London Falling (49 page)

Toshack looked back at them almost sadly, as if they’d chosen the most awful path. Ross saw an echo of her dad’s pain in his face. But she held herself steady. ‘All right, then,’ Toshack said finally. ‘All right. You’ll still find you’ve got an appointment with him.’ He turned, took a last look at them, and walked off into the darkness. A second later, his guised dignity vanished into a scuffle and a scream.

Ross felt pleasure at the closeness of the other three, as if they were standing around the kettle in the Portakabin, instead of inside who-knew-what in some cosmic who-knew-where.

‘What’s this plan of yours,’ asked Quill, ‘that you need the Sight for?’

‘Hostage situation,’ said Lisa Ross. ‘In the fullness of time, I’m going to propose an operation to get my dad out of Hell.’

And then she woke up.

It was daylight. A nurse came over to check her vital signs on the monitor. ‘We didn’t expect you to be awake yet.’

Ross could just about get her parched lips to form words. ‘Stuff to do.’ She looked over to the other side of the room. There sat Costain, looking startled. Then he managed a smile. He’d just woken up too.

Quill woke up to see Sarah glancing down at him. He looked quickly to his side, and saw Jessica curled up, snoring.

‘I’m going to need to know everything now,’ said Sarah.

‘Yeah.’

‘Terrifying as that’s going to be.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’re just agreeing with everything right now, aren’t you? You’ve got your happy copper face on.’

He put a hand to her face. ‘I realized what I was missing.’

‘It was giving them the memories back,’ said Sefton, lying against Joe’s chest. ‘That was the win Brutus was talking about. That was the moment when I felt I’d won.’

‘’Cos you’re a good bloke.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sefton. ‘I think my mum would approve.’ And he kissed him.

And then they started to argue about who was going to get up and make the coffee.

While Ross was in the hospital, Costain found himself faced with the strange prospect of being on leave. He didn’t know what to do with it. He went to a couple of movies, and found he really didn’t like 3D now. And when a movie did take him out of himself, let part of his brain relax, he found other parts kept taking him back to thoughts about an informer and a cat.

One day he went up to Kilburn and, using the carte blanche that Lofthouse seemed to have established for the four of them, visited the local nick. He walked around, nodding wisely at things, perplexing his uniform escort. He took a piece of paper out of his wallet and asked her about a specific shoulder number. He found the officer in question standing by his marked car, parked in a bus stop outside a kebab shop. He was finishing up talking to the owner about a missing pane of his window, now replaced by wood.

Costain watched him for a while. Still a constable. Bit paunchy. Going by the book, bit of a smile as encouragement for the owner. Costain then went over, walking in such a way as to be looked at. He hadn’t visited this nick in his business suit, but wore his hoodie, and now he put the hood up. He did a slow cruise past the uniform, looking him up and down. The copper clocked him, suddenly turned his attention towards him. ‘All right, sir?’ Blandly said, with no spin on the ‘sir’. Nothing about him that connected to what Costain had remembered for so long: that stop-and-search, that racial slur. There was nothing for Costain to build on here. No rage he could make a new version of himself out of. He was going to have to find something. But maybe his way forward had to be based in the future, not in the past.

Costain shook his head and moved on. Reaching the corner, he took the piece of paper with the man’s shoulder number on it from his wallet, and chucked it in the bin.

Ross stayed in the hospital for a week, until the doctors were certain there were no spinal injuries, and that she could start walking on crutches. She got on to them like she’d wanted a pair all her life, and was soon doing laps round the hospital, pushing her muscles until they begged her to ease up.

The other three, having visited in shifts, were all there on the designated day to take her home. Quill stepped forward, took her head in his hands and planted a kiss on her forehead. ‘The life of my child,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forget that.’

They drove back across London, taking the Rotherhithe tunnel under the Thames. Sefton signed one of her bandage strips. She’d been trying so hard not to start laughing or crying or something. She felt chemically all over the place, and she was finding it hard to deal with all this concern. ‘So now Toto will be wrapping up?’

‘Lofthouse wants us to stay together,’ said Quill. ‘That last house of Losley’s stayed put, so there’s enough evidence to try and put some sort of reasonable narrative together. The media have almost made it all sound possible. We “flushed her out”, they say. And, thank God, we were nowhere near the riots, so we’re the flavour of the month. I should think Lofthouse may well have turned down medals on our behalf. It’s causing havoc in the Met, but it looks as if you lot are on permanent attachment to a squad they’re still finding a name for, headed by yours truly.’

They passed, on one of the narrow thin pavements that ran down the side of the illuminated concrete tunnel, a bag lady pushing a supermarket trolley loaded with her possessions. Behind her, Ross noticed, skipped a row of small creatures wearing hooded brown robes.

‘What’s going on there, then?’ asked Quill, having noted it the same moment she did.

Sefton stopped the car. He put the flashing light on the roof, and set the warning lights to ward off passing vehicles.

The four of them walked back to where the woman was already panicking, looking as if she was about to run. ‘I’m not supposed to be down here—!’

Costain smiled at her. ‘Relax, ma’am, it’s not you we’re after.’ He reached down and grabbed one of the little creatures, which reacted with a squeal of shock to be torn from what it had obviously thought was its invisible cavorting. Costain slammed the entity against the wall of the tunnel. The bag lady just stared. To her, it must be like they were harassing her darkest imaginings.

Quill stepped up to the thing in Costain’s grasp and addressed it. ‘Are you bothering this lady?’ It hissed at him. ‘Well, you can stop it now, shortarse,’ Quill continued ‘Put this out on your grapevine. No, tell you what, I’ll do it myself.’ He got his mobile out, and found a particular number. Ross, looking over her shoulder, saw it was the same one that had been displayed on the Ops Board. The same one from which the darkness had texted them at the bookshop. Unfamiliar dialling code, but she was sure it was a London number. From the most distant borough of all. ‘The number of the beast,’ said Quill, and hit it.

They all waited through the ringing tone. Then it was picked up. From the other end of the line there came silence.

‘Yeah,’ said Quill, ‘enough of the heavy breathing. We’ve got a few of your lads down here, causing trouble and, before we give them a good kicking, I thought I’d have a word. Two points here. One: fuck. And two: you. It may not have occurred to you, but us policing the London of the Sight, it’s sort of liberating. We won’t need to be doing so much paperwork. We won’t have to worry too much about the rights and needs of little sods like this lot. We won’t have to watch our Ps and Qs with the cautions. We’re going to be a bit more like policing was when my dad did it. We’re going to be able to kick in a few doors and say, “You with the tentacles, you’re nicked.”’ There’s
law
now, for you and yours. The same law as for everyone else. Have a nice day, sir.’ And he clicked off the phone.

Ross found herself grinning, and saw the others were too. Costain threw the thing back among its fellows.

Quill turned to the old lady. ‘So, love, where to?’

They got her stuff into the boot, with a struggle. They drove her to a night shelter. They were so forcefully jolly at her that it worried her. They tried to answer her vague questions with the best reassurance they could: that they were on the job now. They left the creatures, whatever they were, running about in the tunnel behind the car, bellowing ancient and unintelligible threats as other cars flew through them, unaware. They’d probably catch up with the old lady. But meanwhile they’d given them something to think about.

EPILOGUE

THREE WEEKS LATER

Quill finally dismantled the Ops Board. He left the photofit that they’d renamed ‘the smiling man’ on it, and the Concepts list that could be applied more generally, but got rid of just about everything else. He ticked the operational objectives they’d achieved before filing that section of the chart. Last but not least, he stuck an X of black tape over Losley’s face, and, with great ceremony, transferred her photo into a file box.

‘In order to justify our existence and minuscule budget,’ he announced, ‘we’ll need to become, in effect, a targeted crime squad. So, that means we need to find some other nasty buggers.’ He pinned a new blank card at the top of the board, with a question mark on it where the name of their next operation would be indicated.

Sefton had come in that morning with the idea of further experimenting with the vanes as dowsing rods. Quill assimilated that suggestion in tandem with Ross’ desire to take a closer look at the Thames, since it had seemed such a source of strange activity during her drive across London. ‘I’ve started a dirty great database,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what half of what we’ve been seeing
means
. Think of all those . . . stories we glimpsed across London on that first night. The coffins, the bridge gatehouse, those ghost ships. That’s our patch now. And then we have to find out what that bastard’s done to it. What Toshack meant by moving the goalposts. Why he wanted rid of Losley, and why he was glad we did it.’

‘And,’ said Sefton, ‘we never found out why it was us who acquired the Sight.’ He put his finger on the word ‘protocol’ on the board. ‘Losley didn’t use that word very much, and when we heard it from her, it sounded awkward. I reckon that’s someone else’s word, an expression she heard once.’

They went down to Wapping nick, and Sergeant Mehta of the Marine Policing Unit took them out on the fast-response boat
Gabriel Franks
. Now they’d got used to having the Sight, there wasn’t so much to shock them during the daytime, though those heads sticking out of the mud under certain docks were a bit unnerving. They all took their own special notes, but there was just a bit too much of the pleasure cruise about this jaunt for Quill to feel comfortable.

‘This is just a pause,’ said Costain, looking up at the sky, where the sun was struggling to make London anything other than cold and blustery. ‘The world’s still fucked up. They’re still taking the piss. This city’s still going to Hell.’

Quill could only nod. ‘It’s hard for it to escape the past,’ he said. ‘That’s why they call it “being haunted”.’

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Much like you lot, I suppose. But I’ve had a lot more sleep. I’m enjoying Jessica so much, as if she was just born, that she’s wondering why all the sudden attention. That is positively a good thing. And as for all this . . .’ he gestured around him. ‘If I was previously missing having a meaning to life – which feels bloody weird and selfish now, considering I had her – well, here it is. There
is
a meaning to the world – or at least to London. Granted, it’s a
bad
meaning, but you can’t have everything, can you?’

Costain got the binoculars out, and every now and then he’d call one of the others over. Sefton noted the way the vanes turned when encountering every new oddity. Seeing that going on, Quill felt content to just observe with a sense of purpose.

Maybe that was why he was the first to see it. It was because he’d got used to his ‘new eyes’, he assumed later; because he’d started to integrate them with his copper’s instinct of when something was wrong. He still didn’t have too much of an imagination to get in the way. But, seconds later, Sefton was at his side, indicating there was something important over there, and then the others joined in too, the Sight pulling on them all, in its different ways.

It stood on the left bank, the Rotherhithe side of the river, and it looked completely out of place. ‘Weird that they’ve left that in such a mess,’ he said, pointing it out to the others. ‘Prime real estate – or is it a historical thing?’

Sefton looked with surprise at the vanes in his hands. Quill could see they were almost jumping towards what he was pointing at.

‘What?’ said Mehta, looking straight past whatever Quill was talking about.

He then looked puzzled at them when they all turned and smiled at him at once.

Quill left the sergeant with the boat, docked beside a floating restaurant, and led his team off to have a look. They walked at a pace Ross could manage on her crutches. The anomaly stood on the edge of a great commercial plaza, where new skyscrapers rose, all tall Byzantine curls and gestures towards the nautical. There was a giant anchor here, a flock of seabird silhouettes on the paving.

Among it all, beside a well-tended little garden, were the remains of a square of walls punctuated with gaps, the hint of a roof surviving at one corner. All of them were bleached white, and it was impossible to tell how old the ruin was. Inside it, now they were up close, Quill could see, to his surprise, a stone table, split in two, and beside it the remains of some chairs.

‘Are we sure it’s not some kind of art?’ said Sefton.

As Quill watched, a young man in a suit, hurrying on his way somewhere, swerved right around the outside wall, without breaking step, contorting his body as if he was water flowing around an island, but with a lack of expression that suggested nothing unusual.

He hadn’t even noticed there was anything in his way.

They checked over the ruins.

Quill was all the time aware that, to any passers-by, they must look like some demented group of mime artistes pretending to look into nooks and crannies in mid-air. By the way the others were looking but not touching, and occasionally straightening up when someone laughed, they felt much the same.