London Falling (32 page)

‘I don’t,’ said Quill, causing the brief to look startled.

He put a photo of Losley on the table. They’d wondered if making this connection would get some huge and terrible reaction out of the couple, so they’d left it to last.

‘Who’s that?’ said Terry.

‘I gather you haven’t been paying much attention to the news?’

‘We read the paper,’ said Julie, sounding as if she wondered what they were being accused of
now
. ‘The
Mirror
, every day, cover to cover. Though Terry starts at the back, don’t you?’

‘Then you should remember Mora Losley, the witch of West Ham? She’s been featured on the front page six or seven times, as the single biggest story.’

The couple glanced at each other, and then back at Quill, a look on their face that was half fearful and half wondering if he was joking.

‘Never heard of her,’ said Terry.

Quill and Ross stared at each other. And then at Costain and Sefton, who were coming over to boggle at this incredible news.

They all said it together. ‘Oh . . .’

They sent the Franks and their brief over to the nick for a cuppa, the uniforms from the van escorting them. The football had started, and Sefton set the PC to stream it, so it became a noise in the background. Ross realized that they’d hear any goals just from the crowd volume going up. It caused sheer stress, but they had to do it.

‘She made them forget
her
too,’ said Quill.

‘Which means it wasn’t a snatch-off-the-street job,’ said Ross. ‘We don’t know how it went with Horackova, but the only reason I can see for making people forget Losley herself is that they would have seen or known something important about her, something that could be used to help us.’

‘Maybe we can hypnotize them or something. Maybe that’s exactly what she does.’

‘Long-term, maybe, but does science even work against this? If hypnotism is even science. No, fuck that . . . fuck that. The shape of the hole can tell us. The hole is what she took from their memories; we have to think about that shape.’ Ross realized she was pacing back and forth, waving her hands wildly. But sod how she must appear. ‘
How
does she make them forget?’

There was a sudden roar from the PC.
‘And it’s one–nil to Norwich City!’
yelled commentator Alan Green.
‘Tony Ballackti, that’s five goals in three games for him. And, only five minutes in – who’d bet against him doing it again in this match?’
And that sarcastic suggestion in his voice echoed what everyone else in the country was feeling
. ‘Some people in the crowd are already shouting for them to take him off, but they’re being roared down by the Norwich fans. Ballackti himself is shaking his head. He wants more goals! They say any hat-trick player has got a helicopter to take him out of here straight after the match, that Cardiff themselves have hired private security. They say lots of things but they’re not telling us which of them is true.’

‘Exactly,’ said Quill.

Ross found that the thoughts in her head had now jammed. A terrible silence reigned.

Then Sefton kept going, and she loved him for that. She sagged against the wall and listened.

‘She must use one of her bloody gestures on them,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s done anything that wasn’t line of sight, even if you count text messages. She appeared in their garden, and . . . no, like with Toshack, she couldn’t do it through the wall. She needed to get inside—’

Ross let out a little noise from her throat and considered. Eighty-three more minutes. Two more goals. A prolific scorer. A defence with holes in it. And then three more children to be boiled to death. Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven, whose faces they’d seen in those photos. And only them to stop it happening.

‘She doesn’t need to be invited in,’ said Quill. ‘She’s not a vampire. She’ll just walk through the wall.’

‘Waste of energy, though,’ commented Costain, ‘waste of soil. She’s in a war, so she doesn’t waste ammunition. If she can get them to open that door, she will.’

‘And walking through the wall, unseen,’ said Ross, forcing herself back into this discussion, ‘would not necessitate her having to get them to forget about her.’ She paused suddenly, realization dawning. ‘Maybe they saw part of her MO! Something she doesn’t want known, something she wants to be able to do again.’ Ross had started to shout, and she knew it but she couldn’t stop it. ‘
That’s
the shape of the hole. What wouldn’t she want us to know? Maybe she’s . . . pretending to
be something
?!’

‘Not the babysitter,’ said Costain.

‘Don’t tell me those two have a cleaner,’ said Sefton.

Quill grabbed his phone and told the uniforms to get the Franks back over. The four of them actually met them halfway to the Portakabin and marched beside them on the way back inside.

Quill was already firing questions at them. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘has access to your house? Not individual people, but types of people.’

The couple looked at each other, feeling increasingly scared. ‘I suppose . . . the social workers?’ suggested Julie.

Quill didn’t bother asking why such people would visit a ‘childless couple’. ‘In the plural? Can you describe them?’

‘There are two,’ said Julie. ‘One’s Maria, who’s a . . . coloured lady, in her forties, going grey a bit before her time. And the other . . .’ She suddenly stopped. They were now standing at the door of the Portakabin, Ross shivering with both the cold and the tension, the sound of that bloody radio washing over them. ‘It can’t be only the one, because Maria was asking me about the other one . . .’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God!’

Quill darted into the Portakabin ahead of the others. He’d made sure there were no more details to be had from them, and then sent a screaming Julie and her husband back to the van, back towards a legal process that he would try to make sure didn’t hurt them. In his hand he held the business card of social worker Maria Sutton. Her mobile rang six times . . . then she answered. Quill put the conversation on the speaker.

‘I only know about it because other people on my list mentioned her,’ she said. ‘There was quite a scare about it locally, over the last couple of weeks, what with this old woman showing up and claiming to be a social worker. And I did wonder about Mora Losley, because it was all over the local papers. But this woman looked nothing like her, and it never seemed to come to anything, since no children were taken.’

‘She was preparing for lots of sacrifices,’ said Ross, too far away to be heard by the woman on the phone. ‘She was sorting out where the local kids lived, and she didn’t make them all forget. She didn’t need to.’

‘Other people on your list: have you got that list in a document you can email me right now?’

Sefton went to Google Maps on his phone, and zoomed in on the area Maria Sutton now described, two or three of the poorer neighbourhoods of Brockley, presently being squeezed out by the continuing gentrification of the area. There were open spaces here: Crofton Park, Telegraph Hill Park, Peckham Rye Park. All Quill could think about, as he finished the call, was how that would give Losley room to lurk – lots of places for her to connect her remaining West Ham soil to the ground.

‘She’s in there,’ said Ross. ‘The bitch is in there somewhere.’

Quill looked to his email and found the address list. ‘There’s only about twenty of these.’ He drew with his finger, on the screen of Sefton’s phone, a rough square. ‘If she kept this close to home—’

‘And Tony Ballackti has been brought down in the penalty area! The referee is pointing to the spot!’

They all fell silent. ‘Don’t choose him to take it,’ said Costain helplessly. ‘
Don’t
.’

‘And there is despair at the Boleyn Ground now. It feels as if this is going to go on and on, with a parade of goals. The fans here, they’ve been hit hard by the press stories of the last few weeks. Speaking to some of them, they think they’ve been tarred with the same brush. And now Norwich are showing no mercy. It’s Ballackti to take the penalty, because it would normally be. It has to be, I suppose, if we’re not giving in to fear.’

‘You don’t know anything about fear!’ yelled Quill. ‘You don’t fucking know about
fear
!’

‘Ballackti puts the ball on the spot, brave in the face of all this. And I’ve never heard such sounds from a football crowd.’

Quill could imagine the smiling man somewhere among them, revelling in it.

‘There are West Ham supporters, here and there, not barracking Ballackti exactly, but shouting to him. They’re trying to tell him not to take it, to miss it deliberately. They’re pleading with him.’

Ross grabbed the phone from Sefton so quickly that it nearly made him drop it. ‘We can see what she’s done to the records! What about the internet?! Try Google Street View!’

‘But Ballackti steps up, he places the ball . . .’

Ross pinched at the screen, making agonized expressions as each zoom-in took seconds to load. ‘I think I can see something. In those streets, just a dot.’ She zoomed in closer. They all craned to look.

‘He’s taking his run-up—!’

‘Where is it?!’ asked Costain. ‘What’s the address?’

A roar from the crowd. What sort of roar? They already knew.

‘And Ballackti’s put it away for his second goal! Surely they must take him off now? Surely, if they don’t, he’ll score again!’

But now they could all see it, as they’d seen the house in real life. As they’d seen Losley on that camera footage. The obscene light shone out of the screen at them: glistening and slick, an abomination in this world. From one particular suburban street. One particular house.

Sefton grabbed his holdall and the team ran for the door.

NINETEEN

Quill had asked for a BMW 5 Series from the motor pool, and had it parked outside last night. Now they all leaped into it, Sefton throwing his holdall in the boot. It was getting dark.

‘I’m the best driver,’ said Costain, almost pushing Quill out of the way.

‘I’ll assume you mean you’re a level-two driver, cleared to handle this unmarked car.’ Quill reached up to slam the magnetic blue light on to the roof, and plugged it into the ‘Kojack’ electrical socket in the dashboard. ‘I’ll get us a CAD number so you can jump the lights.’

‘Whatever.’ Costain looked over his shoulder and checked that the others were wearing their seatbelts.

‘Shall I say ETA twenty minutes?’ called Ross, already hitting buttons on her phone.

‘Twenty minutes? Sod that.’ Costain pushed down on the pedal, and mud flew from the wheels as they accelerated towards the gate.

Quill called Lofthouse first. ‘I want uniforms ready down there, ma’am. I mean a
lot
of uniforms, as suspect is armed and dangerous and has potential victims on the premises. Scene commander to let me know RV point—’

Ross didn’t register what he was saying. She was talking to Brockway at West Ham. ‘So Norwich haven’t taken him off?’

‘The fuckwits,’ whispered Sefton beside her.

‘We strongly advise . . . we
officially
advise . . . Okay, they know that, okay.’

‘What’s causing that?’ said Costain. ‘They’d never normally do that. Something’s influencing them.’

‘If he does score a third time,’ Ross continued, ‘as soon as he comes off the field, he stays put, security detail to surround him. Have you got everything we asked for ready?’ The West Ham chaplain was ready to bless the player, the room and the said coppers. Quill had speculated that, while being at the West Ham ground itself would presumably give Losley a great deal of power, she had so far proved unwilling to do anything awful there, and might not want to harm anyone directly connected with the club. Ross had already sold this approach to the club on the basis of what Losley herself believed. She now received assurances, switched off the phone, threw it down – and then grabbed it up again.

Quill switched the radio on, and they all fell silent, listening until it was clear a third goal hadn’t been scored. ‘If there’s a hat-trick, I’ll send whatever uniforms are at the location straight in, whether we’re there yet or not. She’ll be able to hold them off, we’ll likely lose a few, but I’d rather that than losing the kids.’ His tone didn’t sound to be inviting debate. He was again taking that responsibility on himself.

Sixteen minutes later, they spotted the cluster of unmarked vans ahead, two streets away from the Losley house, as arranged. In zero time, Brockley nick had done them proud.

Quill stepped from the car and shook hands with Inspector Ben Cartwright, who looked as if he’d just won the lottery.

‘Losley,’ he said, ‘on our patch. Result.’

‘You know what they call Method of Entry teams?’ said Sefton to Ross, as they watched Quill briefing some uniforms in the back of one of the vans, their enforcer ram held ready between them. ‘“Ghostbusters” – if only they knew.’ He was trying to keep talking, because she looked all closed in on herself, in a terrible way, now that she had stopped working and was just waiting. He could feel it in himself, too.
We smell death near you soon
. It had been written by someone who probably knew. They were going in now and they had almost nothing to protect them that they hadn’t had last time. They had no choice. He found himself again revolted by the thought of what Losley was intending to kill these kids
for
. Not out of madness or anger, but for what must seem to her to be a good, practical reason. To her, the sacrifices were
fuel
: a source of energy for any subsequent attack on the footballer. She lived in a London where that sort of equation must be commonplace. He thought back to holding Joe in his arms, in his hands, and took some comfort from that.

Quill and Costain came over to them, from where they’d been consulting with Cartwright, their breath visible in the street lights. The vans had pulled up beside trees that had cracked the pavement, in front of houses doubtless filled with busybodies already going frantic on Twitter. The radio in the car was still on: the match had reached half time, the restart due in two minutes. No further goals yet, thank God.