London Falling (29 page)

‘I paid you,’ she said. ‘We have a bargain. You can’t break it.’

The woman stopped. She now looked ferocious and, for a moment, Ross thought she was actually going to strike her down with something. But, finally, she sat down again and glared at her. ‘You cunt,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ nodded Ross. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

Quill had systematically checked out all of the people of interest in the centre of the hall, recording their appearance in his special notebook. There was something particular to them, they were the ones in the old clothes: an ancient waistcoat here, a battered greatcoat there. The fashions of everyone else, while occasionally baroque, didn’t incline so much towards the distant past. When he made his way back through the fair, a few of them were no longer about, a couple had left their stalls completely unattended, having taken away with them any items whose presence had been obvious to the Sight. So this lot could detect the law, and not necessarily through extra-sensory means. They’d had that look about them, too, like the ones you hauled in from the pub for an identity parade, and took a quick shufti in the files while they were present. What all those folk also had had in common – and this shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise – was that the objects of power he’d glimpsed had all been either of a particularly London character (a chipped coronation mug, a bunch of London Pride flowers) or could have been if only he’d known what he was looking at (a branch, a bracelet of thorns). So much for the silver handcuffs, although he supposed that, since it was blessed by the Met chaplain, they did have in their possession some very London holy water. Pity that Chamsa wasn’t local, too. He went to the ticket seller at the door, and was introduced to the organizer, a thin man with a ponytail, in sandals and a business suit. Quill followed him into an office, for a more formal introduction involving his warrant card.

‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh, now, is this about Mora Losley? What that woman does has nothing to do with these peaceful practices going back to the time of—’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure. This is just a routine check, nothing to worry about. I’d like to be able to say that the . . . what would you call it, the occult community?’

‘The New Age community!’

‘That you’ve been offering us brilliant support and a nice cup of tea. So, if I could just take a quick look at your list of who’s at what table . . .’

The list showed two big tables, on either side of the hall, each rented to a major dealer. Quill wondered therefore if maybe what he was feeling there was quantity rather than quality, as it were. He gave the list back to the organizer, thanked him for his helpfulness, told him his silence would be appreciated, and headed off to have a quick butcher’s at one of the tables identified.

This was indeed where the professionals were based: real swords, glassware, fabrics, paintings in frames, unicorns and dragons. It made Quill sigh a bit: they were among this terrifying weight of people and history, and yet here were vague guesses at it being regurgitated as tourist tat. Oh, so no change there, then. There was nothing specific about most of it, nothing particularly . . . London. The table was staffed by young men and women in T-shirts bearing the dealer’s logo, with an older man, a bit of a pot belly on him, in charge. Nothing odd anywhere, and certainly not among the merchandise. So where was the huge sense of unease about this table coming from? It seemed to be located further behind . . . Quill saw that, at the rear of the displays, there was a stack of the boxes this stuff had been transported in. Unnoticed by the staff, someone was rooting through them, not looking as if he had any particular purpose, but more like a tramp searching for food. He was a big lad with broad shoulders on him, wearing a tattered military coat, a garment that looked as if it was from the Boer War. Woollen gloves, so no fingerprints. He had that special sense of meaning about him. The Sight knew him, and he made Quill afraid. But Quill had been up close with Losley, and had also been in the presence of whatever that smiling man was, and he didn’t rate this bloke as being in that league. He took a step closer, leaving only a couple of punters between himself and the man who was obviously keeping himself unseen by the traders seated in front of him.

Suddenly the man looked up and sniffed the air. He turned, and Quill felt his gaze sweep the crowd. Any second, he was going to spot him.

Quill felt afraid, but he was more afraid of looking afraid. He didn’t want to experience how whatever this man was going to threaten him with might chime in with the emptiness inside him and with the previous impotence he’d suffered at the hands of this lot, further diminishing who he tried to be.

‘Hoi!’ Quill bellowed. ‘I want a word with you, sonny Jim!’

That terrible gaze engulfed him, and the fear accompanied it. But, a moment later, with a crash of boxes—

The man was running for the door!

Quill felt an old energy come flooding into him. He sprinted off after him.

Costain had been surprised to find that the dangerous gang boss he’d had in his head when he’d considered this move had turned out to be a gawky young man in a T-shirt advertising an occult shop. He seemed to be in charge of this large stall that had so many punters flocking to it. Sefton had then popped over to check out the other side of the hall, and reported back about the other shop, that what they were actually looking at here was a room seemingly shaped not by occult power but by money.

So where had the power gone? Costain couldn’t feel it now they’d got here. It almost seemed as if it was . . .

‘Hiding,’ muttered Sefton under his breath. ‘It knows we’re here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You get used to this stuff. Just tune into it.’

‘Do you?’

‘It’s now under something . . . or someone on that stall’s gone dark on us.’

Costain summoned all his confidence. And, yeah, that felt like a blanket that had a lot of holes in it now. He straightened up and began walking as if he had a gun on him. He headed straight for the young man, and noted Sefton peeling off behind him to check out the merchandise further along the stall. ‘Hey,’ he began, ‘. . . no, never mind about the queue, I’m talking to you, son. Who’s in charge here?’

‘
The Book of Changes
.’ The woman sat opposite Ross, staring coldly at her, and held up the small volume. ‘Pick a number between one and three hundred and sixty-eight.’

Ross took a while to consider. She was wondering if she should text a message to the others to converge on her position. After their business was concluded, she was going to have to try to apprehend this woman. ‘Two hundred and . . . seven.’

‘One to three?’

‘Three.’

‘One to seventy?’

‘Three.’

‘Right,’ the other woman said tersely, ‘that’s Fives Court. That’s the first part of your answer.’

‘Is that book . . . the
London A–Z
?’

The woman was silent. She clearly wasn’t going to offer any more than she had to. ‘Again.’ This was even more like the sort of divination which might have found them Losley. Ross gave her three more random numbers. ‘Four Seasons Close. You’ll “win” by favouring the first over the second. That’s your answer. Five is better than four.’

‘What does that mean: five is better than four?’
Four what? What was five?
‘Do the locations have anything to do with it? Does the rest of the address matter?’

The woman remained silent.

‘Listen,’ said Ross, ‘you know we’re after Mora Losley, and you surely can’t agree with what she does. You could help save those children—’

‘I won’t help you. Not your kind. Never.’

Ross pursed her lips. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s go for the Tarot of London.’

Quill burst out of the hall into the corridor outside. The man he was chasing was just ahead. ‘Police!’ he yelled. The ragged red-faced man spun on his heel and, for a moment, Quill thought he was going to stop. But he was fumbling to get something out of his pocket. He found it and snapped it up to head height, pointing it straight at Quill. Who threw himself into cover behind a pillar adjacent to the wall. He hadn’t got a good look at the thing, but it was close enough to a gun to make him move.

‘I really do just want a word with you!’

But, as he said it, something enormous rushed at him from behind. Quill was hauled away from the wall and thrown into the middle of the corridor. He reflexively put his arms around his head and staggered, aware that he was being battered left and right by . . . air. Air carrying leaflets and rubbish and cardboard boxes. But what was worse was the anger of it: the air was hot and furious and needed something, was missing something as much as Quill was. It was nothing to do with this man, he realized. The man was just . . . using it. That understanding let him find his feet. He could hardly see the bloke now, just a shape in front of him. He couldn’t see how he was producing this effect with whatever he’d grabbed. The beating around Quill’s head got worse, and there were stones now, and suddenly one shot through his guard and struck him across the temple.

Quill focused all his anger on the man in front of him, put his head down, gave a roar and charged.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ The young stall manager was looking at Costain fearfully.

‘Don’t give me that. Where is he? Where’s the boss?’

‘Barry’s back at the shop—’

‘Fuck me, do you want me to tell him how you were like this? You know what I’m talking about, ’cos if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be scared: instead you’d be angry. I’m talking about—’

‘London stuff,’ said Sefton, arriving beside them as if his boss had called him over, looking bigger somehow than Costain was used to seeing him. ‘London rules, you feel me?’

Costain was sure there was a crowd gathering around them now. But not one of them questioned the basis on which he was verbally abusing this poor kid. This was like a market where the stallholders paid protection money. A lot of people here knew vaguely that there was another class of people who came round here sometimes, and so did this kid. And all Costain had to do now was keep carrying on like one of those.

‘We . . . we don’t have . . . We’re just . . . paraphernalia.’

‘I’ve got all the crystal unicorns I want, boy. You know what I’m talking about.’

‘Are . . . are you the ones who were going to collect the package?’

Costain looked skywards in apparent relief, and bumped fists with Sefton. ‘Finally!’

The man went to look under the table. He came back a moment later, carrying what looked like a bit of flat red stone wrapped in a sheet of paper. ‘It’s nothing to do with us,’ he said. ‘He just left it here and said someone would come asking for it.’

Costain nodded as if this was all entirely expected, and took the package. ‘You can now go about your business, my friend,’ he said. ‘Good day to you.’ He led Sefton away from the stand, and the crowd parted meekly for them.

‘Wish we could have asked for a description,’ remarked Sefton.

Costain just about managed not to snap at him. He was holding the paper-wrapped package between two fingers, hoping that he hadn’t messed up any fingerprints left on it. By means of the Sight, he could feel the burden of something notable, the strange weight of it in his hand. ‘You feel anything?’

‘Yeah. It’s a tiny bit different to what we felt from across the room, so I reckon we must have felt whoever left that here, and then that feeling changed a bit, without me noticing, ’cos then I was just feeling the presence of this.’

‘So he got away under cover of it?’

‘I think so.’

The piece of paper was secured by a small piece of sticky tape. He laid the package on a shelf beside a window, got out his multi-knife, and sliced through it. The stone was revealed to be a fragment of red tile, with faded decoration down one edge. Costain took a step back as the paper flapped open. He saw that Sefton had felt it too. The weight of it had suddenly increased. That was the feeling of something hiding that they’d experienced. On the paper was written a message in a large, scrawled hand:

You smell of modern shit. Leave us alone. We smell death near you soon. You brought that on yourselves.

‘Death near us soon,’ said Sefton. ‘Well, there’s a shock.’ He put his hand over the tile, as if trying to gauge the forces involved. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if this would hurt someone who didn’t have the Sight?’ He lowered his hand closer and closer to the tile. ‘It’s not getting any stronger.’

‘Just leave it.’

‘If it can hurt us, maybe it could hurt Losley.’ He touched his palm to the tile quickly and then raised it again.

‘Don’t fucking do that! Did I tell you that you could do that?’

‘Like you’d know one way or the other.’ And there was that furious look again, the real Sefton now that they were out of character. ‘I’m the one who’s been looking into this.’

‘You’re not planning on recognizing my rank at all, then?’

Sefton seemed to pause at that. He didn’t want to say it out loud – which was just like him. His eyes locked on Costain’s, his finger reaching towards the tile again. And suddenly with a yell he withdrew it. Blood went flying from his finger.

A drop of it landed on the tile.

And motion blurred everything as something battered Costain’s entire body.

‘A Shaft of Light in Paddington Station.’ The fortune-teller laid down a card that showed a painting of just that, looking like an old advert or something. The light looked summery, with dust motes hanging in it. ‘Something Glimpsed from the Underground.’ That was the image of what must have been a tube carriage window, with a brickwork arch outside it, also a green and blue light that spoke of meadows gleaming through it. ‘The Sacrifice of Tyburn Tree.’ She slapped the third card down over the first. She’d made a pass of her hands over the cards before they’d begun, and they’d regained the same lustre of importance that they’d had when Ross had first glimpsed them. Now they looked . . . delicious, meaningful like Christmas, a colourful present that had been unwrapped, a terrible pang of nostalgia that was like the prospect of happiness and repose she’d felt from the rest of the fair. But this third card looked terrible, too, and it connected with her. It was a man hanging by his neck, in silhouette, other terrible wounds having been done to him, judging from how the crowd, in faux-medieval dress, all around him were pointing at various parts of his body. The fixture from which he hung sprouted many such nooses, like it was a proper tree, and rooks flew all around it.