London Falling (29 page)

‘I’m sorry, I do seem to keep breaking the rules.’ Ross let a little of her real desperation show on her face, put her hands on the table, as if coming to a big decision.
‘This is . . . very important to me. Please understand, any help . . . any at all. Look . . .’ She put an upper-class note in her voice, suggesting there was the potential for a lot of
money here. ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

The woman smiled broadly, but Ross didn’t let her satisfaction show on her own face. The bait had been taken. ‘That’s what I’m here for, help and interpretation.
You’ve got the right look about you, my darling: I can tell you’ll ask the right questions. And you’re bright enough to understand the answers. Bright enough to come to the likes
of me, too, rather than any of these hangers-on.’ She indicated the innocent fortune-tellers to her left and right, busy with their own meaningless consultations.

‘Yeah, I sensed you were different’, Ross went on. ‘It’s like there’s . . . there’s something about your voice.’

The woman nodded sagely. ‘I said you was clever. You always sound out how a seer talks, my darling. Not all in whispers that won’t break the surface, but with the proper London.
Proper London isn’t your darkie talk, like the kids do now. It’s not your estuary English . . . Gawd, that grates on my ears. It’s from
before
.’

Not that much before, reckoned Ross. This movie Victoriana wasn’t that old, nowhere near as old as London; it was just a gesture in that direction. Maybe that was something to do with
degrees of power. This woman didn’t sound anything like the insane mixture of tongues Losley had used. Oh,
speaking in tongues
, was that a thing, too? ‘You seem to know so much
about these things.’

‘I know what my mum used, and her mum before her, and her mum before that, hetceterhah.’

‘Don’t you ever want to change it? Make it more modern?’

The other woman shook her head quickly, her eyes widening. ‘You don’t want change. Change is the enemy of memory, like my mum always said.’

‘Could . . . could I learn it?’

‘Maybe. It’s about the way you talk, the way you move. The past is the thing, and that’s what the people in the know do, we follow the past.’

Ross felt the truth of it in the woman’s eyes. Here was someone who had the past always looming over her, wearing a parent’s clothes. This lack of a present or a future was suddenly
startling, and genuinely sad. She made herself focus on the job again. ‘You must have had a really hard life.’ That phrase, said right, at the right moment, always opened a few
doors.

The woman paused, searching her face, clearly wondering how much she could trust her. Wanting to talk, though.
Come on, come on.
‘Well, that’s where you find the power,
isn’t it? Like my mum said, between the game and the gutter. Most of it works without you knowing what it means, or how it does it. You can sometimes work it out, just a bit, or sometimes
it’s just obvious, just being how things should be. You try and work one of those out with your school head on, you’ll be up all night pondering the complexities of life. That’s
how the City Line is memory, it’s one of those: you can kind of see how it works, but you can’t
think
about it. All this stuff is just enough to get by. You don’t get no
riches out of it, not really. You start thinking you want that, you start asking for more, it quickly gets to be more than you can handle. More than the likes of me can, anyway.’

Ross decided to take a risk. ‘You’ve obviously made . . . sacrifices.’

The woman was silent for a moment, a real, hurt part of her rebelling, her eyes only just keeping faith with Ross, just the promise of money and being listened to keeping her on the hook.
‘What do you mean by that, now?’

‘I’ve . . . read some old books . . .’

The woman thought for a further moment. Then she raised her left hand from below the table and put it down in front of her. All three middle fingers were missing, and there was scarring up and
down the wrist, old wound on old wound, not in an angry, self-harming way, but something more like the endless search of the junkie for a suitable vein. ‘Of my own flesh and blood.’

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Ross. ‘So you can’t get . . . remembered?’

‘What? You’ve read a bit, I see, but not enough. How would I make a big enough splash to get folk to remember me?’

‘Well, Mora Losley seems to be . . .’ Ross stopped as she felt the words bounce off some sort of tripwire in the air. She felt the confidence leave her face.

And now the woman was looking at her as if she was the scum of the earth, the promise broken, another betrayal in a whole life of them. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, so you’re a
fucking rozzer.’

‘I’m not,’ said Ross quickly, letting the truth that she wasn’t actually a police officer be a kind of lie. ‘If you really can see, you can see I’m
not.’

‘Judas words. As good as.’ She was getting to her feet. She was about to march away, or maybe start yelling. And here was someone who might be able to find Losley for them directly!
By answering just the one question! Ross had to keep her here. She remembered what the woman had said about doing what
seemed
appropriate. Copper gut assumption again: there was one thing
that all the stories seemed to insist on.

‘I paid you,’ she said. ‘We have a bargain. You can’t break it.’

The woman stopped. She now looked ferocious and, for a moment, Ross thought she was actually going to strike her down with something. But, finally, she sat down again and glared at her.
‘You cunt,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Ross. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Quill had systematically checked out all of the people of interest in the centre of the hall, recording their appearance in his special notebook. There was something particular
to them, they were the ones in the old clothes: an ancient waistcoat here, a battered greatcoat there. The fashions of everyone else, while occasionally baroque, didn’t incline so much
towards the distant past. When he made his way back through the fair, a few of them were no longer about, a couple had left their stalls completely unattended, having taken away with them any items
whose presence had been obvious to the Sight. So this lot could detect the law, and not necessarily through extra-sensory means. They’d had that look about them, too, like the ones you hauled
in from the pub for an identity parade, and took a quick shufti in the files while they were present. What all those folk also had had in common – and this shouldn’t have come as much
of a surprise – was that the objects of power he’d glimpsed had all been either of a particularly London character (a chipped coronation mug, a bunch of London Pride flowers) or could
have been if only he’d known what he was looking at (a branch, a bracelet of thorns). So much for the silver handcuffs, although he supposed that, since it was blessed by the Met chaplain,
they did have in their possession some very London holy water. Pity that Chamsa wasn’t local, too. He went to the ticket seller at the door, and was introduced to the organizer, a thin man
with a ponytail, in sandals and a business suit. Quill followed him into an office, for a more formal introduction involving his warrant card.

‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh, now, is this about Mora Losley? What that woman does has nothing to do with these peaceful practices going back to the time of—’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure. This is just a routine check, nothing to worry about. I’d like to be able to say that the . . . what would you call it, the occult community?’

‘The New Age community!’

‘That you’ve been offering us brilliant support and a nice cup of tea. So, if I could just take a quick look at your list of who’s at what table . . .’

The list showed two big tables, on either side of the hall, each rented to a major dealer. Quill wondered therefore if maybe what he was feeling there was quantity rather than
quality, as it were. He gave the list back to the organizer, thanked him for his helpfulness, told him his silence would be appreciated, and headed off to have a quick butcher’s at one of the
tables identified.

This was indeed where the professionals were based: real swords, glassware, fabrics, paintings in frames, unicorns and dragons. It made Quill sigh a bit: they were among this terrifying weight
of people and history, and yet here were vague guesses at it being regurgitated as tourist tat. Oh, so no change there, then. There was nothing specific about most of it, nothing particularly . . .
London. The table was staffed by young men and women in T-shirts bearing the dealer’s logo, with an older man, a bit of a pot belly on him, in charge. Nothing odd anywhere, and certainly not
among the merchandise. So where was the huge sense of unease about this table coming from? It seemed to be located further behind . . . Quill saw that, at the rear of the displays, there was a
stack of the boxes this stuff had been transported in. Unnoticed by the staff, someone was rooting through them, not looking as if he had any particular purpose, but more like a tramp searching for
food. He was a big lad with broad shoulders on him, wearing a tattered military coat, a garment that looked as if it was from the Boer War. Woollen gloves, so no fingerprints. He had that special
sense of meaning about him. The Sight knew him, and he made Quill afraid. But Quill had been up close with Losley, and had also been in the presence of whatever that smiling man was, and he
didn’t rate this bloke as being in that league. He took a step closer, leaving only a couple of punters between himself and the man who was obviously keeping himself unseen by the traders
seated in front of him.

Suddenly the man looked up and sniffed the air. He turned, and Quill felt his gaze sweep the crowd. Any second, he was going to spot him.

Quill felt afraid, but he was more afraid of looking afraid. He didn’t want to experience how whatever this man was going to threaten him with might chime in with the emptiness inside him
and with the previous impotence he’d suffered at the hands of this lot, further diminishing who he tried to be.

‘Hoi!’ Quill bellowed. ‘I want a word with you, sonny Jim!’

That terrible gaze engulfed him, and the fear accompanied it. But, a moment later, with a crash of boxes—

The man was running for the door!

Quill felt an old energy come flooding into him. He sprinted off after him.

Costain had been surprised to find that the dangerous gang boss he’d had in his head when he’d considered this move had turned out to be a gawky young man in a
T-shirt advertising an occult shop. He seemed to be in charge of this large stall that had so many punters flocking to it. Sefton had then popped over to check out the other side of the hall, and
reported back about the other shop, that what they were actually looking at here was a room seemingly shaped not by occult power but by money.

So where had the power gone? Costain couldn’t feel it now they’d got here. It almost seemed as if it was . . .

‘Hiding,’ muttered Sefton under his breath. ‘It knows we’re here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You get used to this stuff. Just tune into it.’

‘Do you?’

‘It’s now under something . . . or someone on that stall’s gone dark on us.’

Costain summoned all his confidence. And, yeah, that felt like a blanket that had a lot of holes in it now. He straightened up and began walking as if he had a gun on him. He headed straight for
the young man, and noted Sefton peeling off behind him to check out the merchandise further along the stall. ‘Hey,’ he began, ‘. . . no, never mind about the queue, I’m
talking to you, son. Who’s in charge here?’

‘
The Book of Changes
.’ The woman sat opposite Ross, staring coldly at her, and held up the small volume. ‘Pick a number between one and three hundred
and sixty-eight.’

Ross took a while to consider. She was wondering if she should text a message to the others to converge on her position. After their business was concluded, she was going to have to try to
apprehend this woman. ‘Two hundred and . . . seven.’

‘One to three?’

‘Three.’

‘One to seventy?’

‘Three.’

‘Right,’ the other woman said tersely, ‘that’s Fives Court. That’s the first part of your answer.’

‘Is that book . . . the
London A–Z
?’

The woman was silent. She clearly wasn’t going to offer any more than she had to. ‘Again.’ This was even more like the sort of divination which might have found them Losley.
Ross gave her three more random numbers. ‘Four Seasons Close. You’ll “win” by favouring the first over the second. That’s your answer. Five is better than
four.’

‘What does that mean: five is better than four?’
Four what? What was five?
‘Do the locations have anything to do with it? Does the rest of the address matter?’

The woman remained silent.

‘Listen,’ said Ross, ‘you know we’re after Mora Losley, and you surely can’t agree with what she does. You could help save those children—’

‘I won’t help you. Not your kind. Never.’

Ross pursed her lips. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s go for the Tarot of London.’

Quill burst out of the hall into the corridor outside. The man he was chasing was just ahead. ‘Police!’ he yelled. The ragged red-faced man spun on his heel and,
for a moment, Quill thought he was going to stop. But he was fumbling to get something out of his pocket. He found it and snapped it up to head height, pointing it straight at Quill. Who threw
himself into cover behind a pillar adjacent to the wall. He hadn’t got a good look at the thing, but it was close enough to a gun to make him move.

‘I really do just want a word with you!’

But, as he said it, something enormous rushed at him from behind. Quill was hauled away from the wall and thrown into the middle of the corridor. He reflexively put his arms around his head and
staggered, aware that he was being battered left and right by . . . air. Air carrying leaflets and rubbish and cardboard boxes. But what was worse was the anger of it: the air was hot and furious
and needed something, was missing something as much as Quill was. It was nothing to do with this man, he realized. The man was just . . . using it. That understanding let him find his feet. He
could hardly see the bloke now, just a shape in front of him. He couldn’t see how he was producing this effect with whatever he’d grabbed. The beating around Quill’s head got
worse, and there were stones now, and suddenly one shot through his guard and struck him across the temple.