The Severed Streets (6 page)

All in all, Sefton was glad to have put in such a productive day and, with the Portakabin getting stuffy, he was pleased when Quill sent everyone home.
Home was now a tiny flat above a shop in Walthamstow with, on good nights, a parking space outside.
Tonight he was lucky.
The flat was half the size of the place he’d used as an undercover.
It was like suddenly being a student again.
Joe, who lived in a bigger place, had started coming over and staying most nights, which neither of them had commented on, so that was probably okay.
Tonight he found Joe had just got in, using the key Sefton had had made for him two weeks ago, and was planning on heading straight out to the chippy.
‘Best news all day,’ Sefton said, after kissing him, and they headed off.

The streets of Walthamstow were full of people, loads of office workers coming out of the tube in shirtsleeves, jackets slung over their shoulder, women pulling their straps down to get some sun.
They looked as if they were deliberately trying to be relaxed, despite the smell of smoke always on the air, even out here.
But even the sunshine had felt sick this summer, never quite burning through the clouds, instead shafting through gaps in them.
It felt as if the whole summer was going to be dog days.
Or perhaps all that was just the perspective of the Sight.
It was impossible for Sefton to separate himself from it now.
Every day in the street he saw the same horrors the others did, startling adjuncts to reality.
‘The opposite of miracles,’ he’d called them when Joe had asked for a description.
There was a homeless person begging at the tube entrance as the two of them passed, an addict by the look of him, thin hair in patches, his head on his chest, filthy blankets around his legs.
He was newly arrived with the ‘austerity measures’.

‘So,’ said Joe, ‘what did you do at work today?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘I thought you told me everything.’

‘Everything about the … you know, the weird shit.
Nothing about operational stuff.’

‘Ah, so now there
is
operational stuff.’

‘Yeah.
Kind of big, actually.’

‘Oh.
Oh!
You mean like what everyone’s been talking about all day?’

Sefton sighed.
Why had he been so obvious?
‘And now
I’m
shagging a detective.’

Joe worked in PR for an academic publishing house and was now doing the job of what had been a whole department.
His
work stories were about dull professors who couldn’t be made interesting.

He lowered his voice.
‘I saw about the murder on telly and thought the same as everyone else is saying, that it had to be the driver—’

‘I can’t—’

‘—which means it must really be something only you lot can see, like, bloody hell, another witch or something, like maybe there’s one for every football club?
The witch of Woolwich Arsenal?
The witch of Wolves?
It can only be the alliterative ones.
Liverpool doesn’t have one.
Liverpool has a … lich.
Whatever one of those is.’

Sefton put a hand on his arm and actually stopped him.
‘Could we just get those chips?’

*   *   *

They sat on the low wall of the car park outside the chippy and breathed in the smell of frying.
The old woman in a hijab they always saw around here trod slowly past, selling the
Big Issue.
Sefton bought one.

‘How are your team getting on now?’

‘I can’t talk about the case.’

‘Which is why I’m asking about the people.’

‘I think there’s something up with Ross.’

‘Really?’
Joe followed the people Sefton talked about as if they were characters on TV, never having met them, and Sefton almost laughed at the interest in his voice.

‘Ever since she got into the Docklands documents, she’s kind of suddenly gone back to how she was: all curled up against the world.
Maybe it’s that she’s found something terrible and doesn’t want the rest of us to have to deal.
Maybe she’s waiting until she’s got all the details.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know.
I don’t even know if she and Costain are rubbing each other up the wrong way or…’

‘Just rubbing each other?’

‘I hope it’s that.
It’s weird when I get a feeling about a person now.
I’m trying to let myself be aware of the Sight all the time, to listen to something whispering in my ear, but, doing that, you start to wonder what’s the Sight and what’s just you.
If I’m not careful I’m going to start being like one of those toddlers that notices a bit of gum on the pavement and hasn’t seen that before, so he squats down and keeps looking at it until his mum goes, “Erm, no – big wide world, more important.”
The others want me to keep looking into the London occult shit, to be that specialist, and, you know, I like that responsibility, but they don’t really get that that kind of leads you away from being a police officer.
Crime stories: all about getting everything back to normal.
This stuff: there
is
no normal.’

‘Crime stories say the centre
can
hold; in reality, it’s going to fall apart any minute.
Maybe all this chaos lately is something to do with the sort of thing you lot investigate.’

‘Yeah, we’re all wondering about that: that maybe the shittiness of life right now is all down to the Smiler and how he’s “moved the goalposts” and changed London.
That’d be a comforting thought, eh?’

‘Only for you is that comforting.’
Joe, having finished his own, took one of Sefton’s chips.
‘I think the riots and protests would have happened anyway.
The protestors are the only people left who give a shit.
You just
expect
a sort of … self-serving hypocrisy from politicians now.
You’d be amazed what the guys in my office said about Spatley.
Nobody was like, “He deserved it,” but…’ He let the sentence fall away with a shrug.

Sefton let his gaze drift along the street full of people.
‘Bloody general public.
Even with London falling apart in the world they
can
see, all they talk about is the royal baby and
The X Factor
and all that shit—’

‘You
like The X Factor.
’

‘—while my lot are involved with … the secret of eternal life, making space out of nothing, extra “boroughs” that don’t seem to be in this universe.
You know what’d be really good?’

‘Go on.’

‘You remember when I caught that “ghost bus” and went … somewhere else, somewhere away from this world, and talked to … whatever that being was, that called himself Brutus and dressed like a Roman?’

‘You really told your workmates about this?’

‘I really did, but even when I did it sounded like something I’d dreamed or made up.
Anyway, just having met some sort of … big London being … that the others hadn’t, I felt like I’d started to get a handle on this stuff.
But as time goes on I’m starting to feel more and more that I
did
dream him.
It’s not as if he gave me much in the way of solid advice, a path I could follow.
He didn’t leave me with anything
certain,
with any mission in life.
And without that certainty, there’s this …
gap.
There’s all sorts of stuff I want to ask him about.
I’ve made an actual list, and today I added the silver goo to that list.’
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and then had to brush away the salt from his chips he’d deposited there.
‘Sometimes I feel like he might just show up, that I might sit down on a park bench and there he’d be.
And then there are times when I
know
he isn’t real.
You can sort of feel something like him in the air, sometimes.’
He was very aware of Joe’s arched eyebrow.
‘You can.
That’s a proper Sighted feeling.
That seemed to be getting easier as summer came on, but now…’

‘When Ross got her Tarot cards read, she was promised “hope in summer”, wasn’t she, and “in autumn” too, just those sentences?
And it had something to do with that card called “The Sacrifice of Tyburn Tree” which you all thought was about her dad—’

‘You remember all the details, don’t you?
You’re such a fanboy of us lot.
Just don’t go on the internet with this stuff.’

‘I’m saying, maybe good stuff is about to happen.
Maybe you’ll find Brutus.’

Sefton sighed, had to look away from that smile.
‘But it’s summer
now,
and it’s just this … burdened heat.’

‘Is there anything you can do to, you know, summon him or something?’

‘Nothing in any of the books I’ve found.
He’s
not in the books.
If I can’t find him, I need to find … something.’
Sefton suddenly felt the need to get rid of all this shit.
‘Fuck it, I need a pint.
And you’re not going to let me go on about the Hogwarts stuff any more tonight.
Deal?’

‘No,’ said Joe, smiling at him.

*   *   *

As always, Lisa Ross was awake into the early hours.
Hers was one of many lights still on in her Catford housing block.
There were people who kept a light on at all hours, no matter what the bills were, as if that offered some protection against the shrieks of the urban foxes and the drunken yelling outside.
She barely registered that stuff.
She would get the three hours’ sleep she found necessary sometime around 3 a.m.

Tonight, like every night, she was about her secret work.
She was sure that the others thought she was nobly sacrificing her spare time to make a database of the documents they’d found in the Docklands ruins.
She had let them think that.
It was safer.
Quill had stars in his eyes about her, about her having saved his daughter.
She was letting him and the rest of the team down so badly.

But she had no choice.
After the ruins had been looted for so long, there hadn’t been much of interest left, so she wasn’t actually keeping the team from anything that could help them.
She wasn’t telling them the whole truth either.
The document she spent all her time on now was about her own needs.
It had probably been spared the scavenging that had emptied that building because it was written in an indecipherable language in a hand that didn’t invite study.
That obscurity had spoken to her of something being deliberately hidden.
She had found something like the script on a visit to the British Library archives.
It turned out that it had been noted on only one tomb in Iran, but the inscriptions on that tomb had been written in several other languages also.
So there was, it had turned out, printed only in one issue of one archaeological journal, and still not available online, a working alphabet for the document she had before her.
It hadn’t taken her long to translate the document, and thus understand what she was looking at.
The document was a description of an object that had arrived in Britain in the last five years, just before the destruction of the Docklands site, in fact.
Now she was looking on her laptop at a series of objects that might prove to be that thing.
She had been doing this for the last week of long nights.
She was on the fiftieth page of the third such catalogue site she had visited, and she was still absolutely certain, because she made herself stay awake and alert at every page load, that she hadn’t yet seen the object she was after.
She was starting to wonder if the tomb in question really had, as the document alleged, been empty.
If there really was an object that would do what the document said it did.

There was a noise from beside her.
A text message.
She was startled to see it was from Costain.
He was wondering if she ‘had five minutes’.

What?
At this time in the morning?
He’d never texted her before.
He was probably drunk.
Or was this meaningful?
Was this the start of the sort of activity on his part that she’d told herself to watch out for?
Whatever.
She put the phone back down without replying.

Costain was the one from whom she especially needed to keep this work secret.

*   *   *

Quill was once again hauled awake by the sound of his phone.
His dreams had been full of something reaching towards him, reaching into him.
But he couldn’t remember it now.
Jessica, unwoken by the sound of the phone, was lying across his head.

‘Would you please answer that,’ said Sarah, ‘and tell them to –’ she looked at her daughter and gritted her teeth – ‘go away?’

Quill saw that the call was again from Ross, and said so.

‘Getting over her now,’ said Sarah.

He picked it up.
After listening for a few moments, he quickly got out of bed and started getting dressed.

‘What?’
moaned Sarah.

‘Another one.
It’s police.’

*   *   *

The slightly portly middle-aged man lay across the sofa.
He was still dressed in a blue towelling robe, the now-familiar silver fluid splattered across him and all over the room.
The robe was open, and so was he.
A livid red trail led from what remained of his abdomen, across the polished wooden floor, and finished in an explosion of blood against the far wall, next to a Jack Vettriano.
The expression on the victim’s face was an almost comical extreme of horror and incredulity.
His eyes were open, glassy.

Quill’s team stood in the doorway, feeling – if Quill himself was anything to go by – like anything but an elite unit at this hour of the morning.
Forensics had just finished with the crime scene and were packing up.
Uniforms were filling just about every available inch of the building.

What they were staring at was enormous.
Bigger, even, than the death of a cabinet minister.

‘Sir Geoffrey Staunce, KCBE, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Ross, keeping her voice low as a uniform made her way past.

‘They got him,’ said Quill.
‘That’s what the papers are going to say tomorrow.
With a strike looming, the protestors killed London’s most senior copper at his home in Piccadilly.’

‘There were indeed Toffs in the area last night, making a nuisance of themselves,’ said Ross, looking up from the report she’d been given on entering.
‘For this sort of address that’s pretty incredible.’

‘The connection is also the locked room and the MO,’ said Quill.