London Falling (11 page)

He went into Soho, tried the Admiral Duncan, was put off by how loud and crowded it was. He found a smaller pub, still with blacked-out windows, which always made him roll his eyes. They should
only have those on a copper pub catering for UCs. He wished there was someone he could share the sense of triumph with. In the car, Costain being Costain and the fact that Ross was preoccupied as
always, had put paid to any thought of shared celebrations, though the driver had been congratulating them. Triumph . . . and, yeah, something heavy got into your brain if you didn’t make
jokes about it. Something else that made him silent and made him need to talk was that bloody cauldron . . .

He had to stop and put a hand out to steady himself as he got a sudden mental image of . . . real children inside it . . . screaming. Oh, God, don’t let yourself go there, mate. He went up
to the bar and got a pint.

‘Haven’t see you before. Where’re you from, then?’ The voice with the nice London accent, a bit south of the river, had come from behind him. He turned to see who it was,
and found himself looking at a bloke with a straggly beard as if he was a hipster mountain man, in a suit as if he was something in PR, and with interesting eyes.

‘Kensington.’ Sefton used his original accent even as he said it. Why, Ambassador, you’re spoiling your son. He felt immediately embarrassed. He hadn’t used that voice in
years.

‘Really?’

‘Nah,’ and there he was again, lying, ‘just having you on, mate.’

‘But you haven’t been out round here before? Right, so, this place is bollocks. Let me give you the tour.’

His name was Joe. They had a couple of pints at a couple of different places. Sefton was too knackered to really care about which pub he was in, but he liked the company. And he was on for
whatever the evening brought because – come on, skeletons in a cauldron – he was off duty now, thank you. And he always loved the sort of offhand friendliness you got when you met a
bloke like this. I mean, yeah, they were both thinking about a shag, but that was also kind of a doorway to the sort of hanging out with near strangers that Americans did so well, and the British
didn’t. Exactly right for him tonight. To be nobody in particular.

‘So what do you do, then?’

‘Stuff.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I don’t want to get into that.’

Joe got a resigned look on his face that said, fine, keep me at arm’s length, why are we bothering with the social bit if that’s all you’re after? So Sefton put an arm round
his shoulder. ‘I mean it’s been a long day and it’s a dull job and I don’t want to talk about it. Sorry.’

‘Okay, taking that onboard. Intense, you are.’

‘Tell me about it.’

It was crowded on the pavements tonight as they wandered along: encountering unlicensed cab offer,
Big Issue
seller, old man in white gloves, beery students; gay, gay, not sure, gay,
straight, straight, straight; hen night, Japanese couple, religious ranter; stall selling something that looked like shite and smelt like toffee . . .

And, suddenly, who they all were and what they all wanted hit Sefton like a punch and he wanted to hide hide hide go undercover be someone else quickly before they know you before they get you
because you can feel how they might hate you if they saw the real you and if they turned on you with this gaze and this power and his vision went weird and he had to fall back against the window of
a Turkish convenience store and the man behind the counter inside started tapping the window saying what are you doing because he was bumping the back of his head regularly against the glass and he
was quite conscious thank you absolutely together but he couldn’t stop and Joe was staring at him not yet completely freaked out and the force of it was because there was something nearby . .
.

He took a breath, closed his eyes.

The fucker must have put something in my beer. Oh God, is this Ketamine or some shit? Is this a sex thing, or was I followed and targeted, and is that the guy whose house I’ve been in?
My warrant card’s in my sock. Get to a taxi, show the warrant, go to Paddington Green or somewhere
—

But Joe wasn’t looking dangerous; he seemed really worried now. So he didn’t do this. What did this?

Something was approaching. Something was heading towards him, and that was what had sent him slamming back against the window. Because his body was afraid of what was coming. The owner was
coming out now. People inside, buying samosas, were looking out at him. Mad guy. But something was coming. That was what had sent him slamming back away from it. He hadn’t realized. Something
was coming and this lot were all in danger. Never mind that they were all terrifying, the force of all of them combined that he wanted to hide from. They were all in danger.

The owner of the shop grabbed his shoulder to push him away into the crowd, towards the thing that was coming. Joe started to get in the way, to rail loudly at him: it’s not drugs, look at
him, he’s ill—

Sefton pushed himself away from the shop owner, away from the window, with Joe rushing after him. Get away from this thing. If it was only after him, then get it away from them.

And then he realized that it had changed the direction it was coming from.

It was coming straight through the crowd in front of him. It was here!

It walked through the crowd. It walked right through them, their bodies passing through it, mostly, for there was one old man stepping round it . . . but enough of that, just look at it –
look at this mother, it’s ten feet tall and it’s a plant, it’s like a tree but with a mass of green on top, and are those human arms? That’s a bloke in a costume, no it
isn’t, it’s bringing with it—

Smell of park, not just grass, not countryside, park. More than smell. Something got park into my head, beyond the smell. There’s money and servitude and that anger, all that anger, all
that anger at doffing your cap and lowering your eyes as the bastards go past and they’re throwing a coin for you and this is you at their houses, Jack in your green Jack after their maids
Jack your only day hidden in here Jack get up to all sorts in here, and Sefton thought,
Not me mate, I’m like you whatever you are, money thing, servant thing, old lady remembering thing,
city remembering thing
—

He’d locked up again, his hands shaking in front of him like he was having a fit, and it was rushing at him, aiming to go through him—

A moment of smelling, or seeing, all those things at once, in the many corners of his eyes, as if his eyes were suddenly stars and pricked with corners, and it was all those things at once and
terrifying! And so cold, made out of cold—

And it was into the crowd again, part of them again, and it hadn’t been after him at all, and he staggered.

Joe caught him.

‘He still thinks you’re bent,’ said the man whispering in Harry’s ear. ‘All those years you’ve been kissing his arse, and this is how he
repays you.’

Quill had stumbled back to his seat, saying, yeah, he had been in the pub a while. He’d been so freaked out he couldn’t deal with it. But he wasn’t about to run out screaming
yet. He sat there and listened to what Harry was saying, numbly nodding along, checking out his surroundings all the time. If he was hallucinating, if he’d got something in his bloodstream,
perhaps scratched himself on a nail or something inside that house, breathed something in . . . but he didn’t feel woozy, apart from the beer, and he knew what beer felt like, so it gave him
something to compare this to. Quill gradually became certain that he was in his right mind.

So what was this fucker he couldn’t touch? Who kept on spouting this shit? And Quill was sure now that Harry was hearing it, too, as he could see tiny reactions to it on his face. But it
was very subtle. He got the feeling that, even if the man suddenly shouted, Harry wouldn’t have leaped up. This seemed to be something Harry was deeply used to. Quill decided that he’d
do what he always did whenever he didn’t understand certain aspects of a situation. He’d plough right on through. Which meant, for a start, not putting up with this any longer.

‘Listen, Harry,’ he said, ‘nobody thinks you’re a bent copper.
Nobody
. And especially not me, all right?’

Harry looked surprised, they’d been talking about something else. ‘Thought never crossed my mind, Jimmy,’ he said.

‘Oh, look at you, lapping up the scraps from his table,’ said the old man. ‘You’re ten times the copper he’ll ever be. Look at him, playing the role, saying all the
right things. He’s just copying his dad. He gets all the attention because he looks right and he sounds right, never mind the fact that you’re more talented. He gets promoted just
because of how he acts, not for what he does.’

Quill realized that he’d only just restrained himself from yelling at the strange man, letting out his fear and anger. But that wouldn’t get him anywhere, because this . . . this
ghost, or whatever it was . . . it wasn’t trying to bait him. Its attention was entirely concentrated on Harry.

‘But you’re the one who does all the hard work and, you’re the one they don’t notice. It’s always him they talk about, while you stand in his shadow. What’s
he doing in charge of you? How is that fair? And this new operation – you should be in on that!’

It dawned on Quill that he himself had come to expect that Harry would never say thanks after he’d paid him a compliment or reassured him like that. Maybe now he knew the reason, and he
felt like he should hold it against him. But this wasn’t
Harry
, was it? It was . . . whatever this thing was. ‘Like I said, I asked for you,’ he began, taking care to talk
to Harry rather than to the older man. ‘But we’re being kept apart from you lot, like we’re contagious, and . . . well, you know who I think the bad apple is. I think maybe
that’s the reason. Or maybe . . . now I’m thinking that maybe there’s something more to it, and that Lofthouse had a plan.’

No reaction from the stranger. He was listening, his face set exactly like Harry’s. He was kind of one-track, wasn’t he?

‘But that’s no comment on you, either. We’re both the sons of coppers, Harry. We know the form. Here, remind me – when did your old dad pass on?’

The man turned to look at him, a snarl on his face. And Quill felt the slight relief of having made him do that.

Got you.

In the car heading back from the Losley house to the Hill, Ross had realized there was something wrong. It was as if something was moving inside her head, and she
couldn’t push it down. She’d understood the stress of her chosen path, but the trouble was that she’d always expected catharsis at the end. She’d been running for the line,
while now she was just working – and then working at home too – until she fell asleep. This couldn’t last. This had to end badly. Maybe this was the start of that ending.

She had first felt it when the car turned into Kilburn High Road. It had felt somehow that gravity had changed, that there was something pressing her down into her seat. She had looked to the
others, and then out of the window, and became aware that she was starting to see . . . fleeting things moving along and among the shopfronts . . . odd things that the car was going too quickly for
her to see, and she felt suddenly glad about that. And the shopfronts themselves, most of them with just overnight lights on now, there were . . . like all sorts of them all laid on top of each
other, at different levels, even, as if suddenly her eyes were offering her options. She had wanted to close her eyes, but she also didn’t want to because, if this was a form of mental
illness, it was as frightening as she expected, but also really interesting. Her hand had gone instinctively to the knife she always kept in her pocket, but then she had let it go again. Best not
play with that right now.

She had felt cars and buses pass that somehow felt more
weighted
than others. The underneath of the Marylebone flyover had been, in the looming darkness, exploding fireworks of tracks, of
traces . . . of cars crashing, she realized; as if every accident, over decades, had left some sort of record. That must be the delusion she was experiencing, that everything mattered, that
everything was recorded, so guilt could never escape, so it was cared about still. Unlike in the real world. She hadn’t wanted to say anything to the others because, if her mind was
disintegrating, she wanted to have it happen in private. It came as a relief, almost.

She had felt huge things passing high over the roof of the car. She had felt joys among the fears, even, but it had mostly been just fear. There had been motion between the trees of Hyde Park,
and strange lights manifesting, in colours she wasn’t able to put a name to. Things moved between the trees faster than was possible. There had been unexpected structures in silhouette.
Shadows lurking under shadows.

And then there had been a feeling of some huge, doom-laden presence somewhere distantly on their left, just as the car took them down Grosvenor Place. The car had felt to be teetering on the
edge of it, affected by its gravity, sling-shotting around in that whirlpool—

‘What’s that over there?’ she’d managed to say, hoping that some part of the distant light she could see was real.

‘Buckingham Palace,’ said Costain.

She had kept herself a little apart from all she was experiencing, as if recording and reporting on her own fascinating breakdown. This familiar stance had calmed her a little.
Never mind that all this reminded her of . . . well, it would, wouldn’t it? She had imagined
that
, and she was now imagining
this
. It had probably been set off by those bodies
in the cauldron. That had been the knife that had severed something she had herself stretched very tight.

The car had proceeded through Victoria, full of tourists, full of unknown shapes moving among the sightseers. And then up onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. Maybe if she went to sleep and woke up again,
her brain would reset and it would all then be gone . . .

No, it wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t. She glanced at Costain and Sefton. Sefton looked calm enough, playing with his phone. Costain had fallen asleep.