London Falling (17 page)

Quill looked to the trapdoor.

Even as he looked, it warped and slowly started to spin its way up the wall.

‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ he yelled to the others. ‘Leg it!’

To Quill’s enormous relief, they did.

They threw themselves down through the trapdoor, and landed hard on the floor below. ‘Out!’ shouted Quill to the forensics shift. ‘Out!’ So now others were running with
them, uniforms and forensics in crime scene suits, like a bomb was about to go off. They ran for the stairs, which were folding in on themselves, and were even harder to see and understand now, and
they fell down them and rolled, and the uniforms helped them up and rushed down around them, nimbly navigating all the impossibilities.

The child’s head fixed on the top of the banister was screaming, and the shape of it was starting to peel off into a long ribbon of flesh that led back up into the twisting, knotting
building. Up ahead there was the front door . . .

. . . racing away from them. Receding into the far distance at the end of an impossible corridor, as space stretched under this strange new gravity. Uniforms were running out through it,
receding with it. This trap was intended just for the four of them.

Quill turned on his heel, grabbed a fur from the floor, wrapped it around him. He made sure the other three saw what he intended, then he flung himself at the nearest window.

The crashing glass expanded slowly outwards. They were escaping something dreamlike and hugely gravitational which was trying to haul them back inside. They burst out of the house as if it was a
dying universe, slowly, slowly, reaching the limit of where it could hold on to them . . .

And they were in the frosty night air, above the passage running along one side of the house, and everything was real again.

They heard the distant slam of that impossible door. The entire contents of the house had now fled through it.

And they fell and hit the ground hard, again, and lay there together, gasping, and the window threw itself back together, and the house vanished towards a point that hurt their eyes.

And then it was gone, heading somewhere into the fine structure of the night.

As they lay there, Quill realized he was still holding a scrap of dirty carpet. It evaporated a moment later into a billow of dust.

Slowly, they picked themselves up. A uniform peered around the corner of a wall. ‘The evacuation’s complete, sir. How far back should I set the perimeter, sir?’ Urgency and
disbelief were fighting on his face. Behind him, Quill could see the big lights of the TV crews coming back on.

Quill turned round to look at what they had just escaped from.

Where a moment before there had been a sort of vacuum, an ordinary house had reappeared. Ordinary to his eyes now, too.

From which all the weight and horror had vanished.

Quill led them back into the house. The skull was still there on the newel post, but it wasn’t a head any more. It looked perversely dull in comparison, simply mundane.
So did the soil upstairs. Perhaps this ‘Sight’ had now left them all? He hoped that was the case.

She had been in this house all the while it was searched, hiding behind a door that existed only for her. They had then made her retreat, through mere instinct and accident.

He shut down all these questions and allowed the forensics shift immediately back into the house. Emergency over. His mistake. He was aware of the forensics shift and the uniforms looking
startled to the point of laughter: what had all that been about? He couldn’t satisfactorily answer them, so he bundled his team into a marked car and they got the hell out of there.

An hour later, Quill stood again outside the Portakabin, and listened on his mobile to his home phone ringing. He thought he could see dawn approaching, or maybe that was just
something weird over there towards the east. Because the drive here had shown them that they most definitely all still had the Sight, whatever that meant. His hands were shaking.

The world was much more terrifying than anyone had known – and it had been pretty terrifying before. He had called Sarah intending to . . . what? Warn her? Tell her not just ghosts
actually, love, witches too? Nobody would believe them. She wouldn’t believe him either.

Just in the moment before he switched off the connection, he thought maybe he heard the phone being picked up, but she didn’t call him back.

The others were sitting in the Portakabin, drinking strong sweet tea, not speaking, not looking at each other. In the car they’d kept their eyes closed, pretending they
were trying to sleep. Quill felt the same great tiredness, but knew no sleep would come. He’d suffered from shock before. He sat down alongside them.

‘“Sodomite”?’ said Costain, as if it had just occurred to him, looking at Sefton.

Sefton looked long and hard at him. ‘You didn’t know?’

Costain shook his head. Sefton kept the look going.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Okay,’ said Sefton finally and looked away.

Quill had known it, actually, but he didn’t think now would be a great time to chime in. He went over to a cupboard and found some blankets, and put them round everyone’s shoulders.
He pulled a blanket around himself as well. They all fell silent again.

After a while, Quill realized that he could see something from across the room. See something with the Sight he still possessed. The realization made him tense again, in a horrible way. But no .
. . no, it was just something inside here, not her walking through the wall. It was something on the Ops Board. He got up, feeling cold inside his stomach, and went to see. It was Losley’s
photo, passport-sized. It now showed her as she . . . he hesitated to think the word, but no . . . as she
really
was. He made himself examine that face. Good to be able to do that, with the
real Mora Losley. She didn’t actually administer poison or have burly nephews. He went to get a file from the table serving as his desk, and he pulled out the season-ticket records. The date
of her first registration, 1955, now glowed dully, completely obscuring another date beneath it. It suddenly came to him that there might be a similar type of glowing covering all those missing
council tax and utility bills. This was a woman who could edit the world.

He went back to look at the Ops Board. He hated the way it looked now, not just that it had her real face on it. It was lying to him. ‘
This
is what’s true,’ he said,
without really knowing who he was talking to. Maybe to the board itself. He picked up a spool of black thread, and tacked a solid association line between Losley and a photo of Rob Toshack. And
then he added a red victim thread as well, because she had also admitted to being his killer. Everything else, all the bullshit that they’d thought might have something to do with this case,
he unpinned. He was left with just the prime suspect and those two strands of relationship. He looked up to find that the other three had stood up and joined him, also staring at the board as if it
had betrayed them.

‘That’s not all we know,’ ventured Ross.

Quill nodded to her to go ahead.

Her hands shaking, she drew three wobbly stick figures in red on a piece of paper, inside a sketch of a cauldron. She pinned that below Losley, and connected them to her with a red victim
thread. She wrote a heading ‘footballers and others’, and attached those to Losley as victims too, ready for the further detail to be filled in.

‘She said that Toshack made a sacrifice.’ Quill attached a victim thread from Toshack to a blank piece of card, and wrote a question mark on it. ‘More kids, like in the
cauldron?’

Ross stopped for a moment, taking that onboard. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘he was capable of that.’

Costain stepped forward, too. He was looking the most stricken of any of them, and his whole body was shaking. He took the black thread, wrote ‘cat’ on a piece of paper, and
connected Losley to that also. Then he did the same for ‘mistress’, and placed it above her. He looked as if he was doing this on autopilot.

‘“My mistress’ blessed soil”,’ noted Quill, doing his best to sound approving.

‘Who owns West Ham?’ asked Ross.

Quill looked it up. Mostly a bank in Iceland. No women on the list.

‘What about that . . . head . . . on the stairs?’ said Sefton.

‘We’re listing pets,’ said Quill, ‘so why not furniture?’ He pinned up another heading and threaded the connection. Just seeing the board filling up like this, he
realized, was making him feel slightly better. Mora Losley was the missing element that connected all the outlying oddities of their investigation, as Ross had perceived it. Losley had been all the
‘freelancers’ Rob Toshack required to make his firm function. She was the suspect that all those murders stretching way back spoke of.

Costain took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said, then used another black thread to connect Losley to yet another card above her. ‘Lord,’ he wrote on it. And on the card
beneath it, he added ‘pleasant face’ as a description.

‘“My lord will have you”,’ said Quill.

‘I reckon that’s what she was trying to do at the house,’ said Costain. ‘To sacrifice us. Give us to her lord. What did you lot see below you, when our bodies were . .
.?’ He gestured, seeming to have reached the end of his ability to talk about it.

‘Like . . . something out of
The Sky at Night
,’ suggested Quill. ‘My own personal black hole.’ He looked to the others, and they nodded.

‘I saw . . . a lot more than that. I think I might have even got a sight of her lord. There was a bloke looking . . . happy. And she’d just “given” me to him. And . .
.’ Costain stopped again. Then he walked quickly for the door, went out and closed it behind him. Through the window, Quill could see his silhouette still standing outside.

‘We need to know,’ said Ross.

‘He knows that. But nobody bloody ask him, clear?’ They both affirmed agreement.

‘Why,’ enquired Ross, ‘was it just him?’

‘I think he’s now asking himself that.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Sefton, ‘who do witches have as their lord? Is that what he’s wondering?’

Quill sighed. ‘I’m way ahead of you two right now, aren’t I? Makes a bloody change.’ He banged his fist on the table, making them both start, and regretted doing it
instantly. He felt the terrible chill as much as either of them. ‘But we don’t know, do we? It could just as well be some sort of . . . bigger version of one of those things out
there.’

‘Right,’ said Sefton, looking almost angry at the idea it could be anything else.

He gave it five minutes, during which he made them another cup of tea, then marched over to the door and opened it, to find Costain leaning against the wall of the Portakabin. ‘In,’
he said firmly.

He turned to all three of them, gathered in front of an Ops Board that was now looking healthier, all with cuppas in their hands. ‘We don’t speculate,’ he said. ‘We
don’t do theology. All there is,’ he pointed to the board, ‘is that.’

They all turned back to the board again. ‘Listen—’ he said. And he started to tell them about what had happened in the interview room, and about Harry and everything else.

They all told their stories in turn. Ross about the drive across London, and then, haltingly, about her first meeting with Losley. Sefton saw all that pain concealed behind her
poker face, and held himself back from taking her hands in his. He himself – with several meaningful omissions, because he wasn’t going to mention Joe to this lot – talked about
his encounter with ‘Jack’, and about the man that had stepped aside from it. Costain seemed to consider what the others had said, and then quickly filled them in on his journey away
from London, about how he saw that the effect was limited to the metropolis. They waited for him to say more but, for the moment, that was obviously it.

‘Just London?’ said Sefton. ‘So we can get away from this shit by just getting on the train to Brighton?’ And then he felt immediately guilty at having been the one to
say it.

‘I’m amazed you ever came back,’ said Quill to Costain. The man looked suddenly furious at him, and Quill raised his hands, quickly explaining himself. ‘I mean ’cos
any
of us here would have thought about doing a runner. I’ll bet Ross is thinking right now about going back to her old nick.’

‘Old Nick?’ said Sefton, ‘I wouldn’t use that expression.’

Which made Ross burst out into an enormous, awkward laugh, and then she put a hand over her mouth, her eyes gleaming with tears as if she’d done the most terrible thing. Sefton found
himself weirdly pleased, in the midst of how shocked he’d been feeling. He never told jokes; it had just slipped out and made a change in the world.

Costain managed a sad smile. ‘We could all easily hop it,’ he said. ‘We could put in for transfers, take any family we have with us. We could leave all this behind. Except . .
. I think I now have to consider so carefully every . . . decision I make. And I think that getting out of it now . . . doing anything but my best to help nick her . . . would be wrong.’

The tone of his voice was so alien to him, so beaten down, that Sefton almost wanted the bully in him back. Almost.

Quill nodded, giving that statement its due. ‘We
all
have to decide,’ he said. ‘A highly dangerous suspect has admitted to several murders, and has threatened to carry
out more. She’s going to kill any player that scores a hat-trick against West Ham Football Club. Their next match is tomorrow night. We know her MO, and we’ve already worked her
background. We have that tiny advantage: we can do proper police work on her. While we were working on that board, it felt as if we were also working to stop her – and that made me feel
better. What about you two?’

Sefton nodded. There wasn’t really a choice, as far as he could see. ‘You’re right about going after her, but it benefits us too, doesn’t it? I don’t want to have
to stay away from London all my life, and who knows what else is waiting out there? If we can find some way to nick her, maybe then we can force her to take away the Sight from us and
all.’