London Falling (39 page)

Quill looked round, maybe hoping for some sort of help, but he just saw the looks on the faces of patrons who had probably watched him stagger back into the bar and start talking to some bloke
who looked too out of it to reply. He saw them try and glance over, but the looks they gave instantly slid off something that felt too hard on their eyes.

Harry’s gaze located Quill, and he seemed to wake from the trance his terror had put him in. ‘Jimmy! Help me!’

‘I will, mate!’

‘My dad . . . My dad’s holding me . . . right on the edge of it. I can feel it, Jimmy. I can see what’s in there. Why is it my dad?! Why’s it him doing this?!’

‘It’s not your dad. It’s just . . . just what you think of as your dad. You’ve always been thinking of him, haven’t you?’

‘I . . . I ’spose! I never thought . . . I never saw him like this. I always just thought he was looking down at me!’

Harry’s dad made a tutting sound. He tugged suddenly at Harry’s wrist, like he was warning a dog. ‘Go on, son!’

‘If I tell him the message, you’ll let go of me and I’ll be off down there anyway!’

‘Yeah, but if you don’t, I’ll do it anyway, and then she’ll have to find some other poor sod to do this to.’

Harry was sobbing, shaking his head, staring at his dad; he couldn’t believe it.

‘You keep him there,’ Quill reached for his mobile. He couldn’t hope to get his team here in time, and he had no idea what they could do to help, but he had to try.

‘No,’ said Harry’s dad again, letting go of Harry for a moment and then catching him once more.

Harry yelled in terror. ‘I don’t deserve this,’ he panted. ‘I haven’t deserved any of this. And this now, this now . . .!’

‘Of course you don’t deserve it!’ shouted Quill. ‘This is something she’s doing to you, not something you’re doing to yourself! None of us is!’ The
other punters were openly staring at them now, the two yelling drunks in the corner.

‘Come on,’ urged Harry’s dad. ‘We’ve got to be off soon, son.’

Harry took some deep breaths, and seemed to steady himself. ‘You’ll get her, won’t you, Jimmy? You’ll nick her?’

‘Mate, don’t tell me it—’

‘You heard him. I don’t have a choice.’ He looked at his dad again, and then looked guilty. ‘I’ve failed so much . . . all my life, Jimmy. Now I’ll never get
to be as good as you.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Shut up and listen. I don’t have much of a sitrep for you. The woman I take to be your prime suspect was in here . . . looked like an old woman, late seventies . . .’

‘She can look like anything, Harry. I should have explained.’

‘. . . and then she looked like . . . something terrible. And I could see nobody else was looking at her, and I got up, I tried to go for . . . No, I tried to run. And she pointed a finger
and twisted something in the air, and . . . all of this happened. And then
he
seemed to come out of my head and right into the middle of what I was seeing . . . and she . . . she put my hand
in his . . . and it feels just like his real hand, Jimmy. It feels like when . . .’

‘Compose yourself, Harry. Take your time.’ Quill looked dangerously at Harry’s dad, wondering if there was any gesture he could make, just a random pass of his hands, that
might harm the thing, or might save Harry.

Harry looked around the room, as if savouring the real world for the last time. All he’s got, thought Quill, was that bloody awful distance shown by the British when they don’t want
to relate to something. Maybe, being a copper, the familiarity gave him comfort. Then Harry started speaking again, quickly, as if afraid his courage would fail him. ‘She said that
she’s got power to spare now, so she’s going to kill anyone who scores even one goal against West Ham. She’s going to keep taking the children. Jimmy, you’ve got to tell my
Sal—!’

‘And that’s your lot,’ said his dad, and let go of Harry’s hand.

Quill shouted something and flung up his arms, expecting an explosion of blood. But Harry was floating on the edge of the cosmic weirdness, light blazing around him, his suit starting to flare
at the cuffs and elbows, his arms cartwheeling helplessly, his gaze still finding Quill as if he could hold on through that connection.

‘Don’t worry, son,’ said his dad. ‘I’m coming with you. I’ll always be with you now, always there to egg you on.’ And he vanished.

Harry’s face erupted with blood.

Quill stumbled over to the body and sat there, dazed, for quite a while. There were screams and shouts all around him. A barman arrived and was staring at Harry, not knowing
what to do. But Harry was dead . . . and the punters were leaning over to look or stumbling back.

Quill made himself stand up, and found that he also was covered in blood. Again. He noticed his friend’s blood on his lapel, and looked at it, curiously unaffected by it, everything too
big for it to sink in now. Quill saw that, coming round the bar, a couple of paramedics had run in and were moving towards them. He stood up, swaying.

He got home hours later, again having tossed all his clothes into a forensics bag, the last traces of his closest friend with them.

Lofthouse had arrived at the pub and had tried to offer words of support.

‘Every goal scorer.’ He said to her, repeating the words to her, until she realized what he was talking about. ‘She’s escalated her threat. Now she’s going to kill
every
player that scores even
once
against West Ham.’ Lofthouse promised to get on to it immediately. Quill got his phone out, and tried to text the news to his unit, but his
fingers couldn’t find the keys, and he asked Lofthouse to get that done instead, and if he could leave the scene now, please. People began talking about Losley’s poisons again, and he
didn’t want to hear it.

A marked car took him home. Slumped in the back seat, he managed to get minutes of something which felt a bit like sleep, but never quite left him unaware. He just about fell up against the door
of his house, and paused there.

He so wanted to tell Sarah. He wanted to tell her everything. But she wouldn’t believe him. That had to be an excuse; surely he could
make
her believe him? But there was still
something other than that, shouting at him – an emptiness, something he was missing. He kept using those words to himself, but what did they mean?

He fumbled for his key.

He could hear Sarah was in now, typing away upstairs. ‘I’m home,’ he called, and there came a muted call back. She obviously hadn’t heard about what had
happened to him. Right, because he’d asked not to be named. She just thought something big had happened in his case, so would be surprised he was home. He himself was surprised he was
here.

He wandered into the kitchen, intending to make tea and then sit down somewhere, try to sleep. Harry . . . bloody Harry . . . after all these years.

Oh!

We smell death near you soon.

That was what whichever small fish had left that note had meant: Harry. They’d felt it coming. Quill felt a stab of guilt over his relief at the thought. It was Harry when it could have
been Sarah, could have been . . . who else? No answer to that.

God, the kitchen was a mess. What were all these junk-shop novelties lying everywhere? Was this really what the two of them were making of their lives?

Maybe he should quit. Nobody would blame him. Not now. He could just not go in any more. She could quit too. No future in her job. No future in his. They could get out of London, make a new
life, and he wouldn’t have to deal with seeing . . .

And let someone else, less able, entirely vulnerable, deal with Losley. Like the way Harry had. Quill leaned against a kitchen unit.

Sarah entered. ‘Are you making tea?’ she was already asking. And then she saw him and stopped. ‘What’s happened?’

He shook his head. He didn’t want to come out with the lie version now.

‘Oh God, when Losley killed that copper tonight, were you . . .?’ He went over and held her tight. They held on to each other together, and she let him stay silent.

But there was something else in him. Something that needed to be asked. ‘Why is the house in such a mess?’

‘Quill, don’t start a row just to—’

‘No, I mean . . .’ He was aware that the copper part of his head was working at this, working and working, gears still missing each other – not something he was used to when at
home. ‘The two of us, okay, we seem to be living these . . . distanced lives. Around something . . . that was there but now isn’t. Was that always how it was? All of those things that
might have been you and me together, that might have been . . . exciting or interesting, they seem to have been channelled into . . . something else.’

‘Our careers, you mean. What are you, a teenager?’

‘No, something else. It’s like a . . . black hole, like something that’s taken loads of our lives, and now we can’t see where it’s all gone. And it seems to have
happened so suddenly, so . . . recently.’

‘It happens to everybody.’

‘No, this isn’t . . . This isn’t something you can talk about with reference to . . . something that
always
happens. This is . . .’ He didn’t have a word for
it. He gently let go of her, then he led her by the hand – as if they were two stumbling children – back into the lounge. He pointed at the piles of DVDs with colourful cases, the
bizarre nick-knacks and odd books that were everywhere. ‘Why do we have all that stuff?’ She frowned at him, her own brain working. And all he could think of were the gaps in what Harry
had said. The things he hadn’t been allowed to hear. There were the same sort of gaps here too.

He led her to the rear of the house, towards the door leading to their little back garden, but beside which was another door. He couldn’t even remember what was in there, he realized, but
it seemed to be the centre of what he didn’t feel like he should be looking at. That’s why he’d brought her here, so he could see it again, so he could . . . He didn’t know
why he was doing this, just letting the deductive part of his brain make it happen. Feeling its way. And it was like bloody crawling uphill.

He pushed the door and, as it swung open, he suddenly understood, without knowing why, in some feral, desperately caring part of his mind, that what he was about to do would hurt not just him
but Sarah, terribly.

Inside the room, there was more weird and colourful stuff. Piles of it. He didn’t know why this was here, but he realized that he knew the word for this sort of room. The feeling of that
moment was like something hard falling into his stomach.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘do we have a
nursery
?’

Ross had been woken in the early hours by a text message from Quill that called for her and the others to assemble at the Portakabin right now. She’d hardly got off to
sleep. Until then she’d been following the news coverage of the attack on the pub, with her special notebook out on her lap, wondering why the team hadn’t been called to the site.

She entered the Portakabin to find every light switched on and Quill, Sefton and Costain standing in front of the Ops Board. Quill turned to glance at her, and the look on his face scared her.
On the corkboard behind him, a thread connected the photo of Mora to a small picture of a tiny baby. ‘She took my daughter,’ he said.

Ross stepped closer, trying not to let the horror of it overwhelm her. It was the lack of any writing underneath the photo that made her ask. She sensed the other two feeling as lost as she was.
And she realized, in that second, what must have been done to them all. ‘What’s she called?’ she asked.

Quill took a moment to control himself enough to answer. ‘Jessica, apparently.’

Ross looked for the gap in her memory and couldn’t find it. She wondered if she’d ever known that name. She wrote it under the photo.

He told them about Losley’s threat concerning the footballers. That meant they had forty-two hours until the next home match, with Man City.

‘How do we know Jessica’s not . . .’ Costain paused for a moment, then visibly decided it was best to continue, ‘. . . already dead?’

‘Losley would have told me so,’ said Quill. ‘She’d want to . . . let me know. It’s as if she wanted this to be a surprise, when I figured it out. Because I think
she knew I would. This is her down to the ground, and we should have realized that from what the bloody cat told us. It’s not just about keeping on with the sacrifices so that she has the
huge amounts of power she’s going to need to kill every goal-scorer. No, she needed to make this personal. She wanted me to
feel
it.’ Then he had to stop for a moment. ‘All
right, listen, you lot.’

He sat down at the table, and made them all sit down too. ‘When this aspect of the investigation becomes clear to Lofthouse, as it will when she wakes up this morning and is told that
forensics are all over my gaff, then there’ll be pressure on me to step aside. I’m not going to and, going on her past eccentric form, I think Lofthouse might let me stay put. If I
could, I’d tell her . . .’ He went to the board and grabbed the picture of the baby. ‘. . . that because I don’t know who this is, I’m only “copper”
afraid, that it’s not in here.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Not that I
could
tell her that. But, if I’m being honest, I think knowing fully what I’d lost . . . I
think that’d be . . . better somehow, you know? Natural. What I’m feeling now, there’s no name for it. The only other people who’ve ever felt it that we know of are Terry
and Julie Franks. I need to
fix
it. Sarah needs to fix it. This morning . . . it wasn’t that the veil suddenly dropped from our eyes. We actually had to persuade each other about it.
She made me go into the nursery with her, and we looked at the crib. We looked at all the DVDs of
Teletubbies
and
In the Night Garden
. We kept having to force each other back to
concentrate on it.’ He told them about what else they’d found at the house. ‘Forensics found a pile of soil half-concealed under a hedge in the garden. Sarah might have noticed it
if it had been out in the open, since she’s been following the story. As you know, I’ve hardly been home. If I’d just taken one walk out into my own garden . . . or maybe
she’d have made it so we couldn’t see that either. If I’d asked any of you lot, you wouldn’t have known, or I wouldn’t have heard you say anything. But if I’d
just
thought
for a moment how I myself might be a target! I’ve constructed this bloke for me to be, out of bits and pieces, and he’s the sort of bloke who never
could
become a target.
This
is what I’ve been missing. The fact that I’m a dad.’