corridor. And there was a
closed door ahead. And the sound was coming from behind that door.

Quill suppressed a great yell and rushed at it.

He smashed down the door and raised the gun to aim . . .

. . . at his own child.

Losley, or the tattered bloody mess that remained of her, was standing over the cauldron, still bubbling, now in a different shape of room. She’d spun with Jessica in her arms, astonished
upon astonished. Jessica hung over the water.

‘And it’s still nil–nil,’
the voice from the radio was saying,
‘and let’s hope it stays that way.’

Quill and the others moved steadily forward, Quill and Costain both keeping their weapons trained on Losley.

‘Put the kid on the floor,’ said Costain.

‘Of course not,’ said Losley. ‘The ceremony is complete. I am ready to make the sacrifice that will give me the power to once again avenge my football club.’ But she made
no move to attack them. Her face had a terrible stillness to it. Maybe she had nothing left.

‘Zoretska’s retrieved the ball, he’s going to knock it to the young defender, Faranchi. It’s like a training exercise out here, West Ham hanging back as much as the
opposing team. There were a few early forays at goal, but there seems to have been a dressing-room talk at half time, and nobody’s had a go in the second half.’

‘Human nature seems to be doing all right,’ said Ross. ‘They’re not going to score for you. Are you sure you know men?’

‘We can make a deal,’ said Quill. ‘Make everything right again. You remove the Sight from us, serve your time for the murders, and we’ll—’

Losley’s laughter drowned him out.

‘Yeah, you fucker,’ he said, nodding along with her, ‘but I felt I had to make the offer.’

‘West Ham developing this strong left side of the field, which can – oh no!’

Quill froze at the sound in the announcer’s voice. A huge roar was coming from the stadium.

Losley tensed in anticipation.

‘It bounced off Faranchi’s boot! And the goalkeeper’s taken by surprise! He’s running after it. It’s
rolling
into . . .! It’s gone in! West Ham have
scored an own goal!’

Losley whirled round and stared at the radio. She looked as if she’d been physically struck by something that had impaled her at an angle to all her world’s rules.

Quill leaped at her. She threw a gesture at him that was little more than a slap, but it still sent him sprawling. But the others had rushed in, were between her and the cauldron. Costain had
his gun up, ready to try for a shot, but Jessica was in the way.

Suddenly, Losley ran for the outside door, taking Jessica with her. ‘Hold your fire!’ yelled Quill. He rushed after her, and the others ran too.

Ross was just behind Quill as they burst out onto a balcony, the sudden chill of night air providing a shock to her senses. Losley was standing on the parapet along the far
edge, a three-storey drop below her, open land stretching behind her, leading across to another long low apartment building. The sound of match commentaries echoed from a thousand satellite dishes
all along the balconies, a sea of lights glowing behind curtains. And already people were stepping out of their doorways, yelling and pointing, turbans and burqas, football shirts and chav caps.
Losley grasped Jessica, with a small gleaming knife set against her ribs. She had a coil of twine already wrapped around the child’s neck, the noose held firmly in her other hand.

‘Daddy!’ screamed Jessica.

‘Wait,’ said Losley, as Quill took a step forward. ‘This is to keep you there.’ She let go of the noose, but kept the knife where it was. She made a gesture with her free
hand as if she was pulling the world into her, the remains of the flesh of her fist sucking on the air.

Ross felt the result as much as she saw it. Something was rushing into Losley from all directions. She could see the images now: all the different versions of Losley, the visions from the front
of the newspapers, the haunting photographs, they were smashing into her, plastering themselves over her, putting flesh back onto her bones new, skin forming out of newsprint, muscle from the three
colours of television.

‘Is that her getting her power back?’ whispered Costain.

‘I think it’s her cashing her last cheque,’ said Sefton. ‘She’s leaning on being remembered, taking it all at once.’

Losley’s newly healed eye looked balefully at them. Unreal because it looked black and white. She put her free hand into a bag at her hip, and threw a handful of soil over her left
shoulder. Ross, impossibly, heard it land on mid-air. She wondered how much of this those people leaning out from their flats were seeing. Losley stepped back off the wall.

‘No!’ shouted Quill.

But she was still standing there. In mid-air. On a trail of soil that stretched out into the gap between the buildings. She took another step backwards. ‘I must continue to do as I have
always done,’ she said. ‘I will have to kill Milo Faranchi, even though he is on my team, even though he is beloved by me. You see, I said I would now kill every scorer. Such are rules.
We all have to make sacrifices.’ She continued to move backwards, higher into the air, her hand tightening again on the noose around the child’s neck. ‘A blow to her head, a wound
to her side, one quick swing of the rope. The threefold death. An even better sacrifice. Especially with her father here to watch.’

Quill bellowed something incoherent at her. Costain had taken up a firing position on the wall. But Ross couldn’t see how he was going to get a chance at a clear shot.

‘I’ve made sure I have enough left,’ she said. ‘I have my soil on me. I have these people remembering me . . . oh, look at them, how they’re remembering me now! I
have enough to do this!’ And she spat out a sudden noise that could easily do the work of a gesture. A very London noise.

Ross pulled the knife from her pocket as the noise burst past her. Her knife split the noise. The noise hit the others. It hit Quill and Costain, and even Sefton, who was starting to turn it
away as it hit, and it broke them from their bodies. She saw their personalities fall, screaming, endlessly through the infinite depth of the housing block, pulled by the gravity of something
beyond London. She saw their bodies collapse where they stood, their souls blasted out of them. But she could still see a connection, still see that they would return if she did something quickly.
She saw how this happened between time, as all the watching public just started to react, but would never understand every moment of it.

Her knife had split the noise.

Losley stared at the knife. Losley stared past it, towards her.

Ross became very sad and very sure. It was just her now. She had only moments left to save the others. She could feel the heat starting to blaze from their bodies behind her. She could hear the
sound of their falling. In moments their bodies would explode into blood.

She jumped up onto the wall. She stepped out onto the soil bridge.

She didn’t look down. She knew there was a long fall beneath her, but that didn’t matter. Losley held the child before her as a shield as Ross got close to her. ‘Come on,
then,’ she said. She jerked suddenly as if about to drop the child or to stab it or hit it.

Ross slashed out.

Jessica yelled in terror.

The rope around the child’s neck parted and fell into the dark below. Ross looked Losley in the eye, wrong eye to wrong eye. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is my knife for freeing
fathers.’

Losley lashed back with her own knife. Ross caught it with her blade, sending the blow swinging aside. Losley screamed in defiance, and turned that swing into a long, downwards, sacrificial
stab—

Ross cut Losley in her side. She cut her on her brow. That blow set the witch swaying on the spot, with blood flying from her, spattering all down the child held in one arm. Losley was still
trying to deliver her own killing blow. ‘If I die or I flee,’ she yelled, ‘this bridge will collapse and you will fall, and the child too!’

‘I know,’ said Ross. And slashed her across her neck.

Losley tried to keep the blood in. She tried and nearly succeeded.

Ross’ sudden punch caved in her nose.

The witch vanished. The soil dropped away from under her feet. And from under Ross’ feet. And the child screamed in mid-air.

Ross grabbed the child. They fell.

Quill slammed back into his body and hit the wall of the balcony—

Just as Ross fell, with Jessica in her arms.

Costain and Sefton were there a moment later. The small clinging mass of two bodies plummeted to the ground far below. Quill rushed for the stairs. Costain and Sefton ran immediately after
him.

Quill shoved his way through the crowd that was gathering around a bundle lying in the dark, torches casting light over the wet grass. There she was, there was Ross, lying flat
on her back with a bush crushed underneath her. Her eyes were closed, one leg projected at the wrong angle. It took a moment for Quill to find what else he was looking for. Something was screaming.
It wasn’t Ross screaming. It was what she still held tight in her arms. What had landed on top of her.