The Severed Streets (3 page)

Quill realized that the radio was playing ‘London Calling’ by the Clash and angrily changed the channel to Classic FM.
He didn’t need his situation underlining, thank you very much.
He wound down the window and immediately regretted it, but left it open for the cool air on his face.
The air brought with it the smell of burning.
The smell was of last night’s riots and lootings, of some borough or other going up in smoke.
Thanks to an interesting series of interactions between this government and certain classes of the general public, it was shaping up to be one of those summers.
He and his team had been told that the Smiling Man had a ‘process’ that he was ‘putting together’, and Quill kept wondering if he was somewhere behind the violence.
He could imagine a reality where the coalition in power had done a lot of the same shit, but without a response that included Londoners burning down their own communities.
Really, it was down to how the initial outbreaks of violence had been mismanaged and a strained relationship between government and the Met that was leaving him increasingly incredulous.

The news came on the radio, and he made himself listen.
Sporadic looting, protests against the cuts and austerity measures.
Cars on fire and bottles being thrown at police.
‘The postal ballot on strike action by the Police Federation—’

Quill told the radio to piss off as he changed the channel again.
He could understand the frustration felt by his fellow officers, really he could.
Every move, every sensible decision that the Met made to get to the cause of the unrest and damp it down seemed to be instantly overturned and criticized by either the mayor’s office or the Home Office.
To the ‘lid’, the uniformed police officer on the street, what that meant was that you got spit in your face and then found out that you were going back the next night for more of exactly the same, when it was obvious to you and your mates – spread out and targets for missiles as you were – that the situation wasn’t going to get any better.
The other police forces of Britain had their own difficult relations with this government, knew where the Met was coming from and wanted to support their colleagues.

But strike action?
His old police dad, Marty, had been on the phone from Essex, making sure Quill wasn’t having any of that.
It was against all the traditions of the Met.
Against the law, even – coppers didn’t have the right.
Besides, Quill’s team’s speciality, standing against the powers of darkness, seemed a bit too urgent to allow for industrial action.

He realized he was passing the cemetery on his right.
He always tried not to glance over there, and always failed.
Graveyards were usually, in his team’s experience, a bad idea.
This one was full of greenish lights that danced between the graves, and there were a couple of swaying figures, one an emaciated husk with glowing eyes who had taken to … yes, there he was again this morning, like every morning.

Quill tiredly raised his hand to return the wave.

*   *   *

Forty minutes later, Quill got out of his car at Belgravia police station.
The sky was getting properly light now.
He found Ross standing under one of the big fluorescent car park lights, moths fluttering around it.
She had been watching the first batch of last night’s Toff protestors, the ones whom the police presumably had no legal reason to keep, stumbling from the building.
They had those Halloween-style costumes of theirs bundled under their arms.
A few of them were, even now, giving each other high fives and laughing.
But most of them looked grim.
Quill looked at their emotion and again felt distant copper annoyance at bloody
people.
He used to joke that without people his job would be a lot easier.
But now he supposed he couldn’t even say that.
‘What have we got?’
he asked.

She looked round at him.
Maybe she was his team’s intelligence analyst, a civilian, but what they’d been through together had brought them as close as Quill had ever felt to any fellow officer.
He owed her the life of his child.
There was something about the paleness of Ross’ left eye compared to her right, about the broken angle of her nose, that made it always look as if she’d just been in a fight.
Her hair was cut short to the point where sometimes it looked as if she’d just taken a razor to it.
She was biting her bottom lip in that skewed smile of hers, which only appeared once in a blue moon, and which Quill had started to associate with the game, as they say, being afoot.
‘Maybe just the op we’ve been looking for,’ she said.

Quill had caught up with the Spatley case before he’d left the house.
The headline on the first edition of the
Herald
had read, ‘Murdered by the Mob’.
Michael Spatley, chief secretary to the Treasury, had been cornered in his car by anti-government protestors, who had forced their way in and eviscerated him.
The story had been the lead on the BBC ten o’clock bulletin last night, but Quill had gone to bed thinking, ironically, that he was glad that it wasn’t his problem.

‘Why is it one of ours?’

Ross led him towards the doors of the nick.
‘I have search strings set up in the Crime Reporting Information System, and I check them four times a day.
A locked report came through on my page of results late last night, with the heading directing me to the extension of one DCI Jason Forrest.
I couldn’t read it, but if it set off my searches it must contain some extreme words, like “impossible”.
Around 2 a.m.
it showed up on the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System too, so it’s a murder.
I checked where this bloke Forrest works, and it’s this nick, which is also the obvious one for a suspect in the Spatley case to be brought back to.
I got excited and called you.’

Quill wanted to slap her on the shoulder or fist-bump her or something, but the very urge was against his copper nature.
His was a squad created within the budget of a detective superintendent, its objectives hidden from the mainstream of the Metropolitan Police while cut after cut reduced the operational capacity of every other Met department, and the riots and the protests and the outbursts of dissent in the force’s own ranks were pushing the system to breaking point.
His team needed a new target nominal – a new operation – before people in senior positions started asking questions about why they existed.

‘And you were awake at 2 a.m.
because…?’

Her poker face was immediately back.
Quill sighed to see it.
After they’d defeated Mora Losley and thus solved the mystery that had loomed over Ross for her whole life, the analyst had opened up for a few weeks, become more talkative, cracked a few jokes, even.
It had been wonderful to see.
But now the cloud was back.
‘I’m still working through those documents we found in the ruins in Docklands.’

She was also, thought Quill, probably still considering the plight of her deceased dad, who, in the course of the team’s first – and so far only – op, she’d discovered to be residing in Hell.
Whatever Hell was.
Quill was pretty sure it didn’t map onto conventional thoughts about damnation.
Ross had told them that she was aiming, in the fullness of time, to do something about getting her dad out of there, if they ever found a mechanism to do so.
Whether or not she’d made any progress on that was between her and her copious notebooks.
‘Okay, but—’

‘That’s my own time, Jimmy.’

Quill raised his hands in surrender, and indicated for her to proceed.

‘Witnesses are saying to the press that the doors of the car weren’t opened at any point, meaning that the government service driver, whom I’ve discovered was one Brian Tunstall, must be the only suspect, presumably the “thirty-eight-year-old male” the Major Investigation Team have announced they’ve arrested in connection.
The words that set off my searches might well be contained in his interview statement.’

‘Terrific.’
Quill took out his phone.
‘You get our two comrades over here.
I am about to wake a detective superintendent.’

*   *   *

The first result of Quill’s call to his superior was that a hassled-looking lid came out of the nick, found Quill and Ross, and checked them through into the canteen.
As in any nick, the canteen smelt of comforting grease and echoed with the clatter of cutlery and the sound of music radio from the kitchens.
To venture any further into this bureaucracy, they were going to need their political muscle here with them.
The food hall was full of uniforms looking pissed off, having just come off a shift where half of them would have been beaten on by protestors and rioters.
Ross kept looking at her phone.
‘Now they’ve made an arrest, I’m waiting for those “the mob did it” stories on the news websites to change.
They might give us more information to go on.’

‘In the meantime,’ said Quill, ‘there exist in this world bacon sarnies.’

*   *   *

Forty-five minutes later, Kev Sefton arrived, dressed like his undercover self, in hoodie and trainers, but with the holdall he now carried everywhere.
Quill suspected that, given the riots, the detective constable must have been stopped a few times lately and searched for the crime of being black in the wrong suburb.
Quill just hoped Sefton flashed his warrant card before the uniforms found the collection of occult, or what they’d taken to simply calling ‘London’, items that he now regularly carried in that holdall.
In their line of work, as Sefton had discovered, some ancient horse brass with a provenance in the metropolis could be much handier in terms of repelling evil than garlic.
If Ross had a boxer’s nose, Sefton had the rest of that body shape, compact and hard.
As Quill had discovered, what went with that physique was a detective’s intellect that was willing to believe in extraordinary possibilities, which could lead Sefton to think about the horrifying reality they’d discovered – to a degree that the rest of the team, Quill included, weren’t yet capable of.
It was as if he had an undercover officer’s adaptability that could extend itself beyond reality.
Quill had started to think of him as his weird-London-shit officer.
He got the feeling that that role was letting Sefton breathe, that all his life he’d been waiting for a chance like this.

‘I thought this might be one of ours,’ he said, sitting down.

‘Do you mean that you did some sort of…?’
Quill still didn’t have the language to form that kind of question, so he contented himself with spreading his hands like a stage illusionist, indicating the sort of occult London thing that he supposed Sefton now did.

‘I wish I
had
some sort of…’ Sefton returned the gesture with a smile.

Quill was pleased to see that.
He knew that Sefton liked to try and keep a positive surface going, but that being the one to deal with the London shit, especially when they’d made relatively little progress, weighed heavily on him.
He had had adventures on his own that, while he’d described them to the team in every possible detail, he’d added had been like ‘something out of a dream’.
Which wasn’t your normal copper description of encountering a potential informant.

‘Right then!’
That was Tony Costain, marching in as if he owned the place as always, dressed to the nines as always, in a retro leather coat that emphasized his tall, slim loomingness.
The detective sergeant was the other black former undercover police officer on the team.
If Costain smiled at you, and you knew who he really was, you wondered what he was hiding, because here was a copper who’d been willing to sell on drugs and guns he’d nicked from the gang he’d been undercover in.
Still, Quill felt he’d treated Costain too roughly on occasion.
He had felt for Costain when he’d developed a desperate desire not to go to Hell and had decided that from now on he was going to clean up his act, having caught a glimpse of the Hell he was certain was waiting for him.
It felt like something that didn’t sit well with the man, though: an abstinence that chafed on him every day.
Costain, basically, didn’t
want
to be a good boy.
Quill had never said it out loud, but he’d started to think of this consummate actor’s ability to step in and out of the dark side, to bring on the dodgy stuff, as a positive asset to the team.
He had found himself hoping that, should push come to shove, Costain could find it in himself to do, perhaps, extreme violence and leave redemption until later.
‘You look like you got some sleep,’ he said.

‘The sleep of the just,’ Costain nodded.

‘The just what?’

Costain gave Quill exactly the sort of smile he’d been anticipating.

‘There you are, James, with the bacon sarnies.’
Detective Superintendent Lofthouse had entered.
The smart, angular middle-aged woman looked exhausted, as always, while never actually seeming tired.
‘Someone’s fetching one for me, and a gallon of coffee to go with it.’
She sat down with them and lowered her voice.
‘I’ve had a word with the senior investigating officer on the Spatley case, Jason Forrest, and he, despite his puzzlement, you will be pleased to hear, has expressed his trust in his old mate, me, by asking to talk to you at the earliest opportunity.
You and I are to take the lift to the third floor.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’
Quill found himself sitting straighter in his chair and glanced around at his team to see them all reacting similarly.
None of them quite knew how to deal with their boss these days.

Three months ago, Quill’s team had used a pair of ‘vanes’ that had been employed to attack Quill with some sort of weaponized poltergeist but could also be utilized as dowsing equipment.
With these they had found a ruined building in London’s Docklands.
It was something like a temple, the remains standing absurdly on an open space between office blocks by the river.
There had been ornate chairs and a big marble table that had been cracked in two.
A pentagram had been inscribed on both that table and the ground underneath.
Quill had swiftly realized that only they could see this building, that passers-by were looking at his team searching the ruins as if they were performing some sort of avant-garde mime.
They’d discovered a few details of a group that called itself the Continuing Projects Team, people who, they’d been startled to find, showed up not at all on internet searches.
Quill’s team had already seen what a huge amount of energy it took to make one person be forgotten by a handful of people.
The idea that a group of prominent people could be made to vanish so completely from public memory was staggering.
They had found an empty personnel file that these people had kept, and on the cover of it had been the name ‘Detective Superintendent Lofthouse’, and then she had stepped from the shadows, holding an ancient key that Quill had recognized as having been on her charm bracelet.
‘
This,
’ she had said, ‘explains a
lot.
’