London Falling

EIGHTEEN

They sat on the steps outside, the Houses of Parliament looming behind them, the office lights coming on in the afternoon twilight. Big Ben began to strike four, and Quill could swear he heard the echoes reverberating through this new London he was learning about. They sounded to the depths and resonated back off the sky. They rang through people and memory. ‘The woman at that table turns out to have paid them in cash and provided a false address. Bloody sketchy description you got of that bloke who left the. . bomb or whatever it was.’

‘I reckon he disguised himself,’ said Costain, ‘like Losley did.’

He looked to Ross. He’d have expected her to have got her laptop out by now, but she was just staring into the distance. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so that woman told Ross that we’re going to have to be like Sherlock Holmes to win: hardly a revelation. She also said that five is better than four, whatever that means. We’ve also discovered that there used to be some form of law enforcement among this community, but that’s gone now. And we’ve found that stuff associated with London, made in London, about London — that stuff seems to have power in London. I got these things too.’ He took the vanes from his pocket and, meeting Sefton’s gaze, handed them over to him.

‘And there’s going to be a death close to us,’ muttered Sefton, accepting them. He’d retreated into his shell again.

Quill closed his eyes for a moment, as that statement put a weight in his stomach weirdly beyond what he’d expect to feel at a threat. He felt he should know what it was about, and was feeling vulnerable that he didn’t. ‘Yeah, but. . later for that. Lisa, what aren’t you telling us?’

She composed herself for a moment. ‘My dad,’ she said, ‘he was Toshack’s “good sacrifice”. He was sent to Hell, and Toshack got Losley’s services in return.’

They were all silent. Quill looked at Sefton, who was silently disapproving of their terminology again.

‘Which makes me realize something,’ she said, making him look back. ‘Everybody thought my dad committed suicide. Including the coroner. So this stuff can close cases that should have remained open. We’ve only instructed the databases to look through open cases, so how about we look at closed ones, too?’ Quill made to put a hand on her shoulder, but her expression deterred him.

That evening, Quill oversaw the rewriting of the Ops Board. ‘Speaking in tongues’ and the three items Ross had consulted through the fortune-teller were added to the Concepts list, as were ‘London items’, ‘old law’, ‘five over four’, ‘tile bomb’, ‘vanes’ and ‘someone close’. ‘Remembered’ had been expanded to include Sefton’s ideas about the memories of the masses and the dead. Photofits for new suspects Fortune-Teller, Windy and Bomber had been put up, unconnected to Losley so far.

‘We’re going to end up with a whole other board just for speculation,’ he observed.

But then, with shaking hands, Ross took down the speculative card under Toshack, picked up a piece of card marked ‘Alf Toshack’, and attached it to Rob’s picture by a victim thread. Then she stood looking at it for a few minutes, as if she could rip up time and have him at her mercy by sheer fury.

West Ham were playing at home on Wednesday evening. It took until Monday afternoon for the list of closed cases of missing or murdered children, enormous as it was, to be sent to the Portakabin. It wasn’t just a computer file, since Quill had asked for the search parameters to go back to the very start of when records were kept. A van arrived, with two archive clerks from Hendon carrying boxes of papers. The computer file included a lot of cases where the perpetrators were currently serving jail time. Ross, who until then had been obsessively trawling the list of bills again, started there, getting the others to begin on the physical files.

‘One thing I’m after,’ she said, ‘is Caucasian, red-headed, parents of three siblings. The parents of those kids in the cauldron. With the older files, you’re looking to match up the descriptors we’ve got of the older victims longer ago, particularly the siblings taken in threes. The cases are now closed, so the authorities at the time will have come to a solid conclusion as to what happened to them. We’re looking to prise that open, and see Losley.’

Quill didn’t suggest that it was a meagre hope. He made them stop every hour for a cuppa, and they worked on into the night. Until-

‘Got one,’ said Ross. Quill and the others went quickly over to see. ‘Tereza Horackova was her name, a redhead — look at that photo. She was serving time in Holloway prison for multiple murder of children, before committing suicide a couple of years ago.’ She went on to the internet. ‘She was convicted of killing her own children,’ she continued, her voice starting to crack. ‘Three of them, and the ages fit, but she always insisted she didn’t have kids.’ She looked up the DNA swab details and emailed them to Dr Deb before his office closed for the night. ‘I’ve got her home address.’

Quill didn’t want to argue with that look on her face. Instead he went to get his coat.

The house in Acton was now occupied by a Bangladeshi family who spoke little English and were reluctant to let them inside. They managed to find a translator from the local nick, and that way eventually got granted access. They did only a cursory search, but Quill had got what he needed from the garden, where there were the faintly glowing remains of soil pushed to the side of where a patio had been installed.

‘She kept rigorously to her story,’ said Ross, ‘insisting that she had no children. She couldn’t explain the many signs suggesting the opposite, up to and including the slide and playhouse in her garden. Losley came here all those years ago, she took those children, and she made that woman forget them. That’s how she manages to steal kids and nobody notices.’

‘Bloody excellent,’ said Quill. ‘Coppers are bound to remember cases like that. We’ll find a few more.’

‘It’s just a pity,’ said Costain, ‘that this is close enough to Losley’s Willesden house for her to have operated from there, so we don’t have a sniff of another base.’

Quill put out the call to every nick in London: they were after current or recent cases where parents of missing children claimed not to have any kids. Especially anything that had just come in. Ross had found them something vital with that obsessive determination of hers. It put hope back into him. But, as Quill walked out of the gate of the semi, he was struck by something: a sudden fear that made him look back. He paused, his eyes searching the garden, finding nothing. It was. . just that feeling of missing something. Again, that echo resonating inside him. Sooner or later he’d figure out what it meant. Maybe all this was just telling him that as a person he was built on nothing. Well, he knew that, and he’d keep going anyway. He headed back to the car and ordered the others to go and get some sleep.

On Tuesday morning they had a reply from the pathologist, stating that the swab record from Horackova was indeed a match for the mitochondrial DNA found in the kids in the cauldron. Quill called up the arresting officer of the time and filled him in, just in case Horackova had relatives who should be contacted and could be interviewed. But there were none. And, so far, there were no replies from any of the London nicks that had been forwarded his message about anomalous perp statements. ‘If we don’t get a lead by tomorrow night,’ he told his team, ‘I’ve put a plan in place for any footballer that scores a hat-trick.’ He handed a folder to Ross. ‘It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.’

‘I didn’t think you were going to call me,’ said Joe, eyeing Sefton over his pint. They’d been talking about pretty well nothing for an hour. And Sefton was getting more and more tired, and more and more certain of what he needed. And he was so aware of ‘We smell death near you soon,’ and he needed to find some way past all of this.

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘You look like. .’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you want to tell me anything?’

‘Yeah.’ So he told Joe everything. Copper: he showed him his warrant card, because he wanted to establish a baseline for the shit to follow. UC. Losley. Everything. He was totally breaking the rules, thus leaving himself entirely vulnerable, but, what the fuck? Joe’s expression grew worried, then scared. ‘Walk away if you want to,’ Sefton said. ‘I need to tell somebody or I’ll go mental. I need someone to talk to about this, to bounce some ideas off, and. . just to talk to. I’m not being listened to, and we’re running out of time. It’s match day tomorrow and we might be going to hear about some kids being fucking boiled alive.’

‘So this is why a lot of the news about Losley makes no sense.’

‘You believe me?’

‘I think. . I’ll reserve judgement. Maybe this is. . a sort of a metaphor for something, but I saw you when you met “Jack” that time, and you weren’t faking that. The least I can do is listen.’

Sefton grabbed him by the back of his head and kissed him. ‘Okay,’ he said after, ‘maybe that’s not the least I can do.’

On match day, Ross woke to her alarm, aware that she’d had terrible dreams, but not remembering them. She went in to work with her iPod playing loudly in the car. Not using the radio, because then she’d hear about Losley. She didn’t want to hear about Losley until she walked into the Portakabin, and then it was all about Losley. Because at that point she could do something.

Do something about Losley? It seemed even more deferred now. That discontinuity was sinking deeper and deeper into her, so she felt that it would one day reach her heart and kill her. What did getting Losley matter, if her dad was in Hell? Continual torment. No passing of time. No ending. She had felt it distantly. She had heard Costain describe it. She could imagine it. And imagine it she did, till she stopped herself. She thought instead of the kids they were trying to save. Then she felt guilty. And so that cycle went round and round.

The newspapers were full of anticipation, a pile of them sitting on the table. That Losley face was everywhere, today looking like a badge in the top right-hand corner of the Star. The Sun had put a green filter over the photo.

‘It’s as if she’s become a cartoon character,’ said Quill. ‘Except people are also terrified of her. Families are taking their kids out of school and moving off to the country-’

‘The rich ones,’ said Costain.

‘-but the public deal with it by making her into. . I don’t know, Mr Magoo with murder too. She’s bloody everywhere.’ He must have seen the look on Ross’ face, because he led her over to where Sefton had placed his holdall on one of the tables.

‘If we find her today,’ said Sefton, stepping forward, ‘we’re as ready as we can be.’

‘If this was an episode of CSI, we could use that single photo of her to find her in databases, crowd scenes, bloody. .’ Quill waved a hand to finish his sentence. He looked as if he’d had a few last night.

‘I think that feeling,’ said Ross, ‘of not being able to control things is why people started doing stuff like Losley does, way back when. That’s why it’s town stuff. Everyone going back and forth in the city, doing deals, getting one up on each other, when maybe you were used to how it was in the country, just working your land and stuff, same thing happening every year. . The city makes you want it now, makes you want it easier. But the bureaucracy of the city also grinds against that, makes you look for a way to get round it.’

‘Dark satanic mills,’ said Sefton. ‘But the city changes all the time. And the users we’ve met dress old. It’s as if, long ago, a few people worked out some ways to use this stuff, which worked back in the day, and they’ve been passing those methods on. Maybe this lot are bottom of the food chain. They’re just. . living in the ruins, playing out the same old games.’

‘They’re like junkies,’ said Costain. ‘They’re not really using it. It’s using them.’

‘Maybe they’re still getting used to their new freedom, if someone was previously policing them. I wonder who that was? The bigger dogs? I think Losley’s the only one of those we’ve had a scent of.’

‘It’s a pity,’ said Ross, ‘that we can’t tell the public about the forgetting, however she manages that.’

‘Thankfully,’ said Quill, who had been reflexively checking his emails again, ‘coppers have less imagination than the general public. We’ve got something here.’

Late last night, Terry and Julie Franks, who lived in Brockley, had been arrested on suspicion of murder. Mr Franks’ brother, puzzled, amazed and then outraged when he’d continually asked about his nephew and niece, and been rebutted with increasing vehemence, had finally gone to his local nick. ‘’Cos the Franks,’ said Quill, ‘have insisted they don’t have any children!’

‘She wouldn’t want to keep them for long,’ said Costain, ‘so she’s taken them ready for tonight.’

‘I’d say she won’t kill them until she knows she needs to,’ said Ross. ‘She must know that taking them, even with this forgetting bit, is the most dangerous thing she does. Most of the long boiling process must therefore happen post-mortem. No hat-trick, she hangs on to the kids for next time.’

Quill got on the phone and started yelling. ‘No, tomorrow’s not good enough. I want them put in a fucking van and brought over here for interview right now. You read the papers, don’t you? Yeah, bit of a hurry on here!’

Sefton was pinning a map of London to the wall. He stuck a red pin in Willesden. Ross realized he was indicating where Losley’s houses were, and she looked up the other addresses to add further pins. Sefton finally added a speculative white pin at the Franks’ address in Brockley. ‘Look at how far away that is,’ he said.

‘Indicative of a new base,’ said Costain. ‘Fucking A.’

Ross brought up the council bill records for Brockley, and started spooling through them, though that was going to take her hours.

Quill suddenly shouted incoherently. ‘Patterns!’ he continued. ‘Patterns with the victims! This is what I’ve been missing! Frigging map!’

Ross swiftly brought up a list of where every victim with a pile of the soil in their garden had lived. They grabbed yellow-headed pins and, between them, covered the map.

Then they stepped back.

And inclined their heads and squinted, as if they were looking at a particularly difficult piece of modern art.

‘It’s sort of like a. . jumping horse,’ said Sefton. ‘Maybe?’

‘There’s a kind of concentration around. .’ began Quill.

‘Storks on the roof,’ said Ross.

‘Eh?’

‘Is there a genuine correlation between number of children born in Dutch houses and the number of storks that come to nest on the roof, supposedly bringing babies?’ said Ross. ‘The maths says, “God, yes”; it screams out at you. But that’s because bigger houses equals richer families, equals more incentive to breed. At least, that was the case back when rich people did breed more. Here all it means is that, yes, this pattern isn’t completely random, there is a concentration here, but that’s only because those are upmarket areas where footballers and gang bosses might live. Money is a hidden power too. And everything’s within reasonable reach of Losley’s known addresses. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.’

Quill slumped, and Ross thought she could see something terrible appear in his face. That wasn’t what he’d been missing. And whatever that was, it was getting harder for him all the time.

‘Pity,’ said Costain. ‘I’ve always wanted to be working on a case where the dots on a map formed a pattern.’

Ross called the Brockley nick, and got photos of the suspects’ house sent over. ‘Look there,’ she said, for there was that glowing soil shape in their garden.

The match was due to kick off at 8 p.m. And, of course, it was going to be broadcast live on Sky and Radio Five. Purely for the sport, of course. As the hours ticked away, and all four of them continued looking through the council records for the boroughs around and including Brockley, and started pulling out the many sighting reports of Losley from around that area, Ross found that she was developing stomach cramps. It hadn’t even occurred to her to eat, and she wondered if any of the others were managing to do so. It took until bloody nineteen-thirty for a van to arrive outside the Portakabin, bringing with it the two suspects, Mr and Mrs Franks. Their brief had arrived also, Janice Secombe from Mountjoy’s, stepping carefully out of her car and raising an eyebrow at the stretch of mud between her and the cabin itself.

‘Ross,’ said Quill, picking up the tape recorder he’d borrowed from Gipsy Hill that morning, ‘you’re with me in interview room one. By which I mean the far corner here. You two, keep checking those records and loom menacingly in the background.’

Quill knew Secombe from many such encounters. She was obviously loving this bizarre lack of the usual form, knowing how it’d play before a jury. But Quill was pretty sure these two weren’t destined for a trial. He set the tapes running with all due procedure, then he studied the suspects sitting across the table from Ross and himself.

For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he saw blood bursting from their faces.

This was going to be such a long shot. Despite the briefing notes they’d prepared on a few things they could have a go at, there were whole areas which, especially with a brief present, could not be touched on. Not without having these two immediately set loose with one hell of a story to tell the press, one which would snare the team and stop them from having the freedom to do what they had to.

‘My clients,’ began Secombe, ‘are the victims in a missing persons case-’

‘No we’re bloody not!’ said Terry Franks.

‘-who have suffered severe trauma-’

‘We haven’t!’

‘They. . agree with me, however, that there is no justification therefore for treating them like criminals. And I personally fail to see what they might have to do with the case you’re obviously pursuing here.’

That aspect must be freaking her out. They’d hidden the Ops Board before this lot had arrived, but Secombe knew which of them was working on what. Terry and Julie Franks looked as if they hadn’t slept recently. They were both in their late twenties, him with a number-two haircut that was growing out a bit, earring, white jacket, T-shirt with something pretty on it. If his mobile rang, it’d be something r amp;b. She was in a grey top that looked as if she’d worn it for three days. Layers in the hair, but no makeup today. She hadn’t been bothered. She wasn’t trying to put on a front, and hadn’t even done the tiny modest stuff that she would have done to attempt to indicate she deliberately wasn’t trying to put on a front.

Innocent, both of them. He wouldn’t normally have let that supposition mean anything, because you always worked the facts in front of your accumulated experience, and he had in the past met many seemingly innocent fuckers who’d done some terrible shit. But in this case he knew it to be genuine, and — had he a heart to break — it would have done so. They were saying something to him about himself, but in ways he couldn’t understand.

‘All right,’ said Terry angrily, ‘what’s going on?’

‘They keep saying we’ve got kids,’ interrupted his wife, still trying to be reasonable while he was already worked up. There was half a laugh in her voice. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad! As if we wouldn’t know. But I’m glad we can sort it out now. It’s some sort of error in the paperwork.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Franks,’ said Quill, ‘but it isn’t.’

Terry immediately started to speak, but the brief cut across him. She said, ‘We’re still trying to establish the facts in this case, aren’t we?’

Ross put copies on the desk of what the brief and the Franks pair had already seen: birth certificates for Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven.

‘We keep saying there must be a mistake,’ Terry continued. ‘Just the same name. . maybe they used to live at our address.’

Ross, with no expression at all, put the photos on the table. They’d been taken both from what had been found during a search of the Franks’ house and from the albums of the children’s uncle and other relatives. They showed Terry and Julie with three happy, messy, gurning children at a theme park, by the sea side, on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry, wearing stupid hats.

The couple stared at the photos, as dumbfounded by them now as they must have been when first they saw them. ‘That’s just it — why would someone go to all that bother,’ Terry protested, ‘to Photoshop these? We are obviously being set up for something!’

‘If you don’t have any children,’ said Quill, ‘why is your house full of toys? Why, on several occasions during the last year, did you hire your niece as a babysitter?’

‘First Craig, and now you lot!’ The man was getting shrill, as if he could fight reality back to what was normal. ‘We get so worked up, we can’t hardly hear what people are saying, because they keep going on and on! You think we might just let these kids you think we have wander off, and forget about them? Forget about them after they went missing? Our own kids? Do you really think anyone would do that? Is that how far you think we’ve sunk?’

‘Everyone is looking at us funny,’ said Julie, more carefully, ‘and there’s something they’re not saying. It’s like they think we’re. . paedophiles. And we’re not! We’re terrified of people like that.’

‘Why?’ said Ross.

The couple were suddenly silent.

‘Why would a couple without children be terrified of paedophiles?’

The silence continued, while their mouths worked as if they were trying to find something to say.

Julie finally raised her hands. ‘I have. . been thinking about this,’ she said. ‘We’re not. . Whatever you may think of us, we’re not stupid.’

‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Quill gently.

‘I remember buying the. . I suppose you’d call them toys. Over, well, years. I remember buying this. . junior tennis set from the pound shop. Just this pair of yellow plastic rackets and a soft ball. Perfect, I thought. Only now. . now I can see that seems weird, because we don’t use it, do we?’

‘It’s not a crime,’ muttered Terry, ‘whatever this is, it’s not a crime.’

‘And I have to. . to try really hard to think about that. It’s like if I don’t think about it, it goes away again. Like my brain doesn’t want to think about it, because maybe there’s something. . terrible. Please. . Please tell us. Are we. . living wrong? Is there something. . wrong with us?’

‘Mrs Franks-’ began the brief.

‘There can’t be something wrong with both of us!’ explained Terry. ‘Everyone thinks we’re lying-’

‘I don’t,’ said Quill, causing the brief to look startled.

He put a photo of Losley on the table. They’d wondered if making this connection would get some huge and terrible reaction out of the couple, so they’d left it to last.

‘Who’s that?’ said Terry.

‘I gather you haven’t been paying much attention to the news?’

‘We read the paper,’ said Julie, sounding as if she wondered what they were being accused of now. ‘The Mirror, every day, cover to cover. Though Terry starts at the back, don’t you?’

‘Then you should remember Mora Losley, the witch of West Ham? She’s been featured on the front page six or seven times, as the single biggest story.’

The couple glanced at each other, and then back at Quill, a look on their face that was half fearful and half wondering if he was joking.

‘Never heard of her,’ said Terry.

Quill and Ross stared at each other. And then at Costain and Sefton, who were coming over to boggle at this incredible news.

They all said it together. ‘Oh. .’

They sent the Franks and their brief over to the nick for a cuppa, the uniforms from the van escorting them. The football had started, and Sefton set the PC to stream it, so it became a noise in the background. Ross realized that they’d hear any goals just from the crowd volume going up. It caused sheer stress, but they had to do it.

‘She made them forget her too,’ said Quill.

‘Which means it wasn’t a snatch-off-the-street job,’ said Ross. ‘We don’t know how it went with Horackova, but the only reason I can see for making people forget Losley herself is that they would have seen or known something important about her, something that could be used to help us.’

‘Maybe we can hypnotize them or something. Maybe that’s exactly what she does.’

‘Long-term, maybe, but does science even work against this? If hypnotism is even science. No, fuck that. . fuck that. The shape of the hole can tell us. The hole is what she took from their memories; we have to think about that shape.’ Ross realized she was pacing back and forth, waving her hands wildly. But sod how she must appear. ‘How does she make them forget?’

There was a sudden roar from the PC. ‘And it’s one-nil to Norwich City!’ yelled commentator Alan Green. ‘Tony Ballackti, that’s five goals in three games for him. And, only five minutes in — who’d bet against him doing it again in this match?’ And that sarcastic suggestion in his voice echoed what everyone else in the country was feeling. ‘Some people in the crowd are already shouting for them to take him off, but they’re being roared down by the Norwich fans. Ballackti himself is shaking his head. He wants more goals! They say any hat-trick player has got a helicopter to take him out of here straight after the match, that Cardiff themselves have hired private security. They say lots of things but they’re not telling us which of them is true.’

‘Exactly,’ said Quill.

Ross found that the thoughts in her head had now jammed. A terrible silence reigned.

Then Sefton kept going, and she loved him for that. She sagged against the wall and listened.

‘She must use one of her bloody gestures on them,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s done anything that wasn’t line of sight, even if you count text messages. She appeared in their garden, and. . no, like with Toshack, she couldn’t do it through the wall. She needed to get inside-’

Ross let out a little noise from her throat and considered. Eighty-three more minutes. Two more goals. A prolific scorer. A defence with holes in it. And then three more children to be boiled to death. Charlie, aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven, whose faces they’d seen in those photos. And only them to stop it happening.

‘She doesn’t need to be invited in,’ said Quill. ‘She’s not a vampire. She’ll just walk through the wall.’

‘Waste of energy, though,’ commented Costain, ‘waste of soil. She’s in a war, so she doesn’t waste ammunition. If she can get them to open that door, she will.’

‘And walking through the wall, unseen,’ said Ross, forcing herself back into this discussion, ‘would not necessitate her having to get them to forget about her.’ She paused suddenly, realization dawning. ‘Maybe they saw part of her MO! Something she doesn’t want known, something she wants to be able to do again.’ Ross had started to shout, and she knew it but she couldn’t stop it. ‘That’s the shape of the hole. What wouldn’t she want us to know? Maybe she’s. . pretending to be something?!’

‘Not the babysitter,’ said Costain.

‘Don’t tell me those two have a cleaner,’ said Sefton.

Quill grabbed his phone and told the uniforms to get the Franks back over. The four of them actually met them halfway to the Portakabin and marched beside them on the way back inside.

Quill was already firing questions at them. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘has access to your house? Not individual people, but types of people.’

The couple looked at each other, feeling increasingly scared. ‘I suppose. . the social workers?’ suggested Julie.

Quill didn’t bother asking why such people would visit a ‘childless couple’. ‘In the plural? Can you describe them?’

‘There are two,’ said Julie. ‘One’s Maria, who’s a. . coloured lady, in her forties, going grey a bit before her time. And the other. .’ She suddenly stopped. They were now standing at the door of the Portakabin, Ross shivering with both the cold and the tension, the sound of that bloody radio washing over them. ‘It can’t be only the one, because Maria was asking me about the other one. .’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God!’

Quill darted into the Portakabin ahead of the others. He’d made sure there were no more details to be had from them, and then sent a screaming Julie and her husband back to the van, back towards a legal process that he would try to make sure didn’t hurt them. In his hand he held the business card of social worker Maria Sutton. Her mobile rang six times. . then she answered. Quill put the conversation on the speaker.

‘I only know about it because other people on my list mentioned her,’ she said. ‘There was quite a scare about it locally, over the last couple of weeks, what with this old woman showing up and claiming to be a social worker. And I did wonder about Mora Losley, because it was all over the local papers. But this woman looked nothing like her, and it never seemed to come to anything, since no children were taken.’

‘She was preparing for lots of sacrifices,’ said Ross, too far away to be heard by the woman on the phone. ‘She was sorting out where the local kids lived, and she didn’t make them all forget. She didn’t need to.’

‘Other people on your list: have you got that list in a document you can email me right now?’

Sefton went to Google Maps on his phone, and zoomed in on the area Maria Sutton now described, two or three of the poorer neighbourhoods of Brockley, presently being squeezed out by the continuing gentrification of the area. There were open spaces here: Crofton Park, Telegraph Hill Park, Peckham Rye Park. All Quill could think about, as he finished the call, was how that would give Losley room to lurk — lots of places for her to connect her remaining West Ham soil to the ground.

‘She’s in there,’ said Ross. ‘The bitch is in there somewhere.’

Quill looked to his email and found the address list. ‘There’s only about twenty of these.’ He drew with his finger, on the screen of Sefton’s phone, a rough square. ‘If she kept this close to home-’

‘And Tony Ballackti has been brought down in the penalty area! The referee is pointing to the spot!’

They all fell silent. ‘Don’t choose him to take it,’ said Costain helplessly. ‘Don’t.’

‘And there is despair at the Boleyn Ground now. It feels as if this is going to go on and on, with a parade of goals. The fans here, they’ve been hit hard by the press stories of the last few weeks. Speaking to some of them, they think they’ve been tarred with the same brush. And now Norwich are showing no mercy. It’s Ballackti to take the penalty, because it would normally be. It has to be, I suppose, if we’re not giving in to fear.’

‘You don’t know anything about fear!’ yelled Quill. ‘You don’t fucking know about fear!’

‘Ballackti puts the ball on the spot, brave in the face of all this. And I’ve never heard such sounds from a football crowd.’

Quill could imagine the smiling man somewhere among them, revelling in it.

‘There are West Ham supporters, here and there, not barracking Ballackti exactly, but shouting to him. They’re trying to tell him not to take it, to miss it deliberately. They’re pleading with him.’

Ross grabbed the phone from Sefton so quickly that it nearly made him drop it. ‘We can see what she’s done to the records! What about the internet?! Try Google Street View!’

‘But Ballackti steps up, he places the ball. .’

Ross pinched at the screen, making agonized expressions as each zoom-in took seconds to load. ‘I think I can see something. In those streets, just a dot.’ She zoomed in closer. They all craned to look.

‘He’s taking his run-up-!’

‘Where is it?!’ asked Costain. ‘What’s the address?’

A roar from the crowd. What sort of roar? They already knew.

‘And Ballackti’s put it away for his second goal! Surely they must take him off now? Surely, if they don’t, he’ll score again!’

But now they could all see it, as they’d seen the house in real life. As they’d seen Losley on that camera footage. The obscene light shone out of the screen at them: glistening and slick, an abomination in this world. From one particular suburban street. One particular house.

Sefton grabbed his holdall and the team ran for the door.