The Severed Streets

SIXTEEN

‘Thanks for coming in for us,’ said Sefton. They were back at the Portakabin, with very strong coffee and, if Quill himself was anything to go by, a feeling of both relief and new pressure at having found a fresh lead. The name Mary Arthur was now written under the victim photograph on the Ops Board. That was a precious data point that their mysterious enemy would become aware they knew of, if they went to sleep.

Costain stretched his knee and winced. ‘We should have them for not keeping a fire escape in working order.’

‘Mary Arthur,’ said Ross, looking up from the PC. The others gathered around to see. ‘Last known address in Muswell Hill, a landlord who called the police when she went missing … two months ago.’

‘Way before she was in that bar,’ said Costain. ‘Looks like she went back to her freelance work.’

‘Having cut off all ties with everyone she knew,’ said Sefton. ‘She deliberately vanished.’

‘Is that her mobile number that was written on the business card we found in Spatley’s office?’ asked Quill.

‘Not that’s listed,’ said Ross.

They went over to the board. Ross reached for an association line, then put it back in the box. ‘I want to associate Mary Arthur with Spatley,’ she said. ‘But I can’t quite do it yet.’

‘Work it out loud,’ said Quill.

‘Michael Spatley MP handles a business card from a brothel he probably never frequented. He loses it in his office, so he obviously doesn’t think it’s very important. Perhaps he’s copied down the info from it, though we haven’t found that. Perhaps he’s tried the phone number, like we did, and got no result. But Tunstall, or whoever was paying Tunstall, does think it’s important, enough to search the place. Then Mary is attacked, but not killed, by the same entity that killed Spatley. And who’s this fucker?’ She stabbed her finger angrily at the picture of the man who’d been at both the bar and the auction. ‘I think there are, in reality, association lines all over this lot. But I can’t attach them on the board because we don’t know what they are. Oh.’

She’d stopped. Quill felt relief at the sound that indicated an imminent breakthrough. ‘Tell us, maestro.’

Ross put her finger beside the picture of Rupert Rudlin, the actual victim from the bar, and ran it in a circle right round him. ‘I was talking about lots of associations for the others. Then I could see it: no associations for Rudlin, not with anyone on this board.’ She pointed back to the picture of Mary Arthur. ‘She’s linked to all this, though we don’t know how. She was the one who was initially attacked in that bar. How about if the Ripper was there for her, and Rudlin just got in the way?’

Quill felt his relief wane slightly. ‘But … he had a good shot at her. He had every chance to kill her.’

‘And Rudlin is a rich white bloke,’ said Costain.

‘Yeah, we’ve been saying that, haven’t we, that Jack the Ripper now just kills rich white blokes, but Tunstall wasn’t rich, and as for them all being white, well, they’ve all been part of the establishment, so storks on roofs there, but, blokes…’ She trailed off.

Quill waited for more insight, but she just hugged herself and sighed, unsatisfied. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘how would you sum that up?’

‘I’d bet,’ said Ross, ‘and this is an assumption-’

‘Marked as such,’ said Costain.

‘-that Mary Arthur was meant to be the Ripper’s next victim. That he had motive for killing her. And for some reason didn’t, and killed Rudlin instead. If we can crack that motive and that reason, we might crack this.’

They kept looking at the board. They wanted desperately for something new to leap out at them. It didn’t. Quill finally turned to an expectant-looking Costain and made his decision. ‘I’m going to choose to believe,’ he said, ‘that our dream lurker already knows all we know. That he or she might actually get scared off by the idea that we know what they’re up to in our brains. So tonight we try Sefton’s protections, and if we feel we’re being got at, we do our damnedest to wake up, and we don’t yet resort to snorting bloody meth, all right?’

* * *

It was in the early hours by the time Costain and Ross got to 16 Leyton Gardens. Ross had asked Costain, as soon as they got in the car, to get out his supply, and he’d demonstrated to her how to sniff it. It felt good; the effect wasn’t as extreme as she’d expected. But then, she’d experienced some extreme things to compare it to. The others could do what they liked; she and Costain had reasons of their own for staying awake.

She’d realized, spending the day with him — sometimes nearby, sometimes away, sometimes with his voice over a speaker — how strange it was for her to be with someone. They’d touched each other in passing, when nobody else was looking, just a hand on her arm. To have touch in her life … it was like a sense she’d lost the use of. There was comfort in it. It made her aware of where the happiness would be if she could feel it. It was like a currency she had none of now, none to pay him back with, none to reward herself with. She was trusting him, and that felt weird too, but he deserved it: every look he gave her, every word he said, told her that he did. Still, she planned to stay right beside him to make sure. If he betrayed her …

She didn’t want to think about that. The meth might make her more paranoid. She had to guard against that.

Every now and then during that day he’d looked to her, as if checking she was okay, as if checking for happiness, and had found … his expression said he was slightly disappointed not to have found it. Every time.

They’d driven past burning cars and heard the thunder of drums and smelt the smoke. But for now it was keeping away from Kentish Town.

The address of the owner of the object turned out to be in one of the grottiest two-storey apartment blocks Ross had ever seen. Every one of the flats on the lower floor had a garden, and all but two of them were overgrown. The balconies on the upper row were the same: window boxes stood empty and piles of junk sat, inviting more disarray. The lights in the particular flat they were interested in weren’t on. ‘I wonder how she paid for it,’ she said.

‘The same way you did?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Speeding. I’m never going to be feeling happy. Could you stop asking?’

‘Sorry.’

You’re never going to make me happy, she didn’t add. That’s a conclusion you might end up dwelling on. She leaned into him for a second, just headbutted his shoulder.

They went to the door of the flat and rang the bell. Nobody was in. They asked next door, where there were still lights on. Yes, the bloke in the Spurs shirt said, freaked out to have his doorbell rung at this hour, but comforted by Costain’s warrant card, the young woman who lived there, weird she was, he’d seen her about recently. She kept herself to herself. The only time he’d spoken to her, well, he didn’t think much of her, to be honest.

They got a description, which was as detailed as you might expect from one meeting, generic, even. The small amount of research Ross had done on this woman had found that here was someone else missing from official records, exactly as Losley had been. She wondered how common a trick that was among the Privileged. Ross didn’t want to have to look through hundreds of records to find the ones where the Sight could reveal concealment again, not with the address in question in front of her and the owner in situ, but she would if she had to find out more about her. They went and looked at the door again. It looked easy enough to break in but that threat assessment didn’t include whatever occult nastiness might await inside.

‘Do you reckon it’s in there?’ Costain asked.

‘No idea. Can you feel anything?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither. I was thinking she might have … you know … used it.’ She hadn’t wanted to say that out loud. If one had bought the Bridge to insure one’s own safety, her reading indicated that it had to be on one’s person at the moment of death to do so, but if she’d bought it to return someone to life …

‘I thought that too. Didn’t want to say anything.’

They waited there for a while, not knowing what to do. ‘Do you think everyone who dabbles with the power of London goes to Hell?’ asked Ross. She could feel the drug surging through her brain, putting her above worries like that so she could say them out loud.

Costain shrugged. ‘Toshack said all four of us were. But I never believed that. I thought it was just a threat, another way of saying the Smiling Man was going to kill us.’ He was looking kind of hungrily at the door. He saw Ross looking at him, and his expression changed. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘We keep coming to this house,’ she said. ‘We do it in shifts if we have to. We meet this woman, and then we do whatever we have to to get the Bridge of Spikes.’

* * *

Quill went home to find Sarah already in bed, reading. She looked up in surprise at the bag of salt and carrier bag of clinking items he was carrying. ‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘I feel like experimenting in the bedroom tonight.’

She was horrified when he told her. She talked about getting all of them out of London right now, going to stay in a hotel in Reading or something. But Quill pointed out that, unlike with Losley, there was nothing to indicate that this intruder couldn’t find them wherever they went.

The salt-and-chalk line on the carpet and protective items on the bedpost comforted her only a little. But she got to sleep. It took Quill himself a lot longer, but he finally did.

He woke in the morning to find Sarah looking at him interrogatively. ‘Well?’ she said.

‘I don’t think anything weird happened,’ said Quill. ‘I think the defences might actually have worked.’

* * *

On the way in to Gipsy Hill, while stuck at the traffic lights, Quill put in a call to Forrest’s office, asking if the DCI had time after work tonight to compare notes. He’d emailed his team over breakfast, and none of them had reported incursions into their dreams, but Quill didn’t entirely trust that. He’d been so exhausted and tense last night he suspected he’d have slept through anything. Ross and Costain sounded to have renewed energy. He’d told them the next thing they should do, while continuing to pursue the prostitute Mary Arthur, was start organizing a raid on the Keel occult shop, where they might find some more defences against dream incursion. That was going to need some seriously bogus justification, so getting the main investigation back onside was a priority. Besides, now Quill had a lead to share with them.

He got a call back a few minutes later saying that DCI Forrest would indeed be free and in central London this evening, and that the Opera Rooms was his quiet pub of choice. Quill was pleased to hear that. He could not only do the business he had to do, but he could also become more au fait with a copper whom he felt was much like himself and could try to begin the process of requesting backup for a raid that they’d have to try and squeeze in before a police strike, the purpose of said raid being one that might well escape the DCI.

So Quill entered the Portakabin with some slight hopes. ‘Today is when it all comes together,’ he said, ‘when the elephant in the Portakabin reveals itself.’

‘And shits on us all,’ said Costain, laughing a tad shrilly, Quill thought.

The team spent the day concentrating on Mary Arthur, exploring possible further links, from geographical to financial, between her and the other victims, not excepting Rudlin, on Ross’ insistence. Quill sent Costain back over to the Soviet bar to ask around about prostitutes using the place. This was not, Costain reported back, having been gone a bloody long time, something the bar staff were aware of, even on the sly. So Quill’s prediction for the day failed to come true. But he knew this was the right line, that this was how they’d crack it. He had some hopes that they might have freed themselves from the problem of being got at when they slept as well, though Sefton looked incredulous at the idea that his defences had worked.

At six that evening, thinking that a bit of bonding with a superior officer might well take him over the limit, Quill headed for the railway station. He fell asleep, as he always did on trains. He realized with a start that he was doing so, but he had some of Sefton’s protective objects on him. Finding them with his hand, he let it happen, and he started to dream.

* * *

He was backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, and he was talking to Mick Jagger, who turned out just to want to talk about money, while Quill was all about the music. ‘Nowadays,’ said Mick, ‘the world is just as bad as it was in the seventies, but we’ve had all our illusions scraped off, and it seems people are willing to put up with that without, you know, revolution.’

Quill said something, he wasn’t sure what. This is a normal dream, a wary part of him kept saying.

A nondescript figure was standing behind him. He had a hand on Quill’s shoulders. Quill ignored him for a moment, then realized, with a start, that he was looking into the back of Quill’s head. ‘No, don’t move,’ said the figure calmly, like a doctor. Quill stayed put, with his back to him, but suddenly he had a gun in his hand, because a part of him was yelling that he really needed to have a gun right now.

Quill knew what this was. He spun round and tried to grab the figure, but he couldn’t register any details of it. His hands went straight through it. Quill stumbled forwards into the figure, which was trying desperately to get out of his way, but now Quill had found that the figure was actually a hole, and in trying to grab it he was falling.

Quill lost his footing completely and fell into the void.