The Severed Streets (27 page)

‘Madams and Messiers!’
the lady called.
Her accent was pretend posh, not even an attempt at French, a music hall barker, playacting ‘above her station’.
The crowd applauded.
‘Welcome once again to this high point of the Seen season, the place to be Seen, our quarterly quantifying of quality, your refreshment on the way to your revels, a palimpsest of prognostication, prestidigitation and parsimony!’
The crowd went ‘ooh’ at every long word.
The host leaned closer to someone in the front row, and put her hand to her mouth in a stage whisper.
‘It’s the stuff of London, on the cheap, dear!’
Then she straightened up again.
‘The truce is in place, so mind your fucking manners.
I am your ’ost, Miss Haversham with an “er” as well as an aitch, not Havisham like that berk Dickens ’ad it.’

Ross heard the crowd chanting along with that bit, a mantra they’d obviously heard many times before.

‘I can tell you good people are itching to begin.
Bit hot out there, innit?
Bernie the Bitch, distribute the catalogues!’

A very thin middle-aged man dressed as a waiter, with bicycle clips on the bottoms of his trousers and a hangdog expression, entered at that same instant through the door behind the stage.
In his arms he carried a pile of papers, which were eagerly snatched up by the audience.
When Ross got hold of one, she saw that this list of auction items had been printed very roughly, as if from some form of mechanical copier, the faded ink pink and purple.
The pages smelt of chemicals.
There were over fifty items listed.
There were no descriptions and no pictures, just the name of the object beside each item number.
She found herself desperately looking down the list.
She looked once, she looked twice.
Then she threw the piece of paper at Costain.
‘It’s not there!
That barmaid said it would be.
She said she had “a strong feeling”.
She said it like she
knew!
’ Costain grabbed the paper, looked quickly down it himself, as if he might see something she hadn’t.
On the stage, Bernie had joined Haversham, carrying an enormous ledger and a quill pen in an inkpot, which he set up on a small lectern.

Ross looked at the crowd and the hosts as they prepared to begin.
She couldn’t just walk away.
She marched up to the stage.
Costain quickly followed.
‘The item I’m after,’ she called, ‘it’s not here.’

Miss Haversham looked at her, and Ross had, in that moment, to use the blanket harder and faster than at any time previously.
‘We’ve had no withdrawals, have we, Bernie?
Are you sure it was meant to be on sale tonight?’

Truly, she wasn’t.
She’d been caught out, she realized, by assumption.
It made her want to laugh and not stop laughing.
But still she answered yes.

Haversham sighed.
‘You aren’t, you know.
We get quite a few like you here, following one of the ways that happenstance and aim interact in the metropolis.
They all find their just deserts.’
She added a big stage wink, then turned away.

Ross wanted to yell at her.
She could feel the crowd looking at her with pity, shame and – given what had happened the last time she and her mate were about – worry.
Costain now had a grim look about him.
Was he distraught for her, or for himself?
She put that thought aside, because a new idea had come to her.
It had brought the sudden pain of new hope with it.
They stepped aside from the crowd to talk in private.
‘That book…’ she said, ‘that’ll be, what, a record of sales?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it’s bloody huge.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So maybe what I’m after has already been sold at one of these auctions, and the details of whoever bought it are written down in there.
Maybe that’s what the barmaid meant.
Maybe she’d seen my future.’

‘That warning we got during the Losley inquiry about someone close to us dying, that was as if someone had seen the future, so I suppose it’s … possible.’
With a lurch of her stomach, Ross knew from his tone exactly what that grim expression of his meant.
He was thinking that she might have deluded herself, that she’d aroused false hope in him, put him through the emotional wringer for nothing.
Was he about to walk away, to reveal that his attempts to be close to her were all a lie?
No, even if that were true, he didn’t quite have reason enough to do that, not yet.

‘Look, even if the Bridge isn’t there, that list would be a treasure trove of background sources for our team.
If it turns out that I can’t do anything for
myself
here—’

‘Then we should do something to help our guys.
Yeah, I agree.’

That would mean she could tell Quill where they’d been, make this secret excursion something the two of them had pursued of their own volition, like when Sefton had gone off after Brutus.

The crowd quietened.
The auction was beginning.
Ross fought down her fury and disappointment and tried to keep her hope in sight.
The rushing of the water nearby spoke of power that was nearly hers, but might never be.

‘Everything is allowed,’ said Haversham, clearly reciting from a familiar ritual, ‘anything can be dealt in here and, as I’m these days forced to add –’ and she made a significant pause before adding it – ‘anything can be
bought.
’ There came grumbles from the audience, but angry shouts of support too.
‘Although, for the first time in a decade, for obvious reasons’ – was there a glance in Costain and Ross’ direction then?
–‘the Keel brothers aren’t present this evening.’

Again, there were both catcalls and cheers.

Bernie, having donned white gloves, held up what looked to be a small piece of tarred wood with splinters sticking in all directions.
Ross felt the Sight swing to it, as if he was waving around a lantern in a darkened room.
‘Lot number one,’ said Haversham, ‘a piece of the sign that was fixed to Tyburn Tree when it was first blooded by William Longbeard, declaring him to be a heretic.
Is the provenance felt as well as signed for?’

‘The provenance is felt,’ called out a man in the front row who was wearing what looked like an ancient agricultural smock; a few others joined in.

‘We start the bidding with small beer, small favours or…’ again that hesitation, ‘… two hundred pounds.’

Ross watched, fascinated, as the crowd started to yell out the names of everything from material goods to body parts to immaterial concepts.
‘A pinch of plague dust!’
‘My last good tooth!’
‘An hour of suicidal depression!’
One of them, as if representing his faction as well as making a bid, insisted on that ‘two hundred pounds!’

With what was clearly an extraordinary skill, or the power of some whispered word or subtle gesture, Haversham decided the money was outbid by the depression.
‘With the man in the tricorne hat.’
The demographic in the suits, she saw, had their phones out now and were listening to them, occasionally bidding themselves.
So they were proxies, agents for buyers not actually present, people hired in who … well, who knew what they believed about what they were participating in?
Ross wished she could make use of that version of the ‘checking-out’ gesture that could investigate a mobile phone.
The identities of those bidders might well be good background info.

The bidding continued for three more rounds, with the lot finally going to the man with the money.
Groans came from the crowd as he pushed his way forward to shove the notes into Bernie’s hand.
Bernie kept his gloves on for that.

‘The movement of money around London must be like another force on the city,’ said Ross.
‘You’d think they’d be more up for using it.’

‘Except money stays
modern,
’ said Costain, ‘because they change the designs every few years, and new notes are printed all the time.’

The next few lots showed the same pattern: items from the distant past of London being bid for by both this strange form of barter and by money.
Haversham seemed to try to treat both systems equally.
The successful bidders who had bought lots for intangibles were taken into the back room by Bernie, each for an illusionist’s moment: the door opened again to let them back in at the very moment it had shut.
Each item was handed to the successful bidder as soon as their business was concluded, and several people left early, having presumably won or failed to get what they’d come here for.
Ross recognized a few of the items: there was a Tarot of London pack of a different design to the one she’d seen previously and an old hardback
Book of Changes.
Finally, the last item in the catalogue was accounted for.

‘Why do you think they keep records of the bidders?’
whispered Costain.

‘Maybe they keep track of the provenance of each item, from owner to owner, just in case someone manufactures something that only looks old.’

‘Or contains a trap.’

‘So that ledger of sales records is indeed the purest imaginable juice, the most valuable object here.’

‘So, what?
Are we going to try to nick it?’

‘There’s probably some fucking terrifying security in place.’

‘Yeah, and we’ve no time to scope it out.
Maybe we should find out when the next auction is, and—’

‘No.’
The path that led to a different sort of life for her was too tempting.
She was shaking her head even as the thought struck her.
She knew what she was going to do.
It scared her.
‘Haversham said anything could be bought.’

‘But—’

‘Does anyone have any further business?’
called Haversham, returning to the ceremonial tone, clearly expecting that to be the end of the auction.

Ross stepped forward before she had time to think, shrugging off Costain’s slight attempt to restrain her.
This was her only chance.
This was clearly what the barmaid had meant in sending her here.
Or if it wasn’t, this was her trying to tell her own story.
‘I do,’ she said.

‘What do you offer or wish for?’
Haversham sounded as if she sort of knew, as if she was willing her on.
Was that real, or was it just for the sake of spectacle?

‘I wish for … that book.’
She pointed at it.
Bernie raised his eyebrows in shock.
There was a combination of amazement and amusement from the audience.
Haversham raised a finger and they were silent.
‘We’ve heard that before, haven’t we, ladies and gentlemen and others?
Please, young lady, before you begin anything you can’t finish, understand the value of what you seek.’
She went over and held up the ledger.
‘This book is a cornucopia, a concentration, a concordance of what are known in the vernacular as right proper names.
My own name, Haversham, is a nom de gesture’ – she again pronounced the words as if they were English – ‘because I don’t want this lot knowing what I was born as, in case there’s a dispute and it’s used against me.
My real name is as valuable to me as my life.
This volume contains more than a thousand such names.
Do you really think you have
anything
to offer, girl, that could convince us to sell it to you?’

‘No.
Which is why I don’t want to
buy
it.
I know the object I’m after only arrived in Britain in the last five years.
So I only want to see those entries.
I want … the chance to read that book for fifteen minutes.’

Haversham let out a bemused breath.
‘You’ll still need an offer of enormous value.
But…’ Ross got the feeling she was making use of some internal power rather than merely deciding.
‘It’s
possible
you
may
have something worth it.’

Ross could see, out of the corner of her eye, Costain looking sidelong at her, wondering what she was going to offer.
She glanced at him, asking him the question first, then back to the auctioneer.
They were about to find out if he really did have any secret funds.
‘What’s the opening bid,’ she asked, ‘in cash?’

The crowd groaned.
There were shouted insults at her, but also scattered cheers.
She got the feeling this would be the furthest anyone had tried to push the imposition of monetary value on this community.

Haversham thought for a moment, her inner power doing the maths.
‘Twenty million pounds,’ she said.

Ross felt a hollow open in her stomach.
She slowly looked to Costain, who was staring back at her.
He shook his head.
Come on. As if.

She had no idea what to do.

No, no, she did.
The audience was laughing at their reaction to the size of the sum.
Some of them were yelling about how absurd it was to put a price tag on such things, an obscenity.
There was factional sympathy for her.
There was outright cynical mockery too.

She had to find something else to offer.
Something huge.

Haversham was looking at her like a judge.
Not unkindly.

‘All right,’ she said.
‘I offer…’ She found herself breathing more quickly, wanting to be sure she knew the size of what she was doing, making herself accept it, for the sake of her father.
‘My left hand.’
She felt Costain beside her start to react and pushed her fist into his arm to make him shut up.

‘My left hand and a finger from the right!’
shouted a voice from behind her.

The crowd roared with laughter.
They were laughing at both bidders.
At them being so wide of the mark.
She turned to see who else had bid so guilelessly, and realized, with a shock, that she recognized who she was looking at.
He must have come in late and stayed at the back, and the truth was that they’d been concentrating on fitting in rather than examining the crowd.
White, late thirties, five nine, large build, no visible identifying marks, balding, dark hair, off-the-peg suit, and, yes, she had previously been looking at him on grainy CCTV footage.

It was the man who’d been talking to the woman in the Soviet bar, who’d left before the murder of Rupert Rudlin.
He was meeting her gaze now, unsurprised by it.
They were competitors – that was all.
Or perhaps they could both win this, if they reached the reserve price.
There was nothing to stop him looking at it for fifteen minutes too.
He wasn’t pleased she’d led him into being laughed at.
She glanced back to Costain, and saw that he’d recognized the man too.