London Falling

TWENTY-SEVEN

With the cage holding the cat, Costain stood at the empty Boleyn Ground, in the gap where Losley’s and Toshack’s season-ticket seats had once been. Match day was tomorrow, and there were already preparations being made. He unbolted the cage. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘out you get.’

The cat looked at him in surprise for a moment, then did so, dropping lightly on to the concrete. ‘Are you releasing me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve got nothing further to contribute to the inquiry. And maybe I’m looking for some good karma. You’ll know from your radio plays that Brits always treat animals decently, even when they’re being shits to each other.’

‘Oh, thank you. Another unexpected kindness.’

‘Will you go back to her?’

‘I’d like to, because I agree with her that she should have me around. But that all depends on whether or not she spots me here. It was a reasonable choice of site on your part. As any true Irons fan would, she does look in on the ground from time to time, remotely as it were. I shall remain here and see what transpires.’

Costain squatted to smooth the creature’s head. ‘Good luck, Tiger Feet.’

‘Thank you. You have been very kind. You are not as bad as you have been painted.’

Costain smiled and headed out of the ground. When he’d driven a significant distance away — further, he hoped, than Losley would ever notice if looking in on her beloved turf — he stopped the car, and took the receiving station for the locator bug from out of the glove compartment. The GPS showed the tiny flash of light at the Boleyn Ground repeating. He didn’t know how long it took for food to make its way through a cat’s digestive system, but he hoped Losley would take the bait before then. She would surely want to retrieve something that she’d invested so much in creating. And there the cat would be highly visible, in a place she paid great attention to, and seemingly free to take back. She might even think she could learn a few things about the coppers from it, but Costain hoped that the friendship he’d so carefully developed with it would protect them from any devastating revelations. And, to be honest, they were utterly vulnerable where she was concerned, anyway. Losley would take the cat back to wherever she was hiding, and the locator bug would then tell them where that was, so they could all swoop in and save Jessica. That was his plan. But, standing here now, it seemed a pretty distant hope.

His phone rang. ‘If you’ve finished your own secret project,’ said Quill, ‘then get your arse back here. Ross has called in, and she’s got us a solid lead.’

‘Me, too,’ he said, and managed to describe what he’d just done without committing the sin of pride. Not much. As he drove off, though, he wondered about sins committed against cats, and whether or not whatever went around really did come around. He hoped he’d get a chance to prove otherwise.

Ross marched into the evidence room to find Quill, Costain and Sefton standing surrounded by all eighty-three stationery boxes. ‘Still can’t find anything,’ said Quill, looking at her almost angrily. ‘Who’s this source of yours?’

For a moment, she wanted to lie or say nothing at all. But then she realized that it was just a ridiculous reflex, that she had no reason to. So she told them everything. She saw that Sefton was looking as if he understood, as if he’d been through something enormous himself. Costain looked sombre as she described her dad’s circumstances. When she got to the bit about the boxes, she went and picked one up, and turned it over in her hands. She put her hand inside it, feeling all the way around. Frustrated, she put it aside and picked up another.

‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Costain.

‘It must be something. . normal. Last time we looked, we were so into having the Sight, but Toshack didn’t possess that. .’ She stopped and realized that, as she’d been talking, she was actually looking straight at what she’d been talking about. ‘Look.’

In biro, on one side of the box, there was a tiny X.

‘X marks the spot,’ said Costain, uncertainly.

‘See if you can find any more,’ said Quill.

They found twenty-nine boxes with Xs marked on them. They made a pile of them. They worked fast, aware of the ticking clock, the football match approaching, and what any single goal would mean. Ross discovered that most of them had two Xs, on opposite sides. Four of them, like the one Ross had picked up first, had only one X. The Xs came in two colours, blue and red. Always the same colour on both sides, except-

Ross held up the special box and spun it to show them all four sides: two blue Xs opposite two red ones. ‘Do you see?’ she said. The others watched as she put it all together. The special box, with four Xs, went in the middle of the space they’d cleared on the evidence room floor. She placed a row of boxes, red X adjacent to red X, running right through it, so the special box remained in the middle. Then she did the same with the blue-X boxes.

They now formed a single large X.

As soon as she shoved the last box into place, something happened. There was a little noise. . as the boxes all shunted closer together. She gently tried to move one of them. But it was stuck against the box beside it, and also to the floor. She stood up and looked at the others.

‘Kick arse,’ said Costain.

Sefton sniffed. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘Fresh air,’ said Quill. ‘Didn’t recognize it for a second.’

It was coming from the boxes, Ross realized. She leaned over to sniff. . and leaped back as the construction. . started to move. It was spinning on the floor, like something badly animated in a children’s show. The lines of boxes were sweeping around, faster and faster, without making any sound to suggest their bases scraping against the concrete. She blinked. . Okay, so the concrete underneath the boxes seemed to be moving too. The X spun faster and faster until it was a silent blur, just a circle of movement on the floor. At the same time a pleasant wet winter breeze was wafting into the stuffiness of the nick.

They kept watching it. They waited. It kept going. Nothing else happened.

‘What’s this for, then?’ said Costain.

‘I think it’s some sort of. . travel thing,’ said Ross. ‘Dad tried to say it was Toshack’s way of getting himself to a lock-up that we haven’t yet found.’

Costain picked up one of the other boxes. ‘I think I heard him working this,’ he said, ‘through the door to his den. This must be why he spent so much time up there.’ He took an awkward run-up at the spinning shape, and threw the box into the air above it.

The box vanished.

They walked around the spinning boxes for a while.

‘We’ve got to see if it sort of. . does it all in one go. .’ said Quill ‘. . or if someone’s going to get their arm chopped off if they make an extravagant gesture.’ He got a mop and, holding it gently, moved it towards the air above the spinning boxes. The end of the mop vanished into thin air. He pulled it back, and there was the end of the mop again. Ross felt relieved. There was a line around the circumference of the boxes: outside it, things were visible; inside, they weren’t — and those things could be safely retracted again.

‘So that leads to-?’

‘Still somewhere in Greater London, judging by his travel time when he used the car instead,’ said Costain.

‘Wait a sec,’ said Sefton. He ran out, and returned a few minutes later with his holdall, from which he produced the vanes that Quill had taken off the bloke who’d attacked him in Westminster Hall. ‘I’ve been wondering if these were meant to be a weapon, or if. .’ He held them towards the spinning boxes as if they were dowsing rods, and took a step forward. The vanes turned in his hands, crossing each other. ‘X marks the spot again,’ he said.

‘And does that mean this is safe?’ asked Costain.

‘How should I know?’

‘Could you find Losley with those?’

‘I think it’s kind of short range. So. . only if she’s right in front of me. And then I think I’d know.’

‘All right,’ said Quill, chucking away the mop, ‘who’s up for doing this? Oh, right, no time to draw lots, so that’d be me.’ And, before anyone could say anything, he’d taken a few steps back and then run at it.

Quill had jumped while hoping that, if they were wrong about this, then at least it’d be quick. He was thinking of Jessica. Of how little he knew of Jessica. Of wanting to get to know her.

And then suddenly he was somewhere else.

He hit a wall. He swore. . fell. . landed. And looked around him, scrambled to his feet, exulting.

They came through one by one: Ross then Costain then Sefton. They took standing leaps.

‘Don’t take a run up at it!’ Quill had shouted back to them.

They all landed against the wall and steadied themselves with their outstretched palms.

Quill stood there watching them, holding his bruised nose. They found themselves in a lock-up, what looked like the inside of a unit in a storage compound somewhere. The only light was from under the door. He found a switch and suddenly he could see properly. They’d come out of a vortex that looked just like the one they’d jumped in to, except that it seemed to revolve just the concrete floor here, rather than any boxes. It kept going, now they’d exited. It operated in a space that looked specifically cleared for it, because every inch of the rest of the unit was full of other cardboard boxes, metal chests and shelves packed with books.

‘Aladdin’s cave,’ said Quill. ‘There you go, Harry.’ He saw Ross looking around with that expression on her face which said she was inside yet another part of what she’d grown up among, and yet of which she’d been unaware.

‘This is where Toshack vanished to all those times, when he wanted to consult his “advisers”,’ said Costain.

‘Meaning,’ said Sefton, ‘he had a way of finding Losley from here.’

Quill looked to Costain, who checked the locator bug monitor, and shook his head. ‘Let’s get to it,’ he said.

As they began to search at high speed, with Ross taking the lead, Quill found himself working beside Sefton. ‘What about your expedition?’ he asked. ‘Did you find anything?’ The young DC had come in earlier, gone up to the Ops Board, stared at it for a while, and then just ended up doodling surreal swirls around the outside of it. Quill was still wondering if he’d gone a bit mental.

Sefton turned to him, still with that bloody Obi-Wan Kenobi expression of his. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m still working it out.’

The GPS on Costain’s phone indicated they were in a trading estate near Heathrow. The contents of the lock-up turned out to be frustratingly mundane, which wasn’t how Costain would have seen it just a few weeks ago. Back then they’d have thought of this place as the mother lode of all evidence. There were records of bank accounts that they’d never dreamed of, a full set of accounts books, too. There were bundles of cash, in Euros and Canadian dollars. It was the most thoroughly equipped bolt-hole, containing what a boss put aside for his last rainy day.

‘Look at this,’ said Quill, having heaved open a metal chest with a crowbar. He lifted out boxes of ammunition, an entire stack of them.

‘All different calibres,’ said Costain, taking one from him, ‘for all sorts of different types of guns. Not like him to bother, since the soldiers tended to keep their weapons at home.’

Sefton pointed to a note on the boxes — the manufacturer’s address. ‘Made in London,’ he observed. ‘Like at the New Age market. It’s the London stuff that works.’

‘Bloody hell, Rob had obviously worked out enough about Losley to get himself a bit of an insurance policy, ammo for whatever he was packing at the time that might actually give him the drop on her. Only we nicked him and he couldn’t use it.’

‘Objective seven on the board,’ said Ross, stepping over. ‘Maybe we could have her with those.’

‘If,’ said Quill, ‘we could ever persuade an Armed Response Unit to shoot an unarmed granny. And maybe shoot her many times.’ He looked between them. ‘What. . any of you lot got guns at home? Thought not.’

They went back to their work. Costain found himself feeling desperately conflicted. There was currently something he had to do urgently, as a way out of everything that loomed above him, but what they were in the middle of was just as urgent. As he searched along the shelves of one of the metal units, suddenly Sefton was beside him, working the other way.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ said Costain.

‘I kept trying to. . write off what you experienced. And I’ve just discovered that. . some of this stuff presents itself in different ways to different people, yeah? I still think there’s only science. I still don’t think there’s a God — at least not like people think there is. I’m going to keep on being proud to say that. I have to. I think I’ve started to. . know something about that now: what Rabbi Shulman called a “deep understanding of the natural world”. Only I’m just starting, at that. I’ve got a lot to sort out and that might take me forever. But. . when you saw Hell. . I think it might be one of many things that aren’t hanging over just you, but over all of us. I know what’d be in my own version. I’m saying. . I think you saw something real.’

Costain stopped, not wanting to reveal how he was feeling. ‘Mate,’ he said, raising a hand.

‘Skip.’ Sefton clasped it.

They looked round at the sound of Quill’s sudden exclamation. They went over to see, along with Ross. He’d just found a cluster of five much smaller cardboard boxes, the kind you’d keep business cards in. He’d put them together in an X, as with the larger boxes, and, as they watched, this also began rotating. And from the air above it fell a steady stream of white powder.

Costain took a pinch of it between his fingers. ‘Heroin,’ he said. ‘Rob’s supply.’

‘And I don’t think it’s being made out of thin air,’ said Ross. ‘Losley must have set that up for him — and the one that got us here too. On the other end of that’ll be somewhere in Burma or Thailand-’

There was a sudden noise from the smaller boxes. It was an outburst of foreign voices. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘they heard us!’ He reached out suddenly, as if to grab whoever was on the other side-

Costain pulled him aside at the last moment, as the boxes flew apart and the heroin puffed up into the air with a sudden release of pressure.

Quill looked furiously at where the boxes had been, rubbing his hand as if his fingers had been nipped. ‘Ta,’ he said, ‘could have been nasty.’

They tried to put the same boxes back together, but they wouldn’t shunt into place. Presumably, whatever was on the other end had been pulled apart. This sudden resumption of interest after such a big gap in communication, Ross thought, would have made the suppliers immediately suspicious. Bloody shame, though. If they’d known that was going to happen, at the very least they could have thrown a locator bug through.

Aware of the clock ticking down towards the start of the match, they got back to work.

Ross was making her way along a row of books, mostly ledgers, when she felt it. It was a feeling born of the Sight. It involved a gravity about this one particular nondescript volume resting beside her hand. But it was more than the familiar feeling that there was something unusual about this book. She called the others over. ‘Do you feel it too?’

They all took turns to touch the book. Right up close to it, and only then, there was a kind of. . nausea. Not sickness, but-

‘It scares me,’ said Sefton, ‘just on its own. It feels like. . the edge of a rooftop. My eyes keep trying to work out where the threat is.’

‘Booby-trapped,’ said Costain. ‘Like that tile.’

‘There’s something. . familiar about it,’ persisted Ross.

‘You mean you saw it when you were a kid?’ asked Quill.

‘Not saw it, but I think it must just have been around sometimes. . in his pocket.’

‘My day for doing this,’ said Quill. He grabbed the book by its spine and threw it off the shelf and onto a nearby desk, as if it was hot. They all leaped back, but nothing happened. Then he took a step towards it, and nodded when Ross asked if he was okay. They all leaned over the desk. The book was The West Ham United Football Book, No. 2, by Dennis Irving, with a foreword by Geoff Hurst.

‘Why is that evil?’ asked Costain.

Ross pointed at the top edge of the book. There were some pages of a different colour sticking up at the back of the text. ‘There’s something else in there.’

‘We need protection,’ said Sefton. ‘What is there we could use for protection?’ He fumbled for his special notebook, and started leafing through the pages. Ross noticed that they were covered with notes added later, so that it looked as if it was starting to become a bit of a grimoire itself.

‘Salt,’ he said finally. ‘That’s the best I can do. The Met chaplain said that was always regarded as a protection against evil. “Always” is good for me. And my mum always threw some over her shoulder, to get in the eye of the devil.’ The twist in the floor was still revolving, making a breeze that, when combined with the cold air coming in under the lock-up door, fluttered everything that wasn’t boxed up. Sefton gingerly jumped back into the middle of it, and returned a few minutes later with some salt from the Gipsy Hill canteen. ‘We’re going to be looking at manufacturers’ addresses a lot, yeah?’ he said, pointing at the container.

‘Packaged in London?’ said Costain. ‘Is that going to be enough?’

‘That means it’s got a bit of London-ness about it,’ said Sefton. ‘And what else have we got?’ He poured some of the salt in a circle around the book, to no effect that Ross could sense. Then he poured some over it. Ross then felt maybe a slight diminution of the power of the thing. Sefton put on his evidence gloves, and gently opened the book, sprinkling salt over every page. ‘It is exactly what it says it is: no marks made on the pages. I’m going to turn to the back.’ He threw a larger amount of salt onto the last page as soon as he got there, and stepped back. When nothing happened, he opened the book again. Inside it were two flattened-out pages of very old paper, brown, cracked at the edges, brittle like leaves. ‘Don’t even breathe on them,’ he said.

Ross could feel the threat crackling from the first page, which looked to be handwritten in some form of old English. She could still make out a few words underneath the salt, but it was the diagram that made her stop and stifle her reaction. It was a drawing of some oddly calm-looking medieval peasant hanging by a noose from the ceiling. There was a wound on his head, and a wound in his side, which was oozing huge drops of blood. A similarly calm man in a robe stood back, a sword in his hand, the other hand in the air, fingers splayed in an unusual gesture. To the left of the hanged man there stood a horned, dog-legged devil with a forked tail, his tongue curled ornamentally. He was spilling coins from a sack, obviously intended as a reward to the man in the robe. Sefton pointed to the page of text facing the loose sheets, where the picture of some long-haired footballer holding a cup had been stained brown.

‘This has been concealed in here for a very long time,’ Ross declared.

She closed her eyes. So this was it, the idea that had killed her father. She could imagine Toshack finding this book in some antique shop. Had it been left there specially for him to find? Maybe. Or maybe this temptation was waiting around to snare just anyone, but Toshack had been ready to receive what was hidden in its pages: a guide on how to sacrifice a man and gain power in return. She could imagine him glancing, curious, at these strange ancient sheets, then starting to read them in detail. The ancient words they contained would have spoken to him, got into his head, whispered to him — as she felt them whispering now. Here’s how you reverse the fortunes of the firm, my son. All it’ll take is the sacrifice of your own brother. That sacrifice of her father had got Toshack his meeting with the smiling man. And the smiling man had then given him Mora Losley. And all Toshack’s riches had flowed from that.

Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and saw that it was Costain. ‘The fucker,’ he said, and she knew that he’d understood what she must be feeling, having finally seen the cause of her misery all this time.

Sefton turned over the page and scattered the salt again. Something golden and fearful bloomed out of the book. It was a name, scribbled in a hand that looked much more modern than anything else here, written right across the diagrams and words of the second page, as if none of that remained important now. It said ‘Mora Losley’.

‘That’s Toshack’s handwriting,’ said Ross, for she could see it now. Him taking this book along to the match that the smiling man had told him to attend; Losley sitting in the seat beside him; the conversation they would have held in whispers, her telling him to take out his pen and write down her name.

‘There’s some power to the paper itself,’ observed Sefton. ‘She must have got him to write it there in order to use that. And now it’s like. .’ He dared to move his finger closer to it, then pulled it away, suddenly more careful now. ‘I can feel it tugging at me. It feels like. . being on the perimeter of those rotating boxes we used to get ourselves here. I think this is. . sort of like a hyperlink on a website. You touch it and go somewhere else.’

‘Losley wouldn’t be up for him summoning her,’ said Costain. ‘He’d have to go to her.’

Before any of them could stop him, Quill slammed his finger down on the golden words. Then, with a yell that shocked Ross, he withdrew it. He made as if to stick the finger in his mouth, but Sefton grabbed his hand to prevent him. ‘Stop doing things like that!’ The finger was badly burned. Ross looked back at the sheet of paper. The name on it was swiftly fading, as the power dissipated. Then it was just ink.

Quill was shaking his hand in the air, furious with himself. ‘Of course that didn’t bloody work. He came back here before we nicked him, so he would have tried that if it would! And I didn’t see a burn on his fingers, because he knew better than to. . knock on a locked door, or something! Fuck!’

Costain was again checking the monitor. When he looked up from it, it was obvious that nothing had changed. Except that his own expression had hardened, and he looked to have made a decision. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have to move as soon as this bug shows the cat’s been picked up. If it is. So’ — he handed the monitor to Ross — ‘there’s something I can’t put off doing any longer.’

And, before anyone could stop him, he stepped over to the spinning boxes and vanished.