The Severed Streets (25 page)

‘That golden threadlike stuff.’

‘Yeah.
But I don’t exactly know what that is.
I’ve only ever seen it a couple of times.’

‘When?’

‘When my youthful experiments messed up.
Unless the golden thread is preset to do something, I think you only see it when things go wrong.
It’s like lines of code in software.
You’re only meant to experience the effects.
Have you seen the silver stuff?’

‘The power source?’
said Sefton.

Gaiman pointed at him with a little nod and pursed lips – an expression that made Sefton feel perversely proud of himself.
‘These are visual metaphors for control and power that only the Sighted can access.
Whether or not you’d say the gold and silver stuff is
real
 … I’m not even sure that’s a sensible question.
I only ever saw either when something I did went wrong.’

‘You never saw the silver splattered around?’
asked Ross.

‘Not especially.
It’s very valuable.
It’s actually the
definition
of value to those who are Privileged to work with the matter of London.
It is the power they’ve sacrificed for.
They tend to make sure it does what it’s supposed to.’

‘Are there any other ways of getting power, apart from making a sacrifice?’
Ross was using the tone she’d employ in an interview room, which was making Sefton smile.

‘You hear about people stealing power from others, or finding it or having it gifted to them, but those tend to be one-offs in specific circumstances.’

‘Okay,’ said Sefton, with a little look to Ross, who was now making notes at high speed.
‘You were talking about how things happen more easily in London if they’re talked about as being possible.
Is that the start of London “remembering” something?’

Gaiman asked what exactly he meant by that, and Sefton tried to fill him in, without revealing operational details, about the conclusions his team had come to concerning, for example, the moment when Losley had been remembered by the metropolis and ghosts of her had appeared everywhere.

Gaiman finally nodded.
‘I didn’t know there was a name for it.
But, yeah, when I’m here, I try not to talk about babies in microwaves.
Try standing in Berkeley Square and reciting a poem about nightingales, over and over, for a day.
My wife did that once.’
He found a picture of her doing so on his phone and showed it to them.
‘At the end, we were hearing their song, just faintly, but it was there.
That’s a quaint feature.
It can become pretty un-quaint.
I think you might find that very important.’

Sefton was remembering their own terrifying adventures in Berkeley Square and could see that Ross had made the connection too.
That wasn’t relevant right now.

Gaiman leaned forward.
‘There’s a question you want to ask me,’ he said, ‘but feel that you can’t, because it’d give too much away about what you’re investigating.
So let me answer it anyway.
No, I don’t think this Ripper of yours is a product of ostentation.
He’s certainly been “remembered” by London, but—’

‘That’s confined to where it should be, in Whitechapel,’ said Ross.

She got one of Gaiman’s affirming nods too.
‘But I have been wondering if the sudden appearances of these flash mobs
might
be a product of ostentation.
In London, tweeting about something might be planting the seed of that thing happening—’

‘So tweeting about a riot—’ said Sefton.

‘—could start one.
If you knew how to do it just right.
But also, imagine doing the opposite.
What if you could seed the idea, especially right now, that everything was okay?
That might start to make everything better.’
He smiled hugely.

‘Catching the Ripper would do exactly that,’ said Sefton.

‘It would,’ said Gaiman.

‘You seem,’ said Ross, ‘to be telling us a lot about what we need to do.’

‘Do I?
Sorry.’

They asked him all their detailed questions about everyone they’d seen in the pub, but he could only provide scant detail.
They explored Ripper connections with him and asked if Sighted cities ever turned against the rich, if one could push the powers of a place too far.
‘It is said,’ he replied to that, ‘that it’s hard for a rich man to enter Jerusalem through the gate they call the Eye of the Needle.
That’s where the proverb comes from.’

Sefton for the first time wondered if Gaiman was making it all up; that didn’t agree with what he’d read.
‘I thought there was no such gate.’

‘That’s true,’ said Gaiman, gently, ‘unless you have the Sight.
More honey?’

ELEVEN

Brian Tunstall had been shocked by his experience of being on remand in Brixton jail.
He’d been on G wing, with a bunch of others awaiting trial, in a cell with, thank God, a very quiet man who had just shaken his head when Brian had attempted to introduce himself, as if he could deny the whole experience of being here.

Brian hadn’t been able to deny it.
While he was inside, and when he’d got past the shock of that terrifying, impossible thing that had happened to Michael Spatley, he’d started to mull over the idea that he deserved to be there.
To his brief, because he didn’t see how DI Quill’s weird belief in what had really happened could help him in court, he’d maintained his other story: that a protestor had somehow got into the car.
So to two different people he’d maintained two different fictions.

He’d started to feel he’d deserved to be there, and then they’d let him out.
He’d gone back home, to Angela and little Alee.
He’d spent a lot of time at night, woken by terrible dreams, troubled by his conscience, doing what he was doing now – sitting watching Alee asleep in her cot.

Tomorrow, DI Quill was going to visit to talk to him again.
He must know something new, something that pointed to Tunstall’s real part in Michael Spatley’s death.
Tunstall had been thinking all day about how good it would be to tell Quill everything.
He didn’t see how he could possibly face a charge of conspiracy to murder.
Though there would, of course, be lesser charges, he might be able to do a deal.
Quill had indicated that he’d believed the impossible bits.
He would have to tell them about the money.

Yes, he thought now as he looked at his baby girl’s face.
Yes, I’ll be a good example to her.
I just want to be able to keep seeing her face, to be here for her.

He remembered the taste of the blood-soaked piece of paper as he’d put it into his mouth and chewed and swallowed.
That was what they had made him do for money.

He would normally have watched TV if he couldn’t sleep.
But all you saw these days were news broadcasts about the protestors.
He didn’t want to see them.
Even here in Hackney he could now hear the sounds of them.
There were shouts from right outside the window.
He hoped they wouldn’t wake Alee up.

When the wall in front of him started warping, he wondered if he was dreaming, or if perhaps the stress he’d been under had deformed the shape of his eyes.
It took him a moment to realize that something was really pushing its way through the wall.

He managed to grab Alee from out of the cradle before the first blow landed.
He staggered to the bedroom door, shoved his way through it, one hand trying to fend off something he couldn’t seem to connect with, his only thought to get the baby away.

He was suddenly aware of many terrible impacts happening rapidly across his body.
He looked into the face of his screaming child.
He heard what must be Angela yelling too.

He was so incapable of helping them.

Then he was gone.

*   *   *

Quill and his team stood looking at the remains of Brian Tunstall.
No scrawled message this time, and, as far as Forensics could find, again no fingerprints.
The adult witness, Tunstall’s wife, Angela, had been too traumatized to answer any but the most basic questions, but it was clear that the MO had been the same.
The Ripper had spared the woman and child.

So much for rich white men.
Only two out of three for Tunstall.

The now-familiar silver goo showed the entry and exit points of the killer.
Jason Forrest, unaware of them, stood glowering near one.
As Quill watched, he just shook his head and walked away.

There came an alert from Quill’s phone.
He looked at it and found confirmation that the prints they’d found in Spatley’s office had indeed belonged to Tunstall.

*   *   *

Back in the Portakabin, Quill said out loud what they all knew in their copper hearts.
‘Tunstall must have
known something
about Spatley’s murder and
we
didn’t get it out of him when we had the chance.
Gaiman suggested that if we catch the Ripper, we might turn everything around and save London.
We might have fucked that up before we even knew it!’

They had gone over all the interviews again and had found nothing that spoke of Tunstall’s complicity.
The efforts to get Vincent to reply to their request for him to be interviewed were continuing.
Billionaires, unlike authors, treated afternoons with the police as optional excursions.
The reverse phone book the Met held online had revealed the mobile phone number written on the card found in Spatley’s office to be that of a disposable model, known in the trade as a ‘burner’ – the sort of thing that organized criminal networks used to reduce the risk of being traced.
At least it was still in use.

‘The assailant,’ said Ross, who sounded as tense as Quill felt, almost to the point of anger, ‘also waited until the night before we were due to interview Tunstall again.
I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.’

‘Who, apart from Lofthouse and the four of us, knew we were going to talk to him again?’

‘Tunstall himself might have talked,’ said Costain.
Quill thought he was looking well frazzled, as if sleep was eluding him more than the others, even.

‘Or,’ said Sefton, ‘the Ripper might have supernatural means of learning about this stuff.’

‘Has anyone got anything new about anything?’
Quill asked.

‘This morning,’ said Ross, ‘I heard back from Photographic Intelligence.
As I expected, the images from the bar weren’t good enough for their software to do facial recognition.’

‘Fuck me,’ said Quill.
He went to the Ops Board and pointed at it.
‘There is, as I have said before,
only
what’s up there on that board.
It is where the only salvation lies for such as us.
Let us think.
What could we add to it?’
Already, the brothel business card had been attached to the corkboard with the number written beside it and an association line attaching it to Spatley.
The card itself had revealed no clear fingerprints except Spatley’s, but now they were at least sure that he’d handled it.

‘But then he lost it,’ said Ross, ‘and that didn’t worry him too much.
Which means it’s probably not a clue to him being involved in some sort of scandal.’

Quill frowned.
‘Why do you say it didn’t worry him?’

‘As owner of that office, he could have locked the door, moved furniture about, found it again.
It seems as if it meant more to the person doing the searching than it did to Spatley.’

‘It’s time we found out what the connection is, why someone might have wanted to search Spatley’s offices for that card.
You two –’ Quill indicated Costain and Ross – ‘take a trip to Soho and put eyeballs on the target.’

*   *   *

Costain had always found Soho’s insistence that it was still naughty, almost because it had to be for the tourists, charming.
It was actually calming to be back here.
The sex-shop end of the business moving into the daylight across the way on Oxford Street had really taken the oomph out of the place, which now said gay and proud more than it said furtive.
There was only one remaining peep show, and its signs sighed with the idea that this was the art of a lost age, like a freak show or a circus.
Presumably because the area was still a popular brand, there were still over a dozen prostitutes working in walk-ups, stairwells with small advertising of their purpose that often seemed to lead to flats above independent television production companies (and there was an example of how rent levels created strange bedfellows).
He assumed that meetings about new drama series were regularly interrupted by faked cries of encouragement.
The TV people probably liked that.
There was still a handful of men who made a living hawking to likely customers on the street and walking them to the stairwells.
The prostitutes discouraged this parasitic trade.
They preferred to have tips given to their ‘maids’, matronly figures who were, in effect, their PAs and lived in.
There was a whole other industry of people who pretended to be prostitutes but were in fact thieves, and brothels that were actually high-priced drinking establishments which one was encouraged not to leave.
There were also three or four genuine, surprisingly large, brothels in the area, including this one on Berwick Street, across from which Costain and Ross now sat, drinking coffee on a street-side table in the sunshine.
The coffee was probably a bad idea.
She looked as on edge as he felt.
They had watched as a number of men had approached a completely nondescript door, had talked into an intercom and been welcomed up.
Having established that the place was still working, in a while they’d take a wander around the map and work out back exits and boltholes.

‘You’re right at home here, aren’t you?’
Ross said to him.

He turned to look at her.
They’d hardly talked on the way over.
She was probably wondering if he’d meant what he’d said about helping her get her dad out of Hell rather than taking the Bridge of Spikes to save himself.
He’d stared into the night worrying about that question himself, but the more he thought about it, the more he looked at her, the more he felt that, once again, he’d done the right thing; this time at least, the right thing felt good.
‘I guess.’

‘It reminds me of Whitechapel.’

‘Does it?’

‘I mean, all those dead women.
Except here it’s all kept behind closed doors.
How many container-loads of Belarusian teenagers do you reckon get decanted here every week?’