The Severed Streets (28 page)

So this was going to be difficult.
Their duty was clearly to apprehend this person of interest.

‘That’s nowhere near what’s required,’ said Haversham, bringing Ross’ attention quickly back to the stage.
‘Are you wasting our time?’

She thought quickly.
‘A year of depression and paranoia.’
She could face that.
Of course she could.
There would be an end to it.
Unlike Dad’s time in Hell.

‘Two years of that!’
The man from the bar again.
He was actually trying to keep up with her.
He didn’t care what the rest of the room thought.
He would wait until she found the right level, if she ever did, and then make sure he matched her.
Damn it!

More laughter, but it was dying now; the crowd saw both of them as merely hopeless, no longer even funny.
Haversham didn’t answer.

‘Me,’ said Ross.
‘I mean, you know, a night with me.’
This was surely much bigger than anything else she’d offered.

At least it made them laugh louder again.
Among the laughter, Ross was actually pained to hear the man making the same offer, his voice breaking as he did so.
She looked back to him again, and saw how desperate his expression had become.
What was driving him, that he’d prostitute himself like she just had?
In his case it looked more as if he was motivated by fear than by need.

‘You can’t offer yourself to London,’ said Haversham, now starting to get annoyed at Ross’ naivety and the way the man was parroting her.
‘We’ve seen what happens.
It’s not allowed, which normally
goes without saying.’

‘You know who you might really be giving it up to,’ whispered Costain in her ear, furious.
‘That smiling bastard.
Would you just think before you—?’

‘No.’
She stepped forward out of his ability to stop her and did what she had to do.
‘I offer my future happiness.
All of it.
For a lifetime.’

There were actually gasps.
Various members of the audience turned to look at her, some with new respect, some with a sort of vertiginous horror at what might be about to happen to her.
They were shaking their heads, appalled by the harm she was doing to herself.
This from people missing fingers and teeth.
She was scared now to see those looks; she’d thought she’d be past that.
It was too late now.

She and the whole room turned to look at the man from the bar.
Ross could see now that he was shaking.
That he was on the edge of tears.
‘Sixty million pounds,’ he said.

The room went silent.
The audience had been startled by his sudden shift from one faction to the other.
Ross looked back to Haversham, who was considering, using whatever hidden power worked out conversion rates for her.
Her decision here might well affect the future of this community.
‘I do not think,’ she said finally, ‘that a lifetime of happiness can be equated with such a small sum of money.’

The crowd exploded in anger and applause.

Ross looked to see what the man was going to do.
He was looking right at her, imploringly, and now she saw that expression fade into fury and defeat.
Abruptly, he shook his head.
He walked quickly towards the door.
She couldn’t follow him – that would be against the rules at any auction, this lot would surely prevent her from leaving.
She looked to Costain, because he had to get after him, but Costain was just staring at her, an agonized, empty expression on his face.

‘Don’t you care that he’s leaving?’
she whispered.

‘I care about
you,
’ he said.

Ross looked round, but the man had gone.
She turned back to the stage.
Haversham was looking horribly sad for her.
She felt terror in her throat and stomach but she stood firm.
She had done this.
She would not retract it.
Even if she could.

Haversham waited for a very long moment.
As if she was hoping for an interruption.
‘Any other bids?’

There was absolute, careful, silence.

‘Going once,’ said Haversham.

‘Withdraw the bid!’
hissed Costain.

‘Going twice.’

‘We withdraw the bid!’
yelled Costain.

Haversham ignored him.
‘Going three times.’

The moment stretched.
Ross wanted to yell for her to get on with it.

‘Gone,’ said Haversham.

Silence.

Ross numbly stepped forward.
She didn’t want to look at Costain.
She headed for where Bernie was looking sympathetically at her, beckoning her towards the back room.
He led her through the door.

*   *   *

She was in an absolutely black space that felt roomy, with air blowing in from many directions.
She suspected that this was like Losley’s tunnels between houses.
Bernie closed the door behind them, but somehow Ross could still see.
He reached into his waistcoat and produced a tiny brass item, something like a curled-up trumpet.
He held it up to her.
‘I’m sorry it has to be like this,’ he said.
‘It’ll be easier if you don’t struggle, but I appreciate that you won’t be able to avoid it.’

She watched as he approached and lifted the object towards her face.
It wasn’t obvious what she was supposed to do.
This felt like a dream, as if what she’d done couldn’t possibly be as bad as it seemed to be.
She wanted to protest, to say she hadn’t meant it, but the whole difference between being an adult and a child was that she could do this, she could make this sacrifice—

The device suddenly sucked at her face.

She cried out.
Bernie slammed a hand onto her shoulder as she tried to twist out of the way.
He was strong, he was infinitely strong!
That was good, because she couldn’t help trying to pull herself away, and she couldn’t stop what was happening.
It was pouring out of her nose.
It was forcing its way up out of her throat, and forcing her mouth open, and … here it came!
It was like throwing up and drowning at the same time.
It started squirming out of the corner of her eyes a moment later.
It was being sucked into the metal shape.
And now she could almost see it!
It was—

It was happiness.

She couldn’t quite see what it looked like, but she knew what it was.
In this space it was mentally labelled for her, in the same way that something in a dream is instantly recognizable.
He was pumping joy out of her.
She had been full of happiness and she hadn’t known it.
She had been full of joy.

Losing it now, she suddenly realized, was much worse than the physical feeling of it being wrenched out of her.
It took her back to a sudden, pure moment of horror from her childhood, when she’d let go of a balloon that her dad had got her at a fair.
She’d grabbed for it and missed and it had floated higher and higher and she’d started to scream, because it was going and she’d never get it back!
Never!
Never!

Bernie held her there as the terror of loss became too much to bear.

Then it passed and was gone, into memory.
The last bit of joy was taken from her.

He put the device back in his pocket, and took out a big crimson handkerchief of absolute cleanliness, and wiped her face with the care of a father as she staggered, leaning against him.
Then he put the cloth away in the same pocket, and she realized that it would be taken to the same place as the device.
Her scraps were to be taken to the table too.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you asked for it.’

*   *   *

She walked back into the room to find the audience waiting for her.
She had only been gone, to them, an instant.
They wanted to stare at her.
They parted for her, their gazes examining her.
She could still feel.
She’d expected to be utterly numb, had looked forward to it, even, during her sacrifice.
Instead she could feel annoyance at them looking at her, fear at what she’d done to herself, even a sort of calculating hope for what this would mean for her plans for her father … and there was Costain, not angry now, just terribly worried for her, and she felt a swell of relief, even, as … there was a reaction in her to his expression.

Perhaps the device had gone wrong.

No.
She wasn’t that lucky.
Perhaps this just wasn’t so bad as it was meant to be.
Perhaps ‘happiness’, for this lot, was very narrowly defined.

No, something inside her said, this is grief protecting you.
The full meaning of it hasn’t hit you yet.
Relief is not happiness.
Hope and lust are not happiness.
Perhaps you are already losing sight of the thing you lost.

She went to the book on the lectern.
Haversham took a fob watch from a pocket of the spidery gown.
Ross found her own notebook, but Haversham raised a finger.
‘You are not to take notes,’ she said.
‘That wasn’t part of the bargain.
You have fifteen minutes.
From now.’

Ross opened the book and found the pages to be smooth with dust.
The lists were written in a precise, looping hand, the scratches of the quill visible.
There were, as with the catalogue, no pictures and no descriptions.
She noted the dates on the pages and saw that the auction was four times a year, yes, on the solstices and equinoxes, so she had nineteen to search.
She flipped back, started with the first of them, and worked forwards in time, running her finger down the lists.
She knew what the thing was called in the translations she read, the Bridge of Spikes, and had seen a few variations.
The familiar name of a person leaped out at her.
There were sometimes celebrities at these auctions, then.
At the winter solstice auctions in particular, there were a number of them.
Four years ago, a famous singer had bought … something the name of which meant nothing to her.
What he had offered?
Oh, that was so terrible for him.

She stopped at the winter solstice of three years ago when she saw another familiar name.
Oh.
Oh, but that meant…!

It meant she had found something useful for the investigation.
She had come here for her own ends, but here, in what she was staring at in amazement, she had found something new to go on for her team, some startling new leverage they could apply.
What could she do about it?

She called Costain over.

‘You can’t show him—’ began Haversham.

‘I can tell him!’
shouted Ross.
She whispered the name and item and given address in his ear.

He stared at her, astonished, started to say something.

She pushed him away and quickly turned back to the book.
She had to put that out of her mind now and get back to her original aim.
The object she was after wasn’t in the first two years of auctions she looked through, to the point where she started to panic at the thought that she’d missed it, because she wasn’t going to get to the front of the book before the time ran out, but then—

There.
Her eye had gone past it then instantly been drawn back.
She realized she was breathing more deeply, her fight-or-flight reflex set off just by seeing the words on paper.
Anna Lassiter was the name of the purchaser, at 16 Leyton Gardens, with a postcode that put it in Kentish Town.
Sixteen flowers, laid on, Leyton, she ran a mnemonic around her head a few times, piling associations on the address and the post code.
She should tell Costain this too, have two brains remembering it.
She looked over to him.
He’d seen that she’d found something.

No.
Still no.
She still could not trust him.

She slammed the book closed and grabbed her notebook, ripped out a page, pulled out a pen and wrote the information down before he could arrive beside her.
She folded the paper up and shoved it into her waistcoat breast pocket.

She had it.
She knew the location of the object that could bring her dad back to life.

It made her excited.
But it didn’t make her happy.

She headed for the door; Costain followed at a run.

*   *   *

He caught up with her in the Turbine Hall.
‘So what’s the plan?
Are we going straight there?’

She didn’t want him going with her.
She didn’t want to tell him that.
She felt emotionally exhausted, and she was aware of a terrible numbness that had taken hold of some part of her personality like an anaesthetic.
Besides, though she really did want to go straight to the address and at least look at where this precious object might be, it did make more sense to use all the tools at her disposal to learn everything she could about the place beforehand.

She turned to look at Costain and saw that he was prepared for disappointment here, prepared to be disbelieved, as he’d been doubted all his life.

She put her hands on both sides of his face and kissed him.

He kissed her back.
Then he stopped.
‘Lisa,’ he said, ‘we have to talk about—’

‘No,’ she said, ‘we don’t.’

*   *   *

She took him home.
He kept on kissing her as she slowly pushed him up against the wall, but he was not going to go any further.
His expression said he wouldn’t let himself unless she gave him some sort of signal.
She took his hand and put it not on her breast as she’d thought to do, but on second thoughts, between her legs.
They stood there awkwardly, him looking at her, still questioning, even at that, him cupping her.
She found her body was moving unconsciously against him.
She opened her mouth to say – God, did she have to give him permission aloud?

Something suddenly changed in his expression.
He took the hand away and went to unbutton her, to start to undress her, quickly, roughly.
She raised her arms to let him.

He manhandled her and turned her body and opened her with his hands.
He spent so long licking her, expertly, but agonizingly too long, too precisely.
He was still fully dressed, even.
He needed to keep his control.
She grabbed his hair, and looked into those deeply worried eyes.
Wasn’t he hard?
Hadn’t she made him hard for her?
‘For God’s sake!’

He looked at her as if he was convincing himself this was real.
He was so unused to being wanted.
Suddenly, he got to his feet.

She watched him, wondering if he was going to leave her there.

Slowly, he started to take off his clothes.
When he was naked, he put a hand on his cock, showed her how hard she made him.
He was shivering.