London Falling (13 page)

Costain considered it for a while, this London thing: this British thing that had been poured into London and solidified there. He found he wanted to apologize to it. But he also wanted it to apologize to him.

He would never before have imagined a London thing. If he was experiencing a psychotic episode, something the drugs had done to his brain over the years . . . that’d be about
everything
he saw and felt, wouldn’t it? Not this one, precise thing. Yeah, he knew a threat when he saw one. And this was
real
.

He sat there for a while longer, letting himself relax, feeling no threat in the woods around him, only beauty in the downlands beyond, but he looked every now and then at where the bad stuff – if it was bad stuff – was. And it was only there. What was over Biggin Hill was like a question posed in the sky. It was a constellation in a suddenly genuine astrology, perhaps significant to him, perhaps not – not good or bad, just real.

For a while, he’d thought he was in on a successful operation, that finally he had something to celebrate. Instead he’d found this.

It was what it was. And he had to face it.

Okay, then.

After a while, he got to his feet, went back to his car, and headed back into London.

Quill had three more pints with Harry. He gradually started to tune out the running commentary from Harry’s dad. The more he drank, the more he accepted what was in front of him. Maybe he could even use it. ‘Harry,’ he said finally, ‘are you jealous of me?’

‘Don’t give him the satisfaction,’ said Dad.

‘What?’ laughed Harry. ‘You’ve done so well ’cos you’re a better copper, Jimmy. I know that. When it comes to getting on, I’m a lazy sod. But I see you putting the work in.’

‘He made you say that! You do all this to hurt yourself! And he loves it when you do, you pathetic little twat!’

Quill steeled himself. ‘To some extent, that’s true, but it’s also just because of how the dice rolled. You’re a fucking amazing DS, Harry. If you went off to do something else, using those same skills, you’d be way ahead of me.’

‘Patronizing bastard.’ That had been Harry himself, with just the tiniest twitch of a smile – which his dad didn’t share.

‘But the dice did roll that way, and you’re my mate. You’re going to be my DS again at some point. I don’t want to think of you gnashing your teeth.’

Dad burst forth with a tirade of insults, but Quill wasn’t listening. He was watching Harry instead. He wanted to see if his laying down the law could make Harry rebel against this thing, if Harry’s disciplined side could make this other bastard vanish.

‘That’s good to hear, Jimmy,’ Harry said. ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.’ But, though he gave Quill his most sardonic grin . . . his dad remained.

Quill finally left the pub at closing time, and fended off Harry’s suggestion of finding a cab with him. This encounter was going to be just a weird drunk ghost story, wasn’t it? Something he’d tell people after he’d retired: ‘There was this one odd night when . . .’

He staggered a bit as he headed back round the corner, stepping on and off the suburban pavement, going back towards the blaze of lights outside the Losley house. He should call home:
Love, it turns out ghosts are real. Don’t have nightmares. It’ll never happen again
. But he was still feeling weird and, now he was out in the open, he could still feel the sort of sensation he’d had with Harry’s dad sitting there. That coldness, it was everywhere. As if there was a dead dad lurking in a lot of these houses. And . . . above him, and under him. That was too worrying to think about. And that feeling was especially strong, hugely strong . . . right ahead of him.

He had to stop as soon as he saw the Losley house.

He stared at it. He had to look away, and then look back. But he knew what he was seeing was real.

EIGHT

Quill was surprised that Costain was the first to arrive at the all-night cafe on Willesden High Road. ‘I hadn’t gone home,’ Quill admitted.

‘Why?’

Quill just shook his head. This was going to be the hardest bit. He had been drinking black coffee ferociously, and now he couldn’t quite tell the difference between drunk, buzzed, and this new weird stuff. But he knew what he was after. He remembered that feeling that had passed among them when he’d touched the soil, and now he needed to find out if the other three were seeing stuff, too, and get them to admit it. They might think they’d been drugged or something, and maybe they had been, but if they were all seeing the same thing . . .

‘Listen—’ he began.

‘You can frigging see it too!’ a voice interrupted. They looked up to see Sefton marching in. He dropped into a chair beside them, and stared at them challengingly. ‘Don’t tell me you frigging can’t, because I’ve had my head full of this frigging stuff!’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Quill reprimanded him, quickly and gently.

‘Sorry, guv . . . sir.’ Sefton looked so suddenly lost again that Quill almost felt sorry he’d said it. He’d quite liked that sudden show of fierceness from the quiet one.

Costain looked between them, and gave in. ‘All right, I can see it, too. What
is
it?’

They looked up at the sound of someone else entering, very quietly. Ross walked unsteadily towards them, and sat down beside them. She looked as if she didn’t know what to say.

‘We’re seeing it, too,’ said Costain quickly.

Ross bit her lip and looked away. ‘I went to the psychiatric hospital,’ she confessed. ‘There was . . . a lot of . . .’

They sat there awkwardly, as she kept a distance between herself and them. They waited for her to finish that sentence. But she didn’t.

‘You’re not going mad,’ said Quill. ‘This is real.’

‘Oh, that makes it so much better,’ said Ross sarcastically.

‘I’ll ignore that remark, but I don’t want to hear anything like that again – from any of you.’

Ross looked up, shocked, as if she’d been slapped. But the others were looking almost relieved. And now so was she. There was a time for informality, which was most of the time, and there was a time for this.

‘Guv,’ they all concurred, grateful to him while resenting it too. He didn’t want to keep handling them like that, but it’d do for right now.

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he began.

They stood in front of the Losley house, but Sefton couldn’t make himself look at it for too long. His thoughts flicked back to Joe in the pub where he’d quickly led him after the incident in the street.

‘What was that?’ Joe had said. ‘What happened to you there?’

‘Just . . . some kind of fit, I suppose. I ought to get myself checked out . . .’

‘Is it still going on?’

Sefton had glanced over to where there was something spindly standing at the bottom of the stairs. And then he’d known he had to get away. Away from things like that, and from where there were so many people, all of whom seemed to be contributing to the weirdness. It had been like the way he felt normally about the general public, but pumped up to eleven. They made him want to hide. He had asked for Joe’s number, written it on a beermat, and got out of there. He’d still been able to feel huge things moving about outside that relatively modern bar. So this wasn’t all about ancient stuff. He’d edged his way through the people on the pavement, feeling all their expectations and fears, not individually as in telepathy or something, but as one great terrifying mass; feeling what might be looming in the distance. He hadn’t questioned this feeling, because he wasn’t able to. This wasn’t some medical condition; he was in the middle of a new reality. The phone call from Quill had come as a relief. He’d known from the DI’s tone of voice that he was feeling it too.

The crime scene didn’t look like a normal house any longer. It was a haunted negative of a building, with black windows that were looking into Sefton, challenging him, making him think that, at any second, he’d glimpse something terrible up there. It was entirely different from the buildings on either side of it. ‘The witch’s house,’ he said. And this time he wasn’t making jokes about fairytales.

‘Right,’ said Quill, ‘so let’s—’

But Ross had already set off across the road, heading straight for the front door.

Ross hardly registered showing her pass to the uniform on the doorstep. She had to be first in, had to be in control of this. But, as she walked into the hall of the Losley house, her courage failed her. Rich tapestries hung where the windows should be. The thin carpet was replaced by fur rugs. The writing and the diagrams were still on the walls, but now they shone. There was something chitinous about the colours of the walls, the filthy carapace of a giant insect. As they came in behind her, Ross saw the other three stop and react to it, too. The new forensics shift was making its way through all this, none the wiser, not seeing what was all around them.

Ross felt her comrades draw closer. They had unconsciously formed a square now, their backs to each other, each of them looking in one of the directions trouble might come from, braced like coppers, with legs apart and weight tilted backwards; Ross found that she was doing the same, while the room swirled with horror around them.

The stairs, right in front of her, were particularly challenging. It was as if you could see underneath the stairwell and yet up it at the same time. The up-and-down pattern of the stairs seemed to be overlaid on the surface of your eyes. But it was still contained within a discrete space. It was like a Picasso painting of a stairway.

It took her a moment to see what was now perched on top of the newel post at the far end of the banister. Not a skull any more, but an entire child’s head. Its neck was like an automaton’s, skin hanging around a spinal column which looked to have been screwed into the wood. It had golden curls like a cherub, and bright blue eyes looking straight at them. It blinked, as if
it
was surprised.

‘Oh,’ it said, ‘you can see me.’ And then it started to yell, louder and louder. ‘Strangers! Strangers!’

Ross didn’t want to acknowledge it. She didn’t want it to be real. She looked back at the others. They didn’t seem to want it to be real either. It was as if they were still in a dream. The forensics team had already started looking at them questioningly. They obviously couldn’t hear the child shouting. Ross took the lead again, and headed up the stairs. She had to do it through sheer physical memory because, if she looked, she couldn’t see where her feet were going. It occurred to her that getting down again would be even harder.

Sefton was looking all around him as they went, letting it soak in. This felt different to what he’d encountered in the street, and had been aware of ever since. The green thing . . . Jack . . . just . . . was . . .
grown
out of something naturally. And that way had felt the same for just about everything he’d felt the distant presence of. This was more like that old bloke who’d stepped out of Jack’s way. This was . . . deliberate, something that someone had
made
. It was like his mum had always said, that there was another world underneath ours. Someone – the suspect Mora Losley – seemed to have been taking advantage of it.

They carefully made it onto the upper landing, and stared around them at what was now a polluted palace, medievally regal, adorned with deep furs and tapestries. There was nobody up here, or in the loft either, from the sound of it. The ladder that led up was now glowing in a low light coming from above. Ross made to go up it, but Quill stopped her, and he went up first.

The loft was even more extraordinary. The beams of the ceiling overhead were brilliantly polished, but also stained with time. They now looked like ancient ribs of wood. The roof was alive with a suffused light, like the sparks in a bonfire, as if the smoke of generations was up here. The room was now lined with previously unperceived chests and chairs and other pieces of furniture. The pile of soil was glittering, twitching with stringy golden light, like scribbled lines of writing or of music. Sefton couldn’t look at it, because it confused his eyes. But he still found himself wanting to get to grips with it, for that would be the only way you could cope. It was only frightening because he didn’t know enough. This stuff had been . . . hiding. It was a language of hidden things and of people . . . people like Mora Losley.

Costain was also gazing around, sizing the place up. Too much to cope with. He’d made a deal with himself about that as he’d headed back into the city and only seen more and more mad shit. He knew what the boundaries were, and what the way out was, so he was in. It was more the case that there was just too much evidence here, meaning it was the opposite of Goodfellow . . .
oh!
‘This is where all the Goodfellow juice was,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t see certain things about Rob’s life, ’cos they were . . . hidden from us, literally.’

‘And now we’re wallowing in it,’ muttered Quill.

‘Trouble is, we can’t show it to anyone else.’

‘Maybe we should get other coppers to touch that soil?’

‘That Scene of Crime Officer said she had, and she was her usual cynical self. I don’t think she was seeing this.’

‘So what’s so special about us?’

Costain saw that Ross reacted to that, with a sharp little look of fear. But she kept her silence. He turned, as they all did, at a sudden noise from the darkness over against the far wall. A noise and a movement in the shadows, only a small movement. A rat? No . . .

A black cat came stepping cautiously towards them. It had rough, matted hair, stained with something sticky and dark. Its eyes were green, and they seemed bigger than a cat’s eyes ever should be. It was also looking at them in a way which didn’t seem to be how cats normally looked at things.

‘What’s happened?’ it said. It had an extraordinarily upper-class accent, like some radio announcer from the past.

They stared at it.

‘What are you doing here?’ it went on.

They continued to stare at it. Costain couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He was struggling just to stop himself from running. What was stopping him was the thought that that would be seen as a terrified rout, a shaming of himself, and putting a target on his back as he went. And the fact that what had sent him running was merely a cat.