London Falling (44 page)

‘Losley wouldn’t be up for him summoning her,’ said Costain. ‘He’d have to go to her.’

Before any of them could stop him, Quill slammed his finger down on the golden words. Then, with a yell that shocked Ross, he withdrew it. He made as if to stick the finger in his mouth, but Sefton grabbed his hand to prevent him. ‘Stop doing things like that!’ The finger was badly burned. Ross looked back at the sheet of paper. The name on it was swiftly fading, as the power dissipated. Then it was just ink.

Quill was shaking his hand in the air, furious with himself. ‘Of course that didn’t bloody work. He came back here before we nicked him, so he would have tried that if it would! And I didn’t see a burn on his fingers, because he knew better than to . . . knock on a locked door, or something! Fuck!’

Costain was again checking the monitor. When he looked up from it, it was obvious that nothing had changed. Except that his own expression had hardened, and he looked to have made a decision. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to move as soon as this bug shows the cat’s been picked up.
If
it is. So’ – he handed the monitor to Ross – ‘there’s something I can’t put off doing any longer.’

And, before anyone could stop him, he stepped over to the spinning boxes and vanished.

TWENTY-EIGHT

At 6 p.m., with twenty-six hours to go until the start of the match, Costain marched towards the office unit of a plastic-sheeting company on an industrial estate in High Barnet. He’d kept his phone switched off. He didn’t want the others to know where he was or what he was doing. Not yet. The manager of the company was trying to keep up with him. ‘It’s now been a few weeks, and nobody’s been in touch. But you needn’t worry. We didn’t disturb anything. We don’t even know what you left in there. Please could you . . . could you pass that information on, higher up the . . . organization?’

Costain turned to look at this nervous little man, lost in his baggy suit, unexpectedly having to deal this evening with someone to whom his usual signifiers of power didn’t apply. He’d called earlier to summon the man over here from his home. And he tried not to enjoy the experience of dominating him, while looking him up and down. Perhaps he should say something reassuring? That would be the good thing to do. But, no, that would be breaking character, and also working against a greater good. This man still thought of him as an enforcer called Blake.

‘Leave it with me,’ he said instead, and reached out a gloved hand. The man put a bunch of keys in it, then quickly retreated to his car.

Costain unlocked the door of the unit, and locked it again behind him. The interior smelt of newness. Certainly it didn’t feel as if anyone had been in here lately. So that meant he was still safe.
Hmm.
The thought made him smile grimly for a moment. He ignored the office and found a back room with an aged carpet, a sprinkle of loose plaster, a stack of three chairs with a corporate desk calendar on top, and a kettle. He pulled aside a thick-piled rug that smelt of dog, uncovering a stack of metal chests of the sort photographers used. He opened the first with one of the annoyingly many keys, and inside saw . . .

They were still there.
He let out a sigh of relief. He’d picked this place because the manager had been on Rob Toshack’s protection list, after a few of his illegal Chinese employees had suffered nasty accidents, but had only had contact with himself and a couple of the other soldiers. At this stage, the man didn’t know who he was paying off, and that’s how it would have stayed until Rob had got confidently used to his reliability. Then this site might have indeed become a drop box for Rob, for certain items that needed to be kept far away from Bermondsey. ‘Anthony Blake’, on the other hand, had
immediately
decided that it would do for his own purposes.

He pulled the two Heckler & Koch MP7 personal defence weapons from the case, possessing the firepower of an assault rifle, but easily concealable. And now, having just seen boxes of ammunition in the lock-up they’d accessed by the spinning boxes, Costain had a supply of it for these babies. Rob must have commissioned that London ammo manufacturer to make suitable rounds, ones that could potentially take down Losley.

Costain put the guns on the table, then found the second box. He couldn’t resist a smile at what he’d left hidden inside it: six kilo bags of cocaine hydrochloride. Not cut with
anything
. It would have been assumed, by whatever remained of the Toshack set, to have been stashed in a particular satellite house when the final raid against the firm went down, and thus now seized in evidence. But actually it had been here, as a result of a little juggling act that could only have been performed by someone with his facility of access. He’d set this up as his last payday and, if required, his emergency exit. Two hundred and forty grand of coke, and who knew how much value for the guns? It had been a game he’d been looking forward to playing, taking them to a port somewhere up north and spending a weekend operating as an arms dealer. Yeah, his comrades had been, to some extent, right about him all along. But now he had to do the right thing – with a gun to his head, as Sefton had said.

He stopped suddenly, stock still. He could sense that there was someone else in the room with him. There had been just that little change in the air pressure, a little moment of cold. It was something derived from the world of the Sight, but it was very subtle. Was it that smiling bastard come for him, now he could be found red-handed? No. He’d always appear red-handed to that one. And, anyway, he knew who this was going to be, didn’t he? He’d known it when Ross had told them about seeing her dad. He knew who, in his own life, filled that special place of pain.

He stood up slowly and turned to look. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘my very own ghost.’

The deceased informer Sammy Cliff stood there, the original Tiger Feet, his arms wrapped round himself, shivering. Not so triumphant as when Costain had seen him waiting for him on the edge of Hell. But a good deal more whole than when he’d last seen the same man in the flesh: a corpse hanging from the ceiling with his feet burned off. Actually, though, Costain realized that now he could see straight through the man. The figure was wavering like a mirage, but the expression on his face said there was still something of the real Sammy in there. Costain watched calmly while that pathetic fear turned to fury, as Sammy realized he hadn’t got the rise out of him that he’d wanted.

With a shaking hand, the ghost pointed at him. ‘You’ll be joining me soon,’ he said. It sounded like a user playing at amateur dramatics. Doing his best and failing. Like they always did.

Costain supposed that he should feel either fear or pity, those being the options that would keep him out of Hell. But now that he saw what he’d expected to see, he didn’t feel either. ‘You reckon?’

‘“Reckon?” Of course I do! Look at you, you’re a fucking liar. You just set people up and let them take the fall for you. And now you’re doing it to your friends, too!’ He was getting more and more solid as he yelled at Costain in that screeching, lost voice that demanded some sort of justice that just wasn’t present in the world. He was a lot like Harry’s dad, and Costain wondered distantly what the difference was between a ghost that was made by being ‘remembered’ and some genuinely dead individual. Because, right now, Sammy seemed bloody artificial, as if he was a story rather than a person. All the time Costain had known him, Sammy had spoken and acted for something else, either for Costain or for the smack. He was continuing in that pattern now, doing this because that smiling bastard wanted him to.

Costain knew now that he could never be someone like that, someone who just played a role, said the expected lines, felt the expected emotions, in response to someone or something that was itself acting. Costain knew himself to be a shit, but inside that –
because
of that – he was honest.

‘Sammy,’ he said, ‘Tiger Feet, old mate, let me explain something to you. No, tell you what, let me show you.’ He grabbed the box containing the bags of coke, and hauled it through the door to the toilet cubicle in the little hallway. He could feel Sammy watching him as he ripped open each bag and dropped it into the toilet bowl, flushing between every one, until he was down to the last bag. Then he looked up, into those eyes that always sought to appear so demanding and always failed so completely. ‘You’re only a ghost for me, you sad fuck, if I
let
you be.’ He flushed away the contents of the last bag, too, leaving just a pinch in the bag’s bottom corner. Then he marched back into the room he’d come from. He dropped the remnant of the splendidly fine product onto the table, extracted the blade from his multi-knife, and started to line it up and chop it. ‘It all depends on what I think of myself, on what I can live with – that’s
my
standard. I’m not going to let you or anyone fucking else judge me when I came out here to help save the life of a child.’

He took a drinking straw from the storage cupboard, looked the astonished ghost in the eye, and snorted up the last of his emergency exit. He felt it surge into his head, then he straightened up and laughed. ‘You know who I am, Sammy. You remember me. I’m not someone who lets himself get fucking
haunted
.’ He marched forward until he was looking right into the ghost’s empty eyes. ‘And I’m not someone who plays at being a nice young man just to get a free pass out of Hell. If I’m doing the right thing, I’m doing it for real. And if I go to Hell, I’ll end up fucking
ruling
it.’ And he stared at Sammy as the ghost faded further, and further, simultaneous with the rush of exultation in Costain’s veins.

‘Just remember,’ Costain said finally, when the ghost was nowhere in his consciousness, ‘who’s the star of this picture.’

He gathered up the guns, turned on his heel, and headed back to Gipsy Hill.

Sefton watched as the Goodfellow coppers entered Toshack’s lockup through the conventional doors and started yelling to each other about what they saw there. He felt distantly glad for them. He looked over to where Ross kept checking the monitor to see if the cat had yet moved. Quill was pacing about, shaking hands without joy. Twenty-five hours to go, and he had to find a way to turn his experience into something that could help.

After the three of them got back to the Portakabin, while Quill and Ross started to add the details from the manuscript pages to the Ops Board, Sefton got out his special notebooks and checked through everything he’d written down about his encounter with . . . whatever Brutus had been. ‘I was proceeding in a mystical direction when I encountered a six-foot-two Roman male, with whom I shared a certain sexual tension.’ That’s what it should have read. His actual account still squared with Sefton’s memory, but it felt like a dream now. Brutus had said that he had to remember the bookshop. What he’d
felt
there. Again that word, a weird one to see in any copper’s record of events. He found the page that covered the night referred to. He read the notes in every way he could: poetically, as if they were metaphors rather than description; like a word puzzle that hid a code. He read every third word; he even ran the pronunciations over backwards. They merely became nonsense. Brutus had been very clear that he had to work for this, that he had . . .
continually
to offer a sacrifice of work, of himself, and of the sort of work he did. That was going to mean a sort of continual background pain, the inability ever to relax.
Pain is what this is about
, said a small voice in the back of his mind. What was the most painful aspect of the bookshop? That one was straightforward: being in the dark, having to save the others, when he’d had to make such an effort to make the darkness itself forget the horrors and be something else. It had taken great effort to make it forget.

And there suddenly was the thought, now so perfectly framed in his head. As it always was in a cop show, the phrase that completed the resolution of the mystery. Except this had taken work. This had taken him on another step towards . . . whatever he was trying to be. Brutus had called him an initiate, and he supposed that now he was. Because he now had something to contribute.

‘Jimmy,’ he said, ‘could you give Lofthouse a call? I think there’s something she could do that might help.’

It was properly night when Costain returned. Ross saw Quill’s eyes widen as the DC put the guns on the table in front of him. He considered them for a moment, then just nodded. ‘I’ll get the ammo sent over from the lock-up,’ he said.

They took shifts in watching to see if the cat’s locator bug had moved. Quill got some sleeping bags brought over. The person checking the monitor sat by its light while the others lay in the darkness, getting what little sleep they could. Ross wasn’t sure if she got any proper sleep at all. Every now and then she heard a small noise or movement nearby, and realized that a nightmare had woken one of her comrades.

But then she must have found some way of drifting into sleep, because it was suddenly bright and cold and she ached all over, and Quill, his head in his hands, was looking up from the monitor. He’d just put his phone down. She’d heard him, she realized, at the edge of sleep, talking quietly to his wife.

‘Match day,’ he said. ‘Shall we forgo the bloody tea and get straight to the coffee?’

They took showers in Gipsy Hill, finding whatever change of clothes they could. Ross actually got to the end of the bills list, using it to eat up the hours, saw the last page of it depart her screen, like the last train. Nothing found. If Losley didn’t take her cat home, then, when that football match started, when bloody Manchester City, with all their firepower, with the bloody smiling bastard on their side, couldn’t resist a goal . . . then Quill’s child would be put in a pot by those unyielding, ancient hands and slowly boiled to death. And, beyond that, into the Hell she gave these infants to. As something cold seized her stomach, Ross realized how debilitating it would be if she kept thinking about that, and made herself get up and start to walk around. Exactly as Quill did.