The Severed Streets

TWO

The torso of Michael Spatley MP was a horrifying mass of wounds, including an awful washed stump of pale, open blood vessels where his genitals had been hacked at.

‘He seems to have been slashed across the throat,’ said the pathologist, ‘and then multiple incisions across the abdomen, by a very sharp blade, probably that of a razor. The weapon was not found at the scene. His testicles were cut at their base and the subsequent shock and swift large loss of blood was the cause of death. Time of death tallies with the clock on the CCTV camera, which indicates between eighteen-thirty-two and eighteen-thirty-nine. Direction of blood splatter — ’ she held up a photo of the interior of the car from the files they’d all been given by DCI Forrest’s office — ‘is consistent with the assailant kneeling across the rear seats. No arterial blood was tracked back to the front seats. The driver appears, and I stress appears, to have stayed put in the front during the attack.’

‘From other CCTV cameras,’ Ross noted, ‘it’s clear that the brake lights come on at several points during the time the car was stuck there, meaning that someone’s foot was still on the brake pedal, until a point which may coincide with the driver going to help the victim after the attack, as per his story.’

Quill knew from what only his team could see that that was actually precisely true.

‘How interesting,’ said the pathologist. ‘Not my department.’

What she wasn’t talking about, because she couldn’t see it, was what Quill could see the others glancing at too. All over the corpse, from the grimace on his face to the ripped-up abdomen, there lay traces of the same shining silver substance they’d seen earlier. It looked like spiders’ webs on a dewy morning, or, and Quill stifled an awkward smile at the thought, cum. As the pathologist went into a more vigorous description of how the wounds had been inflicted — frantic slashing and then precise surgical cuts — he gave Costain the nod.

Costain suddenly spasmed in the direction of the pathologist, knocking her clipboard from her hands, as if he was on the verge of vomiting.

Sefton quickly took a phial from his bag and, while the pathologist was fussing over Costain, managed to get enough of the silver stuff into it. He screwed the top closed and dropped it back into the bag.

The pathologist was helping Costain straighten up. ‘If you’re going to do that, we need to get you out of here,’ she was saying.

‘No, no,’ Costain waved her away and abruptly straightened up, smiling at her as he handed her back the clipboard. ‘Thanks, but I think I can hold it.’

* * *

They went to the custody suite and arranged an interview with Spatley’s driver. Brian Tunstall looked stunned, Quill thought, stressed out beyond the ability to show it, as if at any moment this would all be revealed as an enormous practical joke at his expense. He must be somewhere on the lower end of the Sighted spectrum — there were degrees to this stuff — because he hadn’t mentally translated what he’d seen into something explicable. But Quill supposed that, in the circumstances, doing that would have been quite an ask. There were still traces of the shiny substance on his shirt. It was odd to see an adult standing with such mess on him, not seeing it, and therefore not having attempted to clean himself up.

‘Listen,’ Tunstall said immediately. ‘I want to change my statement.’

‘Now, wait-’ began Quill.

‘What I said happened was impossible. It couldn’t have gone like that, could it? One of the protestors must have got into the car-’

‘Mate,’ said Costain, ‘we believe you.’

Tunstall stopped short. ‘You what?’ Then he slumped, a tremendous weight on him again. ‘Oh, right, I get it: you’re the good cop.’

Costain pointed to himself, looking surprised. ‘Bad cop.’

‘Surreal cop,’ said Sefton, also pointing to himself.

‘Good cop,’ admitted Quill. ‘Relatively. Which is weird.’

Ross just raised an eyebrow.

Tunstall looked between them, unsure if they were taking the piss.

Being interviewed by this unit, thought Quill, must sometimes seem like being interrogated by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. At least they had his attention. ‘Why don’t you tell us all of it,’ he said gently, ‘just the truth, as you saw it, and don’t edit yourself for something that’s too mad, because mad is what we do.’

Tunstall sat down at the interview table. ‘What does that mean?’

‘We have access to … certain abilities that other units don’t. Which means that, as Detective Sergeant Costain says, we are indeed willing to believe you. We know there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. So telling the whole truth now might really do you a favour.’

The man looked more scared than ever.

* * *

It took until lunchtime to complete the interview and sort out the paperwork. Tunstall’s story was indeed impossible, and confirmed all the physical evidence. The man finally said he couldn’t remember anything else and needed to get some sleep. Quill ended the interview. He found his own attention starting to wander and baulked at the prospect of going back to the team’s nick for maybe only an hour or two of bleary discussion, so he sent his team home for the day and went back to his bed. Only to find that Jessica was home and wanted to play with trains. So that was what they did, until Quill lay his head down on top of the toy station and started snoring.

* * *

Kev Sefton felt that he was finally getting somewhere. Being the officer who’d become most interested in the London occult and who’d started to read up on it had given him some extra responsibilities, okay. But now, instead of being second undercover, he was first … whatever his new job title was. Doing that well made him feel better about being out of the mainstream of policing while London was going up in flames.

He’d kept the phial with the silver goo in it in his fridge at home overnight, next to the beer, with a Post-it note on it that told Joe not to touch it. That summed up, he thought, the make-do way his team did things. He was used to having odd dreams now, as his brain dealt with all that he’d had to stuff into it, but those of last night were particularly weird. He felt as if he’d been rifled through and shaken out, as if large things were moving inside him. That phrase had brought a smile to his face as he drove through the gate that led onto the waste ground across the road from Gipsy Hill police station, the mud baked into dust by the early sunshine. No change there, then. He’d stopped on the steps of the Portakabin that served the team, exiled from the mainstream as they were, as an ops room and looked out across London. There was that smell on the warm air … smoke. Well, now they might be doing something to help restore order. He’d taken a deep breath and headed inside.

Now, as the others watched, wearing oven gloves he’d stolen from the canteen across the way, he was using a pencil to encourage the silver goo out of the phial and onto a saucer. He was hoping that graphite and tea-stained china didn’t react with whatever this silver stuff was. Maybe it would tell them something if it did. He was trying to take a scientific approach to his London occultism. Sometimes that made him feel like Isaac bloody Newton, and sometimes as if he was barking up completely the wrong tree. It felt as if this London business only submitted to science sometimes, when it felt like it. The goo dropped onto the saucer. The others leaned closer. Sefton thought he could hear a faint sizzling. He took the thermometer he’d bought at the chemist’s and held it as close to the gel as he dared. He nodded and put on his most serious expression. ‘It’s … really cold,’ he said.

‘Like the insides of every ghost we’ve encountered,’ said Quill.

‘Only this is much more extreme, and, because we’re pretty sure that what we’ve seen aren’t exactly ghosts in the usual sense of the word, inverted commas around the g-word, please,’ said Sefton.

‘Is that it’s “really cold” the full extent of your analysis?’ asked Quill.

‘If we can get hold of some specialist tools, like maybe a temperature sensor that I could actually risk inside this stuff, then I’d do better. But that’d only get us so far. Only we can see this material. It’s too plastic for mercury, too metallic for some sort of oil by-product, and it’s keeping itself and the things around it cold, like a fridge, but without being plugged into a socket. If it’s an element, it’s one we’ve discovered.’

‘Seftonium,’ said Costain.

Sefton used a teaspoon to put the goo back in the phial. ‘So-called spirit mediums used to pretend to be able to project something they called ectoplasm, which usually turned out to be glue and other gunk. Maybe the original idea for that came from this.’

‘Like in Ghostbusters,’ said Costain.

‘It reminds me of what I saw inside those “ghost ships” on the Thames,’ said Ross. ‘They had a sort of silver skeleton inside.’

Quill went to the corkboard which served this team as an Ops Board. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ve got enough to start building the board, to list the objectives and to name this mother.’ All the board still had on it — the artefacts of the other half-arsed would-be operations they’d considered lately having already been consigned carefully to drawers — was the PRO-FIT facial description picture of the Smiling Man and the concepts list, which now was just a series of headings referring to files on their ancient computer (and the phone number of the Smiling Man, which Quill had labelled ‘the number of the Beast’). At the very top of the board was a card with a question mark on it, over which Quill now pinned a new blank card because the name of the operation was about to be decided. Beneath all that Quill added a picture cut from a newspaper. ‘The victim: Michael Anthony Spatley, Liberal Democrat MP for the constituency of Cheadle. Chief secretary to the Treasury, which is a cabinet position. Jewish by birth, atheist by inclination. Forty-six years old. Wife: Ann. Daughter: Jocelyn. Son: Arthur. I’ve put in a request for us to search his home and offices too, which, judging by the tone of voice of the PA I spoke to, will be regarded with incredulity by those who’ve already had the main op through. But we shall persist.’ He attached a red victim thread upwards from the picture and pinned a sheet of white paper above it, on which he drew a very rough cartoon of the Toff figure.

Ross took a new square of paper and added ‘Brian Tunstall’ to the suspect area, also attaching a victim thread between him and Spatley. She drew a dotted line beside both threads, indicating uncertainty. ‘Two suspects,’ she said.

‘Despite the fact that only one of these “suspects” was observed fleeing the scene,’ noted Costain.

‘Yeah, because we make assumptions only when the specialized nature of our work forces us to. And then we take care to note them.’

Sefton looked between the two of them. Costain had always been the sort of officer who’d insisted on the importance of first-hand street experience, and Ross’ intelligence-based approach always felt that that procedure was missing the wood for the trees, but now … He knew that Costain, when Ross had been unconscious in hospital after the Losley case, had stayed by her bed, had slept in a chair. Sefton had wondered, during those few weeks when Ross had been full of the joys of spring, if they were going to get together. That looked impossible now, which was tough on these two, because he and Quill had someone to talk to about the impossible stresses this team were under, and they didn’t.

Costain picked up a card of his own and drew a squiggly mass of people on it, then he attached it to Spatley with a dotted thread too. ‘Maybe it’s the “spirit” of the riots? Losley said there were two ways to power in London: to “make sacrifice” or “be remembered”, and it’s not like it’s only the old or famous stuff that gets remembered. We hadn’t heard of that green monster thing Kev met. Maybe this is the sort of collective will of those protestors made solid, or something.’

Quill nodded. ‘Good. But I hope that doesn’t bloody turn out to be the case, ’cos it’s going to be hard to nick a manifestation of the collective unconscious.’

Sefton had something to add. ‘All the “ghosts”’ — he made the speech marks gesture — ‘we’ve seen have been really passive. Everything “remembered” as part of what seems to be a sort of collective memory on the part of London just kind of hangs around, in classic haunting fashion. They didn’t hurt anyone. Not even the remembered versions of Losley.’

‘So maybe one of the protestors has made a sacrifice and is deliberately making this happen,’ said Costain.

‘Absolutely.’ Sefton was glad to hear Costain making deductions like that about his world. Sefton couldn’t do this bit alone, and it always pleased him when the others had a go. He was the opposite to Ross in that respect because his speciality was bloody terrifying and hers wasn’t. ‘But Losley was very set in her ways and didn’t acknowledge things she didn’t approve of or know about. She didn’t mention various powerful items, for instance, like the vanes that were used to attack Jimmy. I don’t think we should imagine she knew or was telling us about every mechanism that exists to do … the sort of stuff we know objects that are very London can do. Speaking of which…’ He stepped forward and added, down the left-hand side of the board, in the space which their team and only their team used for concepts, ‘Cold residuals. Meaning that silver goo.’

‘But which now sounds like something you’d need to talk to your agent about,’ said Quill.

‘Nobody outside the car saw anything,’ said Ross. ‘Nobody felt the suspect move through or above the crowd. Tunstall’s testimony is what you’d expect of someone who was watching an attack by an invisible assailant. And I should add…’ She used her own pen to write ‘Can walk through walls (slowly)’ under the cartoon of the prime suspect.

‘Like Losley,’ said Costain.

She also added ‘Can vanish’.

‘And again.’

‘Remind me to cover that up at the end of the day,’ said Quill. ‘We don’t want to terrify the cleaners.’ He paused as he stepped back from what was once again a blankness. ‘We need to do proper police work on what’s up there,’ he said. ‘We need to find meaning, a narrative. We work our three suspects: in the real world and in what, horribly, I’m starting to think of as our world.’

Sefton saw that now was the time to announce the plan he’d been putting together. He was a bit proud of this, the sort of cross-discipline package that, in normal police work, would have been a boost to his CV. Now Lofthouse had made it obvious that she was aware of what they did — whatever the implications of that were — it might still be a good career move. ‘I’ve been assembling a list of people who seem to be on the fringes of the subculture we encountered at that New Age fair. I know a few places where they hang out. I could start to attempt undercover contact, get some sources for general background on all this stuff and work towards specifics concerning the Spatley case, if you think it’s time to risk all that.’

‘I do.’ Quill nodded. ‘Go forth and make it so, my son.’ He turned back to the wall and began pinning up a big sheet of paper on the right of the board. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for … operational objectives!’ He picked up a marker and began to write.

1. Ensure the safety of the public.

2. Gather evidence of offences.

3. Identify and trace subject or subjects involved (if any).

4. Identify means to arrest subject or subjects.

5. Arrest subject or subjects.

6. Bring to trial/destroy.

7. Clear those not involved of all charges.

‘Maybe it’s a bit vague,’ he admitted, standing back to admire his work, ‘but for us it’s always going to be. Even writing the word “destroy”…’ He let himself trail off. ‘But that’s how it is for us. And, of course, this list mirrors the objectives of Forrest’s SCD 1 murder inquiry, which, if we’re not careful, may lead to conflict and ire. Now, instead of drawing the names from the central register, I say we continue to name our own ops because that’s how we roll and I like it. So for this one, where we might well be venturing into Gothic and clichéd portrayals of our fair metropolis, how about…’

He wrote on the card at the top of the Ops Board:

OPERATION FOG

The rest of the day was spent assembling all the evidence they had and building their initial Ops Board to the point where they all felt they were looking at everything they knew. They kept the news on in the background, but no fresh details came to light in the press. Ross had set up a bunch of hashtag searches on Twitter, but, as the day went on, they only revealed that London was panicking and gossiping in many different ways about the murder; no one signal was poking up out of the terrified noise.

All in all, Sefton was glad to have put in such a productive day and, with the Portakabin getting stuffy, he was pleased when Quill sent everyone home. Home was now a tiny flat above a shop in Walthamstow with, on good nights, a parking space outside. Tonight he was lucky. The flat was half the size of the place he’d used as an undercover. It was like suddenly being a student again. Joe, who lived in a bigger place, had started coming over and staying most nights, which neither of them had commented on, so that was probably okay. Tonight he found Joe had just got in, using the key Sefton had had made for him two weeks ago, and was planning on heading straight out to the chippy. ‘Best news all day,’ Sefton said, after kissing him, and they headed off.

The streets of Walthamstow were full of people, loads of office workers coming out of the tube in shirtsleeves, jackets slung over their shoulder, women pulling their straps down to get some sun. They looked as if they were deliberately trying to be relaxed, despite the smell of smoke always on the air, even out here. But even the sunshine had felt sick this summer, never quite burning through the clouds, instead shafting through gaps in them. It felt as if the whole summer was going to be dog days. Or perhaps all that was just the perspective of the Sight. It was impossible for Sefton to separate himself from it now. Every day in the street he saw the same horrors the others did, startling adjuncts to reality. ‘The opposite of miracles,’ he’d called them when Joe had asked for a description. There was a homeless person begging at the tube entrance as the two of them passed, an addict by the look of him, thin hair in patches, his head on his chest, filthy blankets around his legs. He was newly arrived with the ‘austerity measures’.

‘So,’ said Joe, ‘what did you do at work today?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘I thought you told me everything.’

‘Everything about the … you know, the weird shit. Nothing about operational stuff.’

‘Ah, so now there is operational stuff.’

‘Yeah. Kind of big, actually.’

‘Oh. Oh! You mean like what everyone’s been talking about all day?’

Sefton sighed. Why had he been so obvious? ‘And now I’m shagging a detective.’

Joe worked in PR for an academic publishing house and was now doing the job of what had been a whole department. His work stories were about dull professors who couldn’t be made interesting.

He lowered his voice. ‘I saw about the murder on telly and thought the same as everyone else is saying, that it had to be the driver-’

‘I can’t-’

‘-which means it must really be something only you lot can see, like, bloody hell, another witch or something, like maybe there’s one for every football club? The witch of Woolwich Arsenal? The witch of Wolves? It can only be the alliterative ones. Liverpool doesn’t have one. Liverpool has a … lich. Whatever one of those is.’

Sefton put a hand on his arm and actually stopped him. ‘Could we just get those chips?’

* * *

They sat on the low wall of the car park outside the chippy and breathed in the smell of frying. The old woman in a hijab they always saw around here trod slowly past, selling the Big Issue. Sefton bought one.

‘How are your team getting on now?’

‘I can’t talk about the case.’

‘Which is why I’m asking about the people.’

‘I think there’s something up with Ross.’

‘Really?’ Joe followed the people Sefton talked about as if they were characters on TV, never having met them, and Sefton almost laughed at the interest in his voice.

‘Ever since she got into the Docklands documents, she’s kind of suddenly gone back to how she was: all curled up against the world. Maybe it’s that she’s found something terrible and doesn’t want the rest of us to have to deal. Maybe she’s waiting until she’s got all the details.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if she and Costain are rubbing each other up the wrong way or…’

‘Just rubbing each other?’

‘I hope it’s that. It’s weird when I get a feeling about a person now. I’m trying to let myself be aware of the Sight all the time, to listen to something whispering in my ear, but, doing that, you start to wonder what’s the Sight and what’s just you. If I’m not careful I’m going to start being like one of those toddlers that notices a bit of gum on the pavement and hasn’t seen that before, so he squats down and keeps looking at it until his mum goes, “Erm, no — big wide world, more important.” The others want me to keep looking into the London occult shit, to be that specialist, and, you know, I like that responsibility, but they don’t really get that that kind of leads you away from being a police officer. Crime stories: all about getting everything back to normal. This stuff: there is no normal.’

‘Crime stories say the centre can hold; in reality, it’s going to fall apart any minute. Maybe all this chaos lately is something to do with the sort of thing you lot investigate.’

‘Yeah, we’re all wondering about that: that maybe the shittiness of life right now is all down to the Smiler and how he’s “moved the goalposts” and changed London. That’d be a comforting thought, eh?’

‘Only for you is that comforting.’ Joe, having finished his own, took one of Sefton’s chips. ‘I think the riots and protests would have happened anyway. The protestors are the only people left who give a shit. You just expect a sort of … self-serving hypocrisy from politicians now. You’d be amazed what the guys in my office said about Spatley. Nobody was like, “He deserved it,” but…’ He let the sentence fall away with a shrug.

Sefton let his gaze drift along the street full of people. ‘Bloody general public. Even with London falling apart in the world they can see, all they talk about is the royal baby and The X Factor and all that shit-’

‘You like The X Factor.’

‘-while my lot are involved with … the secret of eternal life, making space out of nothing, extra “boroughs” that don’t seem to be in this universe. You know what’d be really good?’

‘Go on.’

‘You remember when I caught that “ghost bus” and went … somewhere else, somewhere away from this world, and talked to … whatever that being was, that called himself Brutus and dressed like a Roman?’

‘You really told your workmates about this?’

‘I really did, but even when I did it sounded like something I’d dreamed or made up. Anyway, just having met some sort of … big London being … that the others hadn’t, I felt like I’d started to get a handle on this stuff. But as time goes on I’m starting to feel more and more that I did dream him. It’s not as if he gave me much in the way of solid advice, a path I could follow. He didn’t leave me with anything certain, with any mission in life. And without that certainty, there’s this … gap. There’s all sorts of stuff I want to ask him about. I’ve made an actual list, and today I added the silver goo to that list.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose and then had to brush away the salt from his chips he’d deposited there. ‘Sometimes I feel like he might just show up, that I might sit down on a park bench and there he’d be. And then there are times when I know he isn’t real. You can sort of feel something like him in the air, sometimes.’ He was very aware of Joe’s arched eyebrow. ‘You can. That’s a proper Sighted feeling. That seemed to be getting easier as summer came on, but now…’

‘When Ross got her Tarot cards read, she was promised “hope in summer”, wasn’t she, and “in autumn” too, just those sentences? And it had something to do with that card called “The Sacrifice of Tyburn Tree” which you all thought was about her dad-’

‘You remember all the details, don’t you? You’re such a fanboy of us lot. Just don’t go on the internet with this stuff.’

‘I’m saying, maybe good stuff is about to happen. Maybe you’ll find Brutus.’

Sefton sighed, had to look away from that smile. ‘But it’s summer now, and it’s just this … burdened heat.’

‘Is there anything you can do to, you know, summon him or something?’

‘Nothing in any of the books I’ve found. He’s not in the books. If I can’t find him, I need to find … something.’ Sefton suddenly felt the need to get rid of all this shit. ‘Fuck it, I need a pint. And you’re not going to let me go on about the Hogwarts stuff any more tonight. Deal?’

‘No,’ said Joe, smiling at him.

* * *

As always, Lisa Ross was awake into the early hours. Hers was one of many lights still on in her Catford housing block. There were people who kept a light on at all hours, no matter what the bills were, as if that offered some protection against the shrieks of the urban foxes and the drunken yelling outside. She barely registered that stuff. She would get the three hours’ sleep she found necessary sometime around 3 a.m.

Tonight, like every night, she was about her secret work. She was sure that the others thought she was nobly sacrificing her spare time to make a database of the documents they’d found in the Docklands ruins. She had let them think that. It was safer. Quill had stars in his eyes about her, about her having saved his daughter. She was letting him and the rest of the team down so badly.

But she had no choice. After the ruins had been looted for so long, there hadn’t been much of interest left, so she wasn’t actually keeping the team from anything that could help them. She wasn’t telling them the whole truth either. The document she spent all her time on now was about her own needs. It had probably been spared the scavenging that had emptied that building because it was written in an indecipherable language in a hand that didn’t invite study. That obscurity had spoken to her of something being deliberately hidden. She had found something like the script on a visit to the British Library archives. It turned out that it had been noted on only one tomb in Iran, but the inscriptions on that tomb had been written in several other languages also. So there was, it had turned out, printed only in one issue of one archaeological journal, and still not available online, a working alphabet for the document she had before her. It hadn’t taken her long to translate the document, and thus understand what she was looking at. The document was a description of an object that had arrived in Britain in the last five years, just before the destruction of the Docklands site, in fact. Now she was looking on her laptop at a series of objects that might prove to be that thing. She had been doing this for the last week of long nights. She was on the fiftieth page of the third such catalogue site she had visited, and she was still absolutely certain, because she made herself stay awake and alert at every page load, that she hadn’t yet seen the object she was after. She was starting to wonder if the tomb in question really had, as the document alleged, been empty. If there really was an object that would do what the document said it did.

There was a noise from beside her. A text message. She was startled to see it was from Costain. He was wondering if she ‘had five minutes’.

What? At this time in the morning? He’d never texted her before. He was probably drunk. Or was this meaningful? Was this the start of the sort of activity on his part that she’d told herself to watch out for? Whatever. She put the phone back down without replying.

Costain was the one from whom she especially needed to keep this work secret.

* * *

Quill was once again hauled awake by the sound of his phone. His dreams had been full of something reaching towards him, reaching into him. But he couldn’t remember it now. Jessica, unwoken by the sound of the phone, was lying across his head.

‘Would you please answer that,’ said Sarah, ‘and tell them to — ’ she looked at her daughter and gritted her teeth — ‘go away?’

Quill saw that the call was again from Ross, and said so.

‘Getting over her now,’ said Sarah.

He picked it up. After listening for a few moments, he quickly got out of bed and started getting dressed.

‘What?’ moaned Sarah.

‘Another one. It’s police.’

* * *

The slightly portly middle-aged man lay across the sofa. He was still dressed in a blue towelling robe, the now-familiar silver fluid splattered across him and all over the room. The robe was open, and so was he. A livid red trail led from what remained of his abdomen, across the polished wooden floor, and finished in an explosion of blood against the far wall, next to a Jack Vettriano. The expression on the victim’s face was an almost comical extreme of horror and incredulity. His eyes were open, glassy.

Quill’s team stood in the doorway, feeling — if Quill himself was anything to go by — like anything but an elite unit at this hour of the morning. Forensics had just finished with the crime scene and were packing up. Uniforms were filling just about every available inch of the building.

What they were staring at was enormous. Bigger, even, than the death of a cabinet minister.

‘Sir Geoffrey Staunce, KCBE, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ said Ross, keeping her voice low as a uniform made her way past.

‘They got him,’ said Quill. ‘That’s what the papers are going to say tomorrow. With a strike looming, the protestors killed London’s most senior copper at his home in Piccadilly.’

‘There were indeed Toffs in the area last night, making a nuisance of themselves,’ said Ross, looking up from the report she’d been given on entering. ‘For this sort of address that’s pretty incredible.’

‘The connection is also the locked room and the MO,’ said Quill.

‘Plus, from our point of view, the silver goo,’ added Sefton.

‘And,’ said Costain, ‘the wife is talking about an invisible assailant.’

They paused for a moment, taking in the scene. Quill’s team’s speciality was now being tested against a very mainstream, very high-profile, series of murders.

‘This is going to set London on fire,’ said Costain. ‘I mean literally.’

‘Where’s this message they were talking about?’ Stepping carefully, Ross followed the trail of blood across the room. She got to the enormous splatter of it across the far wall and stopped. Quill and the others joined her. She was pointing at the fine detail that the chaotic enormity of the splatter concealed. Among the blood was written, in awkward, blocky characters:

THE JEWS ARE THE MEN WHO WILL NOT BE BLAMED FOR ANYTHING.

‘What is that?’ said Sefton. ‘I recognize that.’ He started to tap at his phone.

‘So this is almost certainly from the killer,’ said Costain, ‘but-’

‘Making assumptions,’ said Ross.

‘You said we could-’

‘Only when we remember to mark them as such. This is me doing that. Yes, it could be from the killer, but there might also have been person or persons unknown here, associated with the killer or otherwise, who might have left what they regarded as a useful, or just anti-Semitic, message for the many Londoners who will read it when they get a news camera in here.’

‘Next time you make an assumption, I’ll make sure I mark it.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘Would you just bloody finish the sentence you originally started?’ Quill asked Costain.

‘Just that it’s really weird,’ said Costain, ‘to use “are the men” in what’s otherwise a natural-sounding phrase. It feels like … pretence to me. A front.’

‘You’d know,’ said Ross.

‘I would. There’s the fingerprint.’ He pointed to the very end of the words, where the fingers that had daubed the message had paused for just a moment, leaving a single smeared print.

Ross took a photograph of it. ‘I’ll ask to hear from the investigation about the comparison of that to the prints found in Spatley’s car.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Sefton. ‘“The Jews are the men”!’ He held up his phone as the others clustered around. He read from it, keeping his voice down so the uniforms all around couldn’t hear. ‘Those words, or something like them, were what was written on a wall in a place called Goulston Street in Whitechapel, in 1888.’

‘So?’

‘It’s the message left by Jack the Ripper.’