London Falling

SEVENTEEN

Westminster Hall: an enormous public edifice with a stage at one end; a vaulted ceiling; marble steps; polished doors with metal lock plates that collected fingerprints. The smell of a library, the echoes of a concert hall. It was Saturday morning, and the match would be on Wednesday. Quill stood in the entrance area, forcing himself not to habitually watch the people that passed by, carrying boxes or pushing carts. A poster indicated that there was a New Age fair today but, looking at this lot, he’d have guessed that anyway. He stood out like a sore thumb and he knew it. No UC was he, especially among this lot with their long hair and sandals and tattoos. He was concentrating on his coffee, on not letting his hangover drag him even further down. He was trying to ignore the red hue of the light penetrating every window, the way the building seemed splattered with blood. He wondered what that was about, before he found a bronze plaque describing the building’s history. This once high security venue, actually part of the Houses of Parliament, you could now hire out, thanks to this cost-cutting government, for your collectors’ fair or your union meeting. The metal detectors had been moved to where it joined with the lobby of Parliament itself. This was where Charles I had been tried, among many others, where they’d demanded his head and signed the death warrant. It had then had Cromwell’s severed head sitting on the roof for twenty-five years. It was where coronations had been celebrated, too. The place smelt of royalty, of being afraid of something flighty and a bit random when it wanted to be, and a bit too real when it didn’t.

It had something of Losley’s attractions to it as well, a terrible jollity but with blood infused in its bricks. It was a bit like those ships or the bus, then. This whole building had a bit of ghost about it. That way it suited how he felt right now. Part of him was aware that, maybe even now, and more and more certainly as Monday evening approached, more children would be in Losley’s hands. And also that, for some reason, nobody would miss them. And that seemed to be his own fault, no matter what he told himself. The match would see a hat-trick, because that smiling bastard would make it happen, and the hole inside him, he was sure of it, would widen by a notch as if held open with forceps. He was overlooking something terrible.

‘Jolly,’ commented Ross, appearing beside him, and looking around.

Sefton and Costain soon joined them. They, too, were eyeing the white middle-aged crowd trooping past. ‘Plain clothes, is it?’ said Sefton.

‘You’re sounding a lot more sarky these days,’ observed Quill, and then regretted it as Sefton clammed up and looked away. This outing was designed, at Ross’ suggestion, to keep Sefton’s agenda of background research going, but in what they hoped would be a less dangerous way. But Quill wasn’t sure the DC had quite understood that, in that he still looked as if he’d thrown his rattle out of the pram. Getting him and Costain together on the same page was going to take some doing.

‘We’re here on your say-so, you know,’ he said.

Sefton looked back, blankly. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

The interior of the hall was also stained red, but thankfully there was no trace of shambling monarchs. Instead, clouds of them floated loftily overhead, mixing with each other like coloured oil in water. You might call that art rather than a haunting, since they were hardly to be counted as people. Far below their empty gaze, long rows of tables were covered in occult paraphernalia and lifestyle accoutrements, ranging from crystals to racks of colourful dresses. It was like something from after the apocalypse, this bring-and-buy sale held in the palace that nobody quite knew the meaning of any more. Quill passed a woman with a bowl and a chalice on her table, who was offering, her sign said, ‘Whole Spirit Therapy’, and who was, his new senses told him, completely harmless.

She smiled at him, and he felt he should say something. ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a witch.’

Quill couldn’t help it. ‘No you’re not,’ he said, and moved on.

The stage at one end of the hall was occupied by large paintings of dolphins and eclipses, the man trading them presumably having paid a bit more for his pitch. Over the odour of royalty, half jeweller’s shop, half butcher’s shop, there was that splendid metropolitan smell that Quill had always associated with the civic spaces of London: some sort of polish, obviously, but now it also contained the same force that had made the marble and brass shine with use. It was the smell of people. In a good way. Sensing anything about the masses in a good way was a bit new for a copper. But Quill supposed that, right now, he was willing to take comfort from anything that didn’t equate a mass of people with the horrors of the football stadium, and afterwards.

He’d ordered the others to enter, observe and report back to him in an hour with any points of interest. Given their experience in the bookshop, he’d added that they were to leg it immediately away from anything seeming remotely dodgy. They were looking for raw evidence, but especially anything that could be used as a weapon against Losley. At first, it seemed to Quill that this was going to be a repeat of the clerics’ visit. But then he spotted a little shadow of meaning on one table, a little flash of something being put into a box on another. There wasn’t much of it. . but it was here. He clicked the button on his phone to send a text that said, We’re on.

Ross let a false smile appear occasionally on her face as she walked through the rows of tables, listening to the chatter of the people tending the stalls and their customers. Her team were grasping at straws, also running out of time. At least the chief’s text indicated there was more here than there had been with the visit of the clerics. As she passed, nobody was talking about anything weird: tea, the weather, aches and pains, the way the world was going these days. . this lot certainly weren’t the youngest demographic. Business was bad. Table prices had gone up. Someone was wondering whether or not to start accepting credit cards, only then they’d just go and bloody replace them with something else. Ross found herself distantly enjoying listening to them. They seemed to be an everyday sort of people. There was a restful nostalgia about them, for something she’d never really experienced.

And she was feeling so tired. It was tempting to think of herself sitting one day behind a table like one of these, taking refuge in being part of a community like this, where nobody would look twice at her eyes, her bent nose. It was like she often wished she had a favourite record or movie, in the way other people did, rather than just favouring something that was on the radio or the television when she happened to be paying attention. Other people seemed to have things to belong to or things to be. Other people said they were enthusiasts, fans of, supporters of. But no, she chided herself, That can’t come true until you’ve finished this. And then, whatever happens, you have to find a way to deal with not getting revenge for Dad. She couldn’t imagine herself going back to being a normal analyst, even if they somehow got rid of the Sight. What she was hoping for, she now understood, was a happy ending. Which right now felt so impossible that it was almost like inviting death.

Every now and then she saw a flash of something interesting, but she didn’t react, didn’t let them see she’d noticed it. She stopped when she realized she was now feeling a couple of larger presences in the distance, one on each side of the hall. Following orders, she’d didn’t head towards them, or even look, just kept on down the middle.

But then she felt something else right in front of her. At this end of the hall, along on the wall furthest from the stage, there sat a young woman: one in a row of three traders, the others uninteresting. A hand of tarot cards were spread out, face down, on a black cloth in front of her. The cards looked heavy and meaningful in her delicate hand. She looked up at Ross and it was obvious she was seeing her as just another potential punter. ‘Shall I read your fortune, my darling?’

Ross considered her orders for a moment, then she went to sit down.

Costain felt as if he hadn’t really slept, only he supposed his head must have dropped for a couple of hours. He was in a world of rules now, when he really just wanted to cut loose and swagger again, and be the star of this picture and, God, maybe get a toot from somewhere. Only, yeah. . that would be bad. He felt awkward around Sefton.

‘What is it between you two?’ Ross had asked the previous night, after the DC had left. Costain had shaken his head. ‘I read his Goodfellow reports,’ she continued. ‘He always said good things about you. It was reading between the lines there, and your own stuff, that made me think you were a shit.’

Costain had been genuinely surprised. Then had found himself laughing. ‘What do you think now?’

She’d shrugged. ‘You’re our shit.’

Sefton hadn’t been undermining him. That unfairness had been in his dreams that night. He had bigger things on his conscience list: things he couldn’t deal with right now, because it’d be unsafe to do so. But every time he started to think of what words to use to Sefton, he found himself getting angry again. He still wanted to hate him. That entire house of pain was still there in his head, even though now it had no foundations. And that felt, somehow, even more annoying. And now he was standing beside him at the tea stall in the middle of the hall. When Sefton nodded to him, he let himself behave as if they were mates.

‘Might as well look as if we’re together,’ said Sefton, under his breath, as he pressed the tea bag against the side of his cup to try and force out a bit of flavour. ‘Seeing we’re the only black guys in here.’

‘The New Age,’ agreed Costain, ‘does not recruit in line with best practice. What have you got?’

Sefton moved alongside him, so they were both facing the same way. ‘Three and nine, the two big noises in town, behind the rows of stalls on either side.’

One of the aims of this expedition had been to find out if anyone who was in any way like Losley would come along to a New Age fair. ‘Yeah. Bloody hell, I can feel their presence, nowhere near on our witchy friend’s level, but. . yeah, there they are. People, though, you reckon, not your. . spooky things?’

‘At a guess, more like our old witchy friend.’

‘Keeping their distance from each other, like bosses would. You reckon they realize we’re here?’

‘Seven, two here and eight at the back have all checked me out, but I think that’s because I is black. As for the level bosses. . I don’t know. All that’s different about the four of us is. . our advantage.’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘I don’t know why it’d show up. We don’t look. . particular, to each other.’

Costain lowered his voice. ‘You want to try a walk-up with one? Just stroll in like we own the place? Like in that shebeen in Romford?’

Sefton looked startled. ‘That was fucking terrifying.’

‘This will be more so.’

‘Oh, right, this is ’cos marching straight in would be brave — would be “the right thing to do”?’

Costain sighed. ‘Are you going to keep giving me shit about that?’

‘If you want me to stop, Tone, you can always order me to do so.’

‘What’s your question, ducks?’

Ross wondered if that was the fortune-teller’s real accent. It was like something out of a soap opera — the chirpy cockney sparrow, a bit irritating, a bit false. She looked to be late thirties, ears pierced, with evidence of two earlier piercings, tattoo of some sort top left arm obscured by dress, natural brunette, green eyes, no visible fillings, about five foot two, hundred and ten pounds. That tightness of the skin about her. Thin not because of the gym, but with those biceps. This was the kind of woman Ross often saw in interview rooms.

She tried to affect a gentle, spiritual voice without being too hello-trees-hello-flowers about it. ‘Hi, I’m Lisa.’

‘And I am Madame Osiris, at your service.’ The woman added one of those crazy aitches onto ‘Osiris’, as if she was something out of Dickens. She was dressed a bit like that too. That was a genuinely old dress, the wreck of a real Victorian ball gown. Frayed and stitched up, but not by a tailor. She looked like someone who once might have been seen staggering on stage at a music hall. What, was she actually from that time, keeping herself young? In the way that Losley’s record stretched far back enough to accumulate all those bodies? No, this was a modern face. This woman was just trying really hard to seem antiquated. And Ross got the feeling it wasn’t pretence just for this moment, but something she did all the time.

‘Is that your real name?’

The woman raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that your question?’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Ross considered her question. She was feeling the power in those cards, but did this woman know how to use it? What if she asked the obvious: Where is Mora Losley? That was assuming the cards actually worked to answer questions rather than just doing something else, such as make money vanish from her pocket. And that name would surely draw attention. This was their first encounter with another user, and who knew what alliances existed among them? This woman had been keeping her left hand under the table since Ross had arrived. She might suddenly attack Ross with something she had no defence against. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘My question is: how can I win?’

‘Right. What sort of divination would you prefer?’ She made a swirling gesture with her right hand as she indicated the three choices, and Ross imagined for a second that she could feel something moving around her. ‘Tarot of London? Book of Changes? Tube Oracle?’ Each gained weight and importance as she indicated it. So it wasn’t the objects that were meaningful to the Sight, it was the woman — or rather what she was doing. Ross didn’t let the excitement show on her face. This was definitely someone a bit like Losley, the first such they’d met. The Book of Changes was a small leather-bound volume, the Oracle seemed to be a cork-backed platter of wood that lay face down on the table, the Tarot were obviously the cards already spread.

‘All three.’

‘That’ll cost you.’

‘Okay.’ Actually, not so great an idea. They’d have to sign off on any expenses claims for operational budget. That meant the team would soon have to come up with some convincing lies about stuff like this.

‘Cross my palm with silver. That’ll be a carpet.’

Ross had been brought up in London and had never heard that one. ‘Sorry?’

‘Thirty quid. Blimey, you’re far from the madding crowd, aintcha?’ Good. The woman was used to setting herself above her punters, not afraid to be dismissive of them, and she had taken Ross to be as foolish as any other. She took Ross’ money and it was gone into that left hand under the table. ‘Let’s start with the Oracle,’ she decided, and turned over the piece of wood, which now was revealed to look suspiciously like a decorative place mat. It had a map of the London Underground on it, an old one that didn’t have the DLR on it. The woman produced a metal pendulum, and set it twirling on a string right over it. ‘Ask your question again.’

Rather self-consciously, Ross leaned across and spoke into the place mat. ‘How can I win?’

The woman suddenly let go of the pendulum, jerking it hard towards Ross’ face, making her jump back. It hit the wood, rebounded violently and, against all possibility, dropped back into the middle of the map. Its pointed tip was precisely on-

‘Baker Street, on the City side of the Hammersmith and City Line. That’s the top side, by tradition. And all is tradition. . tradition is all.’ She’d said that under her breath, like something she often repeated. ‘So, love, that’s one way you can win. What or who do you most associate with Baker Street?’

Ross realized who that could mean. And probably not the bloke who’d had a hit with the song of that name. But not a great deal of help either. Still, something real seemed to be going on here.

‘The line’s interesting too. The City Line, that’s memory. .’

‘Why is the City Line memory?’

‘Tradition. Every line stands for something. Nobody knows why.’

‘Nobody?’

‘So full of questions, and yet she’s only paid for the one.’

‘I’m sorry, I do seem to keep breaking the rules.’ Ross let a little of her real desperation show on her face, put her hands on the table, as if coming to a big decision. ‘This is. . very important to me. Please understand, any help. . any at all. Look. .’ She put an upper-class note in her voice, suggesting there was the potential for a lot of money here. ‘I’d really appreciate it.’

The woman smiled broadly, but Ross didn’t let her satisfaction show on her own face. The bait had been taken. ‘That’s what I’m here for, help and interpretation. You’ve got the right look about you, my darling: I can tell you’ll ask the right questions. And you’re bright enough to understand the answers. Bright enough to come to the likes of me, too, rather than any of these hangers-on.’ She indicated the innocent fortune-tellers to her left and right, busy with their own meaningless consultations.

‘Yeah, I sensed you were different’, Ross went on. ‘It’s like there’s. . there’s something about your voice.’

The woman nodded sagely. ‘I said you was clever. You always sound out how a seer talks, my darling. Not all in whispers that won’t break the surface, but with the proper London. Proper London isn’t your darkie talk, like the kids do now. It’s not your estuary English. . Gawd, that grates on my ears. It’s from before.’

Not that much before, reckoned Ross. This movie Victoriana wasn’t that old, nowhere near as old as London; it was just a gesture in that direction. Maybe that was something to do with degrees of power. This woman didn’t sound anything like the insane mixture of tongues Losley had used. Oh, speaking in tongues, was that a thing, too? ‘You seem to know so much about these things.’

‘I know what my mum used, and her mum before her, and her mum before that, hetceterhah.’

‘Don’t you ever want to change it? Make it more modern?’

The other woman shook her head quickly, her eyes widening. ‘You don’t want change. Change is the enemy of memory, like my mum always said.’

‘Could. . could I learn it?’

‘Maybe. It’s about the way you talk, the way you move. The past is the thing, and that’s what the people in the know do, we follow the past.’

Ross felt the truth of it in the woman’s eyes. Here was someone who had the past always looming over her, wearing a parent’s clothes. This lack of a present or a future was suddenly startling, and genuinely sad. She made herself focus on the job again. ‘You must have had a really hard life.’ That phrase, said right, at the right moment, always opened a few doors.

The woman paused, searching her face, clearly wondering how much she could trust her. Wanting to talk, though. Come on, come on. ‘Well, that’s where you find the power, isn’t it? Like my mum said, between the game and the gutter. Most of it works without you knowing what it means, or how it does it. You can sometimes work it out, just a bit, or sometimes it’s just obvious, just being how things should be. You try and work one of those out with your school head on, you’ll be up all night pondering the complexities of life. That’s how the City Line is memory, it’s one of those: you can kind of see how it works, but you can’t think about it. All this stuff is just enough to get by. You don’t get no riches out of it, not really. You start thinking you want that, you start asking for more, it quickly gets to be more than you can handle. More than the likes of me can, anyway.’

Ross decided to take a risk. ‘You’ve obviously made. . sacrifices.’

The woman was silent for a moment, a real, hurt part of her rebelling, her eyes only just keeping faith with Ross, just the promise of money and being listened to keeping her on the hook. ‘What do you mean by that, now?’

‘I’ve. . read some old books. .’

The woman thought for a further moment. Then she raised her left hand from below the table and put it down in front of her. All three middle fingers were missing, and there was scarring up and down the wrist, old wound on old wound, not in an angry, self-harming way, but something more like the endless search of the junkie for a suitable vein. ‘Of my own flesh and blood.’

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Ross. ‘So you can’t get. . remembered?’

‘What? You’ve read a bit, I see, but not enough. How would I make a big enough splash to get folk to remember me?’

‘Well, Mora Losley seems to be. .’ Ross stopped as she felt the words bounce off some sort of tripwire in the air. She felt the confidence leave her face.

And now the woman was looking at her as if she was the scum of the earth, the promise broken, another betrayal in a whole life of them. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, so you’re a fucking rozzer.’

‘I’m not,’ said Ross quickly, letting the truth that she wasn’t actually a police officer be a kind of lie. ‘If you really can see, you can see I’m not.’

‘Judas words. As good as.’ She was getting to her feet. She was about to march away, or maybe start yelling. And here was someone who might be able to find Losley for them directly! By answering just the one question! Ross had to keep her here. She remembered what the woman had said about doing what seemed appropriate. Copper gut assumption again: there was one thing that all the stories seemed to insist on.

‘I paid you,’ she said. ‘We have a bargain. You can’t break it.’

The woman stopped. She now looked ferocious and, for a moment, Ross thought she was actually going to strike her down with something. But, finally, she sat down again and glared at her. ‘You cunt,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Ross. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Quill had systematically checked out all of the people of interest in the centre of the hall, recording their appearance in his special notebook. There was something particular to them, they were the ones in the old clothes: an ancient waistcoat here, a battered greatcoat there. The fashions of everyone else, while occasionally baroque, didn’t incline so much towards the distant past. When he made his way back through the fair, a few of them were no longer about, a couple had left their stalls completely unattended, having taken away with them any items whose presence had been obvious to the Sight. So this lot could detect the law, and not necessarily through extra-sensory means. They’d had that look about them, too, like the ones you hauled in from the pub for an identity parade, and took a quick shufti in the files while they were present. What all those folk also had had in common — and this shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise — was that the objects of power he’d glimpsed had all been either of a particularly London character (a chipped coronation mug, a bunch of London Pride flowers) or could have been if only he’d known what he was looking at (a branch, a bracelet of thorns). So much for the silver handcuffs, although he supposed that, since it was blessed by the Met chaplain, they did have in their possession some very London holy water. Pity that Chamsa wasn’t local, too. He went to the ticket seller at the door, and was introduced to the organizer, a thin man with a ponytail, in sandals and a business suit. Quill followed him into an office, for a more formal introduction involving his warrant card.

‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh, now, is this about Mora Losley? What that woman does has nothing to do with these peaceful practices going back to the time of-’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure. This is just a routine check, nothing to worry about. I’d like to be able to say that the. . what would you call it, the occult community?’

‘The New Age community!’

‘That you’ve been offering us brilliant support and a nice cup of tea. So, if I could just take a quick look at your list of who’s at what table. .’

The list showed two big tables, on either side of the hall, each rented to a major dealer. Quill wondered therefore if maybe what he was feeling there was quantity rather than quality, as it were. He gave the list back to the organizer, thanked him for his helpfulness, told him his silence would be appreciated, and headed off to have a quick butcher’s at one of the tables identified.

This was indeed where the professionals were based: real swords, glassware, fabrics, paintings in frames, unicorns and dragons. It made Quill sigh a bit: they were among this terrifying weight of people and history, and yet here were vague guesses at it being regurgitated as tourist tat. Oh, so no change there, then. There was nothing specific about most of it, nothing particularly. . London. The table was staffed by young men and women in T-shirts bearing the dealer’s logo, with an older man, a bit of a pot belly on him, in charge. Nothing odd anywhere, and certainly not among the merchandise. So where was the huge sense of unease about this table coming from? It seemed to be located further behind. . Quill saw that, at the rear of the displays, there was a stack of the boxes this stuff had been transported in. Unnoticed by the staff, someone was rooting through them, not looking as if he had any particular purpose, but more like a tramp searching for food. He was a big lad with broad shoulders on him, wearing a tattered military coat, a garment that looked as if it was from the Boer War. Woollen gloves, so no fingerprints. He had that special sense of meaning about him. The Sight knew him, and he made Quill afraid. But Quill had been up close with Losley, and had also been in the presence of whatever that smiling man was, and he didn’t rate this bloke as being in that league. He took a step closer, leaving only a couple of punters between himself and the man who was obviously keeping himself unseen by the traders seated in front of him.

Suddenly the man looked up and sniffed the air. He turned, and Quill felt his gaze sweep the crowd. Any second, he was going to spot him.

Quill felt afraid, but he was more afraid of looking afraid. He didn’t want to experience how whatever this man was going to threaten him with might chime in with the emptiness inside him and with the previous impotence he’d suffered at the hands of this lot, further diminishing who he tried to be.

‘Hoi!’ Quill bellowed. ‘I want a word with you, sonny Jim!’

That terrible gaze engulfed him, and the fear accompanied it. But, a moment later, with a crash of boxes-

The man was running for the door!

Quill felt an old energy come flooding into him. He sprinted off after him.

Costain had been surprised to find that the dangerous gang boss he’d had in his head when he’d considered this move had turned out to be a gawky young man in a T-shirt advertising an occult shop. He seemed to be in charge of this large stall that had so many punters flocking to it. Sefton had then popped over to check out the other side of the hall, and reported back about the other shop, that what they were actually looking at here was a room seemingly shaped not by occult power but by money.

So where had the power gone? Costain couldn’t feel it now they’d got here. It almost seemed as if it was. .

‘Hiding,’ muttered Sefton under his breath. ‘It knows we’re here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You get used to this stuff. Just tune into it.’

‘Do you?’

‘It’s now under something. . or someone on that stall’s gone dark on us.’

Costain summoned all his confidence. And, yeah, that felt like a blanket that had a lot of holes in it now. He straightened up and began walking as if he had a gun on him. He headed straight for the young man, and noted Sefton peeling off behind him to check out the merchandise further along the stall. ‘Hey,’ he began, ‘. . no, never mind about the queue, I’m talking to you, son. Who’s in charge here?’

‘The Book of Changes.’ The woman sat opposite Ross, staring coldly at her, and held up the small volume. ‘Pick a number between one and three hundred and sixty-eight.’

Ross took a while to consider. She was wondering if she should text a message to the others to converge on her position. After their business was concluded, she was going to have to try to apprehend this woman. ‘Two hundred and. . seven.’

‘One to three?’

‘Three.’

‘One to seventy?’

‘Three.’

‘Right,’ the other woman said tersely, ‘that’s Fives Court. That’s the first part of your answer.’

‘Is that book. . the London A-Z?’

The woman was silent. She clearly wasn’t going to offer any more than she had to. ‘Again.’ This was even more like the sort of divination which might have found them Losley. Ross gave her three more random numbers. ‘Four Seasons Close. You’ll “win” by favouring the first over the second. That’s your answer. Five is better than four.’

‘What does that mean: five is better than four?’ Four what? What was five? ‘Do the locations have anything to do with it? Does the rest of the address matter?’

The woman remained silent.

‘Listen,’ said Ross, ‘you know we’re after Mora Losley, and you surely can’t agree with what she does. You could help save those children-’

‘I won’t help you. Not your kind. Never.’

Ross pursed her lips. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s go for the Tarot of London.’

Quill burst out of the hall into the corridor outside. The man he was chasing was just ahead. ‘Police!’ he yelled. The ragged red-faced man spun on his heel and, for a moment, Quill thought he was going to stop. But he was fumbling to get something out of his pocket. He found it and snapped it up to head height, pointing it straight at Quill. Who threw himself into cover behind a pillar adjacent to the wall. He hadn’t got a good look at the thing, but it was close enough to a gun to make him move.

‘I really do just want a word with you!’

But, as he said it, something enormous rushed at him from behind. Quill was hauled away from the wall and thrown into the middle of the corridor. He reflexively put his arms around his head and staggered, aware that he was being battered left and right by. . air. Air carrying leaflets and rubbish and cardboard boxes. But what was worse was the anger of it: the air was hot and furious and needed something, was missing something as much as Quill was. It was nothing to do with this man, he realized. The man was just. . using it. That understanding let him find his feet. He could hardly see the bloke now, just a shape in front of him. He couldn’t see how he was producing this effect with whatever he’d grabbed. The beating around Quill’s head got worse, and there were stones now, and suddenly one shot through his guard and struck him across the temple.

Quill focused all his anger on the man in front of him, put his head down, gave a roar and charged.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ The young stall manager was looking at Costain fearfully.

‘Don’t give me that. Where is he? Where’s the boss?’

‘Barry’s back at the shop-’

‘Fuck me, do you want me to tell him how you were like this? You know what I’m talking about, ’cos if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be scared: instead you’d be angry. I’m talking about-’

‘London stuff,’ said Sefton, arriving beside them as if his boss had called him over, looking bigger somehow than Costain was used to seeing him. ‘London rules, you feel me?’

Costain was sure there was a crowd gathering around them now. But not one of them questioned the basis on which he was verbally abusing this poor kid. This was like a market where the stallholders paid protection money. A lot of people here knew vaguely that there was another class of people who came round here sometimes, and so did this kid. And all Costain had to do now was keep carrying on like one of those.

‘We. . we don’t have. . We’re just. . paraphernalia.’

‘I’ve got all the crystal unicorns I want, boy. You know what I’m talking about.’

‘Are. . are you the ones who were going to collect the package?’

Costain looked skywards in apparent relief, and bumped fists with Sefton. ‘Finally!’

The man went to look under the table. He came back a moment later, carrying what looked like a bit of flat red stone wrapped in a sheet of paper. ‘It’s nothing to do with us,’ he said. ‘He just left it here and said someone would come asking for it.’

Costain nodded as if this was all entirely expected, and took the package. ‘You can now go about your business, my friend,’ he said. ‘Good day to you.’ He led Sefton away from the stand, and the crowd parted meekly for them.

‘Wish we could have asked for a description,’ remarked Sefton.

Costain just about managed not to snap at him. He was holding the paper-wrapped package between two fingers, hoping that he hadn’t messed up any fingerprints left on it. By means of the Sight, he could feel the burden of something notable, the strange weight of it in his hand. ‘You feel anything?’

‘Yeah. It’s a tiny bit different to what we felt from across the room, so I reckon we must have felt whoever left that here, and then that feeling changed a bit, without me noticing, ’cos then I was just feeling the presence of this.’

‘So he got away under cover of it?’

‘I think so.’

The piece of paper was secured by a small piece of sticky tape. He laid the package on a shelf beside a window, got out his multi-knife, and sliced through it. The stone was revealed to be a fragment of red tile, with faded decoration down one edge. Costain took a step back as the paper flapped open. He saw that Sefton had felt it too. The weight of it had suddenly increased. That was the feeling of something hiding that they’d experienced. On the paper was written a message in a large, scrawled hand:

You smell of modern shit. Leave us alone. We smell death near you soon. You brought that on yourselves.

‘Death near us soon,’ said Sefton. ‘Well, there’s a shock.’ He put his hand over the tile, as if trying to gauge the forces involved. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if this would hurt someone who didn’t have the Sight?’ He lowered his hand closer and closer to the tile. ‘It’s not getting any stronger.’

‘Just leave it.’

‘If it can hurt us, maybe it could hurt Losley.’ He touched his palm to the tile quickly and then raised it again.

‘Don’t fucking do that! Did I tell you that you could do that?’

‘Like you’d know one way or the other.’ And there was that furious look again, the real Sefton now that they were out of character. ‘I’m the one who’s been looking into this.’

‘You’re not planning on recognizing my rank at all, then?’

Sefton seemed to pause at that. He didn’t want to say it out loud — which was just like him. His eyes locked on Costain’s, his finger reaching towards the tile again. And suddenly with a yell he withdrew it. Blood went flying from his finger.

A drop of it landed on the tile.

And motion blurred everything as something battered Costain’s entire body.

‘A Shaft of Light in Paddington Station.’ The fortune-teller laid down a card that showed a painting of just that, looking like an old advert or something. The light looked summery, with dust motes hanging in it. ‘Something Glimpsed from the Underground.’ That was the image of what must have been a tube carriage window, with a brickwork arch outside it, also a green and blue light that spoke of meadows gleaming through it. ‘The Sacrifice of Tyburn Tree.’ She slapped the third card down over the first. She’d made a pass of her hands over the cards before they’d begun, and they’d regained the same lustre of importance that they’d had when Ross had first glimpsed them. Now they looked. . delicious, meaningful like Christmas, a colourful present that had been unwrapped, a terrible pang of nostalgia that was like the prospect of happiness and repose she’d felt from the rest of the fair. But this third card looked terrible, too, and it connected with her. It was a man hanging by his neck, in silhouette, other terrible wounds having been done to him, judging from how the crowd, in faux-medieval dress, all around him were pointing at various parts of his body. The fixture from which he hung sprouted many such nooses, like it was a proper tree, and rooks flew all around it.

‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

The woman looked angry, but some explanation seemed to be required here to fulfil the bargain. ‘The first two are indications of different sorts of hope: summer and autumn. The third is what the hope is actually about.’

‘The hanged man?’ She remembered that name from TV shows. It had always made her look up.

‘These aren’t like normal Tarot cards, which are for the rest of-’ She stopped herself, and for a moment Ross thought it was because she’d already said too much, but it seemed that she’d noticed something else about her subject and now she was smiling, revealing gaps where teeth should be — another sacrifice, Ross guessed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘this is important to you personally?’

Ross didn’t want to show it. ‘The man being hanged. . is a sacrifice?’

‘Does this cause you pain? Are the details going to make you suffer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you listen here, copper, and I’ll tell you all about it. The berk on the card, he’s had three things done to him. The threefold death, they call it: he’s been sacrificed three times. A death wound to the head. A death wound to the side. A hanging to kill him too.’ The woman was gleefully examining her face. ‘Makes his soul like gold, that does — commends him to the fire.’

‘To the fire?’

‘So I’m told. Sends him to Hell as solid currency. You get a lot in return for a three in one.’

Ross felt the room swaying around her. She felt the knife in her pocket. She suddenly had in her mind a picture of her dad’s face tilted up against the ceiling rose. The bruise on his head. The wound in his side.

Quill’s head collided with the ragged man’s stomach. With a cry, the other fell back, and whatever was in his hand went flying. The buffeting winds shut off. Quill leaped to grab him. He got his hands clenched among the dirty ancient coat, and slammed the man down onto the marble floor, hauling one hand behind his back, pulling the handcuffs from his own pocket. But then he realized that he was sitting on top of just a dirty old coat with nothing in it. And then on top of nothing at all. He was crouching on bare marble, his arse in the air, handcuffs jingling from one hand. He looked up to see New Age punters walking past him, raising eyebrows.

He got to his feet and looked quickly around the floor. There they were. He grabbed a fold of his own coat to pick them up in. Then, feeling nothing very dangerous from them, though there was definitely power of some kind, he took them in his bare hand. They were two thin paddles. . or vanes. They were made of very old metal, with ancient decorations, like something from out of a long barrow that should now be in a museum. And in his hands they felt useless.

Sefton lay on the hard floor, his head ringing. He felt as if he was back in the playground. He’d just been thrown to the ground by something with that same effortless power over him. It had felt as he imagined being caught in an explosion would feel. But it had left him. . he made himself breathe deeply. . with his ribs intact, and. . he rolled over. . his hands were just bruised where he’d landed on them. He managed to look over at Costain, who was pushing himself to his feet, looking quickly around him as if he might be attacked again. Sefton himself slowly stood up. The piece of paper was blowing away in shreds, departing too swiftly to catch, too swiftly for normality, and all that had been left of the tile was dust that was vanishing into a red stain on the floor.

The crowd was staring at them, though trying not to. What had they witnessed? Not as much as the two policemen had. That had been an explosion meant only for those with the Sight, a silent warning — something that felt as if it had been put together hastily by an anonymous member of a subculture that didn’t want to be policed. ‘That was my fault,’ Sefton said.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Costain, looking angry, ‘it was. Let’s get some details on this fucker.’ And he led them off to find the stall manager.

‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ the fortune-teller was saying, but Ross wasn’t listening any more. ‘Our bargain is fulfilled.’

Ross got to her feet at the same instant the woman did, intent on apprehending her.

The woman glared at her. ‘We haven’t had the law bothering us for a few years now. We stayed out of sight of them. But then they was got rid of, and so will you be. That’s the way the wheel’s turning.’

Ross gave her a hard stare. ‘Try and get away, I’ll have you.’ She could hear running feet behind her. The others had finally come to find her. She kept eye contact with the woman, who produced a small knife that was too small to make Ross back off. She felt like reaching into her own pocket and comparing blades. But, no, she had to keep her authority. ‘What’re you planning on doing with the potato peeler?’

The fortune-teller suddenly drew it across her own palm, and cried out at the pain. Ross took a step forward, to try to stop the woman doing herself any more harm. But then it occurred to her that she hadn’t paid proper attention to the floor. It was really interesting, so she got down on to her hands and knees and, dimly aware of the rest of her team arriving, she settled on the perfect spot, a brass line at the edge of where the wood and marble flooring met. She raised her head back, smiled at the others, and-

Costain threw himself at her and sent her rolling into the table before she could dash her brains out. The table flew towards the woman. He was desperately holding Ross down.

‘Let go!’ she yelled. ‘I have to-!’ And then normal awareness rushed back into her head. ‘The suspect!’ she shouted. ‘Stop her!’

Costain eased off just enough to see that Quill and Sefton had already pushed the table aside-

To reveal that the woman had gone, like a dove out of a conjuring trick, taking her equipment with her, leaving only a spray of blood across the white cloth. There came cries and shouts from all around, as people who did and didn’t know the truth of it gasped.