London Falling (30 page)

‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

The woman looked angry, but some explanation seemed to be required here to fulfil the bargain. ‘The first two are indications of different sorts of hope: summer and autumn. The third is what the hope is actually about.’

‘The hanged man?’ She remembered that name from TV shows. It had always made her look up.

‘These aren’t like normal Tarot cards, which are for the rest of—’ She stopped herself, and for a moment Ross thought it was because she’d already said too much, but it seemed that she’d noticed something else about her subject and now she was smiling, revealing gaps where teeth should be – another sacrifice, Ross guessed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘this is important to you personally?’

Ross didn’t want to show it. ‘The man being hanged . . . is a sacrifice?’

‘Does this cause you pain? Are the details going to make you suffer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you listen here, copper, and I’ll tell you all about it. The berk on the card, he’s had three things done to him. The threefold death, they call it: he’s been sacrificed three times. A death wound to the head. A death wound to the side. A hanging to kill him too.’ The woman was gleefully examining her face. ‘Makes his soul like gold, that does – commends him to the fire.’

‘To the fire?’

‘So I’m told. Sends him to Hell as solid currency. You get a lot in return for a three in one.’

Ross felt the room swaying around her. She felt the knife in her pocket. She suddenly had in her mind a picture of her dad’s face tilted up against the ceiling rose. The bruise on his head. The wound in his side.

Quill’s head collided with the ragged man’s stomach. With a cry, the other fell back, and whatever was in his hand went flying. The buffeting winds shut off. Quill leaped to grab him. He got his hands clenched among the dirty ancient coat, and slammed the man down onto the marble floor, hauling one hand behind his back, pulling the handcuffs from his own pocket. But then he realized that he was sitting on top of just a dirty old coat with nothing in it. And then on top of nothing at all. He was crouching on bare marble, his arse in the air, handcuffs jingling from one hand. He looked up to see New Age punters walking past him, raising eyebrows.

He got to his feet and looked quickly around the floor. There they were. He grabbed a fold of his own coat to pick them up in. Then, feeling nothing very dangerous from them, though there was definitely power of some kind, he took them in his bare hand. They were two thin paddles . . . or vanes. They were made of very old metal, with ancient decorations, like something from out of a long barrow that should now be in a museum. And in his hands they felt useless.

Sefton lay on the hard floor, his head ringing. He felt as if he was back in the playground. He’d just been thrown to the ground by something with that same effortless power over him. It had felt as he imagined being caught in an explosion would feel. But it had left him . . . he made himself breathe deeply . . . with his ribs intact, and . . . he rolled over . . . his hands were just bruised where he’d landed on them. He managed to look over at Costain, who was pushing himself to his feet, looking quickly around him as if he might be attacked again. Sefton himself slowly stood up. The piece of paper was blowing away in shreds, departing too swiftly to catch, too swiftly for normality, and all that had been left of the tile was dust that was vanishing into a red stain on the floor.

The crowd was staring at them, though trying not to. What had they witnessed? Not as much as the two policemen had. That had been an explosion meant only for those with the Sight, a silent warning – something that felt as if it had been put together hastily by an anonymous member of a subculture that didn’t want to be policed. ‘That was my fault,’ Sefton said.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Costain, looking angry, ‘it was. Let’s get some details on this fucker.’ And he led them off to find the stall manager.

‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ the fortune-teller was saying, but Ross wasn’t listening any more. ‘Our bargain is fulfilled.’

Ross got to her feet at the same instant the woman did, intent on apprehending her.

The woman glared at her. ‘We haven’t had the law bothering us for a few years now. We stayed out of sight of them. But then they was got rid of, and so will you be. That’s the way the wheel’s turning.’

Ross gave her a hard stare. ‘Try and get away, I’ll have you.’ She could hear running feet behind her. The others had finally come to find her. She kept eye contact with the woman, who produced a small knife that was too small to make Ross back off. She felt like reaching into her own pocket and comparing blades. But, no, she had to keep her authority. ‘What’re you planning on doing with the potato peeler?’

The fortune-teller suddenly drew it across her own palm, and cried out at the pain. Ross took a step forward, to try to stop the woman doing herself any more harm. But then it occurred to her that she hadn’t paid proper attention to the floor. It was really interesting, so she got down on to her hands and knees and, dimly aware of the rest of her team arriving, she settled on the perfect spot, a brass line at the edge of where the wood and marble flooring met. She raised her head back, smiled at the others, and—

Costain threw himself at her and sent her rolling into the table before she could dash her brains out. The table flew towards the woman. He was desperately holding Ross down.

‘Let go!’ she yelled. ‘I have to—!’ And then normal awareness rushed back into her head. ‘The suspect!’ she shouted. ‘Stop her!’

Costain eased off just enough to see that Quill and Sefton had already pushed the table aside—

To reveal that the woman had gone, like a dove out of a conjuring trick, taking her equipment with her, leaving only a spray of blood across the white cloth. There came cries and shouts from all around, as people who did and didn’t know the truth of it gasped.

EIGHTEEN

They sat on the steps outside, the Houses of Parliament looming behind them, the office lights coming on in the afternoon twilight. Big Ben began to strike four, and Quill could swear he heard the echoes reverberating through this new London he was learning about. They sounded to the depths and resonated back off the sky. They rang through people and memory. ‘The woman at that table turns out to have paid them in cash and provided a false address. Bloody sketchy description you got of that bloke who left the . . . bomb or whatever it was.’

‘I reckon he disguised himself,’ said Costain, ‘like Losley did.’

He looked to Ross. He’d have expected her to have got her laptop out by now, but she was just staring into the distance. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so that woman told Ross that we’re going to have to be like Sherlock Holmes to win: hardly a revelation. She also said that five is better than four, whatever that means. We’ve also discovered that there used to be some form of law enforcement among this community, but that’s gone now. And we’ve found that stuff associated with London, made in London, about London – that stuff seems to have power in London. I got these things too.’ He took the vanes from his pocket and, meeting Sefton’s gaze, handed them over to him.

‘And there’s going to be a death close to us,’ muttered Sefton, accepting them. He’d retreated into his shell again.

Quill closed his eyes for a moment, as that statement put a weight in his stomach weirdly beyond what he’d expect to feel at a threat. He felt he should know what it was about, and was feeling vulnerable that he didn’t. ‘Yeah, but . . . later for that. Lisa, what aren’t you telling us?’

She composed herself for a moment. ‘My dad,’ she said, ‘he was Toshack’s “good sacrifice”. He was sent to Hell, and Toshack got Losley’s services in return.’

They were all silent. Quill looked at Sefton, who was silently disapproving of their terminology again.

‘Which makes me realize something,’ she said, making him look back. ‘Everybody thought my dad committed suicide. Including the coroner. So this stuff can close cases that should have remained open. We’ve only instructed the databases to look through open cases, so how about we look at closed ones, too?’ Quill made to put a hand on her shoulder, but her expression deterred him.

That evening, Quill oversaw the rewriting of the Ops Board. ‘Speaking in tongues’ and the three items Ross had consulted through the fortune-teller were added to the Concepts list, as were ‘London items’, ‘old law’, ‘five over four’, ‘tile bomb’, ‘vanes’ and ‘someone close’. ‘Remembered’ had been expanded to include Sefton’s ideas about the memories of the masses and the dead. Photofits for new suspects Fortune-Teller, Windy and Bomber had been put up, unconnected to Losley so far.

‘We’re going to end up with a whole other board just for speculation,’ he observed.

But then, with shaking hands, Ross took down the speculative card under Toshack, picked up a piece of card marked ‘Alf Toshack’, and attached it to Rob’s picture by a victim thread. Then she stood looking at it for a few minutes, as if she could rip up time and have him at her mercy by sheer fury.

West Ham were playing at home on Wednesday evening. It took until Monday afternoon for the list of closed cases of missing or murdered children, enormous as it was, to be sent to the Portakabin. It wasn’t just a computer file, since Quill had asked for the search parameters to go back to the very start of when records were kept. A van arrived, with two archive clerks from Hendon carrying boxes of papers. The computer file included a lot of cases where the perpetrators were currently serving jail time. Ross, who until then had been obsessively trawling the list of bills again, started there, getting the others to begin on the physical files.

‘One thing I’m after,’ she said, ‘is Caucasian, red-headed, parents of three siblings. The parents of those kids in the cauldron. With the older files, you’re looking to match up the descriptors we’ve got of the older victims longer ago, particularly the siblings taken in threes. The cases are now closed, so the authorities at the time will have come to a solid conclusion as to what happened to them. We’re looking to prise that open, and see Losley.’

Quill didn’t suggest that it was a meagre hope. He made them stop every hour for a cuppa, and they worked on into the night. Until—

‘Got one,’ said Ross. Quill and the others went quickly over to see. ‘Tereza Horackova was her name, a redhead – look at that photo. She was serving time in Holloway prison for multiple murder of children, before committing suicide a couple of years ago.’ She went on to the internet. ‘She was convicted of killing her own children,’ she continued, her voice starting to crack. ‘Three of them, and the ages fit, but she always insisted she didn’t have kids.’ She looked up the DNA swab details and emailed them to Dr Deb before his office closed for the night. ‘I’ve got her home address.’

Quill didn’t want to argue with that look on her face. Instead he went to get his coat.

The house in Acton was now occupied by a Bangladeshi family who spoke little English and were reluctant to let them inside. They managed to find a translator from the local nick, and that way eventually got granted access. They did only a cursory search, but Quill had got what he needed from the garden, where there were the faintly glowing remains of soil pushed to the side of where a patio had been installed.

‘She kept rigorously to her story,’ said Ross, ‘insisting that she had no children. She couldn’t explain the many signs suggesting the opposite, up to and including the slide and playhouse in her garden. Losley came here all those years ago, she took those children, and she made that woman forget them. That’s how she manages to steal kids and nobody notices.’

‘Bloody excellent,’ said Quill. ‘Coppers are bound to remember cases like that. We’ll find a few more.’

‘It’s just a pity,’ said Costain, ‘that this is close enough to Losley’s Willesden house for her to have operated from there, so we don’t have a sniff of another base.’

Quill put out the call to every nick in London: they were after current or recent cases where parents of missing children claimed not to have any kids. Especially anything that had just come in. Ross had found them something vital with that obsessive determination of hers. It put hope back into him. But, as Quill walked out of the gate of the semi, he was struck by something: a sudden fear that made him look back. He paused, his eyes searching the garden, finding nothing. It was . . . just that feeling of missing something. Again, that echo resonating inside him. Sooner or later he’d figure out what it meant. Maybe all this was just telling him that as a person he was built on nothing. Well, he knew that, and he’d keep going anyway. He headed back to the car and ordered the others to go and get some sleep.

On Tuesday morning they had a reply from the pathologist, stating that the swab record from Horackova was indeed a match for the mitochondrial DNA found in the kids in the cauldron. Quill called up the arresting officer of the time and filled him in, just in case Horackova had relatives who should be contacted and could be interviewed. But there were none. And, so far, there were no replies from any of the London nicks that had been forwarded his message about anomalous perp statements. ‘If we don’t get a lead by tomorrow night,’ he told his team, ‘I’ve put a plan in place for any footballer that scores a hat-trick.’ He handed a folder to Ross. ‘It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.’

‘I didn’t think you were going to call me,’ said Joe, eyeing Sefton over his pint. They’d been talking about pretty well nothing for an hour. And Sefton was getting more and more tired, and more and more certain of what he needed. And he was so aware of ‘
We smell death near you soon
,’ and he needed to find some way past all of this.

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘You
look
like . . .’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want to tell me anything?’

‘Yeah.’ So he told Joe everything. Copper: he showed him his warrant card, because he wanted to establish a baseline for the shit to follow. UC. Losley. Everything. He was totally breaking the rules, thus leaving himself entirely vulnerable, but, what the fuck? Joe’s expression grew worried, then scared. ‘Walk away if you want to,’ Sefton said. ‘I need to tell somebody or I’ll go mental. I need someone to talk to about this, to bounce some ideas off, and . . . just to talk to. I’m not being listened to, and we’re running out of time. It’s match day tomorrow and we might be going to hear about some kids being fucking
boiled alive
.’