The Severed Streets (41 page)

*   *   *

She drove him to Gipsy Hill.
He drank strong sweet tea from a flask as Lofthouse let him know what had been happening with the others.
He let the drink start to warm the terrible cold inside him.
His legs kept cramping, and his stomach was tied in knots.
Costain and Ross were waiting back at the Portakabin, Lofthouse said.
She’d managed to call them and order them to come back in.
She wouldn’t say how she’d known where to find Sefton.
Whenever they stopped at the lights, she’d toy with that key on her charm bracelet.
Sefton finally managed a whisper, because he was so angry at her keeping secrets from them.
‘Five is better than four,’ he whispered, his throat aching.
‘Told that.
Meant to be team of five.
Like the Continuing Projects Team were.
Right now, there’s just three.
You could at least make us four.’

She was silent for a long moment.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘Not now.
You’re just going to have to accept that.
If, that is, you want me to keep helping you.’

*   *   *

When Sefton stumbled into the Portakabin, Ross came straight over.
‘Oh my God, Kev,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘We both are,’ said Costain.
‘We had to go; we thought we were onto something.’

Had they really?
There was that look on Costain’s face that Sefton knew not to trust.
He fell into a seat and Lofthouse asked the others to get him a blanket and a change of clothes and a cup of strong coffee.
He wanted a shower, but didn’t feel able to walk over to the nick to get one.
Slowly, as he was provided with those things, his voice came back to him and he spoke about where he’d been.
Ross added the notes to the concepts column of the Ops Board.
Did she seem even more distant than usual?
He was so unequipped to tell right now.
With his hands shaking, Sefton took out Quill’s notebook, was gratified by their astonished reactions.
He read out the last page: ‘Met the suspect in a dream.
No clue who.
Fell into the figure.
Back in time.
Longbarrow.
Fingerprints on the wall.
Dead woman.
Locked up.
Angry.
Dreaming.’

‘Oh, James,’ said Lofthouse, ‘what the fuck?’

‘“Back in time”?’
echoed Costain.
‘Was it him who was locked up?’

‘So Jimmy encountered whatever’s been visiting us in our dreams,’ said Ross, ‘“fell into it,” and … went back in time?
Or did he have to get back here in time to do something?’
She made a few attempts at adding new entries to the concepts list, crossing things out a couple of times before she was satisfied.

‘It
must
be important,’ said Sefton.
‘That’s what I brought back.
It was so hard…’ He found he could hardly continue.
‘The secret to
all
this is in
those
notes.’

‘“Longbarrow”,’ said Ross.
‘That limits what he was dreaming about to a set of specific places.
Maybe he was trying to tell us where to find the Ripper.’

‘With fingerprints on the wall,’ said Costain.
‘So that’s something we can follow up on.
I’ll bet there are records of fingerprints found at prehistoric sites.
We find out where that longbarrow he mentions is; if it’s real, at least we can go and see it, maybe find out why it’s relevant.’
He did an image search on his phone for barrows with handprints and showed them three pages of results.
‘Doesn’t really narrow it down,’ he said.
‘Six of these are in London, and four of them are now buried under shopping centres and stuff like that.’

‘Send the pictures of those prints to Forensics,’ said Lofthouse, ‘they’ve got databases of fingerprints going back centuries, maybe some connection will leap out at us.’

Ross did as she asked.

‘I really want to go to sleep,’ said Sefton.
‘I should think you lot do and all.
But now I know what Jimmy knew.
Now we all do.
If that’s what got him killed…’

Lofthouse nodded.
‘This better be on my head,’ she said.
‘I’m ordering you all to take the meth.’

Sefton found himself desperately wanting to say no.
As an undercover, he’d always turned down drugs, plus he wasn’t sure if his system could stand it.
But what was the alternative?

Costain got out his packets and looked to Ross with a raised eyebrow.
‘Orders are orders,’ he said.
She just looked coldly back at him.

They all sniffed the powder.
Sefton erupted into a coughing fit and hated the sharp feel of it up his nose.
But after a moment … yes, it did make him feel better.

Lofthouse didn’t partake.
‘So,’ she said, ‘James said your next move should be to raid the Keel shop?’

Costain nodded, a bit too quickly.
‘Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
We can interview Keel about scrying glasses: if he’s got one; who else does he know who has; if there’s any defence against them.’
He gestured to the mirror that stood outside the window.
‘We can ask what that thing is – if it’s just a fake that Vincent got stuck with, which just happened to have the Ripper come out of it—’

‘Or whether the object itself was actually a trap,’ said Lofthouse, ‘using the Ripper, maybe set up by those “dark forces” Vincent thought were working against him.
Either way, you might get a lead on who was trying to kill Vincent, why that was so long before the other attacks, and why, uniquely, that one failed.
And we might find some way to protect you three.’

‘The strike starts at noon tomorrow,’ said Costain, looking interrogatively at her.
‘Noon.
Tomorrow.
Do we do this off the books?
Do we even have time to do it any other way?’

‘Let me talk to my friend the judge.
I may have to bend the vernacular a bit to find just cause, but I’ll come up with some legal reason for the raid.’

Costain paused.
Then he nodded, again a bit too quickly.
‘Ma’am.’

*   *   *

While Lofthouse got on the phone, Ross stared at the board, hoping something would leap out at her.
Once the prospect of a raid on the Keel shop would have made her wonder if there was anything there like the Bridge of Spikes, but the unique nature of the item had been emphasized by everyone they’d talked to, Lassiter included.
If she’d been writing this story, then Keel would have bought the Bridge from whoever had stolen it from Lassiter, but Ross knew coppers and their friends could never be that lucky.
She’d started to appreciate the feeling of the meth keeping her pulse racing.
That was a bad sign.
It was like a distant echo of happiness.
She would have to make sure, after all this was over, that she never got the chance to be tempted by it again.
After this was over.
It didn’t feel as if it ever could be.
If it was, what would she do with her life?
Be with Costain.
Be unhappy.

It took an hour for Lofthouse to find and persuade a member of the judiciary that she had an urgent lead concerning the murder of James Quill, that they had evidence to suggest that senior members of the organization behind the Toff mask protests, which had obvious connections to the Ripper, could be found at a particular shop premises, where the masks were on sale.
No, she hadn’t had reports of any, but it was obvious there’d be some there, wasn’t it?

Ross thought she saw an admiring look on Costain’s face as he watched Lofthouse deliberately venture into what was very dodgy territory for a police officer: making up connections that weren’t yet suggested by the evidence but that you assumed would be provided by the raid yet to come.
Except in this case – and she was surely risking her career to do this, even with the blurry distraction the strike would provide – she was obviously not even imagining that the scenario she was describing was true.

She finally put down the phone having gained a search warrant.
‘I feel dirty,’ she said.

‘Is that really different from turning the place over without
any
authority?’
asked Costain.

‘It is, because we have a piece of paper.
I decide the meanings here.
Now, how do you propose to conduct this raid of yours?’

*   *   *

They worked through the night.
They took a lot of meth.
They managed to find an Armed Response Unit in central London who, while they didn’t want to be blacklegs, were relieved to be rounded up for an operation that would be going down an hour before the strike.
Lofthouse got her call to Forrest answered at 6 a.m.
‘You’re getting in under the wire,’ he said.
‘Are you sure you need to do this now?’

‘I am.
Operation Fog will of course report back to you with everything it finds.’

Ross got an email at nine o’clock that made her heart sink once again.
The fingerprints that had been taken at Anna Lassiter’s flat didn’t match those of anyone in the records, and certainly weren’t a match for those left at the murder scenes.
There were some glove marks, but no DNA other than that of the resident.
Ross supposed Lassiter didn’t get many callers.

*   *   *

At 10.55, on a brilliantly sunny morning, where the light seemed only to illuminate how nervy and strung out the city felt, an unmarked van pulled up on double yellow lines on a side road near the Keel occult shop that Sefton had visited undercover.
This was the place that a ‘customer seeking urgently to sell some items’ – actually Costain – had been told he could find Mr Keel.
Costain had seen from the windows of the van as they drove through the centre of London how quiet the streets were, how many businesses were boarded up or operating through side doors or had private security standing there already.
The strike had put fear into the metropolis.
He felt that tension in his head alongside a thumping in his heart from where he’d partaken again of his supply.
London seemed to be as on edge as he was.

A traffic warden banged his knuckles on the side window.
Costain pulled down the window and shoved his warrant card in his face.
The warden just raised his eyebrows and wandered off: strange to meet a copper on the streets these days.
‘We cut them off from the back of the shop,’ said Sefton from the back of the van.
‘That’s where the serious shit is.’

‘Right,’ said Ross.
‘Okay.
Okay.’

Costain didn’t like her looking as focused as this.
It was as if she was slowly getting less and less range of expression.
She finally saw him looking and managed a deliberate … well, it wasn’t quite a smile.
It seemed that she was already forgetting how to do that.
Sefton opened the rear doors and got out, headed off on his part of this mission.
Costain leaned in and kissed Ross, then she too got out and headed off.

Dear God, the last few days had damaged them all so much.
Costain got out of the van and locked it.
He himself had a terrible choice to make.
He’d done something terrible.
Again.
It kept going round and round in his thoughts.
The meth meant he couldn’t trust how he felt about anything.
For the hundredth time, he put it out of his mind.
He took out his Airwave radio and called the Armed Response Unit, who confirmed they were in place, and on a clock counting down to noon, when the strike began.
He was certain that if they ended up in a fire-fight, the unit weren’t just going to down tools on the hour, but still, their clock-watching didn’t fill him with confidence.
He waited for Sefton and Ross to get to their destinations then headed towards the shop.
To walk felt too slow, so he started marching.

*   *   *

Sefton entered the small car park at the back of the Keel store, used jointly with a patisserie next door.
There was a lower door and a fire escape leading up to an office level, as their research had indicated.
He felt like death, he didn’t like the fire of the meth coursing through his system, and he knew sometime soon he was going to crash.
But he was doing his duty, working for Jimmy and Joe and everything he stood for in this town, and he was content with his own head now and would keep going.
If London survived, he could just about glimpse a future for himself.
He’d called Joe and shut down all his fearful questions, and reassured him he was okay and then said he had to go.
He couldn’t help but look behind him to where the unmarked van containing the Armed Response Unit was sitting ready.

He made sure nobody was about and tried to steady his breathing, but failed.
He got out the London Olympics branded water carrier with a picture of that weird cartoon alien on it dressed as a copper and, his hands still shaking, started sprinkling its contents around the frame of the door.
The water he was dosing the door with was from the underground river Neckinger, which met the Thames at a point where criminals were hung.
Ross would be doing the same thing to the front door at the same moment.
He finished with the lower door and headed for the fire escape, aiming to climb it as quietly as he could, aware that his limbs were shaking.

*   *   *

Ross entered the store and went to the counter.
She managed what she knew wasn’t quite a smile at the young woman serving there.
She managed to stop her teeth chattering.
‘I would like to make a complaint,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.
What’s the nature of your complaint?’
The assistant was genuinely eager to please.
They must get a lot of mad shit in here.

Ross lifted the cage she’d brought in onto the counter.
‘It’s about this.’
She pulled off the cloth covering it and revealed the stuffed bird therein.
It had been the weirdest London-related thing they could find in the dusty corners of the Hill’s evidence room in the early hours, though it didn’t actually have anything of the Sight about it.

‘Is that … a crow?’

‘A crow!’
Ross was following through on an agreed-upon script, not feeling it herself.
But what she did have flowing through her veins was the feeling that she was onstage and wowing the crowd.
It didn’t make her happy, although it clearly should, and that disconnect was yelling at her continually, but it was certainly keeping her awake.
She thought she probably looked and sounded more like a homeless person than anything else.
‘This, young fellow-me-lad, is a raven.
One that has recently departed the Tower of London.
Much as it has departed this mortal coil.’
She glanced across the shop and saw that other assistants were already looking over, taking an interest, amused.
She wished she could feel the same.
If it had been Jimmy doing this, he’d have enjoyed it, part of the great Met tradition of taking the piss.
The assistants were probably getting overtime pay to come in today, with the strike about to break; besides, this place was most likely something like a home to them, somewhere they’d run to rather than away from.
Again, she wished she was part of such a community.
They’d be up for a bit of light relief.