The Severed Streets

EIGHT

The bar in Hoxton was called Soviet, all sofas and low tables and big red projections of Stalin on the wall, so deeply ironic that Quill wasn’t sure he quite followed it. It had been packed at the time of the incident. There were dozens of witnesses, who were now slouching around looking vaguely annoyed, glancing at their expensive watches, as uniforms and Scene of Crime Officers moved between them. There was a huge splatter of blood on the ground between fallen tables, from where a body had recently been removed. Only Quill’s people could see that there was also a splatter of cold silver, which continued across the establishment, right to the window, where this time entry as well as exit splatters could be seen on both sides. An enormous dripping mass of it also covered the far wall. The name of the deceased was Rupert Rudlin, twenty-eight years old, worked for Challis Merchant Bank as an analyst. Parents in Twickenham, single, one sister living in the States.

‘He kept looking over at this young girl, I mean, young woman,’ said Jamie, who was, to give him credit, visibly shaken in his bomber jacket and necktie. ‘He kept saying he was going to go over and talk to her, and everyone was, you know, laughing at him. She was sitting at a table with this guy; Rupert kept saying she was out of his league. And then there was a crash from the window. It was the protestors outside.’ There had been, Quill had gathered, a major Toff gathering outside the bar that evening, something approaching a flash mob, swiftly brought together by Twitter. There were enough youths with those masks in this suburb to do that now, he supposed. ‘They’d thrown a dustbin or something. So we all cheered and waved to them, you know? The bouncers — sorry, security staff — went out there and talked to them. Some of the lads in here — and I don’t agree with this, okay? — they got out their wallets and started waving their cash at them, and pointing to themselves, and they got this chant going, “bankers” … “wankers” … pointing back and forth. Really stupid. Everyone was texting and tweeting about it and, you know, wondering if the police were even going to show up, what with this strike vote and everything.’ Quill was sure that his expression hadn’t revealed anything, but the young man stopped and looked awkward. ‘Sorry. Anyway, that’s when we started to hear the sieg heils from outside, and we realized there were bloody skinheads … well, not real skinheads now but, you know, that lot, they were out there too, and they’d started to fight the Toffs. You could see them outside the window, laying into them, chasing each other across the square, getting into scuffles. There were cheers from in here, not for either side, really. Anyway, I looked back and Rupert had gone over to the woman at the table, had gone to chat her up. That was Rupert all over. The bloke she was with just got up, looked at his watch, didn’t seem like he wanted to get in the way of that. More of a business drink than a date, I got the feeling. But I still thought it was a bit odd that he didn’t want to make sure Rupert wasn’t going to hassle her.’

‘Did she respond well to Rupert’s advances?’

‘It looked as if he was getting somewhere. She was smiling, anyway.’

‘What about the bloke she was with?’

‘He headed off. I didn’t see if he actually left.’

‘What happened then?’

The young man paused, and Quill, through experience, knew that now he was at the point where the impossible had intervened. The boy was trying to navigate through what he could say that might be believed.

‘Just tell the truth.’

Jamie hesitated, then gave in. ‘I thought maybe I was on something, that maybe someone had dropped something into my pint. That table — ’ he pointed — ‘right beside Rupert and this girl just … erupted. All the glasses went flying. This guy that had been standing there was knocked down by it, got cut across his head, and he was screaming. The girl went to help him, squatted down to see what was wrong with him, and Rupert went too. I was thinking maybe some sort of bomb had gone off. And I think the security people started to come over.’

‘And?’

‘She went flying backwards. Like she’d been on one of those springboards stuntmen use. I mean, she shot upwards, I saw her feet off the ground, backwards, and she sort of flew, just a couple of feet, and hit the back wall there, and she stayed there, hanging there, and she was struggling, she was yelling, it was like she was actually fighting with something. She had no idea what was going on, no more than I did.’

‘What was Rupert doing?’

‘He went to try to get her down. But then … he spun round, and blood came out of his mouth. I thought he’d been shot. I ducked down. Really, I did. But then these … wounds … they just started to appear on him, up and down his body, across his neck, and he was staggering about, screaming. And then, then it was like something just burst out of him, like he’d been ripped open. There was this enormous spray of blood, more than you’d think there could be. He fell down. The crowd panicked, I mean, everyone just went apeshit, trying to get outside, running right into the Toffs and the skinheads, and then the police got here, thank Christ, and…’ He trailed off. He was looking at Quill almost desperately. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Is that okay?’

* * *

‘Not many of the witnesses did tell the truth, actually,’ said Ross, reading the report that had been thrust into her hand by an annoyed-looking member of Jason Forrest’s staff. ‘You can’t really blame them. Our own witness statements tend to greater accuracy in cases like this because we let them know it’s okay to say mad shit. We have statements here taken by the main operation, saying that both a skinhead and a Toff protestor did the killing. Which means, I hope, that Forrester will just regard the statements we’ve harvested, when we share them with him, as equally mad.’

Quill glanced through the big window at a hungover early summer morning. A police line was keeping an enormous scrum of press back from the scene of the crime. Forrest himself was now striding about the room, looking at where the body had lain, with Lofthouse at his side. There was no message this time, they were certain, having examined every inch of wall.

‘It all fits the profile,’ said Costain.

Ross was frowning. ‘White men is a big profile. It’s everyone who’s not “the other”.’

‘Rich white men isn’t as big,’ countered Sefton. ‘There’s a reason why they’re called the one per cent.’

‘Was Staunce rich? Was Spatley rich?’

Quill recognized that Ross was sort of talking to herself out loud.

‘Privileged, then,’ said Costain.

‘Usually means the opposite in our world,’ said Sefton.

‘Great,’ said Quill, ‘we’re in a land of things meaning their opposites. What about the woman who was attacked?’

‘She wasn’t among those who stayed behind and were interviewed and processed,’ said Ross, looking at her own copy of the notes. ‘We have some descriptions — wildly varying, of course. There is, hooray, security camera footage of the whole bar.’

‘Hooray indeed.’ Quill looked up and grimaced. ‘Gird your loins, here comes trouble.’

Forrest had arrived, Lofthouse beside him. ‘It took us a couple of hours to sort out the scrummage outside before we could even get in here,’ he said. ‘Multiple arrests, protestors and now, dear God, rival right-wing protestors.’ Quill recalled seeing graffiti about ‘kikes’ on buildings around the square. ‘That’s rare to the point of unique for round here. The hard cases in my cells are saying they’re aiming to break up every Toff gathering.’

‘Just what we bloody need,’ sighed Quill.

‘What, they’re onside with the bankers?’ Ross had a look on her face as if reality was lying to her.

‘What we’re getting out of their online forums is that they think the Ripper message indicates that these killings are all a Jewish conspiracy, and that by wearing that mask, the Toffs are supporting the secret powers that rule the world.’

‘Which in previous decades would have been associated with the bankers themselves,’ said Ross.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Quill, ‘now it’s like anything can mean anything.’

‘The Ripper really should have been more specific with that message,’ said Sefton. ‘Then at least we’d only have one side to deal with.’

‘So, DI Quill,’ said Forrester, ‘what can you bring to the table?’

Quill had prepared this report mentally over the last few days. ‘We’ve placed undercovers in relevant communities and are already hearing useful chatter, though none yet of operational relevance.’ He wished he could mention the silver, but couldn’t think of a way to do it.

‘So, you’ve got fuck all?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Fantastic. Keep up the good work.’

‘Any fingerprints here?’

‘No matches with the others, no.’

‘May I ask, sir, if, given this, we’re still building a case against the driver, Tunstall?’

‘Of course we are. Logically, he must have been involved in the first crime, and it beggars belief that we won’t have him for it in the end. When we’ve got enough evidence we’ll rearrest him, and he’ll eventually give us his accomplices. End of.’ With an ironic glance at Lofthouse that looked to be about Quill’s bizarre querying of that certainty, he was off.

‘To be expected,’ said Lofthouse, reassuringly.

‘Yeah,’ said Quill. ‘He has someone he fancies for it. I’d probably see it like that myself. Let’s check out the security camera footage, shall we?’

* * *

They had a few different angles to choose from this time. There was the young woman: white, late teens, five four, slim build, no visible identifying marks, long brown hair, here in a pony tail, dressed reasonably expensively and fashionably, sitting at her table. There came Rupert Rudlin, the victim, to talk to her. Standing up was the woman’s male companion: white, late thirties, five nine, large build, no visible identifying marks, balding, dark hair, off-the-peg suit, glancing at his watch, saying goodbye to her and heading off. They followed him across the bar and out of the door, shaking his head at door staff, pushing his way through against their urging him to stay inside, actually going out into the riot. Then light arrived in the corner of the frame and the shining figure in the shape of the Ripper leaped lightly into it. The assailant had landed on the table, causing the drinks and empties placed there to fly off, wounding the bystander as the witness had stated. The young woman had tried to aid the wounded man and been slammed up against the wall, where the assailant indeed held her for twenty seconds, as Rudlin got to his feet.

‘Look at how much silver gets spilled on that wall,’ said Sefton. ‘A bigger deposit than any we’ve seen.’

‘Spilling fuel,’ said Sefton, ‘like something’s going wrong.’

Rudlin had indeed gone to help and had been attacked as per witness statement. This was the first time Quill and his team had seen the Ripper at work. They watched the shining shape of a razor sweeping through the air, cutting and cutting. There was an unhinged rage to it, but also a terrible precision. There was a sudden hauling of the razor that made the victim scream silently on the footage like a slaughtered animal. Then the Ripper was bounding off and the young man had collapsed into a pile of his own bloody insides.

The woman had stayed put for a moment after the Ripper had dropped her, unharmed, then she’d hauled herself to her feet and run for the door. She also had got through the door staff, who were reacting to the violence now happening inside their establishment, and was gone into the night.

‘I want a word with her,’ said Quill. ‘She’s experienced that thing close up, and it let her off. And she saw fit to run, immediately, through more trouble.’

‘The bloke who was with her too,’ said Costain. ‘Would you walk out into what was going on outside that bar?’

‘I would need,’ said Ross, biting her bottom lip, deep in thought, ‘a reason.’

* * *

The team circulated the description of the woman and her companion among the witnesses. A few people had seen them, but nobody knew who they were. They weren’t going to be able to get the main inquiry to put pictures of them onto the news, Ross realized. All Forrest would see on this CCTV footage was the sort of headache-inducing visual lie that she and her colleagues had experienced during the Losley operation before they’d got the Sight. To see even as much as he had — a young woman being thrown against the wall by something invisible — their witness must be somewhere on the lower end of the Sighted spectrum. Most of those working the main inquiry would interpret the same scene as her being thrown to the floor, or something like that.

Ross wished she could feel comfortable around Costain. His expression when he glanced in her direction, that shared secret, made her wince inwardly. She wished they could have had that kiss without having the prospect of the auction hanging over them. That look on his face, if she could ever think of any expression of his as genuine, said he wasn’t feeling comfortable either, that maybe he was as vulnerable as she was. Yeah, maybe.

They found the woman’s original companion, the balding guy, on CCTV camera footage from outside as he left the bar, skirting the edges of the clash between protestors, and then they managed to follow him, camera to camera, to Old Street, where he’d caught a taxi heading towards town. Ross noted down the registration number. Checking earlier CCTV footage from the bar, the man had paid only with cash, damn it, and not a card they could check for at the bar. They’d at least have a record of where he’d got out of the taxi. The woman’s path from the bar was caught on a couple of cameras, but then she’d vanished into the backstreets. Ross knew from previous experience that the CCTV footage wouldn’t be good enough for the facial recognition software used by the Photographic Intelligence team to be any use, but she sent images of both patrons to them anyway.

So now Ross was looking for links between this victim and the others. Rudlin had been pretty ordinary, not important like Staunce and Spatley: redbrick university, Lancaster; reasonably well-off family; nobody close to him worked in police or government. It was possible that the idea here was just to create terror in a particular group of people, but then why not kill loads of them? The presence of the protestors outside was interesting. The faces that had been identified in the crowd outside the bar didn’t match any who’d been present at the Spatley murder, but that sample, among all the masks involved, was pretty small. It was perhaps indicative that the protestors just happened to show up in this neighbourhood and mount their first ever protest outside a bar on the night when the Ripper attacked someone inside it. That was a very attractive connection to make, now with three data points in a row, but it could still just be coincidence, given the prevalence of the Toff movement across London. Perhaps the Ripper was somehow the ‘spirit of the protests’ or being summoned by someone in the Toff crowds, or feeding on their anger or something like that.

Tired coppers from the main investigation had told her they’d found no sign of a pre-organized picket of the bar on Toff websites. But with an organization this diffuse — if it could be called an organization at all — there was usually little warning of anything. It was as if they were dealing with a flash mob as a culture. A bunch of tweets had gone out, giving the impression that something was already happening outside this particular bar, and other people had shown up to join in. The main investigation had asked Twitter to provide details of those accounts under the Data Protection Act, and Forrest’s office had promised to share that with her.

‘If our lot ever get something on Crimewatch,’ said Quill, after she’d told him, ‘they’ll need a special effects budget.’

In the back of Ross’ mind, as she worked the case, she was also working her other problem. She looked to Costain every now and then, and gradually she realized that there was something she could do to change things, perhaps to make things better. It would involve no risk on her part. It would be very hard on him.

That was all right.

She waited until he was on his own, staring into the fine detail of the silver splash on the wall. ‘About last night…’

‘What about it?’ He was careful now, guarded. She could tell that he thought she was going to say it had been a mistake, that it was all over. He was worried either about losing the connection they’d made or about missing his chance to get hold of the Bridge of Spikes. Would she ever be able to look at him and make an accurate assessment of what he was thinking?

‘I had a good time.’

She felt horribly pleased to see his sudden smile. ‘Oh. Great.’

‘So, we should talk about how we’re going to go forward with all this. I mean, if we’re going to go to the auction together, how we could maybe find, you know, some trust.’

He was nodding quickly. ‘Absolutely.’

‘So, I was thinking, second date?’

‘Right. Right, yes.’

She didn’t like the amount of power she had over him either because of her bloody allure or because he was giving it to her in order to flatter and deceive her. ‘Do you mind combining business and pleasure? There’s someone I want you to meet. My place at 2 p.m. tomorrow.’ She walked off and looked over her shoulder: yeah, now he was the one watching her go.

* * *

Sefton lay awake in bed, listening to Joe snoring beside him. He couldn’t help but keep seeing the blows the Ripper had struck. The news tonight had been about escalation, about far right groups starting to march in areas affected by the riots, starting to shout down Toff protestors. From what he knew about the Thirties, he didn’t like the feeling of where this was all going. If people started to feel the establishment was failing them, that the police were failing them, they looked for order in terrible places.

He kept thinking about Barry Keel, about human remains. The two deaths overlapped each other in his head, to the point where he felt vaguely guilty, insanely, for Rudlin’s death too.

He had to do something more than he was doing, he decided. He had to find some way to heal both himself and everything around him. He had to see if the centre was going to hold, to ask a greater power for answers.

* * *

At home, Quill stayed up late that night, looking at the documents of the case, wondering if there was any single thing more he could do. They’d gone out to the Spatley home that afternoon, after they’d got all they could from the new crime scene, and had found, even with their Sighted eyes, nothing the main op hadn’t.

Forrest was starting to realize that Quill’s team were bringing nothing extra to the operation. There seemed to be no connections between Rudlin and the other two victims. They still had very little in the way of access to an occult underworld that seemed to know nothing about this case. Nothing, nothing, nothing … and time was running out both for his team and for the next bloody unlucky man who the Ripper decided to randomly slaughter. Just as he’d finally decided to go to bed, his mobile rang. He saw it was Sefton, and answered.

‘Jimmy,’ said the voice on the other end of the line, ‘I’ve decided.

We’re not getting anywhere. So it’s time for me to do something I’ve been putting off. Something a bit scary.’

‘You know,’ said Quill, ‘Ross called five minutes ago, and she said almost exactly the same thing.’