London Falling

FIFTEEN

Dr Piara Singh Deb, DMJ, was a forensic pathologist working out of Lambeth, and he knew about coppers. He knew they reacted only slightly to the dead. That they rarely expressed anger at the perpetrators, whom they seemed to view as a sailor would view sharks. That their dark sense of humour concerning corpses always sought out new depths to plumb. And that, despite being so unlike how they were portrayed on television, they always expected him to have coffee and sandwiches handy.

Singh had never before been part of an investigation that had received such media attention. The free tabloid that had been thrust into his hand at the tube station this morning had carried that photo of Mora Losley on its front cover, and so did every other newspaper he saw as he headed for St Pancras Mortuary. Singh supposed that this represented the mother lode for any editor: a serial killer who murdered children, gangsters and footballers. His daughter had asked him earlier about Linus McGuire. The canteen here was full of gossip. For this hour, and probably just this hour, the bulletins were leading with a story on one West Ham supporter who was claiming, dubiously, that Losley had offered to babysit.

Singh found the team from Toto quite surprising. He could see they were tired, and so he expected the usual crudity and impatience, the usual blank reaction to bodies unless he showed them injuries done to testes or breasts. But these four. . for a start they looked like junkies. As if they’d slept regularly in those suits. Their eyes were red and they stood looking about to fall over at any moment. They’d reacted hugely when he wheeled out the corpses of the three children. That wasn’t odd in itself. Police officers, in Singh’s experience, tended to be ‘lookers-after’, meaning the oldest sibling in their family, or the sort of only child who takes on the responsibilities of its parents. The woman here, though she wasn’t a police officer, had some of that about her, too. More than anyone, they didn’t like harm done to children, because they always felt that something could have been done, and therefore they sought — and he’d heard this feeling expressed in the most extraordinary ways — to blame themselves for it. But this time the reaction was different. They were horrified, yes, but it was as if they’d expected to see something more than what he was actually showing them, and were angrily frustrated at the mere sight of the bodies. One of the two young black men stayed absolutely silent. He looked lost, as if he desperately wanted to help but didn’t know whether anything he could say might prove worthwhile. The other was very proper, addressing Singh by his full title, all please and thank you. But there was something odd about that, as if he’d been ordered to do so, and resented it. The analyst did most of the talking, and she seemed to be the one with the greatest command of the situation, but even she spoke in a clipped monotone. The DI looked completely out of it, seemingly forcing himself to listen, putting a hand to his brow, appearing stressed to the point of distraction. Singh wondered if he was grieving privately, and persisting at work despite that burden.

He had to make himself stop paying such watchful attention to these strange coppers, and more to the work confronting them. He felt a little worried as to how they might react to his conclusions, which were so grim that they’d laid a considerable weight on his own shoulders. The three victims, he announced, were two boys and a girl, aged from four to seven years old. Their teeth featured dental work that looked British to Singh, including a filling that was less than a year old. He hadn’t found any unique skeletal markers, dental implants, diseases that affected the bones — the sort of thing that would help with identification. They were all Caucasians (he pointed out the smooth nasal sills and the u-shaped palates), and the remaining strands of hair indicated that all three were redheads (he’d found enough of it to harvest mitochondrial DNA). He’d pulled teeth from the bodies and found — and it had been a bit of a lottery whether or not he would, considering that there was none left anywhere else — nuclear DNA in the pulp, so he was certain in stating these three children were siblings. If they found a candidate for a mother, he’d be able to make a positive identification from a mouth swab. His office was already checking the DNA against the NDNAD database, and would let them have the results as soon as possible.

‘What were the circumstances of their deaths?’ That was from the analyst.

‘There are traces of flesh, so the skeletons weren’t picked clean, and there are no indications of sharp-force trauma, no knife or tool or tooth marks.’

‘So not cannibalism?’

‘I’d be inclined to say no, despite the media speculation. Were any internal organs found separately? We didn’t receive any.’

The analyst shook her head.

‘Yes, I was afraid that might be the case. And I think I know the reason. The bones show signs of pot polish, meaning they’ve been softened by heat and then collided repeatedly with the walls of the cauldron in which they were found. Look at the pale coloration of the bone, which is a sign of exposure to steady heat. And look at this, too.’ He indicated the small bones of the fingers and toes, some of which had been found in the cauldron alongside the skeletons. ‘There are small fractures on several of these. This is peri-mortem damage. Living bone breaks like this, in splinters or fairly straight lines. And among the small bones we found a lot of shredded and split fingernails. He held one up with tweezers. ‘This is evidence of a struggle, in close conditions, where the victims were so concerned about escape that they were willing to harm themselves. I think it’s possible that these three may have been. . boiled alive.’

By the way they reacted, he had indeed added to their burden — a burden which he was sure he didn’t fully understand. They clearly knew horrors beyond even what he had just described. He felt for them.

The one young black detective thanked him very properly, the other stayed silent. The analyst merely nodded to him, and then they were on their way. The DI didn’t look back.

Singh found himself wondering if this investigation really should be left in such trembling hands.

Sarah Quill sat at her desk in the newspaper office, thinking about Saturday night.

She had heard about what had happened to Linus McGuire, but she’d had no idea that Quill had also been in that car, until he got home, supported by two uniformed police officers. She’d wanted to yell at him, and felt horribly guilty at such an impulse. How dare he risk. . himself. Them. And what they were. That had suddenly felt like so little; it should be more. He’d just waved the coppers away, and they went off, and he’d been left there looking lost. Again he looked as if he’d been drinking, without actually having been drinking. Not a word had come to his lips, none of the usual bollocks. He’d finally let her hold him, and they’d stood like that for ages.

‘Talk to me,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘I can’t. I don’t want to lie to you.’

‘Why do you feel you’d have to lie to me?’ But he’d been silent, then, and nothing she could say would make him change his attitude. She’d heard what his mates at Gipsy Hill sometimes said about being married to a member of the press: rather you than me. But she could tell there was more to it than that, and it scared her. This was going to eat away at him.

It had been the next morning when he’d tried to say a few funny things, but kept coming up short. It had been the next night when he just seemed lost again. She missed that act he put on, and was horrified that there was something big enough to make it fall away from him. She didn’t want to keep asking, but she knew she would persist, because it was all she could do.

She could feel it in herself too. It seemed that Quill was trying to be honest, but she’d meanwhile managed to bury something inside her. The way they stared at each other as if they were angry and scared by each other, by what was missing between them. It felt now that the Quill she knew might go missing forever.

Sefton stumbled out into the mortuary car park, the other three beside him. The rain lashed down on them. ‘The noises in there,’ remarked Costain.

‘That was what it was like at the psychiatric hospital,’ said Ross.

‘Boiled alive,’ Quill whispered. And that made Sefton feel it again, the horror of those bare skeletons. He saw the others reacting as well. They’d had their sense of distance taken away. It felt as if they were all rookies again. ‘If that’s what she does every time. . think of all those kids.’ He remained absolutely still for a moment, as if he had lost everything, every hope. They’d been running on empty, and they’d known they were. It had been Quill who’d kept them going. Now that he was like this. . they seemed to be carrying on only because they had no other hope. At least now they had a few days’ grace. The next West Ham fixture was an away game against Liverpool. Which meant that even if a player did score a hat-trick against them, it might take a while for him to next come to London. If the Losley case had been big in the media before, now it was huge, the sheer impossibility of the killing of Linus McGuire slamming it to the top of every website, every news bulletin. And the bullshit they were coming out with — about hurled grenades, mines planted in the road. Sefton wondered how far Losley would have to go before the media just caved in and started saying she could walk through walls and destroy cars with her body. Finch had given a couple of interviews that had started to suggest Quill was at fault, that the death of his player was down to dangerous driving, but Lofthouse, without prompting from the investigation team, had got the mayor of London to call the chairman at home, and that had put an end to that. It had been Ross’ idea to visit the mortuary and look at the skeletons again, though none of them had any thought as to what the Sight might reveal about them. Again it turned out that they’d been pinning their hopes on nothing.

Now she looked up from where she was checking the emails on her phone. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It is what she does every time.’

They stood outside the Losley house that Costain and Sefton had visited in Wembley, under a vast polyurethane tent that had been put up to obscure the site, the rain pooling in its canopy. Forensics workers had uncovered a pit in what had been the garden. The sides of the pit revealed strata of bones, including small skulls. It was like an archaeological dig of a battle that had only involved children. Working to a pattern as they did so, the forensics teams had found a similar collection of skeletons at all of Losley’s houses, almost simultaneously.

‘That would have taken. . centuries,’ said Costain, ‘she’s that old. She’s been doing this all that time and. . nobody’s noticed.’

‘Sod starting with 1900, I’ll pull all the parameters off my searches, start them at the year dot,’ said Ross. Now she sounded to Sefton to be deliberately trying to energize the rest of them. ‘I haven’t found anything odd in the list of bills from the councils yet, apart from for all the houses we know about, but I will. We’ll have loads of nuclear DNA by now. Those kids in the cauldron were taken during the last year-’

‘And we’d find three new ones,’ said Quill, ‘if we could locate her new house.’

‘So bells will start ringing on the NDNAD, and we’ve put out the word for open cases featuring missing kids.’

‘No,’ he sighed, as if Ross was a fool. ‘She’s fixing this. We’d have heard something straight away. Three from the same family? Who can lose three kids and not report it?’

‘Jimmy,’ said Ross, raising her voice, and that was the first time Sefton had heard her use Quill’s name, ‘we’ll have her.’

Quill seemed to be on the verge of bellowing something, as he stared at the bones, but when he actually spoke his voice was again just an urgent whisper. ‘How?’

Sefton decided that now was the time for him to speak up. He’d been sitting on what he’d been working on, expecting that any moment a lead would come up through traditional police work. Talking about what he’d been doing seemed. . obscene in comparison to what they’d just witnessed, but he couldn’t see another way forward. He didn’t know if what he was going to offer was just a distraction, but even that might do some good right now. So he made himself speak. ‘While we’re waiting for more evidence,’ he said, ‘maybe we can. . work the background?’

He didn’t feel any more confident as he showed them, back at the Portakabin, what he’d found. He felt that he was risking something again, showing them the part of all this that, for some reason, felt most personal. But this was all for those kids. Everything they did now had to be for them. The Ops Board had only changed in that it now had that photofit picture under the heading for Losley’s lord, and a much bigger piece of card ready for a list of her victims.

‘Jack,’ he said, showing them a picture on a London folklore website. ‘That thing I met, its full name is Jack in the Green. Sort of like a big tree.’

‘Those are legs sticking out,’ said Ross, studying the photo. ‘You’re not saying it was a bloke in a costume?’

‘’Course not, not what I ran into, but it can be. People dressed like this still lead May Day parades. They have since the sixties, a revival of what used to go on in London every year, centuries back. He’s something the old trade guilds put together, as a big showpiece. They went from house to house, all of them in different sorts of costume — dames, princes — to collect a kind of tip, their only extra for the year. Happened a lot around Soho, so he’s still in the right place. They used to stop at the end of the circuit and all dance around Jack, as if he was a kind of mobile maypole.’

‘And someone got sacrificed at the end of it?’ said Quill. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

Sefton paused. ‘Everybody says stuff like that. . that this must go back to before the Romans, but. . you don’t often find any evidence. I looked up those ships of yours as well,’ he looked to Ross, ‘HMS London and HMS Victoria. The first,’ he found the photo of what looked like a computer simulation of the ship on the bottom of the river and read from the text, ‘escorted King Charles II back from Holland at the Restoration, then it blew up in 1665, and sank in the Thames Estuary.’ He went to the next image. ‘The second, on the other hand, was the most powerful ironclad afloat, specially named after the Queen on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee. . but it sank in a collision with another British ship, in the Mediterranean even, in 1893.’

‘So these are ships haunting the Thames?’ suggested Quill. He sounded impatient, but he was at least waiting for Sefton to get to the point.

‘It’s more complicated than that.’ Sefton looked hopefully around at their bemused faces. ‘I think I’ve got a good example we can look at. And it runs on a timetable.’

But why did it have to be here?

As he led the other three along the tree-lined avenues of Kensington in the rain, Sefton wondered if there was anything more than coincidence to this. The winter rain was pissing it down on houses that had flights of steps leading up to their front doors, and three different kinds of compost bin in their forecourts. Exactly the sort of place he’d grown up in. Just round the corner, in fact, was the building where his dad had used to rent the upper-floor flat with the roof garden. Sefton had regularly stood in his school uniform at a bus stop a couple of streets away, and been literally spat at by the kids walking past as they headed for the local comprehensive. That London accent they used, it was the same one his tormentors at school had used — and he’d ended up using it, too, as a way of life.

A bus stop. Waiting for a school bus. That connected to something very particular in his head. And now this case had brought him back here. It seemed that coincidence definitely should be part of this stuff. But if you started paying attention to all possible coincidence, finding meaning in everything, then you’d be fit for the loony bin. And that would be worse for them now than for anyone else.

The others were all checking their phones, every other minute, for news from the DNA databases. Sefton found the bus stop he was after and checked it against the website on his phone. Yeah, this was the one. The four of them managed to cram into the shelter beside two nannies talking in what sounded like Russian, and an elderly man in a dufflecoat that smelt of beer. The display showed nine minutes till the next scheduled service. But what they were after, if the internet was to be believed, would come along a couple of minutes earlier than that. There was no reason why they couldn’t try to see it at a whole variety of places, but here was special somehow. It was only here that he’d read about it actually appearing to other people. Who knew if having this ‘Sight’ would make it different for them? This would be a first experiment. . if this stuff could be experimented on at all.

On the bus itself was where everything had been worst for him. A small bunch of kids, who’d all found their different reasons to pick on the posh little black child, had built up complex narratives of abuse, rhymes, stories and things they’d make him do that were repeated many times a week for five years. Many different drivers had all ignored it. Hell is other people. That bus was the cauldron he himself had been boiled in, and that had made the UC.

He forced those thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the job at hand. He looked again at his watch. ‘One minute.’

They all craned their heads to look out of the shelter and along the suburban street.

‘It’s not due yet,’ said the man in the dufflecoat.

Sefton nodded in reply. Through the rain that was bouncing off the trees and floating across the street, there appeared shining ancient lights, shining too brightly while yelling about what was approaching. . and a grey shape, red faded to dust-coloured, was emerging, approaching faster than any vehicle should.

Coming out of the rain, a bus roared into sight. The number 7 with its final destination, Russell Square, indicated on the front, and adverts for Ovaltine and Guinness along its side. There were the silhouettes of a driver and his passengers. It was only the age of the vehicle which made it seem like a ‘ghost’. But it was obviously something to do with the Sight. Sefton took a quick look at the other people at the bus stop. The Russian nannies were looking straight through the bus and past it, as they continued talking, but the old man. . no, he wasn’t like that side-stepping bloke in Soho, because he wasn’t so certain, but nevertheless he had turned his head quickly as if to follow the movement, as if he’d just glimpsed something but wasn’t sure. Then he’d looked away again.

Not giving anything away, Sefton let his gaze follow the departing bus, glimpsing only shadows inside, through the entrance leading to the stairway at the back. And suddenly he shuddered at what he felt there. He’d had a sudden flashback to that dark warm void below him. Not that he believed in Hell — he was sure Costain had come to the wrong conclusion about what he’d seen — but he knew what it would be like for himself: a bigger bus, with more people inside to contrive torments for him. What would have happened if he’d raised his hand just now and requested it to stop? Where would it have taken him? Probably not to Russell Square.

He watched the bus vanish into the rain again, the cloud of water that had parted for it dropping like a curtain and filling the space where it had been. He had to grab hold of the bus shelter to stop himself shaking.

They found a Starbucks. ‘In June 1934,’ Sefton read from his laptop, ‘London Transport held an inquest into the death of a bus driver who’d been killed at the junction of Cambridge Gardens and St Mark’s Road, after he swerved violently for no apparent reason. Other drivers testified at that inquest that they had also had to swerve at that spot, to avoid a double-decker bus, a number 7 to be precise, in the livery of the General Omnibus Company — which had become part of London Transport the year before — which “whizzed out at them”, and then disappeared. These appearances happened at two particular times of day, there being a morning service and an afternoon one.’

‘So the bus driver that got killed didn’t stick around to become a ghost,’ said Costain, ‘but we just saw the ghost bus that killed him.’

‘My point,’ said Sefton, ‘is this. You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically. . a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn’t head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in. . bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they. . I don’t know, break down, but instead is doomed to. . drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!’ He looked between them, hoping they were getting this. ‘There isn’t even any record of a number 7 crashing.’

‘There very probably would have been at least one death occurring on any particular bus route-’ began Ross.

‘So one death onboard is all it takes to make an entire bus into a ghost? Why not ghost houses where people died, or ghost hospitals? Every bit of London would be full of them. Listen, what about those ships you saw?’ He felt the risk of pursuing this, the risk of losing them with theory rather than the sort of factual detail coppers worked with. But Ross had said they should allow assumptions. And more than mere assumption, he was certain, he was starting to put together a working hypothesis. ‘They must have had lots of passengers on them but, in their case, as in the case of that particular bus, we don’t see any of those people sticking around to become ghosts. We see the vehicles themselves. Even if we agree that vehicles can “die” and come back to “haunt” places, one of those ships was sunk somewhere else! So what’s it doing on the Thames? We could find, if we wanted to search the bottom of the sea, what remained of the actual hull of one of those ghost ships of yours, haul it up, restore it to full working order and launch it here, and then there’d be the real ship and its ghost floating on the same river! How does that work? And what about that Jack thing I met? He’s not even a real. . person, or vehicle or anything that you might even think could die and haunt somewhere, he’s just an. . idea!’

‘You’re saying it’s not always about something that’s died and stays on here afterwards,’ said Costain.

‘But sometimes it is,’ said Quill, ‘like with Harry’s dad, or the kid that bloke at the football match was carrying.’

There was silence as they considered that.

‘That old fellow at the bus stop saw it,’ said Costain.

‘Yeah, he did,’ Sefton found himself pointing at Costain as if he’d got an answer right in a quiz game, and realized how patronizing that looked and lowered his hand. ‘But only for a second. . and that’s another thing. I don’t think this is about who’s got the Sight and who hasn’t. I think it’s a. . spectrum of who can see what, when and where. That place, for some reason, is where it’s easier for people without the Sight to see the thing. And then it vanished for us too. But maybe we could follow it and see it elsewhere. Or maybe we could see it all the time if we used some of those hand gestures.’

Ross managed one of her awkward smiles. ‘You’ve got something going here,’ she acknowledged. ‘Go on, establish the narrative.’

Sefton shared that look with her, feeling relieved.

He took them to Charterhouse Square near the Barbican and, as the rain battered down on them, they bent down to hear more clearly the agonized, continual screaming under the carefully mown grass. Quill got quickly to his feet and walked away a few paces. ‘A plague pit,’ explained Sefton. ‘Some of them are meant to have been buried alive.’

‘Ghosts again,’ said Costain.

‘Yeah, sort of. It’s meant to be the ones who were still alive doing the screaming.’

Quill sighed. ‘Fuck me. I wish there was some point at which this team of ours could decide to go off duty, ’cos I need a pint.’

Sefton nodded obligingly. ‘We can do that, too, and continue the demonstration.’

They ended up drinking at a pub called the Sutton Arms. And Sefton felt an awkwardness as they had a pint without having officially come off duty. But Quill was right. With just the four of them in the only unit pursuing this, they could never really go off duty, so they had to cut themselves some slack. There still hadn’t been further word from the database searches. He asked the pub regulars what their ghost ‘Charley’ was like, and then led the other three as they looked around the place, finally finding a shimmering man with a ruddy face sitting on his own in a corner, staring wide-eyed at every woman. He looked part funny and part scary, in a ratio which changed, Sefton thought, almost every second.

‘Definitely scary,’ said Ross when he asked her. And, in that same moment, Sefton watched as the man’s leer became less a thing of seaside postcards and more like something you’d imagine on the face of a rapist. ‘I wouldn’t mind interviewing him, mind. What could one of those things tell us, if they’ve been hanging round for centuries?’

‘Harry’s dad wasn’t much use.’

‘That might not always be the case, though. Maybe I should work out a questionnaire.’

They sipped a careful two pints each. Quill hesitated a moment when Sefton said they’d get a better look now it was dark. But finally he followed them. Sefton took them to the Charterhouse itself, off the square of the same name.

‘I looked up some of the most historical places,’ he explained, ‘by which I mean places where terrible shit happened. Places that are meant to have ghosts. This was originally a priory, like a monastery, and it’s been used for all sorts of stuff since.’ They entered the complex of cobblestone courtyards and old buildings, with signs pointing to restaurants and toilets, and still a few hardy tourists. Immediately Sefton pointed out the wraithlike figure of a monk drifting through the grounds. They watched for a minute as it repeated the same pattern of movements. Quite a few tourists seemed to look round as it passed them, but none of them stopped and stared. Conditions, whatever they were, obviously weren’t right for them to see it entirely.

‘Now that,’ said Costain, ‘is a ghost.’

Sefton consulted the website map, and walked them over to a specific stairwell inside the main building. He leaped back as a man dressed like something out of Shakespeare walked out of it, with his head tucked underneath one arm.

‘Even better,’ said Ross.

‘That,’ Sefton said, ‘is Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk.’

‘And he is-?’

‘Some dead posh bloke. I could read you his Wiki.’

‘What he is now is a well proper ghost,’ said Costain. He sounded to be putting some hope in the simplicity of the statement. Sefton looked to the others. They didn’t look quite so burdened. He hadn’t yet got to the point of this exercise but, along the way, the familiar nature of some of these ‘hauntings’ seemed to be doing the team good. That was kind of awkward, given what he’d particularly wanted to tell them. Even Quill was now looking more engaged.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘maybe there are categories we could sort this stuff into. .’

‘Ghosts, witches, objects, like the ships. .’ suggested Ross.

Sefton hesitated. Right now he didn’t want to tell them that he thought it was more complicated than that. But he had to reach the end of his demonstration. ‘Let’s get to the final stop on my list,’ he said.

It was getting close to 7 p.m. by the time Sefton led them into Berkeley Square. The pavements were still busy with office workers going off to the pub, tourists heading between sandwich bars and coffee shops. The little park in the middle had a few remaining parents with pushchairs and owners of small dogs, or the homeless combing the bins that by now were full of the remains of the day.

‘Number 50, Berkeley Square,’ said Sefton, as they arrived at the address. The ground floor contained the shopfront of Clanfields, a dealer in rare books, with a window that looked warm and inviting and modern. They all looked up together. The upper floor radiated darkness. ‘According to all the books, this is the most haunted building in London.’

Costain watched Quill summon the manager of the shop and, albeit with a bit of initial weariness, manage to summon up his usual rough-diamond character to talk to her. He looked relieved to be throwing his weight around again. Costain knew how that went, but these days he wondered if merely pretending to be someone other than the cringing savage that was surely inside everyone was bad in itself, yet another contribution to whatever complex of burdens was taking him to Hell. Everything for him was now about that. Everything had to be.

The manager had been about to close up for the evening, and was understandably concerned at having a detective inspector on the premises. ‘It’s the sort of thing I hope we can do without a warrant,’ explained Quill. ‘Nobody in your firm is under suspicion of anything. But, unfortunately, I can’t tell you much beyond that.’

He asked her if they’d heard anything strange from the upstairs floor, and it was immediately obvious he’d touched a nerve.

‘You’re interested in. . all that?’

Costain felt stupidly offended by her tone. The weight he felt on his shoulders, that they all did — to these ordinary people it was merely ‘all that’. But he recognized the direction his thoughts were going, and made himself stop thinking badly of her. Every thought, every moment. . how much would it take to scrub him clean? Or would he one day be able to put a bullet through the head of that smiling man and get out of jail free? Or was that a bad thought, too?

‘Purely professionally, ma’am.’

She made a sour face. ‘Every few days, someone comes in asking about it. We’re a bit fed up with it, to be honest, and none of us believes in it. Except, you know, whenever we hear a bang or a crash from the stockroom or the office, we say “That’s just the ghosts.”’

She led them up a narrow unpainted flight of stairs, a sudden contrast to the shop below. It got quickly colder as they climbed, and Costain found himself thinking of the warm comfort of that pub. He put that unworthy idea out of his head, too. Every thought, every moment. . But it was going to take more than that, wasn’t it? Some holy ceremony, some great deed of repentance — or just making right everything he’d done. But how could he do that, when so much of it was lost in the past, beyond altering? He wasn’t used to shit like this slopping around inside his head. He hoped that it wasn’t showing on his face. That was the last bit of front he had left.

They came out onto a landing with bare boards, an open door that showed a tiny office beyond, two closed doors leading to the stockrooms further back. ‘This is where it’s all supposed to happen,’ she said. Even with all of them up here beside her, she looked eager to retreat. Their vague interest was making her believe far more than she normally liked.

‘We’ll take it from here,’ said Costain, carefully doing another good deed.

They waited until she’d gone back downstairs, then they took a quick look round the small office, waiting for Sefton to give them some cue about what to expect, but he remained silent, as if he was waiting to play a gag on them. There was a faint sense of unworldliness about this place, and Costain wouldn’t have wanted to work up here alone. Especially with the desk facing the grubby window and your back to the door. But there was a confidence about the team now, and Costain had to admit this had been a good idea of Sefton’s, whatever his eventual plan was. They’d become a little more familiar with the enemy, and all they were going to find here was another floating spectre, or probably a whole bunch of them. But that would be okay, for it looked like ‘ghosts’ were the shallow end, and a long way from Losley.

Sefton headed over to the door into the stockroom. He gently opened it, then looked inside. ‘I think it’s worse in here,’ he called back. Costain went in along with the others.

They were standing in what had once been a bedroom: plaster curlicues in the corners of the ceiling; an elegant bare window, now dingy, and dark outside. Bare boards. Another door led to what might still be a bathroom. This room was full of boxes, carefully stacked piles of them arranged in rows, with delivery forms in cellophane attached. There was a tall glass-fronted bookcase that contained what must be duplicate stock or books too precious to be displayed downstairs. Also there was a side table on which sat still more books, paperwork lying beside them, a Stanley knife having just hacked open a new delivery.

‘All dark and brooding on the outside,’ said Quill, ‘but nothing evident in here.’

‘Just the potential for something,’ said Sefton. ‘That makes sense, too. The building itself has a reputation, so from outside it’s kind of a “ghost” too.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Ross.

They all turned to look, and Costain was the first to realize what the woman was seeing. The room had got significantly darker, but without the lights dimming. It was as if the darkness had moved in from every corner. He felt his pulse increase, his breathing grow faster. Bit of a white-knuckle ride coming up, then. Okay. It was as if he’d stepped into an open doorway with light behind him, and was, for some reason, pausing there. He wanted to run. I will not run. He controlled himself. His fear suddenly seemed as artificial as this darkness was. It wasn’t coming from inside. . Oh fuck.

He could feel it. Something enormous was approaching from all directions at once. Its shadow had fallen across the house. The Sight seemed to be turning a dial in his head, up and up and up. ‘This is not the shallow end,’ he said. ‘This isn’t like what we saw before. This is bigger than Losley, than anything else we’ve yet seen. .’ Bigger than what that smiling bastard lets us see of him. Or maybe this is him!

‘No,’ said Sefton. ‘Wait a sec. This isn’t what it looks like.’

Costain looked to Quill, who nodded back at him, visibly sweating. So now Costain had his orders: now he had to stay if he was going to keep on being the good little boy. The four of them, as one, took a step closer to each other.

‘An experiment,’ said Sefton. ‘This might make it a bit easier.’ He went over to the table, grabbed a marker pen, and on the polished floorboards drew a wobbly circle surrounding the others. Then he stepped back inside it.

‘What’s that about?’ said Quill.

‘In what I’ve read online, any sort of circle is protection.’

‘Oh,’ said Costain. ‘Great.’

‘I think. . you might have to be prepared to believe in it.’

‘Now you tell us.’

There was a sudden noise from around their feet. They all looked down. The ink circle was sparking and hissing. And now Costain became aware that it was significantly lighter inside it. They shuffled closer together. ‘Now I believe in it,’ he said.

‘As long as it isn’t broken,’ said Sefton.

The darkness became solid around them. It became a warm, close thing, like being pressed up against some enormous animal. Costain slowly lost the ability to see anything elsewhere in the room. He had to look at the others to check he hadn’t gone blind. Normal evening was contained only in this circle. A smell wafted through the air. He’d smelt it before, he realized, and now he really started to feel afraid. He looked over to where the door to the stairs should be. All he would have to do now was run six paces-

He stopped himself. No!

The smell was the same one he had smelt during those moments of horror and falling in Losley’s attic. It was like the most terrible nostalgia, something that connected your brain to somewhere outside time; as if something inside you knew an awful truth that your memory didn’t. It was that place you sometimes went in dreams, when you then awoke thankful to be back in. . he now hesitated to think of it as the real world. Because, somewhere inside him, he was desperately hoping there was a real world elsewhere that he might one day get back to. ‘So,’ he said to Sefton, ‘you knew that ghosts were real. . and you led us to the “most haunted building in London”. What’s up with that?’

‘I didn’t. . I don’t think it’s-!’ What Costain most of all didn’t like was that Sefton seemed completely wrong-footed by this experience now. Whatever he’d expected to happen, this was obviously a long way from it.

There was a low noise from the ink circle, a static hiss that was slowly rising in pitch.

‘I think the circle’s melting,’ said Ross. ‘Do you think it’s melting?’

‘Experiment over,’ said Quill. ‘Can you get us out of here?’

Sefton seemed to panic for a second, then he bent back to the floor. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m going to draw a circle intersecting this one, and then another, and we’ll slowly head towards the door-’ And then he shouted in surprise and jumped back — as the pen rolled away into the dark and was lost. He held up his hands and Costain could see the burns on the tips of his fingers. ‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect this.’

‘What was the plan?’ asked Quill, whose voice had become very precise. All pretence had left him. That realization chilled Costain too.

‘I thought it’d be hard to take, a lot more so than the tourist ghosts. Because that’s what all the books say about it, that there’s a terrible sense of fear. But the most important thing about this place is. . it’s not true.’

‘What?’

‘It’s like that bus that had never crashed, like one of Ross’ ships that actually sank in the bloody Mediterranean! I followed everything back. I looked up all the details. This place is just a chain of people making up stories, all of them based on what the last one said. And some of them are actually, you know, just stories! Fiction set in other places, then retold about here, made up by writers! From 1871, there was one about a maid having suffered a fit here, and so a bloke stayed in the room and saw the same stuff, only that was the plot of a story in a magazine three years earlier. This is where a new bride was going to live, but she left her husband at the altar, and he was left mad and wandering. Or a rich man kept this place empty only so that he could visit it, lock up the caretakers, and do something evil. Or this was where a lunatic brother was kept, and fed just through a hole. And none of it — none of this shit — is true! The “most haunted house in London” doesn’t present a single item of evidence.’ He sounded to be arguing with the darkness itself. ‘And, absolutely, there’s no proof that anyone ever conducted a sacrifice here. So, if it’s one thing or another-’

‘This,’ interjected Ross, ‘is what Losley meant by remembered.’

‘Exactly. . and so are the tourist ghosts. But this is the extreme case, the one I was leading you to to show you, the one case that tests the rule. ’Cos it’s not true.’

‘Stop believing it’s real, then,’ said Quill. ‘Wish it away.’

For a moment, Costain was sure he could. He visualized the darkness as not being there. When he went undercover, he always felt he was absolutely in charge of what he believed about himself, could project that persona to other people, acting a part and making them believe it. But. . now it felt that he wasn’t in charge of every part of himself, because part of him — the part that he knew had done bad shit in the past — had been judged and found wanting. He kept scrambling to make up for that flaw. And that flaw put a hole in everything he tried to do through exuding confidence alone. Every time he said something funny, there was now that thought undercutting it: am I hurting anybody? It felt as if he couldn’t take a single step without hurting someone. Or, at least, the person he was right now couldn’t. And he didn’t yet know how to be anyone else. That flaw meant that. . he found he couldn’t project anything of himself, couldn’t make the world around him believe anything. So he couldn’t make this darkness go.

None of them could.

‘We didn’t believe it when we came in here,’ he said. ‘Or we thought it’d be easy. If it was as easy as that, we’d be fine.’

They heard a noise in the darkness, and they all fell silent. And there it was again. A footstep on the stairs.

‘Sometime in the 1870s,’ said Sefton, ‘and this is just what a short story from the 1930s says, there were these. . these two penniless sailors who’d heard all the previous stories, only they were too poor to care, and they-’

The footstep again, closer now. That door they couldn’t see would soon open.

‘-they broke in here, ’cos it was empty, and they stayed the night. They lit a fire. They fell asleep. And one of them woke up and he heard-’

Another step.

‘That’s what he heard: something on the stairs. But, of us, it was just me that knew that. So you don’t need to know about this to experience it, so apparitions aren’t about what the people who see them believe-’

‘You should have told us all this,’ said Quill, ‘before we entered.’

‘Would that have made a difference?’ whispered Ross.

The sound of the door opening. Something stepped slowly towards them. It felt huge, but not focused in one place. Instead, it seemed to be all around them. Costain could sense it trying the air around the circle, pushing at it, trying his eyes too at the same time, testing his skin, trying to find any way in. Costain’s eyes strained to discern it in the absolute darkness. But it felt like it was all darkness at once, unknown and unknowable. Was this the smiling man? How would he react if it was him? Was the man coming for him now?

‘As long as the circle isn’t broken,’ said Sefton, ‘we’re fine. Believe that, ’cos it’s true. We can stand here all night if we have-’

Their phone text alerts all went off.

They all jumped simultaneously at the sudden noise. Costain let out a relieved breath. The tension was broken. Whoever that was was from their world, from the world of forms to fill out and warrant cards and cups of tea. It was probably the news about the DNA searches they’d been waiting for. It was like a torch they could hold up against the dark. Something modern. He took out his phone and defiantly hit the text from an unfamiliar number. He expected to see a proud announcement of success, of hope he could use to hold off this dark, even to hold up the screen and yell at whatever it was that they were closing in on it.

He stared at what the text actually said:

Any communication breaks the circle.

Costain looked down on hearing a sudden noise, and the others looked too. The circle had roared into a sudden, consuming flame.

‘Oh fuck,’ said Sefton.

The circle evaporated. The darkness rushed in.

Costain ran.

Behind him, he could hear shouting. He didn’t make it to the door.

As the darkness swept over him, Sefton bellowed in despair and threw himself flat. And then there was silence. .

He waited. He raised his head slightly. He saw that his hand had landed across what remained of the circle. An ache in his palm told him that he’d snuffed out the fire on a small section of the ink line. And so he was still connected to it. Careful to keep his hand where it was, he looked around. Beside him, still as statues, caught in the act of shouting, stood Ross and Quill. Halfway across the room was Costain, frozen in mid-sprint. That was what had happened to the two sailors. One had run, the other had stayed, and been driven out of his mind to the point where he’d thrown himself out of the window.

As Sefton watched, he saw a tiny movement of Costain’s arm. Time was still going, then. Sefton was just experiencing it a lot more quickly than the others. Nothing special about me. Must be because I’m still touching the circle. They’ve been caught by whatever this is. He moved his hand a little, and saw the edge of it. He slid his knee up, until it was touching the line too. Then he lifted his hand quickly, ready to slam it down again. Still fine. He put one foot down on the ink by his knee, and managed to stand. Okay. He looked out into the darkness that had infested every inch of the space, like a darkened theatre around a bare stage set. The most haunted house in London. And he himself had led them here. Costain had been right about that: Arrogance. You start to take a bit of charge of your life, and you go mad with it. You’re not used to it. The Sight was now worked up to a pitch inside his head, pulsing out of everything around him. The darkness had bloody texted them! Had that been his fault, had him saying it made it happen? No, otherwise they could have believed their way out of it. It was the mass of opinion that mattered, he was sure of that now, unless you were one of those people who could surf that with words and gestures — or something like Losley’s lord, whose opinion seemed to matter more than other people’s. Oh, very British.

But not many people in London right now would know about the details concerning this place. . Oh. It must be the memories of the dead, too. Somehow. That would suggest they were somehow still around, lingering in an. . afterlife. But he didn’t want to credit that, because it went against everything he believed in, and what he believed was even more important now. Perhaps the dead also existed only as some sort of reservoir of memory held around London. He remembered the rising fear among his team as he’d told his story. It was as if they’d summoned something here, by using the Sight, in a chain reaction between what they expected and what collective opinion said about this place, and what they could see, which had then reached a moment when it went off the scale and kind of. . shorted them out. If he hadn’t been touching the last bit of the circle, what would have happened to all of them? People vanish in London all the time. With his fumbling ‘experiment’, he’d brought them to the edge of that. So he had to get them out of it. How?

He stared out into the dark, let himself get a flavour of it.

The roar of the engine underneath. . a school bus. His school bus. Children, pressed all around, holding him down, his face against the floor, singing taunts round and round, batty boy posh boy homo, all in that accent he hated that was also him that time they’d made him eat fag ends, the walls of the bus locked around him, and the doors will never open-!

He stumbled, nearly fell off balance from where he was standing on the line, so had to take a mental leap back. He found his feet again, breathing hard. Okay, so when he looked into it, it was about himself. That was probably what the others were experiencing too. Costain would be getting another taste of what he’d decided was Hell. One way to muller a copper: take them off the grid. This was just fear pushed to the maximum. It was like being trapped under the surface of a frozen lake. It was what he’d felt inside Jack, but far worse. This was the perfection of the weight and terror of the crowd. Just as well I’ve got freedom of thought, it’d really be hell if I couldn’t step out of it. The kind of stress that’d give you a heart attack. The others haven’t got long. I can’t walk into that, so what can I do? At least it could only kill him. He didn’t think there was anything beyond death to be threatened with, and he felt that conviction was a strength here.

So this was remembering. The force of it was huge, like continents. It was older than everything. It flowed through everything. He wanted to utter something brave at it, to make a joke at it. He couldn’t, not just now. What would it take to make it forget instead of remember? He felt the answer emerge: to make something forgotten would take an enormous effort, a continuous effort during every moment. To do that was way beyond him. But instead of forgetting. . what about trying to create a different version of what was remembered here, to remember not this horror but some of the other things this place had been or was meant to have been? Those memories wouldn’t be as powerful as the fear, for fear was always so strong, but. . his research had also said this house was a den of criminals, counterfeiters, who used that fear as a cover. Okay, so they wouldn’t still be here as ‘ghosts’, because there was no legend, no memory of that; besides, he had to get rid of even the idea that there were ghosts here. He imagined instead the remains of coins discovered in the gaps in the floorboards, an exhibit commemorating it, maybe, a plaque on the wall outside, this place as a historical building, the infamous counterfeiter gang, with modern actors playing the roles, that manager downstairs laughing about how they get the crime tours coming through here. . He made himself see the details-

And, for the first time, he felt the Sight pushing back against this world he’d found himself in. He could see these fragile things in his eyes now. Light had expanded from where he was, making a vulnerable space on the stage set. Knowledge was power, literally, in this city. He stopped himself from celebrating, because he knew this would last only seconds. He dared to step off the marker line. He grabbed Quill and Ross by one hand each. He started to drag them towards the door, pushing against the nightmares that confined them. Their faces were looking at things beyond him, their feet dragging along like reluctant toddlers. He pushed them into Costain, sent him, also, stumbling towards the door.

Four of them? They could have made their own circle, he realized, with a part of his mind he associated with deduction — with UC thoughts about what OCN shape was like. Only five would be better than four, the shape of the organization of five would be strong. Thoughts like these were being formed inside him by the sheer pressure around him, he suddenly understood: natural defences in operation, his persona finding a way.

But the fear was strong. The fear had more force. The fear had been thrown back and now was. . going to come crashing in on them again!

He gathered them all with him, and shoved them at the door. They rushed through it together. They got over onto the other side. They fell in a heap. The door swung shut with a bang.

And suddenly the light in the corridor was again provided by a bulb. The four of them were just lying there, staring up at the bulb in its dusty lampshade. Sefton thought they must look like something from an old painting, with their clothes and their hands flung out in glorious abandon. He started to laugh, but then he bit down on it. He didn’t like the feel of where that reaction might take him. He was panting too hard, so he put a hand over his mouth and took smaller breaths. He felt aware of his own failure that had led him to this knowledge.

The others started to sit up, to look at him and each other. They were shaken to the core. Costain had his hands covering his face. Footsteps approached. Footsteps on the stairs. But no, no. . not now.

The startled manager was peering at them. Slowly they got to their feet. Quill just nodded to her, no funny line appearing on his lips. Sefton just about managed to get himself down the stairs. The others stumbled down around him.

Costain found he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. He reached out to Ross for support, and appreciated that strong shoulder. He felt as if he was going to burst into tears or else throw up. Doing either would feel like death. He had seen it again. It had nearly had him again.

They went back to the pub. Costain put his hands on his pint but didn’t trust himself to lift it. He didn’t feel able to look at Sefton, even though the man had saved him. That was wrong. He looked at the other two, who were shaking as much as he was. ‘Headless fucking ghosts. As if!’ he said. ‘We had no idea. We’re not even rookies. We’re just. . kids!’

‘We. . we learned something.’ That was Sefton, looking angry and defensive. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not; it’s what people believe, and-’

‘Shut the fuck up.’ And then the crushing limitations descended again. ‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘It’s okay-’ Quill began.

‘It’s not okay! We’re playing. . cops and robbers because it comforts us. That’s all there is to it!’

Ross took Costain’s hands in hers. ‘What did we all see?’ she said. ‘I saw. . my dad, over and over.’

‘I saw a lot. . of fuckwittery concerning myself,’ said Quill, ‘about which I feel like suing someone. Pity, then, that it was all true.’

‘Complicated.’ Sefton shook his head. ‘I need to think about it.’

Ross looked back to Costain. ‘So what about you?’

He didn’t want to answer, but. . this was still going to come out. It was beyond his control, and he hated that too. ‘I saw it again. . what I saw in Losley’s attic. The place I’m. . I’m going to.’

‘Hell,’ suggested Sefton, sounding like he wanted to say it out loud, but also sounding like he didn’t bloody believe it.

‘Back in the attic, you lot were being sent there, so maybe it appeared differently for you. I was just. . getting there early, so I saw all the details. And I saw them again just now.’

‘No,’ said Quill, ‘we don’t do theology-’

‘Jimmy, we have to,’ said Ross.

‘That smiling bastard was there, too. And down there he felt like. . like one of those gang enforcers who have done the really bad shit, the ones where you can see it in their faces that they can’t surprise themselves with how far they’d go, because there is no limit to. .’ He had to stop. He was shaking so hard, it took him a moment to continue. ‘The sort that put blowtorches to informers’ feet. Every UC. . we think about those guys, about ending up in the hands of one of them.’

‘Yeah,’ whispered Sefton.

‘He’s the biggest version going of one of those terrifying sods. He knew all about me, so I had no secrets I could give up to spare myself anything. He’s waiting for me when I die. I know he is, it’s just obvious. Does nobody get that?’

Sefton again nodded, grudgingly. ‘Yeah.’

‘And with him. . there was this informer. Sammy Cliff, his name was.’ They were silent now, listening carefully. ‘He kept pretending he didn’t want my money. This is years before Goodfellow. He kept saying he was “on the side of the police”; that’s the catchphrase we joked about with him. Fucking little bike boy, user, dirty fucking hair, burns. . that smell on his skin.’ He saw from their faces that they’d all known similar. ‘He kept saying how he was nothing, a pile of shit on the pavement; that’s what he once told me he was. When it became clear we weren’t going to get his boss, best we could do for him was not nick him. And it was bloody obvious to the gang, by the end, who the informer was. They can’t run anywhere, not kids like that. Their idea of running is going to a different mattress. He ended up with one of those blokes. They burned his feet off, worked upwards from there. They made a party of it, there were cans and condoms all over the warehouse. We heard all the details. So there he was, Sammy Cliff, waiting for me. He didn’t even look pleased. All he was there for was to wait his chance to see what had been done to him also being done to me. Forever.’

‘So,’ said Sefton, oh so gently, as if he was talking to a lunatic, ‘you think that now you have to be good.’

‘It’s my only chance, yeah? And it’s so bloody hard to think of every single thing, all the time-’

Sefton was shaking his head. ‘Can I say something?’

‘More of your theories,’ said Costain, ‘’cos that worked so well! Sorry!’

‘There’s no God, so there’s no Heaven-’

‘How do you know?’

‘-and this “Hell” might well be like that, might well have the ghost or the memory or whatever these things are of this informer of yours in it, but it is just the place where the big boss of whatever we’ve found-’

‘How do you know?!’

‘If you’d listen! I’ve found out-’

And suddenly Costain was up out of his seat, and had thrown himself at him.

Ross leaped up just as Quill did. She managed to grab Sefton so that a punch that would have taken Costain’s head off went wide. They hauled the pair apart. They fell on the floor as one mass.

Bar staff were running over, shouting. Among all the confusion, as they were being hauled to their feet, Quill’s phone beeped. As he stumbled out onto the street, looking angry as he did so, as he made himself do it — he looked at the screen. ‘The DNA database results are in,’ he said, his voice incredulous. ‘They found nothing.’