London Falling (39 page)

And let someone else, less able, entirely vulnerable, deal with Losley. Like the way Harry had. Quill leaned against a kitchen unit.

Sarah entered. ‘Are you making tea?’ she was already asking. And then she saw him and stopped. ‘What’s happened?’

He shook his head. He didn’t want to come out with the lie version now.

‘Oh God, when Losley killed that copper tonight, were you . . .?’ He went over and held her tight. They held on to each other together, and she let him stay silent.

But there was something else in him. Something that needed to be asked. ‘Why is the house in such a mess?’

‘Quill, don’t start a row just to—’

‘No, I mean . . .’ He was aware that the copper part of his head was working at this, working and working, gears still missing each other – not something he was used to when at home. ‘The two of us, okay, we seem to be living these . . . distanced lives. Around something . . . that was there but now isn’t. Was that always how it was? All of those things that might have been you and me together, that might have been . . . exciting or interesting, they seem to have been channelled into . . . something else.’

‘Our careers, you mean. What are you, a teenager?’

‘No, something else. It’s like a . . . black hole, like something that’s taken loads of our lives, and now we can’t see where it’s all gone. And it seems to have happened so suddenly, so . . . recently.’

‘It happens to everybody.’

‘No, this isn’t . . . This isn’t something you can talk about with reference to . . . something that
always
happens. This is . . .’ He didn’t have a word for it. He gently let go of her, then he led her by the hand – as if they were two stumbling children – back into the lounge. He pointed at the piles of DVDs with colourful cases, the bizarre nick-knacks and odd books that were everywhere. ‘Why do we have all that stuff?’ She frowned at him, her own brain working. And all he could think of were the gaps in what Harry had said. The things he hadn’t been allowed to hear. There were the same sort of gaps here too.

He led her to the rear of the house, towards the door leading to their little back garden, but beside which was another door. He couldn’t even remember what was in there, he realized, but it seemed to be the centre of what he didn’t feel like he should be looking at. That’s why he’d brought her here, so he could see it again, so he could . . . He didn’t know why he was doing this, just letting the deductive part of his brain make it happen. Feeling its way. And it was like bloody crawling uphill.

He pushed the door and, as it swung open, he suddenly understood, without knowing why, in some feral, desperately caring part of his mind, that what he was about to do would hurt not just him but Sarah, terribly.

Inside the room, there was more weird and colourful stuff. Piles of it. He didn’t know why this was here, but he realized that he knew the word for this sort of room. The feeling of that moment was like something hard falling into his stomach.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘do we have a
nursery
?’

TWENTY-FOUR

Ross had been woken in the early hours by a text message from Quill that called for her and the others to assemble at the Portakabin right now. She’d hardly got off to sleep. Until then she’d been following the news coverage of the attack on the pub, with her special notebook out on her lap, wondering why the team hadn’t been called to the site.

She entered the Portakabin to find every light switched on and Quill, Sefton and Costain standing in front of the Ops Board. Quill turned to glance at her, and the look on his face scared her. On the corkboard behind him, a thread connected the photo of Mora to a small picture of a tiny baby. ‘She took my daughter,’ he said.

Ross stepped closer, trying not to let the horror of it overwhelm her. It was the lack of any writing underneath the photo that made her ask. She sensed the other two feeling as lost as she was. And she realized, in that second, what must have been done to them all. ‘What’s she called?’ she asked.

Quill took a moment to control himself enough to answer. ‘Jessica, apparently.’

Ross looked for the gap in her memory and couldn’t find it. She wondered if she’d ever known that name. She wrote it under the photo.

He told them about Losley’s threat concerning the footballers. That meant they had forty-two hours until the next home match, with Man City.

‘How do we know Jessica’s not . . .’ Costain paused for a moment, then visibly decided it was best to continue, ‘. . . already dead?’

‘Losley would have told me so,’ said Quill. ‘She’d want to . . . let me know. It’s as if she wanted this to be a surprise, when I figured it out. Because I think she knew I would. This is her down to the ground, and we should have realized that from what the bloody cat told us. It’s not just about keeping on with the sacrifices so that she has the huge amounts of power she’s going to need to kill every goal-scorer. No, she needed to make this personal. She wanted me to
feel
it.’ Then he had to stop for a moment. ‘All right, listen, you lot.’

He sat down at the table, and made them all sit down too. ‘When this aspect of the investigation becomes clear to Lofthouse, as it will when she wakes up this morning and is told that forensics are all over my gaff, then there’ll be pressure on me to step aside. I’m not going to and, going on her past eccentric form, I think Lofthouse might let me stay put. If I could, I’d tell her . . .’ He went to the board and grabbed the picture of the baby. ‘. . . that because I don’t know who this is, I’m only “copper” afraid, that it’s not in here.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Not that I
could
tell her that. But, if I’m being honest, I think knowing fully what I’d lost . . . I think that’d be . . . better somehow, you know? Natural. What I’m feeling now, there’s no name for it. The only other people who’ve ever felt it that we know of are Terry and Julie Franks. I need to
fix
it. Sarah needs to fix it. This morning . . . it wasn’t that the veil suddenly dropped from our eyes. We actually had to persuade each other about it. She made me go into the nursery with her, and we looked at the crib. We looked at all the DVDs of
Teletubbies
and
In the Night Garden
. We kept having to force each other back to concentrate on it.’ He told them about what else they’d found at the house. ‘Forensics found a pile of soil half-concealed under a hedge in the garden. Sarah might have noticed it if it had been out in the open, since she’s been following the story. As you know, I’ve hardly been home. If I’d just taken one walk out into my own garden . . . or maybe she’d have made it so we couldn’t see that either. If I’d asked any of you lot, you wouldn’t have known, or I wouldn’t have heard you say anything. But if I’d just
thought
for a moment how I myself might be a target! I’ve constructed this bloke for me to be, out of bits and pieces, and he’s the sort of bloke who never
could
become a target.
This
is what I’ve been missing. The fact that I’m a dad.’

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Costain.

‘I think I’ll be joining you in Hell,’ said Quill gently. ‘I think I might be on the edge of it now.’ He looked at the photo. ‘I can’t see anything left,’ he said. ‘We could stare at Google and the bill lists for days, but with all her new power maybe she can conceal all that from us now. That cat’s no bloody use. I’m going to be left with this child I don’t know, this little stranger, as my very own bloody ghost standing there in that nursery. I can see it. I can see it. I’ll be able to distract myself whenever I’m here; it’s not going to be following me around like Harry’s dad did. But it’ll be there to remind me when I get home, locked into that particular place. And I’m calling it an it. I’m calling my own baby an it.’ He put a hand to his forehead and grabbed his flesh so hard that Ross was afraid he’d draw blood. ‘We’re helpless.
I’m
helpless.’

Ross now found that a horrible feeling was creeping over her. ‘What if . . . it’s not just you?’

They called up every friend and relative they could think of, including some deliberately distant ones they
wouldn’t
readily have been thinking of. Ross could see how the shortness of Costain’s list was troubling him. But waking up a distant cousin eventually convinced him. ‘No, Tone, you ain’t got no kids that you don’t know about. Mate, why are you asking?’

Relief and guilt came with the knowledge that the three others didn’t have any children. Nor did anyone close to them here in London have any that weren’t safely at home. Ross wanted to joke with Sefton that she hadn’t thought kids were likely in his case, but he had such an intense look on his face, as if he was coming to some huge decision.

As dawn came up outside, Ross went back to the board. ‘How did she do it?’ she said.

‘I remember her zapping me with something back in her attic, that first time, just after you told her to go fuck herself,’ Quill glanced ironically at Costain. ‘I thought, at the time, it was just for her to grab the cat.’

‘Bitch plans ahead,’ observed Costain. ‘Okay, we’ve got to ask.’ He went to fetch the cat’s cage, put it on the table, tapped it until the animal woke up, and then showed it the baby picture. ‘Recognize her?’

‘Oh,’ said the cat, ‘that’s the very young one.’

‘When last you saw her, was she still alive?’ asked Quill, all in a rush.

‘Yes, I believe so. Mora had quite a business to keep her fed. Oh, the bawling that thing made! That’s why she keeps her in one of the tunnels between houses, as with a lot of the younger children.’

Quill closed his eyes. Ross went over to him and, against her whole nature and his, took him into her arms.

In the early light, Sarah Quill stood watching the forensics team combing her back garden. She felt that she should be seeming more desperate, more agonized. She saw the police expressions and saw them wondering why she wasn’t. She realized she was trying to fake it, trying to look like those people you saw in police appeals to the kidnapper. She felt stupidly guilty, and genuinely guilty, and she had no idea how to describe how she felt. She was angry at Quill, and at herself. She made police officers cups of tea, while trying to look devastated, hating the fact that her hands didn’t shake. She kept trying to direct their searches, interferingly, meaninglessly. She kept standing at the door of the nursery as forensics combed it, hoping the details would connect to something. They had used a childminder, apparently, who was struggling to explain why she hadn’t visited the house for weeks, why her books, to her own eyes, showed no sign of the Quills. Neither the census, nor the borough records showed any sign of their child to the custodians, yet they did so to investigating officers. One social worker, it seemed, had kept asking all the others what was going on, to the point where it had become an office joke. Sarah kept looking at the photos that Josh, her nephew in Scotland, had sent. Photos of Jessica, aged eighteen months. She knew this must be a terrible wound that she had suffered. She kept hearing from the family liaison officer assigned to her how Losley kept the children safe. But there was an
until
involved there. Quill had told her: two days.

She wanted him to be here, and she wanted him to be out there, along with his unit that these coppers here kept complaining about not being part of, but kept saying was too small to achieve anything further. She overheard these conversations; did they really think she wouldn’t?

‘How did she make us forget?’ she had demanded last night. Quill had then told her: everything had finally come flooding out of him. Every detail made her more angry. ‘That happened to you, and you didn’t tell me? Things like that exist, and you didn’t tell me? How could you keep me out in the cold like this? Who am I to you?’ But she believed him very readily, because it was the only option. She got scared at what lay outside, dragged him to the window and made him explain what he could see out there in the night. The journalist part of her kept arranging it into tidy questions, but the person she was went deeper than that. Someone who had thought she was married, and hadn’t thought twice really about the strength and quality of that relationship kept ripping those questions up in sheer fury. How
dare
he? How dare he not have
told
her about the danger to her
child
? He just stood there and took it from her. He wasn’t taking on some sort of noble burden, just accepting the truth of it, rocking slightly on his heels.

She felt the world was against her now. She found it all too easy to see London as Quill described it, as a tentacled monster at the heart of a whirlpool that had snatched away their child. But it was Quill she saw as failing to put a stake into the heart of that monster. It was him whose desperate attacks on the monster had slammed a hole into the ground, who’d caused everything to start whirling around them. He had put an emptiness into the heart of everything, as well as having one inflicted on himself. It was as if something from inside him and his job had spread out into the world and engulfed them.

She stood against a wall, her body propped at an angle it would never normally have assumed, as if she’d been shot, or was a toddler, and she tried in her head to find her way back to a baby called Jessica.

At 10 a.m. Detective Superintendent Rebecca Lofthouse was sitting at a table facing the special committee of the Football Association, which consisted of five white men in their fifties. She took a deep breath. ‘With respect, Mr Chairman,’ she said, ‘what the
fuck
are you doing?’

The man looked to have faced his fair share of criticism in his time, and he was proud to have done so. But now he was eyeing her with a strange expression, as if he literally didn’t know why he was taking this position. He and his fellow committee members, selected from the high and mighty in the game, had occupied this grand meeting room at Wembley Stadium for three days now, and only this afternoon had she been called in to hear personally the extraordinary news that was about to be given to the press. Now that she’d heard it, she still couldn’t believe it.