The Severed Streets

TWENTY-SIX

TWO NIGHTS AGO

Quill had felt all the signifiers, all the meanings of the world collapse at the moment of his death. For just an instant, it had been a relief, an end to the terrifying pain. He saw his old life fall away below him with his body, and suddenly it had been like when he was dying in Mora Losley’s attic, except now there was nothing to hold him back from speeding higher and higher towards … what? To somewhere where mind and matter existed together in a different way.

He felt the heat and closed his eyes. He had hoped for Heaven. Hadn’t he been good? But he already knew that the supernatural in London wasn’t about good and evil.

Sarah and Jessica — the thought of them made him panic and try helplessly to shove himself back down towards his body. They would hear what had happened to him. The hurt they would suffer. He couldn’t help them. It was too much to bear. He pushed such thoughts away and tried to control his non-existent breathing and concentrated on the now.

He was looking at a sign. He was passing under it. He was being forced to read it. He hated what it said. Could what it said be true? No, it mustn’t be, it mustn’t be. That lie was surely meant to be the first step towards breaking him.

Then he woke up. That’s what it felt like. It took him a few moments to process what he was seeing. He was, bizarrely, standing up. He was standing on a muddy, paved street with dung piled in the gutters, between rows of houses that looked Gothic, imperious. He looked around. There were people in all directions, people and horses! Carriages and carts and cabs. He took a step forwards and a man in a cap carrying a tray of apples on his shoulder shoved him out of the way … then looked at him, afraid, doffed his cap and hurried on. He was in London, he realized. He heard the chimes of Big Ben somewhere in the distance. They sounded weird, echoing. It was hard to hear over the clatter of hooves and people, so many people, many more than in the London he knew. This was, what, Victorian? Was he in Victorian times? No, it didn’t feel real, somehow. Certainly, this was nothing like the glimpse of Hell that Costain had reported, but had he really seen anything past what Quill had seen in those first moments? He saw his reflection in a shop window; he was dressed in bowler hat and waistcoat and long coat with tails. He put his hands on his clothes; he could feel. He had a body, but it felt odd, like after a visit to the dentist. There was a small pain in his arm. For some reason it reminded him of being in hospital. Then he noticed: there was something on his arm, where the pain was. He reached to touch it and found his fingers went through something that was only sort of there. He pulled his sleeve round to see. It was a kind of tag that hovered in the air. It was attached right through the fabric, to his flesh, by — he winced as he tugged at it — something like an intravenous connection. Gingerly, he pulled on it, then harder, tried to pull it out-

He reeled and fell against the window, suddenly full of sickening pain.

He waited until the pain left him. It took its time. The people continued to walk past him, amused by him, some afraid of him.

He looked again at the tag. On it was a tiny clock face, a segment of it ticking down to something, along with his name, and … it said he had a job. He was ‘a police detective’. What was this game? It was almost comforting, being immediately given a function. He was sure it wasn’t meant to be reassuring. He thought again of Sarah and Jessica and wondered how far away he was from where they were. It felt as if they were a billion miles away, or rather, an impossible distance; you couldn’t get there from here. There was something, he thought, looking around again, about the squalor of here that said, implicitly, that one would never leave. It was one of many messages written into the shape of the buildings, the air he was breathing. This was a different state from being awake or dreaming. Who he was had been squeezed into a space that was too small. The shape of it was made to limit and control him and make him afraid. There was none of the comforting pantomime of a dream, the ever-present knowledge one could escape.

This was Hell. He knew it. It was telling him what it was.

Suddenly, he coughed. He’d been tasting the air, and the muck of it had slowly built up in his mouth: it was harder to breathe than it should be. He looked around once more and saw that many of those in the street had cloths or scarves across their faces. He could taste industrial smoke on his tongue, see the fog of it in the distance. The faces of some of the children who passed were spattered, as if they had freckles of tar.

There were children in Hell? He looked up and saw a mother carrying a baby. There were babies here? He shouldn’t be shocked. This wasn’t about good and evil. He knew that now. But it meant that the terrible words written on the sign over the gate might actually be true.

There came the sound of a scream. Behind the window he was looking in, there were … children, naked children, and they were being … oh, God! He went to the door, tried to get in, shouted he was police, and knew in that second that he’d done that out of habit but in doing so had submitted to the label this world had given him. The door was locked, so he tried to smash the window, but nothing would break it. The gentlemen inside looked out at him with smiling bemusement as they continued their abuse. Quill looked back to the street. He saw a uniformed policeman and ran to him. He started yelling, pointing out what was going on. The man was extremely deferential. ‘I see that, sir. There’s nothing we can do, I’m afraid, sir. Would you like to take it out on me instead, sir?’

Quill stopped at the look of genuine fear on the face of the officer. He backed away. He went back to the window. He kicked at it a few times. ‘I’ll be back for you,’ he said, impotently. Those inside hardly registered his presence.

He looked away. He walked off. He stumbled across the street.

He’d been shown that because he was a parent. Hell now made him acutely aware that he was walking away and leaving those children to their fate. He tried to find some mental posture that allowed him to feel more comfortable about that. He could not. He thought about Jessica. Hell laughed at him doing that.

The throngs with their top hats and waistcoats and gloves and pith helmets and spats passed, and he started to see it everywhere now, such horror. Child prostitutes in lewd costumes pulled at the trousers of the men and were kicked away or had their hands grabbed and were led away. Beggars with horrifying ailments were lying in the horse shit, some of them just a head and an arm sticking helplessly up out of it, a hopeful expression on their gnawed-away faces.

Quill tried to haul one up out of it, dodging as carts rushed to and fro, but the beggar was screaming and complaining, urging him not to do it. Quill finally managed to heave him out onto the road surface, such as it was, both of them covered in mud, and found he’d rescued just the smallest part of a chest, with arm and head still attached. ‘What did you go and do that for?’ the beggar asked, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Quill pulled him to the side of the road, with the beggar all the while screaming, ‘Put me back!’

He sat the man up against a lamp post. ‘I’ll find you something to eat,’ he said.

‘Fucking newcomers, trying to make themselves feel better! Fuck you!’ The end of the sentence was cut off as a boot from a passerby sent the beggar tumbling into the street once more.

Quill watched as the beggar was run over by the wheels of a cart and, still alive and screaming, was ground back into the muddy centre of the road. He wondered how deep it was there, if there were layers of them down there, some sort of peace to be found.

You couldn’t die here, he realized.

He moved on. What else could he do? He had to see. Hell noted that he had to see. It would therefore enjoy showing him.

He saw the body of a child being thrown out of a house, covered in soot. Other children ran to the door, pounding on it, demanding to be given the work that had … killed … the boy. The boy’s chest started to heave, and he began to cough, black tar bursting from his mouth and nostrils.

Quill moved on.

What could money mean here? Why did people need it? Quill started to realize that there was a pecking order here and, oh, the pecks were precise and they went deep.

In every window, in every building, at the end of every alley, there was something else that made him sick. By the time he’d fought his way to the end of just this street it felt as if he’d been here for days; he was tired to the core, moving through so many people. That would continue forever, said Hell, with interludes where things would get horrifyingly worse. When would one of those happen? Unexpectedly. By surprise.

He heard what sounded like a distant barking, coming from overhead, and looked up. There was something odd in the sky. It was hard to see, past the smog, but there it was, a band of something, as if he was standing on a planet that had rings. Now he was listening for it, he could hear all sorts of animal noises from up there, and Hell, whispering in his mind, told him that was nothing but animals, that that was where most of them were kept. Quill remembered all the times they’d heard about animals being sacrificed, that those who’d done that thought they were making sacrifice to London itself. But what they killed ended up here. He wondered if the foundations of this place were made of all the teeth and fingers and blood that people had cut from themselves in return for power on earth.

He realized that Hell was telling him things in the place in his head where he normally had the Sight, that the Sight had gone from him now. He had no greater feeling for anything. He found he missed it as if it was armour he no longer wore. The lack of it was another thing that added to his complete vulnerability. He moved on. Ahead, there was a building with red curtains at its windows, looking a bit like somewhere official, a post office or something. People with no expression on their faces, looking as if they’d been here a long time, were trudging tiredly into it. Here came someone who was fighting, being dragged into the building by his fellow citizens, shouting and bellowing, and ripping at their clothing. Quill felt a surge of pride and fellow feeling to see someone putting up a fight, but already he knew that the emotion was only there to be pulled away from him, already he was flinching from the blow that was about to come, and he had been here minutes, and would be here forever.

The people going into the building had something in common: the tags on their arms were flashing like Belisha beacons. Their time, Quill realized, was up. What did that mean? What happened in there? Hell felt his animal fear, the way his new body — which was somehow more compromised and pathetic than his old body, as if all the worrying signs of age that Quill had ever felt were packed into it at once — reacted to the smell of the slaughterhouse. Quill felt something inside him start begging and squealing, and he had to clench his teeth to stop terrible pathetic sounds coming from his mouth. This was in the first few minutes, and he had forever ahead of him. Since the end of the Losley case, he had been blissfully without the depression that had occasionally beset him. He’d fooled himself into thinking that his new awareness of a greater purpose to his work had rid him of his ‘black dog’, but here he knew he still had that darkness in him, here he knew it would be forced back into him.

He turned the corner at the end of the street, at a point where many roads met, where the volume of sound actually increased, and he saw the other side of the red-curtained building, the back door, where people stumbled out again, their tags no longer flashing. They had on their faces expressions of new hope, of shattered emptiness, of howling, sobbing pain, sobbing like laughter. He stopped one of them and started asking questions. ‘Ticking down to the next time,’ the woman said, ‘going to get a drink.’ She shouldered past him.

Quill tried to look at his own tag, but he couldn’t now quite bend his shoulder and neck to see how long he’d got. He’d been able to see it before. Things changed arbitrarily, said Hell. He needed to know the clock was there so he’d be afraid of time running out. But he couldn’t see how much time he had left. He could ask others to look, of course, but that would take a negotiation. He would never know if they were telling the truth. That might be why there was money here, because of that horrifying force underneath this … he didn’t want to think of it as a civilization; it was a continuing parody of one.

He walked on. He had nothing else to do. He couldn’t quite believe he still existed. Why was all this here, instead of just simple death? Why cruelty instead of nothingness? He remembered Sefton speculating that the memories of the dead contributed to London ‘remembering’ a powerful being or location. Maybe that was why so many people had been shoved together in such a small space, to increase that effect. He’d got used to the idea of death as part of nature, or he’d got used to it more than he ever could this. He walked and he walked. He needed to see everything. As if, said Hell, seeing it all would make it better. He covered a lot of ground. Day became night, which meant the sky had just become a little darker.

He found that there were versions of buildings he recognized. The dome of Saint Paul’s was now a basin, filled with steaming water. The Houses of Parliament were like a leaning row of dominoes against the tidal bashing of the Thames, over which bridges covered in shops — shops that were actually falling off — swung dangerously, everyone nevertheless swarming over them, having to get to wherever they had to go.

He’d noticed it earlier, and now he saw it in every detail: the people were fighting over every scrap because they needed to pay others to increase the time on their clocks, or even to see the clocks. It was an economy of fear.

His ‘job’ allowed him to explore, he realized. His ‘job’ let him see everything. Was he going to perform his ‘job’? To do so would be another submission. How could it do any good? He decided to go along with it for now, to wait and see if it could. Hell was pleased at his acceptance and indicated that it was sure he was keeping some part of himself apart from it. It could wait. In an eternity of time, he would become the thing it had labelled him.

A street trader was standing outside a grand circular building, a comedy theatre, it seemed, judging by the mocking masks hanging from its over-decorated pillars. In a battered carpet bag behind him were a pile of the tags, and the crowd all around him were jostling for them, fighting for them, showing him how much money they had. ‘Now then, lads and lasses. Everything’s for sale here, and we’ve got all the time in the world! I don’t want your money, little lady, it’s a question, is it not, of what else you have for me?’

Quill moved on, wanting to make an arrest, but already wondering what use that would be, wanting to smash heads, but already seeing how meaningless that would be, wanting to keep a part of himself separate from all this still, undemeaned.

People talked about ‘them’ a lot. How ‘they’ would come, about what ‘they’ would do to them. It was ‘they’, he soon realized, who you saw when your time ran out. He was aware he’d been here for some time now and kept thinking that it had to be any moment now, kept feeling that fear, suppressing it, wondering if there was any attitude, anything he could do that would give him any control over this process, apart from participating in this terrifying market of time. He knew that everything about this place told him there was nothing he could do. His time would come. He would eventually have to go into one of the buildings with the red curtains. He couldn’t think about that. He had to be strong. Didn’t he? What did that even mean here? What would that be for?

He used his authority — hating to do it, because Hell underlined how it compromised him — to stop people and talk to them. He asked them what year they were from. Some of them said the year had been twenty-something when they died, some said fifteen-something. The earliest was twelve-something. Not all of them wanted to admit they had died. Some of them had strange explanations, weird cosmologies of their own. Some, particularly the children it took all his courage to question, expected to wake up. The sheer completeness of it was a new horror to Quill: it meant that the sign above the gate that he’d seen when he came in, that he kept trying not to think about, this also meant that it might be true. There were more people from later times, of course, because more people had been alive then. To some of these people, this was a futuristic city they were suffering in. For most, it was a vision of the past. It didn’t change, he heard. Or he found nobody who remembered it being different.

A significant number of them said they felt that things had once been different, even after they’d died. They thought the place they were in had changed but they couldn’t remember how. That made sense, considering what Quill’s team had found out on earth about the point when everything seemed to have changed, the moment when the Docklands headquarters of the Continuing Projects Team had fallen. Perhaps this Hell was not eternal after all, but actually quite new, in terms of its rules and how many people were in here. In all his walking, he still had not found any limits to this generic metropolis. It kept telling him that it did have some, that it was growing every second. However, every street was packed with people, much more so than Quill had ever seen in the real London.

‘They always come for us in the end, sir,’ said one of the constables in a police station he entered. The interior of it was like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan: a lot of men, and only men, from different times, judging by their haircuts, all squeezed into Victorian uniforms, performing endless slapstick comedy and making jolly comments. ‘It is how you spend your time before that … I was about to say that it counts. It does not.’ He would be paid, he was told, amid much laughter at the obviousness of the newcomer’s question, with a certain amount of time on his clock, ‘at the end of the week’. Whenever that was. That seemed to be something that could be moved or taken away.

He stopped on the threshold as he walked out. There was something here that did not seem to be compromised by Hell. It was surely a trap, a device to give him hope, but … ‘What the Hell,’ he said out loud.

He was still being paid to be a policeman. Those in charge of him were arbitrary and miserly. So no change there.

A number of persons of interest in the matter of the Ripper murders would almost certainly be in this most outer of outer boroughs.

He would do his duty and continue his investigation. It would, at least, be something to do until they came for him.

* * *

He found Spatley first. He was working as the director of a home for wayward girls. It looked like a factory, with enormous chimneys. He watched as parties of female children were herded out of police vans and through the doors.

He saw posters and heard that Spatley was going to give a speech. Quill went along and found he couldn’t get through the crowd. He stayed at the back and watched. Spatley stood onstage with banners and complacent matrons and stern sponsoring men who looked proud to be there. Spatley himself was in a high collar so starched that Quill was sure it made him stand straighter. But Spatley was sweating, and his eyes looked desperate. ‘If I was not here to hold the powers that control this world back, to moderate their policies,’ he said, ‘then things would be so much worse. I’m doing a good job here. What I do here is important.’ The rest of it was drowned out by audience laughter.

Afterwards, Quill went into the dark factory, barged past a pair of stout yeomen at the door and marched into Spatley’s office. The man looked up from his work with an admirable amount of poise. ‘What is the meaning of this affront?’

‘Listen to you, already going native.’ Quill sat down opposite him, in what turned out to be a squirmingly uncomfortable chair made of … he stood up and didn’t look at it again. ‘It’s not often I get a chance to ask this: why do you think you were killed?’

‘I’m … not certain. I don’t deserve to be here-’

‘That’s what they all say. What do you know about a prostitute by the name of Mary Arthur?’

Spatley looked suddenly, desperately, guilty.

‘Mr Spatley,’ said Quill, ‘you’re in Hell. Even if, for some unimaginable reason, you think you can mitigate this place, what further trouble do you think an admission of guilt could get you into?’

Spatley looked at him for a moment as if his world was crumbling. ‘I … was lured to a hotel room,’ he said. ‘With an offer, an offer that very specifically catered to my … It was like someone had looked inside my head. But it seemed too perfect … I mean, I went because I wanted to spring the trap. Seriously.’

‘I believe you, sir.’ He actually did.

‘I pretended to be outraged that she was dressed as a schoolgirl. Well, actually, I was outraged. Or I would have been, had I not been there, you know, deliberately.’

‘Could we please get to the meat of this, sir?’

‘I sent her into the bathroom to change and took a look in her bag. I found her phone, discovered that that was her real name, Mary Arthur. There was a text message on the phone that described what was supposed to happen as a “honey trap”. She was meant to take photos of me, to compromise me. I wrote down the number of whoever had sent her that text on the back of a card I found in her bag. When she came out of the bathroom, I sat her down and told her I knew everything. I tried to get her to come with me to the police, to tell them all about the man who’d hired her, although I was sure he must be an employee, a deniable freelancer. She listened; I’ll give her that, she was interested. I ended up telling her all about my suspicions concerning who was behind this trap, put the story together for the first time — the first time I’d told it all to anyone.’

‘Who did you think was behind the trap?’

‘Russell Vincent, of course.’

Quill frowned. ‘Go on.’

‘I was about to start assembling my forces for a major inquiry into how he was attempting to influence government. A certain number of ministers to the right of the Tories adored him, but some of the moderates seemed actually afraid of him. It was as if he had a hold over individual MPs. The attempted honey trap convinced me I was right, that he was blackmailing his way towards some enormous … coup.’

Quill didn’t know enough to make a guess about how credible that was. ‘I take it Mary Arthur didn’t agree to give evidence?’

‘No. She said, sorry, she already felt a bit threatened by how scared the man she’d worked for had seemed of a boss he wouldn’t talk about. If she’d fucked up a job for someone as powerful and dangerous as that, she said, she was going to have to vanish for a while. I wished her well and felt worried about how I’d burdened her with so much of the truth. I decided to stop gathering evidence and move to acting against Vincent as soon as possible. I don’t know how he could have known my intentions, because I’d told nobody, but I think, on reflection, that my plan was what got me killed.’

Quill was starting to wonder at how calm the man seemed. ‘Don’t you want … I don’t know, revenge for what Vincent did to you?’

There was something a little cracked in Spatley’s smile in return. ‘Look at where we are. Here I am, making a difference. I don’t think I’d better allow myself thoughts of revenge.’

Quill wondered at the plasticity of mind of this politician. ‘I gather you lost the card with her employer’s phone number on it?’

‘Yeah, somewhere in my office, I think. Though I kept wondering if it had been taken, because I often got the feeling that the place was being searched. It didn’t matter. I’d written down both the number and the address of the establishment.’

‘Ah. We never found that.’

‘I kept it on me at all times. In my jacket pocket.’

Quill frowned.

‘Anyway, neither seemed likely to be useful going forward with the inquiry; the number always went to a blank answerphone, and if I wanted to have another go at convincing Mary to talk, I didn’t have to go via what I presume was her brothel — I’d written her number down too.’

Quill failed to stop himself looking surprised. ‘You wrote down her number?’

‘Yes. On the same piece of paper.’

Quill put a hand over his eyes. He was pained by now having hope again. Hell told him he could have all the hope he liked, he was never going to get any of this information to his colleagues. ‘I don’t suppose-’

‘Oh yes, I can tell you it. I looked at it so many times, and I’ve got a good memory for numbers. But surely, we’re both dead now, so it hardly matters.’

Quill leaned over the table and pointed into his face. ‘It matters to me.’ He made Spatley tell him the phone number, and wrote it on the back of his own hand. As he went on his way, he started to repeat the number to himself, his own mantra, his own tiny hope.

* * *

Staunce was actually quicker to find, now Quill had got into the ways of this place. He was a retired grandee, working on endless charitable schemes that always came to nothing, all the Hell money spent on them frittered away in graft, as he always complained at many luxurious dinners. After those dinners he would suffer days of indigestion and acid reflux that would leave him gasping on the floor of his study, unable to reach for water. He could have paid for water, but it seemed he was unwilling to do so. Quill found him in that condition, but, even curled up around himself like a wounded animal, he wanted to be interviewed. He wanted to talk to anyone. ‘He paid me to tell him things which only the police knew,’ he said, ‘back in the day. Particularly gossip about celebrities. They deserved what they got. And it was harmless. Argggghh!’ He gasped and curled up around himself again. ‘But I stopped! I stopped because I knew it was wrong! Is no one listening?’

‘Who paid you?’ asked Quill.

He was told the name, and about how Staunce had taken another payment, and what it was for. ‘You sold us out,’ Quill said, ‘to Russell Vincent.’ He looked up to see an enormous roast being brought in by Staunce’s servants.

‘But … but I thought about turning the tables. I thought about turning him in, taking the evidence to the cabinet office…’

Quill straightened up and nodded to him. ‘Thanks for that. I’ll leave you to it; I don’t want to get in the way of your dinner.’

* * *

Tunstall was in a workhouse, walking on an enormous wheel that was slowly grinding a millstone. He wore a long coat made of weights. Quill wondered aloud if this was something he was doing to himself.

‘No,’ the man sighed, ‘this is very much something being done to me by others.’

‘What got you killed?’

So Quill was told about a working life spent making some extra cash on the side, necessary to keep a home for his wife and child. The man had, as Quill suspected, been the one who searched Spatley’s office. ‘Not very professionally, I should think, but pretty thoroughly.’ Quill was amazed, distantly, by the idea that Tunstall might still take pride in the quality of such a job. Tunstall had been told to stop the car, when he’d been driving Spatley, in a specific place at a specific time. ‘We’d already worked out where security might send us if a particular road got blocked up. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was so shocked after … well, I didn’t even know if that had been what the bloke I was working for had planned…’

Quill asked for a description, and recognized the man who’d met Mary Arthur at the Soviet bar.

‘So I said what I’d seen happen, straight off. I suppose part of me thought I might get off because it was all so mad, though I was being well paid to take any fall. We was sent a lot of money in a way so my wife could get hold of it. We needed that money. You don’t know how hard it is; they expect you to live in town … But then you lot turn up, saying you actually believe me, and you get me off. And I go home and … and it’s all shit. I couldn’t keep Spatley’s face out of my head, how scared he was when he was killed. I did like him, all right? But I’m holding on for my family, it’s all I ever did. Until you lot want to interview me again, and I start thinking I’d feel better if I told you everything. And then … then the Ripper came for me.’

‘You want to come clean about everything now, then?’

Tunstall seemed to understand what Quill was talking about. ‘I did something else on orders. When he was lying there dead in the back seat … I reached into his jacket pocket, and my hands were shaking, I tell you. I took out this piece of paper I’d been told was there, and I … I ate it. I was told that was the only way to get rid of it without tipping anyone off that anything had been there. Burn it and there’d be, you know, the smell. They didn’t even want to risk me crumpling it up and taking it with me. I can still taste it.’ Quill could see the tears welling up in the man’s eyes. ‘I mean, my mouth’s still full of it. It’s all I can taste.’

Quill went on his way and left Tunstall to his walking.

* * *

He found Rupert Rudlin in the middle of a crowd that kept grabbing him and hauling him over to waterboard him in a barrel of beer. Quill spared him that for a few moments and asked him his questions.

‘No,’ sobbed the young man, ‘I don’t know why I was killed! I don’t!’

The crowd grabbed him from Quill again and kept on with their torture.

* * *

Quill discovered, much more easily than he expected, that the real name of the final person he wanted to interview was Eric Wilker. He was something of a celebrity. Quill arranged to meet him in a pub. He was a small man with threadbare clothing — someone so average that it took Quill a while to pick him out in the crowd. ‘People tell me there’s all this kerfuffle about me,’ he said, sipping his half-pint of mild and bitter. ‘I thought it’d all die down when I did. Back in 1888, I killed them filthy whores as a public service. One of them they say were mine wasn’t, I can’t remember which. Two more they say were other people were me. All the time I was working as a draper’s assistant. I just did what I felt like with them after, and I laughed when I saw what they all made of it. Didn’t mean nothing. I never sent no letters to anyone, I never wrote no message on any wall, I ain’t daft. I stopped when it got too hard. Every now and then I was tempted, but then I thought, no, I’ve done my bit. I died of a fever when I was in my sixties. Thought about telling my old lady on my death bed. Decided against. Ended up here. And younger, which is nice. And here I get to keep on doing what I’m most famous for. Only, every now and then, they get a chance to do it to me. We take it in turns, you might say.’ He took a slow, sad sip of his beer. ‘All a bit pointless, really.’

That was true of Quill’s investigation as well. He’d interviewed everyone he could find who was involved in the case. He was aware of Hell laughing at him for how short a distance that small hope had taken him. Now that small hope was gone. He knew who was guilty, but he had no way to tell anyone.

* * *

At one point, as Quill was walking down the street, picking his way through the enormous crowds, someone grasped him, flung him to the ground and started kicking him. ‘It’s your fault!’ screamed Barry Keel. He seemed to be an alderman now, smart in his coat and tails. But his eyes were lost to madness.

Quill grabbed his leg, rolled it over, and slammed the man into the shit, his hand in the middle of his back. He was aware of whistles and of suddenly efficient hellish coppers running towards him from all directions as the crowd helpfully shouted all the details to them. ‘I don’t want to find out what they’ll do to you,’ said Quill, ‘for assaulting a police officer.’ He let the man go and kicked him on the backside, off into the crowd.

Quill supposed that bloody Mora Losley would be somewhere in this lot as well, and Rob Toshack and Harry and Harry’s dad and a bunch of others who might bear him a grudge, but he wasn’t planning on trying to find them.

* * *

Quill walked to where he thought Bermondsey should be, and asked around for Ross’ dad, Alfred Toshack. He was directed to a small park, where he found an enormous tree that grew to a tremendous height above all those around it. Putting a hand to his eyes to shield them from the dull glare of the sky, Quill looked up into its highest branches and found a noose there. But there was nobody hanging from it. Alfred had, according to the passersby Quill stopped and asked, been ‘sent to the Tower’.

Quill went to the Tower of London, but his authority wasn’t enough to get him in. Walking away from it, though, he had an idea. According to Ross, Alfred Toshack had been able to see every detail of what was going on in the everyday world from his vantage point in Hell. It was part of his punishment. If Quill could find somewhere high enough that he could access — in his condition he didn’t fancy trying to climb that tree — perhaps he could duplicate that. Perhaps he could find out, from Hell, things he wanted to know about the real world.

* * *

He was told the centre of London was where, in the modern version, the Centre Point building would be. He went to see what was there, and Hell anticipated that, enjoyed it. He wondered if it would be a tall building.

He felt the shadow a long time before he saw, over the buildings, what was making it. At the centre of Hell’s London stood an enormous statue of the Smiling Man. There was an entrance at its base. Like the Statue of Liberty, it seemed, one could walk up inside it and, yes, he saw movement behind them, look through the eyes.

He discovered, when he got to the entrance, that to do so would cost him. Of course it would. But he needed to do this, so he paid. Hell had known that he would.

He climbed the stairs inside the statue, which took all his energy, emphasizing each of his pains — of course it did.

He reached the top and looked out of one of the eyes. Beside him, helpless, sobbing newcomers were doing the same from the other. They had come here, like him, in a vain search for hope.

Quill looked out over Hell’s London. There it was: not just this outer borough beneath him, but, at an angle to the horizon, the real London. He was looking down on it. London in summer, a blissful aerial view that made Quill feel an agony of wanting and loss. He could see it in several different ways, he realized. There was the physical city, there was a sort of contour map of rushing energies, and there was … as if it had been built there, a great wheel, the structure of which was threaded through everything, that cut across everything. The wheel was made of ideas made by people, or imposed on them. It had gone wrong, he saw: it was moving the wrong way. Right now, there was nothing he could do about that, so eventually he looked elsewhere.

He could see Jason Forrest’s limited point of view, the history of the historical Jack the Ripper, the warring viewpoints of the occult community. He could see whatever concepts he wanted to see. He found himself automatically thinking about Sarah, and then suddenly he was looking at her, and he knew where she was on the map as he pulled his attention away from her.

Oh, oh, that was too painful. If he stayed here he was going to have to do it again. Again and again. What could he look at that was more practical, that could give him a despairing hint of his duty again? He looked again at the back of his hand, at the phone number he’d written there and memorized through repetition.

He looked back to the real London to find all the places Russell Vincent might be.