London Falling

FOURTEEN

The crowd rose from their seats amid a vast, jeering roar, Irons fans surging towards the lines of the Stoke fans, as if it was their fault that McGuire had scored. He was immediately substituted, and ran for the tunnel to the away changing rooms as abuse and objects were hurled at him. The uniforms and stewards rushed forward, to get between them, and just about managed to keep them apart. The fans fell back like an ebb tide, bellowing at each other across the lines.

‘Come on,’ Quill shouted, and led his team running for the steps.

Quill burst in through the door of the away changing room, a bunch of uniforms with him and his team, having shoved their way past all the idiots that tried to get in the way. The enormous noise of the jeering echoed all around them. It didn’t seem to be just one opinion of what had happened, but many, all interfering with each other like waves crashing around the stadium. Physios and assistants and players came towards them, all yelling in different languages. ‘Change of bloody plan!’ Quill yelled. ‘Get your trousers on, Linus. You’re going on a long journey.’

And there he was, the player himself, with a grim look on his face, already buttoning his shiny suit. ‘I don’t know. . Nobody’s said. .’

‘That’s what we’re here for. Let’s be having you.’ Quill grabbed hold of the man and hauled him to the door, just as Finch, the Stoke City chairman, arrived to get in the way.

‘Now, hold on. We offered you our complete cooperation but-’

‘Brilliant. Try to keep up.’ And they were off and out of there.

Quill spoke quickly into his Airwave radio, as Finch tried to argue in his ear, Costain having to actually grab the star player away from the trailing mass of people who followed them. He could hear Ross behind him, keeping Lofthouse in the loop on her mobile. With the uniforms kept so busy on crowd control, the original plan was shot, and there was no chance of keeping McGuire safe on the team coach. Their only chance now was speed and surprise.

They came out into the fading light at the players’ entrance to the stadium, just as two cars pulled up. They were CID unmarked cars, driven by DCs from the local main office who’d been handy when Quill had started yelling. They’d have to do. Outside the gates, Quill could see the media forming up on the pavements. He found a CID officer, threw a towel over his head, and got the uniforms to form a cordon as the man was bundled over to the first car and shoved in the back. ‘Fast as you can, go visit lovely Swindon,’ he told the driver, then thumped the roof and stepped back. The car headed off out through the enormous gates, the media moving in but then giving way in the face of a blaring of the horn. Costain meanwhile held McGuire back in the tunnel, out of sight.

‘She might buy it,’ said Ross, ‘if she keeps herself separate from the world, hiding away in that room of hers.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

Finch was looking increasingly worried at seeing all these precautions. A growing phalanx of people was gathering around McGuire, looking as if they might lure him away at any moment — agents, trainers, who knew what. ‘Detective Inspector,’ the chairman began, ‘come on, surely there’s no need for-’

‘Shut it,’ said Quill. He pointed at McGuire and gestured for him to come over. ‘This isn’t down to any of that lot. This is just down to you. You want to do all you can to help us catch a child killer?’

‘Absolutely.’ He meant it too. He had a serious look about him, this boy.

‘Then come with me.’ Quill had the uniforms hold everyone else back, as his group led the footballer away from further protests.

They pulled the car into line with a couple of police vans from the regular match turn-out, and walked McGuire out to it, wearing a police uniform, the cap pulled well down over his head. Quill looked at the alert young face of the driver, and realized just how much danger he was going to ask him to walk into, without this officer having been adequately briefed. Or maybe he just felt a need to do this himself, to show that smiling bastard — that even if they’d had their roles reversed, even if the operation was falling apart, even if the tiny hope he’d provided his team with was going to be dashed — someone was still willing to take him on. He felt his hands shaking, and grabbed hold of the door to hide that. ‘Out you get, son, I’ll take it from here.’

Ross stepped forward as he was exchanging places with the officer. ‘This isn’t a good idea. What if she’s after you?’

‘Then she gets me.’ He slammed the door behind him, and nodded to Costain. ‘And then you’re in charge.’ Then he turned the car in six cramped points, and drove out of those gates in company with the two vans, past a media crush that didn’t register his passing. As soon as the traffic opened up, motivated by the fear of a witch on his tail, and with the confidence that the traffic cops would let him pass, Quill floored the accelerator.

He took the car up onto the North Circular, where he made a nuisance of himself in the winter dark, weaving in and out of the match-day traffic, yelling abuse and hitting the horn, his lights on full beam. A lot of it was bravado; a lot of it was him knowing they had nothing to feel sure of. She could either see him or she couldn’t, and only speed was on his side. Or maybe she didn’t have enough of whatever this power was to do it this time. Maybe her boss had set her a challenge too? Just get this bloke out of range of Losley’s power, to the point where if she came to visit him up north, it’d just be a little old lady arriving on his doorstep, without her soil all glowing with energy, and they’d have broken her, immediately showing her that she was not going to get to do what she’d always done. Then they would have won. He would have won. A victory over her, over this strange nothingness that seemed to have leaped out of the corners of his depression and exploded a hole in the middle of his life. Winning this now would make his team feel they could win the entire war, realizing that this was a war, not a nightmare, which would finally engulf them. That was the battle going on in his head, too, every moment since he’d acquired the Sight.

‘You’re taking this really seriously,’ said McGuire.

Quill liked his concern. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘a lot we can’t reveal.’

‘But you’re on top of it, right? You’re going to get her?’

‘Yeah.’ Quill said it determinedly, as if she herself could hear. For all he knew, she could, though he hoped not. ‘Meanwhile, I’m taking you up the M1. Once we get north of Watford, the local uniforms can get you back home to Stoke.’

‘Can I call my girlfriend?’

‘When we get there.’ Because who knew whether Losley could listen in to phone calls? In fact, who knew anything?

As he passed Brent Cross, all lit up on his right, Quill started to really deeply hope. He was in a modern city, his city, in a modern car and, once he just got past this interchange and hit the motorway, he would be up and out and past the M25 in fifteen minutes. And the M25 bloody well should be as far as Losley could use the power of London. His Airwave radio told him the decoy car was already past the M25, going west. He hadn’t lost any lives tonight, either. He glanced at McGuire in the mirror. He was young enough, just about, to be Quill’s own lad. He felt the ache of something missing there. Not that he had a kid, and why not? It suddenly felt terrible that he and Sarah had never gone for it. Between them, they’d have had a wonderful kid-

He realized that McGuire was suddenly staring ahead. ‘What’s that?!’

Quill looked back to the road. Something was shining in the dual carriageway in front of them. And, coming right at them faster than any car, right in his headlights, there was a figure-

He threw the car sideways. Too late.

She rushed through the front of the car. She didn’t break the vehicle as she passed through it. She was going fast and slow at the same time. She trailed lattices of gold and silver that struck sparks off the metal as she passed through it. She brought the stinking beauty of the executioner’s sword. Her hands danced in an intricate pattern. Quill had time to see her fingers pulling at the air, spinning more gold from it. Old books invaded his car, turning it inside out. She turned to look at him, as she moved past at eighty miles per hour, her head cocked to one side again.

‘Do you know how I do this?’ she said.

Quill didn’t answer. He was trying hard to move, desperately to put himself between her and the boy. But he was caught in a different sort of time, a slower sort. He was impotent. He was deeply, deeply a fool. His pride had now brought him and an innocent to slaughter. He was almost, horribly so, pleased for himself. To get to the end. He was anticipating the car crash that was about to happen to him, that was already happening to his body.

‘I make sacrifice to my lord of the pleasant face, that is how things work. Three more children went in the pot so I could do this. If you keep attempting to limit me, I will have to make more sacrifices. And therefore many children will die because of you. My lord of the pleasant face told me how this would be tonight. He appeared to me — in so rare a visit. He told me not to return to the football matches.’

Quill tried to say something. He wanted to yell at McGuire to get himself out of it.

But then time was gone again in a flash and McGuire’s body was hitting the roof of the car and hot darkness had burst up from the ground and a scream fell away into the depths. The boy exploded with blood. The liquid splattered onto the window, passing Quill. He had lost control dreamlike ages ago. And he wondered, at the last moment, why he hadn’t been taken too.

Losley vanished through the back of the car, her laugh staying as an echo that fluttered as the metal burst open around it.

The car spun back into complete time, hit the pile of soil that stood in the road, slewed across it, and ploughed into the crash barrier.

Costain got out of the marked car in which he’d been a passenger, Sefton and Ross walking quickly beside him. They showed their warrant cards and were allowed through the cordon. The dual carriageway had been shut down on the northbound side, and cars were backing up on the southbound, to get a look. It had started to sleet, the drops of ice in the air reflecting the bright lights. Ahead of them a spent pile of Losley’s soil shone dully.

‘He won’t move from there, sir,’ said a uniform. ‘He could. . I mean he’s. . not hurt, somehow.’

Forensics were already swarming around the car, with an ambulance standing uselessly nearby. The crashed vehicle had compacted, and the remains of McGuire were being picked out of a back-seat deceleration area where he would surely have been killed anyway. The windscreen had collapsed into daisy chains of cellular glass spreading out across the road, reflecting light in all directions, like Christmas. The front seats were crushed, airbags inflated. And impossibly, beside the car sat Quill in the cold and wet, with no expression on his face.

They helped him up. Costain let Quill push him away, starting to stumble away on his own. ‘I felt it hit,’ he said suddenly. ‘I knew I was going to die. But she didn’t let me. Because she wanted me to know about the children.’