The Severed Streets (49 page)

Quill supposed that bloody Mora Losley would be somewhere in this lot as well, and Rob Toshack and Harry and Harry’s dad and a bunch of others who might bear him a grudge, but he wasn’t planning on trying to find them.

*   *   *

Quill walked to where he thought Bermondsey should be, and asked around for Ross’ dad, Alfred Toshack.
He was directed to a small park, where he found an enormous tree that grew to a tremendous height above all those around it.
Putting a hand to his eyes to shield them from the dull glare of the sky, Quill looked up into its highest branches and found a noose there.
But there was nobody hanging from it.
Alfred had, according to the passersby Quill stopped and asked, been ‘sent to the Tower’.

Quill went to the Tower of London, but his authority wasn’t enough to get him in.
Walking away from it, though, he had an idea.
According to Ross, Alfred Toshack had been able to see every detail of what was going on in the everyday world from his vantage point in Hell.
It was part of his punishment.
If Quill could find somewhere high enough that he could access – in his condition he didn’t fancy trying to climb that tree – perhaps he could duplicate that.
Perhaps he could find out, from Hell, things he wanted to know about the real world.

*   *   *

He was told the centre of London was where, in the modern version, the Centre Point building would be.
He went to see what was there, and Hell anticipated that, enjoyed it.
He wondered if it would be a tall building.

He felt the shadow a long time before he saw, over the buildings, what was making it.
At the centre of Hell’s London stood an enormous statue of the Smiling Man.
There was an entrance at its base.
Like the Statue of Liberty, it seemed, one could walk up inside it and, yes, he saw movement behind them, look through the eyes.

He discovered, when he got to the entrance, that to do so would cost him.
Of course it would.
But he needed to do this, so he paid.
Hell had known that he would.

He climbed the stairs inside the statue, which took all his energy, emphasizing each of his pains – of course it did.

He reached the top and looked out of one of the eyes.
Beside him, helpless, sobbing newcomers were doing the same from the other.
They had come here, like him, in a vain search for hope.

Quill looked out over Hell’s London.
There it was: not just this outer borough beneath him, but, at an angle to the horizon, the real London.
He was looking down on it.
London in summer, a blissful aerial view that made Quill feel an agony of wanting and loss.
He could see it in several different ways, he realized.
There was the physical city, there was a sort of contour map of rushing energies, and there was … as if it had been built there, a great wheel, the structure of which was threaded through everything, that cut across everything.
The wheel was made of ideas made by people, or imposed on them.
It had gone wrong, he saw: it was moving the wrong way.
Right now, there was nothing he could do about that, so eventually he looked elsewhere.

He could
see
Jason Forrest’s limited point of view, the history of the historical Jack the Ripper, the warring viewpoints of the occult community.
He could see whatever concepts he wanted to see.
He found himself automatically thinking about Sarah, and then suddenly he was looking at her, and he knew where she was on the map as he pulled his attention away from her.

Oh, oh, that was too painful.
If he stayed here he was going to have to do it again.
Again and again.
What could he look at that was more practical, that could give him a despairing hint of his duty again?
He looked again at the back of his hand, at the phone number he’d written there and memorized through repetition.

He looked back to the real London to find all the places Russell Vincent might be.

TWENTY-SEVEN

EARLIER ON THE EVENING THAT QUILL RETURNED TO LIFE

Costain drove the van into the car park of St Gertrude’s Church in the part of Enfield known as World’s End and parked.
He composed himself for a moment.
Then he got out.

The facade of the church was bathed in spotlights on this still not very cold night.
They threw deep shadows across the porch.
As he approached the building, Costain saw a figure standing there, then stepping out to meet him.
It was a young woman in clerical dress, a worried look on her face.

‘Reverend Pierce?’

‘You must be Sergeant Costain.
Okay, let’s not waste any time.’
She sounded like an Oxbridge graduate, calm and professional.
She was somehow more modern than Costain had expected her to be.

‘I was surprised when I read you did this.’

‘I don’t like the fact that one
can
do this.
Very few people know.
Priests who apply to be the vicar of this parish are warned off it, and only if they persist are they told the nature of the geography here, and only if they then still persist are they trained to make use of it.
Turns out I’m rather pig-headed.
We’re told it’s for the health of London.
There used to be some sort of body overseeing it, but for some reason no one now seems to know how to contact them.
I’m quite interested to see whether it still works.’

‘Me too.’

She led him not inside the church, as he’d been expecting, but around it, to a side of the churchyard where there were no spotlights and the shadow of the building cut a straight line between light and absolute darkness.
There they stopped.
‘Here we are.’

‘Have you done this before?’

‘Twice.
My predecessor only did it once.
Demand seems to be on the increase.’

He showed her the Bridge of Spikes.
‘I thought this was unique, or at least just once a century.’

‘It might be.
I don’t know what it is.’
He quickly explained to her, and she raised an eyebrow.
‘In every previous case I’ve dealt with, and in all I’ve read, these are only
visits.
You think that this object offers … a permanent solution?’
She sounded not only dubious, but worried at the implications.

Costain found he was suddenly angry.
But not at her.
He could only hope he hadn’t sacrificed so much for something brief and terrible.
‘Whatever.
Come on.
Let’s do it.’

‘All right.’
She closed her eyes, said some prayers under her breath and made the sign of the cross.
‘If you know what to do with that thing, do it now.’

Costain took a deep breath.
He only had a feeling for what had to be done.
The sphere seemed to be telling him.
If he was to use it on himself, this is what he’d have had to do at any point before he died.
He supposed you could even do it way in advance.
He put the sphere in the palm of his left hand, and then, decisively, crushed it in his grasp.
For a moment, nothing happened, and then—

He stared in shock as he saw the spikes burst through his flesh.
It was as if his hand had turned into a golden sea urchin, every spike dripping with blood.

Then the obvious agony of that hit him, and he had to fall to his knees.
He grabbed his left wrist with his right hand, staring at it.
Blood was gushing around the spikes now, surely from some major artery!
He was panting.
The meth both amplified the shock and deadened it, let him see past it.
But … it was … only pain.
He somehow knew he hadn’t been horribly wounded, that the Bridge had prevented that.

He managed to open his hand … the Bridge had vanished.
He was sure, though, because it was telling him, that it had done its work.

The reverend was crouched beside him, he realized, looking desperately at him, wondering how she could help.
‘Do it!’
he bellowed.

‘It’s done,’ she said.
‘Can I get a dressing for—?’

‘Not until I know!’
Costain forced himself to look up from his own blood splattering onto the gravel of the church path.
He looked into the darkness.
He could see something moving there.

‘The Maori of New Zealand believe their dead leave a pohutukawa tree at Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island for a journey back to Polynesia – actually back to where they came from, historically,’ said the vicar, staring into the void as Costain was, now fascinated.
‘There’s a river in Japan which is also, physically, the border between this world and the next, so they say…’

Costain watched as the vague shape resolved itself into a figure.
He wasn’t sure now if the uncertainty about it was in the world or in his head.
He’d lost a lot of blood to get him to the point of being able to see this.
The figure wasn’t stumbling.
It was walking quite purposefully, marching, even.
It was familiar.

With a determined look on her face, Pierce went to the edge of the light and held out her hand.

*   *   *

Quill didn’t know if he could trust this.
He had found, standing in the head of that statue, that he was being forced to close his eyes, and when he’d opened them he was elsewhere, looking at a strange figure.
The ferryman was, depending on which side you saw him from, either a cloaked figure with skeletal hands or an Asian cabbie with tobacco stains on his fingers.
He was pushing the boat forward across the river of silver which warped under and around them, his staff of many wrapped dimensions made out of the pink flatness of the Hammersmith and City line as seen on a tube map.
Or he was driving across a bridge that didn’t exist, going north across the Thames, the road lined with a million spikes, the tarmac ahead red with blood that was flowing down to meet them.
‘I don’t normally go south of the river,’ he said.

*   *   *

Costain watched as the figure reached Pierce and grabbed her hand.
He willed its features into being those he wanted to see.
He hoped he had given enough.

*   *   *

James Quill woke up.
He was in darkness.
He was gasping for air.
He sucked in a great breath of it.
He didn’t know where he was.
He … okay, he knew who he was.
But there were gaps.
He was naked.
Was he…?
He panicked for a moment, his limbs shot out and hit the sides of a container all around him.
He cried out.
He found that his throat hurt desperately.
He bellowed again.
He made himself concentrate and reached out … the sides he was touching were made of metal.
He pulled back his legs as far as they could go, and slammed them forward again—

Suddenly, he was rushed forward, and was being hauled out into a light too blinding for him to see anything, amongst shouting people.
He tried to lash out, fell, howling, onto a freezing floor.
He was in a room.
More and more people were rushing into it and they looked as astonished as he felt.
He looked down at his body.
His familiar flesh startled him.
It was … as if he’d been gone from this house.
For so long.
There had been changes.
Swathes of new pink skin across his chest and abdomen, younger than his own, smooth.
Between his legs … new there too.
The people were asking him all sorts of questions.
They put water to his lips.

A morgue, he was in a morgue.

He took their hands and helped them haul him to his feet.
He knew something terrible … but that didn’t matter now.
Dear God, that didn’t matter now!
He grabbed the glass and threw back the water.
He moved his tongue, croaked and licked his lips until he was sure he could use this … unfamiliar … body again.
Until he was certain he could form words.
He knew exactly the words he wanted to form.

‘I know where Russell Vincent is,’ he said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Quill called Costain from the morgue, having had a vague memory of seeing him on what already felt like a dream of one side of that bridge he’d crossed.
Thankfully, the DS had been expecting the call and arrived an hour later in an unmarked van.
His left hand was bandaged, but only to the extent of a minor wound.
By then, Quill had been given some clothes by still-astonished morgue staff who had started to assume they must have made some enormous clerical error and were probably about to be sued.
Quill immediately told Costain not to call Sarah, having already talked to the morgue authorities on that subject.
He had no idea how he was going to tell her he was back, was desperately restraining his own urge to call her, to go immediately to see her, because he wanted somehow to moderate how big a shock that was going to be.

He looked at his hands.
He kept wanting to touch his body.
He expected to feel traumatized, but it was as if his time in Hell had been filed away by his brain as being something like a dream.
He felt abused on some distant, deeply internal level and was aware that this might come out and haunt him at some point.
But at least for now it was absent.

He asked about how he’d come back, what Costain had had to do with it.
Costain told him: about the relationship between himself and Ross, about the details of the auction that Ross hadn’t revealed, about him committing burglary to get the Bridge.
He unburdened himself of all the terrible shit that he hadn’t shared with his colleagues.
Quill had to sit down.
He couldn’t imagine how this was going to make Ross feel.
He felt angry on her behalf, and his own – actually infuriated at this man who’d just saved him from Hell.
Dear God, that was Costain all over.
‘Why did you choose me to bring back?’

‘Ross’ father coming back still wouldn’t make her happy.
She even told me that.’

‘Why not keep it for yourself?’

Costain looked annoyed at being questioned.
He looked as if he’d expected something more from Quill.
‘Because I want
all
of us to stay alive, and you’re our only chance to do that.
If the truth behind what you wrote in your notebook is as important as Sefton thinks it is—’

‘Well, I know who’s responsible for the Ripper murders.’

‘Russell Vincent?’

Quill laughed in pride at his team.
But the laugh turned into a painful cough and he had to drink some water.
He waved aside Costain’s questions about his physical state.
‘And I know where to find him.
And I’ve got a lead on Mary Arthur.’
Quill had looked at the back of his hand when he’d first understood that he had come back to life, and found nothing written there.
So he’d grabbed a piece of paper and swiftly written down Mary Arthur’s number, hoping that, having repeated it so many times to himself, he’d remembered it accurately.
Now he showed it to Costain.
‘Can you get me to Wapping?
I’m going to make a house call on Russell Vincent.
We can catch up on the way.’