London Falling (43 page)

Well, maybe that was someone’s way of saying that what he’d just experienced had been real. But he felt disappointed, unfulfilled. He didn’t know if he’d discovered
anything that could help Quill. He felt the Sight back inside his head, but there was a difference now. Just a slight one. He felt more confident about it, as if he’d calibrated something
inside his head by . . . switching it off and turning it back on again.

He’d gone down into the hole and he’d faced his fear and he’d come out changed. He’d taken a first step. Already a lot of what he’d experienced felt like a story,
something that had happened to someone else. He took his special notebook from his pocket, and started to write down all he could remember. But he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to
show it to anybody.

With the cage holding the cat, Costain stood at the empty Boleyn Ground, in the gap where Losley’s and Toshack’s season-ticket seats had once been. Match day was
tomorrow, and there were already preparations being made. He unbolted the cage. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘out you get.’

The cat looked at him in surprise for a moment, then did so, dropping lightly on to the concrete. ‘Are you releasing me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve got nothing further to contribute to the inquiry. And maybe I’m looking for some good karma. You’ll know from your radio plays that Brits always treat animals
decently, even when they’re being shits to each other.’

‘Oh, thank you. Another unexpected kindness.’

‘Will you go back to her?’

‘I’d like to, because I agree with her that she should have me around. But that all depends on whether or not she spots me here. It was a reasonable choice of site on your part. As
any true Irons fan would, she does look in on the ground from time to time, remotely as it were. I shall remain here and see what transpires.’

Costain squatted to smooth the creature’s head. ‘Good luck, Tiger Feet.’

‘Thank you. You have been very kind. You are not as bad as you have been painted.’

Costain smiled and headed out of the ground. When he’d driven a significant distance away – further, he hoped, than Losley would ever notice if looking in on her beloved turf –
he stopped the car, and took the receiving station for the locator bug from out of the glove compartment. The GPS showed the tiny flash of light at the Boleyn Ground repeating. He didn’t know
how long it took for food to make its way through a cat’s digestive system, but he hoped Losley would take the bait before then. She would surely want to retrieve something that she’d
invested so much in creating. And there the cat would be highly visible, in a place she paid great attention to, and seemingly free to take back. She might even think she could learn a few things
about the coppers from it, but Costain hoped that the friendship he’d so carefully developed with it would protect them from any devastating revelations. And, to be honest, they were utterly
vulnerable where she was concerned, anyway. Losley would take the cat back to wherever she was hiding, and the locator bug would then tell them where that was, so they could all swoop in and save
Jessica. That was his plan. But, standing here now, it seemed a pretty distant hope.

His phone rang. ‘If you’ve finished your own secret project,’ said Quill, ‘then get your arse back here. Ross has called in, and she’s got us a solid
lead.’

‘Me, too,’ he said, and managed to describe what he’d just done without committing the sin of pride. Not much. As he drove off, though, he wondered about sins committed against
cats, and whether or not whatever went around really did come around. He hoped he’d get a chance to prove otherwise.

Ross marched into the evidence room to find Quill, Costain and Sefton standing surrounded by all eighty-three stationery boxes. ‘Still can’t find anything,’
said Quill, looking at her almost angrily. ‘Who’s this source of yours?’

For a moment, she wanted to lie or say nothing at all. But then she realized that it was just a ridiculous reflex, that she had no reason to. So she told them everything. She saw that Sefton was
looking as if he understood, as if he’d been through something enormous himself. Costain looked sombre as she described her dad’s circumstances. When she got to the bit about the boxes,
she went and picked one up, and turned it over in her hands. She put her hand inside it, feeling all the way around. Frustrated, she put it aside and picked up another.

‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Costain.

‘It must be something . . .
normal.
Last time we looked, we were so into having the Sight, but Toshack didn’t possess that . . .’ She stopped and realized that, as
she’d been talking, she was actually looking straight at what she’d been talking about. ‘Look.’

In biro, on one side of the box, there was a tiny X.

‘X marks the spot,’ said Costain, uncertainly.

‘See if you can find any more,’ said Quill.

They found twenty-nine boxes with Xs marked on them. They made a pile of them. They worked fast, aware of the ticking clock, the football match approaching, and what any single
goal would mean. Ross discovered that most of them had two Xs, on opposite sides. Four of them, like the one Ross had picked up first, had only one X. The Xs came in two colours, blue and red.
Always the same colour on both sides, except—

Ross held up the special box and spun it to show them all four sides: two blue Xs opposite two red ones. ‘Do you see?’ she said. The others watched as she put it all together. The
special box, with four Xs, went in the middle of the space they’d cleared on the evidence room floor. She placed a row of boxes, red X adjacent to red X, running right through it, so the
special box remained in the middle. Then she did the same with the blue-X boxes.

They now formed a single large X.

As soon as she shoved the last box into place, something happened. There was a little noise . . . as the boxes all shunted closer together. She gently tried to move one of them. But it was stuck
against the box beside it, and also to the floor. She stood up and looked at the others.

‘Kick arse,’ said Costain.

Sefton sniffed. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘Fresh air,’ said Quill. ‘Didn’t recognize it for a second.’

It was coming from the boxes, Ross realized. She leaned over to sniff . . . and leaped back as the construction . . . started to
move.
It was spinning on the floor, like something badly
animated in a children’s show. The lines of boxes were sweeping around, faster and faster, without making any sound to suggest their bases scraping against the concrete. She blinked . . .
Okay, so the concrete underneath the boxes seemed to be moving too. The X spun faster and faster until it was a silent blur, just a circle of movement on the floor. At the same time a pleasant wet
winter breeze was wafting into the stuffiness of the nick.

They kept watching it. They waited. It kept going. Nothing else happened.

‘What’s this for, then?’ said Costain.

‘I think it’s some sort of . . . travel thing,’ said Ross. ‘Dad tried to say it was Toshack’s way of getting himself to a lock-up that we haven’t yet
found.’

Costain picked up one of the other boxes. ‘I think I heard him working this,’ he said, ‘through the door to his den. This must be why he spent so much time up there.’ He
took an awkward run-up at the spinning shape, and threw the box into the air above it.

The box vanished.

They walked around the spinning boxes for a while.

‘We’ve got to see if it sort of . . . does it all in one go . . .’ said Quill ‘. . . or if someone’s going to get their arm chopped off if they make an extravagant
gesture.’ He got a mop and, holding it gently, moved it towards the air above the spinning boxes. The end of the mop vanished into thin air. He pulled it back, and there was the end of the
mop again. Ross felt relieved. There was a line around the circumference of the boxes: outside it, things were visible; inside, they weren’t – and those things could be safely retracted
again.

‘So that leads to—?’

‘Still somewhere in Greater London, judging by his travel time when he used the car instead,’ said Costain.

‘Wait a sec,’ said Sefton. He ran out, and returned a few minutes later with his holdall, from which he produced the vanes that Quill had taken off the bloke who’d attacked him
in Westminster Hall. ‘I’ve been wondering if these were meant to be a weapon, or if . . .’ He held them towards the spinning boxes as if they were dowsing rods, and took a step
forward. The vanes turned in his hands, crossing each other. ‘X marks the spot again,’ he said.

‘And does that mean this is safe?’ asked Costain.

‘How should I know?’

‘Could you find Losley with those?’

‘I think it’s kind of short range. So . . . only if she’s right in front of me. And then I think I’d know.’

‘All right,’ said Quill, chucking away the mop, ‘who’s up for doing this? Oh, right, no time to draw lots, so that’d be me.’ And, before anyone could say
anything, he’d taken a few steps back and then run at it.

Quill had jumped while hoping that, if they were wrong about this, then at least it’d be quick. He was thinking of Jessica. Of how little he knew of Jessica. Of wanting
to get to know her.

And then suddenly he was somewhere else.

He hit a wall. He swore . . . fell . . . landed. And looked around him, scrambled to his feet, exulting.

They came through one by one: Ross then Costain then Sefton. They took standing leaps.

‘Don’t take a run up at it!’ Quill had shouted back to them.

They all landed against the wall and steadied themselves with their outstretched palms.

Quill stood there watching them, holding his bruised nose. They found themselves in a lock-up, what looked like the inside of a unit in a storage compound somewhere. The only light was from
under the door. He found a switch and suddenly he could see properly. They’d come out of a vortex that looked just like the one they’d jumped in to, except that it seemed to revolve
just the concrete floor here, rather than any boxes. It kept going, now they’d exited. It operated in a space that looked specifically cleared for it, because every inch of the rest of the
unit was full of other cardboard boxes, metal chests and shelves packed with books.

‘Aladdin’s cave,’ said Quill. ‘There you go, Harry.’ He saw Ross looking around with that expression on her face which said she was inside yet another part of what
she’d grown up among, and yet of which she’d been unaware.

‘This is where Toshack vanished to all those times, when he wanted to consult his “advisers”,’ said Costain.

‘Meaning,’ said Sefton, ‘he had a way of finding Losley from here.’

Quill looked to Costain, who checked the locator bug monitor, and shook his head. ‘Let’s get to it,’ he said.

As they began to search at high speed, with Ross taking the lead, Quill found himself working beside Sefton. ‘What about your expedition?’ he asked. ‘Did you find
anything?’ The young DC had come in earlier, gone up to the Ops Board, stared at it for a while, and then just ended up doodling surreal swirls around the outside of it. Quill was still
wondering if he’d gone a bit mental.

Sefton turned to him, still with that bloody Obi-Wan Kenobi expression of his. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m still working it out.’

The GPS on Costain’s phone indicated they were in a trading estate near Heathrow. The contents of the lock-up turned out to be frustratingly mundane, which wasn’t
how Costain would have seen it just a few weeks ago. Back then they’d have thought of this place as the mother lode of all evidence. There were records of bank accounts that they’d
never dreamed of, a full set of accounts books, too. There were bundles of cash, in Euros and Canadian dollars. It was the most thoroughly equipped bolt-hole, containing what a boss put aside for
his last rainy day.

‘Look at this,’ said Quill, having heaved open a metal chest with a crowbar. He lifted out boxes of ammunition, an entire stack of them.

‘All different calibres,’ said Costain, taking one from him, ‘for all sorts of different types of guns. Not like him to bother, since the soldiers tended to keep their weapons
at home.’

Sefton pointed to a note on the boxes – the manufacturer’s address. ‘Made in London,’ he observed. ‘Like at the New Age market. It’s the London stuff that
works.’

‘Bloody hell, Rob had obviously worked out enough about Losley to get himself a bit of an insurance policy, ammo for whatever he was packing at the time that might actually give him the
drop on her. Only we nicked him and he couldn’t use it.’

‘Objective seven on the board,’ said Ross, stepping over. ‘Maybe we
could
have her with those.’

‘If,’ said Quill, ‘we could ever persuade an Armed Response Unit to shoot an unarmed granny. And maybe shoot her many times.’ He looked between them. ‘What . . .
any of you lot got guns at home? Thought not.’

They went back to their work. Costain found himself feeling desperately conflicted. There was currently something he had to do urgently, as a way out of everything that loomed above him, but
what they were in the middle of was just as urgent. As he searched along the shelves of one of the metal units, suddenly Sefton was beside him, working the other way.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ said Costain.

‘I kept trying to . . . write off what you experienced. And I’ve just discovered that . . . some of this stuff presents itself in different ways to different people, yeah? I still
think there’s only science. I still don’t think there’s a God – at least not like people think there is. I’m going to keep on being proud to say that. I have to. I
think I’ve started to . . . know something about that now: what Rabbi Shulman called a “deep understanding of the natural world”. Only I’m just starting, at that. I’ve
got a lot to sort out and that might take me forever. But . . . when you saw Hell . . . I think it might be one of many things that aren’t hanging over just you, but over all of us. I know
what’d be in my own version. I’m saying . . . I think you saw something real.’