London Falling (35 page)

And, on Monday night, West Ham were once again playing at home. In an FA Cup quarter-final against bloody Manchester City.

‘So she has to get a line of sight on someone to make them forget,’ said Ross now, again become the force that kept them going. ‘But then that must kind of . . . spread out. We know it’s a bit random, from what happened in the Franks case. Schools forget. The paperwork’s still there; it’s not like the way she edits people’s memories, but loads of teachers just can’t see it. We know of social workers who were made to forget, but we know of relatives who weren’t.’

‘Maybe,’ said Sefton, ‘it’s about what’s in someone’s head when she makes them forget. Maybe it depends on what they think of in connection with what she’s making them forget. It goes out into the world and finds those things and zaps them. If you don’t think of Great-Aunt Nora as someone who knows your kids in that second, then Great-Aunt Nora keeps her memories of them. It’s another pattern that lies under what we’d normally deal with.’

Silence fell again. ‘All right,’ said Quill, ‘it’s time we interviewed the suspect.’ He walked over to Gipsy Hill and fetched the cage containing the cat, which glowered at him silently all the way back. As they entered the Portakabin, it looked up at its own picture on the Ops Board and curled up into an uncommunicative ball once more.

He put the cage on a table and the others gathered round. They’d been putting aside their impatience and made the cat wait for this, giving it time to worry about its situation. ‘Hoi!’ he tapped the cage until the cat uncurled itself and stared at him. ‘You’re not staying in the Hilton now. You’re with the bastards who know what they’re doing. No food or drink until you start talking, capeesh?’

‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

‘Do you know where Mora Losley is?’

‘In general,’ it sighed, ‘yes, I suppose I do.’

‘Can you tell us how to find her?’

‘No.’

‘Does that mean you can’t, or that you won’t?’

‘It means I am simply not made that way. I am unable, because of the way in which I was constructed, to provide any information concerning my mistress’ whereabouts, or to tell you anything about her which would allow you to impede her movements in any way.’ It sounded, thought Quill, as if it was reading that stuff off a card.

‘That’s an interesting way to put it,’ said Ross. ‘She doesn’t mind us hearing all sorts of other stuff about her. All she worries about is us getting in the way.’

‘Are you saying she made you?’ asked Sefton. ‘She actually
made
something with a personality, with a mind?’

‘Indeed she did, centuries ago, out of the body of a dead cat. I learned to speak through listening to the wireless, later, when that device was invented and my mistress acquired a set.’

‘What are you intended for?’ asked Quill. ‘Spying for her? Warning her?’

‘Not at all. I was made to agree with her. The head on the stairs is for warning her.’

‘Did she make that too?’

‘Why, yes, obviously.’ And now Quill felt patronized by a cat. ‘Only I’ve been incorporated into this body for simply ages, and the head on the stairs has got a new skull . . . well, it’ll be twice now. Every time she has to change residences suddenly. The bodies get left behind, you see, but the information that animates the head goes with the house. Its job is to shout out when there are intruders. Which works well enough, I suppose, if the radio’s not on or if she’s not halfway to another property. It’s a maze back there, moving between all those houses.’

‘You’re a very chatty interviewee,’ observed Quill.

‘I was hoping for some of that food and water you mentioned. And it’s not as if I can give anything away. Cut my whiskers off and drown me, if you like, but I’m incapable of actual treachery.’

‘How many houses does she have?’

‘I’m afraid that
would
count as helping you find her.’

‘How do you feel about her boiling children alive?’ asked Costain.

‘I enjoy the children petting me and talking to me while they’re held captive, and I also enjoy, during the boiling, the smell and the cries of pain. It’s
all
rather marvellous.’

‘But . . . they’re innocent children—!’

‘But in order for my mistress to have the power to do her lord’s will, I’m afraid they simply have to die horribly. I do apologize, but it
is
my nature to agree with her.’

‘Can you give us descriptions of the children?’ asked Quill.

‘Human beings all look rather alike to me – and there have been quite a few.’ They asked it more questions, and its answers continued to be maddeningly polite but, on the matter of how to find their quarry, utterly useless.

‘Now, please,’ said the cat finally. ‘You promised food and water when I started
talking
, and I’ve been going on and on.’

Quill took one of the cans of cat food he’d bought from the cupboard and spooned some into a saucer, leaving another saucer of water beside it. The cat stepped out of its cage and started eating, pausing only to excuse itself when its stomach made a sudden noise. It looked up when it had finished. ‘I do believe,’ it said, ‘that my mistress would wish you to know more about her. Once you do, you will surely share her point of view and perhaps also, we can but hope, her cause. Allow me,’ it said, licking a claw, ‘to tell you her story.’

TWENTY-TWO

FOUR HUNDRED AND
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Mora Losley stood at the window of the master bedroom, at the top of what the locals called ‘the tower’. She was sixteen years old, full of fear and foreboding. She could feel London in the distance tonight, she was sure. For the first time, she could see the glamour of it, the light of heaven that flickered between the meadows and the villages and the gardens of the great, all the way to the great palaces along the river, York Place and the Palace of Westminster and the Tower, which radiated importance and threat. The musician had claimed it was the light of heaven. She had heard people at court talk about it as the very opposite: as something one must never see if one was to retain one’s soul. Or perhaps it was still only her imagination. Perhaps she wanted too much to be like her mistress Anne, the Queen. She was kinder to Mora than even her mother had been, who had herself served as maid to an earlier Queen. But perhaps this royal kindness would soon result in horror.

Anne Boleyn had been the best wife King Henry ever had. He had split the Church for her, for her mind as well as for having her in his bed, since he had read all the books she’d given him on the evils of Rome. She had borne him a daughter, and that had pleased him, for a while. But he wanted a son,
he wanted a son
, till that desire and those words echoed around every corner of Hampton Court and Greenwich. Mora had watched her mistress’ desperate struggles to do as he wished, the care she took when bathing after she had been to his bed, the horrors of her howling in grief at both miscarriages. The sand was trickling through the glass. The King’s patience was stretching thin. He now looked at other women in the same way that he looked at fillies of good stock. One day, Mora had entered the Queen’s chamber to find her with one of her musicians, and at first she had thought they were practising some new dance. He was rehearsing gestures with her, over her stomach. Mora had noticed how her mistress had turned every holy icon in the room to face away from them, and she began to fear. Strange smells wafted from a brazier and, to Mora’s horror, blood was dripping from the Queen’s palms. She had then stepped forward, afraid that he had wounded her.

‘Don’t be scared,’ the musician had said. ‘This is what is called sortilege, the creating of obligations in the world, the weaving of the pressures.’ She had been shocked then by the coarseness of his accent. She had seen him play instruments at the court, but had never heard him speak. ‘It is learned in cities. But I hope,’ he smiled, ‘that it will be of benefit to the country.’ Mora’s mistress had made eye contact with her then, to assure her that all was well.

Mora had not been able to ask the question in her mind: was this not witchcraft? Back then it was never mentioned at court, but Mora had heard it said in the streets that her mistress was a whore, even that her mistress was a witch. She had changed the peoples’ age-old religion, had whispered of change in all sorts of ways into the ear of the good King, and they hated her for it. But Mora could not believe that anything Anne did was wrong, so she instead asked, as she did with every art used around the Queen, if she too might learn it, so she could be of service to her mistress whenever the musician was absent. The Queen agreed, as long as, and Anne managed a scared smile as she said it, it wouldn’t make the girl conceive a child. It took some effort, but the Queen then persuaded the musician to begin tutoring her. Mora was angered by how boldly he spoke back to her mistress, but Anne needed him, and he knew it. Mora noticed the coins jangling in his purse.

And that was how she had learned of the other tides surging through London, sweeping down the river and off the hills and round the buildings, and in the minds and hearts of . . . well, women more than men, beggars more than courtiers. That was how desperate the Queen had become. During that time of learning, the whispering started to be heard in the palace too. As Henry grew more distant, everyone became interested in who visited the Queen’s apartments, and when, and the maids were warned to be careful who was paying court to them. Even the Queen’s brother George, who came and went freely, started to be looked at in the way that Mora started to be afraid of: that look given by dangerous dogs sizing up a weaker member of the litter.

Anne had become desperate, sensing every eye in the palace on her, sensing them acutely now, as she seemed to look through the walls and into a great vault beyond. ‘A gigantic prison, this London is,’ she told Mora. She requested that she be allowed to take her retinue to one of the King’s houses outside the city, in the village of East Ham. To everyone’s surprise, the King agreed. And for the last few weeks, it had been fine, and the weather had become better as winter turned to spring. Anne had brought with her a merry court of musicians, dancers and debaters, though sometimes Mora thought that was more to distract her courtiers than to entertain the Queen herself, who concentrated on her studies with her special musician and with Mora, and for days at a time would stay in her chamber, calling only them to her side. And the things Mora had seen there, the way she started to be able to see, by angling her hand, the weight they were all under all the time; the ocean they were at the bottom of. She dreamed one night of London as an underwater kingdom, itself with pressures and tides and waves, and at the centre of it all was the King, the whirlpool itself. Mora wondered, on waking, what the King looked like to informed eyes like the musician’s. Did he shine like the sun? Did he reflect the forces of London, like the moon was said to reflect all the lights below it? (That was a dangerous thought.) Or, more dangerous still, was his light the infernal kind that the Queen sometimes talked of seeing, when she grew frightened of what she had taken on, and would desperately ask Mora if what they were doing was a sin?

Now, as Mora looked out towards London one noon, she tried not to think of what had happened during the last few days. The musician had suddenly vanished, could no longer be found anywhere in the house or the village beyond. Then, early this morning, while Anne had been distracting herself from her growing fears by watching a game of tennis, a messenger had arrived from the King at Westminster, ordering the Queen to appear before the Privy Council. The tone of the message itself was at least basically courteous, but it was the attitude of the messenger that spoke loudest to Mora and, judging from the look on her face, to her mistress. His expression was like that of a goodwife in a whorehouse.

Anne promised she would obey, then she rushed back to her chamber, accompanied by Mora, and the two of them had spent the next few hours ripping blood from Anne’s palms, desperately seeking a pregnancy through whatever means, crying out for the Queen’s womb to bear fruit, even though they neared the end of the time when it could reasonably have been Henry’s child. Finally, Anne had sent Mora off for an hour of troubled sleep.

She had been woken by one of the other maids telling her that the Queen’s menses had come. Anne didn’t summon Mora to her company, so she had come up to this highest window to gaze out in the direction in which they would all depart later that day . . . and to consider a fear that was gathering inside her.

And now she could see – she was sure she could feel as well as see it – that danger was coming. She could feel the tide of the King’s will. And then, across the pastures, she saw the first banners approaching. Then the tiny figures that were huge to her with meaning now. The oncoming horsemen.

The escort was led by three members of the Privy Council sent to fetch Anne, and they pounded on the door of Green Street House with all the watching mob, starting to shout, ‘Get the whore, get the witch.’ Mora heard the other maids screaming and running, and she feared that her mistress would be dragged outside and killed in the street, and maybe all of them along with her. Mora stood where she was. She looked down at her hands, and she searched everywhere through her eyes, and she felt the pressure of the city around her, and she sought something she could do. And she found it.

She ran down to the kitchen and found a blade, and then went to the pigsty in the courtyard. She could feel in the air what her course of action had to be. It was the only hope for all of them. ‘Mistress!’ she called out, projecting her voice along a path that wound through the battering tides about them, from her mouth to Anne’s ear, and she knew her mistress heard her. Mora bent towards the pigs, and slit the throat of three of them, their desperate squeals flying past her. She arranged the bodies in a pattern which seemed to complement and at the same time complain about the London massed around it. It just seemed the right shape. The blood intertwined in a knot at her feet.