London Falling

TWELVE

‘Just nobody ask which of us is missing a brain. Operational objectives.’ Quill began writing them down on the right-hand side of the Ops Board:

1. Ensure the safety of the public.

2. Gather evidence of offences.

3. Find subject Mora Losley.

4. Find means to arrest subject.

5. Arrest subject.

6. Forcibly negotiate removal of the Sight.

7. Bring to trial/destroy.

It took Quill a moment to add that last word, Sefton realized. But they all nodded when they saw it. ‘Yeah,’ he concurred.

Quill shrugged. ‘We don’t want to turn this into some sort of witch hunt.’ Which was the point at which Sefton understood what the man had done. He’d turned their personal nightmare into something approaching business as usual. It wasn’t bloody sustainable, but it at least gave them solid ground to put their feet on. The blankets had been left behind, hanging on the backs of their chairs. It was now starting to get light outside the Portakabin.

‘I’m going to put in requests for bill records from. . sod it, all the thirty-three boroughs, going back. . well, as far as they go, which’ll only be ten years or so, but it’s a start,’ declared Ross, going to the computer. ‘There’ll be a pile of them, but if her alterations, her edits, stand out that clearly, just skimming them will do.’

‘It’ll take weeks of grunt work and potentially lead nowhere,’ said Quill. ‘Excellent: that sounds like police work to me. Anyone got anything else?’

Sefton found one of the new police pocket books he’d been given when he’d suddenly stopped being a UC, and leafed quickly through it. There wasn’t much there that related to anything that was true — not now they knew what the truth was. He put it aside, went to the cupboard and found four plain notepads. ‘Special pocket books,’ he said. ‘Not as issued by the IBO. For our sort of stuff. Like Ross here has always used for her speciality. Maybe one day a court will be prepared to believe us. We can’t put this stuff in the regular pocket books, but we’ll need to remember things.’

‘And now paperwork’, Quill nodded. ‘I’m feeling more at home all the time.’

Sefton felt weird at doing so much speaking up now. His skills had been, up until now, basically hiding, pretending and observing. It must be the observing part of that which was giving him all these ideas. ‘Yeah, well, that’s what this is about: remembering. We have to. . remember better than she does. Starting with. .’ He grabbed a marker pen and a sheaf of paper, and started urgently writing out big headings. ‘Protocol.’ ‘The Sight.’ ‘Privileged.’ ‘Make Sacrifice.’ ‘Remembered.’ He held up those last two. ‘That’s an either/or,’ he explained, his brain moving so fast that he just hoped he was making sense. ‘She asked us if we “made sacrifice” or if we were “remembered”.’ He put them up as headings down the left-hand side of the Ops Board. ‘And. . this is a new area on the board, where the concepts go.’ He stared at it for a moment. He’d just created a new area on an Ops Board. An innovation in policing, just like that. It was only a matter of time before someone stopped him from doing stuff like this.

‘So what does “remembered” actually mean?’ asked Quill. ‘How is that the other choice, instead of just making sacrifice?’

‘Maybe that’s what I felt about the difference between stuff that’s sort of. . grown. . like Jack the green man was, and. . made, like Losley’s stuff is.’

‘So long as we don’t properly know things like that, we’re going to be living on assumptions,’ said Ross, looking up from the computer. ‘We need to get used to that, using working assumptions but bearing in mind that they are just that.’

‘And feelings as well as assumptions,’ said Sefton. ‘Copper instinct. Like when the guv. .’ he hesitated, but then had to say it anyway, ‘. . got his cock out.’

‘If you write that down,’ insisted Quill, ‘do make the context clear. How do we limit what we record? Ghost ships, Harry’s dad, your Jack creature. . it’s like claiming every crime in London is relevant to a murder case.’

‘If we didn’t know what murder was,’ said Ross, ‘they would be.’ She came over and looked at Sefton’s new side of the board with an expert eye. ‘Everything we see with the Sight is part of. . a hidden culture of London. Like an OCN could be divided into chop shops, robberies, toms and drugs, and each of those have their own subculture involving loads of signifiers and definitions that interact with each other. But it’s all still the one thing, and quite often we encounter a small part of it and, given time, pull at that one thread to find a way to nick the whole thing. There are new factors appearing in normal police work all the time: new security behaviours, tech use, drugs. But maybe this special culture is a bit easier because, unlike with organized crime, there might be only two ways for someone to get into this business. .’ She pointed at Sefton’s signs. ‘I mean sacrifice or be remembered. We have some idea what one of those involves: from seeing the kids in the cauldron.’ She now linked those pieces of paper with white thread. ‘We need to find out what this other concept means.’

‘“Protocol”, that’s the word that applied to us,’ said Costain, pointing at the other sign. ‘That’s the important one for us lot. She mentioned it as if it wasn’t something she was used to, either.’

‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘I noticed that, too. So that’s someone else’s technical term, not one she’d use normally herself.’

‘It’s called “a Protocol”, and we “had it on us”, as if it’s something physical — that’s what she said — and it “reacted with the soil”.’

‘But of the four of us in that attic, only I touched that soil,’ said Quill. ‘This must involve some sort of area effect, like a hand grenade going off.’

‘Whatever, that’s how she thinks we got the Sight, why we’re seeing all this shit. So what is it?’

Nobody had any answers to that one. ‘We need to use these new eyes of ours,’ said Ross, ‘and check out the evidence again.’

‘Well,’ said Quill, ‘there’s one piece for which we can do that immediately.’

They stood at the fence at the back of Gipsy Hill police station. Sefton could now see the mound of soil shining from here. ‘If we touched that,’ said Quill, ‘would it give us more of the Sight, or would it maybe switch it off?’

‘Neither,’ said Sefton, to himself. He looked up when he realized the others were wondering why he sounded so certain. ‘She left it there. It’s not precious any more, so it must be kind of. . used up.’ Quill popped inside the fence to take a quick look. It took a few moments for it to dawn on Sefton that he wasn’t worried, standing here, that the uniforms might get a look at him. The possibility that any remnants of the Toshack organization might learn his identity was nowhere near as threatening as what he now knew lay under reality itself. ‘It’s better in the day,’ he said, ‘don’t you reckon?’

Costain glanced across to London. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

Quill returned to tell them that this mound of soil, when seen with the Sight, looked like a pale reflection of the pile they’d seen inside the house, before Quill had pissed on it. ‘And, yeah, I touched it, but no joy to be had.’

‘I don’t think it’s a symbol of anything,’ said Ross, ‘not like we thought. These things are invisible to most people. When that soil got pissed on, suspect wasn’t psychologically traumatized, but she got so worried she actually legged it! No, this is practical. A system we don’t know much about, but still a system. I think, for some reason, she needs the West Ham soil. She told us she needs to keep it clean, and I don’t think that’s a psychological tic on her part, either. I think she needs to bring it with her when she’s killing, to put it in that heap, in that pattern, otherwise she just wouldn’t do that.’

‘“I have more soil,” that’s what she said,’ recalled Costain, ‘as if it was valuable to her. As if it’s her stash. Maybe that’s why she’s got so many houses.’

‘Like with a heroin-distribution network,’ said Ross, ‘you don’t keep all the eggs in the same basket.’

‘We know Toshack tried to find her at her main home first, on his own. Then he went round all her other houses, her safe houses. He went up into every loft, maybe because he was checking to see if she’d left some soil there, which would mean she still used the place.’

‘While he was getting the rest of us to make as much noise as possible downstairs,’ said Sefton, suddenly sounding shocked again.

‘The fucker was using us as bait! He was trying to make her come out and grab us! We were to be his sacrifices, like he said in that note!’

‘He tried to do that again when the raid went down,’ said Quill, ‘calling her a sow and all.’

‘Why West Ham soil?’ said Ross. ‘Just ’cos she’s a fan?’

Nobody had an answer to that either. Quill called the nicks in all the areas where the other Losley houses were located. They’d already been sealed off by Goodfellow, but now he asked to hear from them about what had been found in their lofts.

‘Get them to piss on it, too,’ suggested Costain.

Quill declined that recommendation. He swiftly heard that largely empty tubs had been found in all the houses, with just a layer of local soil left at the bottom. ‘Right you are: she hauled in her stash.’

Quill felt the new energy of his team, and liked it. But now they needed to do something positive with it rapidly. They needed an aim to work towards, or all this new hope was going to fall apart again. They went back into the Portakabin. There had been a lot of emails forwarded to them concerning possible Losley sightings by members of the public but, given that she could make herself invisible, Quill had the team give them only a quick once-over, and they found nothing that caught their eyes. He got copies of the Goodfellow files emailed over, but he was deeply familiar with their contents, and there was nothing that leaped out at him now that he had this new way of seeing. ‘She said she met Toshack at the football. .’ he reminded them.

Ross found on the PC the list of season-ticket holders in seats close to Losley that West Ham had sent over to Quill. ‘I was going to get to this today,’ she said. She ran her finger down the list of names. Then stopped at a particular one. The seat next to Losley’s was occupied by one Robert Toshack.

‘Get in,’ said Quill triumphantly.

He found the disc with the CCTV tape on it and played it again. That familiar corner of the building, and that flower bed. One moment there was nothing there, and then there was Losley, who’d literally appeared out of thin air. Quill again found himself startled, fearful even at the sight of a moving image of her. ‘It works through video as well as still photos,’ he said, with a cough to conceal his reaction. On screen, Losley took a small bag from her pocket, and poured the contents out on the ground, tracing a spiral with her hand, the other turning in the air. A pile of soil far too large to be contained in the bag was deposited there, arranged in the familiar pattern, shining with power.

‘Maybe it’s like wi-fi,’ said Ross, ‘she can only operate so far from a base station.’

‘Why do it out there?’ said Sefton. ‘Why not just arrive in the interview room itself?’

Quill clapped his hands together in realization. ‘Because she needs to put soil on soil! To put her earth on top of what was there before. Like with those containers in her houses.’

They watched as Losley walked directly towards Gipsy Hill police station and straight through the wall, moving her hands before her as if she was performing an intricate dance. ‘Those gestures, all the time,’ observed Sefton. ‘That’s not habit, that’s meaningful. That’s how she does what she does, using words and gestures as weapons.’

Quill liked how much he was speaking up now. And now he had a sudden idea himself. He called up the nick, then headed over there to pick up a much less controversial CCTV camera recording. He played that back in front of his team, and they all saw the next part of the action: Losley in the interview room, sending Toshack flying up to the roof; Quill looking on awkwardly, his expression and body language saying he was trying to look in all directions at once; the expression on the brief’s face also saying that he didn’t quite know what he was looking at.

‘It’s as if we scratched the lottery card of reality,’ he said, ‘and this is what was bloody underneath. Not a big win, really.’

‘The eighteen per cent!’ said Ross suddenly.

‘What?’ said Quill.

‘The eighteen per cent of the other cases, the hat-trick scorers over the years who we thought probably died of natural causes. .’ Ross went to the computer and busied herself for half an hour, then gathered them round a display on the screen. ‘They’re almost all from teams outside London. So sometimes she’d get them when they came back to town, sometimes she’d forget or give up, sometimes they never came back at all. But she never followed them home!’

‘That means she’s got an operational range,’ said Sefton. ‘Soil in her pockets will only take her so far. Only London provides power. And she only has power inside London.’

‘Fuck,’ said Ross, ‘that’s why Toshack didn’t send her after me. I was up north.’ She added a note to that effect to the board, under Losley’s name.

They mulled that over for a few moments.

‘I’ll see if she’s caught on camera anywhere else inside the nick,’ said Quill. ‘Though I don’t know if we’ll learn anything more from it. Meanwhile. .’ he turned to the others and realized that, with two UCs and an analyst, he had no sensible way of picking who should do the legwork. ‘Toss a coin for who calls up West Ham again. See if they have a list of people who they sold their soil to. Then tell them to stop.’

They actually did the coin toss, and it turned out to be Costain whose job it was to cajole and intimidate the West Ham hierarchy. Quill listened to him doing it, impressed but also a bit freaked out. There was something in the man’s voice that sounded as if it was his first day on the job now, too eager to impress. He felt that Losley had already taken a piece out of one of his team by making Costain behave like that. The football club turned out only to have a mailing list of people who’d bought soil over the internet. Getting that sent over was no problem, and indeed it arrived by immediate email. But they were selling a lot of soil right now, because they were in the process of moving to their new home, and every fan wanted a piece of the old Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, and those in charge couldn’t see any reason why the police would want them to cease trading. All Costain could say was, ‘it’s an operational matter.’

When Quill waved to him to give the phone over to him and have a superior officer yell at them, Costain held up a hand and went into overdrive. ‘You know what you get when you Google “West Ham” now? Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer. . oh, look, there’s also some news about your FA Cup run, there on the third page. Only saving grace is, you’re helping to catch this killer by cooperating so fully. Yeah, I will speak to your chairman, that’d be nice.’ When he eventually put down the phone, job done, Quill slapped him on the back.

Costain nodded solemnly. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

That afternoon, Quill led his small team into Gipsy Hill, causing a raised eyebrow from the station reception officer on shift when she saw Costain and Sefton. Everyone would now be gossiping, Quill knew, about the huge pay-off from what had originally looked like a weird and intimidating spin-off. And everyone would be wondering why they themselves hadn’t been considered good enough or straight enough to go after the real juice behind the Toshack organization. Seeing the four of them march in right now, including the UCs, half of the operational team would assume they were here to nick someone, and the other half that just showing them those two UCs was some sort of demonstration of trust.

Plus, of course, Quill’s lot hadn’t slept and they all looked like tramps.

Nods and smiles of appreciation greeted Quill when he entered the Ops Room, but he could feel the dutiful nature of it, the fear and irony at the edge of it. Goodfellow was busy to overflowing with paperwork and personnel, but it was all post-raid stuff eclipsed now by his serial killer. Quill felt glad to be back in his real world. Except here came Harry, with his dad beside him. Quill looked over his shoulder and saw the other three checking out this new vision. Well, at least nobody else in the nick seemed to be carting dead relatives around with them.

Harry held out his wrists. ‘It’s a fair cop, Jimmy.’

‘Don’t kow-tow to him,’ said his dad. ‘You little shit, you’re worth ten of him.’

Quill wished desperately that he could talk to Harry alone. That they could go for a pint again, be proper mates again. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘come on now-’

‘What,’ said Harry, suddenly serious, ‘you’re not really here for me, are you?’

‘Don’t be fucking scared of him! What sort of a friend is he, to lord it over you?! He’s just a pretend copper, an actor playing a part!’

Quill clapped his hands together to get the room’s attention. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘you lot, listen. I came over from my Siberian exile to say that Operation Toto has found conclusive proof of what I always suspected: there isn’t and never has been a security leak in Operation Goodfellow. More than that I can’t tell you, only that. . I never bloody believed it, okay? I never sat there looking down at you lot, thinking any single one of you, Harry here included, were anything but the best bloody coppers in the world, all right? And to be put at this distance from you like that. .’ He found he had a catch in his throat, and let it stop him. To his amazement, Harry came over and put a hand on his shoulder, which made his dad scowl. And the applause slowly started up again from the whole room. Only this time it was genuine.

Quill raised a hand in acknowledgement, then clapped an arm around Harry’s shoulder, and hauled him away from his dad. ‘And, erm, also we popped over ’cos we’re after the keys to the evidence room. And any chance of a cup of sugar?’ Behind him, he saw Sefton putting his hand right through Harry’s dad, and getting a glare in return.

‘Jimmy, mate,’ said Harry, ‘I’ll open it up for you myself.’ Quill followed him through the door, looking over his shoulder to where the other three were all backing out of the room quickly, embarrassed by and not used to dealing with the appreciation of their comrades. He was glad they’d got to see that, though.

Ross had hoped that the door of the evidence room would be heaved open to reveal a glittering mass of objects: like the contents of that locked study in the Toshack house that she’d had such expectations of, but that had contained no juice at all when the UCs had searched it. She’d hoped that this look back into Goodfellow would be more fruitful than Quill’s examination of the operation’s files. But at first glance that was not to be. The shelves contained rows of tagged evidence, and a pile of Toshack’s favourite cardboard boxes at the back, but nothing at all leaped out. Their Sight counted for nothing here. She’d delivered some brave words about Losley, but it was now slowly sinking in that her revenge was still going to count for nothing. More than that, something worse had taken Toshack’s place, and she hadn’t prepared herself for it, hadn’t focused herself in the right way. The death of her father was now sidelined. It felt horribly selfish to make the pursuit of Losley all about her own teenage injuries. But what else could give her the stimulus she needed to get through this?

‘So we look through it all again,’ announced Quill. ‘We untag, process, seal and record.’

‘I’ll give you a hand if you like,’ said Harry. ‘Be good for me to catch up.’

So they worked their way through all the stuff.

‘Why,’ said Sefton, ‘did this bloke keep eighty-three stationery boxes with nothing in them?’ He glanced over to where Harry was busy opening boxes, Quill being forced to look over his shoulder continually, because Harry wouldn’t be able to see what they were looking for. Harry’s dad kept berating him, both of them getting increasingly worked up.

‘There was nothing like this when my dad was in charge of the gang,’ remarked Ross. She was starting to feel the effects of fatigue, seeing things out of the corner of her eye which scared her awake again, but which weren’t real, just memories, the symptoms of sleep trying to force its way into her.

‘He kept his local branch of Staples busy,’ said Sefton. ‘That’d be good for his epitaph.’

‘Though it does fail,’ observed Ross, ‘to tell the whole story.’

‘Listen to you, with the copper jokes.’

‘Why is he looking over your shoulder?’ Harry’s father prodded. ‘Look at him, he’d much rather have just his new friends here. He doesn’t trust you. You’re not quite the thing, are you? Not any more.’

‘You may have wondered why I’m looking over your shoulder,’ said Quill to Harry. ‘It’s ’cos I’m looking for a particular piece of evidence, and you wouldn’t recognize what you were looking at.’

‘What is it, exactly?’

‘Can’t tell you. Due to the usual operational bollocks. But — tell you what — you find anything unusual,’ he looked meaningfully towards Harry’s dad, ‘and it’ll be pay dirt. Then I’ll use it to try and get you recruited for Toto. And how often do you get to use that sentence?’

Harry nodded appreciatively, and took another box down from the shelf.

Quill waited for a moment to see if Harry’s dad was going to react to anything, then, when he didn’t, wandered over to the others, glancing back to see the ghost looking at him angrily. ‘He’s a bit one-note,’ he remarked quietly. ‘I was hoping, ’cos he was his dad, he’d want to help Harry a bit and so he’d whizz about like a genie and find what we’re looking for. But he’s all about delivering the abuse.’ He sighed. ‘I can be a bit of a bastard, you may have noticed.’

Quill felt the energy draining from his team as it became clear they weren’t going to find anything new. He said a fond goodbye to Harry, glowered at his dad, and forced on himself another burst of enthusiasm. He drove them out to the Toshack house, so they could keep talking in the car, and, apart from a couple of near misses, found that nothing of the Sight jumped out to stop him from driving safely. Maybe, he said, the wonders were still concealed in the place itself. But the house, emptied for purposes of evidence, was completely normal. Even that regularly locked office the UCs had had such high hopes of turned out to be utterly mundane. As night came on, they returned to the Hill and the Portakabin, and managed, slumped together, to watch CCTV footage from the nick that merely showed Losley, as expected, impossibly approaching and walking through the wall of the interview room. All that they’d recently added to the board was a list of notes in the Concepts section, beneath a new heading about ‘Soil’.

‘I think we’ve worked off a bit of that original shock,’ said Quill, ‘so you’ll be ready for what comes next.’ They all looked up at him at once, those defeated faces again expectant. ‘We know where she’s going to be. She might have only one bolt-hole left to run to. And we know she’s got a limited fuel supply. She’s a big monster, but so’s the Met. Normal police methods have got us a long way, so let’s use them to see how much of her is merely front. Go home and get some kip, because tomorrow we’re going to nick her.’

‘You look terrible,’ said Lofthouse. ‘Will a drop of gin help with that?’

Quill waved that suggestion aside, settling heavily into the comfort of the chair facing her desk. ‘It’s only ten o’clock at night, so a bit early for me.’ He noticed that she wasn’t wearing her charm bracelet, and then felt a little uncomfortable about noticing it.

‘Bit of a blip in the media coverage last night. They went away again through lack of fresh material, thank God. What’s this about a broken window and a hoo-hah at the crime scene?’

Quill didn’t want to lie to her. ‘Just. . one of those things,’ he replied.

‘Have you got everything you need for tomorrow?’

‘Yeah, I think so. Ta for getting that sorted so fast.’

‘A lot of it involved persuading Brian Finch, the Stoke City chairman, that his players might have anything to fear from a mad old woman — even one who poisons people.’

Quill suddenly thought of something. Did the bemusement they’d all felt at the super putting this incredibly weird team together mean she knew something extra about this situation he’d found himself in? ‘Does. . the word “protocol” mean anything to you, ma’am?’

‘Are you saying that operational protocol is getting in the way of-?’

Quill shook his head, dismissing it. ‘Thanks for all you’ve done, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope it pays off tomorrow.’