London Falling (48 page)

Quill pulled Jessica from hands that would loose her only to him. She was screaming for her daddy. Quill felt horribly, distantly, that that wasn’t him. He looked back towards Ross.

Fumbling, Costain had found her pulse. ‘She’s alive!’

‘We called an ambulance,’ said a woman. ‘She just . . . threw herself off.’

‘No she didn’t,’ said Quill, frustrated to the point of anger at what these bloody people hadn’t seen. Suddenly, from all the flats around them, the crowd noise on radios
and televisions became very loud indeed.

‘Something’s happening at the Boleyn Ground,’ said Sefton.

Mora Losley had run to where she felt most safe. She was dying. And soon. But she still knew how to save herself.

She threw herself off the wave as it entered the West Ham stadium. She found herself stumbling forward onto the blessed pitch, the floodlights washing over her. Blood was pouring from her
wounds, and she couldn’t stop it now. Meanwhile the match was continuing. But now she was on the sacred turf! Her blood was mingling with it. In a moment, power would surely come to her. She
started heading into the midst of the West Ham team, and there he was, Milo Faranchi, stopping now, slowly turning to stare in horror at her approach. She waved the dagger at him, so sadly. But it
had to be. She had to do what she had always done. The dagger would have to make do until the power came.

She was suddenly aware of the crowd all staring at her, of shouts and screams going up, in a roar louder than she had ever heard, even here, and on the screens there still were images that spoke
of the children she had boiled, of her glorious sacrifices. It was as if this moment was made only of her. She thought absently of the coincidence in where that girl’s blows had fallen,
without apparent intent on her part. Or had it merely been coincidence? That thought was worrying. Mora increased her speed, marching determinedly towards Faranchi. His team mates parted like sheep
before her—

She was attacked from behind.

Her face hit the turf, she sprawled on the ground, the knife bounced away from her. She lay there, shocked, her face and fingers pressed in that beloved soil. She tried to take power from it.
But she found there was . . . nothing!

She had been severed from it. She had been betrayed.

Or . . .
sacrificed
?

She looked up as what turned out to be the steward who’d tackled her grabbed her once more, manhandling her, started hauling her up. She raked his face with her fingernails. He cried out
and fell back, but then another two were on her, trying to restrain her. Both were wearing the club badge, and she hesitated at the sight of it.

She looked past them, saw the entire stadium. And she stopped her struggling in astonishment. From every direction, spectators were fighting their way onto the pitch, a great concert of them
bursting over the barricades. The stewards couldn’t stop them, and then they came at her, too. They were roaring now, enough to drown out the tannoy. They were fast converging on her,
hundreds of them, converging on the centre spot where she stood. She spun slowly in the circle, feeling the mob all looking at her and, for the first time, taking nothing from it.
‘Don’t you understand?!’ she screamed. ‘I did it all for you! I’m on your side!’

Being
remembered
had turned out to be a two-edged sword.

The mob rushed in. She threw the stewards down. She picked a direction. She started to hopelessly hobble away.

The fittest men reached her first. One struck her round the shoulders, and while she was scratching at him, another grappled her around the waist. She could hear screaming now, the screaming of
women, coming in on the next wave, women howling for her blood. Something heavy struck her round the head. She spun away, towards the beloved floodlights and the blank dark sky—

She encountered a second attack, from the other way. Hands grabbed at her, from every direction. What hair she had left was wrenched out. They yelled in triumph that they’d got some of her
hair. Feet lunged into the backs of her knees. Childish blows rained on her back, delivered by those who ran forward and then fearfully back again, just to say they’d got her. Long nails
raked her face, and tried to get into her eyes and tug her ears.

She hadn’t expected the knife. She felt a final weakness flood into her, in a terrible instant, as its blade entered the existing wound in her side. A large hard man and his mates pierced
the wound again, and then again, their blades through her ribs, catching on the organs inside her. They were shouting obscenities, rage on their faces, calling out things about kids – when
their words were recognizable at all. For every one of them she wounded and flung away, the rest of them grew more shrill, more ecstatic. Their blood on her hands was everything they had seen in
their dreams for weeks, and now, she realized, they had found a release for all that fear, all that hatred. She had made herself the thing they hated. And now they had her. And, just for once, just
for once, she heard the actual words, hissed through clenched teeth: they were going to give it back, give someone what they deserved.

A large hand got the back of her head and twisted it and forced it down into the mud. She writhed, she spluttered, sucking mud down into her lungs. She felt something tighten around her throat.
A belt. Thin leather. Too tight.

She saw now why this had to be like this. But she was not willing. But that didn’t matter. What a terrible thought. Three blows to the head, three wounds to the side, three suffocating
attacks on her throat. The threefold death three times. She was to be a great sacrifice.

Still a victim! Still!

She wrenched herself up, and felt all her limbs held, and her body being hacked at. If there was rescue, it was far beyond this crowd that spun around her, around and around, and every one of
them reaching in to add to her punishment. Fists punched at her face. Blood covered her vision. An eye exploded. Her ribcage burst open. She tried to twist away. Just an animal now. But every part
of her was being pulled. Her intestines, she was dimly aware still, were being hauled out, beautiful silver-peppery in the gold and green light.

Hands plunged in. Hands got hold of her heart. And she had one last thought, which was that she knew where she was going. And who would be waiting for her there. And she thought she saw him
– in the last moment she could still see – standing there apart from the crowd and smiling.

And then the mob ripped her fucking heart out.

The wave burst from the stadium. Ripples raced out from it in concentric circles. The ripples hit other waves and rebounded, set up interference patterns that bounced off the
nearby buildings. They rushed invisibly, instantly, to the very boundaries of the crooked circle of the conjoined cities of Greater London. And then it reflected back to the centre again. And burst
out again fivefold, in five directions, forming the great knot of something being pulled suddenly tight.

The smiling man exulted in it. He stood at all the places in London where he could stand, and watched as the wheel of his ambition turned a full circle on this dark winter day, towards what he
had in store for London. And he found it good, my son.

He held the pieces of Mora Losley in his hands. Because in the moment of her death he had arranged for her good work to continue. For the image and the fear of her to imprint themselves on
everyone.

He scattered the notions of what she was into the hidden rivers under London. She was swept underground, through the caves where the remains of older civilizations were built upon, each city
standing on the shoulders of some older giant. She passed along the back of St Thomas’ hospital, and under Elephant and Castle, alongside New Kent Road, and then she was lost amid that
plummet into the modernity of all the new sewers, and he felt the roar of despair in her—

—and then the sense of accomplishment as she emerged again, part of the pattern, to splash upon the mud of the old rookery of Jacob’s Island, where they used to hang the pirates, and
there she became the last victim lost in that murk.

And so she was watermarked into the hearts of men.

Ghosts of her would appear this very night, and often, as the stories would spread, and people would look out for her and believe. At her houses, and at the West Ham ground, she had done great
service in life, also in the moment of her death, and now she would continue to turn the wheel for him afterwards, in his own borough. ‘No rest for the wicked,’ he declared.

And then he washed his hands of her.

Quill was feeling totally useless as the paramedics got Ross into the back of the ambulance, gazing into her unconscious face as they got the collar on – the three of
them looking down at her, helpless but horribly caring. He felt sick at what he was hearing from the radio, and from the police reports coming out of Upton Park. He kept holding the child who was a
stranger to him, as the ambulance drove away, feeling that he was frightening her with how blank his face must be compared to whatever she was so desperately needing. He wanted to hand her on to
someone else, but he couldn’t, and he felt guilty even at the thought. He saw how Sefton and Costain were standing about uselessly too. A copper thought saved him: they had done what they set
out to do. Well, they had achieved Objectives one to three and seven, anyway. He felt ridiculously proud of his team, of what each of the other three had done to get them here. And proud of Ross,
at the end: her sacrifice. For a moment, he thought that this must be what it was like to be a father.

And then, suddenly, he knew what it was like to be a father. That thought came crashing down on him, as if it was released out of the sky. Because there was no longer a will in this reality to
block it.

And he fell to his knees under the weight of it. And he stared into Jessica’s face. And he knew exactly who she was.

Terry and Julie Franks, at home in Brockley, suddenly looked over to where Charlie aged five, Hayley, six, and Joel, seven sat watching television, because Terry and Julie had
kind of felt the children would take themselves off to bed when they were ready. The kids had adapted a little already to how their parents were now. They were starting to deal with the shock,
starting to accept the awkward, desperate trying-to-care they’d been offered as simply how things were now, part of the hugeness that had happened to them. Terry and Julie had been doing
their best, buying them loads of stuff, because they felt they had to do the right thing. They had neighbours to fend off, too, people who they’d never realized were their neighbours until
the TV crews started showing up.

It had been like one of those dreams where you’re called on to be an expert, only you’re really not.

But now there was suddenly this great lump of pain and history within their bodies.

They now knocked over furniture to get to those three children, because suddenly they needed to hold them so much.

When she was born, James Quill had put his enormous rough fingertips on the side of his little daughter Jessica’s red face, and felt how incredibly soft she was.
She’d smelt like a butcher’s shop. A good butcher’s shop. He had put his nose in her hair so many times in the last year and a bit. She would hand him things when he was sitting
beside her, as if he was just a convenient keeping-things-handy thing. Or she would just leave things falling in the air, expecting him to catch them.

She could drive him to fury because she was stubborn, exactly as her mother was, and would raise her voice higher and higher until she was screaming at him. And he could never be fully angry
back, because he was her world, and that world should never be completely angry at the little one inside it. And that wasn’t something he had to try to be or not to be; it was just what he
was.

And Jessica and Sarah . . . that smaller, shaking her head violently, putting her hands over her eyes, putting her arms over her head, impossible to get into her pyjamas, louder, small-explosion
version of the woman he loved. A little clone of her. Them looking at each other, the little one not knowing a thing about love, as if Mummy and Daddy were her friends, and everyone in the world
was like this, not understanding the way Sarah looked at her.

Quill grabbed for his phone just as it rang. ‘I want to talk to her!’ Sarah sounded as if she was crying, and he thought he was probably crying, too, but whatever
he
was doing
had now suddenly rushed into the background and become so hugely
unimportant
—

‘Daddy,’ said Jessica, looking up at him as she said it to both of them.

‘Hello, girl,’ he said.

He was sure that, at this age, the witch would eventually be forgotten.

That night in the hospital, with two broken legs, three broken ribs and numerous vertebrae waiting for a specialist verdict, Lisa Ross had a dream.

She, Quill, Costain and Sefton were standing together in the tunnel that led from the home dressing room to the pitch at Upton Park. They’d been there for real, of course, so there was
loads of authentic detail. Ross looked around, amazed at the clarity of it. There was a framed picture on the wall of the tunnel. She went to it, and smiled when she saw that it was a picture of
the four of them, with their names neatly inscribed, standing like four proud hunters, their feet on top of . . . the corpse of . . .

No, she
was
proud. She expected to meet her dad somewhere in this dream. She really was proud. Under the picture were written two words in longhand:

The Present.

She didn’t know what that meant, as she couldn’t find any information to analyse there. She looked to the others, and then walked up the tunnel.

Kev Sefton had a dream that night too, while he was lying in bed with Joe. He was standing, with Ross, Costain and Quill, in the tunnel that led from the home dressing room to
the pitch at Upton Park. There were pictures of famous players on the wall. Up ahead there were full-length ones, shining. He started forward . . . No, not pictures. Mirrors. They were going to
walk through a tunnel of mirrors. He went ahead. He did it first. He carefully didn’t look to his left or right. He was being offered the opportunity to see himself as others saw him. To be
judged. Did he think he was up to that? Those mirrors would reflect each other. Those visions of himself would go on forever. Wouldn’t that be grand? To see himself so thoroughly, so
brilliantly – to shine gloriously like that?